BAD LORDS.

BAD LORDS. I learned —I don’t know quite how—to think of knights as exemplars of chivalry. Instead, knights in the twelfth century should be thought of as gangsters, according to Alexander Murray’s review in the April 30 London Review of Books of Thomas Bisson’s THE CRISIS OF THE 12TH CENTURY. Bisson takes for granted that the “‘godfather’ system of social cohesion was the norm” and asks why this stopped being the case. Murray says that “what is new about Bisson’s thesis is its emphasis on the badness of lords.” Further, castles were often instruments of bad lords: they were “designed not to shelter but to subject local populations.” Henry II made his first act in England the destruction of castles he could not control because they were “built to plunder the poor.”