Would a medieval Duchy or County be ruled from a "capital" city/town, or from a Duke / Count's castle ?

by TheMadMapmaker

I have two somewhat conflicting mental models of how a medieval kingdom is split up:

  • One in which the feudal lords mostly own / control the countryside, and the cities exist outside the feudal system and do their own thing with a town council or whatnot, and the lords pretend that they don't exist until they get powerful enough in more recent centuries
  • One in witch the territory is split into juridictions (duchies / provinces / counties etc.) each with their own capital, as is basically the case in modern times

More specifically, if one looks at this map of 1145 France, France is divided into counties and duchies, who have major cities, but it's not clear to me whether those cities were "capitals" (or if it was mostly ruled from a castle in the countryside), and whether there were other important cities who weren't administrative capitals.

Or is this something that depended of the time and region ? (I expect at least that as we got nearer to modern times, with cities being more important and power being more administrative, power became centered in cities)

the_direful_spring

So one thing to bare in mind was that feudalism is a term used by more modern historians to describe a pretty wide variety of different power structures and associate socio-economic systems that had a lot of variation across time and space rather than some kind of uniform ideology of governance or the like.

There were certainly cities that had a special privileges within the wider systems. For example one which has vestiges that last till this day with be the special privileges of the City of London as a special entity within the larger modern London that afforded it a certain degree of self governance within the larger kingdom. Comparably within the Holy Roman Empire certain cities gain special status as Free Imperial Cities which legally afforded their loyalties directly to the Holy Roman Empire rather than a Prince, Duke ect ect within the Empire.

In some cases though a lord might have his castle within or extremely close to a city to protect and help administer such important centres. For example the often considered virtually impregnable Bristol Castle was the seat of the earls of Gloucester. In other cases there might be castles on a hill or the like close to a city such as Old Sarum which sits on a hill above the city of Salisbury was usually the seat of the Sheriff of Wiltshire who held the castle on the behalf of the crown who'd own it.

That said there were examples where regions were ruled from castles a little way from the largest city in the region for a variety of reasons. For example a Marcher Lord of a frontier region might rule from a large castle situated in a position ideal to defend the region in general or to take advantage of a particularly advantageous geographical location the city doesn't possess.