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Theodore Evergates, Hélène Débax. La seigneurie collective: Pairs, pariers, paratge; Les coseigneurs du XIe au XIIIe siècle., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Page 1581, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1581
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Hélène Débax has written an important study that demolishes the textbook paradigm undergirding even modern scholarly studies of medieval society, especially in France: that castle lordships and other fiefs passed undivided to the eldest son. Working from her deep knowledge of family histories and tenurial customs in the Midi, where co-lordship was widespread, Débax reviews the evidence from northern France, Catalonia, and northern Italy to find a wealth of examples of shared and divided lordships in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The evidence is overwhelming. The division of estates and of castles themselves was not at all unusual, nor was the sharing of lordship between siblings or between laymen and religious communities. Débax's typology of lordship (single lord, co-lords, multiple lords) reflects the complexity of tenurial arrangements in both the Midi and northern France. In traversing the traditional historiographical divide between north and south, she makes a notable contribution to the history of medieval France.
