English Nobility

England was a good example of how the nobility could be bent to the will of a central government. The English kings had never allowed their nobles to become strong. This was largely because the conquest of England by duke William of Normandy in 1066 was relatively recent. When William took the throne in 1066, he found an existing nobility similar to that found in Germany. Although England had been as Romanized as France, the German influence was stronger. The language, English, was not derived from Latin as French, Spanish and Italian were, but was Germanic in its origins. The feudal customs were less influenced by Roman practices than in France. William demolished the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) English nobility and installed his own. The families he established as the new English nobility were selected from among those who had joined him in his conquest. These were his creatures and he never let them forget it. The English nobility was also fewer in number, as a proportion of the population, than on the continent. The "kings peace" that William, and his successors, enforced led to a gradual disarmament of the English nobility. When England entered the Hundred Years War in 1337, there were only about a thousand knights in all of England. France had about ten times as many knights, but their's lacked the discipline and experience of their English counterparts.

Feudal custom counted each knight as the leader of a small military unit, which might be three to a dozen armed men led by the knight. Higher ranking nobles would be required to bring more troops with them, plus being in command of many knights and the followers of those knights. Thus the French king, with his larger number of nobles and knights, could call them to feudal service and end up with some five thousand knights and nearly twenty thousand other troops. These, however, proved unable to deal with the smaller number of English professional soldiers and even smaller number of knights.

By the 14th century, the senior nobility of England comprised only some 70 families, which made it easier for the king to control his nobles. The French king had several hundred similar families to worry about, and generally exercised much less control over them. The post-1066 English nobility was always kept on a short leash and, as a result, never became as troublesome as the more ancient noble families on the Continent. The French kings were also striving to rein in their nobles, with much less success.