Keywords

Warranty clauses represented scribal efforts to capture in writing a host of verbal engagements and physical gestures given at the occasion of a property transfer. Following the first mutation documentaire of the 1040s, charters open a window that had hitherto been closed on these practices, thereby allowing us to reconstruct in some detail what the actual process of making warranty commitments looked and sounded like. Here we shall look at the role played by oaths and speeches when undertaking warranty commitments, and consider the question of who, exactly, warranted property transfers.

Questions of practice and the types of people involved in it will reveal significant continuities in practice that traverse supposed differences between pre- and post-c.1200 warranty. Because warranty has been associated primarily with thirteenth-century developments, especially the Roman law of contract, earlier evidence has been difficult to incorporate into narratives centred on the juristic renaissance. One solution to this interpretative difficulty has been to suggest that eleventh- and twelfth-century warranty clauses reflect only voluntary commitments, whereas thirteenth-century clauses provide evidence of genuine legal obligations.Footnote 1 Features of earlier warranty practices, such as oaths, the pledging of faith (fides), and other ritualised behaviours were thought to indicate the voluntary nature of warranty, where the normative force attached to such commitments rested entirely on a sense of moral duty and social pressure. By the thirteenth century, however, jurists had found in the Justinianic Corpus (along with texts from canon law) the means through which to articulate the principle whereby an obligation—obligatio—could arise by the nature of an agreement itself that had been consented to by both parties, such as a sale. Sometimes described as a shift from ‘formalism’ to ‘consensualism’, the underlying point was that the existence of an obligation did not depend on a ritualised act (in theory, at least) as had been the case earlier.Footnote 2 The distinction between the formal and consensual nature of obligations has remained implicit in much of the brief comment devoted to warranty. The often unstated assumption seems to be that warranty required express formulation, secured through gestures, prior to c.1200 and the absence of such gestures necessarily meant an absence of warranty commitments. Conversely, warranty obligations arose automatically once they were conceptualised in terms of an obligatio that was inherent to the contract or agreement itself. With this in mind, it is time therefore to turn towards questions of practice and to rethink the relationship between pre- and post-c.1200 warranty commitments.

Warranty clauses in charters record the verbal engagements and promises that alienors and/or others on their behalf made when alienating property. The essentially verbal nature of warranty commitments is readily apparent from the earliest surviving clauses, and remains little changed throughout our period. Warrantors were frequently described in the charters as ‘promising’ or ‘swearing’ to warrant their alienations.Footnote 3 Spoken commitments are clearly envisaged when scribes used words such as promittere or jurare to describe how the warrantor gave his or her commitments, and a number of clauses gloss for us what might ordinarily have underlain more generic statements.Footnote 4 Thus, in 1110 Osanna de Lavazé ‘proclaimed … with a clear voice’ that she would warrant her gift to the monks of Saint-Aubin; or, between 1070 and 1082, Aubrey de Laigné ‘promised by lawful statement’ that he would warrant his sale to the monks of Saint-Serge.Footnote 5 Quite how formal such statements were is difficult to know, however. On occasion, a warrantor might make his or her commitments ‘in simple words’ (i.e., without an oath or without giving faith), as Fulk de Matheflon did when he promised to defend his quitclaim to the nuns of Le Ronceray between 1110 and 1115.Footnote 6 Yet on other occasions, undertaking warranty commitments was a solemn affair, involving oaths sworn upon the gospels, an altar, or an abbey’s relics.Footnote 7 When he sold part of his mill to the abbey of Saint-Aubin between 1060 and 1081, Oilerius swore ‘upon the holy relics’ that he would warrant the monks; similarly, in 1096, after selling his fief to the monks of Saint-Vincent du Mans, Guy and his kin warranted the monks by swearing an oath ‘on the text of the holy Gospel’.Footnote 8 Between ‘plain words’ and oaths sworn on holy objects were differences in formality and in the proximity to the sacred; but both ends of the spectrum affirm the association between warranty and speaking.

