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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
2. The Feudal “State”:
Indirect Rule
The Western Roman Empire was succeeded by a collection of Germanic kingdoms. Over time, these kingdoms were subdivided into semiautonomous politico-military units and eventually came to be treated as the private domains of those whom the king had appointed to administer them. Gradually, centralized, public politico-military power and authority all but disappeared and became a private possession that could be bought and sold, divided among heirs, mortgaged, and given in marriage. In other words, public power had been essentially privatized. 1 The development of the modern territorial state during the late medieval period, as will be shown in the next chapter, involved the gradual deprivatization of public politico-military power and authority. To help understand this modern public space, we first review elements of the Germanic kingdoms; they continued to influence later political structures even if the kingdoms themselves did not survive intact. We then describe “feudalism” to set the stage for the emergence of the modern state, that is, to describe the institutionalizations of power through which the modern territorial state could be imagined and constructed.
Germanic Kingdoms: Privatized Rule
Kingship as a form of rule originated in Germanic tribal custom. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, the Germanic peoples were ruled by chieftains selected from certain clans. Chieftains were military, political, and religious figures who were expected to lead the tribe into combat, settle disputes among the tribe’s members, and act as intercessors with the gods through the performance of religious rituals, such as making sacrifices for successful hunting and good crops, or victory in battle. Successors were chosen from among a chieftain’s direct, male descendants. The choice was made by the still-living chieftain but had to be confirmed through an act of acclamation by an assembly of the leading warriors of the tribe. Thus, loyalty among Germanic peoples was based on persons, which meant that followers were loyal only to a certain chieftain from a certain clan. 2
Politics and power did not operate according to the same logic in Germanic tribes as it did in the Roman Empire. The chieftain was the leader of the tribe, not the ruler over the tribe’s people. Chieftains did not have the power to command the obedience and actions of persons in the tribe. Rule was a matter of performing religious rituals, maintaining peace among the tribe’s clans, and leading the tribe into battle. These activities accorded the chieftain honor and respect and, hence, authority, but did not give him “power over” fellow tribespeople.
After the conversion of Germanic peoples to Christianity, an incomplete and uneven process that took place from around the second through the ninth centuries, 3 the Catholic Church was called upon to consecrate, and thereby authenticate, a new chieftain. According to the Church, a king was appointed by God to maintain order, protect the weak, support the Church, and defend the faith. Thus, Germanic kings in the area of the collapsed Western Roman Empire held secular authority under the sacred authority of the Church—in contrast to the Eastern Roman Empire where the emperor, seen as representing Christ on earth, held both secular and sacred authority. Consequently, in the West, kings wielded secular power, which they acquired through heredity, and the Church wielded sacred power, which it had acquired, in its view, from God. 4 Thus, in the West, a political imaginary emerged that defined politics both in terms of the clan-based, personalized, lateral connections of Germanic tribal rule and in terms of the translocal, depersonalized, and hierarchical politics of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Germanic kingdoms had no formal political organization, no specialized administrative departments, no civil service, and no standing army, as did the Roman Empire. Governance was handled by the king’s household, which was not a problem when the kingdoms were small. As they grew larger, new governance structures were invented. When a kingdom reached a certain size it was subdivided into counties, and a representative of the king, called a count, was selected to govern each one. Counts ruled their counties as the king ruled the kingdom: they had full military, judicial, and financial power, which they exercised with the aid of their household companions. Thus, the problem of governing the Germanic kingdoms was solved by breaking them into subunits small enough to be ruled by a few individuals. 5
This way of governing had a significant drawback: counts could become independent of the king and challenge his power in their counties. Kings attempted to prevent such challenges in several ways. First, they tried to prevent counts from becoming too strong by directly supervising them, but such supervision was intermittent. Second, they sought to counterbalance the power of strong counts by establishing rival authorities in each county. Thus, at an early date the Church was taken under the protection of kings. Abbots of the monasteries and bishops of the dioceses were placed on the same level as counts, who were forbidden to enter Church property or territory. Third, kings would establish a few close and unswervingly loyal companions on estates scattered throughout various counties of the kingdom. 6
Gradually, the large Germanic kingdoms, already fragmented into counties, were themselves fragmented into a bewildering array of smaller kingdoms and independent principalities and duchies, each possessing its own military, financial, and judicial powers. Although this fragmentation resulted in part from the practice of delegating rule downward to counts, it was also in part the result of dynastic struggles provoked by the dissatisfaction of the king’s heirs with the subdivision of the kingdom at his death. The breakup of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire in 840 is the most famous example. Toward the end of his life Charlemagne’s son Louis, who had received the Holy Roman Empire intact, willed the empire to his oldest son, Lothar, and subkingdoms to his younger sons. When Louis died in 840 a war broke out among Lothar and his brothers for the throne of the empire. After a bloody internecine struggle, the combatants agreed according to the Treaty of Verdun (843) to partition the empire into three new kingdoms: West Francia (France), East Francia (Germany), and the Middle Kingdom (Lotharingia), which included the northern half of the Italian peninsula.
