Conclusion

Historicising violence means understanding its contingent function within the social contexts specific to the period. Throughout the med­ieval millennium, political and social elites killed, ravaged and waged war.

In our own society, these are acts that only agents of state may legitimately undertake; in anyone else's hands, they now constitute crime or (perhaps another category altogether) terror. In medieval Europe, it was different. Seigneurial violence had its critics, but it persisted as a social fact throughout the period and beyond. It did so partly because personal redress of wrong with violence was not only widely practised but also widely accepted. This was true in great part because medieval power was personally held and relatively widely dis­persed; many individuals within the political community possessed not only a right to act violently but also a social duty to do so. For lords in particular, especially in the period's later centuries, vindicatory right and legal prerogative frequently overlapped; their ‘private' and ‘public' inter­ests and duties were not fully distinguishable. The social corollary to this was an aristocratic licence to violence, sometimes shared by noble­women and usually suffered by non-nobles, especially peasants, though there were legal and cultural constraints on how lords and their men used violence. Seigneurial violence expressed and maintained the politi­cal dominance of lordship, simultaneously reiterating the socio-cultural norms of aristocracy. It was a demonstration and an actualisation of medieval order.

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