More or less everywhere the titled nobility broke away, or stood apart from the mass of nobles: its members held high offices and were sometimes termed great lords or magnates. They numbered a few dozen families out of a few hundred or a few thousand ordinary nobles, perhaps between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of all nobles. Contemporary documents carefully listed the duchies and counties of the French kingdom, as well as their feudal status, but it must be said that the same individual might hold several of these great fiefs simultaneously and that ‘sires’, occasionally barons or viscounts, could themselves claim to belong to the high nobility (French examples include the families of La Tremoille, Chabannes, Estouteville and Rohan). In Castile, in 1474, there were forty-nine families termed titulos or grandes (dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts); they formed a unified body, were immensely wealthy, reasonably cultured, and exerted great influence on society, although far from posing a serious threat to the monarchy’s political supremacy, which was constantly being strengthened. In fifteenth-century Scotland, from within the emerging nobility, and in opposition to the lairds, came the peers, dukes, earls and lords, who enjoyed the privilege of being individually summoned by the king to parliament. They numbered about sixty individuals (hence sixty families), as many as in England whose total population was some five or six times greater. In Hungary, the barons, who in 1430—40 held 40 per cent of the land, were about sixty in number and formed a class apart. In Portugal, where the first ducal title dates from 1415, the first marquisate from 1451, and the first barony from 1475 (all of them royal creations), the titled nobility numbered about thirty in the second half of the fifteenth century. In Poland, the powerful communitas nobilium (the celebrated slazchta) succeeded during the course of the century in reducing the power of urban societies politically and even economically, in winning control of the powers of the state, and in promulgating itself as the sole political group in Poland. Not only that. It also sought to prevent the institution of hereditary titles and the creation of a separate and exclusive aristocratic upper class. Poland, to use the accepted terminology, thus began to develop a ‘republic’ or a ‘noble democracy’.
Poland, in point of fact, was an exceptional case. Generally speaking, the highest nobility had its clients, its loyal servants (the term used in Hungary was familiaritates) very many of whom were themselves nobles, or, in the case of England, gentlemen. In fact, in England bonds of a contractual nature (indentures) were formed between magnates and their retainers, the latter benefiting from the patronage of the former, whose livery they wore and from whom they received fees or annuities; they were also liable to interfere violently with the free functioning of justice. Hence the expression ‘bastard feudalism’, created by modern historians to describe this new type of bond between one man and another, which replaced the classic feudalism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such phenomena or tendencies, transcending institutional differences, were also to be found on the continent. Spanish grandees surrounded themselves with man-servants or criados, among them many bastards of noblemen. In France, the king, as well as princes and great lords, asked for and obtained without difficulty undemeaning service from middle-ranking or minor nobles (men, women, young people) who staffed their households as chamberlains, grooms and stewards, followed them in war and peace, and helped manage their estates. For a great many nobles, entry into the circle of a powerful individual was a step as natural as it was profitable.
Such clients could, in many cases, become ‘bands’, ‘factions’ and alliances that were active on the political scene. These developments appeared in many states and societies, if sometimes only intermittently. An example of aristocratic faction is provided by Olivier de la Marche who reports the occasion which occurred when, shortly before the war of the Public Weal broke out in 1465, those wishing to support Charles of France, Louis XI’s brother, in alliance against the king, sent word of their commitment to a meeting allegedly held at Notre Dame, Paris. ‘And those who had sent seals in secret wore a silk favour in their belts, by which they would recognise one another; and thus the alliance was made, the king knowing nothing about it, although there were more than 500 (princes, knights, squires and others) who were all staunch to this alliance.’ In fact one of the foundation stones of the league of the Public Weal was precisely the discontent of a number of the kingdom’s nobles who, under the protection of a few princes, wanted to resist the king’s assaults upon their rights and privileges. Yet the sum total of these groups (whose cohesiveness is not always evident) is much smaller than the number of nobility as a whole (or, in the case of England, the number of knights, squires and gentlemen). It is clear that many mere gentlemen did not have a patron, and so were forced to rely upon their own resources, in consequence leading circumscribed and limited lives.
In every respect it would be an oversimplification to believe that political conflict hinged solely on the struggle between a king (or a prince) and his magnates seeking to preserve their ‘feudal’ privileges in defiance of a modern state in the making, and discovering their military arm in a lower nobility, itself wedded to the old order. Too often it is forgotten that kings (and princes) had their own noble clients who, because their means were usually more substantial and in the long term their chances of success consequently greater, were more numerous and firmer of purpose. It also happened that lesser nobles opposed those of higher rank by turning for support to the king. In Hungary, at the end of the century, Matyas Corvinus made use of the lower nobility against the barons in order to destroy the system of familiaritates, to create a wholly royal army and, of course, to fight the Turks.
Over and above the vertical socio-political structures which have just been examined, others appeared which were essentially horizontal. As examples of this tendency we may note for instance, the anti-urban (or anti-prince) chivalric leagues (‘Horner’, ‘Falkner’, ‘St Georgsbund’, ‘Elephantenbund’) native to Germany at the end of the Middle Ages, or, again, in the years about 1475, the nobles of Lorraine who, in order to cement their defensive alliance against the Burgundians, agreed to place their armorial shields in the choir of the collegiate church of St George at Nancy.