Identity

The discussion of hierarchy, status and estate management has already introduced the subject of identity but, to explore this further, we need to examine landowners’ conceptions of family and locality. If it is no longer accepted that the lineage was more important to a family’s sense of identity than the immediate family, lineage was selfevidently cherished, as is demonstrated by the ability to reconstruct genealogies in heraldry and in making claims to land. It can be seen also in family connections with religious houses that spanned generations, for instance the Warennes’ with Lewes Priory. But accurate knowledge of lineage was related to tenurial security and continued family existence. Most historians now agree that all landowners had de facto security soon after the Conquest but that it was not guaranteed by the king’s law until Henry Il’s reign and was not proof against the king himself until Magna Carta. Paradoxically, because they were less exposed to the complex tenurial politics of Anglo-Norman and Angevin England, the knights, despite ill-defined tenures, were in practice secure earlier than the nobles and were able to express their lineage in the development of toponymic surnames by the mid-twelfth century. Until well into the thirteenth century, noble estates were often unstable in composition, and whole honours, sometimes the entire property, changed hands as a result of contested successions or royal interference, often both. As noble agglomerations acquired stability, so the memory of lineage, expressed in titles, in heraldry and in continued patronage of a monastery that came by marriage or inheritance with a landed estate from another family, became stronger. By contrast, the identity of gentry estates remained more volatile, simply because, with their smaller estates, new acquisitions could substantially relocate the focus of the family. The filtering of heraldic arms down the hierarchy enabled all the gentry to record their lineage, and patronage of the local church gave the lineage a religious focus, often with a family chantry after 1300. However, chantries were readily abandoned when families relocated and the sixteenth-century heralds’ genealogies reveal very faulty memories of lineage. The one group of gentry that clung tenaciously to lineages, however tenuous the connection, were predictably the parvenus, for this was all they had.

If the idea that the aristocratic family only became ‘modern’ by abandoning its identity with ancient lineage in the sixteenth century is no longer believed, no more is it thought that a similar ‘modernization’ took its structure from extended to nuclear. Although we have better documentation of property dispositions and religious commemoration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, evidence suggests that the family was conceived in close nuclear terms throughout the period 1100-1500. Primogeniture prevented the division of estates among sons and, if there was a direct male heir, the church or non-inheriting children were only made such grants as were compatible with careful protection of the integrity of the estate for the heir. That meant also that only nobles could afford to make very generous provision for non-inheriting sons. The only change in the allocation of estates was in the form: from the late thirteenth century, the entail, which made it possible to designate the heirs to an estate, and then the use, which enabled some avoidance of primogeniture, made it easier to apportion and tie up property. Although these practices might have led either to still greater emphasis on male primogeniture or to the break-up of estates, it seems that what was actually done had changed little by 1500. However, although the nuclear family was the norm, the household, also called the familia, which included servants and sometimes unmarried adult children and paying guests, remained an important part of aristocratic life well beyond the middle ages. Even so, the growth of private rooms from the thirteenth century onwards suggests an increasing desire to retreat from it. Nor is it true to suggest that family affection and emotion is a ‘modern’ phenomenon. Undoubtedly, marriage among landed families was a business transaction, as it had to be when the family business was at stake, and noble heirs and heiresses tended to be married off in extreme youth, although canon law forbade actual cohabitation until the ages of fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. However, late medieval evidence shows that the children of the gentry tended to be married in their mid - or late teens or even their twenties, and all prospective marriage partners were allowed by canon law to refuse their intended. If youthful nobles were in practice unlikely to be able to do so, the gentry correspondences reveal that the gentry’s sons, and occasionally even daughters, had a great deal of say in this and that an arranged marriage is by no means a bar to love between the partners. They also show strong and sometimes stormy emotional bonds between parents and children and among siblings.

Since very few aristocratic women were able to attain any public authority, it was within the family that they had a significant role. They were important carriers of land: by the early twelfth century a daughter was beginning to take precedence over a collateral male heir and by the early thirteenth century, when inheritance law in general had become more fixed, the practice of equal division among heiresses had become the norm. Although married women were nominally entirely subject to their husband, the development of use and entail enabled their families to protect the wife’s property interests under the terms of the marriage contract. Those who had absent husbands had an enormously important part to play in running the household. It was noblewomen, with husbands serving abroad or about the king, who were most likely to be in this position, but gentlewomen were also left in charge on occasion and Margaret Paston, for one, shows herself to be no mean local politician. It was as widows that these women really came into their own; they had a right to a third of their husband’s lands in dower and, from the fourteenth century, often a jointure, of lands given on marriage to both partners and held by the survivor. While heirs might rue the land that they had to wait for, sometimes very large amounts, a single widow could become a very powerful figure if she chose to. If she was an heiress, she might indulge her own wishes by using some of her wealth to found religious houses; a circumstance to which Clare and Pembroke Colleges in Cambridge owe their existence. It is sometimes argued that women’s position declined in the later middle ages and the growth of tail male inheritance is cited as one instance of this. However, tail male was not yet normal among the gentry by 1500 and on entailed noble estates only close male heirs trumped daughters. Well-known fifteenth-century aristocratic women, from Margaret Paston to Margaret Beaufort, suggest that they were still a force to be reckoned with. Clearly the question would bear further scrutiny.

