Talk:Honour (fief)

Should this new article exist?

I don't think this article should exist. This article was created after a discussion started about other new articles which like this one seem to recreate more or less the same topic as English feudal barony. See Honour (feudal barony) (now already merged), and Honour (England) (in discussion), Like this article, those articles are about tenancies in chief, and based upon early English feudalism after 1066. Apart from anything else this forking is creating chaos by redirecting search terms for well known feudal baronies to these new article. Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:02, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

@JASpencer: I see you deleted/reverted the tag I added to this new article calling for discussion (this discussion).

• Your edsum: This does not have a separate discussion section and is any way quite different from Honours in a purely English context. Are we seriously suggesting that Hungarian and Portuguese landholding concepts should be put into English Feudal Baronies?
• Here is my edsum for reverting your reversion: Explain on the talk page, and don't just revert. This article says it is about FIEFS held "in chief" and then in the sections it explains that the Portuguese and Hungarian honours were not fiefs, and you even suddenly switch to the word baron

The article as it stands is a mixture of apples and pears. There is already an article for English feudal baronies. If there is to be an article about Honours which are not English feudal baronies, then why would it have the name that it has, and the opening sentence that it has? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:16, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

Our article honra says the Portuguese honours " the honras were a form of "spontaneously generated" Lordship" and "were not gifts bestowed by the power of the King but rather impositions on the crown, made by powerful Feudal Lords".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:18, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

@Srnec:--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:20, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

As an example of the confusing redirects problem all the changes being made as various new articles are being made and then not linked to our pre-existing articles, why is the new article you made about the Honour of Haughley being redirected to this new article Honour (fief), and not linked at all to English feudal barony, where it is listed in the standard list?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:03, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

And honors are correctly described as public (not feudal) in the 'France' section when it discusses the Carolingian Empire (not France). All these changes appear to be hasty and poorly done. Lots of text getting recycled but very little value added through new material referenced to high quality sources. Srnec (talk) 02:46, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes this burst of effort involves a lot of copy-pasting from our own articles about feudal baronies in England, even though those articles need to be improved, AND these new ones are supposedly about something else. The sources being added are mainly casual-looking websites, and these are clearly only being added later, rather than guiding the direction of editing. It is almost as if there is a major push to dismiss or ignore the work of academics like Sanders and others even though these are also mentioned in better websites (Susan Reynolds, Judith A Green). The result is distorted and strange. For example, if the English section of this is an article about something different than feudal baronies why are we saying that "In Norman England honours were granted to a tenant-in-chief of the crown centred on a caput baroniae"? Surely an honour centred on a caput baroniae (the head of a barony) is the same as a barony (which was a specific type of honour)? But then I see that our article Caput baroniae completely fails to make this distinction between baronial holdings and others. I am guessing the edits here are actually based on reading that Wikipedia article, which also seems to be a source for the citation of Coredon?

Coming back to a central concern, concerning the word "honour" in the case of English history, these edits demand a properly sourced and clear explanation about how the term honour meant something different from other terms we already articles for such as "fief" or "barony". We are now citing a terminology page on the website of the Hull project which is not an ideal source, but more to the point it ALSO seems to say something quite different than the information we supposedly got from it. This terminology page, which is focussed on the specific the situation in 1086, says that honour was NOT a technical term with an exact meaning: It is, however, a conventional, not a technical term and is sometimes used interchangeably with fief. (It generally referred to tenancies in chief, and mainly bigger ones, but in that case "tenancy in chief" is the more exact term/definition.) The idea that honour was a technical term seems to be permeating all the edits which are happening here, but that seems to be the misunderstanding of a single Wikipedia editor and not coming from any reliable source? One of the best sources we are citing goes further and does not even mention anything about an honour being large or held in chief. It is just A group of manors or fiefs held by one lord; a lordship. Why don't we say that? And why do we keep mentioning castles as if they are part of the definition? The editing ideas driving all these changes do not seem to be coming not from reliable sources! Actually Coredon has a real entry for "caput honoris". Please look at that (page 58) It starts: The main seat, or head, of the *honour of a lord holding several manors, on which there would have been many fiefs. It was the administrative centre of a widely distributed honour.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:03, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I should add a remark about Coredon. page 272 under Tenant-in-chief [tenant-in-capite] he writes: The term *honour is used of all the fiefs held by a tenant, even if in more than one *county. Unfortunately this is a bit unclear. Did he mean to just write "tenant" or "tenant in chief"?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:43, 13 August 2025 (UTC)–

@JASpencer and Srnec: having looked at it a bit more I suggest that maybe the next step for THIS article is a name change. Apparently this article and the redirect Honour (land) were made with the idea that honours always involve land. If you look at the information for Hungary I think this might not be correct? I am honestly not sure now, so please comment. In any case I have removed the merge proposal for now because I THINK we can take this as the article which will be about the broad European concept? If not please say so!--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:22, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

What would you name this article then? Srnec (talk) 01:35, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

@Srnec: Well, I am not sure. We could keep fief/land if it is true that this is what united all the honours. My concern is that honours were perhaps not always land-connected, but I am not certain. Were there not other types of income stream "possessions" which could be called honours?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:41, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I am most familiar with the word honores in a Carolingian context, where it does not refer to land but to public office. When I created a redirect to fiefdom back in 2007, it was a kludge. Srnec (talk) 19:51, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

This is also my "understanding". It seems parallel to what happened to some other terms, like comitatus, which I know better. I know enough to know that these are tricky terms, because there was (I think) a long period of fuzziness in meaning. We could consider splitting into office and fief articles I suppose, which is similar to where I think our county/comitatus articles will eventually need to go. Not sure.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:17, 15 August 2025 (UTC)