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CHAPTER 2

Dealing with Lordship Rights

Between 1469 and 1471 Savoyard courts handled an inheritance dispute between the high noble brothers Guillaume and Hugues de Chalon regarding the small lordships of Grandson, Montagny, Belmont, and Echallens in the Pays de Vaud. Commissioners of the court interrogated approximately sixty witnesses. To determine their loyalties—according to the standard court procedure of the time—the witnesses were asked what their relation was to the two brothers in the conflict. Almost half of those examined stated that they had sworn an oath of loyalty to Guillaume before his brother had made a claim to the lordships. Two witnesses explicitly explained that they therefore preferred Guillaume rather than his adversary to win the case.¹ About one in five witnesses claimed to be a friend (amicus) of his lord. Similarly, in a witness deposition from 1433, one witness stated clearly what may well have been tacitly understood in many of these claims of friendship. When asked about his relationship to his lord, he answered that he was his friend, as a dependent must be to his lord.²

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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 consisted primarily of questions regarding how a lord had enforced the rights that he claimed. One might expect that the witnesses answered these questions at least partially by recounting incidents in which noble and ecclesiastical lords confronted their dependents to confirm orders, enforce regulations, or collect payments. Yet the witnesses cited at the beginning of this chapter, who listed their lord as their friend, seem to have received hardly any attention from the latter on an everyday basis. These witnesses were also asked whether they had seen any official lordly acts of the two quarreling brothers of Chalon, both of whom had spent some time in the region. At best the witnesses mentioned in their answers, along with formulaic phrases about the oath of loyalty, that they had seen the lords riding into or out of the castles or heard that they had named officials.¹² Apart from such solemn occasions, not a single witness furnished an example of a specific piece of manorial business during which he appeared directly before one of the two lords.

From the answers to the individual questions of the commissioners, it is evident that even witnesses who expressed their strong personal ties to their lords did not necessarily know very much about them. Guillaume had inherited the title of a prince of Orange and lord of Arlay from his father and was usually described with the appropriate titles in the court records. Yet only one witness could correctly answer the question of where this Orange and this Arlay actually were, namely “in Provence” and “in Burgundy,” respectively.¹³ Even the notary Jean Criblet, a serf and tenant of Chalon who had served Guillaume for three years as the substitute (Statthalter) of the castellan of Yverdon, answered that he did not know, although he must have been to the area. In another place in his statement, Jean noted proudly that he had traveled to Rome, Avignon, and Burgundy.¹⁴ It is perhaps not so surprising that lords who controlled such extensive territories as the lords of Chalon seldom appeared in the field of view of their local populations. Yet even in witness depositions that concern lords of small and even tiny lordships, practically all the talk is about the activities of their officials. The relationship of these witnesses to their lord did not involve the type of intimacy that we associate with concepts like friendship and loyalty.

Instead the witnesses drew from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of accounts about people who acted in the name of the lord. The abundance of information in the witness statements about the actions of officials must have been perceived as irritating background noise by contemporary courts, which wanted to establish the rights of the lords themselves. Even to the modern view, the information scattered throughout the witness deposition records about the lower levels of lordly administration seems confusing and disparate, not least because it attests to very diverse local structures, terminologies, and divisions of labor among officials. Nevertheless, in what follows it is possible to sketch a few patterns of the delegation of lordship duties—such as the collection of dues and the implementation of local regulations—that witnesses described regularly, although in conjunction with very diverse organizational structures. We will examine these patterns of daily activities to see how lordship was delegated and which forms of participation in the practice of lordship arose from that delegation. Although the precise social status of the parties is difficult to establish, they nonetheless give information about the ways in which they were linked to one another, to lords, and to the dependents of lords and about how practices of exercising lordship fit into a broader context of rural forms of cooperation and conflict.

