The aristocracy of the Norman frontier: origins and status

TL;DRAbstract

The recorded history of the Norman frontier in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is largely a story of the aristocracy. The peasantry who comprised the bulk of the population have been poorly served by the sources; the burgesses of the little towns and bourgs fare rather better, not least in fiscal records, but they, too, are scantly documented if compared with the landowning classes, on whose behalf the bulk of extant charters were issued. It is almost exclusively their activities that drew the attentions of chroniclers. The Norman exchequer rolls abound with the names of the petty knights, who can often be identified more precisely from charter witness-lists; not surprisingly, the Angevin and Capetian surveys into military service also noted mainly domini and milites. The material and social concerns of what Lucien Musset has called the classe dirigeante in the frontier regions will be the focus of the second part of this book: its origins (real or imagined), its notions of

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper