Bibliographical Essay

Relevant source material can be found in almost every European documentary collection and archival repository. For the early Middle Ages, the various ‘barbarian' law codes have often been used to discern cultural norms and set beside documents like chronicles, letter collections and saints' lives that may reflect social practice.

The anthropologist Max Gluckman's article ‘The Peace in the Feud', Past & Present 8 (i955), 1-14, was fundamental in influencing medieval historians to view elite violence as culturally contingent and possibly socially constructive. Drawing on Gluckman, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill's ‘The Bloodfeud of the Franks', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41.3 (1958-9), 459-87, inspired studies of medieval elite violence in later centuries. More recently, William Ian Miller's Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) has provided an influential model for medieval historians thinking about feuds in other contexts.

A recent overview with much attention given to lords and aristocrats is Warren Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (Harlow: Pearson, 2011). There are any number of good essay collections on seigneurial violence or ‘feud', see for example Warren Brown and Piotr Gorecki (eds.), Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Jeppe Buchert Netterstrom and Bjorn Poulsen (eds.), Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007); Belle Tuten and Tracy Billado (eds.), Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D.

On early medieval elite violence, see essays in Guy Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998). For violence, status and gender, see Nira Gradowicz-Pancer, ‘De-gendering Female Violence: Merovingian Female Honour as an “Exchange of Violence”', Early Medieval Europe 11.1 (2002), 1-18. For the Carolingian aristocracy, see Janet L. Nelson's work, including essays collected in The Frankish World, 750-900 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996). Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image, and Experience (London: Hambledon Press, 1999) remains the best treatment of the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman contexts, though compare Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), which follows the English story through to the fourteenth century.

For violence and lordship after the millennium, the ‘feudal revolution' debate remains unresolved: Thomas N. Bisson, ‘The “feudal revolution”', Past & Present 142 (1994), 6-42 and the ensuing debate, with contributions by Dominique Barthelemy, Stephen White, Timothy Reuter and Chris Wickham and a reply by Bisson in Past & Present 152 (1996), 196-223 and 155 (1997), 177-225. More recently, see Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800 to 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the Peace of God, Thomas Head and Richard Landes (eds.), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) remains a good introduction. On central medieval Germany, see Timothy Reuter's work collected in Janet L. Nelson (ed.), Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On France, there is a trio of classic articles: Frederic Cheyette, ‘Suum cuique tribuere', French Historical Studies 6.3 (1976), 287-99; Stephen White, ‘Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine around the Year 1100', Traditio 42 (1986), 195-263; Patrick Geary, ‘Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management Mechanism, 1050-1200', in his Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp.

For the later Middle Ages, Richard Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) lucidly discusses interrelated developments in law, military methods and socio-aesthetic mores. Howard Kaminsky, ‘The Noble Feud in the Later Middle Ages', Past & Present 177 (2002), 55-83, has been agenda-setting. On the legal revolution, legitimate authority and just cause, see Frederick Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). The classic study on martial norms and practice is Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

For specific national treatments, on Germany it is hard to choose between the perspectives of Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1996) and Christine Reinle, Bauernfehden: Studien zur Fehdeführung Nichtadliger im spätmittelalterlichen romisch-deutschen Reich, besonders in den bayerischen Herzogtümern (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003). For France, the only sustained treatment is Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250-1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Useful for the relationship between French noble behaviour and royal justice is the work of Claude Gauvard, some of which is collected in Violence et ordre public au Moyen Age (Paris: Picard, 2005). The historiography of English seigneurial violence is closely bound up with highly technical legal history. See S. F. C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) on land disputes and Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217-1327 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). On baronial rebellions, Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) is excellent, and comparatively see Bjorn Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c. 1215-0.1250 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) seminally re-assessed “bastard feudalism'. Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360-1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) is a major contribution in that tradition.