Secular noble household in mediaeval England, 1350-1550

Abstract

R. A. Griffiths, in his recent article on "Public and Private Bureaucracies in England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century (in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. 30,1980, pp. 109-130)", stated the need of administrative, economic, social and other historians for a full study of royal, ecclesiastical and secular noble households of the later middle ages. While T. F. Tout and A. R. Myers, among others, have delved into the organization of the royal household, and such historians as R. B. Dobson and R. W. Dunning have written on the establishments of bishops, very little detailed work has been done on the households of secular nobles. These private, bureaucratic and domestic structures were crucial to the functioning of English noble society, regulating personal lives and participating in the exercise of authority on both local and national levels. Therefore, this thesis, "The Secular Noble Household in Mediaeval England, 1350 to 1550", has been written as a preliminary study of these households: their organization and manner of functioning, their role in the lives of the nobles who established them, and their wider significance for mediaeval society generally.

The breadth of the subject has been qualified in three ways. Firstly, "secular noble" is a title of convenience, and has been taken to include all landowning families, titled and untitled, who did not work the land with their own hands. The homogeneity of interests, social circles, ways of exercising influence -- and of householding forms -- makes the establishment of an artificial boundary between peers and gentles unnecessary in this sort of study. However, this includes a very large number of families; therefore the scope of the study is modified by concentrating chiefly on five specific families of varying rank, income and geographical location, who have left household accounts covering at least two generations. These are: the Staffords, Dukes of Buckingham; the de Veres, Earls of Oxford; Ralph Lord Cromwell, his uncle and his nieces; the Luttrells of Dunster Castle, Somerset; and the Stonors of Stonor, Oxfordshire. The specific information and functioning of the five households of these families are examined in this thesis, and general conclusions drawn from these five examples are modified or reinforced by further illustrations from outside their ranks, thereby attempting to counteract some of the ill-effects of both casestudies and general surveys. Finally, the scope of the thesis has been restricted to two centuries, 1350 to 1550, and concentrates chiefly on the fifteenth century, due both to important developments within the landholding classes in this period, and to the paucity of household documents before 1350.

This thesis opens with a discussion of origins and early householding practices, and a biographical section describing each of the five families and their documents used herein. After a discussion of the accounting system whose records provide most of our information about households and'which itself contributed to the peculiar structure of noble establishments, the organization of the household, the nature of its component parts, and how they function, is undertaken; and a chapter is dedicated to the individual members of the household: their origins, aspirations and ends. Three chapters are devoted to the functioning of the household in mediaeval England, and its part in its masters political interests and influences, in the balance of local and national economy, and in the religious and social communities of mediaeval society, are determined. In conclusion, the thesis discusses the significance of the secular noble household as an institution, or framework for controlling experience, for late mediaeval English society as a whole; and reiterates the importance of understanding the household in order to comprehend, not only the English nobility, but also such fields of historical inquiry as local economic systems, peasant/noble relations and popular piety.