The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217-1327

by Scott L. Waugh

Overview

This thorough examination of the feudal powers of English kings in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is the only study to analyze the actual pattern of royal grants and the grantees' use of their rights, and to place them in the social context of marriage, kinship, and landholding within the English elite. The royal rights, known as feudal incidents, included custody of a tenant's lands when he died leaving minor heirs, the arrangement of the heir's marriage, and consent to the widow's remarriage. Scott Waugh shows how the king exercised those rights and how his use of feudal incidents affected his relations with the tenants-in-chief. He concludes that royal lordship was of fundamental importance in reinforcing the power and prestige of the monarchy and in offering the king a valuable source of patronage.

English kings, therefore, devoted considerable effort to defining and institutionalizing their feudal authority in the thirteenth century. It is also clear that families living under royal lordship were profoundly concerned about these rights, especially since marriage was of such critical importance in providing for the smooth transfer of lands from one generation to another. Given the hazards of life in the Middle Ages, inheritance by minors was a frequent occurrence, and the king's distribution of feudal incidents was therefore a delicate political problem. It raised issues not only about royal finances and favoritism but also about the fate of families.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691631516
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #909
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.30(d)

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The Lordship of England

Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217â"1327

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By Scott L. Waugh

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05509-1

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CHAPTER 1

MARRIAGE, KINSHIP, AND PROPERTY

The acquisition, preservation, and cultivation of property absorbed the energies of families at all levels of society in medieval England. For members of the elite, this preoccupation meant devoting as much care to the marriage of children as to the management of lands and tenants. Family obligations caused economic difficulties as real as those brought on through indebtedness, bad management, forfeiture, or economic change and led to the loss of land or revenue. Thus, however great their desire to consolidate wealth in the hands of the eldest son, landholders did not hesitate to support younger sons, daughters, and widows. They also faced the prospect that if they did not leave a male heir the estate would be divided between women. To cope with these dangers and uncertainties, landholders devised various strategies for acquiring and protecting land, one of the most important of which was marriage. Marriage offered an opportunity to acquire land and the potential for future acquisition through inheritance. It fostered group cohesion by uniting families in a network of kinship and shared interest in one another's property. And it had far-reaching political consequences, because it was in this context of marriage and landholding that the king exercised his feudal incidents — rights that seriously affected marital plans.

Inheritance and Demands on the Estate

English custom directed the bulk of an estate to the eldest male heir, but it also called for the distribution of land to other family members, a form of "diverging devolution." Property seldom descended intact from one individual to another. It was used instead to support the entire family. Sisters and younger brothers, theoretically left out of the inheritance under primogeniture, in fact often received a premortem share of the inheritance in the form of gifts from the holder of the estate. Widows controlled at least a third of the estate for their lives after the death of their husbands, regardless of any subsequent marriages. The ideals of diverging devolution, providing for all family members, and patrilineage, concentrating wealth in a male heir, were equally important to all landholders, though not all were equally lavish to noninheriting children. For every family in every generation there was a strong possibility that some lands would devolve away from the patriline, forcing landholders to make up the loss and to prevent the estate from wasting away.

This fission intensified whenever women inherited because, from the late twelfth century onward, estates were divided equally among female heirs. Feudal custom preferred male heirs to female, yet because it also preferred the nearest blood relative to distant relations, women inherited in the absence of a direct male heir. Daughters inherited before their father's younger brothers, and sisters before their uncles. Property descended as a "unitary right." Yet all women of the same degree, or of the same relation to the landholder, had equal claims on the inheritance. It did not matter whether they were "of the father and the same mother [or of the mother and same father] or different ones." Since the inheritance was treated as a unity, all the daughters of a given property holder, by one or more wives or husbands, who were equally close to the property holder and hence to the property, shared the inheritance equally. For example, Gilbert de Lesteneston married three times and had one daughter by each of his wives. On his death in 1246, his property descended to all three daughters.

