The first body within the kingdom after the monarch and the royal family to visualize itself as a distinct order or political community was the aristocracy. Although England’s aristocracy had no formal legal standing until two centuries later, descendants of William the Conqueror’s companions quickly came to view themselves as a hereditary caste. Second - and third-generation Anglo-Norman barons adopted patronymics derived from ancestral lands in Normandy; and they came to expect royal patronage because of their superior status and distinguished ancestry rather than as a reward for services rendered. Before the twelfth century, nobilitas was not a term designating a social or economic class, and the medieval English aristocracy was never a completely closed class. It was a fluid group composed of dynasties often lasting no more than three or four generations and constantly replaced by newcomers rising through royal favour or marriage. Indeed, England’s nobility had no precise definition until the fourteenth century, when individual summonses to parliament became heritable, creating a hereditary peerage.
The term ‘baronage’, tenants-in-chief of the king holding substantial numbers of knights’ fees (at least thirty knights’ fees and an annual income of ?200), is commonly accepted as a synonym for the medieval English nobility; and it is useful, although the connection is not complete. Among the aristocracy, the highest rank was ‘earl’ (Latin comes); and earls were often the king’s kinsmen, although the title was largely honorific after Henry Il’s accession. Their number ranged from about a half-dozen during the Anglo-Norman era to more than a dozen under the Angevins, but the number rose excessively during Stephen’s weak rule. Standing alongside earls and barons in status were bishops and abbots. Despite the church’s definition of all clergy as separate from and superior to all laity, the higher clergy had dual status as both spiritual leaders and lay lords, holding lands of the king and owing him quotas of knight service. They often came from baronial families, they shared a similar preoccupation with protecting their property, they frequented the king’s court and sat alongside other great men at great councils.
In the years following the Norman Conquest, the new monarch and his aristocracy were united in a common interest in protecting the kingdom from foreign threats, keeping a subject population under control, and generally preserving and expanding their possessions. Since the barons were bound to the king by individual ties of homage and fealty, as well as by shared interests, they had little sense of themselves as a corporate body or estate with concerns that conflicted with the king’s goals. Although king and baronage were bound together, a certain tension always marked their relations. On one hand, William I and his sons relied on their aristocratic subjects’ castles, knights and other armed retainers to crush rebellions and to defend their territories, both in England and in France. On the other hand, nobles’ military strength could tempt them to challenge their ruler with rebellion if his demands pressed on them too hard; and their means for violence could obstruct his enforcement of royal authority over the entire kingdom. Both the king and his magnates had an appetite for continued conquests along the Welsh borders and in Ireland, and barons continued throughout the twelfth century to carve out large liberties or franchises beyond the reach of sheriffs or itinerant justices. Since a number of magnates were cross-Channel landholders with estates in both England and Normandy, several powerful barons shared with their king-duke a determination to hold on to the Norman duchy. Most English barons did not have enough land across the sea to care about Normandy’s fate, however; and by the end of the twelfth century, they resented the king’s increasing demands for money and military service in defence of his duchy.
The monarch saw his task as preventing his great men from forming factions capable of overwhelming him with armed force. The seriousness of a baronial threat would determine his response; he could subdue his barons by instilling fear, threatening force and confiscating their lands; or he could keep them contented by flattery and by patronage. Historians have accused Henry I of controlling the baronage by terror; but he moderated his predecessors’ severity in mutilating, imprisoning or exiling vanquished rebels, and his quarrels with great men more often ended in mutual accommodation than in harsh punishment. Monarchs were hesitant to dispossess their nobles of their family’s lands permanently, for custom insisted on hereditary right to one’s patrimony. In fact, Henry I generally placated his magnates with judicious distribution of patronage, recruiting a band of royalist barons or courtiers who frequently appeared at his side. Henry II also proved to be forgiving towards the defeated rebels who had joined his sons’ great revolt in 1173-4, few of whom lost their property, much less life or limb. When the king rewarded his faithful nobles, he had to take care not to create overmighty magnates, greedy for more patronage and capable of contesting royal power. It is little wonder that as early as William II (1089-1 100) kings were choosing counsellors and officials satisfied with more modest rewards: new men, lowborn servants, military retainers or clerics of undistinguished ancestry.
