Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the 12th Century, the Origins of Government
‘Never had power seemed so personal, so ominous as in the two generations before 1150’
Thomas N. Bisson wrote:
CHAPTER II: THE AGE OF LORDSHIP (875–1150)
Suppose, for example, that someone is organizing cities, provinces, kingdoms. What has he thereby arranged but a license to possess and dominate? Or in a lesser sense, that someone secures a horse: what … is that but a license to possess, ride, and do with it whatever he wishes?
—Cardinal Humbert (1058)
When the radical religious reformers of the eleventh century questioned the legitimacy of secular power, they were closer to contemporary action than to prevailing thought. Few people can then have doubted that emperors, kings, and lesser princes existed to protect and do justice; they were disposed to ignore the psychology of actual power; and they found comforting unscholastic logic in old ways of order and command. But the critique was insistent. … the very conception of secular order had become problematic … Hincmar of Reims had seen this as early as the 880s with a clarity seldom matched thereafter, and his view would long remain normative. Those who ‘should rule the people under the king,’ he wrote, ‘that is, dukes and counts … understand that they are appointed for this: that they should preserve and rule the populace, not that they should dominate and afflict [it] …
… Since the later ninth century people had been learning to live with danger (and without Charlemagne). Everywhere, even in lands never subject to the Franks, such as Asturias, the lands of Poles and Bohemians, and England, the pressures of hostile neighbors were real and constant; not even the heartlands of the Carolingian protectorate were exempt from alien depredations or the anxieties they caused …
… Was “tranquillity” then a normal expectation when our story—or its prelude—begins? Or was this an illusion fostered by the improbable and fragile successes of a great king in a fast receding past? These are disputed questions amongst historians. Not all today would agree with Marc Bloch that the renewed invasions of the ninth century induced a novel and transforming fixation on protection. It looks as if security of life and property had never been assured in post-Roman societies, and famous examples of the weak commending themselves to the strong are to be found in the eighth century. Yet it seems likely that Bloch was right about a new regime of power commencing in the ninth century; and on one critical point the written sources bear out the great historian of ‘feudal society’ absolutely. They show that people almost everywhere in Christian Europe, from the later ninth century, were seeking or submitting to lords. How and by what rhythms this happened is an unsolved problem of history. What seems clear is that while protection and command were chiefly royal prerogatives in the ninth century, they remained so thereafter less in practise than in theory, as effectual power devolved to lesser mortals through usurpation and default.
What followed was an age, or ages, of lordship that, considered as an expression of focal power, lasted for some three centuries. Historians have lately been reluctant to recognize this period as such, for several reasons. First, they are habituated in the belief that lordship was a constant in all the Middle Ages, being an institution of biblical antiquity. Moreover, they cannot help but notice that the period 875–1200 is precisely the period when feudalism prevailed, according to the discredited view of older historians, and there is a noticeable tendency to allow this inconvenience the force of fact. Yet a third objection might be that European societies surely changed too much during three centuries to be well characterized as one age. Only the third of these objections has merit. Lengths of human experience vary. Lordship came to have political meaning after the ninth century such as it had never had before. Lordship and feudalism are altogether different things, a point that may have eluded some radical critics of feudalism. And the societal changes that surely marked the age of lordship are of its very essence ….
The Old Order
What changed least, being a survival from the early Middle Ages, was a sturdy consensus about power and its just norms. Counts, kings, even bishops might be murdered, catastrophic defeats might overturn dynastic and cultural traditions, but the structures of prelacy, kingship, and princely lordship persisted. Generation after generation we read of the public doings of the powerful, of their consultations, judgments, and conflicts. … Roman rules governing accountable public service were never abrogated, while the precepts of Gregory the Great concerning competence in clerical offices were widely diffused in Benedictine monastic culture. Powers were seen to attach to office, although it must always have been difficult to compensate services impartially.
The monarchies of eleventh-century Europe were hardly ‘stateless’ societies. Imposed norms of justice were not lacking in them. Everywhere people looked to kings and laws; clerks in Poland and Italy contemplated the absence of rex and lex with horror. There was reason for such anxiety. But we should not confuse the failings of kings with those of laws and order, nor did kings fail everywhere. In England new legislation devised to secure life and property was fundamental to a public sphere of consensus that lasted until 1066, and in some respects, for the Norman conquerors claimed to redirect it, much longer. In old Frankish lands the higher clergy joined with magnates to restore disrupted protections …
… Royal order was seldom centralized order. Widely characteristic was the associative life of villages and valleys, natural communities of interest that must often have functioned autonomously to determine agrarian customs and collective rights in forests and pastoral slopes. They are all but invisible to us, figuring in writing as a rule only when activated by the pressures of kings and other powers. …
… The affective life and self-regulating power of such communities were not normally written, nor does it appear that urban communities had other than oral identity. The ‘municipal deeds’ (gesta municipalia) of late Antiquity had disappeared, although there may be some survival of public associative procedures in the impersonal styling of written judgments in Italy, the Spanish March, and León. Communities of interest in agrarian-pastoral affairs were less artificial than those created by early medieval kings, notably in England, in respect to security and to judicial and fiscal obligations. Yet here, too, the power of decision-making took habitually unwritten forms …
… In its expressive action the local community was virtually an assembly, as can be seen in words like concejo (council), vista, and hundred. Yet the conceptual identity must always have been fragile, for wherever the sources permit we see the precedence of persons or wealth taking hold, the working of influence; collective power overtaken by domination. This is why an idealised egalitarianism of communal life sounded few echoes in the institutionalized assemblies of the later Middle Ages. Not even the ‘parliaments’ in Italian communes did much more than sound the same. It is safe to believe that peasants and shepherds harboured elemental notions of rightful powers; and it has been argued that, given the exceptional circumstance of a kingless regional interest, as in eighth-century Saxony, a representation of villages was possible. What becomes visible in twelfth-century Pyrenean valleys may well be continuous with unrecorded collective action. The known assemblies of the old order, while affording occasional glimpses of judicial speech, tell us more about public than political order.
