The Norman Conquest has long been seen as a watershed moment in the history of lordship in England. It is generally accepted that individuals in pre-Conquest England could have separate soke, personal and tenurial lords. This framework operated under the auspices of the king, who granted bookland or soke (i.e. judicial) rights to favoured landholders, and enacted laws to regulate seigneurial behaviour. Under the influence of the Conquest and the Norman ideas that came with it, a new, condensed form of lordship emerged after 1066 that vested the personal, tenurial, and judicial roles in a single lord. This, in turn, is taken to have precipitated a shift to a ‘feudal’ social structure, in which a sole lord might exercise control over his men with relatively little interference from other lords or the king. Lesser landholders, English survivors and French alike, were now connected to a sole lord through his honour. Only with the supposed decay of this system in the later twelfth century, it is thought, did lesser landholders begin to break away from the oversight of a single lord.

This essay contends that the shift from royally supervised to ‘feudal’ lordship at the Conquest has been overstated. Part of the apparent contrast between pre-and post-Conquest conditions derives from a contrast in the sources. Much of the material used by historians as evidence for pre-Conquest lordship was produced in a royal context. The law-codes, although problematic in transmission and produced with the involvement of lay lords, at least purport to be royal decrees. Domesday Book, while again compiled with the collaboration landholders, some of whom pursued their own agendas, is set up as a view of England from the royal court. But after the Conquest, even allowing for Domesday Book and some miscellaneous royal material, our picture becomes heavily reliant on charters. These tend to give a limited view, and generally one focused on the lands and business of a particular lord. Non-diplomatic texts of this period similarly tend to originate outside royal circles: notably, the Leges Henrici Primi present a view of a regional juridical and seigneurial landscape. With this break in the material, it is perhaps inevitable that lordship should look ‘royal’ before the Conquest and ‘feudal’ after it, but the impression demands closer scrutiny than it has received.