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4 - Annuities and assignments

from PART ONE - New Parliamentary Peerage Creations, 1330–77: the Sources and Uses of Royal Patronage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

J. S. Bothwell
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Summary

UNFORTUNATELY for Edward III's new nobility, appropriate sources of landed income, long or short term, were not always available at the time of endowment. Until these could be found, the king used other means to sustain these individuals – something done mainly through payments from various sources of royal revenue. Undeniably, though financial patronage was often a ‘secondary indicator of importance’, as one historian has called it for Henry I's reign, nonetheless, it remained a very useful and important one throughout the Middle Ages. Though whether Anglo-Norman kings favoured money fiefs for ordinary patronage to household knights is now open to debate, it is more difficult to deny that later kings used cash payments as a flexible way to show favour, especially to those moving into or within the nobility. Henry III gave such payments to his courtiers, and Edward I, while generally believed to have been tight-fisted, granted a variety of dona to his supporters. But it was only in the first quarter of the fourteenth century that increased co-ordination between use of cash payments, especially annuities, and other forms of patronage really came into its own. Before this, the lack of secure entails and life grants meant that it was difficult to know if, when or how a piece of land was going to return to the king, and therefore if an annuity should be granted in expectation of those lands coming back into the king's possession.

Type
Chapter
Information
Edward III and the English Peerage
Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England
, pp. 78 - 92
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2004

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