Bloch said-it-first, Feudal Society
The fragmentation of power, then the reconcentration of authority..
Before the exhibit, here’s why Marc Bloch should still be read:
“… but Marc Bloch made the point first, as usual …” [Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages, OUP 2005]
The Source:
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, translated by L.A. Manyon, La Société Féodale (first published 1940 in French by Michel Albin, France), Routledge 1962
[MH: Bloch refers throughout to “The second feudal age” which corresponds to what earlier writers called “The twelfth-century renaissance” and which Bloch also calls the “legal awakening”, and which Thomas Bisson has more recently termed ‘The crisis of the twelfth century’. Yet, so far, I find Bloch and Bisson quite compatible.]
Chapter XXXI
RECONSTRUCTION OF STATES
1. REASONS FOR THE RECONCENTRATION OF AUTHORITY
IN the course of the second feudal age the political authority, which up to that time was much subdivided, began everywhere to be concentrated in larger organisms. (These were not new, of course, but their effective powers were genuinely revived.) The apparent exceptions, like Germany, disappear as soon as one ceases to envisage the State exclusively in terms of kingship. So general a phenomenon could only have been the result of causes common to the entire West; and a list of these causes could almost be compiled by taking the opposites of those which earlier had led to disintegration.
The cessation of the invasions had relieved the royal and princely powers of a task which exhausted their strength. At the same time it made possible the enormous growth of population to which, from the eleventh century onwards, the progress of land clearance bore witness. The increased density of population not only facilitated the maintenance of order, but also favoured the revival of towns, of the artisan class, and of trade. As a result of a more active and abundant circulation of money taxation reappeared, and with it salaried officials; and the payment of troops began to be substituted for the inefficient system of hereditary contractual services.True, the small or medial lord also profited by the transformations of the economy; he had, as we have seen, his “tallages”. But the king or the prince almost always possessed more lands and more vassals than anyone else.
Moreover, the very nature of his authority provided him with many opportunities to levy taxes, particularly on the churches and the towns. The daily revenue of Philip Augustus [king of France 1165–1223] at the time of his death was equal in amount to about half the annual revenue returned, a little later, by a monastic lordship which, while not accounted one of the richest, nevertheless owned very extensive properties in a particularly prosperous province. Thus the State from this time onward began to acquire that essential element of its supremacy—financial resources incomparably greater than those of any private person or community.
Corresponding changes took place in the mentality of men. The cultural “renaissance”, from the end of the eleventh century, had made it easier for them to understand the social bond—always a somewhat abstract conception—which is implicit in the subordination of the individual to the government. It had also revived the memory of the great well-ordered monarchic states of the past: the Roman Empire, whose greatness and majesty under absolute rulers were proclaimed by its Codes and its books of history; the Carolingian Empire, embellished by legend. It is true that men sufficiently educated to be influenced by such memories continued to be relatively very few; but in an absolute sense this élite had become much more numerous.
Above all, education had spread among the laity—not merely the greater aristocracy, but also the knightly class. At a time when every administrator had to be also a military leader, these noblemen of modest fortune were more useful than the clergy; they were also less liable to be diverted by interests alien to the temporal authorities, and they had long been experienced in the practice of law. Hence it was this class which, well in advance of the bourgeoisie, came to form the general staff of the revived monarchies—the England of Henry Plantagenet, the France of Philip Augustus and St. Louis.
The practice of writing and the growing interest in its potentialities enabled states to form those archives without which there could be no real continuity of government. Lists of feudal services due from fiefs, periodic accounts, registers of documents dispatched or received—innumerable memoranda of various kinds made their appearance, from the middle of the twelfth century, in the Anglo-Norman state and the Norman kingdom of Sicily and, towards the end of the same century or in the course of the thirteenth, in the kingdom of France and most of its great principalities. Their emergence was the premonitory sign that there was arising a new power, or at least one that had hitherto been confined to the great churches and the papal court, namely the bureaucracy.
Although virtually universal in its fundamental features, this general development nevertheless followed very different lines from country to country. We shall confine ourselves here to considering briefly, and as it were by way of examples, three types of state.