Whatever their formality, the weight that could be attached to a warrantor’s verbal commitments can be appreciated by the fact that scribes sometimes chose to record them in stylised ‘direct speech’.Footnote 9 In 1111, for example, Aimery warranted his quitclaim to the abbey of Cormery in the following terms: ‘If anyone further, however, should arise and make a challenge against you concerning the aforesaid things, I am prepared to resist whomsoever is challenging by whatever means, in both secular and ecclesiastical judgment. If I am unable to do so, though, then I and my [family] will lose everything that we have to date from our benefice’.Footnote 10 Similarly, when William Gorrum made a gift of rents to the abbey of Noyers in preparation for his departure to Jerusalem in c.1146, he instructed his son in no uncertain terms to warrant his gift: ‘I am making this gift to the monks so that you will defend and guard it for them for your entire life; and if you are unwilling to do this, if in a dispute for some of your land you want to wage a war, then may you be brought down to size, and may you not succeed in your dispute’.Footnote 11 Each example just quoted speaks to something of the varied form that a warrantor’s verbal commitments might take, and cautions against the view that there was a standard oath or set of words spoken when giving warranty promises. Such a conclusion further helps to account for the linguistic and syntactical range that is evident in the surviving clauses. Scribes’ efforts to capture in writing the spoken promises given at the occasion of a property transaction probably reflects therefore something of the diversity in how those promises were made.

When a warrantor gave his or her word, it was meant to be given without deception and in good faith. Warrantors during the second half of the eleventh century sometimes made their promises ‘without wicked intent’ (sine/absque malo ingenio), while statements that promises were made ‘in good faith’ only become common from around 1200, with a couple of earlier exceptions.Footnote 12 The alienee’s interest in the sincerity of a warrantor’s engagements simply made good pragmatic sense. Of particular concern was whether the alienor was withholding any important information that might otherwise jeopardise the alienation. For example, sometime around 1103, after Fromond Bevin had made a gift of land to the abbey of Saint-Serge, which the monks had turned into arable, a miles of Fromond claimed part of that land as the ‘rightful heir’ (rectum heredem); the monks were understandably annoyed by this, and they denounced Fromond as a ‘deceiver’ (frustrator), whereupon Fromond took counsel and offered the monks a hillock in recompense.Footnote 13 In a possible interpretation of this case, one might suggest that Fromond and his miles acted in concert: the lord made a gift of land to which he knew that his follower had a claim so that the monks would undertake the labour to transform it into arable, after which the miles might then surface to make a claim upon his inheritance. Regardless of the specifics, the tale of Fromond ‘the deceiver’ offers a useful vignette about the role of trust in alienations, and why individuals might wish to record that the promises they received and oaths given to them by their alienors had been made in good faith.Footnote 14

If the language of ‘good faith’ was primarily a thirteenth-century development, charters during our entire period described a particular set of actions that warrantors regularly performed when making their verbal commitments: the pledging or giving of faith, that is, of the alienor’s fides.Footnote 15 Pledging or giving faith was done with some frequency. In the ‘Livre blanc’ of Saint-Florent de Saumur, for instance, nearly 23% of recorded warranty clauses ranging from the 1050s to 1170s explicitly mention fides, whilst in the published charters of La Madeleine de Châteaudun from between the 1190s and 1270s, roughly 24% of all warranty clauses refer to one’s faith or fides.Footnote 16 One’s fides was often accompanied by certain physical acts, like in 1233, when Gervaise Crispin gave his faith in the hand of the officialis of Le Mans that he would bring no challenges against a sale he had made to the monks of La Couture and would instead warrant it for them.Footnote 17 Typically, as in the preceding example, the warrantor’s faith would be secured by the clasping of hands (i.e., a handfast), with a wide cast of potential characters holding the warrantor’s hand including abbots, priors, lords, and family members. But other gestures might also be employed, and thus do we find occasional examples of a kiss done ‘in the name of fides’.Footnote 18 There may have been concern, at least amongst some monks, that to accept handfasts from laymen did not constitute real fides, which may account for some of the variation in physical acts used to secure one’s fides. A Saint-Florent charter from 1095 concerning possessions near Saint-Gondon certainly makes the point explicit: Gilo de Sully-sur-Loire gave his fides, ‘not by his hand, where there is no fides, but by his words and spirit [animo] where fides resides’, and ‘kissed the monks in fides and societas’ because, as the monastic scribe glossed, ‘it is not the custom of monks to accept the fides of anyone by the hand’.Footnote 19

