ABSTRACT
One particular side of William Marshal's career deserves a good deal of attention: his relations with the men who looked to him as lord. The subject is an important one: it touches on the very nature of aristocratic and royal power in the Marshal's lifetime. A bigger consideration than that, however, is that the History gives us a unique source by which we can examine the relations between the Marshal and his knights. William Marshal lived at a time when structures of aristocratic power were beginning to change. The 1180s and 1190s, the very time when the Marshal was promoted into the baronage, was a time when the lesser knights of England were becoming more mobile in their allegiance. The exercise of recreating the Marshal affinity is no small step towards finding a new view of medieval England. The Marshal had already had some experience of keeping his own following before 1189.
