ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses where power lay in medieval society. The idea of the honor as a centre of power and as an aristocratic community was established for England by Stenton. The word 'honor' has passed into the technical vocabulary of the British historian, although there are synonyms like 'barony', 'feudal barony' or 'fee' which Sidney Painter and Stenton himself used. The purpose of the honor was to accumulate revenue and exert power over lesser men. Carpenter draws attention to some mid-thirteenth-century honors which showed very positive signs of political life: notably the large honor of Tutbury, possessed by the Ferrers earls of Derby and the smaller honor of Eaton Socon, possessed by the Beauchamp family of Bedford. The Meulan-Le Neubourg conventio of the 1140s is a document which in form and purpose closely resembles the indenture, looked upon as the key to social and political relationships amongst the aristocracy of later medieval England.