The frequency and impact of women's inheritance can be seen in the fate of English baronies between 1200 and 1327. By that time a baron had no specific legal functions or privileges, and the term did not denote a precise economic rank. At one end the group included knights, squires, and Serjeants who comprised the bulk of the tenants-in-chief, while at the other it encompassed the wealthiest lay landholders in England who were the leaders of the landed elite. Here the elite is defined as those landholders with sufficient wealth, expertise, and inclination to participate in the important functions of the medieval state. The elite was not an undifferentiated mass but can be divided, like the ranks of the barons, into two groups according to their public importance. At the top were about a hundred magnates or proceres: earls, barons, wealthy knights, and ministers who served on the king's council, performed the higher functions of law and administration, led his forces in war, and whose wealth and power covered the kingdom as a whole. The second level comprised knights and wealthy gentry who served the king in local and central institutions and whose wealth was concentrated in one or two counties. The two groups were not mutually exclusive and status did not divide them with geologic fixity. No barriers of law or privilege prevented interrelationships or movement between them. The so-called peerage had not yet come into existence to demarcate clearly the difference between gentry and aristocracy. Contemporaries nevertheless distinguished between those who wielded influence across the community of the realm as a whole and those whose authority was more localized. Although not socially homogeneous, this secular elite along with its ecclesiastical peers comprised a class distinct from the mass of peasantry who worked their lands and were subject to their legal and economic authority. The baronies offer a representative sample of the lay portion of the landholding elite and yield important data about the social and political consequences of marriage, descent, and female inheritance.

The hazards of life in the Middle Ages were so great that families could not count on the unbroken descent of property through fathers and sons. The descent of the sample baronies is summarized in Table 1.1. There were 192 known and probable baronies in 1200. Down to 1327 they experienced approximately 635 generational changes, that is, points at which a barony passed on to the next generation. In 144 cases (22.7 percent of the time) the baron died childless and the property passed to a collateral line or to women. None of the original 192 baronies in this period actually escheated to the Crown due to a total failure of heirs, though a fair number came into the king's hands by sale, grant, or forfeiture. Nevertheless, continuity in the male line could not be guaranteed. Some families ran through several male heirs. William Marshal, the renowned knight and royal counselor, died in 1219 leaving five sons. Yet between 1219 and 1245, each of them died childless, one after the other, eventually leaving the inheritance to their five sisters. The extinction of the male line was sufficiently remarkable to engender rumors of prophecy and a curse on the family, but the earldoms of Chester, Arundel, Huntingdon, and Winchester likewise fell to sisters when their brothers died childless in the early thirteenth century. In 21 of the cases in which the tenant-in-chief died childless, the barony went to a sister, aunt, or niece. Taking all of the generational changes into consideration, men usually inherited. Yet baronial estates fell to women 19.5 percent of the time, and less than a third of the original baronies descended through males over the period as a whole.

Women's inheritance, therefore, profoundly affected the distribution of wealth within the elite. Inheritance by a single woman did not disrupt estates. Through marriage her inheritance merged with her husband's property to form a new patrimony. In at least ten cases, the heirs of these unions highlighted their attachment to the property by taking their mother's or grandmother's family name, that is, the name associated with the land. Inheritance by more than one woman was more significant for the distribution of wealth because it shattered estates. The biographer of Edward II thus lamented the partition of the Clare inheritance after the premature death of the earl of Gloucester in 1314. Like the Marshal partition seventy years earlier, it spawned rumors of a prophecy. This time it was Simon de Montfort who supposedly laid the curse on the family at the battle of Evesham (1265) when he denounced the earl of Gloucester for deserting Simon's cause. A generation later Edward III deplored the fact that women's inheritance had reduced the number of titles and had weakened the realm. The process of fission is laid out in Table 1.2. It went even further than that. Of the 185 fragments listed in the table, 28 were subsequently partitioned, making 75 more, of which another 5 fragmented into 12 pieces. Altogether, the 67 baronies inherited by more than one woman eventually devolved into 246 particles, some of them quite small. As can be seen in the table, estates usually fell to only one or two women, though large families were not unheard of. William Marshal had ten surviving children in 1219, while at the other end of the period, Roger de Mortimer, the first earl of March, had eleven children, seven of them girls.

