Abstract
It is clear from the preceding chapter that “bad” maintenance differed little from other, acceptable practices. Historians may split hairs over terminology, but generally agree that service relationships existed on a continuum including a wide range of people engaged in diverse relationships. Before turning to the literature in the remaining chapters, in the following pages I will use a documentary source, letter collections, to explore how medieval people themselves discussed a variety of service relationships. The dividing line between “good” and “bad” maintenance appears complicated to these fifteenth-century people, many of whom were negotiating the demands of multiple allegiances discussed in chapter 1. As we shall see, lord-retainer and the less noble master-servant relationships were often linked to bad maintenance in these documents. Nevertheless, it would appear that what medieval people saw as bad maintenance reflected personal bias and perspective as much as it did actual deviation in practice from the cultural norm.
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Notes
Christine Carpenter, ed. Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17.
For general information on the Stonors, see also Christine Carpenter, “The Stonor Circle in the Fifteenth Century,” in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, ed. Rowena Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), p. 25
P.J. Jefferies, “Profitable Fourteenth-Century Legal Practice and Landed Investment: The Case of Judge Stonor, c. 1281–1354,” Southern History 15 (1993): 18–33.
For general history of the family, see Joan Kirby, “A Fifteenth-Century Family, The Plumptons of Plumpton, and Their Lawyers, 1461–1515,” Northern History 25 (1989): 106–119.
Ruth Wilcock, “Local Disorder in the Honour of Knaresborough, c. 1438–1461 and the National Context,” Northern History 41 (2004): 39–80.
For the legal background of this situation, I am drawing on Colin Richmond, “Elizabeth Clere: Friend of the Pastons,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale, and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 251–73.
I cite from the letters using the volume, number of the letter, and line number when appropriate. Norman Davis, ed. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). II. 592–94
Carole Rawcliffe and Susan Flower, “English Noblemen and Their Advisers: Consultation and Collaboration in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 157–77.
For the concept of honor and shame among the gentry as distinct from that of the nobility, see Philippa Maddern, “Honour Among the Pastons: Gender and Integrity in Fifteenth-Century English Provincial Society,” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 357–71.
A brief but powerful additional example of a man calling upon his lords for aid is John Chancy. Describing himself as a squire of the Duke of Exeter, Chancy entered into a disputed property, and to ensure its continued possession by his family, enfeoffed the Duke of Exeter, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Eu in it. We know about the event from the rival claimant’s letters and petition to Parliament for redress against such powerful opponents. See pages 177–78 and 191–92 in Christine Carpenter, ed. The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex c.1417–1453 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1998).
Thomas Stapleton, ed. The Plumpton Correspondence (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990).
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© 2009 Kathleen E. Kennedy
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Kennedy, K.E. (2009). Maintaining a Family. In: Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_2
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