2. A NEW MONARCHY: THE CAPETIANS
The relative strength of the Carolingian monarchy in its heyday had been based on a few general principles: the military service required of all its subjects; the supremacy of the royal court; the subordination of the counts, who at that time were genuine officials; the network of royal vassals, who were to be found everywhere; and finally, its power over the Church.
Of all this almost nothing remained to the French monarchy towards the end of the tenth century. It is true that a fairly large number of medial and petty knights continued to do homage directly to the king, especially after the accession to the throne of the Robertian dukes, who brought with them their own retainers. But henceforth they were to be found almost exclusively in that rather restricted area of northern France where the dynasty itself exercised the rights of counts. Elsewhere, apart from the great barons, the crown had only sub-vassals—a serious handicap at a time when the local lord was the only one to whom men felt morally bound.
The counts or the officials in control of several counties, who thus became the intermediate link of many vassal chains, did not deny that they held their dignities from the king. But the office had become a patrimony charged with obligations of a new type. Odo of Blois, who had tried to take the count’s castle at Melun from another of Hugh Capet’s vassals, is reported by a contemporary to have said: “I did not act against the king; it does not matter to him whether one man or another holds the fief ”—meaning, when the relationship is one of lord and vassal. In the same way, a tenant-farmer might say: “It does not matter who I am, provided the rent is paid.” Yet this rent of fealty and service was often, in cases of this kind, very unsatisfactorily discharged.
For his army the king was normally obliged to depend on his petty vassals, on the “knights” of the churches over which he had retained some control, and on the rustic levies from the estates of those churches and his own villages. Occasionally one or two of the dukes or greater counts contributed their contingents, though as allies rather than as subjects. Among the litigants who continued to bring their cases to his court we find that it is almost exclusively the same circles which are represented—petty lords bound to the king by direct homage, and royal churches. When in 1023 one of the magnates, the count of Blois, pretended to submit to the judgment of the king’s court, he made it a condition that the very fiefs which were the subject of litigation should first be made over to him.
More than two-thirds of the bishoprics— along with four entire ecclesiastical provinces (Rouen, Dol, Bordeaux, and Narbonne)—had passed under the domination of the provincial dynasties and were completely outside the control of the crown. True, those that remained immediately subject to the king were still very numerous; and thanks to one or two of these the influence of the monarchy continued to be felt even in the heart of Aquitaine (through Le Puy) and, through Noyon-Tournai, in the very midst of the regions of Flemish domination. But the majority of these royal bishoprics were also concentrated between the Loire and the frontier of the Empire; and the same was true of the “royal” abbeys, many of which had formed part of the heritage of the Robertians, who in their ducal period were cynical appropriators of monasteries.
These churches were to be one of the crown’s greatest sources of strength. But the first Capetians seemed so weak that their own clergy attached little value to such privileges as they were able to distribute. Only a dozen charters of Hugh Capet are known to us, from the ten years of his reign; of his contemporary Otto III of Germany, in a reign of less than twenty years—during the earlier of which he was a minor—we know of more than four hundred.
This contrast between the weakness of the monarchy in the West Frankish kingdom and its relative strength in the great neighbouring state did not fail to impress contemporaries. In Lotharingia people were wont to speak of the “undisciplined manners” of the Kerlinger, that is to say the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Charles the Bald. It is easier to note the contrast than to explain it.
Carolingian institutions had been originally no less strong in the one kingdom than in the other. Probably the explanation must be sought in fundamental facts of social structure.
[MH: Page 446 much referred to by Chris Wickham who complains of the translation in three of his books, preferring his own translation — “the fragmentation of power”.]
The great active principle of feudal disintegration was always the power of the local or personal chief over little groups who were thus removed from any wider authority. Now leaving out of account Aquitaine, traditionally insubordinate, the regions which formed in a true sense the heart of the French monarchy were precisely those regions between Loire and Meuse where the manor went back to remote ages and “commendation” had found its favourite soil.
In a country where the immense majority of landed properties were either tenements or fiefs and where, at an early date, the name “free” came to be applied, not to the lordless man, but to him whose only privilege was the right to choose his master, there was no place for a genuine State.
