Exhibit category type 7 rank over status society.
The Source:
Timothy Reuter, ‘The Medieval Nobility in Twentieth-Century Historiography’, in Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley, Routledge 1997
[By the mid-twentieth century] what had once appeared to be an antiquarian sidetrack [the nobility], whose subject matter represented a brake on more progressive features of medieval life, now seemed all-pervasive and highly significant.
… Even areas of life formerly perceived as set apart from or opposed to the nobility—monasticism, for example, or early urban elites—revealed their aristocratic streak. … The realisation that nobility is a matter of consciousness as well as of being has been one of the most valuable insights of recent scholarship: nobility is not just an objective state but a state of mind, of Selbstverständnis (‘self-understanding’, ‘self-awareness’), a term which denotes the view held by a person or group of themselves (by contrast with the view of others or of the historian who perceives them).
Most of the surveys mentioned above dealt primarily with the period from the ninth to the mid-twelfth centuries, and this has certainly attracted the most attention and revealed the most uncertainties; but the nobilities of the time of the barbarian invasions or in the early Carolingian era have seemed almost equally in need of study. As will be seen, the nobilities of the later Middle Ages present rather different problems, and the following survey will concentrate largely on the period before 1250. It will be helpful to begin by examining the concepts and definitions of nobility available …
In virtually all societies visible to the medieval historian’s naked eye there is a ruling group (Oberschicht, ceti dirigenti, classe dirigeant), distinguished from the rest of society by its greatly superior economic resources and its ability to translate these into political power. Concomitant with this are a different lifestyle, mentality and status.
[FOOTNOTE: The only evident exception is medieval Iceland, and here it is far from clear whether the low degree of social stratification suggested by the sagas is fact or fiction. Other acephalous societies like pre-Carolingian Saxony and (probably) the Elbe Slavs were by no means egalitarian because acephalous.]
‘Ruling group’ or ‘class’ ought to be a sufficiently neutral term, but it evidently carries too many overtones of ‘class struggle’ for historians to feel comfortable with it, and it also says nothing about how the members of the group acquired their membership. Western European languages offer two other terms—nobility and aristocracy—which have been more generally used.
[FOOTNOTE: French: noblesse, aristocratie; German: Adel, Aristokratie; Italian: nobilità, aristocrazia; Spanish: nobleza, aristocracia. … For an example of the kind of imprecision which can all too easily arise see (REF): ‘A nobility is a group of persons in which membership is transmitted by fixed criteria, most often descent, while an aristocracy is less rigidly defined. Early medieval Europe had both a nobility and an aristocracy. Since no biologically closed group can perpetuate itself, the nobility had to be replenished by intermarrying with aristocratic families’.]
The terms ought to be used to distinguish between two different things. A noble is, strictly speaking, a person whose (normally privileged) status is legally defined, which means that one can be a noble without exercising power. An aristocrat, by contrast, is someone who exercises power as a result of being well-born in a socially rather than legally defined sense: this implies the inheritance of wealth, power and social (but not legal) status, and it does not preclude some degree of social mobility.
In practice the two terms [nobility/aristocracy] have rarely been distinguished in this way; they have been felt to overlap sufficiently to be interchangeable, and when they are found close together this is all too often mere stylistic variation. In so far as a distinction is observed, it is more one between a nobility as a set of individuals whose status is legally defined and an aristocracy as that same set perceived as a sociologically defined group.
In what follows the two terms will also be used as loosely interchangeable, but with the slight distinction just mentioned.
The reason for the terminological and definitional imprecision is simple: in practice, any distinction between a nobility and an aristocracy is hardly sustainable for the period before about 1250, nor is it present in the terminology used by the sources.
[FOOTNOTE: There is no precise equivalent of ‘aristocracy’ in the sources of the early and high Middle Ages; when these do not refer directly to nobiles they use terms like primores, optimates, maiores natu, principes, etc., best translated as ‘leading men’.]
The position later was somewhat clearer: at least in principle a firm legal distinction evolved between the English peerage and everybody else, while elsewhere also the nobility was legally defined as to both membership and status.
The ruling groups of the early and high Middle Ages were not. Some historians have wished to maintain the late medieval distinction and so to define early medieval elites as aristocracies rather than nobilities. Others have turned the distinction on its head: once status is defined by law, then a nobility is no longer as noble as it was.
[dict. sumptuary: denoting laws that limit private expenditure on food and personal items]
Definitions, like sumptuary legislation or the ‘creation’ of nobles, are a sign that nobility is no longer self-evident; legislation must protect the truly noble against de facto usurpations of their rights and standing. This has been a particularly convenient line of argument for those who have wished to talk of a nobility for an era or region where legal texts mention no such thing.