Old order was public order. One need not imagine this as juridically distinguished from a private sphere (although conceptually the distinction between public and private, in those very words, was never lost in the Middle Ages). Yet in the formulaic usage of Mediterranean boundary clauses, ‘public road’ (via publica) was habitually differentiated from proprietary roads and parcels, and the same was doubtless true wherever ‘public roads’ were recorded. Those enticed by modernist theory should not forget that Jürgen Habermas, who opined that ‘publicness’ has no autonomous meaning in ‘feudal society,’ had never read medieval charters. The truth is that what he calls ‘feudal society’ is problematic precisely because it is pervaded by, indeed occupies, the ‘public sphere.’ Flemish scribes wrote ‘publicly’ to record the lawful openness of transactions; Mediterranean notarial functions were sanctioned in written laws; and the survival of formulaic procedures everywhere marked a vestigial culture of public responsibility. ‘The public thing,’ as Karl Ferdinand Werner has rightly insisted, ‘never disappeared.’ Educated writers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries continued to speak of res publica.
The precipitating test was whether rulers could protect their peoples and keep the peace. For in reality little else mattered. Justice became abstract, a live attribute (for a time) chiefly in cases of dispossession and violence; an appurtenance of defence and peace. The old order, a passive zone of consecrated authority, was neither constitutional nor (in the modern sense) political; it could neither promote nor prevent the sort of factional bonding of magnates for patronage or dynastic advantage such as must now and then have rested on principled persuasion. Of utilitarian services (other than military) only the coinage remained in most lands, generally public in form but, save probably in England, chiefly fiscal in practise. By the eleventh century imperial and royal coinages mingled with the issues of princes and prelates to whom the profits of moneta had been commended. But the only matters on which rulers shared the preoccupations of society were bound up with defence and the peace.
Indeed, it can be argued that the external menace of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims worked to preserve public order, such as it was. Territorial England was forged in tenth-century counterattacks on the Viking Danelaw, a process that led to something resembling public taxation and one that ensured that conquests, from within or without, could only be total. Something similar was happening in León and Navarre, where the cohesion of kings, barons, and churches survived in proximity to the dangerous frontiers with Islam. What is striking, however, is how little, almost everywhere, the subsidence of external pressures seems to have encouraged or confirmed the old order of public powers. In west Frankland free peasants and other proprietors would have found it harder than ever to secure justice in county courts in the later tenth and eleventh centuries. Defence gave way to internal peacekeeping, which proved hardly more successful.
In this age the concept of order became illusory. It ceased to correspond to the real experience of power. But it persisted as a norm, was never renounced as an aspiration, and would one day be substantially restored. Its conceptual persistence as a literate culture may be traced in monastic and cathedral communities possessed of the Latin classics and the decrees of Christian councils; for writers like Burchard of Worms, Ivo of Chartres, Gratian, Lampert of Hersfeld, Suger of Saint-Denis, and John of Salisbury, the public responsibilities of kings, princes, bishops, and abbots were axiomatic. … [M]anifestations of public order, which are widely attested in that age, were conduits of a traditional concept of government and harbingers of a new concept of state. No one can have supposed that public order as such had to be rescued in the twelfth century. Yet it badly needed defending.
The Quest for Lordship and Nobility
By that time the meaning of public order as well as the realities of power had been deeply transformed. The old way of saying this was to assert that feudalism destroyed the state. If we knew what ‘feudalism’ was, this might be acceptable, but the real problem with this discredited formulation is that the very institutions associated with the concept in the writings of distinguished scholars—lordship, vassalage, and the fief—were originally elements of, and supports for, the regime they are held to have subverted. Of course, such things may have changed in time. This is a case where one can have it both ways. King Athelstan thought that justice was better served when men took lords; and it was hardly subversive for kings and bishops to maintain knights, as at Reims towards 935 and in Lombard cities a generation later. In the Spanish March as well as in imperial Italy conditional tenures of land often termed ‘fiefs’ were and long remained fiscal in nature; that is, endowments for public administrative service. Viscounties and ‘honours’ could be described in early eleventh-century Aquitaine as if they were conditional tenures. Relations of lordship and dependence silently modified the old regime of publicly secured property, perhaps more deeply in northern lands, but progressively everywhere. …
… These people were sharing in patrimonial power and constantly tempted to appropriate it. …
Assuredly this behaviour was not new in the tenth century. We know that Carolingian counts were inclined to overlook the distinction between official and proprietary revenues, an understandable tendency in agrarian societies short of coined money. Moreover, public rights were already—indeed, since the late Roman Empire—identified with royal patrimony. But ninth-century records enable us to see that the difference between royal-fiscal and proprietary entitlements was well understood, the former often defended against encroachment by the latter. This differentiation fades from sight thereafter. Later Carolingian kings fought a losing battle to preserve it. …
… the inheritance of counties and honours became normal in many regions, though not everywhere: it was resisted in Germany, Aragon, and Navarre until the late eleventh century, and in León and England even later than that. But even in those lands what determined were the imperatives of royal lordship, not of government. No one renounced the glitter of high office, but power now attached to tenurial status and quasi-proprietary possession. Without ceasing to be a sphere of public order, the kingdom had become a fabric of lordships sharing patrimonial wealth.
