Lordship and Lawlessness in the Palatinate of Lancaster, 1370–1400

Abstract

The precise connection between “bastard feudalism,” the characteristic form of aristocratic social organization in later medieval England, and the disordered condition of English politics in the later Middle Ages has long been a subject for debate among historians. While earlier writers had no doubt that the emergence of magnate affinities—bands of men bound to a lord by an indenture of retainer and a money fee rather than by a heritable fief in land—in the early fourteenth century had destructive consequences for the quality of public order, their unfavorable judgments have now been largely replaced by a more sympathetic account of the workings of magnate lordship, which portrays the late medieval affinity as neither an aberration nor a degeneration from the arrangements of an earlier age, but, rather, the logical successor to them. The creation of this consensus represents, however, only the first stage in the effort to reach a proper understanding of the mechanics of lordship in later medieval England, for it raises a number of secondary questions that have yet to be resolved. How pervasive, for instance, was the network of clientage and patronage represented by the magnate affinity?One view holds that this network “formed the fabric of contemporary life”: a magnate could effectively control a county or counties by using his indentured retainers “to diffuse the lord's influence through the areas where his estates lay, into the wider affinity, and even among landowners outside the affinity, using above all the power they could wield as local administrators.”