Attainder was usually (AFAIK) a result of offending the king, usually something serious like treason or conspiracy to commit treason. IIRC many of the noble families of Scotland that participated in the Highland uprisings lost their lands and titles. But apparently most were restored within a generation… It was not appropriate to turn those of noble families into peasant class.
Similarly, history (and fiction) is full of those who have fallen from grace being hangers-on in another noble’s house, much like poorer relatives of the lord. Another reason why lords had money problems, they were to some extent supporting an increasingly extended circle of family and friends. No doubt, though, the lords of those days felt it was important to help their fellows - a one-time member of the upper circle suddenly becoming a homeless beggar was probably too much to swallow. After all, nobles were different from the great unwashed masses and so deserved to be helped.
(But it’s not unthinkable that over a few generations a hanger-on’s offspring would descend to minor then no noble station, unless they found someone with appropriate higher station - and money - to marry into.)
As to land and sales, it’s likely there were distinction between the lands which belonged to the title and back then could not be sold, and those “freehold” that could be bought and sold. Presumably those with good money management skills acquired freehold land to expand their estates.
Land was always a source of income. A landowner would generally have the option of living frugally on his land, and maybe paying back his debts gradually.
Someone at the level of a knight or squire might possibly be forced to sell all or part of his land over a large debt. Knights who were landless for one reason or another were fairly common. They might take service with a lord, or live with relatives or friends. For most people of property and status, one more hanger-on to feed and house didn’t make much difference.
Jean de Carrouges was a knight. His wikipedia page doesn’t say that he was in debt, only that he didn’t have much income. He hadn’t been given land and income that he felt was due to him because he was on bad terms with his overlord Pierre, Count of Perche.
A Duke or Count in 14th century France was an entirely different matter. Dukedoms and Counties were semi-independent ‘states’ within France. He was the law within his territory, and wealthy almost by definition. Only the King could force him to give up part of his land over a debt, and that would be highly unlikely, and only in a case where the debt was owed to someone of equal or higher rank. If his land was conquered or confiscated he would retain his rank and status, and probably live on the charity of one or other king or lord.
If you’re bored and interested in history, I recommend Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror which examines 14th century life by following a Norman French noble through his life, going into asides about all the happenings of a tumultuous century.
Sorry, but I really wouldn’t recommend A Distant Mirror.
Firstly, it’s seriously outdated. It was published in 1978, and medieval scholarship has moved on and advanced considerably since then.
Secondly, even in 1978 it was regarded as dated and inaccurate. From the wiki,
However, scholarly reaction was muted. In the journal Speculum, Charles T. Wood praised Tuchman’s narrative abilities but described the book as a “curiously dated and old-fashioned work” and criticized it for being shaped by the political concerns of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[6]
Bernard S. Bachrach criticized Tuchman’s reliance on secondary sources and dated translations of medieval narratives at the expense of archival research, and characterized the book as a whole as “a readable fourteenth-century version of the Fuzz n’ Wuz (cops and corpses) that dominates the evening news on television.”[7]
Thomas Ohlgren agreed with many of Bachrach’s criticisms, and further took issue with many perceived anachronisms in Tuchman’s characterization of the medieval world and a lack of scholarly rigor.[8]
William McNeill, writing in the Chicago Tribune, thought that A Distant Mirror, while well-written on a technical level, did not present an intelligible picture of the period.[9]
This is a point that I find myself making again and again. Knowledge of history grows and changes. History is not a static subject, any more than science. The history you learned at school was often inaccurate, distorted, over-simplified, and is no longer considered valid. History books written more than 20 years are mostly out of date, especially relating to the medieval period.
Movies and TV series about the medieval period are usually wildly inaccurate. There’s a sort of generic ‘Hollywood medieval’ style that has nothing to do with reality.
Going on a Crusade could be lucrative, particularly for younger sons of the nobility who had no land of their own.
Robbing the local Christians while traveling to the Holy Land wasn’t unknown and once there even a kingdom of your own could be up for grabs.
Turns out, not so lucrative for de Carrouges. He was killed in the Crusades some years after his famous duel.
I opened a thread on the subject some years ago. But I also found it interesting how they dealt with paying for stuff and just basic logistics back then. Obviously they didn’t have ATMs, credit cards, and wire transfers and whatnot back then. In the movies, travelers just walked into a pub, tossed a few coins at the innkeeper and ordered a meal. So do you basically have to carry around a bag of travelling money wherever you go?
How quickly we forget! It is not a whole lot different than international travel 50-60 years ago. You carried cash, or travelers checks (but try cashing them at a small restaurant in a provincial town) and if you ran out, it could be a 1-2 day effort to obtain more cash. Sure, there were credit cards, but their usefulness was very limited outside of big establishments in major cities.
Generally, you “made arrangements” ahead of time if you could. But yes, cash was also useful for that kind of thing. For business, there was also letters of credit, promissory notes, bills of exchange etc.
I’ve long been fascinated by stories occurring around the American Revolution era which tell of people traveling to distant lands with letters in hand to vouch for their credibility.
