Kings and Castles by Marc Morris Read Free Book Online

Norfolk’,
in spite of his record of loyal service to the Crown. It was only thanks to the
generosity – and dire financial need – of Richard I (1189–99) that the Bigod family were able to buy back their lost title. Other
changes initiated by Henry, especially his expansion of royal justice,
increased the power of the Crown to the extent that, while the king himself
might be challenged, his position was never again called into question.
    By the thirteenth century, therefore, there was no power that
automatically went with being an earl: certainly nobody claiming independence from royal control by virtue of his title. This is not to
say that earls were not powerful men – they were. Their power, however, was
based on purely material measures: how much land they had, how much money they
raked in, and how many men they could afford to keep in their service as a
consequence. Most earls had land and money in abundance, and were therefore
politically important. But the few exceptions prove the point that simply being
an earl did not in itself grant much of an advantage. The earl of Oxford, for example, had
little in the way of land and resources; his wealth was only a fraction of that
enjoyed by his fellow earls, and he was less well-off than a good many barons.
As a result, he was politically inconsequent – his title counted for
next-to-nothing. Of the public powers that had once belonged to the earl in
Anglo-Saxon times, only a single vestige remained in the thirteenth century.
This was the so called ‘third penny’, once taken as a third share of the
profits of royal justice, but now commuted to a fixed sum, and not a
particularly large one at that.
    All of which is to say that the more thoughtful earls of
thirteenth-century England, if they ever took a moment to reflect on the nature
of the title they enjoyed, must have been left wondering precisely what the
point of it was. To be an earl was clearly to be special: in the first half of
the thirteenth century there were never more than twenty individuals who could style
themselves as such at any one time, and in the second half their numbers rarely
rose above ten. ‘Earl’ was, moreover, a unique distinction: there were no other
competing ranks of nobility – no dukes or marquises of the kind found on the
continent, and introduced to England in the fourteenth century. English society
at this time was quite open to ambitious social climbers, and those with
sufficient drive and ambition could rise through a variety of means: a career
in royal service, distinguished conduct on the tournament field or in battle,
the acquisition of lands by purchase. Such men could get themselves knighted,
but they could not buy or fight their way to an earldom. Only the king, it was
accepted, could create an earldom from scratch and, after Stephen’s reign,
kings were understandably reluctant to do so. The only way to obtain an earldom
was to inherit one or marry into one, and in both cases the king might still
withhold the title (as nearly happened in the case of the Bigod family, and as did happen in the case of William Longespée and John fitz Geoffrey, who succeeded to their
fathers’ lands but not to their titles). When an individual was admitted to the
rank of earl, it involved a special public ceremony, in which he was ‘belted’
by the king with a sword. The restricted numbers, the ceremonial investment: it
all suggested that contemporaries still saw the rank of earl as significant,
yet if they had any specific theories about the rights and duties that went
with the title they have not survived.
      Doubtless many earls
conceived their role rather vaguely as being leaders of local society and the
king’s natural advisers. For most of the time, it is important to remember,
kings and their magnates got along with the routine business of government. We
might expect, therefore, that theories about the nature of ‘ comital ’
power would develop more rapidly at times of