After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.

Turning to more ceremonial, less habitual actions in which a young heir’s active participation could be vital, this chapter stresses the political community’s wider investment in children as political actors. Royal children were both enablers and facilitators of diplomacy rather than merely pawns in the diplomatic and political games of adults. Children’s participation could be decisive to acts of association and diplomacy, and thus vital to readying the realm for their succession and rule. The chapter first examines attempts to secure magnate loyalty to children through oaths of fidelity and performances of homage. The earliest stages of the male life cycle had unique attributes in regard to demonstrations of loyalty, and there were substantial benefits in securing oaths to children when they were so young. The chapter then turns to focus on children’s incorporation within performances of cross-kingdom diplomacy, an important aspect of children’s education. The final section foregrounds the chanson de geste Le couronnement de Louis to examine the importance of children’s dynamic contribution at coronation and the wider political community’s investment in boy kings.

This chapter assesses the impact of co-rule on the duchess’ political networks, using this external perspective which rarely features in studies of shared power to concretize the contemporary perceptions of joint authority. The stability, composition, and affiliations of two well-documented groups within the administration – the ducal council and the regional officials across Brittany – differentiate Jeanne and Charles’ scope of administration according to both chronological and geographic circumstances. Despite these differences, Jeanne actively worked together with Charles to reward their followers’ loyalty and maintain these political relationships; correspondingly, service to the duchess and duke was largely interchangeable, even for formal relationships such as homage. This relatively level hierarchy further links spousal co-rule to the other power-sharing structures in the medieval aristocracy, which promoted the idea (if not always the practice) of equality between lords.

Holding land ‘in fee’ was an idea central to the Normans. A fee was land which was part of a relationship to which tenure was central. Land in ‘fee simple’ was ‘land held hereditarily, by service’. This chapter looks at how these feudal ideas played out in the English countryside. After the Conquest a link was being established between tenure and doing ‘homage’ for land. and there is an ongoing debate over whether this was expressed in the Oath of Salisbury, and whether there was a connection between the Oath and the Domesday survey. The second part of the chapter is an enquiry into the means by which peasant tenures too became ‘feudalised’. Courts, and what a court consisted of, were changing. Before the Conquest the hundred and the shire, were the proper forum in which to settle disputes but for Norman lords taking over English lands jurisdiction over one’s ‘men’ was a valuable part of what lordship entailed. The procedures and vocabulary of hallmoots and manor courts show that, while incorporating the ideas inherent in feudal tenure, they retained something of the early notions of dispute settlement.