The quest for patrimonial wealth was a dynamic force in the post-Carolingian centuries. It is easy to think of it in economic terms, which is why historians have often interpreted feudalizing as a competitive, if not quite a mercantile, phenomenon—an effort to accumulate fiefs; and why one recent scholar chose to stress the proprietary aspect of conditional tenures. What has commonly been overlooked is that tenures of all kinds, including those of fiscal rights, were not only shares in higher lordships; they were invariably lordships themselves. And it is lordship that brings us closest to the lived experience of power in the post-Carolingian centuries. This is so not because all lordships were impositions of personal coercive force; much landlordship, as in all ages, was undoubtedly proprietary in impersonal ways. But there is good reason to believe that most of the new lordships that multiplied in the growing populations of the tenth and eleventh centuries aimed at creating power over people as well as mobilising wealth, whether by exploitation of beneficial tenures, or by the imposition of protective or judicial customs, and (in whatever case) by pretence to enhanced social status through command and constraint.
Lordship matters because the human realities of power—command, allegiance, accountability, coercion, and violence—were bound up with it. Few can have envied people without lords in these times. If the shepherds and small holders in Pyrenean valleys knew little of power, having none themselves, they like most other peasants were vulnerable to devastating thrusts by armed forces that could wipe them out. By the tenth century, lordship seemed as natural as it was venerable. It drew on a theology of inequality rooted in an ancient culture of paterfamilial mastership, subservience, and slavery. …
… What counted in the Middle Ages was that the protective (familial) and arbitrary modes of lordship tended to be confused. This was so even though, very early, lordship was assimilated to office. From the fourth century, the imperial intitulature was ‘personalized and openly linked to a dynasty’: one spoke of ‘our Lord Flavius,’ so that ‘all people were placed in a state of inferiority before the lord [dominus], a word referring to the chief of the household and of slaves.’ By the sixth century Saint Benedict could speak of the abbot as ‘called lord and abbot, because he is believed to act in Christ’s place.’ These representations of lordship promoted humility as a collective virtue in submission, a virtue … Yet another tradition of affective power had formed in the experience of tribal war bands. Here the dynamic lay in a followership imbued with ambition and greed while conducive to the associative virtues of largesse and loyalty. This sort of solidarity, which proved conspicuous and abhorrent in the ravages of Vikings after about 850, also gave rise to ideas of honour and fidelity such as found expression in the ‘songs’ of Maldon and Roland.
So by the ninth century lordship was widely as well as diversely experienced. Historians rightly distinguish between ecclesiastical fatherhood, patrimonial exploitation (seigneurie, often considered to have no equivalent in English), feudal-vassalic lordship, etc. It is not hard to understand why lords with patrimony to spare might welcome the service of those in quest of support for their prowess and ambition. What is less well understood, and perhaps even misunderstood, is that lordship was becoming more and more conspicuous, and that it was progressing at the expense of obligations to regalian courts and armies. To a Flemish hagiographer around 900 it seemed that most men of standing (his word is ‘nobility’) had taken lords whom they were obliged to follow— ‘dear lords,’ moreover, which hints at the affective character of such bondings—, leaving but few who had sufficient patrimony to avoid commendation while remaining subject only to ‘public sanctions. At about the same time, according to Saint Odo of Cluny writing a generation later, princes were taking advantage of a disturbed ‘state of the republic’ to impose their lordship on ‘royal vassals’; one of the latter was Count Gerald of Aurillac, who seems to have resisted the pressure. So in west Frankish lands a twofold dynamic becomes visible, with lesser men commending themselves for the rewards of service even as magnates strove to remodel territorial power by imposing fidelity on a lesser elite. Although the evidence for these processes beyond the scope of jurisdictional order is very inadequate, it seems reasonably clear that lordships at all levels were multiplying. …
… new and small lordships matter to the story of power in the (long) twelfth century, in the years from before 1100 to after 1200. They were a facet of demographic expansion and of a vast multiplication of castles, and they were surely more numerous than the new centers of command in growing communities. Considered as protectorates, they must have been acceptably functional, although we hear less about good lordships than about troublesome ones. …
Were people content under their lords; that is, under those of whom we have no record of complaint? Thinking first of the agrarian masses, was not theirs routinely a ‘good deal’: protection from the noxious forces of a fallen world in exchange for customary services and payments? No doubt many lords did their part; while for those luckier men who were armed or ordained, “it seems even likelier that their fidelity secured the rewarding favours of lords with property or endowments to bestow. Such men had plenty of complaints—and plenty of conflicts—, but comparatively few about lordship have come down to us in writing. Bishop Robert Bloet’s bitter recollection that King Henry I ‘only praises those whom he wishes utterly to destroy’ sounds what must have been a familiar theme in the courts of lord-princes. We shall never know whether the vast silences of surviving archives conceal normal experiences of power at variance with those that can be documented. This problem will haunt my discussion. But two considerations argue from the outset against any temptation to suppose that what we shall never know about domination was any more benign than what is well recorded. First, there were far more peasants than knights in this turbulent post-Carolingian world: people, that is, capable of being exploited. Second, the prevailing model of lordship through the whole period of this book was what may be called a ‘servile’ model. Lordship was conceptually likened to the mastership of slaves, a wilful domination to be suffered in patience, not enjoyed. …
Constraint, Violence, and Disruption