The greatest danger to an estate, as Bracton noted, was that it would be partitioned in successive generations, eroding it into ever smaller pieces. The Marshal inheritance offers an instructive example. After the death of the last brother in 1245, five sisters partitioned the estate. Two of those sisters produced only daughters, further subdividing their portions. Eve married William de Braose and passed her fifth of the barony on to four daughters, while Sibyl and her husband, William de Ferrers, passed her fifth on to seven daughters, one of whom had four more daughters and coheirs. By the mid-thirteenth century, those seven women had contracted a total of twelve marriages, but only eight of the matches produced children and one of the women died in 1274 without surviving descendants. In fact, in 1327, when the last descendant of another of Sibyl's coheirs died without children, royal escheators could find only five male representatives of all of Sibyl's offspring.

At any given time, a significant portion of the elite's wealth was in the hands of heiresses or widows. The extent of their control can be glimpsed in some lists of knights and potential knights drawn up by sheriffs to determine liability for compulsory knighthood. For example, a list of landholders for Northamptonshire in 1297 shows ninety-seven knights in the county, forty-one squires (armigerii), and twenty women (16 percent). A list of the holders of £40 worth of land by knight service in Shropshire in 1300 records that six of the thirty-two or more lay landholders (19 percent) were women. Finally, a return from a Gloucestershire inquest in 1344 records that of more than sixty lay landholders, twenty-four were widows or heiresses, and that they held approximately 13 percent of the assessed wealth. Of course, the accidents of birth, death, and inheritance that caused family wealth to devolve outward could likewise reunite fragments. The barony of Burgh by Sands, for instance, was partitioned between two daughters on the death of Hugh de Morvill in 1202, but was reconstituted seventy years later through inheritance.

Demography and inheritance customs, therefore, could have serious political repercussions. As it subdivided estates over time, women's inheritance weakened the concentration of land and lordship that constituted the power of the elite and led to a redistribution of wealth. The corrosiveness of inheritance could be neutralized to some extent through marriage. All nine of the coheirs to the Marshal and Chester inheritances were married to barons at the time of the partitions, meaning that the wealth was contained within the ranks of the baronage. At the other end of the period, marriage and inheritance combined to produce a dramatic concentration of wealth in the hands of Thomas of Lancaster. True, as Edward II's biographer stressed, Thomas was of noble, even royal, kinship, but the control of such wealth gave him inordinate power. The politics of Edward's reign were distorted further when the Clare estate was partitioned after 1314, robbing the elite of any counterweight to Lancaster. Then Edward foolishly compounded these problems by marrying two of the Clare heiresses to mere courtiers rather than to other members of the established nobility. Inheritance, especially when it thus involved women, was a dangerous point of transition, with the potential for realigning wealth and power.

Aside from inheritance, family members asserted other claims that could dissipate property or disrupt finances. Dower was the most prevalent and most seriously affected family income. A widow's right to at least a third of her deceased husband's property during her lifetime was well protected by the common law. And among baronial landholders, wives often outlived their husbands, as can be seen in Table 1.3. The even greater rate of survival for second wives undoubtedly reflects the advanced age of the barons when they remarried as well as the fact that they seem to have preferred younger women to widows as second wives. In such a circumstance, an heir might have to wait in vain for the death of a stepmother who was nearly his coeval in order to obtain his full inheritance.

Some widows were especially long-lived and carried the dowers they accumulated, along with any inheritance or dowry, to subsequent husbands. One glaring example was Isolda, the daughter and eventual sole heir of William Pantolf, who married five husbands in succession between about 1180 and 1223. She may have been exceptional, but widows often remarried at least once. Although the dower was only a life grant, and families could recover lands that widows alienated, the loss of a third of the estate while the widow was alive nonetheless seriously depleted the heir's income. It was not unusual, moreover, for successive generations of widows to survive, thereby delaying an heir's full enjoyment of his inheritance until the deaths of his mother, grandmother, and perhaps even great-grandmother.

