Michael Hicks has done more than any other historian since K.B. McFarlane to elucidate the world of bastard feudalism. He has drawn our attention away from the narrow confines of the indenture of retainer to emphasise the wider context of service in which the formal legal ties between lord and man existed. But the indenture and the payment of annuities remain the most visible form of clientage in the fifteenth century. We seldom see behind the formal contract to the reasons for its existence, the personal relationships, or the motivation especially of a retainer in actually making this solemn undertaking. Even more rarely do we know how the relationship develops, the tensions that might arise, and how they might be resolved, short of the cancellation of a fee. A tantalising and frustratingly incomplete glimpse of one dispute between lord and man is revealed in a revision of an existing indenture of retainer between the earl of Salisbury and Sir Edmund Darell of Sessay in the North Riding in 1435, which is transcribed below.

The Dawnay Archive in the North Yorkshire Record Office contains one box, ZDS 1/2/1, listed as ‘Sessay’. It contains some seventy-six documents covering the period from c.1150 to 1503. The contents of the box are not fully catalogued. The name is misleading, for the collection focuses not on Sessay, one of the properties that passed from the family of Darell to that of Dawnay in 1503, but is in essence the remnant of what was once a vast Darell archive. It is a miscellaneous collection, no doubt weeded out by later generations. There is no knowing why particular documents were kept, but some must be there to ‘prove’ possession, such as the one court roll for Sessay and Dalton from the reign of Richard II and two enfeoffments of 1423 and 1431 encompassing virtually the whole of the Darell inheritance. No doubt this remnant itself survived through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of antiquarian curiosity. Among these papers is the indenture between Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, and Sir Edmund Darell.

The Darells were a long-established and substantial North Riding family, whose estates were focussed on a compact block of land around Sessay, between Thirsk and Easingwold.