Escheat with Heir’

This article looks at Edward III’s use of the royal feudal rights over guardianships and marriages for the sake of a group of men newly promoted into the peerage or further to earldoms. Based primarily on chancery records, it examines this monarch’s use of wardships and marriages of his tenants-in-chief, which were used both in order to bolster the wealth of his "new men" to match their new status and as a way to mingle their blood with those of more established noble families. More importantly, the royal use of both these rights during the reign marked a way in which the potentially problematic situation inherited from his father, Edward II, and from the minority regime of Isabella and Mortimer, could be defused. For, though a number of the key players of the 1320s were now dead, their families were often still a force to be dealt with, both in terms of their landed power and the potential ill-will they had towards either the king or other members of the polity. However, by placing the estates of the "old" nobility into the care of the new men, and by marrying the new men into the established nobility, a way was opened not only whereby the fortunes of the two groups — and by extension, the monarchy — were intermingled, but also through which reconciliation could take place. Thus, though feudalism was beginning its decline in this period, for Edward III’s reign at least, control over the right of wardship and marriage played a crucial part in both the development of royal power and the smoothing over of political divisions of the earlier decades of the fourteenth-century

Ancient history · Economic history · Feudalism · Legal guardian · Monarchy · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Polity · Power (physics) · Reign · Sociology · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History