Jenny Wormald has written with distinction on lordship, service and governance in late medieval Scotland. This is a contribution to the same subjects in the kingdom on the other side of the border. It addresses, at times speculatively, a conundrum that has of late become increasingly evident: if, as has been assumed, bastard feudalism in the fourteenth century was the same as in the fifteenth, why does it look so different in many ways?

It is necessary to begin with a summary of our present understanding of bastard feudalism in the fifteenth century. The fons et origo is K. B. McFarlane and his revolutionary rejection of the Plummer/Stubbs view that this was, as the name suggests, a debased form of feudalism. Thus, bastard feudalism did not replace a legitimate and permanent bond, based on land, with an illegitimate and inherently unstable one, based on money, contract and mutual advantage, thereby undermining government and society and encouraging terrible violence which culminated in the Wars of the Roses. Rather, it filled a gap left by the decline of feudalism. At first McFarlane still accepted the prevailing opinion that linked the emergence of bastard feudalism to the king's military needs. But, for him, it was not the case that the requirements of the French wars gave birth to the military contract and all its alleged evils; rather, the decline of the feudal host necessitated the recruitment of armies in a new way: the contract. However, well before his death, he had realised that we need to think of bastard feudalism not as a by-product of military needs but (to use George Holmes’ apposite phrase) as ‘part of the normal fabric of society’.

Building on McFarlane's work, especially as more of it began to come into print, historians of bastard feudalism, working initially on noble followings and then increasingly on the localities, where its normal operation lay, came to a clear understanding of the system in its mature form. Much of this confirmed or amplified McFarlane's own insights. Just like feudalism, bastard feudalism was a perfectly respectable tie, binding lesser to greater landowners, as feudalism had done.