Fragmentation was also the result of a series of invasions: by the Saracens (a derogatory term derived from the Arabic sharakyoun, meaning easterner), a nomadic, Muslim people from North Africa, in 711; by the Vikings or Norsemen, a seafaring people from Scandinavia, whose descendants, the Normans, spread throughout western Europe, including England (1066) and Sicily (1091); and by the Magyars, a nomadic people from the steppes of central Asia, who eventually settled in the tenth century in what is now Hungary. The brunt of these invasions was borne by local counts and their retainers and encouraged their independence. Few kings were able to raise an army quickly enough to be effective against bands of swift-moving raiders. Therefore, local counts had to defend themselves. This led them to believe that the land they defended was their own personal property, not the king’s. The people whom they defended also came to believe that the local count was their ruler, not the distant king. Great families began to take root in specific counties. In this way the principle of strong monarchy, which had been synonymous with the early Germanic kingdoms, was undermined, and rule became fragmented and indirect. 7
Europe: Political Divisions and Invasions, 800-900
Feudalism
The politico-military practices in the fragmented successor Germanic kingdoms have been known since the seventeenth century as feudalism. “Feudalism,” then, is a representation, not a mirror, of this period. The concept organizes a complex, heterogeneous reality by reducing it to forces and dynamics important to later times and places. The term was never used during the Middle Ages, that period of European history beginning with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and ending with the overthrow of the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifteenth. It was invented by lawyers and antiquarians of the 1600s to describe customs and institutions, such as the possession of public power by private persons and rules governing the transfer of land, that did not meld well with the new laws and institutions of the emergent territorial state. These customs and institutions appeared to be connected to the medieval institution of the fief ; therefore, they were lumped together under the term feudalism, which comes from the medieval Latin feodum, itself from the old German fee, meaning cattle or property. 8 As such, the construction of the idea of “feudalism” as a unified, coherent system of social relations was used to help legitimize the modern state by contrasting modern conditions (those of the seventeenth century and later) with a “premodern” condition (the previous feudal epoch) whose “primitive” organization, it was argued, had been overcome and surpassed by a “better,” more “modern” one. We therefore look at feudalism with two of our own aims in mind: first, to introduce some of the elements of this historical period that established political, economic, and social conditions within which the modern state emerged; and, second, to see how the representation of this period as “feudalism” could be used, as was Rome, as a system of signs pointing to the emergence of the modern state.
Feudal rule consisted of five interrelated activities and practices. First, vast castles were built with high, stone walls for defense, which generated loyalty by providing security to those living nearby. Second was the carrying out of military campaigns against rival lords, which made reputations and established particular lords as leaders to be respected, obeyed, and feared. Third was providing religious leadership and patronage, which furthered the reputations of certain lords as defenders of the Faith and ensured support from the Church. Fourth was pursuing dynastic alliances, primarily through strategic marriages, which expanded the wealth and politico-military power of rulers. Fifth was providing justice throughout the territory being governed, be it kingdom, principality, duchy, or county. 9
Such practices did not constitute a “state” in any formal sense, however. Feudal governance lacked key features of a state, such as permanent structures for decisionmaking, a standing army, or an extensive administration that operated according to codified law. Most important, though people were personally loyal to counts and kings, their identity as human beings was not bound up with a secular political order to which all belonged. To the extent people recognized an intersubjective social unity that linked them to people outside their immediate local surroundings, it was a vast Christian community of believers under the authority of the Catholic Church that came to be called Christendom.
