The literature on the European societies of the middle ages is permeated with the notion of something struggling to become something else. Until recently this end point has usually been described as the ‘modern state’. Historians are now more sceptical and less inclined to claim that ‘states’ did indeed emerge in medieval Europe. And obviously all claims relating to the earliest origins of states in Europe by the year 1500 give the lie to premature identifications of city-states and territorial states in the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and, later, China. We encountered this quest for the holy grail of ‘state’ previously in the histories of emergent ‘administered societies’. I then argued in favour of various alternative terms that more realistically describe ancient centralised, hierarchical governance cores, among which ‘polities’, ‘governed territorial units’, and ‘tiered settlement systems’.
My starting point is simple. The definition of ‘state’ or ‘modern state’ should derive from understanding the state as we know it today so that we can then reach back in time for the elements that produced its formation. My definition of ‘state’ is one that cannot be applied to any of the medieval territories that will now receive our attention.
The state was in an abstract sense correctly conceived (a better term might be ‘imagined’) by medieval scholars and political philosophers as the territorial unit for governance that was responsible for the pursuit and representation of ‘common good’ or ‘common utility’ summarised in a Latin term ‘status’. The relevance of medieval ‘status’ lies, for present purposes, in my conceptual distinction between ‘status’ and ‘rank’ and in the ways highly ranked individuals sought to justify their personal and discretionary authority with recourse to the writings of scholars and philosophers—lay and clerical—who devised doctrines for an underlying public utility of state. It is paradoxically true that medieval writings on status and related conceptions of public law as opposed to private law did eventually inform the thinking of post-medieval seventeenth and eighteenth century practitioners and ideologues during their more definitionally valid and genuinely articulated state formations. But in medieval times and in the most practical terms we must make do in the introductions with facts on the ground, i.e. with realities of governance rather than with doctrines and ideals.
Every state requires coexistence and functional interaction of three organisational spheres: administration, law, and representation. There were certain developments in medieval European governance that clearly were requisite for state formation. There was a large amount of formal law making, some original—based on local custom—but mostly as a direct outgrowth of previously codified Roman law. Law became more necessary than ever for maintaining and expanding the arrayed forms of rulership that characterised European polities. Similarly there were visible and recorded advances in administration which depended on writing and innovative methods of organising hierocratic and secular rulership. Advances in ‘representation’ were by comparison far more modest. In no shape or form can medieval societies be conceived as having progressed to the kinds of representation pioneered in the early modern polities. Yet in organisational terms representation certainly broke new ground in the middle ages. Therefore, in each administrative or legal or representational sphere there are to be found medieval formations of state-like features which demand attention.
Looking ahead in time within the context of my general typology of societies I have made an assumption that the integration of the lineaments of ‘state’ only became apparent in early modernity as a result of constitutional revolutions that deprived monarchial executives of their personal legislative mandates—and other powers, such the lordly monopoly of organised violence—by empowering more or less genuinely ‘free’ representative parliaments and by setting in train processes that then led to the further ‘separations’ by means of which multiple and overlapping judiciaries became single independent institutions on their own account. These epochal evolutions that were initiated in England are to be examined under a heading of ‘modern society’.
Therefore I have approached the medieval period with an assumption that the modern states corresponding to modern societies are systems of interacting institutions in the absence of one exclusive centre of power. This absence of a central control is also by definition the nature of a ‘system’. By having created a decentred state consisting of three more or less equally powerful and functionally specialised institutions of state, a society becomes a mechanism for interaction which lacks a unipolar centre and yet is—or at least should and could be—solidly governed by the system of the state.
In the course of surveying the nature of medieval polities I hope to show again (the equivalent argument having already been made for Rome) that ‘system’ phenomena are not unique to states. Systems of governance are not preconditioned by territory-based cohesion or perfect synergy between the spheres of administration, law, and political representation. Once this insight is properly understood it becomes easier to appreciate the relative ease with which separations of power have been and could be made to work on behalf of today’s ever more complexly ‘demand-driven’ polities.
To categorise the predominant single type of society of the European middle ages in sociological terms I begin by identifying a singular continuous ‘common element’ for the period among the broadest conceivable and more or less continuously active units or arenas of territorial governance, which arguably can be reduced to three subtypes.
Of the three ‘unit’ types two are big and historically unique to the West: the largest legal-administrative organisation, the Latin church, and, secondly, the largest systemic association, the Holy Roman Empire. For purposes of tracing the evolutionary origins of medieval social rankings both units can be productively patterned forward in time from Carolingian antecedents. The third unit type is then accounted for by ubiquitous continuous proliferation of plethoras of fragmented autonomous lordship kingdoms throughout Europe during 600 years following the breakup of the Carolingian empire.
