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Medieval rural lordship has the reputation of being paternalistic and personal. The units of lordship that exercised everyday authority were often small and had only a rudimentary administrative apparatus at their disposal. Against this background it seems obvious that legal documents describe face-to-face relationships as the backbone of the organization of lordship. But exactly how should one imagine the personal relationships that were constitutive of lordship? This chapter examines how actors experienced their local lords, and lordship in the abstract: how they made agreements about lordship rights, and how they dealt with them in everyday life. It thus attempts to clarify the relationship between everyday lordship and the conventions of its description in legal documents. How everyday, truly, were the customary laws that were ostensibly derived from peasants’ everyday activities?
Late medieval records of local laws such as Weistümer and charters describe local and especially rural legal regulations predominantly in the form of lordship rights. Primarily they define the dependents on whom a lordship could impose requirements of particular dues, labor obligations, or obedience. Restrictions on the rights of a lordship arose primarily from the rights of others.3 Most people were subordinate simultaneously to different lordships that exercised qualitatively different rights. In medieval legal documents local networks of the reciprocally defined claims of legal entities, who are described either as “lords” or as “dependents,” appear as the rural legal order.
Especially in German-speaking areas, social historians have until recently considered the relationship between lords and peasants as the central problem of late medieval rural lordship organization, and have therefore relied heavily on the descriptive categories of contemporary Weistümer and charters. As a pioneer of this strand of research, Otto Brunner bears the credit—and blame—for having overcome a constitutional history that relied too heavily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of constitution and state. For Brunner the local rural legal structure rested on personal relationships between lords and peasants, which could not be described in terms of modern institutional categories.4 These relationships were forged through feelings of loyalty and conceptions of justice that committed them to a reciprocal exchange of benefits, so that the peasants were obligated to obedience and dues only insofar as their lord promised them “protection” (Schutz und Schirm) in exchange. The cause of conflicts, according to Brunner, was less the relationship between lords and peasants than the relationships between lords. These lords pursued feuds against one another, not least because they had to defend their subordinates from the assaults of other lords.5 This harmonious picture of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled is rooted in an idealization of authority by the self-confessed National Socialist Brunner—a background that the majority of German-speaking research has unjustly seen as inconsequential.
A few years ago, Gadi Algazi persuasively showed that the talk of loyalty and reciprocity conforms to an ideological construct that unilaterally championed the views of the lords, and, moreover, which was whitewashed by Otto Brunner: a construct that only poorly conceals the actual and often forcible oppression of the peasants.6 Algazi showed that the descriptions of the lordpeasant relationship in legal documents are more normative than descriptive—but without going so far as to subject the categories of lords and peasants to the same rigorous ideological critique. Much of the new social history of the French and Anglo-American type abandons the organizational categories of contemporary legal documents, largely without comment.7 Instead, they place the study of social inequalities and economic dependencies of rural society in the foreground and occupy themselves with tensions between interest groups that elude description, using categories like “lords” or “peasants.”
Older works of institutional history have already shown that the local level of late medieval lordship organization was characterized by enormously diverse allocations of legal competence, interdependence between lordships, and relationships of delegation.8 When legal documents describe “peasants” or “dependents” as the subjects of lordship rights, they often refer less to individual people than to societal or communal institutions. The holders of these rights are almost always described as “lord” or dominus, although the term could refer to very diverse people, including someone who exercised the lordship by the power of an office (such as provost or abbot), a baron with a local power base, an urban patrician who invested his business earnings in lordship rights, a knightly ministeriale who was ruling as a vassal and who was thereby connected to one of the great territorial courts, or a powerful territorial lord himself.9 Similar distinctions can be made for the “peasants.” This description of people in legal documents can refer to urban patricians who themselves were the holders of lordship rights in the area, agricultural producers of different social classes, or even day-laborers and craftsmen.10 In sociohistorical as well as institutional-historical terms, the possibilities for describing rural society according to admittedly contemporary but strongly formalized legal descriptive categories such as “lords” and “peasants” appear quite limited.
All the more pressing, then, is the question of what meaning these descriptive categories carried in the concrete contemporary forms of dispute resolution and cooperation. Later records of witness depositions, which were focused on real-life actions as evidence for the laws’ existence, yield particular insight into the ways and means by which actors outside the court agreed on the rights of the lordship and the privileges of the peasants and put them into concrete practice.11 The liveliness of the witness statements should not deceive us regarding their original aim. In the context of a witness deposition procedure, the court was interested less in details that were relevant to practice than in those that were relevant to law. At the same time, the witnesses described specific incidents which, as far as they were not merely known from hearsay, necessarily took place not only in a legal but also in a specific experiential context. This experiential context was especially evident when it came into conflict with the goal of describing the law. Examining such tense relationships furnishes valuable insight into how the lordship organization functioned at the level of individual actors. This also makes it possible not simply to employ the descriptive categories used in normative documents—such as “lords,” “peasants,” and “legal customs”—as departure points for describing social order that resist further analysis, but rather to examine what meaning these terms carried in everyday forms of cooperation and conflict.
The investigation that follows reconsiders the practicalities of dealing with lordship rights, which lie outside the perspective of a conventional constitutional history but became important in similar ways in very different legal-institutional contexts from the beginning to the end of the period under investigation. First, we take up the question of which actors mainly confronted the peasants with lordly claims at the local level: besides the actual holders of lordship rights, one must discuss not only officials but also others who exercised lordship rights through delegation, and the ways in which such delegations functioned. Second, we will investigate, through the example of a few specific conflicts about lordship rights, the field of conflict between legal descriptive conventions and the social dynamics of disputes over the lordship of a region. Third, we must reconsider the relationship between the practice of lordship and legal customs. Particularly toward the end of the period under consideration, courts increasingly assumed that the origin of legal rights lay in regular patterns of practice. The course of conflicts, however, can often be better understood if one asks whether the actors were not also abiding by completely other types of norms. This makes it easier to grasp the consequences that followed when conflicts were judged from the point of view of old customs.
The Branching-Out of Lordly Administration
Beginning around 1300 witness depositions concerning lordship rights