Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
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The deteriorating state of the king’s health sparked off many debates on
his succession. In the absence of any children his closest heirs were his sister
Sibyl and, failing her, his half-sister Isabella. This made their marriages state
business of the first order. Sibyl was married to the marquis of Montferrat in
1176 but he died after one year, leaving her pregnant with the future Baldwin
V. Various projects to find husbands for her had foundered before 1176; others
met with the same fate afterwards. She had been born from an illicit union
and had expressly been legitimized by the church but from 1183 at the latest
doubts were being expressed about this. The debate was a delicate one because
what applied to her applied equally to her brother on the throne. If she had no
claim to his succession, he was the wrong man to wear the crown. In 1180 the
prince of Antioch and the count of Tripoli were approaching from the north,
apparently to talk with the king about Sibyl’s re-marriage. By now illness had
turned Baldwin IV into a man desperately clinging to his office and suspecting
almost everyone of designs to supplant him. He quickly married Sibyl to Guy
of Lusignan, thus making Guy count of Jaffa-Ascalon, Sibyl’s inheritance.
He was to regret his choice which was a triumph for the ‘court party’. The
kingdom would, after the king’s death, go to Sibyl and Guy. They and Agnes’s
party controlled the royal domain as well as the lordships of Jaffa-Ascalon, the
Transjordan and Hebron, adding Toron in the north, when it was given to
Agnes in c. 1183.Sidon was neutral after 1183.Only Galilee, under Raymond
III of Tripoli, Ramla, Ibelin and Nablus under various members of the Ibelin
family, and, perhaps, Caesarea were likely to put up any opposition. In fact,
Raymond inspired such panic in the king and the court that in 1182 he was
formally forbidden entry into the kingdom. In 1183 Baldwin IV abdicated
de facto when he appointed Guy of Lusignan to be his regent on condition,
characteristically, that he promise that he would not formally supplant him.
For himself Baldwin only kept Jerusalem and a substantial annuity in cash.
Butinthe same year the king had a change of heart for reasons which are not
entirely clear. He dismissed his regent and reverted to a personal rule which
he was less and less capable of discharging. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent
anew regency by Raymond, Agnes of Courtenay tabled a motion which was
carried after much debate. The king would continue to rule personally which
meant that the ‘court party’ would remain in power. The succession problem
was ‘solved’ by the coronation of Baldwin V, a boy of six, as king while his
predecessor was still alive. It was hoped that this would mean the exclusion of
Guyfrom the throne and make the deal acceptable to Baldwin IV.
But the king was not satisfied. In 1184 he tried to bring Guy down completely
by having his marriage to Sibyl ended. This drove Guy into open disobedience.
The king now confiscated his county and appointed Raymond to the kingdom’s
regency, in spite of the latter’s hard conditions. This regency continued beyond
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the old king’s death in 1185 but at the end of the summer of 1186 the child-king
also died suddenly. Raymond tried to promote Sibyl’s half-sister Isabella as
queen, but her husband went over to Guy’s side and in September 1186 there
was a spectacular coup d’
´
etat by the ‘court party’. Joscelin III of Courtenay
seized the royal domain of Acre and Beirut and even prevented Raymond from
attending the funeral of Baldwin V. To bar Guy from the kingship Sibyl was
divorced from him under pressure from the patriarch and Reynald of Ch
ˆ
atillon.
She agreed to this only on the condition that after her coronation as queen
of Jerusalem she should be entirely free to choose her new husband and after
she had received the crown she caused general consternation by selecting Guy
from whom she had just been divorced. Guy had to be crowned.
The country was now on the brink of civil war between Raymond and Guy,
who lavishly compensated Joscelin III, and doubtless others, for their support.