The 1095 Saint-Florent charter just quoted speaks to an apparent concern over whether the fides refers to a series of physical gestures or describes instead a state of mind, where fides serves almost as a matter of conscience. Here we have an unusually early and fascinating example of the tension between ‘formalist’ modes of contract formation and their ‘consensualist’ counterparts, a distinction that has been central to discussions of French contract law as mentioned earlier. While there is certainly more to be said about the relationship between warranty on the one hand, and oaths and fides on the other, for our present purposes the following two points merit emphasis. First, despite the diplomatic transformation in warranty clauses in the decades following c.1200, the practices associated with the actual giving of warranty show a remarkable and important continuity. Some thirteenth-century alienors still seem to have sworn oaths upon the gospels when warranting their transactions; post-1200 clauses continued to be introduced by a verb of spoken engagement, such as so-and-so ‘promised that…’; and I have already noted that pledging one’s fides continued into the thirteenth century.Footnote 20 The only significant change in the recording of such acts in thirteenth-century charters is that scribes increasingly made reference to a warrantor’s ‘bodily pledge’ (corporalis fides) or ‘bodily oath’ (corporale juramentum).Footnote 21 The phrase has caused some confusion, but need be little more than an extension of the fides in manu of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At any rate, this leads to the second point I want to emphasise: the continued relevance of oaths and physical acts that accompanied the giving of warranty suggests that the distinction between ‘formalist’ and ‘consensualist’ modes of contract formation may not be that relevant, at least for western France. Regardless of the theories about when an obligation was created, and if an individual’s word alone sufficed to impose a binding obligation, the juristic distinction may have carried little import in situations of actual practice, whether transactional or litigious. Warranty obligations from the eleventh through to the thirteenth century had ultimately to be proven in court if the warrantor denied owing them; and here the probative value of oaths, fides, handfasts, and even the occasional kiss would have come into their own.Footnote 22 This is not to say that in the absence of such acts there was no obligation to warrant: rather, the practical concerns of establishing warranty obligations in court, and of registering publicity more broadly, probably minimises any sharp contrast between ‘formalist’ and ‘consensualist’ when thinking about the establishment of warranty obligations.

Finally, we should address the subject of payments in return for the promise of future warranty, which can be dealt with briefly. Sometimes, charters explicitly associated the payment of monetary counter-gifts with the securing of warranty commitments, though in the clearest surviving examples, such payments often went to the kin or the lord of the principal alienor. The monks of Marmoutier, for instance, during the abbacy of Albert (r. 1032/7–1064), offered a quitclaimant, along with his mother and sister, 20s. ‘through such an agreement that’ they would henceforth and legally serve the abbey as their ‘most faithful defenders against everyone if there should be, by chance, any further challengers of their properties’.Footnote 23 These same monks, around 1060, gave 12d. to a vendor’s sister-in-law and his own sons (apparently to be shared between them) ‘on the agreement that’ they would warrant the principal’s sale of a mill should a challenge surface after his death; importantly in this case, the 12d. payment in return for a promise of future warranty was differentiated from the 3li. sale price given to the vendor.Footnote 24 Similarly, in 1096, an individual who restored a cemetery to Saint-Florent de Saumur, following his excommunication, requested that the monks give something to him ‘because he was poor’; the monks took the counsel of Bishop Sylvester de Rennes, and gave him 30s. ‘on the agreement that’ he serve as the monks’ aider and defender ‘wherever right will be judged’.Footnote 25 Statements that a payment was provided ‘on the agreement’ that an individual warrant are also found in the context of donations, like when the lord (senior) of a donor consented to his man’s (homo) gift of a tithe to Saint-Serge d’Angers, and accepted 30s. ‘in charity’ from the monks so that he would ‘protect them from any challenge’.Footnote 26 And in one charter from 1239, William Manoury promised to warrant a sale made to the canons of La Madeleine de Châteaudun by the widow of Geoffrey de Vallières, but only until (donec) he returns the 60s. payment he had accepted as the lord of the fief.Footnote 27 It is unclear why William Manoury’s promise of warranty to the canons of La Madeleine was conditional (insofar as it only lasted for as long as he was the canons’ debtor for the 60s. payment that he had received).Footnote 28 If nothing else, the example shows that warranty commitments were in some cases time-limited—a point to which we shall return later.Footnote 29

Each of the above examples has the appearance of quid pro quo payments made by an alienee to a third party in return for an explicit engagement by that third party to undertake warranty commitments. How commonly third-party warrantors expected payments for their promises is difficult to know, not least because we rely here on explicit formulations recorded within charters that a pecuniary counter-gift was given ‘so that’ or ‘on the agreement that’. But such examples nonetheless point towards the wider association between payments and promises of warranty. Occasionally, these payments might serve as indemnifications for any rights relinquished by the warrantor in his or her promise of future warranty. Promises in these contexts may be closely associated with the consents and authorisations that others might give to a principal’s property transfers. Yet pecuniary counter-gifts also played an important commemorative role. The exchange of monies provided an action for witnesses to remember; if called upon in a trial to testify as to whether or not so-and-so had in fact warranted such-and-such an individual, being able to recall that the person vouched to warranty had accepted a pecuniary counter-gift no doubt strengthened the alienee’s case. Whether we tease out the conclusion from this that such counter-gifts were necessary for the creation of warranty obligations in the first place is another question altogether, and one for which the evidence from our period will not give a clear answer. A cautious response would simply emphasise the important evidentiary role that counter-gifts could play, whilst acknowledging the potentially close relationship between warranty and forms of consent that individuals might give to strengthen property transactions.

