Necromancy!
Not just thread necromancy,
forum necromancy!
I wonder though if it might be worthwhile for all knights to be able to influence the tax-rate of their own estates, just so they can get practice managing a tax system. It would be a good way to encourage more p2p interaction. Lords will have to warn their knights not to over-tax their peasants and might have to expell a tyrannical knight for being greedy.
That's one thing I have in mind as a possibility for an eventual expansion/rework of the estate system. Details are still very much TBD.
I'm pretty sure historically a lord wouldn't need to personally hold court like that. It even says here that medieval stewards had to oversee judicial proceedings:
I've actually got some ideas in mind for making holding court a little less of a rote region-maintenance mindless click, and more something that feels (at least a little bit) like you're resolving disputes. I could easily see broadening that to include some disputes that a Knight could resolve, and some that require the authority of the Lord (and, indeed, have a concomitant increase in effect).
Now, it's also worth noting that as part of the Hinterlands feature package, I'm currently working on some changes that will significantly shift the knight/lord landscape: in particular, I'm looking at changing how many regions would be expected to have knights at all. In general, less-populated rural regions would not be expected to support a knight; many more knights would get shifted to cities, where they would be much more certain of getting a decent income.
How that will affect the region management needs of rural regions, I'm not yet sure; this is still all very much uncharted waters. Overall, I'd say it's likely to make expanding the role of Stewards much less effective at taking burden off of Lords, simply because there would be fewer Lords with Stewards in the first place.
