ABSTRACT
One particular side of William Marshal’s career deserves a good dealof 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. Historians have only recently begun to look at the general nature of the power wielded by the aristocracy in the period 1150-1250. It is now clear that the way he exerted lordship in his own day was something new. William Marshal lived at a time when structures of aristocratic power were beginning to change.