Nevertheless the very decay of the old public law proved in the end an advantage to the Capetian monarchy. Not that the new dynasty ever contemplated a break with the Carolingian tradition, whence it derived the best part of its moral force. But it was of necessity compelled to replace the old, atrophied organs of the Frankish state with other instruments of power.The kings of the previous dynasty had looked on the counts as their representatives and had not believed it possible to govern any sizeable territory except through their agency. No county directly controlled by the crown seems to have been included in the heritage of the last Carolingians, as received by Hugh Capet. The Capetians, on the contrary, were descended from a family whose greatness was founded on an accumulation of county “honours” and very naturally they continued the same policy when they were on the throne.
This policy, it is true, was not always very firmly pursued. The early Capetians have sometimes been compared to peasants patiently adding field to field. The picture is misleading in two ways. It expresses very poorly the mentality of these anointed kings who were also great warriors and at all times—like the knightly class whose temperament they shared—dangerously susceptible to the glamour of adventure. It also assumes a continuity in their plans which the historian, if he takes a close look at them, seldom finds.
If that Bouchard of Vendôme, whom Hugh Capet made count of Paris, Corbeil and Melun, had not lacked any direct heir save a son who had long ago entered a monastery, the most strongly situated of territorial principalities would have been established in the very heart of the lIe-de-France. One of the charters of Henry I even envisages, as a not unlikely eventuality, the enfeoffment [dict. property or land given in exchange for pledged service] of Paris. Plainly, it was not easy to break away from Carolingian practices.
Nevertheless from the beginning of the eleventh century the kings acquired one after another a series of counties without appointing any new counts to govern them. In other words the sovereigns, having with good reason ceased to regard these magnates as officials, were less and less reluctant to become their own counts; and so on the estates—inherited from ancestors or recently annexed—where there was now no intermediate power, the only representatives of the royal authority were persons of rather modest status, placed each at the head of a fairly small district.
The very insignificance of these “provosts” (prévots) prevented them from being a real danger, and though at first a few of them seem to have succeeded in making their posts hereditary, their masters had no great difficulty in the course of the twelfth century in limiting most of them to farming their offices for a specified term.Then from the time of Philip Augustus, at a higher level of the administrative hierarchy, genuine salaried officials made their appearance—the bailiffs (baillis) or seneschals.
Because it had adapted itself to new social conditions and modestly based its power on the direct control of fairly restricted groups of men, the French monarchy benefited most by the eventual reconcentration of authority and was able to turn it to the advantage of the very ancient ideas and sentiments which it continued to embody.
But it was not the only power to benefit in this way, for the same phenomenon also occurred within the great territorial principalities which still subsisted. The mosaic of counties, ranging from Troyes to Meaux and Provins, which Odo of Blois about 1022 had succeeded in appropriating by an astute exploitation of family connections, was no less different from the county of Champagne at the beginning of the thirteenth century, with its law of succession based on primogeniture to the exclusion of partition, with its well-defined administrative districts, its officials and its archives, than was the kingdom of Robert the Pious from that of Louis VIII. The organisms thus formed were so strong that even their final absorption by the monarchy failed to disrupt them.
Thus it might be said that the kings reassembled France rather than unified it. Observe the contrasts between France and England. In England there was the Great Charter; in France, in 1314–15, the Charters granted to the Normans, to the people of Languedoc, to the Bretons, to the Burgundians, to the Picards, to the people of Champagne, of Auvergne, of the Basses Marches of the West, of Berry, and of Nevers.
In England there was Parliament; in France, the provincial Estates, always much more frequently convoked and on the whole more active than the States-General. In England there was the common law, almost untouched by regional exceptions; in France the vast medley of regional “customs”. All these contrasts were to hamper the national development of France. Indeed it seems as if the French monarchy, even when the State had been revived, continued permanently to bear the mark of that agglomeration of counties, castellanies and rights over churches which, in very “feudal” fashion, it had made the foundation of its power.
3. AN ARCHAISTIC MONARCHY: GERMANY
Noting that “the perpetuity of fiefs was established in France earlier than in Germany”, Montesquieu attributed it to the “phlegmatic humour and, if I may venture to say so, the mental immutability of the German nation”. As psychological diagnosis this is certainly too sweeping, even when Montesquieu tones it down with a “perhaps”. But it is a remarkably penetrating piece of intuition, especially if, instead of “phlegmatic humour”, we say simply “archaism”; for this is the word which must occur to any student of medieval German society, compared period by period with French society.The remark certainly applies, as we have seen, to vassalage and the fife, to the manorial system, to the epic (so truly archaic in its legendary themes and the pagan atmosphere of its marvellous events); and it applies no less to the economic sphere (the “urban renaissance” in Germany was a century or two later than in Italy, France and Flanders), and is equally valid when we pass to the evolu- tion of the State. No example is more telling than the harmony between social structure and political structure.
