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Conventional typologies of lordship and its relationship with royal power in the territories of the English crown emphasize the precocious distinctiveness of royal power as against noble lordship, with the latter consequentially bound by an essentially restrictive territorialized model. With the decline of pan-British activity after the difficult years of 1296 to 1333, the focus of most English historians of lordship is on a primarily English territorialized lordship that, because of a fragmentation of holdings, might be powerful but has never constituted an overwhelming nexus. Writing in the shadow of K. B. McFarlane,1 they have concentrated on processes of exclusion, definition, and stratification in the nobility in the late Middle Ages. The vista of English royal authority, formal and informal, is also constantly spread before us as a clearly distinctive alternative to noble lordship. Consequently, the emphasis has been on overlapping patterns of interest, the importance of noble patronage and household, and the significance of interactions with that ever-growing English royal authority.2 R. R. Davies, in his last, unfinished book on lords and lordship in the long fourteenth century, however, reminded us that lordship was potentially more complex and extensive than that. His prime points of reference were marcher lords: their lordship, and that of some in Ireland, “approximated (or could do so) more closely to royal lordship than we sometimes care to acknowledge.”3 This article is intended to explore the continuum that Davies proposed. In place of the neat, clean hierarchy subordinated to a growing royal authority, the potential complexity of manifestations of sovereignty in these territories is considered. In particular, the use of royal titles by people other than the English king is assessed, as are associated ceremonial and issues such as forms of dating. Some practical manifestations of “sovereign” power in judicial and fiscal rights and relations between princes and in the capacity to exclude the intervention of others are also considered. In doing so, I am responding to prompts from the recent historiography of the jurisdictional complexity of England and other early modern states.4 Borrowing a term applied elsewhere for political systems in which sovereignty is not held by one individual in absolute form but shared in a more diffuse manner,5 I argue for the...