The Ineffectiveness of Lordship in England, 1200–1400

This essay is concerned with the English aristocracy, meaning lay and clerical lords, from the gentry to dukes and archbishops, mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It examines critically the reputation that the lords have gained in modern times for playing a very decisive and forceful role in the economy.¹

The aristocracy, especially the magnates, are often depicted as attaining a pinnacle of economic success in the thirteenth century. They had been faced with grave problems around 1200, as inflation threatened to reduce the value of their fixed incomes, and a predatory Angevin monarchy increased its financial demands on them. By the end of the thirteenth century, they had increased their landed revenues; embraced direct management of agriculture on their estates; honed an effective system of private administration; completed the imposition of a new form of serfdom; developed written records as an aid to exercising profitable private justice; squeezed large sums from the peasantry; founded a network of new markets and towns; invested in property in the larger urban centres; embraced technological innovations such as windmills; and changed the landscape by clearing land from wood and marsh, and by creating impressive buildings and parks.²

All of these things happened, but when the significance of these changes is questioned closely, the level of achievement must be qualified. It will be argued here that in some respects we must regard the thirteenth century as marking a phase in the failure of lordship.

Rodney Hilton emphasized the coercive powers of lords, which allowed them to extract the peasants' surplus, so he would not have welcomed this line of argument. He was, however, opposed to mechanical, economistic conceptions, and distrusted dogmatic ideological positions which were not informed by empirical observation. If our evidence undermines a generalization, then that position must be revised or restated. The observations presented here to some extent draw on his ideas about peasant self-reliance and activism. He pointed out that the peasant economy was autonomous, and that peasants could live without lords; they derived strength from that potential independence.³ Far from all-powerful lords oppressing cringing demoralized peasants, Rodney Hilton showed that although lords put pressure on their subordinates, the peasants could resist because they had their own resources in terms both of their material goods and their ideas. In his broad theory of the crisis of feudalism he argued that the feudal regime around 1300 failed to sustain its earlier growth, and this paper attempts to explore the inherent weaknesses in the power of lords which contributed to the crisis.⁴ Hilton would have welcomed a critical appraisal of the aristocracy, whether medieval or modern, but he would have said that the jurisdictional power and the selfish ruthlessness of lords should not be underestimated.

Weaknesses of the seigneurial regime

First of all, the evidence itself must be considered, because the abundant documentation of estate management by its very existence represents a major achievement of private administration. If we move from being impressed by the sheer bulk of manorial rolls, registers and cartularies to examining their contents, the rising rents and manorial profits in the thirteenth century can readily be observed. Admirers of lords point to the skill with which central estate administrators, like those of Norwich Cathedral Priory, calculated the annual profits of each manor.⁵ The local knowledge and quick decision-making of the reeves who managed individual manors could raise profits by adjusting the balance of crops from year to year. Their annual accounts reflected the quality of their performance, a judgement which could be made by the estate administrators as well as by modern historians.⁶

The usefulness of the profit calculations, however, is not always apparent, and modern observers wonder how much practical use could have been made of them. Lords like Merton College, Oxford, seem to have been reluctant to lease out their demesnes around 1300, even when their own accounts suggested that this move would have yielded a larger income.⁷ The documents tell a story of lords' defensiveness in the face of real threats to their property and incomes. Surveys...