Bohemond III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli entered into truces
with the Muslims for their northern possessions and in Galilee Raymond even
accepted armed support from Saladin. Reynald of Ch
ˆ
atillon now did in the
Transjordan as he pleased. In 1179, 1182 and 1186,inspite of prevailing truces,
he fell upon Muslim caravans and never made amends. The systematic attacks
were probably aimed at wresting from the crown the last right it held there,
that of taxing peaceful Muslim caravans. When Guy complained, Reynald
answered that he was sires de sa terre in the same way as Guy was king in
his kingdom and that truces between the kingdom and the Muslims did not
concern him. He thus declared himself virtually independent. In 1183 he had
shocked the Muslim world by a spectacular maritime invasion of the Red Sea
and had been a target for Saladin ever since. Saladin, therefore, was ready to
strike. In 1187 Reynald gave him the desired casus belli by ambushing another
Muslim caravan. Saladin now invaded the country. Both sides pulled together
all the troops they had. But in the middle ages pitched battle was always a risky
business. Raymond of Tripoli, reconciled to the king, strongly advised against
leaving good water supplies in Galilee. The master of the Templars changed
the king’s mind, perhaps because, contrary to the will of Henry II of England,
he had opened the large treasure which Henry had laid up as a frozen account
in the east, to be spent only with his permission, and was now condemned to
success to justify his action. On 3 and 4 July 1187 the Frankish army was cut
to pieces on the hills of Hattin near Lake Galilee in the worst defeat ever to
befall the crusader states. The relic of the True Cross was lost for ever. The
king was captured. The army was either slain or taken prisoner. Most Templars
were killed in captivity and Saladin in person struck off the head of Reynald of
Ch
ˆ
atillon. Within a matter of months Saladin took the rest of the country. Acre
fell at once, Jerusalem followed in October. The great castles in the Transjordan
surrendered in 1188 and 1189.Itwas the end of Frankish rule there, although in
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1217 aGerman pilgrim still found a French widow in Montr
´
eal who showed
him the way to Sinai. Beaufort in Lebanon capitulated in 1190.
In 1188 it was the turn of the north. Tripoli and the castles of the military
orders in the county held out. The castles around Antioch fell, but the city
bought a truce. One year before this Raymond III had died childless in Tripoli,
after having arranged for the succession to his county by a son of the ruler of
Antioch, but Antioch faced problems stemming from the rise of Lesser Armenia
in Cilicia under Leon II (1187–1219). Tensions began to mount in 1191, coming
to a head in 1194 when Bohemond III became Leon’s prisoner. An Armenian
takeover of Antioch failed, however, in the face of resistance offered by the
urban commune. Jerusalem intervened on behalf of Bohemond who had to
renounce his loose feudal suzerainty over Cilicia. Lesser Armenia now took
advantage of German imperial politics and in 1198 Leon did homage to the
emperor and was crowned king by the archbishop of Mainz. The death of
Bohemond III in 1201 triggered a bitter war of succession between Tripoli and
Lesser Armenia which lasted for fifteen years and eventually led to Antioch’s
union to Tripoli in 1219.
All that remained of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187 was the port-
city of Tyre. It was valiantly defended by Conrad of Montferrat who had just
arrived in time and set up another urban commune according to Italian fashion.
Conrad had designs on the crown from the moment he arrived. Saladin could
not wrest Tyre from him and made a considerable mistake when he failed to
raze the chief port of Acre to the ground. When King Guy had been set free
in 1188,inasituation to try the stoutest heart, he showed his mettle and in
August 1189 set down to besiege Acre. He was insufficiently equipped for the
siege, particularly since he received little or no help from Tyre, where Conrad
refused to recognize him as king. The two contenders now dissipated what
was left of the royal domain on an unprecedented scale, by their grants to
their supporters. But, helped by growing arrivals from Europe, Guy kept the
siege going until the coming of the Anglo-French armies of the Third Crusade
which forced Acre to capitulate in July 1191.
The crusade saved the country. In September 1192 it was reconstituted, on
a smaller scale and excluding Jerusalem, by the truce between Saladin and
Richard I of England, which also covered Antioch and Tripoli. Before Richard
left in October for Europe he had settled the problem of who was to rule the
Latin kingdom, or thought he had. Up to this time he had supported Guy of
Lusignan against Conrad, who relied on the French. He now dropped Guy who
was compensated by becoming the ruler of Cyprus. The law of the country,
in fact, favoured Conrad because Queen Sibyl had died, while Conrad had
married her half-sister Isabella in 1190.But before Conrad could be crowned
he was struck down by two Assassins in April 1192.
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Within days his widow was married to Henry of Champagne, the count
palatine of Troyes, who ruled for five years without ever being crowned. Gaining
arespite when Saladin died in 1193,Henry ruled from Acre which was now
the capital. Not only Jerusalem was lost but also Nazareth and the natural
frontier along the Jordan river. The coast from north of Tyre to south of
Jaffa was Frankish but, close to the coast, Lydda and Ramla were partitioned
between the Franks and the Muslims. Land connections between the kingdom
of Jerusalem, a name which persisted, and the county of Tripoli were broken by
Muslim possession of Sidon and Beirut whereas a Muslim Latakia separated the
county from the principality of Antioch. The old nobility had been decimated
at Hattin, and the survivors had become impoverished by the loss of fiefs now
in Muslim territory. There was emigration to Cyprus, now under Latin rule,
and, after 1204,tothe new crusader states in Frankish Greece. There were
newcomers but the future among the nobles belonged to the Ibelin family, in
the country since a little before 1115.
