This chapter explores the transition from a medieval picture of manorial courts as being focused on seignorial concerns to an early modern picture of being focused on community concerns. Through categorising presentments, it demonstrates that the role of manorial officials went through two transitions between c.1300 and c.1650. Firstly, there was a shift away from seignorial and royal business to a community-focused ‘little commonwealth’ where courts worked to maintain local infrastructure and common lands. In a second transition, in the seventeenth century some courts began to be purely focused on land registration and transfers. However, these changes occurred in the context of local variation and a wider East Anglian versus western/south-western divide. These findings support two conclusions. Firstly, they challenge a narrative of the decline of manorial structures, showing how the adaptability of courts allowed them to be put to a wide range of uses by communities. Secondly, they highlight that manorial institutions were not imposed by lords in a top-down process, but were shaped by local officials, who recognised the utility of these institutions for their own purposes.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

This chapter investigates the connection between officeholding and serfdom in light of new interpretations which have suggested that serfdom, rather than being a significant liability that the unfree fought hard to remove, was instead characterised by routine obligations and disappeared quickly after the Black Death. Through comparing lists of officers with records of landholding and personal status, it finds that both free and customary landholders served in office. It also demonstrates that serving in office was rarely resisted as an obligation and that while officials did help enforce some aspects of serfdom, they were no longer doing this by the mid-sixteenth century, and even before this only enforced limited aspects of personal unfreedom which likely did not disadvantage tenants in a meaningful way. These findings highlight that the division between unfree and free landholding was breaking down in the late Middle Ages, but also, more significantly, show that officials were not put-upon unfree servants. Communities of tenants were not forced to serve in office but recognised the utility of manorial structures for meeting their own objectives.

The introduction starts by showing how the Swallowfield Articles, the famous record of the early modern ‘politics of the parish’, reveal the persistent importance of the ‘medieval’ manorial court leet to local governance. It then provides an overview of both the medieval and early modern historiography, showing how a newer set of contributions has emphasised continuity between these eras by revealing the importance of manor courts after 1500, a long-run connection between state and locality stretching back into the Middle Ages, and the existence of a medieval local elite. It shows that a flaw in the literature remains the lack of cross-period studies which this book tackles by exploring the functions of manorial offices, who filled these offices, and the ways in which officeholding systems changed in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation using a long-run time frame stretching from 1300 to 1650. Next, the key features of the case-study manors (Horstead, Cratfield, Little Downham, Worfield and Fordington) are discussed. The final section provides a plan of the book.

The Introduction argues that the common scholarly terms feudalism, lordship, state-building, bureaucracy, officeholding and government all promote a misleading narrative about Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern period. To better understand how power and authority functioned at the local level, it is essential to focus on the people who provided protection and exercised justice – and to recognize how little their corrupt practices changed between 750 and 1800. At the center of this study is the position of advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt), which emerged in the Carolingian period. Advocates then proliferated, especially in the German-speaking lands, and were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice on ecclesiastical estates, in some towns and even for entire regions. Examining how advocates profited from their positions across a millennium offers the opportunity to reassess the standard narrative of European political progress and to rethink the concepts we rely on to tell that story.

This chapter concludes the detailed examination of co-rule with two responsibilities most intimately connected with lordship in medieval thought and modern scholarship: war and justice. During the succession dispute, the Montfortists raised the standard complaint that a woman could not undertake these duties, but the Penthièvre case argued that inheritance and shared power circumvented this objection. Jeanne’s actual engagement with responsibilities of jurisdiction and warfare demonstrates that although her role expanded in Charles’ absence, she continually acted in her own right rather than as a proxy or intercessor, two dynamics strongly linked to women’s exercise of power (and particularly to queenship). This independence allowed Jeanne to use power-sharing as an active strategy to stabilize her and Charles’ position during periods of protracted negotiations, as two case studies show. At the same time, theoretical and practical distinctions made between performing these seigneurial responsibilities in service to one’s lord, and one’s own exercise of lordship, embedded the gender dynamics of spousal co-rule within the negotiation of power across the French sociopolitical structure.

This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.

Chaucer, writing for an upper-class audience, satirises the productive base of society, peasants and cottagers, by idealising their frugality and sense of social duty, leaving the reader to contrast these qualities with their perceived selfish acquisitiveness. In dealing with the landed aristocracy, the poet criticises them (without irony) for their exploitation of their tenants, and reminds them satirically that the managers of their landed estates were cheating them. Landed magnates and gentry were engaged in mundane routines of land management, and Chaucer indulges their escapist fantasy of living in ideal places, man-made paradises in gardens and parks. The economy depended on rural production envigorated by commerce, especially with industrial growth after 1350. Chaucer, himself a townsman, wrote about the traders and professionals who functioned in a complex urban environment. He refers to money, credit and contracts, and some of his plots hinge on bargains made and broken.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.