Women also received a portion of the family property on their marriage. A dowry represented an internal rearrangement of the inheritance for the purpose of supporting a woman and her new family, if she produced one. If she or her heirs within three generations failed to have children, the land reverted to the donor's family, for neither she nor her husband or heirs performed homage for the dowry. Furthermore, if it turned out that a woman who had received a marriage portion became a coheir of the property, then she had a choice in the partitioning of the property. She could put her dowry back into the pot with the rest of the inheritance and then apportion the land, or she could keep her dowry and make no further claim on the inheritance. Bracton bluntly states that "she either contributes her marriage portion or departs without any share at all ... she has the choice of contributing it or not." The possibility of choice shows how custom equated a marriage portion with a share of the inheritance.

After 1300, when marriage portions came to be paid in cash, it is possible to calculate the impact of marriage on a family's wealth with some precision, but prior to that most dowries at the upper ranks of society were made in land, and the precise economic effect of marriage portions on estates is less easily determined. One inquest to determine the value of a ward's marriage noted that the dowry of the ward's grandmother was due to descend to him on her death and would make the marriage so much more valuable. Landholders were sufficiently concerned about the effects of such grants to seek legal measures to protect their right of reversion if a recipient died without an heir.

Custom did not provide so much protection for the interests of younger sons and brothers as it did for those of widows and daughters. Glanvill reveals the mixed emotions that such provisions aroused. He warned that because fathers bore greater affection for their younger sons, they were apt to disinherit the elder. Fathers, therefore, could not grant younger sons any of the inheritance without the heir's permission. Their position was thus worse than that of a bastard, with regard to inherited lands. Glanvill also pointed out, however, that fathers displayed great generosity toward their sons. By the thirteenth century, as a result of legal change, there was little that prospective heirs could do to prevent parents from alienating as much of the patrimony as they pleased. It does not appear that parents often disinherited eldest sons, but they frequently gave land to younger sons and brothers. When John Lestrange of Knockin, Shropshire, granted half of his manor of Lytcham, Norfolk, to his daughter Alice toward her marriage around 1260–1261, he delivered the other half to his younger son, Robert, with the consent of their brothers, Hamo and Roger.

As a consequence of grants between family members, kinship and lordship often intertwined, reaffirming the need for cooperation within families. Lord and tenant could be cousins. The heir of a tenant holding by military service came into the wardship of his lord. The lord married the boy to his own daughter and remitted the service of the fee, making it a kind of grant in free marriage. Thenceforth, lord and tenant were collateral members of the same family. A grant in marriage after three generations, or a grant to a younger son, behaved in the same manner. The Yorkshire family of Paynel and the Dorsetshire family of Keynes, for example, shared the manor of Coombe Keynes, Dorset, as a result of intermarriage. Both families descended from a certain Letitia who married successively the head of each family in the early thirteenth century. The Paynels acquired their share of the manor through Letitia and held it of their relatives or in-laws, the Keynes. Two half brothers, John Paynel and William Keynes, became brothers-in-law when each married one of the coheiresses of Adam de Perington. The rule that a man or woman could not be both lord and heir helped to distinguish the claims of family and lordship when an individual acquired land from the family. Yet the nature of conveyancing in medieval England meant that family grants added the obligations of lordship to the responsibilities of kinship.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Lordship of England by Scott L. Waugh. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• 1. MARRIAGE, KINSHIP, AND PROPERTY, pg. 15
• 2. ROYAL LORDSHIP IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, pg. 64
• 3. ADMINISTERING ROYAL LORDSHIP, pg. 105
• 4. THE USES OF ROYAL LORDSHIP, pg. 144
• 5. GUARDIANS AND WARDS, pg. 194
• 6. INCENTIVE AND DISCIPLINE: THE POLITICS OF ROYAL LORDSHIP, pg. 232
• CONCLUSION, pg. 273
• APPENDIX: RECEIPTS OF THE ESCHEATORS, pg. 281
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 287
• INDEX, pg. 307