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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.