and Anglo-American type abandons the organizational categories of contemporary legal documents, largely without comment.7 Instead, they place the study of social inequalities and economic dependencies of rural society in the foreground and occupy themselves with tensions between interest groups that elude description, using categories like “lords” or “peasants.”
Older works of institutional history have already shown that the local level of late medieval lordship organization was characterized by enormously diverse allocations of legal competence, interdependence between lordships, and relationships of delegation.8 When legal documents describe “peasants” or “dependents” as the subjects of lordship rights, they often refer less to individual people than to societal or communal institutions. The holders of these rights are almost always described as “lord” or dominus, although the term could refer to very diverse people, including someone who exercised the lordship by the power of an office (such as provost or abbot), a baron with a local power base, an urban patrician who invested his business earnings in lordship rights, a knightly ministeriale who was ruling as a vassal and who was thereby connected to one of the great territorial courts, or a powerful territorial lord himself.9 Similar distinctions can be made for the “peasants.” This description of people in legal documents can refer to urban patricians who themselves were the holders of lordship rights in the area, agricultural producers of different social classes, or even day-laborers and craftsmen.10 In sociohistorical as well as institutional-historical terms, the possibilities for describing rural society according to admittedly contemporary but strongly formalized legal descriptive categories such as “lords” and “peasants” appear quite limited.
All the more pressing, then, is the question of what meaning these descriptive categories carried in the concrete contemporary forms of dispute resolution and cooperation. Later records of witness depositions, which were focused on real-life actions as evidence for the laws’ existence, yield particular insight into the ways and means by which actors outside the court agreed on the rights of the lordship and the privileges of the peasants and put them into concrete practice.11 The liveliness of the witness statements should not deceive us regarding their original aim. In the context of a witness deposition procedure, the court was interested less in details that were relevant to practice than in those that were relevant to law. At the same time, the witnesses described specific incidents which, as far as they were not merely known from hearsay, necessarily took place not only in a legal but also in a specific experiential context. This experiential context was especially evident when it came into conflict with the goal of describing the law. Examining such tense relationships furnishes valuable insight into how the lordship organization functioned at the level of individual actors. This also makes it possible not simply to employ the descriptive categories used in normative documents—such as “lords,” “peasants,” and “legal customs”—as departure points for describing social order that resist further analysis, but rather to examine what meaning these terms carried in everyday forms of cooperation and conflict.
The investigation that follows reconsiders the practicalities of dealing with lordship rights, which lie outside the perspective of a conventional constitutional history but became important in similar ways in very different legal-institutional contexts from the beginning to the end of the period under investigation. First, we take up the question of which actors mainly confronted the peasants with lordly claims at the local level: besides the actual holders of lordship rights, one must discuss not only officials but also others who exercised lordship rights through delegation, and the ways in which such delegations functioned. Second, we will investigate, through the example of a few specific conflicts about lordship rights, the field of conflict between legal descriptive conventions and the social dynamics of disputes over the lordship of a region. Third, we must reconsider the relationship between the practice of lordship and legal customs. Particularly toward the end of the period under consideration, courts increasingly assumed that the origin of legal rights lay in regular patterns of practice. The course of conflicts, however, can often be better understood if one asks whether the actors were not also abiding by completely other types of norms. This makes it easier to grasp the consequences that followed when conflicts were judged from the point of view of old customs.
The Branching-Out of Lordly Administration
Beginning around 1300 witness depositions concerning lordship rights consisted primarily of questions regarding how a lord had enforced the rights that he claimed. One might expect that the witnesses answered these questions at least partially by recounting incidents in which noble and ecclesiastical lords confronted their dependents to confirm orders, enforce regulations, or collect payments. Yet the witnesses cited at the beginning of this chapter, who listed their lord as their friend, seem to have received hardly any attention from the latter on an everyday basis. These witnesses were also asked whether they had seen any official lordly acts of the two quarreling brothers of Chalon, both of whom had spent some time in the region. At best the witnesses mentioned in their answers, along with formulaic phrases about the oath of loyalty, that they had seen the lords riding into or out of the castles or heard that they had named officials.12 Apart from such solemn occasions, not a single witness furnished an example of a specific piece of manorial business during which he appeared directly before one of the two lords.
From the answers to the individual questions of the commissioners, it is evident that even witnesses who expressed their strong personal ties to their lords did not necessarily know very much about them. Guillaume had inherited the title of a prince of Orange and lord of Arlay from his father and was usually described with the appropriate titles in the court records. Yet only one witness could correctly answer the question of where this Orange and this Arlay actually were, namely “in Provence” and “in Burgundy,” respectively.13 Even the notary Jean Criblet, a serf and tenant of Chalon who had served Guillaume for three years as the substitute (Statthalter) of the castellan of Yverdon, answered that he did not know, although he must have been to the area. In another place in his statement, Jean noted proudly that he had traveled to Rome, Avignon, and Burgundy.14 It is perhaps not so surprising that lords who controlled such extensive territories as the lords of Chalon seldom appeared in the field of view of their local populations. Yet even in witness depositions that concern lords of small and even tiny lordships, practically all the talk is about the activities of their officials. The relationship of these witnesses to their lord did not involve the type of intimacy that we associate with concepts like friendship and loyalty.
Instead the witnesses drew from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of accounts about people who acted in the name of the lord. The abundance of information in the witness statements about the actions of officials must have been perceived as irritating background noise by contemporary courts, which wanted to establish the rights of the lords themselves. Even to the modern view, the information scattered throughout the witness deposition records about the lower levels of lordly administration seems confusing and disparate, not least because it attests to very diverse local structures, terminologies, and divisions of labor among officials. Nevertheless, in what follows it is possible to sketch a few patterns of the delegation of lordship duties—such as the collection of dues and the implementation of local regulations—that witnesses described regularly, although in conjunction with very diverse organizational structures. We will examine these patterns of daily activities to see how lordship was delegated and which forms of participation in the practice of lordship arose from that delegation. Although the precise social status of the parties is difficult to establish, they nonetheless give information about the ways in which they were linked to one another, to lords, and to the dependents of lords and about how practices of exercising lordship fit into a broader context of rural forms of cooperation and conflict.
While witnesses’ statements in depositions regarding the activities of their lords remained quite sparse, they went into great detail regarding officials in the broadest sense, whether they were called castellani, officarii, deputati, nunci, receptores, or mandati. Even the witnesses who had so little to say about the lords themselves in the conflict between the brothers Chalon made very precise statements regarding officials. The witnesses saw
