Exhibit category type 7 European medieval rank over status society. Now skipping through later periods and territories to double-check sustainability of type 7 thesis✔️
The Source:
Andrew M. Spencer, Nobility and Kingship in Medieval England: the Earls and Edward I, 1272–1307, Cambridge University Press 2014
INTRODUCTION
A history of the politics of the reign of a medieval king that is told without the nobility at the heart would be, if not quite Hamlet without the prince, then the History Plays without the nobles. In some of these, it is not always easy to tell which character is which and what is the motivation of each. Without them, however, little would happen and less would make sense. A king’s relations with his nobility, and particularly his earls, who were the greatest nobles in the kingdom, did more to shape his reign than perhaps anything else, as is clear from Shakespeare’s dramas. As T. F. Tout put it, ‘[e]ven in the hands of a dull and commonplace person – provided that he were but brave and strenuous — the dignity of an earl was so great that it could not but exercise immense weight’.
Edward II’s failure to meet the aspirations of his nobility fatally hampered his kingship. The clash between Richard II’s view of kingship and that of his nobles blighted his reign and eventually brought him down. Henry III’s personality never inspired confidence among his nobles and eventually convinced them that the kingdom would be better off under their stewardship. It was the breakdown in relations between King John and his nobles that led to Magna Carta. Conversely, the military and domestic successes of Edward III and HenryV can be attributed in no small part to their ability to carry their nobles with them and to put them to work in the interests of the crown.
It was K. B. McFarlane who first recognised that in the relationship of nobles and crown, so central to medieval politics, the interests of the crown and the nobles were not naturally at odds with each other and that quarrels between kings and nobles were not the product of an unending struggle between natural enemies, but rather specific failures of kingship by monarchs such as Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI. …
CONCLUSION
When even they [the earls and barons], like the king, are without bridle, then will the subjects cry out and say ‘… bind fast their jaws in rein and bridle.’
Bracton, De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliæ
In his reign Edward I did indeed seek to bridle his nobility, and they … saw the wisdom of renewed royal authority … Edward bridled his earls not through ‘confrontation and compulsion’ but by the simple, though skilful, application of carrot and stick. He rewarded good service, he sought their counsel and their company, he offered them internal peace, justice and arbitration in their quarrels and he strove to bind them more closely to the crown and its purposes. In this he presaged the policy and achievements of his grandson and laid the foundations for the service nobility of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Under a less skilful monarch than Edward I, the combination of a vigorous king with powerful ideas about the nature and scope of royal authority and nobles used to throwing their weight about and getting their own way could have been an explosive cocktail. Edward’s great achievement was to avoid this and to co-opt his earls so successfully. … Earl Warenne articulated the comital vision of the earls’ role in society as the king’s ‘partners and co-workers’.
Edward I’s greatness lay in offering them partnership with him, while ensuring that, at the same time, in Bracton’s phrase, ‘qui socium habet, habet magistrum’ [He who has a partner has a teacher/master]. In his reign, Edward ensured that it was he who was the master carrying his partners’ bridle and not vice versa.
Having thus summarised the relationship between Edward and his earls, it is worth reflecting again on the challenges facing both nobility and kingship at the start of Edward I’s reign and asking how both of them stood at the end of his life. Taking kingship first … Edward I … applied … one big idea: the restoration of the power and authority of the English monarchy on every front …
… Through parliaments Edward was able not only to foster a sense of political unity and promote the image of a listening and responsive monarchy but also to solve the chronic financial problems of Henry III’s reign by his own much better financial management and by obtaining regular parliamentary taxation to pay for the crown’s military and diplomatic policies. Edward’s legislation, agreed and promulgated in these parliaments, was not just restorative but expansionist, extending the reach and authority of the crown in … different directions.
Likewise, the financial, material and manpower needs of the crown after the outbreak of war with France in 1294 began a further expansion of the role and reach of royal government, which was to have profound consequences for English law and government in the later middle ages.
By strengthening the relationship between the crown and the gentry, by further extending the local reach of the king’s government and by investing so much royal capital in parliaments in return for regular supply, Edward I was laying the foundations of the late medieval English monarchy, even if he would not have approved of some of its features, notably the devolution of so much governance to the localities. …
… The harmonious relationship Edward I had enjoyed with the gentry began to unravel in the last decade of the reign under the strain of his military and financial demands. The problem of matching what the crown wanted with what the gentry were prepared to give was not a new one but was now becoming even more acute as the crown was forced to rely ever more upon the gentry for governance, supply and military service. Through his intransigence and duplicity in the last ten years of his reign, Edward I poisoned the well of goodwill that he had created during the previous quarter-century of good rule. …
… One might say that the challenges that had been overcome were those of the high middle ages, those yet to be solved were of the later middle ages. …
… A crucial part of the late medieval polity was, of course, the nobility, and here too Edward’s reign marked an important stage in their development. David Crouch has written that the thirteenth century was a time of ‘aristocratic self-confidence and strength’, and there is much to commend this idea. The nobility had imposed Magna Carta on a reluctant King John and sought to depose him when he repudiated it. Under Henry III, they had been given a largely free hand by a king wary of provoking them as his father had done, and, in 1258, felt confident, and exasperated, enough to reduce the king to a cipher and run the country themselves.
Noble confidence in the mid-thirteenth century was perhaps summed up by the reported comment of Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, when confronted by Henry III in 1249 for his illegal order to seize the count of Guisnes … Norfolk … had ordered his men to arrest the count when ‘crossing through my land’. His justification was spurious but demonstrates the lofty position he assumed earls held in England at this time … Norfolk was claiming equality in terms of tenure and authority with the much more powerful, independent and territorially compact counts of France. His claim to be ‘comes ut ipse’ [I am an earl as he is] was untrue insofar as it related to actual power, as he and everyone hearing it must have known, but that he was proud enough to make it says much about the self-image of the English earls under Henry III.
