THE FIRST CENTURY OF ENGLISH FEUDALISM

Abstract

Over the past sixty years or so the nature of baronial lordship in Anglo-Norman England, and the impact upon that lordship of the Angevin legal reforms, have become the subject matter of an important and vigorous historical debate. The origins of the debate lie in Professor Stenton's classic Ford Lectures of 1929, published under the title The First Century of English Feudalism . The society portrayed by Stenton was a ‘seignorial world’, dominated by baronial lordship rather than royal control. Although careful to point out that the crown had an overriding supervision of law and aristocratic affairs, Stenton implied that this supervision was exercised intermittently and selectively, and that, generally speaking, the greater baronial lordships were autonomous jurisdictional entities free from the interference of the crown. Referring to a document recording an agreement made in the 1140s between two Lincolnshire tenants in the presence of their lord, William I of Roumare, Stenton stated that the king, [could not] intervene in the internal affairs of a great honour. The supreme authority here is not the king, but William de Roumara, earl of Lincoln. The present agreement was made at Bolingbroke, the head of his fief, and witnessed by a group of his leading tenants; the heir to the land at issue was put in seisin by his marshal. The feudal order illustrated here was independent of the king's direction or control. The honour of Bolingbroke was a feudal state in miniature. […]

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