NOTES 1 Introducing Medieval Maintenance 1. Lest we believe that a positive perspective on gang activity is impos- sible, consider that a number of organizations, including the Mob and the Black Panthers, touted the community services they pro- vided. To see “organized crime” as entirely evil may be an expres- sion of American postwar middle-class culture, with its racialized veil of whiteness, rather than an unquestionable moral position. 2. Anthony Musson uses the term “Mafiosi,” but does so in arguing against it as an effective analogy in Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice 1294–1350 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1996), p. 264. 3. Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300– 1348 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 221. It should be noted that by 1998, she chose to avoid the loaded term “Mafia” and used studies of white-collar crime to coin her own term, “fur-collar crime” for noble criminality in “Of Good and Ill Repute”: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially Chapter 4. 4. British audiences are better off here, benefiting from a culture includ- ing a tradition of service. Anyone who wants to see this notion of service and its lack demonstrated might consider different readings of the famous relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings. British audiences recognize this rela- tionship as the close one between a traditional (perhaps stereotypical) master and servant. At the same time, lacking a similar tradition of service, this relationship appears to American audiences to be either an especially homosocial friendship or a homosexual couple. 5. Abbot-monk was the other recognized analogy. The gravest proof of the currency of these analogies was the codification of a law of petty treason in the 1352 Statute of Treasons, where a servant killing a master, a wife a husband, or anyone his prelate were all considered traitors: see 5 Stat. EdwIII c. 2. For examples of these relationships 122 NOTES used as analogous, see 14 EdwIII, case 49 where the legal prejudice of a canon is directly related to that of a femme couvert: “celuy qest obedient navera jammes accion si il ne soit de corporel trespas fait a luy mesme, et unqore ceo coveynt estre fait ovesqe son sovereyn” [one who is in obedience shall never have an action except in respect of corporal trespasses committed against himself, and even then it must be undertaken with the Head of his House] Alfred J. Harwood, ed. Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third. (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1896). Similarly, the legal relationship of husband and wife was compared to abbot and monk in L.C. Hecher and Michael Hecher, eds. Year Books of Richard II. 8–10 Richard II 1385–1387 (London: Ames Foundation, 1987), 8 RII, case 13. For clarification, regnal years are denoted by the year of a king’s reign (in the example above, the fourteenth year of Edward III’s reign). When convenient, I will identify Year Book cases by case number as well as regnal year, as I do above. Chris Given-Wilson’s recent electronic version of the Parliamentary Rolls also includes contem- porary statutes: see Chris Given-Wilson, ed. The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, Scholarly Digital Editions 2005, hereafter abbrevi- ated PROME. Statutes, like Year Book cases, will be cited by statute number, regnal year, and chapter when applicable. 6. Elizabeth Fowler, “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 760–92, esp. 768. J.H. Baker also provides a legal introduction to coverture in, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (London: Butterworths, 2002). Chief Justice Belknap expresses the contempo- rary perspective when he states that “le baron et la femme sount vn mesme person en ley” [the husband and wife are one and the same person in law] in Isobel Thornley, ed. Year Books of II Richard II 1387– 1388 (London: Spottiswood, Ballantyne, & Co., 1937), 2 RII, case 9. Also consider 19 EdwIII, case 42, where in answer to whether one could charge a husband damages for a tort done by his wife, Justice Willoughby responds succinctly: “Pur quei nient?” [Why not?]. 7. Fowler, “Civil Death,” p. 768. 8. MED, “maintenaunce.” OED, “maintainer,” “maintenance.” Frances McSparran, chief ed. The Electronic Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), and John Simpson, chief ed. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2007). 9. For one consideration about the importance of friends among gentry networks, see Philippa Maddern, “ ‘Best Trusted Friends’: Concepts and Practices of Friendship among Fifteenth-century NOTES 123 Norfolk Gentry,” in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994), pp. 100–117. 10. Richard Kaeuper and Philippa Maddern are notable exceptions here, see for example Philippa Maddern, Violence and the Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Richard Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and both historians have other works in this vein. 11. In the interest of precision, I will generally use the term “auton- omy” throughout this book to the more commonly seen “agency.” Carolynn Van Dyke asks some provocative questions about liter- ary critics’ use of the term agency in Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), pp. 13–26. 12. K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), particularly Chapter 1, part vi. 13. McFarlane, Nobility, p. 105. 14. For examples of just how complex these networks could be, in McFarlane’s view, see Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), especially Part Two. 15. McFarlane, Nobility, p. 106. 16. McFarlane, Nobility, p. 113. 17. Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New York: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 203. I am especially indebted to chapter 4 in what follows. In addition, I must recognize that the historians quoted here are exemplary samples of a much larger group of histo- rians studying maintenance and retaining. 18. J.M.W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 179. 19. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 203. 20. Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 335–36. 21. Bean, Lord, p. 236. 22. Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 1. 23. Walker, Lancastrian, p. 17. 24. Walker, Lancastrian, p. 84. 25. Bean, Lord, p. 236. 26. Walker, Lancastrian, p. 16. 124 NOTES 27. Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (New York: Longman, 1995), p. 8. 28. Walker, Lancastrian, p. 103. 29. Walker, Lancastrian, p. 261. 30. McFarlane, Nobility, p. 115. 31. Hicks, Bastard, p. 120. 32. J.G. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 21–22. 33. J.G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (Portland, OR: Aeropagitica Press, 1989), p. 80. 34. For example, see Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, pp. 28, 66. 35. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, p. 95. 36. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism, p. 96. 37. Musson, Public Order, p. 1. Musson also discusses this development in his newer book, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), particularly Chapter 1. 38. David Gary Shaw, Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2005) and Raluca Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). 2 Maintaining a Family 1. Christine Carpenter, ed. Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17. 2. For general information on the Stonors, see also Christine Carpenter, “The Stonor Circle in the Fifteenth Century,” in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, ed. Rowena Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), p. 25 [175–200]. For informa- tion on Judge Stonor, see P.J. Jefferies, “Profitable Fourteenth- Century Legal Practice and Landed Investment: The Case of Judge Stonor, c. 1281–1354,” Southern History 15 (1993): 18–33. 3. For general history of the family, see Joan Kirby, “A Fifteenth- Century Family, The Plumptons of Plumpton, and Their Lawyers, 1461–1515,” Northern History 25 (1989): 106–119. For a minute analy- sis of local gentry families and their relationships with the Plumptons around mid-century, see Ruth Wilcock, “Local Disorder in the Honour of Knaresborough, c. 1438–1461 and the National Context,” Northern History 41 (2004): 39–80. 4. Colin Richmond gives an example that should make us pause before assuming gentry clannishness was without its complexity: he details a thorough disinheritance by Henry Inglose through the first section NOTES 125 of Chapter 2 in The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5. Wilcock, “Local Disorder,” p. 70. 6. For the legal background of this situation, I am drawing on Colin Richmond, “Elizabeth Clere: Friend of the Pastons,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale, and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 251–73. 7. I cite from the letters using the volume, number of the letter, and line number when appropriate.