I analyse these one by one. A fourth type—the English type—will be dealt with separately as the topic to introduce early modern transition. The small England polity became differently ‘solid’ in its administration, law, representation, and doctrines.
The singular continuous ‘common element’, on the other hand, is the aristocratic class or nobility and their (potentially or initially) non-progenitorial appointed counterparts—the latter include consuls, town councillors, merchants, and all the ‘officials’ who as a result of variable motivations were awarded positions of rulership in administration and adjudication regardless of prior or consequent blood lines and heritability. This common element needs a name and explanation. If sociopolitical and socioeconomic ranking is the defining feature of European middle ages it must be seen to fit logically into the general typological framework of a 40,000 year history and theory of society.
Before naming this common element I should further clarify the argument that there emerged a ‘new type of society’ in—broadly speaking—the European middle ages. As in all the previous ‘types’ the question to answer is — ‘what is the thing that is new?’.
In my earlier definition of ‘state’ I noted—without any implication of there being an historically necessary sequence of development—that administration is the first element, law the second element, and representation the third element. (Today the priority of developing countries must be to build and strengthen rule of law). Because an earlier type of society has already been labelled ‘administered society’ (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and given that the developmental path is almost universally presented as a journey to ‘becoming’ a modern state (in our schema, ‘modern society’) and since the intervening types of society are already categorised as ‘participatory’ (in Rome/Greece) and ‘peripheralised’ (through the administration of empires), with ‘participation’ being logically subsumed in the usually poorly defined dimension of ‘representation’, an impression could easily arise that after ticking the boxes of variables one by one the only element missing from our schema is law or rule of law. That would be wrong.
Rules of custom and convention became codified as (Roman) laws before the Common Era began. Even before Rome we found that legal liability, inheritance, and property rights were systematically recorded as far back in history as 2nd and 3rd millennium Mesopotamia. In the middle ages there was nothing ‘new’ in ‘law’ per se. Nor was ‘representation’ new, not even in ancient Greece or Rome. Representation began as campfire consultation and consensus-building within or among hunter gatherer tribes, and evolved into the prehistoric village assemblies where elders convened discussions about crop rotation, storage, irrigation. Assemblies in Europe 500-1000 were sometimes more specialised (e.g. convened to adjudicate a case or negotiate a tax) but remained procedurally similar to prehistoric assemblies, largely in terms of functions of legitimation and displays of unity and consensus. As foreshadowed earlier, the start of the transition from ranked to functionally differentiated society (medieval to early modern) was first revealed in moves toward ‘free representation’.
A more contentious claim —requiring historical validation—is that the only ‘new’ factor in post-Roman medieval Europe was the nature and function of social rank.
The Romans formalised binary core rankings and multilayered peripheral rankings on an unprecedented scale as the most efficient means for maintaining social order and organising administration and soldiering. In practice the actual execution of ranking policy was through mechanisms of patronage and clientelism, yet there was an effort to justify appointments systematically according to predetermined criteria of merit and eligibility that consciously sought to give the impression of impersonality. One might justifiably conclude that the Roman ranking order was centrally planned. There were rule books that needed to be followed. In the medieval period the organisational Latin church similarly planned its own internal rankings as structures. But in neither the Latin church nor the Roman republic and empire could it be said that rankings were the distinguishing feature of their organisation or their society. Even had Roman ranking evolved organically, which to some extent it did, these arrangements of ranks never constituted the ‘essential distinctiveness’ of Roman or imperial society.
The peculiarly distinctive nature of medieval society, as I wish to demonstrate, was that ranking arrangements evolved through unprecedentedly organic multiplication and diversification. The covert nature of underlying patron-clientelism characteristic of the earlier societies now became an overt public good to be pursued and shamelessly displayed for oneself and for society. Though ‘status’ philosophies of the general public good were eclipsed by the practicalities of the private good, it often transpired that the latter were not at variance with the common good. As in Roman emperorship it was desirable throughout the middle ages that personal power at the apex of every territorial governance be presented as a god-sanctioned appointment. Similarly, although mechanisms existed for the representation of views, specialised advice-giving and consultation among the highest ranks, no one pretended input in the decisional process was unranked, free and equal, or that participatory approval from below was needed or desirable. Likewise, there were many varied justifications for political action based on rationalisations of general goodness and individualistic godliness in pursuit of administrative-military territorial expansion. Nor, finally, was there ever any apparent functional imperative to prevent the arbitrariness inherent in extreme personalisations of central power. The consequence, however, was a dynamic form of society with internal and external checks and balances that survived continual fragmentations of power and civil wars, and plagues, and whose economies grew.
