Aristocratic violence - be it on crusade, in the tournament lists or on a cavalry charge in shining armour - is iconic of the Middle Ages for most people. In this chapter,

I will mainly focus on the violence of one particular sort of aristocrat, that is, lords (seigneurs in French). Lords were those aristocrats who exercised power, usually including both fiscal and judicial rights, over a particular lordship (dominium in Latin).

In dialogue with its relationship to the culture of aristocratic violence is seigneurial violence's relationship to the authority of kings, princes and emperors, primarily as mediated by law and legal institutions. For most of the twentieth century historians often argued - and more often assumed - that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of such ‘sovereign' rulers. When they were strong - at the height of the Carolingian empire in the later eighth and early ninth centuries, say, or under the increasingly bureaucratic governments of the later Middle Ages - such rulers preserved peace through the promulgation of laws and the enforcement of justice against unruly nobles. When they were weak - around the

My thanks to Tom Bisson, Dick Kaeuper andJinty Nelson for their thoughts on this chapter.

Seigneurial Violence in Medieval Europe millennium in France, for example, or in fifteenth-century England - lords violently usurped their power, going to war against each other or even their rulers for their own political and economic profit and oppressing the pea­santry. In short, Hobbes's Leviathan had to be strong to contain lordly violence.

Since the 1980s, medieval historians have progressively challenged many aspects of this zero-sum model across the subject's geographic and chron­ological range. Ideas about sovereign power and ‘the state' have become more nuanced and more historically sensitive. The Weberian ideal type of a state as having a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of violence is increasingly understood as inapplicable to the medieval polities, even in the period's final centuries. Investigating aristocratic practices of ‘feud', ‘ven­geance' or ‘private war', historians found that they could not be accommo­dated within the paradigm of a public state opposed to the exercise of private power. It is now recognised that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. When they wielded public powers of taxation and justice, as many of them did, these functions could not be carried out without at least the implicit threat of force, if not actual violence. In many times and places, lords' and nobles' right to wage war against each other or even against their superiors was an established principle of practice and sometimes of law. The practice of ‘feud' has also come in for reassessment, increasingly not understood as anarchic or usurpatory but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. This has encouraged emphasis on the rules that (ostensibly) structured seigneurial violence rather than the institutions that (ostensibly) limited it.

Seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politi­cally intelligible to historians than it did until relatively recently.