User:Ltwin/Sandbox 18

Material on this page to be moved to User:Ltwin/Draft History of the English aristocracy as needed

Norman (1066–1154)
The baronage (including barons, earls, and high-ranking churchmen) had a duty as tenants-in-chief to provide the king with advice when summoned to great councils.

The greater tenants-in-chief were large landowners known as feudal barons who held tenure by barony (Latin: per baroniam) and were distinguished by certain rights and responsibilities from other tenants-in-chief who held tenure by knight-service.

The baronage was not yet a hereditary, titled class. Nor was there definitive rules as to who was considered a baron. The historian David Crouch defined barons as "the greatest men in the aristocracy (whether they were earls, barons or not), men habitually at court, lords of great estates, those indeed whom the king consulted in the affairs of the realm". Crouch theorizes that a man needed to control 15 to 18 knights' fees to be considered a baron in the 12th century.

Angevin
The lower ranks of the nobility consisted of the knightly class or gentry, which numbered around 3,000 landholders by 1300. Half of these were dubbed knights, while the other half were styled esquire. The banneret was ranked below a baron but above a regular knight. There was overlap between this group and the "lesser barons".

Feudalism empowered lords in a variety of ways over their vassals. On the subject of Henry II's daughter's marriage "aid" Bartlett writes: "All his barons and many of their vassals could act in a similar way when their daughters were married—these levies were a perquisite of being a lord, not of being a king." Bartlett goes on to say that Magna Carta stipulates that the barons should follow the same rules in regards to their vassals.

Plantagenet
During the reign of Henry III (1216–1272), the great council evolved into Parliament, a representative body that increasingly asserted for itself the right to consent to taxation. Initially, participation in Parliament was still determined by one's status as a tenant-in-chief. Earls and greater barons received a writ of summons issued directly from the king, while lesser barons were summoned through the local sheriffs. In the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), the first hereditary barons were created by writ. Overtime, baronies by writ became the main method of creating baronies, and baronies by tenure became obsolete.

Barons enjoyed greater access to the king than did other subjects and were exempt from jury service. Though they could be tried in ordinary courts, their amercements could only be assessed by the barons of the exchequer or before the king himself.

Interesting article you can read online for free i think
Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who Was Then the Gentleman? John Gillingham Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 5 (1995), pp. 129-153 (25 pages) Published By: Cambridge University Press Transactions of the Royal Historical Society https://doi.org/10.2307/3679331 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679331