Thus the absence of any special Wergeld for ‘crimes’ against nobles in Lex Salica, it has been argued, shows not that there was no nobility in sixth-century Francia but rather that it was so powerful that it could refuse to admit a fixed tariff for offences against its members. Late medieval legal definitions certainly often went hand in hand with the ruler’s ability to create a noble, an ability whose very existence has been denied for the period 600–1100.
The idea that a nobility can be said to have existed even when a legal definition for it was lacking can thus be defended, but this has not made the historian’s task easier, for the undefinable still needs to be defined in some other way. Studies of words have turned out to be less helpful than might a priori have been expected. Etymology in particular is a poor historian: the roots of Adel-/Edel-words in the Germanic languages may suggest that the term was originally cognate with property, but that hardly shows much about the connotations of the words at the time when they were used in the sources we have to deal with, nor about their links with the words we find in Latin sources.
Synchronic surveys of usage have been more helpful: we are now reasonably well informed about the use of nobilis and its cognates in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian eras. However, this information reveals a wide spectrum of meaning for the word and hence reinforces caution. It is of little help in the interpretation of critical passages, where the danger remains that historians will simply hear the echoes of their own voices.
Two frequently cited passages from Carolingian texts illustrate this. The first is an answer given by Charlemagne (or in his name) to a royal official enquiring about the status of the children of a marriage between a free man and an unfree woman: it says simply ‘there is nothing other than free or slave’. This has been taken to show Charlemagne’s ‘policy’ (by implication, one of non-recognition) towards the nobility, even to prove that there was no such thing as a nobility in Carolingian Francia. Taken in context, however, it means simply that everyone must be either free or unfree—tertium non datur—and thus carries no implications about possible distinctions among the free.
The other passage is an accusation allegedly flung at Archbishop Ebo of Reims in 833: ‘The emperor made you a free man, but not a noble, for that is impossible’. Ebo had risen from being an imperial serf to high ecclesiastical office, having been manumitted by Louis the Pious on the way, whom he had now betrayed. The charge can be—and has been—read in a number of different ways: as implying that the emperor could not, as a question of right and law, ennoble; as implying that the emperor could not ennoble at all, for much the same reason that he could not make black white; or as implying that Ebo in particular was so ignoble in spirit that no one could have ennobled him.
The link between birth, privilege and power given by nobility must be considered together with the paradigm of medieval politics inherited from nineteenth-century constitutional historians. Particularly important here was the nature of royal power. Even in recent writing the king has often been identified with the state; it might be conceded that his powers were ultimately rooted in those of the ‘people’, but this is conceived of as an amorphous proto-democratic group of property-owners rather than a small number of aristocrats, while the king’s authority is seen as the source of all other legitimate ‘public’ power. Nobles, found both exercising extensive ‘public’ power and in opposition to the king, were thus almost automatically illegitimated. They might be perceived either as ‘feudal’, hence opposed to modernisation and progress, or as ‘particularist’, hence opposed to the king who was seen as the ancestor of the modern state … and so once more against modernisation and progress because hindering the formation of the nation. …
… The distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ power raises a much wider question, that of the concept of power with which medieval historians have operated and still operate. It is clear that medieval elites, however defined, exercised social, economic and political power over the rest of the population; but the relationship between these kinds of power and the power they held as members of the political community remains ill-defined, in spite of much discussion. …
… ‘Feudalism’, conceived of as a form of distribution of political, military and administrative power, has been sharply distinguished from private lordship over peasants or dependants (‘seigneurialism’) and it has generally been denied, often as a knee-jerk response, that there is any necessary link between the two, and more radically, that the former existed at all [includes ref. to Susan Reynolds’ famous argument]. …
The most articulate attacks on the view of noble ‘public’ power as essentially usurped and abused were made in … in the first half of the century. These reversed the traditional view, arguing that noble power was … innate ‘autochthonous’ (inborn), hence prior to and so at least as legitimate as royal power. …
… The initial way out, however, the assumption of ‘autochthonous’ noble rights and powers, has turned out to be difficult to demonstrate conclusively, and it has also been found not all that helpful as a tool for analysing the politics of the early and high Middle Ages. It is clear that throughout the period it was possible to view the public exercise of power as originating in its delegation to an official, who was hence rightfully subject to control and supervision from above [supporting] the modern view of legitimate power as derived from above.
Yet it is equally clear that those who opposed rulers or treated the ‘offices’ they held as if they owned them often did so with a strong sense of right … [though] not so much by the myth or reality of the distant origins of ‘autochthonous’ noble power alone, which contemporary sources in any case do not describe in such terms … There were thus (potentially) competing views on the origins and legitimacy of power rather than a single view. The functionalist style of argument as deployed by social scientists may help here: questions and indeed answers about the origins of a social practice (‘how did this practice come about?’) are irrelevant to a synchronic understanding of how it works in a given society at a given time (‘what is its function, how does it work now?’).
