The lordship was an institution of the Middle Ages.
Lordship is the name given to the domain or power of a lord . The concept also refers to the territory that belongs to this person and the status or dignity that he enjoys.
The lordship can be understood as a medieval institution that shares characteristics with the fief . It was common in Spain , where it arose in the northern region and then expanded to the rest of the kingdom .
Rise of a lordship
The monarchs were the ones who decided to donate vassals and lands to the clergy or nobles who had provided important services to the Crown . In this way each lordship arose, whose rewards were hereditary .
When the nobles began to lose political power, the manor became their economic support until the 19th century , when the institution was abolished by the Constitution sanctioned in 1812. The peasants in the service of their lord became, in many cases, small landowners. Others became day laborers.
The emergence of a lordship occurred when the monarch donated lands and vassals to a noble or a cleric.
Vassals or slaves
The condition of the peasant under the manorial regime, however, could vary according to the scope of the institution , which depended on the region and the period. In certain contexts, the land worker was a vassal who provided service to the lord, while in others he was a serf or slave who lacked individual freedom.
An example of this is the Lordship of Moguer , which was granted to Alonso Jofre Tenorio in 1333. This lordship encompassed territories of the town of Moguer , in what was the Kingdom of Seville . Carlos María Fitz-James Stuart y Palafox-Portacarrero was the 27th and last Lord of Moguer .
Types of lordship
According to historians, we can distinguish between two types of lordship: the territorial one , also known as the solariego , which effectively resembles the fief, as mentioned in previous paragraphs; the jurisdictional one , in which the lord mainly enjoys the power to collect the manorial rights of a judicial and political nature.
Although differentiating between territorial and jurisdictional lordship can lead to confusion, it is a classification that can be seen in most historical documents related to this topic. Of course, the difficulty in understanding jurisdictions and rights is not something unusual in these pages of history: the limits of titles such as the lord of the gallows and knife (who could decide to end the lives of his vassals), or the scope of the right of pernada (which allowed feudal lords to have sexual relations with the maiden of their choice) are not very evident.
Taking as a reference the research work of Fernando García de Cortázar, a Spanish historian born in Bilbao in 1942, we can understand that territorial lordship defines the power that a lord enjoyed over the lands and men who were under his eminent domain, and that jurisdictional lordship refers to a legal domain that affected people who depended on other lords.
The territorial lord's relationship with the land was closer than that of the jurisdictional lord, and the extraction of the surplus was usually carried out by means of work services or payments in money or kind. Although the difference may seem subtle, the jurisdictional lord was not linked to the land in the same way, since the serf had the useful domain .
It could be said that, in summary, the lordship pursued a fundamental objective: to collect rent from the land. There do not seem to have been any limits to achieving this, since history speaks of an endless number of seigniorial rights through which the lord justified the taxation of all signs of production by the peasants, without leaving aside fines and penalties.