In Germany, far less profoundly and less uniformly “feudalized” than France, the monarchy remained faithful much longer to the Carolingian model. The king governs with the help of counts whose hereditary position is only slowly confirmed, and who, even when this has been established, continue to be regarded as the holders of an office rather than a fief. Even when they are not direct vassals of the king it is from him that in theory, like the advocates of immunist [dict. one that enjoys an immunity from service or payment of some due] churches, they hold by special grant their power to give orders and to punish—their “ban”, as it was called. It is true that here also the monarchy came up against the rivalry of the territorial principalities—especially in the form of those duchies to whose original structure we have called attention. In spite of the suppressions or divisions carried out by the Saxon dynasty, the dukes continued to be dangerously powerful and insubordinate. But the kings were able to use the Church against them.
For, unlike the Capetians, the German heirs of Charlemagne succeeded in retaining control of virtually all the bishoprics of the kingdom. The surrender of the Bavarian bishoprics by Henry I to the duke of Bavaria was only a measure of expediency and was soon revoked; the belated grant of sees beyond the Elbe made by Frederick Barbarossa to the duke of Saxony related only to a missionary field and did not last much longer, and the case of the small Alpine bishoprics, appointment to which was vested in their metropolitan at Salzburg, was an insignificant exception. The chapel royal was the seminary of the prelates of the Empire and it was this personnel of clerics, educated, ambitious, experienced in affairs of state, which more than anything maintained the continuity of the monarchic idea.
Bishoprics and royal monasteries, from the Elbe to the Meuse, from the Alps to the North Sea, placed their “services” at the disposition of the sovereign: contributions in money or in kind; lodging for the king or his followers; above all military service. The contingents of the churches formed the largest and most stable part of the royal army; but they were not the whole of it. For the king continued to demand aid from all his subjects, and although the general levy properly so called—“the call to the country” (clamor patriae)—applied in practice only to the frontier regions in the event of barbarian raids, the obligation to serve with their knights rested on the dukes and counts of the entire kingdom and was in fact fairly satisfactorily fulfilled.
This traditional system, however, never worked perfectly. True, it made possible the great projects of the “Roman expeditions”; but in so doing—in favouring over-ambitious and anachronistic designs—it had already become dangerous.The internal structure of the country was not really strong enough to support such a load. It is really not surprising that this government which had no taxation other than the few financial “services” of the churches, no salaried officials, no permanent army—this nomadic government, which possessed no convenient means of communication and which men felt to be physically and morally remote from them, should not always succeed in ensuring the obedience of its subjects. No reign in fact was free from rebellions.
With some delay and many differences, the process by which the powers of the State were broken up into small centres of personal authority triumphed in Germany as in France. The dissolution of the counties, for one thing, little by little deprived the edifice of its necessary basis. Now the German kings, since they were much more than territorial princes, had not provided themselves with anything resembling the restricted, but well-placed, domain of the Robertian dukes who had become kings of France. Even the duchy of Saxony, which Henry I had held before his accession, passed eventually— though reduced in size—out of the hands of the crown.
This was one example of a usage which progressively acquired the force of law. Any fief de dignité provisionally falling in to the crown by confiscation or abeyance must be regranted in fee without delay, and this characteristic principle of the imperial monarchy was especially fatal to its progress. Had it prevailed in France it would have prevented Philip Augustus from keeping Normandy, just as in Germany, some thirty years earlier, it did in fact prevent the annexation by Frederick Barbarossa of the duchies taken away from Henry the Lion.
True, it was left to the twelfth century to formulate the principle in its full rigour, under pressure from the baronage. But without any doubt it took its origin from the character of a public office which in Germany was firmly attached to the “honours” of counts and dukes. How could a sovereign appoint himself his own representative?