The approach which has been adopted in more recent work, often implicitly rather than explicitly, is to take noble power as given rather than to take a legitimist view as to who was on the right side … part of a more general paradigm shift. … The principal working assumption on which it rests is a view of medieval kingdoms as governed by largely cooperative oligarchies.
The success of rulers is not to be measured by the extent to which they could crush nobles or force them to do their will; rather, the normal forms of politics were cooperative and collective, and conflicts between rulers and nobles were exceptional rather than built into the system. Such trends have not been universal, and even in the 1990s there is no difficulty in finding historians who think and write in terms of Strong and Weak Kings (the Strong Kings being those who curb the power of the nobility) …
All this [subsequent debate Cold War, Marxism, post Cold War etc.] left little room for the luxury of questioning a simple equation of rulers’ interests with the common weal. …
The development of the paradigm has been made possible by the methodological assumption that a medieval polity should be defined not through its rules, whether written or unwritten, but in terms of its practices: the historian as constitutional lawyer has been replaced, though slowly and by no means completely, by the historian as sociologist or social anthropologist.
… The sociological approach … derives the rules from the practice … live with contradictions and tensions without feeling obliged to resolve them [as] lawful and unlawful. Such developments have been visible not just in historians’ attitudes to the relations between kings and nobles but also in their increased interest in such things as feud and dispute settlement or in rituals of all kinds, whether social or political.
A detailed examination of the role played by the medieval nobility both in the past and in current historiography must begin with genealogy and prosopography, for these supply historians with their raw material: without knowing something about people’s families, one cannot say much about whether they were new members of a ruling group or owed their membership of that group to birth. Genealogy … is still indispensable for a study of the nobility in any region or period, since it is impossible to discuss the links (or lack of them) between power, wealth and birth unless you have some knowledge of who was related to whom. … Prosopography [dict. description of social and family connections] seemed to fill the gap: tell me your … connections and I will predict what your behaviour must have been when I have no direct evidence for it, and explain it by them when I do. The historians of such disparate eras as Late Antiquity and sixteenth- or eighteenth-century England were seduced by its charm, and so also were medieval historians. …
… It has been peculiarly difficult to do either genealogy or prosopography for the period between the late fifth century and the late eleventh or early twelfth century, because of the name-giving habits then current. The multiple names used by the aristocracy of Roman antiquity, which identified both individuals and their membership of families, had dropped out of use … by about 600. For the next half-millennium almost everyone in Europe whose name we know at all carried a single name drawn either from a small fixed stock of Roman and biblical names or from a much larger and variable stock of Germanic, Celtic and Slavic names and name-elements. …
… Faced with the sea of uncertainty presented by single naming, historians were long forced to depend on casual (often also untestable or unreliable) mentions of relationships in charters and narrative sources in order to establish genealogies [e.g. written records of legal transactions or church records] … When traditional genealogy did exploit such material it often relied on unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable guesswork in order to do so, and the results were often hardly more than fantasy. …
[Omitted above and below extensive discussion of the difficulties of tracing descent.]
… There has thus been a tendency in more recent work to put aside the question of origins, and simply examine actions and attitudes.
After all, even if the principes of post-Carolingian Francia were indeed all descended from Carolingian noble families, the political situation in which they operated was post-Carolingian; contrariwise, even if all the families of the new principes had in fact been descended from crossbowmen or pedlars and owed their rise to virtus rather than nobilitas (in modern terms meritocratic rather than aristocratic), the second generation would still have constituted a ruling elite within the same post-Carolingian framework.
One thing apparent in the behaviour of all those who are or were said to have ‘risen from the dust’, or at least of those who having risen succeeded in staying risen, was their determination to shake the dust from their shoes, to behave in established ways rather than establish new ways of behaving.
Questions of aristocratic origins have thus not completely lost their interest, but the explicit sources dealing with them are now examined more as interesting in themselves and for the period in which they were written than for their information about the period to which they refer, much as the works of the great medieval historians are now studied as much as records of their authors’ minds as for their ‘factual information’.
… A number of key points have [recently] emerged. First, historians have noted the clericalization of the warrior ethos. This is apparent not only from the development of ecclesiastical rituals for blessing arms and those who carry them, including a rite for the making of what would slowly come to be called a knight (miles, Ritter, chevalier), but also from the appearance of a tripartite scheme for the division of society into ‘those who fight, those who plough and those who pray’, which occurs sporadically from the late ninth century and more continuously from the early eleventh century.
This cut across not only socially or legally defined class divisions, but also the traditional Christian division between clerical and lay; and it legitimised and at the same time sought to control and restrain fighting as an activity.
Second, and closely linked with this, historians have noted the merging of the two groups, nobiles and milites (nobles and warriors).