While witnesses’ statements in depositions regarding the activities of their lords remained quite sparse, they went into great detail regarding officials in the broadest sense, whether they were called castellani, officarii, deputati, nunci, receptores, or mandati. Even the witnesses who had so little to say about the lords themselves in the conflict between the brothers Chalon made very precise statements regarding officials. The witnesses saw how they rode into each of the four lordships, stayed in the castles, saw to their maintenance, and ate and drank. Moreover officials collected dues, fines, and labor obligations for their lords; leased mills; and exercised jurisdiction rights by holding curia or banchus publicus.¹⁵

Unlike in the formalized depictions of the activities of lords themselves, the descriptions of the more everyday manorial activities of their officials make evident the diversity of individual perspectives from which witnesses could experience lordship. Among the dependents of the lords of Chalon who were examined was one whose nephew had acted as dues collector for Guillaume in Montagny. A second had held the office of accountant for Guillaume; a third had once served as a substitute for Guillaume’s mistralis in the village of Yvonand outside of Grandson; and a fourth numbered among the people who had guarded the castle of Grandson on commission from Guillaume.¹⁶ At this level the boundary between rulers and ruled was very blurry indeed.

The Tithe Administration of the Chapter of Amsoldingen

An especially precise insight into delegation relationships is provided in the few witness depositions in which at least one party needed to ask the witnesses systematic questions about the practices of officeholders in order to prove its position. The chapter of Amsoldingen found itself in such a situation in 1312 when it defended its alleged right to the tithe of the church of Hilterfingen against the claim of the cloister of Interlaken, or rather against the rector appointed by Interlaken.¹⁷ The settlement of the legal situation was complicated by the fact that the recently deceased rector, Heinrich von Wädenswil, had for many decades held the office of provost of the chapter of Amsoldingen in addition to that of rector, as had his predecessor. The Interlaken party took the view that the dead provost had had claim to the tithe only by reason of his additional post as rector, and the new successor named by Interlaken was therefore entitled to it. Against this, the chapter of Amsoldingen held that part of the tithe had accrued to Heinrich von Wädenswil not in his function as rector but rather as provost of the chapter, and that therefore the chapter could claim the tithe in the future. To substantiate this position, it was necessary to illuminate the mechanics of collecting the tithe in enough detail to highlight the difference between Heinrich’s two positions.

An astoundingly high number of witnesses—at least twenty-seven of the total forty—who made statements on behalf of the chapter of Amsoldingen had themselves taken part in the collection of the tithe at the church of Hilterfingen in the preceding decades. In addition, numerous others who did not testify were mentioned by those who did testify. That so many people were involved is even more striking because the church of Hilterfingen was entitled to the tithes only from the village of the same name and the hamlet of Ringoltswil. At the head of the administration of these tithe rights, the statements agreed, were people who were described as ministri or ministeriales of the chapter. These terms refer to representatives of the regional service aristocracy, such as members of the families of Gobi, Lösch, and Rieden under the leadership of Heinrich Rieden, who is described in the charter as a miles and even as a dominus by one of the witnesses.¹⁸ Also belonging to this core group of lesser nobility were two illegitimate sons of the provost and a member of the Rieden family, whom the witnesses describe as the stepson (filiaster) of the provost. Although most of these people occasionally appeared in conflict with the provost, they presumably belonged to his personal retinue, which he brought with him to his church office as the scion of one of the most influential noble families in the region. These ministeriales had leased their share of the tithe of Hilterfingen for decades.

Below them came a series of people who were bound less closely to the provost, apparently belonging to the higher class of peasants. Now and then they had leased the right to the tithe of a smaller area, or even only a portion of it, for a duration of one or a few years—perhaps not from the provost or the chapter itself, but rather as subleasers of the ministeriales.¹⁹ A now-prominent member of those leasing the tithe, R. Kriecho, remembered how his father had begun to lease small shares of the tithe right of the church of Hilterfingen in one year or another. At the beginning he had to join together with his two brothers and a neighbor. In the evenings, the four had then divided the earnings among themselves at home.²⁰ In addition to the tithe leasers, nine other witnesses stated that in one year or another, when they were hired for the task by the provost or another member of the chapter, they transported the tithe earnings from the church of Hilterfingen, where the collectors had initially assembled the tithe, back to Amsoldingen for delivery to the chapter. This involved mostly peasants from the area who earned some welcome supplementary income from it.²¹

