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ii Medieval English authors often regard aspects of the legal system to be in conflict with an endemic cultural practice, maintenance. Simply put, maintenance was the payment of a form of salary to a high-level servant by a lord. The salary this servant (or affine) might receive could consist of cash-payments, gifts, or access to lucrative official positions, including the proxy enjoyment of some portion of the lord’s judicial rights. The more lavish the assistance, the more the lord honored the retainer. Obviously, the mutual ties of aid and loyalty between a lord and an affine threatened impartial justice at every level, and medieval authors strove both to bring its abuses to light, and to offer alternatives. Each of my chapters sheds light on how late fourteenth-century authors articulated the relationship between different legal institutions and maintenance. I begin by showing how the events in one of the more obscure Canterbury Tales, the Tale of Melibee, resemble a popular out-of-court settlement practice called accord. Chaucer blamed a contemporary practice called maintenance, the exchange of money an