What made this idea commonplace was that the human experience of power in the tenth and eleventh centuries was overwhelmingly that of lordships over growing populations of peasants and townsfolk with no more than their labour to offer. Growing lordships, that is, with little resemblance to the old ones of kings, princes, and bishops. The proliferation of castles, knights, and conditional tenures held by knights was in many parts of France and the Mediterranean an explosive phenomenon. What had begun in the garrisoning of old castles in regions like Provence and Lotharingia vulnerable to external attack was amplified wherever castle-building passed out of control of the old aristocracies. ‘The original feature of the tenth century,’ writes Robert Fossier [1999], ‘was the way in which Europe came to bristle with strengthened buildings …’; and while the collaboration of archaeologists and historians in this field is still young, it is already clear that new fortifications multiplied in waves moving from south to north. …
… The impact of this phenomenon, which has been labelled ‘feudal revolution,’ should not be minimised. However problematic the concept, it refers unambiguously to a demonstrably massive multiplication of lay lords and fiefs (feuda, feva) in the years 950 to 1150. This was sooner or later to transform the map of power almost everywhere. It put thousands of peasants under the lordship of untitled masters, many of whom tried to impose servile obligations on them; while for further thousands of other people on older domains belonging to the old aristocracy and the church, the proximity to penurious knights in threatening castles proved to be a harsh liability. To be sure, not all was abrasive or violent in this age of growth when external incursions subsided. A new world of aristocratic public order was in the making, as we shall see. But it would be quite as misleading to underestimate as to exaggerate the problem of disorder, which was clearly perceived as such by contemporaries. Armed men in or about castles, more and more of both, and the temptation to constrain by force: these were elemental realities of power in the age of lordship.
Let us look in on this history. Two problems of interpretation have arisen: first, whether the violence of ambition and constraint so often attested in written sources can be accepted as a plausible representation of ‘what happened’; and second, whether evidence of ‘violence’ and ‘disorder’ in the tenth and eleventh centuries points to disruptive historical change, or even to revolutionary change. It will be useful to keep both problems in mind, without confusing them.
What seems beyond dispute is that people living in the heartlands of the old Frankish kingdom in the later tenth century spoke of violence, constraint, and disruption as palpable and deplorable scourges. ….
… there is timeless poignancy in the depiction stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry of a woman and child escaping a house torched by hefty Norman retainers But the normal brutalities of war and vengeance could not of themselves have remodeled social order in Frankland or anywhere else. What mattered more was how violent practises came to affect relations of lordship and dependence. For in this respect violence became instrumental as well as customary.
From the tenth century come stories of armed laymen encroaching on peasant holdings so as to enlarge or create lordships. Good lords could surely be found to protect rustics clearing new fields; yet from a biography composed towards 940, in which Count Gerald of Aurillac was represented as saintly for caring for his tenants and not oppressing others, one infers that most lords in the Auvergne behaved otherwise. Such lords had retinues of armed men sometimes, and already since the ninth century, described as ‘violence’ (violentia); men who shared in the lord’s take and aspired to fiefs or lordships themselves. ‘Violence’ in this sense was associated with fortified space. …
… The abrasive self-assertion of castellans and knights became virtually a method of lordship. Violence was nurtured in the economy and sociability of castles. Even when a master’s domain sufficed for his upkeep, the support of his knights must have seemed chronically inadequate. The spectacle of prospering peasants was manifestly insufferable; the competition to exploit improving yet ever scarce lands a generator of violence as well as of entrepreneurial collaboration. And for those who would escape their burdens, it could be unsafe to mingle overmuch with peasants. Armed, pretentious, and poor, knights clung to their stoned-off spaces, talking of weapons and deeds, of horses, of strikes and demands; of stratagems and seizures more than of incomes or management. …
… The lordship of this sort of life was personal and affective: militant, aggressive, but unstable. It aspired to administrative character insofar as it claimed the powers of public command (bannum) long associated with Frankish castles. Yet since few of the new castles possessed such a pedigree, banal lordship(s) (seigneurie banale) typically fed on the capricious manipulation of powerless people. No evidence whatever survives to show that the castellan elite thought of their lordships in normative terms; they left no surveys of domain, no evidence of accountability. It looks as if their servants shared their predatory outlook, while the cavalcade enforced the abrasive immediacy of personal domination. In social terms this was a quest for status. Only lords could be noble, only nobles could govern: could exercise the powers of justice and command that created the presumption of nobility. But two difficulties arose to deflect this aspiration. The swelling masses of armed horsemen had all they could do to avoid being taken for peasants. They needed servants, dependents, suppliants; needed to dominate proprietorially. They needed to replicate the mastership of slaves. Were not unbeaten rustics as free as themselves? …
… Moreover, knights shared with lords possessed of regalian powers a second liability: that judicial powers (other than domestic ones) were losing such sanction in public authority as they had ever had and were becoming occasions for exacting money. Nothing so clearly reveals the novel diffusion of affective lordship as the appearance of the ‘customs’ (consuetudines) in the later tenth century: that is, of demands sanctioned by precedent rather than by regalian concession. In the county of Vendôme around 1005 the customs both domanial and fiscal were pecuniary; there is no sign of courts generating revenues, only of ‘vicariate’ as a cluster of ‘forfeitures’ to remedy criminal transgressions. Not even the vestigial survival of public procedures could deflect the landslide towards lordship: towards an unpolitical mode of affective patrimonial power rooted in will instead of consensus. ‘You are mine,’ Count William V of Poitiers is said to have declared to Hugh lord of Lusignan, ‘to do my will.’ Would either have said less to his peasants?