Henry of Champagne was an able ruler who tried to reconstruct the king-
dom. Occasionally he resorted to high-handed measures, as when he impris-
oned the canons of the Holy Sepulchre because, in 1194, they elected a patriarch
without his knowledge instead of presenting him with a choice of two as had
been the custom formally abolished by Pope Celestine III in 1191.Henry had
to give in quickly. He also had his share of troubles, with the Pisans plotting
against him on behalf of Guy of Lusignan. They were Guy’s natural allies be-
cause both he and Conrad had made enormous concessions to them in Acre,
giving them the waterfront on both sides of the old city including the whole
port. They had made vain attempts to take over large parts of the Seigneurie de
Joscelin (below, p. 669). This would have made them crown vassals. They had
also briefly succeeded in subjecting their scattered holdings in the royal part
of Acre to their own consular jurisdiction, now extended to cover everything
except feudal tenures, and to have them taxed by Pisa rather than the king.
This policy had a certain grandeur but challenged the rulers. Henry bluntly
presented them with a choice of surrendering their holdings in the royal part
of the city if they wished to keep their privileges or, like others, to hold them
on his conditions. He cut the Pisan quarter back to its previous size; in any case
the donation of the waterfront had not been implemented after the reconquest
of Acre. But Henry overreacted when he drove the Pisans completely from
the mainland and arrested the constable Aimery, Guy’s brother. In the end he
needed the naval squadron which Pisa was the only Italian city to maintain
permanently in the Levant at that time and he had to readmit them in 1194.
Aimery of Lusignan preferred to join his brother in Cyprus, succeeding to
him there in 1194.Faced by a Greek-speaking and Orthodox population, Guy
had distributed lands on a reckless scale to prospective vassals ready to come to
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Cyprus from the mainland or establish a second foothold there. Aimery, who
became the first king of Cyprus in 1197 after performing homage to the emperor
Henry VI, reduced this to proportions, ensuring a financial preponderance for
the Cypriot kings. With the able help of Alan of Lydda, now the first chancellor
of Cyprus and archbishop of Nicosia, he organized the Latin church on Cyprus
by despoiling, it must be admitted, the Greek church. The ritual differences
could never be solved and much work in organizing the hierarchy and the
distribution of revenues was left to the thirteenth century.
Henry of Champagne died in 1197 during the emperor Henry VI’s crusade.
Under German pressure the hand of Henry’s widow Isabella was now given to
King Aimery of Cyprus who thus also became king of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was
not an imperial fief but Aimery’s election opened a long period of Hohenstaufen
influence in the east. Its chief instrument was the order of the Teutonic Knights,
formally founded in March 1198 in Acre but having its origins in a German
field hospital established during the Third Crusade and, even further back, in
aGerman hospital in twelfth-century Jerusalem. In electing Aimery the barons
of the kingdom had hoped for a united kingdom of Cyprus and Jerusalem,
but Aimery kept the two strictly apart in a purely personal union. He thus
saved the wealth of Cyprus from being depleted on behalf of the mainland.
In 1197 he occupied Beirut, thus restoring the land connection with Tripoli.
In 1198 he renewed a truce with the Muslims which had been broken by the
arrival of the German crusade. When he renewed it again in 1204 the terms
were surprisingly advantageous, the Christians receiving the Muslim half of
Sidon and Ramla and all of Jaffa, which had been lost in 1197.
It used to be believed that among the great tragedies on 1187 had been the
loss of the Lettres de S
´
epulcre, the collection of royal laws enacted since 1099
and deposited as individual charters in the church of the Holy Sepulchre and
that in an attempt to replace them Aimery issued a codification of feudal law
known as the Livre au Roi. The text of the Livre is preserved and reveals the
king’s intentions in reflecting at least some of the rights of the stronger twelfth-
century monarchy. But it has recently been proven that the Lettres had never
existed but were only a myth fabricated by thirteenth-century feudal lawyers.
The Livre was not likely to make the king popular with his vassals. Neither
was the fact that, for lack of revenues, he curtailed their money fiefs, even if
for this purpose he relied on the help of two commissioners elected by them.
