7 - Law, Tenure and Douglas Lordship: A Fifteenth-Century Case Study

Summary

SANDY Grant has clearly never seen medieval Scottish landed society as merely a continuous series of contests for political dominance or raw power. He has, instead, been sensitive to the countervailing existence of the ordinary and the routine as part of the individual ties involved in kingship, lordship, governance and landownership: ‘the system, so to speak, lying behind those ties[, which] has tended to be taken for granted’. This contribution in Sandy's honour starts from a study of a court case decided in the mid-fifteenth century. The underlying stories touch upon the Anglo-Scottish and the Anglo-French/Scottish wars of the preceding hundred years and more, and also draw us into the events leading up to the fall of the Black Douglases. Politics and power struggles are not irrelevant to the case, therefore; but the law, which reflected, supported and guided the social system of kingship and lordship, was also a significant element in political events as well as the peaceful resolution of disputes. Our discussion seeks to demonstrate the value of legal analysis to gain a deeper understanding of what was going on, not only in the case that is our point of departure, but also more generally in the world from which it emerged.

The case deals with issues about succession to land. At the social levels it involved, land was typically held by way of grant from a superior in return for service. That service might be military but by the fourteenth century was most often either financial or nominal. When a landholder died, the successor would generally be the first-born legitimate son. In the absence of a son, the land would pass to any legitimate daughters. But female inheritance held at least two risks: partition of the land for multiple daughters and carrying it into another family or kindred in the event of marriage even if there was only one. Hence the development of the tailzie or entail, the grant that displaced the ordinary rules of succession by defining in advance a sequence of inheritance in which only a male (usually) could take the land. This also manifests the freedom which a current landholder had to deal with his land, including its transfer to others as well as the definition of its future inheritance, at least if he got the consent and confirmation of his superior to what he wanted to do.