Moving from the family to the locality, the issues become both more complex and more debatable. The big question concerns the relative importance of horizontal and vertical relationships: whether the knights’ or gentry’s ties to the nobility were more important in defining their social and political world than their links with each other. This is a key issue in assessing the power of the nobles in the localities and therefore in the country as a whole. In the period up to the early thirteenth century, the issue revolves around the force of feudal lordship: the power of the honour against the strength of local connections with other lords, and with sub-tenants of other lords. No one now believes that there ever was a ‘perfect’ feudal world, where all political and social life was concentrated on the honour, and the honorial court was the only judicial forum for all pleas concerning feudal tenants and their lord. The geographical dispersal of many honours, especially in the south midlands and south, made this improbable from the first: a tenant residing far away from the feudal caput honoris (the capital of the honour, where the lord resided) and the honorial court was almost bound to come into the ambit of neighbours who were lords or tenants of other honours. Twelfth-century studies, for example of the honour of Holderness, have shown sub-tenants holding of more than one lord and in widespread localities and have indicated that there were connections among them forged by neighbourhood and cutting across feudal ties. Given that it is unlikely that most lords could impose their will throughout their honours, the evidence of royal intervention in affairs between lords and tenants, which grows rapidly under Henry I, and of settlement of disputes in the county and hundred courts is no surprise. That the lords’ efforts to control the allegiances and violence of their feudal tenants when royal government broke down under Stephen were often unsuccessful suggests that lords and tenants had become used to the king’s involvement. Moreover, the earl of Chester’s attempt under Stephen to construct an enclave in which he was tenurially and jurisdictionally supreme indicates that lords had not been able to achieve this kind of dominance before. However, there is also good evidence of feudal tenants attending honorial courts, of the courts acting effectively to resolve land disputes and of the honour functioning as a political, social and religious focal point for many of its tenants. Historians would be unwise to kill off the honour prematurely, before the king’s law completed the process, and as late as John’s reign feudal ties still had some bearing on political action, especially in the north, where honours were less dispersed.

Undoubtedly, lordship determined by geographical proximity to the lord rather than by tenure began to predominate in the thirteenth century, and this is what we mean by ‘bastard feudalism’, a once pejorative phrase for such allegiances which now serves simply as useful shorthand. Although the historiography of ‘bastard feudalism’ used to focus on the indenture between lord and man and the fee paid to the retainer, it is now clear that this was merely a formal, and relatively rare, recognition of a tie that was as fundamental to the aristocracy’s social and political world as the feudal link between barons and knights had been. ‘Bastard feudalism’, like feudalism, bound together the hierarchy of greater and lesser landowners and the ‘bastard feudal’ groupings round a noble lord are known as affinities. We know very little at present about the degree of involvement of lords in the affairs of the shires during the thirteenth century. For subsequent centuries, there is a lively debate over whether it was gentry or nobility who were the commanding figures in local societies and hence in the local administration, which by the later fourteenth century was in local hands. The answer is that there was great local variation, as we might expect, but that it was assumed that noble leadership would be the norm, even though it did not obtain universally, or always take the same form. The key variants were accordingly the lands, circumstances and ability of the local nobility. Counties like Devon and Warwickshire, where there was a tenurially dominant noble family, were more likely to be subject to strong noble leadership than those like Norfolk, where there was no such family, while counties where the crown as private landowner predominated were again different. But, whatever the local circumstances, there was neither wholesale noble supremacy nor assertion of independence by a self-confident gentry but a complex mutuality of interest linking nobles and gentry and gentry to each other. This was based above all on the nobles’ need to secure the local support that enabled them to stand behind the king’s local government, the gentry’s need to keep their estates safe, partly by means of that government, especially the law, and the common need to keep the peace locally and so prevent damage to property. Proponents of ‘gentry power’ advance the idea that there were gentry county communities which, as the parliamentary Commons, presented a corporate gentry perspective, central to which was hostility to noble interference in local affairs. There is no doubt of the county’s administrative and representational importance, but there are numbers of reasons for doubting that it played the predominant role in landowners’ lives. Gentry estates rarely coincided with it, spouses often came from beyond the county, local networks were never delineated by county boundaries. From the later thirteenth century the county court was no longer a forum where gentry regularly met, except perhaps at elections, while by 1500 the sessions of the justices of the peace were only beginning to attain their Tudor status as the fulcrum of local society. Furthermore, the county community leaves no room for the key local role of the nobility, whose lands made them supra-county figures. The Commons in parliament were certainly their own men rather than the dependent mouthpieces of the Lords, and local elections were not just a matter of local nobles nominating their men. However, the Commons’ defence of their interests in parliament needs to be read with due allowance for rhetoric and it was in any case more often directed against king and peasants than against the nobility. Landowners at all levels throughout this period had a number of shifting and multi-layered local identities which still await proper exploration.

