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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- IN PIAM MEMORIAM
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Record of 1204
- ‘In Testimonium Factorum Brevium’: The Beginnings of the English Chancery Rolls
- The Earliest Exchequer Estreat and the Forest Eyres of Henry II and Thomas fitz Bernard, 1175–80
- Theory and Practice in the Making of Twelfth-Century Pipe Rolls
- Between Three Realms: The Acts of Waleran II, Count of Meulan and Worcester
- Archbishop Geoffrey of York: A Problem in Anglo-French Maternity
- Hugh de Gundeville (fl. 1147–81)
- Guérin de Glapion, Seneschal of Normandy (1200–1): Service and Ambition under the Plantagenet and Capetian Kings
- Index
Guérin de Glapion, Seneschal of Normandy (1200–1): Service and Ambition under the Plantagenet and Capetian Kings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- IN PIAM MEMORIAM
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Record of 1204
- ‘In Testimonium Factorum Brevium’: The Beginnings of the English Chancery Rolls
- The Earliest Exchequer Estreat and the Forest Eyres of Henry II and Thomas fitz Bernard, 1175–80
- Theory and Practice in the Making of Twelfth-Century Pipe Rolls
- Between Three Realms: The Acts of Waleran II, Count of Meulan and Worcester
- Archbishop Geoffrey of York: A Problem in Anglo-French Maternity
- Hugh de Gundeville (fl. 1147–81)
- Guérin de Glapion, Seneschal of Normandy (1200–1): Service and Ambition under the Plantagenet and Capetian Kings
- Index
Summary
Every medieval ruler faced one overriding problem: who was to carry out his commands? If he entrusted them to a local magnate, there was always a risk that the ruler would be enhancing noble power rather than his own. If, on the other hand, he appointed a man of lesser rank, the official's dependence upon the ruler's authority would usually ensure his loyalty to his master, but he might well not wield sufficient power to execute his master's wishes. Promoting an official of modest rank to a great command also risked antagonising the local aristocracy whose resentment against an upstart could serve to undermine princely authority. In an age of poor communications, and with no standing army or police force, rulers had to tread a delicate path between using servants they could trust and ensuring the cooperation of local magnates. Local elites invariably treated outsiders with suspicion, yet for a ruler it was always tempting to impose a man from one part of his realm upon another.
The ‘Anglo-Norman realm’, between 1066 and 1204, has proved a fertile ground for considering such problems of rulership, and the origins and careers of its officials have been explored in considerable detail. Orderic Vitalis, writing at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Évroult in southern Normandy in the late 1130s, famously stated that Henry I ‘ennobled [men] of base stock who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman RealmPapers Commemorating the 800th Anniversary of King John's Loss of Normandy, pp. 153 - 192Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009