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33 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
2.0 KiB
Markdown
The argument of this chapter is that the obligation ran both ways, and that
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contemporaries said so plainly whenever they were asked. A lord who could not
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protect was a lord who could not command, and the men who owed him service
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said as much in language that has survived in the court rolls.
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What the rolls do not say, and what has to be inferred, is how often the
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obligation was actually tested. A tenant who withheld service in a year of
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famine was not making a constitutional argument; he was hungry. The clerk who
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recorded the withholding had no vocabulary for the difference, and so the
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record flattens the two into one offence with one penalty.
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This flattening is the central difficulty of the sources. It is not that they
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lie. It is that the categories they were written in were designed to produce a
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number at the bottom of a column, and a number at the bottom of a column
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cannot distinguish a rebellion from a bad harvest. Everything that follows
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depends on reading around that limitation rather than through it.
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Three approaches have been tried. The first counts the offences and treats the
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count as a proxy for discontent, which assumes the clerk's attention was
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constant across years when we know it was not. The second reads the language
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of the entries for signs of unusual trouble, which works where a clerk was
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talkative and fails entirely where he was not. The third, adopted here,
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compares the same manor across decades and treats changes in what was recorded
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as evidence about the recorder as much as about the recorded.
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None of the three is satisfactory, and the third has the particular weakness
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that it needs a long run of documents from a single place. There are not many
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such runs. The ones that exist are concentrated in the south and east, which
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is to say in exactly the regions where the argument is least likely to be
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surprising. A reader who wants to know what happened in the north will find
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this chapter unsatisfying, and the reason is that the documents do not exist,
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not that the question is uninteresting.
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