While the degree to which warranty obligations were heritable, and when they became so, has been the subject of historiographical debate, from our evidence warranty seems often to have been envisioned as a trans-generational affair.Footnote 30 For a start, from the earliest surviving clauses, warrantors ordinarily expected their heirs to uphold their warranty following their deaths. As early as the mid-eleventh century, Hubert, the nephew of Isembard du Lude, explicitly included his heirs (atque heredes sui post eum) in his promise to the monks of Saint-Aubin d’Angers, and clauses that amounted to so-and-so ‘and his/her heirs’ undertook warranty commitments recur throughout our period.Footnote 31 The formulas to express the hypothetical heir’s obligations sometimes refer to a single heir, or, like in Hubert’s promise, refer to multiple heirs.Footnote 32 On occasion, the intergenerational transmission of warranty obligations might be framed in a more open-ended manner, like when Urso de Fréteval made a gift to Marmoutier and warranted, both with respect to himself, his sons, or ‘whoever will be lord of Fréteval’ in the future.Footnote 33 And by the time warranty clauses included the obligatio bonorum in the thirteenth century, it was common that this obligatio bound both the principal alienor(s) and the heirs. It would of course be naïve to assume that the inclusion of an alienor’s heirs within the charter diplomatic of warranty clauses necessarily meant that if called upon to do so in the future, those heirs would, without fuss, warrant their predecessor’s alienations. Yet the charter diplomatic remains an important measure of general expectations, and from it we see that alienors and alienees alike often expected the alienors’ heirs to warrant after them, and held this expectation from an early date.

Numerous charters, moreover, allow us to contextualise more fully the participation of heirs in the promises to warrant the alienations of their kin, as well as in actual warranty practices. Alienors did not always undertake his or her warranty commitments alone: we find an alienor’s family members warranting either alongside them, or sometimes in their stead altogether. Husbands and wives, perhaps unsurprisingly, often warranted together—though equally, we have evidence for joint alienations made by a husband and wife in which only the husband warranted.Footnote 34 Nevertheless, a wife’s warranty, sometimes given specifically in the form of a promise of non-contravention, might have been particularly desirable if the alienated property came from her dowry, dower, or inheritance.Footnote 35 But the composition of warranting kin-groups could vary widely, moving well past husbands and wives. A mother might warrant together with her sons; fathers and sons warranted together; brothers might jointly warrant; or an alienor’s daughter occasionally joined in on the warranty.Footnote 36 And in some instances, warranty could be given by a complex alienatory group composed both of blood and of affinal kin. In 1251, for example, Alaïs, a widow, made a sale to the abbey of La Couture, along with her three sons, her son-in-law, her daughter, and two of her daughters-in-law: all of these proceeded to warrant the sale, with the exception of the two daughters-in-law.Footnote 37 That each separate alienor would be expected also to warrant has a certain logic to it—even if the exclusion of the daughters-in-law in Alaïs’ gift suggests that the relationship between alienation and warranting was not quite so direct. Yet there are also transactions in which an individual or pair of alienors saw their transaction warranted by a larger group of people. Two sisters, between 1149 and 1170 for instance, made a gift to La Roë, which was then warranted not by them, but by seven other individuals, including the sisters’ father and mother.Footnote 38

Like so much involved in the alienation of property, seldom was the promise to warrant a solitary affair, and the principal alienor’s kin were often described as also giving their promises and/or pledging their faith that they would ‘warrant’, ‘acquit’, ‘defend’, etc. the principal’s transaction.Footnote 39 Though the composition of warranting kin-groups varied, the common theme uniting such examples is that the individual and the family frequently warranted together, which suggests that explaining the development of warranty by appealing to an argument of greater individual alienatory powers at the expense of kin perhaps needs to be nuanced. This is not to posit that property relations were characterised by some irenic family harmony: the inclusion of kin in the actual giving of warranty promises need not preclude future conflict if some of those individuals later sought to extricate themselves from earlier promises. Nor does it dismiss the tensions that underpinned the wishes of some to make inter vivos alienations on the one hand, with others’ desire to preserve the family patrimony on the other. Rather, the point is simply this: it is less clear how immediately relevant such tensions are specifically in the context of understanding warranty obligations and their development, at least based on the evidence which survives from western France. The general orientation of warranty ideas in this region and during this period may have owed less to the changing structures of family property than has sometimes been assumed.

