Tensions between ‘public’ right and power exercised from a ‘private’ standpoint are at the heart of this volume's exploration of the contestation of power. While the previous chapter concentrated on the significance of ‘public’ space in contestations of legitimacy, the aim of this chapter is to examine the contestation of authority within frameworks of lordship. The control and dispute of land was one manifestation of the tensions that had emerged as kingdoms with intensive power developed in England and France. Lordship, both royal and aristocratic, was expressed most often (though not exclusively) through control of a private domain. Actions which were focused on the familial interests of lords or nobles who wished to express their own interests, either as lords or, in ‘corporate’ terms, as members of a particular family, are the starting point for this chapter. The ways in which these issues drifted into a ‘public’ sphere are nonetheless important, as the permeability of boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ action means that those boundaries were never sharply defined. However, it is important to address cases where lands perceived to be associated with the status of an individual within a family seem to have played a part in conflicts that were ostensibly about a contestation of publicly acknowledged authority. This was the case, for example, in the grievances of the ætheling Æthelwold arising from treatment of family lands by the Alfredian branch of the West Saxon royal family in the late ninth century, which are considered in detail at the end of this chapter. Naturally, grievances associated with lordship or familial status (or both) might also be expressed through the contested control of a fortification dear to the heart of a rebel or a lord. Furthermore, given that privately held fortifications were intrinsically linked to the surrounding landscape, the division between the holding of land and the holding of fortifications, treated in chapter 5, is somewhat artificial. Landholdings that were contested through the fortifications in them are not excluded from this chapter. Insofar as it is possible to provide a rationale for division between this chapter and the next, the current chapter considers fortifications as property in terms of the land with which they were linked, while the next focuses on the fortifications themselves, as places for active opposition.