That was one of the services that the Knights Templar provided. It worked out quite well for them (at least until their creditors decided to liquidate their debt by liquidating their creditors).
I once attended a lecture by L.E. Modesitt, who was an economist before he turned to writing fantasy novels. He said that most writers had this warped idea of the middle ages, where everyone travelled with a magic credit card - exactly as described, at every stop toss a few coins on the bar. The problem was, travel was expensive and dangerous. Robin Hood supposedly made a good living off VIP’s purses, since you had to carry enough money for the trip. If it was a long trip, you had a lot of money - a prime target. Roads often went through lonely areas where gangs of thieves waited. (And by sea, pirates were a risk). If you brought armed guards- worse, now you needed a chest full of money to pay everyone - assuming you trusted the guards. You didn’t just hire them at the local pub. So you needed a cart to carry the money, food, and other luggage. It tended to balloon.
One solution - as we see in The Canterbury Tales - is to travel in large groups. But, you were still at risk of sneak thieves in your sleep even in a tavern in town, because you still had to carry money. And fortunately, in a pilgrimage, the whole big group was going the whole way all together.
Plan B was as described above - get someone along the way to help. The whole nobility was a big (un)happy family, and a lord and his retinue could usually count on a fellow lord (or lesser noble) being willing to put them up for the night. There were groups like the Templars that acted as ATM’s along the way.
But considering that food was a major expense in those days, one did not simply decide to go a-wanderin’. Plus, most places were suspicious of armed, unattached strangers wandering through with no particular destination. There were plenty of such types who were bandits.
Also, nobles were a small clique. We live in an era where cities are a million people and many have no idea who lives two doors down. Nobility were a limited number, and knew each others’ business. The idea that some time traveler or peasant upstart could impersonate some random distant or fabricated noble was likely to fail because everyone knew about the rest of their ilk. There was no TV or Youtube, their major entertainment was gossip, and even with the difficulties travelling, someone had been somewhere and knew someone who could tell you all about the business of the rest of the land.
The medieval period is 1,000 years long, covering a huge area, and extremely varied.
You can either go for an overview, or for books that focus narrowly on particular individuals, or particular times and places, or particular aspects like military history, daily life, cities, economic history, etc.
A book I found fascinating was The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Falk.
It will totally change your views about knowledge and science in late medieval Europe.
It follows mainly one individual, John of Westwyk in 14th century England, but also gives a far larger view of the growth of science and technology over a far longer period, especially astrolabes, clocks, mathematics, and astronomy.
It was named a Best Book of 2020 by The Telegraph, The Times, and BBC History Magazine
For a bird’s eye view of the whole period from 500 - 1500, I liked Medieval Europe (2016) by Chris Wickham, professor of history at Cambridge University.
A warning, though. This is not light reading or pop history. But it gives an excellent broad overview in the light of modern academic knowledge.
Sample (click)
CHAPTER ONE
A new look at the middle ages
This book is about change. What we call the medieval period, or the middle ages, lasted a thousand years, from 500 to 1500; and Europe, which is the subject of this book, was a very different place at the end of this period from what it had been at the beginning. The Roman empire dominated the start of the period, unifying half of Europe but dividing it sharply from the other half; a millennium later, Europe had taken the complicated shape it has kept since, with a majority of the independent states of the present recognisable in some form or other. My aim in the book is to show how this change, and many others, happened, and how far they are important.
…
The middle ages had some clearly marked moments of change; it is these which give form to the period. The fall of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century, the crisis of the eastern empire when it confronted the rise of Islam in the seventh, the forcefulness of the Carolingian experiment in very large-scale moralised government in the late eighth and ninth, the expansion of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe in (especially) the tenth, the radical decentralisation of political power in the west in the eleventh, the demographic and economic expansion of the tenth to thirteenth, the reconstruction of political and religious power in the west in the twelfth and thirteenth, the eclipse of Byzantium in the same period, the Black Death and the development of state structures in the fourteenth, and the emergence of a wider popular engagement with the public sphere in the late fourteenth and fifteenth: these are in my view those major moments of change, and they have a chapter each in this book.
Linking all of these turning points was a set of structural developments: among others, the retreat and reinvention of concepts of public power, the shift in the balance of the resources of political systems from taxation to landowning and back again, the changing impact of the use of writing on political culture, and the growth in the second half of the middle ages of formalised and bounded patterns of local power and identity, which transformed the ways rulers and the people they ruled dealt with each other. These will be at the centre of this book too.
A book of this length cannot delve into the microhistory of societies or cultures in any detail, nor, for that matter, provide detailed country-by-country narratives of events. This is an interpretation of the middle ages, not a textbook account – there are anyway many of the latter, many of them excellent, and they do not need to be added to.
I have, certainly, in every chapter set out brief accounts of political action, so as to give contexts to my arguments, especially for readers who are coming to the medieval period for the first time. But my intention is to concentrate on the moments of change and the overarching structures, to show what, in my view, most characterised the medieval period and makes it interesting; and they are the basic underpinnings of what follows.