The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The nobility were lords of the land and they were lords of men. Once
lordship of land and of men had been one and the same, but that strictly feudal relationship, whereby holders of fiefs were obliged to provide military service and other payments and services in recognition of vassalage, was by the end of the middle ages lost almost everywhere. In the far north, the 10th Lord Clifford (d. 1523) and his knights still performed the ceremony of homage, but elsewhere, although the personal bond between lords and their gentry clients might have seemed to depend on the tenure of land, a gentleman's dependence on a lord was more often due to his own land lying within the lord's sphere of influence, his 'country'. Although Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 1 portrayed the 1st Earl of Northumberland plotting with his noble allies to partition England and Wales, the nobility, even then, never held their land in great concentrations as the French nobility did. Even the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who was also Earl of Hereford, Stafford and Northampton, Lord of Brecon and Holderness, holding land in all those places worth £6,000 per annum, still did not have an autonomous principality. His lands were scattered, and his authority was fragmented also. Few lords could command the loyalty of a whole region, and where they did, that loyalty was based on things other than land. The possession of land had always been the foundation of lordly dominion, wealth and honour. Their great lands had given the nobility and gentry an army of tenantry, a manred, which the lord could call upon as a personal following for waging war and keeping peace. Behind all authority, public and private, lay the threat of force, but since the coercive power of monarchs was limited not only by the lack of anything like a state police force or standing army, but also by the extreme slowness of communication, they must rely upon those who could readily rally and command men in the localities: the greatest landowners. Lords of manors could call upon the military service of their agricultural tenants, and as manorial lordship weakened, the obligation to turn out might be written into tenant leases. It was the nobility, throughout the middle ages for centuries to come, who were carries of royal authority into their own 'countries' and into the shires, and who were the guardians of the interests of their gentry clients. In so hierarchal and deferential society, it was natural for the gentry to look upwards for leadership and protection. The need and obligation was mutual. The magnate must call upon the military potential of his lesser neighbours, the gentry, if he were to remain a political force in the area in which his lands lay.
The power of the lords had come to lie less in the lands they held than in the number of men they could muster. The affinity - the personal following a lord could command; his dependants, allies, tenants, servants, retainers and kin - was the characteristic social and political bond in the later middle ages and remained so under the Tudor kings. A man offered his service to a lord and received in return his favour and protection; 'good lordship'. All the personal following of a lord wore his badge as the sign of allegiance: the sun in splendour of the House of York, the house of the Earl of Arundel, or the swan of the Duke of Buckingham. The ties that bound followers might be very close and lifelong, or more tenuous. All the servants in a lord's household, high or low, were sworn to his service and wore his livery. Beyond the household, men with more tenuous ties of service could also be retained.
The leading knights and gentry of the North joined the Percy affinity and served in the Percy household. At the time of his death in 1489 Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, was retaining eighty-four lords, knights and esquires, and paying £1,708 yearly in fees and annuities: nearly half of all his revenue. But this was on the Borders, the violent frontier with Scotland, where the two sovereignties met and clashed, and where the rule of law and loyalty to the Tudors were weakest. Elsewhere retainers were not usually paid in return for their services. Through their great estates in Cumberland, Northumberland and Yorkshire the Percys held almost vice-regal powers. For the gentry of the far north the Crown was alien and remote, so their loyalty was due rather to the local lord from whom favour flowed: Percy, Dacre or Clifford. Yet magnate affinities also flourished far closer to London. In 1513 the 13th Earl of Oxford, whose lands lay in Essex and East Anglia, bequeathed annuities worth more than £200 to twelve knights and forty-six other gentlemen. A great lord naturally had a great retinue: it was a manifestation of power and honour, needed in both peace and war. The nobility were warlords still under the Tudors, with an awesome military potential. Born to a life of chivalry, given the privilege of maintaining armed forces for keeping order, of using violence as the ultimate sanction, the sword was for them still the way of honour. The battle cry, 'thousands for a Percy', was no empty boast, for within the Northern Marches the Earl of Northumberland had 5,000 tenants, and a further 6,200 on his Yorkshire estates. At Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire in the early 1480s Lord Hastings, the head of a powerful affinity, was building a new castle of brick with gunports in the tower through which to fire cannon, through this fortification could not save him from the ferocity of Richard III.
As late as the 1560s the Earl of Leicester was fortifying his castle at Kenilworth and gathering munitions. Kings had to be able to call upon the nobles' power and know that they would answer the summons. Royal armies were little more than the conjunction of noble bands. In the summer of 1513 an army of more than 30,000 men, including twenty-three peers, their heirs, and retinues, invaded France; an army three times the size of Henry V's at Agincourt. The 4th Earl of Shrewsbury raised 4,437 men of his own and commanded 8,000 others. As lieutenant-general of the vanguard, he led the retinues of the Earl of Derby, Lords Hastings, Fitzwalter and Cobham. The 3rd Duke of Buckingham led 550 men, though without glory, and George Neville, Lord Abergavenny brought a 500-strong retinue which had once been seen as a threat, but which was now needed for royal service. A few months later nine English peers led a victorious army against Scotland. The noble affinities, based upon fidelity, service and obedience, contributed to the political and social stability which was vital for the preservation of land and 'livelihood'. Yet the pursuit of wealth and 'worship', and the maintenance of family honour, led also to competitiveness, feuds and lawsuits; even to rebellion. In their darker moments the Tudor kings could see in the noble affinities a threat of disorder as well as the promise of support, especially if they ever banded together. 'We might do more . . . when the time should come, what with power and friendship,' promised Sir Geoffrey Pole in 1538, but then his hopes were illusory and his family doomed. The bands of retainers were a potential threat to order if they were loyal to a disloyal lord. Repeated laws to restrict retaining were passed between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII; repeated because they were not obeyed. They were directd against the swaggering routs of idle retainers, who meant trouble and caused alarm, whose links with the lord were tenuous and temporary; not the household officers, retained for life. In 1507 George Neville, Lord Abergevenny was prosecuted for retaining 471 men, all below the rank of esquire. When Lord Montague dreamt of a noble confederacy thirty years later, he lamented Abergevenny's passing, 'for if he were alive he were able to make ten thousand men'.