This took a number of different forms. From the late tenth century onwards nobles used or were given the title miles (‘soldier’, ‘warrior’), which had previously applied to the fighting men of their followings, whether free or unfree.
As early as the ninth century there is evidence that entry into adult noble life was marked by a (secular) ceremony conferring arms, and with the development of more formal ecclesiastical rites of dubbing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries entry not only into what came to be the profession of knighthood but also into the ranks of the nobility was often marked by such a ceremony.
This cut two ways, however: if the nobiles became milites, the milites equally became nobiles, for the ceremonies applied just as much to the sons of kings and established nobles and princes as they did to those who had genuinely risen socially.
… the general European tend, which with some time-lag extended even beyond the boundaries of the former Roman Empire, was towards a merger of the groups of nobiles and milites, complete in most of Europe by the later Middle Ages and in some parts of Europe considerably earlier.
The merger did not anywhere make a mere knight the equal of a prince or a king’s son in all things, but it did make the two at least for some purposes members of a group set apart from the rest of society, a group which came to have a common identity, interests and ethos. This merger … also created tensions and status anxieties.
Both the comparative fluidity of knighthood in its early phases and the possibility of assuming noble status by using economic resources to pursue a noble way of life led to reactions on the part of the now expanded noble class: entry into knighthood came to be more tightly controlled, and sumptuary legislation aimed at preventing the tacit assumption of noble status, though no doubt it was often unsuccessful in doing so. …
… Not only is the existence of a broad though internally subdivided class of nobles one of the fundamental features of the society of the ancien régime in Europe between the middle of the thirteenth century and the French Revolution; there are also obvious links here with the emergence not only of a courtly literature but also of a courtly way of life and a chivalric code of conduct.
The specific rite of passage which defined and controlled entry into the group conferred not only status but also obligations.
The duties ascribed to ‘those who fight’ … were those which before the emergence of knighthood had been ascribed to kings: the protection of the poor and the defenceless, meaning widows, orphans and the Church. Holy war against the enemies of Christianity, as practised above all in the crusades, was merely a logical extension of this.
Imitation of kingship was visible in other ways as well. Just as to be chivalrous you need a horse (cheval), so to live the courtly way of life you need a court, and the study of the court in the high and late Middle Ages, both as an institution and as a way of life, has received much attention from medieval historians in recent decades. The palaces and residences established by rulers came to be imitated by princes and lesser men.
Indeed, such visible symbols of power were perhaps more important for lesser nobles, for whereas kings and princes could derive their self-understanding from their kingdoms and principalities, lesser nobles from the eleventh century on … defined it in terms of their ‘family seat’, a castle or aristocratic country house …
… Only of the nobility in the social, political and cultural history of the later European Middle Ages can we say that the study of the subject has been truly Europe-wide.
Here the exponential growth in the quantity and quality of evidence available from the twelfth century onwards in most regions of Europe has made a change of focus both possible and essential. A single princely family, even a single aristocrat, in the later Middle Ages can, often be studied in a depth simply inconceivable for earlier centuries.
Even studies of lesser nobles often have to proceed by examining a selected group rather than a whole class. The mass of material in the archives also means that there is still a great deal of positivist slogging to be done, of establishing who did what and to whom. Late medieval historiography is therefore still regionalistic, particularist and nominalist, and on the whole its practitioners address themselves to colleagues working within the same region rather than to a wider professional public.
The question of whether a nobility existed (and if so, what its nature was) is here not seriously at issue; hence the nobilities of later medieval Europe are simply part of the historiographical landscape. …
… Two issues have dominated. The first is the question of nobles’ relation to their king or prince, in other words of the legitimacy of their political behaviour and aspirations, and here the discussion has proceeded along lines very similar to those we have already noted for the early and high Middle Ages.
The second … is the idea that there was a general late medieval ‘crisis of the nobility’. This in turn is linked with the more general issue of how far there was a late medieval economic and social crisis, to use an overworked but perhaps necessary term. Such a linkage also shows that the study of the nobilities of later medieval Europe has a different quality to that of its counterpart for the period before about 1250: the density and variety of evidence available makes possible a view of the society as a whole in a way found only for brief periods in restricted regions in the earlier era.
The fruitful element of tension provided by the uncertainty about the status and nature of the nobility for so many different aspects of the historiography of the earlier Middle Ages is much less evident for that of the later Middle Ages: the nobility is, to change the metaphor, bread and butter rather than caviar.
Attention to noble consciousness and noble being is no longer one of the few available means to avoid being forced to perceive the world medievalists study as one which consisted largely of kings and saints.
[FOOTNOTE IN TITLE: I should like to thank Chris Wickham for incisive and helpful comments on an earlier draft.]
[END of Chapter 10]
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