What I aim to reveal in this examination of medieval pan-territorial organisations and systems, and in the territorial fragmentation of personalistic polities, is that everything concerning evolutionary factors of economy, administration, law, and representation revolved around rank mobility. Even the organisationally ‘horizontal’ phenomena of decision making in the Holy Roman Empire were instigated and built hierarchically by movers and shakers of social action among the higher ranks. Even the ‘communes’ of Italian cities were associations of the ‘leading men’. Everything of consequence to the ordering and shaping of change depended transparently on highly individualised and progressively more intricate ritualistic-ceremonial layerings of official power-holding offices through blood ties and/or patronage by the prominent households.
Despite being hierarchical internally the ranking orders of medieval polities corresponding to each sector of political or economic activity were multitudinous, evolutionary, self-generating, proliferate, overlapping, astonishingly diverse and surprisingly inclusive. High-person ‘y’ could simultaneously belong to several functionally specialised ranking hierarchies at different positions in the ranking scale and yet be equalled or outranked by high-person ‘z’ in one but not another. The ‘new’ factor in medieval society was the priority all decision makers gave to disbursed and duplicative motivational differentiations by ranks in virtually all aspects of life.
Year by year and territory by territory it fast becomes evident that none of the much discussed features of domestic and political life, religion, labour, land tenure, taxation, warfare, and modes of production in medieval Europe were ‘new’. Universities did not have a future-oriented pan-societal impact but provided doctrinal or legal-clerical support for existing institutions. There was no scientific or economic revolution, and no fundamental discontinuity in cognition. Dynamism was to be found instead in individualistic and entrepreneurial ranking orders. In the medium term (500+ years) societies survived on the unstable dynamic of obsessive ranking, and on the obsessive religiosity which seems to have been its essential accessory for salving the souls.
We know in hindsight that this model of structured inequality could not be sustained. It bridged the period between the collapse of the Roman empire and the final coming of a more balanced secular and meritocratic management of power which generated free institutions and encouraged scientific, industrial and democratic revolutions.
[Aside: Without wishing to go to extremes (dark ages, age of chaos, etc.) it should be noted that prehistoric societies were pervasive and even dominant in areas within the landmass of ‘medieval Europe’ as late as the 10th century, notably in the northern latitudes where units of whole governance were self-sufficient villages in absence of any unifying organised religious, economic, or military force, and where the locus of power was the quasi-egalitarian assembly or the negotiable and escapable authority of chiefs constrained internally by clan loyalty and externally by bordering chiefdoms.]
In other words, we begin with the individual person, much as we have in the previous discussions outlining the fundamentals of six types of society. Remarkably, in this 7th typological category the focus on the individual does not naturally lead into a higher-level focus on governance group or governance core but rather stays fixedly and in respects atavistically upon the individual and household. That should not of course distract us from fully accounting for the real and constant reform innovations in the mechanisms of governance, while remaining cognisant of the simple historical fact that administration, law, and representation were all far older innovations. Only by isolating organisational and system dynamics and their corresponding and coevolving collegial and pre-collegial forms of rulership and enterprise will we be able to identify the unique progressive and developmental features of ‘rank differentiation’ societies.
It remains only to discuss the terminology I will use to bring the medieval ‘newness’ to life. The most commonly used terms to describe the ‘elite’ or the ‘ruling classes’ in medieval Europe are ‘aristocracy’ and ‘nobility’. Both words are strongly suggestive of hereditary rights to rule by family descent. The term ‘ruling class’ carries with it the old baggage of Marxism. Strictly speaking ‘class’ is a market-based economic rather than social or political concept. The term ‘elite’ is of 18th century French origin. The élite is voluntaristic in the sense of ‘selection’, deriving from élire, ‘to elect’, neither of which are comprehensive enough in their application. On the other hand, however, in the same way that ‘state’ should be defined by what it ‘became’ in modernity, so ‘elite’ can be utilised as an accurate descriptor in medieval contexts in the form it now takes in modern parlance, i.e. a select group that is ‘superior’ in power and influence, with an emphasis on ‘rankings’ of privilege and monopolistic sociopolitical power.
If it were not for the ‘maleness’ of its connotation I would prefer words deriving from the Latin ‘magnat’, literally ‘great man’. The reason for using the word ‘magnate’ and its derivatives is that it describes high rank without requiring or suggesting power by birthright. One can become a magnate over the course of a lifetime, and many ‘leading men’ of the middle ages acquired their rights and great titles to rule or to officiate at the highest levels without necessarily acquiring family rights to these titles. Bishops are called ‘magnates’ by virtue of their large-scale ownership of lands. Bishops often became bishops as family members of the nobility or aristocracy, but the position of bishop was rarely if ever hereditary (appropriately given celibacy vows imposed by the church). Much the same applies for abbesses of abbeys. There were many more kings than queens on medieval thrones but it is the case that females could—in explicit or implicit ranking terms—be the equal, second, or real power behind the throne. In his Medieval Europe Chris Wickham identifies how women could become “autonomous protagonists” both utilising and allocating rights of privilege and political power.
