King and Lord: The Monarch and his Demesne Tenants in Central Nottinghamshire, 1163-1363

Summary

In the thirteenth century the kings of England were well on the way to becoming the executive heads of what later came to be known as the nation state, ruling the kingdom with the advice of their leading men, employing a growing number of administrators and judges, and levying national taxes to finance their wars. However, although their own demesne was by the late twelfth century much reduced in extent from the time of the Domesday survey, the number and importance of the manors which were part of it for at least a significant proportion of the thirteenth century was still significant. The king was an important manorial lord in the same way as his barons, knights and esquires were lords of their own manors. He could only expect to be a successful ruler if he was adept at managing the expectations of those of his subjects who were of political or military importance, or whose service to him in other ways demanded reward, and his demesne provided him with one of the main means of doing this. For the same reasons, he also needed to maintain and increase his income, not only by taxing his subjects but also by exploiting his demesne, in a period when it was coming to be acknowledged as having a status marking it out from the rest of the realm, and over which the king had relatively unbridled rights. As R.F. Hoyt pointed out, more effective exploitation of the royal demesne began under Henry II, and under John and during the minority of Henry III it ‘emerged for the first time as a crown endowment specially subject to unhampered royal will and annexed to the office, rather than merely belonging to and disposable by the person of the king’.

I want to explore, in a small geographical area, some of the tensions between the king’s role as lord to the tenants of his manors, his need to use all the resources at his disposal to be a successful ruler, and the aspirations of some of his own tenants to manage their own affairs. There are in the thirteenth century few local sources bearing on these problems, and very little evidence which gives a detailed insight into the attitudes and opinions of the king’s tenants themselves.