In short, it seems beyond reasonable doubt that the multiplication of lay lords, knights, and castles was attended characteristically by coercive violence. Whatever allowance must be made for the self-serving exaggerations and misrepresentations by monks and litigants, an enormous mass of documentary evidence testifies to abrasive lordship during many generations down past 1150. Was this phenomenon, in its beginnings, a disruptive event, a break with the past? Even, as suggested above, a ‘feudal revolution’? In light of recent discussion, it now seems possible to suggest better answers to these questions. If the term ‘feudal’ is employed metaphorically, and if it is defined to refer to fiefs, then the shift from an occasional resort to conditional tenures from public domains to the newly feudalized France of the later eleventh century was phenomenal in quite the same sense as industrialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new societies that resulted, in regions extending far beyond France, as well as a new order of power will be the subject of later chapters. But revolutions are made in their origins; they ought to be incited by subversives if not incendiaries; and the origins of this (quasi) revolution are suspiciously obscure. …
… evidence of violence is constant from the ninth century. Yet if we ask of the sources when and where contemporaries were conscious, or became conscious, of violence disruptive of social order, two suggestive responses emerge. First, the eloquent denunciations of disorder … appear to coincide not only with the dynastic crisis of 987, when the Carolingian Charles of Lorraine was thrust aside by the magnates in favour of Prince Hugh Capet, but also—and more tellingly—with a cluster of other events and signs of trouble in late Carolingian Frankland. Second, in the wider historical perspectives available to monks living in the twelfth century, the generations beginning towards 900 in Italy came to be viewed as a disruptive watershed separating an old age of free property and protected patrimony from a new age of lordship and reconstruction. These perspectives can be reconciled: for both, the millennial generation (or about 975–1025) becomes a critical moment when disorder can no longer be contained.
It was just then, in west Frankland, that old authorities and their scribes took new notice of seigneurial violence. The ‘customs’ make their appearance in records of all kinds after 990, surely because impositions on tenants by lords claiming rights of command were proliferating without sanction other than force or precedent. No doubt, the claims antedated our first records of customs, but the explosion of documentary allusions cannot in the circumstances be explained away. For at just the same time—the first series of programmatic councils dates from 989 to 1014—the peace of unarmed people and the clergy was placed under religious sanctions. First instituted in Poitou and Occitania, the ‘Peace of God’ was transparently a reaction against violence, perhaps even proof of a collective perception that violence was worsening.
And at exactly the same time scribes less professional but more realistic than their elders were beginning to change their vocabulary of power: the word miles in an unclassical sense of horseman was introduced, together with a redolent quasi-vernacular equivalent: caballarius; while the word dominus, hitherto reserved for God, kings, and bishops, and lately applied to counts, was henceforth descriptive of masters of castles. Other words for seigneurial power became current: potestas, dominium, mandamentum (power, lordship, command). The new vocabulary of lordship was by no means always pejorative, yet at exactly the same time we begin to hear of ‘bad customs’ (malae consuetudines). Denounced in the Council of Le Puy about 994, they figure commonly thereafter in the South, then after 1000 in Champagne, Picardy, and the Mâconnais. All these concurrent events point to the knight as a new subject of anxiety. The earliest extant written oaths to keep the peace, such as were administered in councils, and famously that of Beauvais (ca. 1023), spell out in detail the whole programme of seigneurial violence to be renounced. In graphic language the knight is made to promise not to break into sanctuaries on excuse of protection, not to burn or destroy houses without good reason, and not to destroy mills or seize the grain in them.