Certainly, the German king was the direct lord of many villages; he had his own vassals, his ministeriales, his castles. But all these were very widely scattered. Belatedly, Henry IV realized the danger, and from 1070 he tried to create in Saxony a veritable Île-de-France, bristling with fortresses. The plan failed; for already the great crisis of the struggle with the popes was at hand, which was to reveal so many sources of weaknesses.
Here again we are faced with an anachronism. Henry IV and Gregory VII had been engaged for several years in an apparently commonplace conflict when in 1076 it suddenly developed into a relentless war. The cause was that dramatic event at Worms—the deposition of the pope pronounced, after consultation with a German council, by a king who had not even as yet been excommunicated. Now this act was only an echo of earlier events. Otto I had deposed one pope; Henry IV’s own father and predecessor had deposed three at a single stroke. Since then, however, the world had changed. Reformed by the emperors themselves, the papacy had regained its moral prestige and a great movement of religious awakening was making it the highest symbol of spiritual values.
We have already seen how this long quarrel finally destroyed the hereditary principle in Germany. It ended by throwing the monarchs into the perpetual hornet’s nest of Italy; it became a focal point for rebellion and its outcome profoundly affected the royal powers over the Church. Not, of course, that the kings ceased, even in the thirteenth century, to exercise an influence over the appointment of bishops and abbots—an influence which, though it varied greatly with the reign or the moment, continued to be on the whole very extensive. But the prelates, who were henceforth invested by a touch of the sceptre (symbolizing the grant of the fief), ceased to be regarded as holders of a public office, and appeared from now on as ordinary feudatories.
Moreover, the development of religious consciousness weakened the idea of the sacred value hitherto attached to the royal dignity and rendered the clergy less willing to submit to attempts at domination which conflicted with their heightened sense of the pre-eminence of spiritual forces. At the same time social changes were in progress which finally transformed the former representatives of the monarchy in the provinces into hereditary lords of subdivided domains, reduced the number of free men (in the original sense of the word), and took away much of the public character of courts which were becoming progressively more subject to the local lords.
In the twelfth century Frederick Barbarossa still gave the impression of being a very powerful monarch. The imperial idea, nourished by a richer and more self-conscious culture, had never been expressed more powerfully than during the reign and at the court of this prince. But badly buttressed and ill-adapted to contemporary forces, the monarchic structure was even then at the mercy of the slightest shock.
Meanwhile other powers were preparing to spring up on the ruins of both the monarchy and the old tribal duchies. From the end of the twelfth century territorial principalities, hitherto somewhat loosely held together, gradually emerged as bureaucratic states, relatively well-ordered, subject to State taxation, and possessing representative assemblies. In these states what survived of vassalage was turned to the advantage of their rulers and even the Church was obedient. Politically speaking, there was no longer a Germany; but, as they said in France, “the Germanies”.
On the one hand there was retarded social development, a specifically German characteristic; on the other, there was the advent, common to almost the whole of Europe, of conditions favourable to a concentration of public authority. The meeting of these two chains of causation meant that in Germany the reconcentration of forces was effected only at the cost of a long fragmentation of the ancient state.
[MH: Marc Bloch was executed in France by a German firing squad in 1944.]
4. THE ANGLO-NORMAN MONARCHY: CONQUEST AND GERMANIC SURVIVALS
The Anglo-Norman state was the fruit of a double conquest—the conquest of western Neustria by Rollo and of England by William the Bastard. It owed to this origin a structure much more regular than that of principalities built up piecemeal or of monarchies burdened with a long and sometimes confused tradition. What is more, the second conquest, that of England, had taken place at the very moment when the transformation of economic and intellectual conditions throughout the West began to favour the struggle against disintegration.
It is significant that almost from the first this monarchy, born of a successful war, seems to have had at its disposal at an early date an educated personnel and bureaucratic machinery. Anglo-Saxon England in its latest period had witnessed the creation under its earls of genuine territorial principalities formed, according to the classic pattern, from agglomerations of counties.
The war of conquest and the harsh suppression of the subsequent rebellions removed from the scene the great native chiefs; and all danger to the unity of the State from that side might have seemed to be at an end. Nevertheless the idea that it was possible for a king to govern his whole realm directly was then so alien to men’s minds that William believed it necessary to create regional commands of a similar type.