By the tenth century, feudalism had spread more or less to all former territories of the Roman Empire. Although more highly developed in some areas than others and exhibiting local variations, each feudal “state” was a pyramidal structure of individuals bound together by oaths of loyalty. The king was at the top of this pyramid and was the suzerain, or overlord, of the entire kingdom. Several dukes, who held huge tracts of land within the kingdom, were his direct vassals. Dukes, in turn, retained a number of direct vassals, and so on. At the bottom of this pyramid were the simple knights, who held sufficient land to maintain themselves and their families. All land was someone’s property and all landholders, except the king, were someone’s vassals. 10 In some cases, kings were considered vassals of the pope, who, of course, was considered God’s vassal on earth!
The glue that held the feudal “state” together was vassalage, which can be defined as “a system in which a free man binds himself personally to a lord, offering him loyalty and military service in return for protection and the use of property (usually land).” 11 It was entered into by doing homage, which was a ceremony in which the lesser man, kneeling before the greater man with hands joined as if in prayer, pledged himself and his loyalty to the greater man. In some areas, the pledge was “sealed with a kiss.” Ties of vassalage lasted during the entire lives of both lord and vassal. 12 Vassalage was thus a complex politico-military system based on ties of personal dependence within which all men were the “men of other men,” to whom they owed obedience and loyalty and from whom they expected unwavering assistance and beneficence. Thus, dukes, counts, marquis, and even bishops and abbots pledged themselves to their kings. Lesser knights pledged themselves to counts and marquis, and so on. As will be seen in the next chapter, the rise of the territorial state involved replacing an idea of politico-military power and authority rooted in the personal ties of loyalty and obedience to individuals with a conception of politics rooted in identity with and loyalty to the institutions of the sovereign territorial state.
Although some vassals resided in the households of their lords, more significant were those who were granted an estate called a fief, from which the vassal could derive sufficient income to feed, clothe, and arm himself and, if the fief was large enough, keep an armed retinue. Political power in the form of immunities, that is, the right to collect taxes and tolls, dispense justice, and coin money, were often delegated by the king to local lords. The granting of land from which the vassal could derive personal income became the most common way of rewarding service, because land was the primary source of wealth. From the king’s point of view, granting fiefs to vassals was a way of shifting the cost of maintaining an army of heavy cavalry to the warriors themselves. 13
Vassals provided the king with three forms of service. The first was military, which involved appearing fully armed when summoned by the king. The second was counsel, or advice on important decisions, a legacy of the German practice of involving all warriors in decisions affecting the tribe. The third was financial, which involved payments of money to the king to help him meet unusual expenses such as ransoming himself from his enemies, paying for the great feast given when his eldest son was knighted and given horses and armor, or when his eldest daughter was married. 14 As will be shown below, such aid evolved into modern systems of general taxation.
The feudal contract was binding on both lord and vassal for life, although it could be broken by mutual agreement or individual public renunciation. Nonetheless, at the beginning of the medieval period, the status of the lesser vassals was precarious. Their fiefs could be seized by the king for no reason at all or exchanged for others. Vassals had no assurance that their lands would be inherited by their heirs, because after a vassal’s death, the fief legally reverted back to the king. In other words, the vassal had no hereditary right to the fief. As a consequence, vassals became obsessed with strengthening rights of inheritance any way they could. The transference of a fief exclusively from father to son did eventually become hereditary under laws of primogeniture, although it was never automatic and had to be reaffirmed by the king. Kings gladly acquiesced to these efforts because they did not want fiefs to become too small by inheritance to provide protection. Laws of primogeniture replaced the earlier Germanic custom that favored equal inheritance among sons and daughters. Therefore, although there were occasionally exceptions, as a rule, women were unable to inherit fiefs. When a woman was permitted to inherit, it was always with the proviso that her husband perform vassalic duties in her stead. If the firstborn son was too young to meet the obligations of a vassal, an adult relative, usually a maternal uncle, was chosen to exercise vassalage until the minor came of age.