Nor is this all. The multiplying signs of newly assertive power and of reaction against it corresponded to apprehensions about the legitimacy of obligations amounting to a crisis of fidelity. Were commended men to be entrusted with conditional tenures no longer sanctioned in public order? Observers of regnal and ecclesiastical affairs in north Frankland became obsessed with faith (fides), fidelity, and treachery towards 990. … What cannot be doubted is that permissible options for solemnly commended men at all levels of society were coming under discussion in north Frankland at the end of the tenth century. The accession of the great duke Hugh, with his own congeries of castles and vassals, could only have encouraged a reshuffling of lesser fidelities and have accentuated the problem of prior or multiple allegiances, a problem worsened by growing temptations to prefer new benefices to old lordships. …
… All that is left of public order here is the tenacious recognition that complaints should be pleaded openly and procedurally; the Agreement has virtually the content of the written charges once required to initiate judicial proceedings in southern lands. The count-duke, for his part, although he retains something of his public prestige, can no longer command officially, can only negotiate with lesser fortified lords on the basis of personal and mutual fidelity of which the rewards, obligations, and rules are still being worked out. …
… The proliferation of coercive (or ‘banal’) lay lordships was a phenomenon sooner or later attested widely in Europe; an experience of power more or less disruptive depending on local circumstances, pointing to societal transformations, diversely related and phased, by the twelfth century. If this is not quite the whole story of power by then, it is arguably the focal plot that explains what Cardinal Humbert [was] thinking in the epigraphic text quoted above. This plot, it should be added, is inextricably bound to the craving for nobility that accompanied the rise of lordship. It took lord-princes secure in their allies and castles to preserve some measure of public order, not because of a rebellious disposition resentful of central authority, but because castellans and vicars everywhere were seeking to magnify their lordships at the expense of their offices. …
… the ‘feudal revolution,’ considered strictly as the multiplication of fiefs, knights, castles, and lordships of constraint, had had a long run. Considered in its meaning for the human experience of power … Considered in relation to dynastic crises, it is important to recognize that the disorders were not limited to the imposition of lordship. Much of the violence deplored in Stephen’s England was that of ill controlled armies, a phenomenon that would recur in weakly dominated regions of greater France in the later twelfth century. But the craving for lordship by men of new social strata as license to demand lay at the heart of all this. …
… With the growth and furtherance of new patrimonies and with the proliferation of feudal and vassalic dependencies in most of the societies so far mentioned, lordship had achieved a new potential for bypassing official outlets of action. It was—and this cannot be put too strongly—not inherently vicious. Everywhere personal powers over people expanded benignly, most likely so in the hands of princes, vicars, barons, bishops, abbots, and priors, fueled by economic and demographic growth. Yet almost everywhere the temptations of accumulating wealth and the opportunities afforded by changing habitats promoted a characteristic dynamic of self-promotion in which coercive violence became a customary means.
It is not difficult to understand why. Violence, both in its personnel and its practise, was an adaptable instrument of warfare, so that the pillage we read about in Pomerania or Tuscany or the pilgrims’ roads to Compostela or in King Stephen’s England is a phenomenon of armed bands as well as of lordship. It was peculiarly associated with status. There had been a time when all free men were expected to fight, when their freedom indeed depended on the fulfillment of that obligation; and there may never have been a time when the imperatives of vengeance became an exclusive privilege. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries most of the fighting and coercing was done by armed men who arrived on horseback, and to the extent that the freedom to fight and command elevated one above the incompetent masses, it came to seem that force (violentia in its special sense) was an attribute of human distinction. Two circumstances contributed to this. The freedom of elite families to fight and to hunt, derived ultimately from their association with or descent from kings, became an enviable emblem of nobility, while a vastly multiplied class of fighting men struggling to achieve the freedom of nobility, seized on its privileged culture of violence as its means. This is why knights, advocates, and bailiffs were disposed to impose afflictively on peasants, to enforce the latters’ unfreedom by flaunting their own superiority. The knighthood stigmatized by the early councils of peace looks like a disreputable culture of violence in quest of elusive status, a culture that would in time be co-opted by the church in a refurbished ideology of war in service of Christ. And it was the remodeled knighthood of Christ that induced the higher aristocracy to latch on to the new culture of arms and horsemanship whereby knighthood became ritually central to nobility in the twelfth century.
If lordship was essential to this newly respectable knighthood, it remained problematic for those who, far into the twelfth century, imposed themselves forcibly on peasants, whether their own or others.’ Yet the very expressions of disapproval bear witness to the self-justifying persistence of oppressive lordship. …
… in order to understand how power was experienced in the twelfth century, we have to come to terms with the evidence of plunder, consort with pillagers, violent seizures and dispossessions, and depredations of church lands and property, for this is what clerical writers and notaries evoke or echo in many parts of Europe. Historians are, not unreasonably, sceptical of such evidence. It was in the interest of prelates and monks to complain of exactions by lay lords; and since peasants, eager to represent any uncustomary demand as violent, sought to fix obligations in growing economies, a structural tension worked so as to justify seigneurial pressure.
Yet to reject such evidence seems not merely heartless but mistaken. The violence alleged, although sometimes exaggerated, was seldom invented. … Wilfully exploitative lordship, including that addicted to violence, became an institution even as it was discredited. It drew ideological support from the old order it pervaded insofar as it could be likened to slave lordship at a time when agrarian slavery had disappeared from western Europe.