Some great men always accompanied the king on his travels about the kingdom or fought at his side on campaign in France, counselling him on matters of warfare and diplomacy, and adding to their family’s power and prestige, for example William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, companion of three Angevin kings. Other barons remained on their manors, seldom attending the royal court, and these country nobles became envious of courtiers who were winning patronage through their proximity to the king. They saw their own power diminishing as knights and clerks of the royal household won favours in the form of disputed inheritances, custody of manors in the king’s hand, marriages to wealthy heiresses or widows, and remission of debts and tax obligations. Country barons’ growing national consciousness complicated the patronage picture under John and Henry III. Many of King John’s favourites were alien mercenaries who had fled Normandy in 1204, men whom the native baronage considered unworthy companions for the king. Opposition to foreigners increased when Henry III showered favours on his Savoyard inlaws and his Poitevin half-brothers; and fears of so-called secret or household government spread.
Noble rebellions were not infrequent in twelfth - and thirteenth-century England, and they fell into three categories. First were isolated outbursts by individual barons defying the king, provoked by real or imagined personal grievances, often resulting from failure to secure royal patronage. Custom sanctioned an individual vassal’s renunciation of his homage to a lord who treated him cruelly or unjustly, but it did not approve compacts or conspiracies by bands of vassals. Second were larger-scale movements among the baronage seeking to replace the king with a rival claimant, frequently a disgruntled member of the royal family, although the warring barons rarely presented an enduring or unified front. Characteristic are the rising in support of Robert Curthose’s attempt to wrest the throne from Henry I in 1101, the revolt by Henry II’s sons in 1173-4, or an extended version of this type, the 1139-53 civil war between King Stephen and Henry I’s daughter, the Empress Matilda. Third are the large-scale baronial rebellions with agendas of limiting royal power appearing in the thirteenth century, first against King John in 1215-16, and then against his son Henry III from 1258 to 1265.
The collective action by the baronage against King John took the form of a conjuratio or sworn band of barons, bound together not simply by private complaints but by broad opposition to his rule based on principle. Late in the first decade of the thirteenth century the baronage began to think of itself as a corporate body with collective rights and responsibilities. The twelfth-century revolution in government had caused a faltering in the aristocrats’ position within the kingdom. An indication is the Angevin kings’ abandonment of the aristocratic assemblies summoned by the Anglo-Norman monarchs on great festivals of the ecclesiastical calendar, although great councils resurfaced temporarily during Richard Lionheart’s absence on crusade and in captivity (1190-4). Tendencies towards royal centralization threatened aristocrats’ autonomy within their honours, and they were feeling financial pressures from the English monarch’s efficient exchequer that exploited their tenurial relationship with him. The king loaded down his barons with payments due from their fiefs, assessed arbitrarily, leaving them in debt; and he exercised control over baronial inheritances, threatening noble lineages. Some nobles, hoping to swell their fortunes, made bids for custodies or other privileges; and such crown debtors became dependent on the king for deferment of payments or remission of debts.
Opinions on the nature of government diverged, as the new corps of professional royal servants not only challenged the magnates’ social and economic superiority, but also proposed theoretical justifications of royal absolutism. The barons condemned innovations under Henry II and his sons as departures from ancient custom, and they looked back with nostalgia to an idealized picture of Anglo-Norman England, where the king ruled with the counsel of his tenants-in-chief and safeguarded their honour courts’ integrity. By King John’s reign, two notions were taking root among the baronage; they sought to replace arbitrary rule by the king’s will with ‘due process of law’ and demanded a role for themselves in policy through frequent great councils: governance per judicium (by judgement) and per consilium (by counsel).
With Magna Carta (1215), the barons succeeded in gaining grudging royal assent to these principles of the rule of law, yet its guarantees of ‘due process’ did not settle the issue of royal prerogative versus the law of the land. Henry III, influenced by alien advisers with autocratic ideas, continued to violate that Charter’s spirit, tipping justice towards his favourites and threatening his subjects’ secure possession of property. Henry’s magnates periodically demanded his reaffirmation of the Charter’s principles; also great councils or parliament once more became common, and they claimed the right to give or withhold assent to new levies of general taxes, acting on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’. Barons complained that both John and his son took counsel with career royal servants, or worse, Poitevin military captains and other alien adventurers, refusing to restrict their choices to a hereditary elite who saw themselves as voicing the ‘common counsel of the realm’. Henry’s magnates had less reason than aristocrats in the twelfth century to complain of aggressive royal agents threatening their domination over the countryside, however; since he tended to neglect enforcement of royal authority in the counties, leaving much local peacekeeping and dispute settlement to nobles’ private courts.
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