All this may have been behind the spectacular attempt on the king’s life by
four German knights in 1198 from which he only very narrowly escaped. He
took a considerable time to recover from his wounds. It was the one and only
Christian attempt to murder a king of Jerusalem, although previous kings had
repeatedly feared for their lives. Aimery fixed the blame on Ralph of Tiberias,
who had competed with him for the crown in 1197.Hesurvived the German
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666 hans eberhard mayer
swords but in Lent 1205 (1 April) he died from over-indulging in fish which
may not have been fresh and his queen Isabella soon followed him to the grave.
After a century of kings the stage was set for a century of the aristocracy.
This feudal nobility was already, of course, of great importance in the twelfth
century but so little is known about the feudal society in the northern crusader
states that the discussion must here be limited to the kingdom of Jerusalem and
must, for lack of space and knowledge,be confined to the Latin Staatsvolk,tothe
exclusion of the Muslims and Syro-Christians, not to mention the minorities
of the separated eastern churches or, even smaller in number, the Jews.
Roughly speaking, the Latin kingdom consisted of royal domain, lordships
and church lands, leaving aside the exempt Italian concessions in the port
cities. Church properties, owing little or no service or payments, were scat-
tered throughout both the royal domain and the lordships. In the thirteenth
century this became a serious problem but it is difficult to contend that in the
twelfth century this impoverished the lords, and if the kings were poor – and
they frequently were – it was certainly not a result of an alienation of royal
lands to the church. Such alienation by the magnates was frequently the result
of their need for ready cash, and of this the kings, even when poor, had more
than their vassals. Often enough, giving lands to a religious corporation was
a cheap way for the vassals to settle wastelands and make them economically
more profitable in the first place. It is true that the lords thus lost revenues,
but the kingdom gained settlers, alleviating thereby the most pressing problem
of the crusader states: manpower shortage. Also, the secular and the regular
church, at least in times of need, carried a heavy burden of footsoldiers main-
tained at their expense, with the patriarch of Jerusalem and his chapter owing
500 each. Certainly, the military orders successfully claimed full exemption
from services to the king or the lords for whatever they owned, but they added
their considerable fighting power and the castles built or enlarged by them
to the kingdom’s strength and fought, more often than not, without direct
financial reward. It is true that in the Egyptian campaign of 1168 the Hospi-
tallers presented a very heavy bill but so did everyone else because military
service outside the kingdom had to be paid for directly; and the king did not
seal the respective diploma. There was, in the twelfth century, only one big
defensive frontier march in the hands of a military order on the borders of the
Latin kingdom, around the Templar castle of Safad in Galilee, while the much
smaller county of Tripoli had two of them. The other castles of the orders were
sometimes strong (Belvoir) but did not control extensive marches.
The royal domain was the greatest block of lands owned by any one person.
At least according to the feudal jurists of the thirteenth century, the king could
do in his domain as he pleased: he could freely alienate royal lands to the
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church, he could create allodial lands or fiefs without service, he could relieve
vassals of their service or fully acquit them of it, he could create as many
vassals as he pleased, while they were bound not to sub-infeudate more land
than they themselves retained. Conversely, he could not do anything in the
lordships without the lord’s consent, nor could he make a donation or create
arear-vassal at a lord’s expense. Whether the feudal practice was ever that
strict is open to conjecture, although the kings seem to have refrained from
interference in the lordships unless called upon to redress patent wrong-doings
against rear-vassals. There is, with regard to the domain, a particular lack of
sources because within it the kings made extensive use of the money fief. To
estimate the extent of this we would need to have the lost records of the royal
secr
`
ete, the king’s exchequer so to speak. As the century proceeded, the domain
was subject to great fluctuations in size and, hence, in revenue. The kingdom
expanded up to 1153 and so did the domain. But the expansion of both was
quicker at the beginning of the century than towards the middle. The domain
also grew from confiscation of fiefs following revolts but, although there was
no Leihezwang preventing the king from keeping such acquisitions, such fiefs
sooner or later were used again to provide for family or vassals. Occasionally,
the king adroitly exploited a vassal’s financial difficulties such as when he cut
off a debt-ridden lord of Beirut in c. 1166 from all credit until he was forced
to trade his lordship to the king for a money fief. The king did allow him to
marry the very rich heiress of the Transjordan but after her death he lost the
lordship and found himself very insufficiently compensated with the tiny one
of Blanchegarde. In 1180 Humphrey IV of Toron, the heir of the Transjordan,
had to surrender to the king his patrimony at Toron, which he had inherited
in the previous year, as part of a deal which gave him a king’s daughter for a
bride.
