This book, the final installment of a two-volume history of French lordship, examines the role of lordship in old regime society, the internal structures and administration of lordship – including the seigneurial dues, domain-farms, forests and common lands, and serfdom – and seigneurial justice. In addition, the book reviews the regional patterns of lordship, and concludes with an examination of lordship from 1770 to 1789, the years immediately preceding the French Revolution.
"Lordship in France, 500-1500" presents a new interpretation of lordship in medieval France based on recent, ground-breaking research on the Merovingian, Carolingian and Capetian eras of lordship in medieval France. In the standard interpretation, lordship emerged around the year 1000, when landed magnates and armed adventurers usurped public authority from the collapsing Carolingian state. This book argues instead that lordship emerged roughly 500 hundred years earlier with the disintegration of the Roman Empire. Politically and socially, lordship expressed the collegial ruling authority of kings and aristocrats, not the usurped public authority of a failed centralized state. Institutionally, lordship was essentially a fiscal apparatus that perpetuated remnants of the late Roman tax system.