Fortunately for the monarchy, the very faithlessness of the great barons to whom they were assigned quickly led—with only two exceptions, the earldom of Chester on the Welsh marches, and the ecclesiastical principality of Durham on the Scottish border—to the suppression of these formidable political units. The kings continued to create earls from time to time; but in the counties whose names they bore, they were thenceforth confined to receiving a part of the proceeds of justice.
The actual exercise of judicial powers, the levying of troops, the collection of fiscal revenues, belonged to direct representatives of the king, called sheriffs. These men were not exactly officials in the usual sense.They farmed their office by paying a fixed sum to the royal treasury (at a time when economic conditions still precluded a salaried officialdom, this system was the only alternative to enfeoffment), and a fair number succeeded in making themselves hereditary. But this dangerous development was suddenly checked by the strong hand of the Angevin sovereigns. When in 1170 Henry II, at a single stroke, removed from office all the sheriffs in the kingdom, subjected their administration to an inquest, and reappointed only a few of them, it was plain to everyone that throughout England the king was master of those who governed in his name.
Because the public office was not completely identified with the fief, England was a truly unified state much earlier than any continental kingdom. Although in certain respects, no state was more completely feudal, the feudalism was of such a kind as ultimately to enhance the prestige of the crown. In this country where every piece of land was a tenement, the king was literally the lord of all the lords. Nowhere was the system of military fiefs more methodically applied. With armies so recruited the essential problem was, as we know, to get the direct vassals of the king or prince to bring with them to the host a sufficient number of those sub-vassals of whom the bulk of the army was necessarily composed. Now in the Norman duchy and subsequently on a much larger scale in England this figure, instead of being left to be decided (as was so often the case elsewhere) by a varying custom, or individual agreements that were more or less ill observed, was fixed once for all for each barony—at least as to the required minimum—by the central power. And since it was a recognized principle that almost every obligation to do something might be replaced by its equivalent in cash, the kings, from the early years of the twelfth century, adopted the practice of occasionally demanding from their tenants-in-chief, instead of soldiers, a tax assessed on the basis of the number of knights or (to use the contemporary expression) “shields” which they would have had to provide.
But this admirably planned feudal organization was linked with traditions derived from a more distant past. In the firm peace established, from the time of the occupation of the Neustrian counties, by the “dukes of the pirates” we can surely recognize the code of an army in cantonment, like those laws which the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus attributes to the legendary conqueror, King Frode.
Above all, we must not underrate the part played by the Anglo-Saxon heritage. The oath of fealty which in 1086 William required of all those in authority in England, “whose soever men they were”, and which his first two successors caused to be renewed—that pledge which transcended and took precedence of all ties of vassalage—was it after all anything else than the ancient oath of the subject, familiar to all the barbarian monarchies and practised by the kings of the West Saxon dynasty, as well as by the Carolingians? Weak as the Anglo-Saxon monarchy in its final period may have seemed, it had none the less been able to maintain—alone among all its contemporaries—a general tax which, from having served at first to pay ransom to the Danish invaders and then to supply the means to fight them, had acquired the name of “Danegeld”. In this extraordinary survival, which seems to presuppose in England a better monetary circulation than elsewhere, the Norman kings were to find a remarkably effective instrument. Finally, the persistence in England of the ancient courts of free men, associated in so many ways with the maintenance of public order—a Germanic institution if ever there was one—greatly favoured the maintenance and then the extension of royal justice and administrative authority.
Yet the strength of this complex monarchy was entirely relative, and here too the elements of disintegration were present. Service from the fiefs was more and more difficult to obtain because, while the royal government was capable of exercising some measure of coercion over its tenants-in-chief, it could not so easily reach down through them to the mass of often recalcitrant petty feudatories. The baronage was almost continually insubordinate, and from 1135 to 1154, during the long dynastic troubles of Stephen’s reign, the building of innumerable “adulterine” castles and the recognition of the hereditary position of the sheriffs, who sometimes united several counties under their domination and themselves bore the title of earls, seemed to proclaim the irresistible progress of disintegration.
Nevertheless, after the recovery which marked the reign of Henry II, the aim of the magnates in their rebellions was henceforth much less to tear the kingdom asunder than to dominate it. The knightly class, for its part, found in the county courts the opportunity to consolidate itself as a group and appoint its own representatives. The powerful kingship of the conquerors had not destroyed all other powers; but it had forced them to act, even when in opposition to it, only within the framework of the State.