But these gains through conquest, confiscation and manipulation were offset
by the constant demand on the king to pay his vassals and mercenaries, to
reward his supporters and to provide for members of the royal family. The last
was done on a lavish scale. Acre and Tyre, the economic centres of the kingdom,
had to provide for the king’s son-in-law Fulk of Anjou 1129–31. The county of
Jaffa–Ascalon was an appanage first for Amalric, the brother of King Baldwin
III, then for Sybil, the sister of King Baldwin IV. The county was a true fief
only in c. 1108–34, 1191–3 and 1197, but was an appanage in 1151, 1154–63 and
1176–86.Nablus with most of Samaria was given to Queen Melisende 1152–62
and to Queen Maria Komnena from either 1167 or 1174 to 1187.
The king administered and exploited his domain, including its towns,
through the viscounts as the principal crown agents, who had judicial, ad-
ministrative and financial functions. King Baldwin I originally had only one
viscount for the whole of the kingdom, but as the kingdom grew this became
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impractical and in 1115 there was a major administrative reform which broke up
the kingdom into several vicecomital districts (Jerusalem with Judaea, Nablus
with Samaria, Acre, later also Tyre). This office was so successful that many
lordships began to have viscounts of their own.
Since after 1115 the royal viscounts were restricted to their respective districts,
their office was ill suited to help the king in ruling his kingdom as opposed to
administering his domain. Government was carried out by the king in person
acting in council with the advice of his barons. With them, and often with the
episcopate, he debated and formulated government policies and with them he
sat in supreme judgement on feudal matters pertaining to crown fiefs. This
body, known in the twelfth century as the curia regis, became known later as
the Haute Cour.Ithad its smaller counterparts in the seigneurial courts. In the
task of government the king was helped by his great household officials. As
these offices were lucrative and of considerable political weight, they were often
in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although royal favourites not from this
privileged class might be appointed through royal patronage. An exception was
the chancellor because he had to be a literate ecclesiastic. At first he actually
composed the royal charters but as time wore on, he withdrew from this daily
business retaining, however, the formal direction of the chancery and keeping
and controlling the seal. In the second half of the twelfth century he was the
principal foreign policy adviser of the king, and from early on his office quite
naturally was a springboard for an episcopal career. The kingdom’s military
establishment was under the direction of the royal constable and the royal
marshal, whereas the seneschal, to whom the viscounts accounted financially,
directed the king’s financial affairs through a separate office known as the
secr
`
ete, perhaps more departmentalized than the chancery but still rudimentary
when compared, for example, with England’s exchequer. The greater lordships
who could afford it emulated the royal household for their own administrative
purposes.
With the exception of most church lands, the properties of the military
orders and the autonomous quarters of the Italian communes, the kingdom
became, for practical purposes, fully feudalized. At the source of this process
was, of course, the king. In the early days he occasionally signed away whole
conquered towns and their districts as fiefs (Haifa 1100–1,Sidon and Beirut
1110). In 1100 Tancred accepted Tiberias and Bethsan as a fief from Godfrey,
and Tiberias grew into a very large fief, the principality of Galilee. But most of
the lordships originated in royal castellanies (Tiberias 1099,Hebron and Jaffa
1100, Arsuf and Caesarea 1101, Ramla 1099–1102,Toron c. 1105, Scandalion
1117,Ibelin and Blanchegarde c. 1142,Mirabel before 1150). The only lordship
to have neither a town nor a castle as a nucleus was Transjordan, which slowly
grew from 1115 onwards.
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Occasionally whole towns given in fief became lordships from the beginning.
Taking as points of reference the years of death of the kings, the lordships of
Haifa, Sidon and Beirut existed by 1118.Bythen some castellanies had also
risen to this status (Tiberias 1100, Caesarea by 1110,Jaffa 1108–10,Toron c.
1115). By 1131 one of the kingdom’s two ecclesiastical lordships had been added
to the seigneurial map, that of the archbishop of Nazareth (before 1121), while
Bethsan had been elevated by 1129, both in unknown circumstances. By 1143
Ramla and the ecclesiastical lordship of the bishop of Lydda (a vassal of the
ruler since 1099) had become lordships. Both had been created before 1138 in
the wake of the revolt of Count Hugh II of Jaffa in 1134.Bytheend of the
following reign in 1163 there were three new lordships (Scandalion before 1148,
Mirabel by 1162, Arsuf c. 1163,atthe latest by 1168). By 1174 Ibelin (1163–7)
and Blanchegarde (1174) had acquired seigneurial status. The last castellany to
become a lordship was Hebron (1177;atleast this seems more probable than
1161 which has also been argued). To these must be added the quasi-seigneuries
which were lordships in fact, or even in name, but not in law, such as Nablus,
which after 1177 developed out of the dowry for a former queen, and the
Seigneurie de Joscelin, a conglomerate of lands, revenues, wardships and other
rights which Joscelin III of Courtenay, uncle and seneschal of King Baldwin
IV, obtained for himself from 1179 onwards in the royal domain of Acre.