Never had power seemed so personal, so ponderous, so ominous as in the two generations before 1150 … Lordship was nothing new by this time; it was a facet of old order. Yet now it was different. Never had there been so many lords. Never had the bearers of official powers been so tolerant of encroachment on public domination, so ready to share their lordship or commend it to others. Command could be seized or imposed or, in the perspective of old order, abused, but to many it must have seemed that lordship was a reasonable reward for loyalty and service. Never had there been—in some sense as much qualitative as quantitative—so much lordship. It permeated every pore of action in the (relatively) thickly settled zones of European habitation. Without obliterating official conceptions of power, it co-opted or weakened or transformed them. This is why the oaths required of kings at their coronations tended to be fixed in tenth-century forms administered on occasions unrecorded as such. …
… The ways in which people experienced power—wielded it, imagined or celebrated it, responded to it—attest to the preponderance of lordship. It became a culture of power, with its characteristic facets of expression, justification, and expectation. Even those without lords knew who had power, for there was nothing private about the claims of many to judge or coerce. Lordship, indeed, created community. Unlike the traditional lay communities of villages, valleys and, in England, hundreds and shires, those who banded together in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were often reacting against the alleged excesses of lordship. Yet even the notables of northern towns who banded in ‘communes,’ in this respect like the capitanei of early Lombard cities, found it impossible to persist in the rejection of the very patrimonial power to which they themselves aspired. What the ‘council-men’ of the North and the consuls in Mediterranean towns aspired to were exemptions from arbitrary seizures and impositions by external lords, these above all, and seldom much more. They cultivated liberties and (good) customs, not freedom nor (still less) equality. Typically, urban magistrates strove for lordships of their own …
… In the early Middle Ages free men had learned to look upon lords as providers. Fighting lords secured followers by promise and rewards, their lordship amounted to followership. Warlord kings, amassing and distributing wealth, were remembered for the prowess that brought wealth and for generosity. This tradition survived in the homages and oaths that proliferated after the ninth century, in the songs sung about lordly honour and largesse, and vassalic fidelity, as also in the dramas of betrayal, deprivation, and war. For while homage created personal submission, dependence, or even subjection, the oath tended to create reciprocity even as it confirmed submission. …
… Social aspirations and imaginings of divinity, however they may have affected the exercise of power, were not determinants of lordship. No one spoke of ‘regalian’ or of ‘feudal lordship’ as such, let alone labelled them godly or otherwise. A lord-bishop or king might judge vassals or peasants or free-holding subjects; what he could not easily do was maintain the quasi-domestic sociability of his festivals and courts for all those he wished to dominate. Trust became critical. …
… The attributes of seigneurial power were diversely expressive of tradition, situation, and status. Consider what it means to say that the powerful acted (or were expected to act) by will, mercy, and grace. Such behaviour, manifest in rituals of supplication for clemency or the grant of favour, sustained a venerable conception of ministerial kingship: an official theocratic justice resonant with a theology in which humanity was coming to have an enlarged role in the drama of salvation. Representations and rituals of majesty and judgment perpetuated this cultural assimilation, while confirming some in their conviction that they were blessed as well as born to command. But the image of such domination, whatever its relation to ‘reality,’ was ambivalent. …
CHAPTER VII: EPILOGUE
… What then was the ‘crisis’ of the twelfth century? In response to this question two normal continuities of power have been explored: the conceptual persistence of public order and the tenacious implantation of customary coercive lordships. It was the violation of the first of these norms in the tenth and eleventh centuries—not for the first time, but perhaps with newly disruptive force—that created the second one. Not only was lordship on a massive scale a new phenomenon almost everywhere, it speedily became customary. What is more, by about 1100 it was becoming customary even in its coercive or violent forms. If a perceptive biographer of King Henry IV and a great abbot of Cluny were among the few to see and say this clearly and explicitly, their testimony is borne out by incessant hints, insinuations, and complaints from almost every corner of Europe. And this is evidence, let us not forget, of a mode of coercive lordship that had no outlet of literate expression of its own. Even so, its tongue-tied norm must have been virtually as ubiquitous as customary vengeance, yet another continuity reeking of violence and one quite as ancient and tenacious as public order. Far more expressive than new lordship, vengeance was often a factor in crises of power ….
… What moved the crises of the twelfth century were not simply the designs and dynastic accidents of the powerful amidst growing populations and wealth, but chiefly the new customs of coercive lordship: the craving for status tied to banal powers and the possession of castles. How better to justify one’s superiority than by imposing on people? This dynamic explains—not alone, but substantially—the violence and violations of which monks in Eng land (and elsewhere) and peasants in Catalonia (and elsewhere) complained. The violences and societal ‘mutation’2 of the (long) millennium had by 1050–1100 settled into a pervasively ‘normal’ dislocation marked by harshly imposing lordships, whether of knights around castles or of managers or advocates on patrimonial domains. And it is this customarily coercive lordship, a novel continuity seemingly in conflict with that of public order, that invites us to think of the recurrent crises of power that have been sampled as the symptoms of an unstable confrontation of forces that may justly be thought of as one protracted crisis of the twelfth century. …
… The Polish council of 1180 may be viewed as precursor to the great series of assemblies in which, from 1185 to 1195, European lord-kings first seriously addressed the violences of lordship and unmobilised knights. This was to recognize a deeper and more prolonged crisis (in the modern sense), a crisis, almost everywhere, of multiplied castles in the hands of people in quest of status and power. Not all such were defiant of princely authority, but quite enough of them were so to defeat the purposes of high justice in almost every European realm. …
… the wider sociology of lordship … Service could hardly be pried loose from aspirations to power. This is why the spectacle of vicars abusing Italian townsfolk or sheriffs trafficking in commended or escheated lands may not be written off as corruption; it further explains why the improving mechanisms of accountancy were not enough to turn provosts and bailiffs into officials. Corruption is an abuse of government, such as hardly yet existed in the twelfth century. Not even learned courtiers, let alone their masters, commonly spoke of power deliberately exercised in the common interest. Few princes or prelates would have disclaimed such a purpose, yet one senses that the Parisian masters had it right when they belaboured the old distinction between serving and dominating.