5. NATIONALITIES
[MH: I have considerably shortened this section.]
To what extent were these states also nations or destined to become nations? Like every problem of group psychology, this question necessitates a careful distinction not only between periods but also between environments.
The growth of national sentiment was hardly possible among the most educated men. All that survived of culture worthy of the name took refuge till the twelfth century among a fraction of the clergy, and there was much in this legacy to alienate these intellectuals from what they would probably have treated as antiquated notions: for example the use of Latin, an international language, with the facilities for intellectual communication which flowed from it, and above all the cult of the great ideals of peace, piety, and unity, which in this world seemed to be embodied in the dual images of Christendom and Empire.
Gerbert, although a native of Aquitaine and a former dignitary of the church of Rheims (and therefore in a double capacity a subject of the king of France), certainly did not believe that he was betraying any essential duty by becoming—at the time when the successor of Charlemagne was a Saxon—“a soldier in the camp of Caesar”.
In order to discover the obscure foreshadowings of nationalism we must turn to groups of men more simple-minded and more prone to live in the present; not so much, indeed, to the popular masses, of whose state of mind we have no documentary evidence, as to the knightly classes and that half-educated section of the clergy which confined itself, in its writings, to reflecting with sharper emphasis the public opinion of the time.
As a reaction against romantic historiography, it has been the fashion among some recent historians to deny that the early centuries of the Middle Ages had any group consciousness at all, either national or racial. This is to forget that in the crude and naive form of antagonism to the stranger, the “outsider” (horsin), such sentiments did not require a very great refinement of mind. We know today that they manifested themselves in the period of the Germanic invasions with much more strength than Fustel de Coulanges, for example, believed. In the greatest example of conquest offered by the feudal era—that of Norman England—we see them clearly at work.
When the youngest son of William, Henry I, had by a characteristic gesture, judged it a shrewd move to marry a princess of the ancient dynasty of Wessex—of the “direct” line of England, as it was called by a monk of Canterbury—the Norman knights took a derisive pleasure in loading the royal couple with Saxon nicknames. But singing the praises of this marriage, about half a century later, in the reign of the grandson of Henry and Edith, a hagiographer wrote:
“Now England has a king of English race; it finds among the same race bishops, abbots, barons, brave knights, born of both seeds.”
The history of this assimilation, which is the history of English nationality, cannot be recounted here even in outline, owing to limitations of space. Leaving aside acts of conquest, it is within the boundaries of the former Frankish Empire, to the north of the Alps, that we must be content to examine the formation of national entities—the birth, so to speak, of France and Germany.
Here, of course, the tradition was unity—a relatively recent tradition, it is true, and to some extent an artificial one, as regards the Carolingian Empire as a whole; but within the narrower limits of the old regnum Francorum, many centuries old and based on a real community of civilization. However palpable the differences of manners and language at the lower levels of the population, it was the same aristocracy and the same clergy which had helped the Carolingians to govern the vast state from the Elbe to the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover it was these great families, linked by ties of kinship, which after 888 had provided the kingdoms and principalities resulting from the dismemberment with their rulers, who were only superficially national. Franks disputed the crown of Italy; a Bavarian had assumed that of Burgundy; the successor to theWest Frankish throne (Odo) was perhaps of Saxon origin. In the wanderings to which they were committed either by the policy of the kings (to whom they looked for rewards) or by their own ambitions, the magnates took with them a whole body of dependants; with the result that the vassal class itself shared this—so to speak—supra-provincial character. To contemporaries the laceration of the Empire in 840–843 naturally had the appearance of civil war. …
… All this had not been created by patriotism; but in the course of the second feudal age, which was characterized both by men’s need to group themselves in larger communities and by the clearer general consciousness of itself which society had acquired, patriotism became as it were the outward manifestation of these latent realities, and so in its turn the creator of new realities. Already, in a poem a little later than the Chanson de Roland, “no Frenchman is worth more than he” is the praise accorded to a knight particularly worthy of esteem. The age whose deeper history we are endeavouring to trace not only witnessed the formation of states; it also saw true fatherlands confirmed or established— though these were destined still to undergo many vicissitudes.
[END CHAPTER]
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