If employing the word ‘magnate’ three considerations should be kept in mind.
Firstly, the encompassing terms ‘magnateship’ (status or rank of being a magnate) and ‘magnatical’ (being lordly) are recognised in the source material (though I would claim there are sound reasons for preferring the word ‘magnatism’ over ‘magnateship’).
Secondly, everyone from kings to councillors fall naturally and by definition correctly into the broad category of ‘magnate’, regardless of whether they were aristocrats or nobles, or commoners who for a variety of reasons were appointed to high office.
Thirdly, kings and queens were invariably selected or self-selected for their office of lordship and ladyship because they were already classified magnates or nobles. One of the central motivations for the behaviour and actions of lords, kings, or magnates was their awareness that many people around them had similar or identical backgrounds (as nobles, aristocrats, or magnates) and therefore possessed more or less legitimate ‘rights’ of usurpation. The fluctuating fortunes and fragmentations lordships during this period were intimately connected with mobility of rank among the magnates.
In the final analysis it is advisable to work out terminological priorities according to the contexts of rank acquisition and rank mobility based on an essential prior insight: this was an age of individualised social rank. In the literature the word usually used when discussing and identifying the nature and consequence of rank is ‘aristocracy’, and many a book section or chapter has this word as its heading. Realistically, it does remain the case that blood lines were overall the decisive factor in acquiring ultimate powers to allocate rank to ‘commoners’. And it is an age and a society that ends with the structural taming of the ‘aristocracy’ by the constitutional institutions of nascent early modern state system. Medieval society thus returns us categorically to the first society of individual differentiation (person over person). The difference is that individualised rank in medieval societies is allocated by the poles and polarities of social force rather than by the naturally embodied forces of sex, age, physical strength, intelligence, charisma and other personality trait that may be said to be biologically given.
MH: These are early drafts for my evolving book History & Theory of Society.
Frescoes of the Good and Bad Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (date: 1339)
… And always keeping in mind the classics.
Every society based on social rank is ordered conventionally, through the regulation of life conduct; this therefore creates irrational conditions for consumption. This obstructs the free formation of markets, through monopolistic appropriation, and by obstructing the free disposition of individuals’ capacities to engage in gainful activity on their own account.
Max Weber, Economy and Society
There is some justification, I think, for saying that the followers of medieval doctrine … were confined, to a very large extent, to what might be called the upper strata of society. … It was only a rather thin upper crust of society in which the purely abstract doctrine had gained a firm foot hold. … The fact remains that although one might well be tempted to doubt not only the correctness but also the actual social relevance of that pure doctrine which saw the individual merely as a recipient of favours and which gave him no constitutional standing or autonomous function within society itself, it is, I think, rather necessary to recognize the gulf separating government and governed, a gulf easily recognisable precisely because the individual had not been accorded the status of a citizen. There was not merely a social stratification virtually amounting to an isolation between the two estates on the one hand and the rest of mankind on the other hand; there was also a quite noticeable distinction concerning the conduct of affairs in the socially privileged ranks of society and in the lower regions. … If one wishes to understand why and how it came about that from the late thirteenth century the individual gradually emerged as a full-fledged citizen, it would seem profitable to look at two rather practical facets of medieval society: on the one hand, the manner in which those far away from the gaze of official governments conducted their own affairs and, on the other hand, the feudal form of government which was practiced all over Europe.
Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages
I do not believe that it is too reckless to assert that the basic idea that government should limit the freedom of the individual as little as the general welfare permits, comes from the feudal warrior's insistence on his freedom from restraint. The feudal system fostered individual liberty.
Sidney Painter, Feudalism and Liberty
In the absence then of a strong state, of blood ties capable of dominating the whole life and of an economic system founded upon money payments there grew up in Carolingian and post-Carolingian society relations of man to man of a peculiar type. The superior individual granted his protection and divers material advantages that assured a subsistence to the dependent directly or indirectly; the inferior pledged various prestations or various services and was under a general obligation to render aid. These relations were not always freely assumed nor did they imply a universally satisfactory equilibrium between the two parties. Built upon authority, the feudal regime never ceased to contain a great number of constraints, violences and abuses. However, this idea of the personal bond, hierarchic and synallagmatic in character, dominated European feudalism. [MH: ‘Synallagmatic’: each party to the contract is bound to provide something to the other party.]
Marc Bloch, ‘European Feudalism’, in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory
Roxanne Receiving Her Husband's Crown, by Il Sodoma (date 1519)
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