This account is, to some extent, deceptive. While it demonstrates that most
of the big lordships go back to the early days of the kingdom, it does not
reveal that some developed only very gradually or that others gained and lost
their status as they drifted out of, and into, the royal domain. Examples must
suffice. Jaffa, for instance, was a royal castellany until c. 1107.Between 1108
and 1110 it became a county under the Le Puiset family until 1134, when the
king confiscated it. It remained royal domain until 1151 when it became the
appanage of the king’s brother, Amalric. He lost it in the civil war of 1152,
regained it in 1154 and was able to add Ascalon to it, to which the Le Puisets
had laid proleptic claims as early as the 1120s. When he rose to be king in
1163,Jaffa-Ascalon returned to the royal domain and left it, once more, in 1176
as an appanage for the king’s sister. When she, in turn, rose to be queen in
1186, the double county became royal domain again, was a fief in 1191, domain
in 1193 and again a fief when it fell to the Muslims in 1197.Its checkered
history continued in the thirteenth century. These changes in status had their
repercussions among the vassals of the counts, particularly at Ramla which
started out as a royal castellany. It became a fief of the counts of Jaffa but by
1120 had an unofficial quasi-seigneurial status. Shortly after the county reverted
to the royal domain in 1134, Ramla was officially recognized as a lordship, but
it lost this status in the 1150s, when there was a count again. Hugh of Ramla
then used his grandfather’s seal, although when his count was present he used
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670 hans eberhard mayer
the comital seal, claiming that he had no seal of his own. After the count had
become king, Ramla was again ranked as a lordship.
The most striking example of a gradual growth was Transjordan. After cam-
paigns from 1100 to 1115 which brought the country north of the Yabbok river
into the principality of Galilee, the former Viscount Pisellus was established as
lord south of the Yabbok. In the same year (1115) the king, further south, built
the strong castle of Montr
´
eal (Shaubak) which was not joined to the Transjor-
danian lordship until the early 1130s; only around this time was Frankish rule
extended as far as Petra and Aqaba. But this most southern part continued to
be a royal holding until 1161, when the region south of Petra was made part of
the lordship which now, after nearly half a century, finally reached its greatest
extension, from the Yabbok to the Red Sea.
In theory this feudal map did not change when most lordships were wiped
out in 1187.Only some of them could be regained, but on paper they all con-
tinued in being. A text of 1239 enumerating land occupied by the Muslims
carefully listed the pretender to Transjordan, who was already four generations
removed from the last Frankish holder, although Transjordan was never re-
turned to the kingdom. Until recently it was believed that after c. 1130, and
except for the most major upheavals in feudal revolts, there was security of
possession for feudal tenures big and small. This is, indeed, true if we think in
medieval fashion in terms of lignages,offamilies firmly rooted in their lordships
and fiefs. Putting down such roots was facilitated by legislation. It is true that
an old rule that fiefs could be inherited not only by direct offspring but also
by collateral heirs was changed before 1150, but the ‘old fiefs’ could successfully
defend themselves against it. Another law preventing the accumulation of fiefs
by one man also disappeared. This was to the benefit of all fiefholders but,
more particularly, to that of the small baronial group, which, through carefully
arranged marriages, concentrated more and more feudal lands in the hands of
avery small group of families steadily growing in status, richness and power.
It was obviously difficult to dispossess such lignages.Weused to believe that a
law promulgated by King Baldwin II set down twelve crimes which entailed
royal confiscation of fiefs without trial by peers but this view has successfully
been challenged. Rather, the law laid down fixed penalties which were at the
king’s disposal, but only after a vassal had been pronounced by his peers to be
guilty.
In the thirteenth century the inheritance of fiefs was rigidly governed by the
theory of the plus dreit heir aparant, that is the nearest relative to the last in
possession of a fief, present in the east and capable of performing the services
due. But it seems that twelfth-century practice was less rigid and protected more
the lignage than the individual. For the latter the wheel of fortune could turn
very quickly and there were more conflicts between the kings and their vassals
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