Such confidence, however, was undoubtedly shaken by the events of 1258–65 [crisis and humiliation of King Henry III versus Simon de Montfort] that revealed two things to the magnates.
First, that they [magnates] could not run the country themselves. Differing visions about the nature and pace of reform had quickly emerged among the leaders of the 1258 revolution, differences that had eventually released terrifying violence and resulted in the supreme rule of one magnate, Simon de Montfort, as a quasi-king with no respect for his opponents’ lands or traditional areas of influence. The internecine quarrels among the nobility and the period of Montfortian rule reminded the magnates why effective royal power was both necessary and desirable.
Second, they had been forced to recognise and address the grievances of the gentry who had felt themselves oppressed by baronial as much as royal officials in the years before 1258. As has been seen, under Edward I things were to change.
While Edward had offered his nobility much in the way of personal and political inducements, this was not free of pain for them. Through … statute, he forced them to accept that the authority that went with their lands was delegated, as with the land itself, from the crown and did not originate in their ancestors’ exploits at the time of the Norman Conquest.
On a more practical level … the king’s determination to stop the rot of usurpations, withdrawal from royal jurisdiction and private feuding that had characterised the nobility’s behaviour during much of both the indulgent years of Henry III’s personal rule and the chaos of the period of Reform and Rebellion.
At the same time as they were coming under scrutiny from above, the nobility were also feeling pressure from below, from a gentry who, under Henry III, were finding their political voice and who had many grievances about the behaviour of magnates, particularly their officials. For the time being, the earls of Edward I had been able to rely on the trusted methods of the thirteenth century to bolster and protect their local power by trying to filter the crown’s access to the localities and the localities to the crown, but these techniques could not long survive the further expansion of royal government begun after the outbreak of war in 1294.
A crown so greatly in need of the resources of its subjects to fight its wars could not permit the restraint or exclusion of its agents by the nobility. If the nobility were to maintain their local power and authority, they needed to engage more closely and more positively with both royal government and their gentry neighbours than they had been accustomed to doing for a long time.
By the end of Edward I’s reign it was no longer clear that the methods of the thirteenth century would continue to be effective for the nobility.The expansion of the power and influence of both the crown and the gentry as the fourteenth century developed meant that the ‘bastard feudal’ control of local public offices by the agents of the nobility would begin to become part of the normal functioning of local society. …
[MH: Until now I had thought of ‘bastard feudalism’, sometimes also called ‘state feudalism’, as a disputed concept describing widespread informal appropriation of levers of public power e.g. finance, administrative offices and law by localised lordships acting as cellular kinglets over local gentries, effectively disempowering the single-central royal public order. The evidence in this book seems to emphasise its progressive form and function. I will return to topic and book later.]
… The evidence presented in this book suggests that, though the thirteenth-century nobility were using many of the techniques of ‘bastard feudalism’ and were no longer restricting their search for service to their feudal tenants, if indeed they ever had, they were emphatically not engaging with royal law and administration in the way in which their successors in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did, or in the way in which thirteenth-century historians of ‘bastard feudalism’ have assumed they did.
The service nobility of the later middle ages was integrated into the systems of royal law, administration and war in a manner unknown in the thirteenth century or, indeed, at any time since the late Anglo-Saxon period.
This is not to say, of course, that the nobility had no role in this period.They were always prominent in war and counsel and were expected to help keep order in the localities but their role in supervising local government, so prominent in the late Anglo-Saxon period, was massively restricted within a generation of the Conquest. After a long period of more than two centuries, where the nobility’s direct role in local government was, for the most part, limited except for emergencies, things began to change.
The nobility in general, and the earls in particular, became an essential component in the late medieval polity, not some malignant force corrupting it from the outside.
‘Bastard feudalism’ was thus a vital part of the late medieval system of government, not an aberration from it.
That is not to say, of course, that the system was perfect by any means. It assuredly was not. For most of the time, however, and in most places it rubbed along reasonably well, which was as much as could be hoped for in a pre-modern (or indeed a modern) world. It is important to emphasise, of course, that in offering themselves as the link between the centre and the localities magnates were not acting disinterestedly or altruistically.They had their own interests to defend. To protect and enhance their power, both locally and at the centre, they needed to demonstrate their indispensability both to the king and to their neighbours.
Conversely, the crown had to delegate (though importantly not reduce) its authority to the localities for law and administration to function effectively and the nobility were able to seize the opportunity to act as the conduit between the centre and the periphery in the way described above, and thereby protect their own position at the same time by promoting the interests of both the crown and the members of their affinity. There were inevitably casualties of ‘bastard feudalism’, as there are in any political system, who complained loudly about its obvious failings, and it took a good deal of time for the crown, nobility and gentry to see that such a system was in all their best interests …
… in many ways, indeed, ‘bastard feudalism’ was not planned by anyone, all sides rather stumbled into it as the best solution in changed times.
The circumstances of Edward I’s reign, however, and the decisions he took regarding his nobility were an important staging post in the creation of a new service nobility and in the development of the late medieval polity.
Thus, for both nobility and kingship in England the reign of Edward I was a crucial period of transition. It was, as has been seen, a transition that was for both the king and the earls one that was painful and incomplete. For all this, however, Edward’s reign was indeed, as Michael Prestwich has called it,‘a great one’, and this was in no small part due to the nature of the relationship between Edward and his earls. For the most part he had met their expectations of good kingship and they had provided him with loyal and steadfast service in war and peace. His reign stands as one of the clearest examples of what a medieval king could achieve when he worked in partnership with his earls.This was not an equal partnership, however, but one that gave Edward, as was only fitting for a king, the last word.
[END]
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