In addition to kin, an alienor’s lord might also warrant the alienee. Lords would sometimes warrant when their follower was not long for this world. Thus, between 1082 and 1093, for instance, Hamelin de Méral lay on his deathbed and summoned his lords Guy [II] de Laval and Renaud de Craon to his side; he then commended his daughters and his honor to them, and asked them ‘with groans and tears’ to confirm his gift to Saint-Serge d’Angers, and for each of them to warrant.Footnote 40 Similarly, Geoffrey de Saumur was gravely wounded during a campaign against the count of Angoulême with Henry the Young King (†1183), and he therefore summoned Robert de Blou as the ‘chief and major lord of his fief’ to his side and asked him to be the custos and defensor of his eleemosynary gift to Fontevraud.Footnote 41 But a lord’s warranty was not limited to situations of the alienor’s imminent demise. When Berard Buxum gave the canons of La Roë a chapel so that he could become a canon there (at a later date), he also had his lord, William de la Guerche, warrant his gift; at some point in the 1070s, Cadilon, the vicomte of Aulnay, warranted a gift to Saint-Florent de Saumur made by his follower Haimo; in 1122, Hugh, the vicomte of Châteaudun, promised his future warranty (garandabo) ‘according to right’ for land given to Fontevraud and which came from his fief; and in the second half of the twelfth century, an alienor obtained a promise to warrant his transactions by his ‘liege lords … who ought to be [his] warrantors and defenders’.Footnote 42

The evidence for lords explicitly warranting the transactions of their men and/or tenants becomes especially marked from 1200 onwards. Seigneurial warranties might appear in several different diplomatic contexts, ranging from a charter issued by that lord authorising or confirming the alienation of his or her tenant and/or man and which included an additional explicit promise of warranty, to charters issued by an officialis in which the principal recognised his or her transaction before the officialis and then the lord, ‘at the petition’ (ad petitionem) of the principal, agreed to undertake the warranty commitments for that transaction. Whatever their diplomatic form, seigneurial warranties are very prevalent in the thirteenth century. From the published charters of Marmoutier, for example, roughly 41% of the warranty clauses recorded between 1200 and c.1270 were promises made by the alienor’s lord.Footnote 43 While other archives do not yield quite so high a figure as Marmoutier, we nevertheless find a similar prominence of seigneurial warranties elsewhere. The thirteenth-century charters of La Madeleine de Châteaudun, for instance, produce a figure of approximately 23% for seigneurial warranties.Footnote 44 These seigneurial warranties were often accompanied by specific formulas: in eleventh- and twelfth-century charters, the lord might be identified as the figure ‘from whose fief’ (de cujus feodo or variant) the alienated property came; in thirteenth-century charters, lords stated that they were bound (teneor, e.g.) to warrant, should the need ever arise in the future for them to do so, in their capacity ‘as the lord of the fief’ or ‘feudal lord’ (tamquam or ut dominus feodi; or dominus feodalis).Footnote 45

Whether the warranties given by a lord differed from those given by an alienor is difficult to know. For our present purposes, however, the following observations are merited. First, obtaining the warranty of a powerful lord presented obvious advantages for both the alienor and the alienee.Footnote 46 As we shall later see, warrantors might be expected to use force or wage war (a guerra) on behalf of the warrantee, and alienors might well have turned to their lords as warrantors, not least because their lords were politically important figures able to command greater military and economic resources than they could themselves. The support and warranting of a follower’s transactions, especially those made to churches in the hopes of obtaining favour at the heavenly court, provided the lord with an opportunity to display ‘good lordship’ and reward his follower’s past services. Second, and to be discussed in greater detail later, the warranty given by a lord may often have been connected to the customs and services owed for the property given. Seigneurial warranties were in this respect tantamount to the waiver of services in some situations, or amounted to the confirmation of predetermined or long-established arrangements for services and customs. And finally, the practice of seigneurial warranties may also be understood in light of the growth of juridictions gracieuses, representing here something of a corollary to the officialités discussed above. This suggestion makes particular sense of the thirteenth-century seigneurial warranties and the use of phrases such as ut dominus feodi. But earlier promises in which a lord’s warranty included a commitment to provide justice in his own court, or the case material that demonstrates such promises in action, have a marked jurisdictional edge to them. While it would be anachronistic to describe Guy [II] de Laval’s warranty mentioned above as the operation of a juridiction gracieuse—that is, as the work of an established public figure by whose authority people had their transactions ratified—it is equally important to recognise that his promise to Hamelin de Méral has obvious resonances with the seigneurial warranties of the thirteenth century.

