ABSTRACT
An aristocrat was a monarch in miniature. Like the king, it was his will that governed his establishment, his initiative that mattered, and his decision how his resources were exploited and exercised. He had physical, emotional and other needs, the means to satisfy them, enough leisure and money to indulge his whims, sufficient staff and dependants to fulfil his commands. He too possessed authority – the power to command – and a mass of varied patronage with which to purchase service.1 Aristocrats had kinsmen and favourites too: it was to Sir William and Sir Robert Plumpton’s advantage that successive earls of Northumberland regarded them as cousins, however distant, and addressed them as such, though the former was obviously disadvantaged in disputes with the earl’s brother [in-law] William Gascoigne. An aristocrat was also constrained by standards and conventions and beset with duties, obligations and responsibilities which he could, in the last resort, refuse. No more than the king could he know about or indeed be interested in everything. His court was his household. He had his own council and councillors. He recruited, retained and rewarded the manpower he required through a series of mechanisms to which modern historians have given the name bastard feudalism.