The delegation of local lordship rights can only in the rarest cases be reconstructed so precisely as in Hilterfingen. But for many lordships there exists evidence that not only tithe rights²² but also many other lordly offices and competences that were not assigned as permanent hereditary tenures were carried out by rapidly changing personnel. Even though the litigating parties were presumably interested in recording details in witness deposition records from longstanding officeholders who accordingly had a wealth of experience, it is only the exceptional case that mentions people who had occupied an office for more than ten years.²³ In 1278 witnesses in one deposition named at least eight different men who had held the office of crop overseer in the small village of Les Chevalleyres for periods of one to three years, including one named Perronetus, who had held two one-year terms of office separated by ten years.²⁴ The circle of manorial officials and the people who owed these dues often overlapped. One witness from Les Chevalleyres was asked from whom he had collected dues as crop overseer; in addition to himself, he named another peasant who also appeared as a witness and stated that he had sometimes served as crop overseer.²⁵ In a witness deposition from 1446, the witnesses casually mentioned the names of no fewer than thirteen different people who held the office of the local representative (nuncius) of the bishop of Lausanne in the small village of Villars-Sainte-Croix over a short period.²⁶

The Circulation of Lordship Rights

The rotation of manorial officials who were responsible for small villages—sometimes including only a couple dozen households—suggests that a considerable part of the local male population participated personally in the manorial organization at one time or another. Although with different competences, most of them had the opportunity now and then to “officiate” (officiare),²⁷ to use the typical word with which the witnesses describe this occasional service. Although the social background of the rural officeholders is seldom accessible, it would seem, on the one hand, that they belonged primarily to the upper classes of the village. Yet on the other hand, this seems not to have been a case of oligarchy, in the sense of the exclusive ruling classes that monopolized different town and village offices in the early modern period, which observed rules of succession defined by kin relationships. One can easily find rural manorial offices that were held by a father and his son or by two brothers, one after the other.²⁸ Such successions were, however, disrupted by people with other names. The term of office was often short but variable; furthermore, repeated terms of office sometimes occurred at very different intervals. This makes it unlikely on the whole that the rotation followed specific rules. Instead the irregularity indicates that the succession of officials was determined by momentary needs, personal relationships, and the availability of qualified candidates.

The circle of people who occasionally took part in the exercise of lordship responsibilities reached past the lowest holders of office and the shortterm leasers of shares in lordship rights. Even the small, sporadic leasers of tithe shares of the church of Hilterfingen hardly went from farmyard to farmyard themselves to fetch grain and fruit. In witness deposition statements the actual collection of manorial dues of all kinds is often described through the witnesses’ childhood memories of having to fetch and carry such dues as the son or the servant of the relevant official.²⁹ Thus in 1465 Cuonrat Würgler said that his father, a longtime substeward in the village of Mönchaltdorf, sometimes sent him around to the local farmyards to collect rents or assemble the “shrove chickens” (Fasnachtshühner) that were owed as a manorial payment.³⁰ And in 1433 Savoyard commissioners examined an eighty-year-old widow who described how, as a young, newly married woman, she had gathered a fee currently under dispute in the form of wine must (newly pressed grapes) for the lords of Blonay because the relevant official, who was her Gevatter (that is, related to her through godparenthood), had requested it.³¹ At the lowest levels of delegation, the vicarious exercise of lordship rights was a matter of sharing responsibility among the family or the household, or was a part of the everyday exchange of reciprocal assistance among acquaintances.

Official activities could also be performed for a share in the accompanying earnings by people who were neither especially familiar with their direct employer nor aware of the legal basis of his assignment. In a witness deposition from 1413 about the tithe in Vernaz near Apples, two different witnesses affirmed that, years ago, they had collected sheaves on behalf of Ludovicus Rat without knowing on behalf of which lordship he had hired them.³² Perhaps they did not want to know. But for assistants at this level, the person to whom the proceeds of the tithe ultimately went would in fact have been of secondary importance.³³ The less glamorous duties that accompanied lordship rights were even more often assigned as contract work. A witness deposition from 1396 investigated which lordship was responsible for judging claims to the skins of animals that had died along the road in different villages, which served as an indicator of the practice of higher judicial rights. Most witnesses who had taken animal skins to a lordly headquarters were not actual officeholders but rather had taken on this assignment as contract labor. Thus Borcardus Rocual saw to the dead horse of a German-speaking man who was passing through the area. He had already received eighteen pennies and some wine for skinning the animal. Then he brought the pelt to the local official, the maior of the lords of Oron, who instructed him to take it to the lord’s castle. There he was served a memorable meal in the entrance hall. When Cuanetus de Perla brought to the castle the pelt of an ox that had broken its leg on the bridge, the lordship offered to sell it to him at a reduced price.³⁴