Lordship remained the normative expression of human power in the later twelfth century. The deployment of patrimonial wealth to reward warriors and servants reached it apogee, amounting in some regions to a ‘feudalism’ (that is, an ‘ism’ of fiefs) in all but name: in troubadour lands at once a regime of fiefs and a culture of fidelity (-betrayal); in Normandy, Flanders, England, and Germany the variable matter of codified custom. So far from subverting lordship and dependence, the fitful intrusions of expertise and accountability became its timid prop. Collective privileges and offices were awash in the imperatives of affective service and fidelity, to the ironic extent of requiring external ‘powers’ to rescue civic purposes in Italian communes.
Only in Catalonia did exploitative lordship outlast the twelfth century, although the violence of castles persisted in parts of southern France if no longer in the Ile-de-France. The peace of Soissons (1155) was the last of its kind in France. In England the Inquest of Sheriffs (1170) coincided with new efforts to secure the reputation and revenues of the king’s court. Yet in both lands it was just in this third quarter of the twelfth century that incessant allegations of dispossession and seizure goaded their lord-kings to take new notice, even new measures. In England the ‘assizes’ of 1166 and 1176 are veritable manifestos of pacification aimed at reducing petty violence and securing lawful order. The ‘common law’ incomparably displayed in Glanvill was not all new; yet its witness to expertise in procedure virtually coincides with new evidence of official work for the king and of its recognition by chroniclers.
Likewise responsive to violence was the incipient recognition of associative interests. In Catalonia and the Hispanic realms, peace itself was the first perceptible cause, the work of lord-kings presuming to impose it. Taxation for crusade was another new cause, characteristically contaminated with that of the confirmed coinage in north and south alike. That such impositions served public purposes, such as the peace-taxes in Catalonia and Quercy, could not be sustained; that they were seen to violate custom pushed lordly right in the direction of debate. In France and the empire the quasi-professionalizing of justice and finance was delayed for another generation. In León, King Alfonso IX sought to identify monetary stability and the suppression of violence with the ‘state of the realm,’ a precocious hint that the responsible exercise of power is what might already be viewed as the power of state, or government. Such an understanding of consent, while inexplicit in other lands, was widespread towards 1200–1225. Except in southern France and Lombardy, it owed next to nothing to Roman-canonical legal teachings. For in fact what is most striking about the records of power is how consistently the diplomatic and conversation of princely courts remain those of ill-tutored lordship. Offices, officers, even accountancy there might be; but fidelity remains the key to vocational success. …
So the narrative of progressive change is offset by those of responsive shifts of direction, setbacks, and complacency. Which, upon reflection, is quite what might have been expected of this famous one of the ‘Middle Ages.’ The societies of 1100, continuous with their early medieval pasts, had been nonetheless disrupted, even deformed, by growing populations dominated by a newly stratified elite, of which the larger and militantly ambitious element was an incorrigible challenge to old public order. The world of 1225 was still a world of horses and castles, of peasants and knights, as it had been in the eleventh century. Now there were far more people, doubtless most noticeably in towns; in Germany, France, and England the rebuilding of cathedral churches pointed to new wealth and enterprise as well as to the ‘shadowed peace.’ Government distinct from lordship, even in most towns perhaps, was hardly to be found.
At most we may suspect that the insistence on patrimonial rights was giving grudging way to the recognition of collective interest. The bad-lord castellans of Old Catalonia had shown the way; the barons of Magna Carta had a better cause. People were talking in assemblies, even talking back, and learning how to argue. A new sort of convocation lurked, one less easy for rulers to exploit. Its novelty lay not so much in who or how as in what it did, for it was not so much the representation as the elite expression of incipient societal status—of the state.
To speak of the ‘origins of European government’ in such reserved ways may seem overly fastidious in the end. But the beginnings of great things in history are seldom other than problematic. And what we have found in the present case is that the very expression quoted above would have been as meaningless to contemporaries as it is alluring to us. Of ‘government’ they had neither a definition nor a vision. What they knew about was power. And it is by insisting on power, as they did, that it becomes clear that if ever government was the solution, not the problem, it was so for European peoples in the twelfth century. Hence the interest to their history of not only justice and law but also: office, accountability, competence, social utility, and persuasion to tenets of collective interest; that is, of pregnant stirrings in a distant time that were to have a famous modern destiny. To reflect on their (original) historical meaning may be still today, as it was in the course that nurtured this book, a resonant exercise.
The Source:
Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century : Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government, Princeton 2009
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.