Over the past sixty years or so the nature of baronial lordship in Anglo-Norman England, and the impact upon that lordship of the Angevin legal reforms, have become the subject matter of an important and vigorous historical debate. The origins of the debate lie in Professor Stenton's classic Ford Lectures of 1929, published under the title The First Century of English Feudalism. The society portrayed by Stenton was a ‘seignorial world’, dominated by baronial lordship rather than royal control. Although careful to point out that the crown had an overriding supervision of law and aristocratic affairs, Stenton implied that this supervision was exercised intermittently and selectively, and that, generally speaking, the greater baronial lordships were autonomous jurisdictional entities free from the interference of the crown. Referring to a document recording an agreement made in the 1140s between two Lincolnshire tenants in the presence of their lord, William I of Roumare, Stenton stated that the king,