No exploration of landowners’ identity would be complete without a discussion of their religious beliefs and education. Study of their religion has focused mainly on the nobles in the period up to c.1300 and on the gentry thereafter. Although the much better recorded outward forms have received more attention than inner belief, grants made to the church and such evidence as we have of personal beliefs reveal a thoroughly conventional religion, albeit an increasingly well-informed one. There were fashions in donations. First, it was the religious orders: Benedictines, then Augustinians, an order associated particularly with Henry I’s new men, and Cistercians in the middle of the twelfth century. These foundations were often placed at the caput honoris and sub-tenants would be encouraged to contribute to their endowment. From the thirteenth century lack of spare land for founding great religious houses, with the ending of the colonial period, and the new doctrine of

Purgatory led to an emphasis on endowments for post mortem prayers, such as the collegiate foundations of the nobles and chantries, the latter often in parish churches. For the gentry, now imitating the nobles in having a religious centre to go with the centre of their estates, the parish church became the focus of religious patronage. The search for harbingers of the Reformation among landowners has not proved especially fruitful. There were certainly Lollards, or Lollard sympathizers, among gentry and nobility, especially in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but not in significant numbers. The argument that aristocratic religion was becoming individualist and elitist and separated from ‘popular’ religion during the fifteenth century, and hence more prone to eventual seduction by Protestantism, begs many questions about popular and elite religion. It also ignores the enormous importance of the parish church to the gentry at this time, even to those who imitated the nobles in acquiring private altars for their houses. There is, however, one characteristic of aristocratic religion that may presage the dissolutions of the sixteenth century: the proprietorial attitude to religious foundations, which arguably grew stronger towards the end of the period and which led eventually to the idea that grants to such institutions, even ancient ones, might be rescinded.

The myth that the medieval aristocracy was ill-educated has long been dismissed. We know that education, first of nobles and then of gentry, was taken seriously. Education for both groups was usually in the household, often someone else’s household; we have seen that it was only at the end of our period that national institutions of higher education for the laity began to develop. Nobles may have been able to read French and even Latin by the early twelfth century, and by 1200 it was certainly assumed they could read, probably in both languages. By the fourteenth century some were writing books themselves and the late medieval nobility were undeniably a well-educated group, some of them in the forefront of the new learning. From the time that the royal government expanded in the late twelfth century, lesser landowners, whether objects or officers of the government, also needed to be able to read enough Latin to understand the written instructions emanating from the government, and the influx of professionals into their ranks brought in men who could read and write in French and Latin. The proliferation of literature that would have appealed to men and women of the gentry from the later thirteenth century, such as the less courtly English versions of French romances, indicates the spread of reading, and there is direct evidence in the fifteenth century that even women could write.

