catena/parity/cases/chunkmd/prose.md

The argument of this chapter is that the obligation ran both ways, and that
contemporaries said so plainly whenever they were asked. A lord who could not
protect was a lord who could not command, and the men who owed him service
said as much in language that has survived in the court rolls.

What the rolls do not say, and what has to be inferred, is how often the
obligation was actually tested. A tenant who withheld service in a year of
famine was not making a constitutional argument; he was hungry. The clerk who
recorded the withholding had no vocabulary for the difference, and so the
record flattens the two into one offence with one penalty.

This flattening is the central difficulty of the sources. It is not that they
lie. It is that the categories they were written in were designed to produce a
number at the bottom of a column, and a number at the bottom of a column
cannot distinguish a rebellion from a bad harvest. Everything that follows
depends on reading around that limitation rather than through it.

Three approaches have been tried. The first counts the offences and treats the
count as a proxy for discontent, which assumes the clerk's attention was
constant across years when we know it was not. The second reads the language
of the entries for signs of unusual trouble, which works where a clerk was
talkative and fails entirely where he was not. The third, adopted here,
compares the same manor across decades and treats changes in what was recorded
as evidence about the recorder as much as about the recorded.

None of the three is satisfactory, and the third has the particular weakness
that it needs a long run of documents from a single place. There are not many
such runs. The ones that exist are concentrated in the south and east, which
is to say in exactly the regions where the argument is least likely to be
surprising. A reader who wants to know what happened in the north will find
this chapter unsatisfying, and the reason is that the documents do not exist,
not that the question is uninteresting.