A final observation needs to be made on the subject of the people most likely to warrant a transaction. A promise of warranty was sometimes accompanied by the alienor naming and giving personal sureties.Footnote 47 These figures were often identified as fidejussores, though sometimes scribes would describe them as plegii or as obsides.Footnote 48 In some instances, the alienor would promise his/her defence or acquittal of a transaction, and then provide sureties as a supplement to his or her original promise. Yet, in other examples, the alienor does not seem to have undertaken warranty obligations personally, but rather, to have identified a number of sureties who would acquit, defend, or warrant the transaction on the alienor’s behalf. It can therefore be very difficult to draw clear boundaries between warranty and personal suretyship. From an analytical perspective, personal sureties might typically be expected to apply pressure on the principal alienor himself/herself to ensure that the alienor in fact discharges whatever obligations he/she had undertaken.Footnote 49 But when an individual sometimes came forward to stand as a ‘surety of tranquillity’, it is unclear in what ways, if any, such a promise would have differed from that of warranty, especially if no separate warranty clause was recorded for the transaction.Footnote 50 The other main role of sureties seems to have been to share in the financial liabilities potentially arising from warranty obligations, especially the provision for compensation.Footnote 51 We thus find individuals who promised to warrant a sale, for instance, and then named sureties who would help them repay the payment price. When Acharias de Marmande confirmed Noyers’ acquisition of a mill, for example, he promised to pay the monks 1000s. if he failed to repel any challenge that might be brought upon it: Acharias then gave eleven named sureties, nine of whom were liable for 100s. each, and the further two liable for 50s. each.Footnote 52 In this respect, sureties became participants in any liabilities for debt connected with the act of warranting that the alienor might incur. Quite how (or even if) the relationship between warranty and suretyship evolved over our period, however, remains a question that requires further research.Footnote 53

We have seen, therefore, that in its practice and in the types of people who gave it, warranty displays marked continuities from the 1040s into the 1270s. Throughout our period, warranty continued to reflect its oral roots, with clauses often introduced by verbs denoting some form of verbal engagement. Pledging or giving one’s fides remained common, and commitments were sometimes secured with oaths. Changes in practice, at least as we see them in the charters, involve the places where and before whom such verbal commitments were made. The confessio in jure sworn in the presence of the officialités may imply a departure from earlier practices of swearing oaths at the site of the transferred property or before a large body of witnesses; but even so, it is important to underline the significant changes in what thirteenth-century charters do and more importantly do not show us. As ever, it is difficult to know how far a charter issued by an officialis comprised the entirety of actions accompanying a transfer of property: common sense alone, however, would suggest that much was left out of these documents. This means that we should exercise caution in using our heterogeneous charter evidence to argue for a substantive change in the decades around 1200 whereby warranty ceased to be only a voluntary commitment and instead became a legal obligation. The distinction, based on the evidence we have, makes little sense.

We have also seen that warranty often remained a collective or collaborative affair. Individuals regularly sought the assistance of additional parties, either kin and/or lords, to supplement their own commitments, or to undertake warranty commitments on their behalf. The frequency of seigneurial warranties in the thirteenth century stands out as a particularly arresting phenomenon, and specific diplomatic formulas developed around the practice of seigneurial warranty. Further, as we have seen, warrantors continued to supply personal sureties (fidejussores) throughout our period, further reinforcing the collective dimensions of warranty commitments. Crucially, an alienor’s heirs, it seems, were expected to warrant their predecessors’ transactions from an early date, at least based on the diplomatic. Whether they actually did is another matter altogether, one we shall address in the following chapter. Regardless, the diplomatic of warranty clauses does not support the argument that warranty commitments only became binding on heirs from the thirteenth century. The continuities in warranty practices thus described therefore invite us to question the extent to which the growth of warranty should be tied to a narrative centred on the rise of individual alienatory powers. We may therefore need to look elsewhere when explaining the development of warranty.