To sum up this overview of lay landowners in this period, they were a well-educated group, mostly very competent in their varied public and private duties, highly conscious of their own importance, an aristocracy of service that drew much of its identity, purpose and sense of personal consequence from the official and unofficial role it played in enabling the work of the king’s government to be carried on. This was in fact a group which spent much of its time on government and politics, whether national or local, and a survey of landowners’ morality and expectations with regard to politics and governance is accordingly an appropriate conclusion to this chapter. A cliche of much work on the fourteenth - and fifteenth-century aristocracy, now informing discussion of the entire period from 1100 to 1500, is that politics and governance were all about the king’s distribution of patronage. This, however, sits uneasily with the idea that the relationship of crown and aristocracy was mutually supportive - service in return for security - since it implies that service had to be bought with material rewards. It also implies that politics were confined to what happened around the king, although it is clear that for much of the period the centre could not dictate to the localities and that throughout the period the interplay between centre and locality was a pivotal element in politics. For, while royal power came from the centre, landowning power was by definition rooted in the shires. Moreover, it ignores the importance of the public authority of the king, in making governance effective and in forming aristocratic opinions about how far personal interest might impinge on governmental processes. In fact, contemporary commentaries on politics, which proliferate from the late thirteenth century, very explicitly condemn ‘covetise’, self-advancement and the substitution of ‘stirring and moving’ for what should be the disinterested counselling of a lord or king. Thus, if patronage really was the fulcrum of kingship, nobody was prepared to acknowledge it as such. Royal patronage, in taking and granting estates and deciding between rival heirs, was politically at its most important from the Conquest to the early thirteenth century, the period of colonization and lack of restraint on royal interference. Thereafter as estates, especially noble ones, became more stable in composition and inheritance, the compact between king and landowners centred round the king’s duty to protect land with his law. By definition this excluded using the law to show favour or disfavour; kings still did it occasionally but needed to act with care and from a position of strength, and those, like Edward II and Richard II, who abused the law systematically were without the means to defend themselves when landowners en masse withdrew their normally automatic allegiance.

There were certainly ‘court politics’ in the sense of intrigue and personal confrontation in the king’s ambience, though their much greater frequency in the reigns of inadequate kings suggests that they were not the norm. It is also undeniable that there were some major personal feuds at the highest and lowest levels of the landowning hierarchy, but it is equally true that the individualism which the patronage paradigm implies is only one part of medieval politics. We have seen the extent to which nobility and gentry had collective interests. From Magna Carta onwards the nobles acted collectively to reform or protect the realm. Personal divisions, an inescapable part of small-scale politics, only became truly divisive under kings like Stephen, Henry III, Edward II and Henry VI, when the political framework was shattered, and even in these periods acute division was usually short-lived and nobles like Simon de Montfort or Thomas of Lancaster who went out on a private limb found themselves isolated. Studies of local landowning societies have shown that these were held together by a powerful sense of mutual obligation and reciprocity. Certainly, the interests of family and lineage could encourage disruptive, even violent, behaviour, but it was normally held in check by trust built up over years of mutual association in the business of the family estate and in the running of the shire, and by the knowledge that landed wealth is peculiarly vulnerable to destructive violence. Paradoxically, it was because landowners at all levels wanted the freedom to pursue their personal agendas that the strong bonds of royal authority and collective security which provided an ultimate restraint were so important to them. The powerful sense of what was proper to pride of family and lineage was matched by an equally powerful one of what was proper in the context of landowning society.

This has important bearing on the idea advanced by some historians that the ‘law-state’ made by the Angevins was sacrificed to a late medieval ‘war-state’, in which the crown traded direct control of the shires against war taxation, leaving law as administered in the shires prey to the corruption of the nobility and gentry who now controlled it, and giving free rein to the violently individualistic chivalric values unleashed by war. This is in fact just a restatement of the dismissive nineteenth-century view of the period, which identified ‘bastard feudalism’ as the root of all evil. We have seen that the reason for devolution was the expansion, not the retreat, of government and there are no evidential grounds for believing that ‘bastard feudalism’ was an intrinsically destabilizing phenomenon. Violence there was among landowners but no more, probably less, than in earlier, less well-documented centuries and, to be approved, it had to conform to a recognized code, in the formation of which chivalry played its part. Chivalry itself carried, along with the valuing of individual prowess, strong connotations of allegiance and conformity to group norms. As for the alleged corruption of the law, contemporary comment may well indicate rising rather than falling standards, and in the fourteenth century, when it is most outspoken, it certainly reflects as much responses to a period of great expansion and change in the law and its administration as criticism. Moreover, it is important to shed the modern notion that order is rooted in law and any private interference is corrupt. Throughout this period, public order was not only enforced by private power but grounded in private relationships. It was not that evil landowners deliberately sought to control the king’s law for nefarious purposes but rather that the law rested firmly on this older private domain. Among landowners law acted as a safety net when private relationships broke down. It was therefore irreplaceable but not normally their first port of call, and its role for them was primarily to force contending parties into private settlements.

Any survey of lay landowners between 1100 and 1500 will present more questions than answers at the moment. However, one clear outcome of the research of the last half-century or more has been to reveal the rich complexity of their lives and assumptions. It is a complexity that has only become apparent since historians began to take these men and women seriously and study them for their own sake, rather than as an undifferentiated mass forming an alleged obstacle to the effective operation of the institutions of central government. We now know that they were, on the contrary, an essential adjunct to government, and that the multiplicity of ways in which both their public and their private activities influenced the realm of England and its people makes them a demanding but rewarding object of study.