La Seigneurie collective

This is a challenging book which deserves to be widely read. But the first chapter is demanding. In the course of defining her terms and introducing her sources, Hélène Débax sets out a substantial list of problems which she faces: regional variations are great; the terminology used to express coseigneuries, the subject of her study, is extremely diverse; and in practice the sources are often, if not usually, inadequate to prove that the lordship at issue is a true coseigneurie. Yet she maintains that the elephant in the room of social history in the high middle ages is the coseigneurie, almost absent from conventional historiography of the period, yet vital for a true understanding of how society functioned. In her words, ‘the coseigneurie is like a brilliant star which sends out rays in all directions, [illuminating] the depths of social relationships’ (p. 15). She attacks the view, beloved by historians of high medieval England, that medieval Western Europe was composed of indivisible fiefs, each held by a vassal who did homage to his lord and owed him service; primogeniture was the standard rule of succession. Débax is not the first historian to undermine this picture; recently Theodore Evergates did a good demolition job in The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100–1300 (2007; rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], 395–7). But she proves that shared lordships of various different kinds occurred all over Northern France, and makes a case for the view that indivisibility was a late development, even in Normandy. However, a mere shared lordship or fief must be distinguished from a true coseigneurie. This was a lordship which a group of people (she is only interested in aristocratic groups) shared, either by holding it in common or by dividing it into parts. The usual cause of such an arrangement was adherence to partible inheritance. In a coseigneurie there had to be equality of status, though not necessarily equality of shares, among the partners. Lest it be thought that coseigneuries were restricted to southern climes, Débax makes a speculative case that the peers of Flanders originated in one such. She is thus interested in horizontal lines of cohesion among aristocrats, rather than the lord–man vertical ties that have been so extensively studied

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