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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1522493" data-attributes="member: 18377">In the first place, there was the duty of "guard and ward". A knight who owed military service not only had to show up or provide a substitute in time of war, he [may also have] had to show up for specified service guarding one of his lord's castles in peace-time.In the second place, lords and landed knights maintained 'households' of 'knights in service', sergeants, archers &c. whom they provided with accommodation, fed (out of the produce of their estates), clothed (with gifts of clothing at Christmas, usually), and sometimes even horsed and armed (with presents on special occasions). Petty lords usually lived in more or less the same place, their households with them. Great lords with scattered estates used to wander around the country, descending on each of their manors in turn, and feeding their household the accumulated surplus. One way that a great lord (such as a king) could garrison a castle was to appoint a castellan and give him estates around the castle. The castellan would then recruit or breed a household, and these would effectively garrison the castle by living in it.On a larger scale, kings and the emperor sometimes garrisoned borderlands (marches, marks) by appointing special counts (mark-grafs, margraves, marquises) with powerful castles, compact collections of estates, and powers to call up the feudal levies in the king's name. Examples include the markgraf of Brandenburg (later king in Prussia), the markgraf of the Ostermark (later emperor of Austria), the comte de Barcelona (later king of Aragon) and (less spectacularly) the marquis of the Gothic March, and the marquis of Septimania. In England the 'marcher lords' were not given a distinctive title, but the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Shrewbury. the Earl of Northumberland, the Earl of Richmond &c. did have palatinate powers for border defence. Most remarkably, a march palatinate might be bestowed upon a bishop rather than count: the palatinate powers of the Bishop of Durham were not abolished until the early nineteenth century, and the unique armorial marks of its powers as a palatinate (the crowned mitre and the crossed sword-and-crozier) are still in use.Finally, in the last three centuries of the feudal period kings would sometimes pay castellans a cash salary rather than giving them estates, and likewise salary the garrisons of their castles (usually archers). They raised the money by allowing knights who owed guard-and-ward to pay cash (called 'scutage') instead.</blockquote>

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