Status and Title Deeds

The ‘following’ (historians tend to call it the ‘household’ or the ‘affinity’) of a great man, was what distinguished a truly powerful baron from his inferiors, in the eleventh century as in the eighteenth, or indeed as is still the case amongst the modern-day affinities of pop stars or Hollywood egoists. A man who travelled with twenty knights, forty servants and a menagerie of hangers-on, up to and including a clown and a pet monkey, was to be accounted a great deal better than someone who travelled alone or with a smaller retinue. We begin to get lists of these affinities and of the knight service of the great from the late eleventh century onwards, because listing them was one way of boasting of wealth and status. The letters and charters, the documents by which kings and barons conveyed their instructions and gifts, are the most common historical sources because they have been carefully preserved. All manner of deeds and documents might be discarded from an archive, but not the charters by which land had been acquired, the jealously guarded title deeds to an estate. In themselves, such deeds often display the pride and power of the barons who issued them. Not only are they written instruments from a time when writing itself was a rare accomplishment, but they are authenticated with wax seals, generally showing a stylized figure of a warrior riding into battle, with lance or sword and shield, his horse being the chief symbol of lordly authority. From horseback, it is very hard not to look down upon pedestrian concerns, just as today the pedestrian finds it hard not to look up to a mounted police officer.

As a second guarantee of authenticity, medieval documents were also witnessed, not, as in a modern marriage register, by one or two close friends, but by a great list, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty of those present at a charter’s award. It is from these lists that we can reconstruct the affinity of the greater barons, always bearing in mind, of course, that the lists themselves were intended, even at the time, to give an impression of the strength, number and authority of a baron’s hangers-on. In this way, the witness lists to royal charters are our best, indeed sometimes our only guide, to who was or was not at the King’s court. The witness lists to the charters of barons and bishops tell us who was in, and who was out, amongst a baronial or episcopal affinity.

What do such lists tell us about the connection between knights, land and loyalty in post-Conquest England? Firstly, they suggest that within one or at most two generations of the Norman Conquest, not only had the division between Normans and other Frenchmen from various parts of northern France been largely smoothed away, but that a new gulf was beginning to open up, dividing those who held land on either side of the Channel. Not all Normans with lands in Normandy participated in the Conquest of 1066. In the aftermath, even those families which gained land in England might choose to divide their estate on the death of its founder, with the Norman patrimony remaining with the eldest son, the newly acquired English lands passing to a separate branch stemming often from a younger son in England. The effects of this over time, as we shall see, were to prove momentous. Secondly, they suggest that even by the 1130s, within less than a century of 1066, barons were being required to bring new men into their affinities, either because the ties of loyalty between them and the descendants of the tenants to whom their fathers and grandfathers had given land had begun to fray, or because the specific requirements that they placed upon their followers could not be discharged from within the pool of talent supplied by their existing tenantry. Within a further half century, indeed, it becomes increasingly hard to find any tenants regularly attached to the household of a great man whose ancestors were that great man’s original followers in the aftermath of Hastings. The military tenantry of the greater estates tended to solidify into nothing save a tax-paying rump. The actual knights serving a baron would be recruited by other means, in return for money, less often in return for land. Land was the ultimate goal of such men, but after 1100 it was in much shorter supply than had been the case during the great bonanza years of the 1070s and 80s.

Moreover, lords had learned their lesson: to grant land in one generation was to risk indifference or even disloyalty in the next. If we take a particular example, a Wiltshire knight of the 1140s, descended from men who had arrived in England only shortly after the Conquest of 1066, inherited little land from his father so went abroad to carve a reputation for himself on the tournament fields of northern France. He became so famous as a knight that kings vied for his service. Eventually, aged nearly 50, he was allowed to marry a great heiress in the King’s gift. Shortly afterwards he was granted the ceremonial belt that conferred title as an earl. In his new estates, however, he was a stranger to his tenantry, unknown to those whom he now ruled as lord, none of whom had owed him any sort of allegiance before his rise to greatness. Instead, he turned back to the Wiltshire friends of his youth and began to import large numbers of these cronies, or the sons of these cronies, into his household, some of whom, when land became available, were richly rewarded from his new estate. The man in question was named William Marshal, and he will reappear later as one of the leading figures in English, Irish and Anglo-French history towards the end of the twelfth century. In the meantime, his story is significant in disproving two persistent myths that continue to attach themselves to the Normans and the Norman Conquest of England.