THE aristocracy has long been one of the most popular subjects among historians working on the Middle Ages. Particular attention has been paid to regions within or bordering the area that corresponds to modern France, and most work has been on the period between the late Carolingian era and c.1200. An important feature of the study of the elites of the central medieval period is that scholars have not limited themselves to the idea of aristocrats as historical performers within various social, economic, political, and institutional settings. There has been an awareness that our understanding of these people requires us to consider what they thought as well as what they did; their identity was as much a function of their mental universe – their mentalité – as it was an aggregation of all the ways in which they behaved. Given this interest in the realm of ideas – understood in a broad sense as not simply a body of considered positions but also a complex of instincts, assumptions, and emotional reactions – it is valid to ask whether and to what extent the aristocrats of the eleventh and twelfth centuries directed their minds to the future. A useful starting point is that pondering the unknowability of things to come can amount to an opportunity to express a deep-rooted sense of self. Furthermore, the tensions created by the conflict between the unpredictability of the future and the impulse to control and contain it may lead to the forceful articulation of ideas that would otherwise not surface so clearly in the historical record. In other words, a consideration of attitudes towards and attempts to control the future has the potential to open up insights into the world of lords and knights and, more importantly, their notion of their place within it.

For the purposes of this discussion, the primary focus will be on the aristocracy in various parts of what is modern-day France and Belgium. Some reference will also be made to Anglo-Norman conditions where they offer supporting evidence; the experience of the elites of post-Conquest England was in many respects a series of variations on basic themes found in northern France. The term ‘aristocracy’ is used to avoid thorny issues about the origins and nature of the nobility, and the relationship between it and knighthood.