Fiefs were subdivided into manors, the basis of the feudal agricultural economy. The lord of each manor was a free man who owed feudal obligations to the lord of the fief. Thus, political and economic life were thoroughly intertwined within the feudal “state.” The peasants who lived on the manor were free, half-free, or tenants called serfs. They tilled a plot of land owned by the lord of the manor, who gave the serf life tenure and military protection for as long as he paid an annual rent in produce, labor, and money. 15
The Estates
In the feudal “state,” rights and privileges were attached to corporate groups called estates, not to individuals. Political power was inseparable from social status, just as it was intertwined with economic wealth. There were three main estates. The first estate was the clergy, which was composed of the official hierarchy of the Church (bishops, priests, archbishops, and cardinals) as well as the monks and abbots of its religious orders. The second estate was the nobility, which comprised a privileged politico-military ruling class. The third estate was the bourgeoisie, which was composed of the merchants and artisans who lived in towns (bourgs). In addition, there were various other groups—serfs, free peasants, servants, beggars, prostitutes, and thieves—most of whom were poor and, except for the serfs, without legal status in the estates system.
Although not part of the formal estates system, women were often treated as a separate and distinct corporate group, a “fourth estate.” In the feudal “state,” women were dealt with under the sign “woman,” which was not a description of a particular person but a social category. 16
In order to represent women as the social category “woman,” medieval society primarily drew upon two Christian teachings. The first was the biblical narrative of the Creation, in which woman was seen as being created from Adam’s rib and serving as his “helpmate.” In this narrative women were the incarnation of Eve’s sins in the Garden of Eden, and hence were seen as inclined by their nature to sin and as responsible for sin in men, who could not resist women’s tempting. The second was the story of the virgin birth of Christ, in which woman, of whom Mary became a dominant representation, was seen as innocent and chaste. 17 The former teaching was openly misogynistic (i.e., hating and distrusting women), and the latter valorized “woman” as representing absolute purity, innocence, and goodness. When women failed to live up to the ideal of purity, they were subjected, and subjugated, as sin incarnate. Hence, these two seemingly opposite characterizations formed part of a singular representation of women that effectively subordinated them within medieval life.
In general, women could not exercise politico-military power and, as one contemporary source put it: “They must devote themselves to their feminine and domestic occupations.” 18 Women had no rights at all against ennobled males and were both legally and in custom subordinate to men in nearly all spheres. Once married, a woman could do little without the consent of her husband. 19 Describing the condition of women in marriage, one historian says: “In marriage, the husband predominated by force of law and with the guidance of homiletic [i.e., religious] literature. Many women feared their husbands, and some were even beaten by them. Law and custom permitted a man, whatever his class, to bring his superior physical strength to bear against the woman who was supposed to be his helpmate.” 20
Although they had no rights, women were in charge of the household, whether it be castle, manor house, or hut, and shared the status of their husbands. This occasionally gave some women significant power and importance, especially because the life expectancy of their knighted husbands was quite low. 21 For example, in some places in medieval Europe, such as France and Catalonia (although not in England), noble wives not only took responsibility for educating children but also protected their inheritances and otherwise safeguarded their futures. In several cases, noble wives took on the role of local governance and administration in the absence of their husbands. 22
The First Estate: Clergy
The clergy included the priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals of the regular Catholic Church hierarchy; the monks and abbots of its religious orders, such as the Cistercians, Benedictines, and Franciscans; and the knights, masters, and grand masters of its military orders, such as the Templars and the Hospitallers. Bishops, archbishops, abbots, masters, and grand masters were equal in status and power to the greatest dukes and counts of the secular nobility. Many dioceses and religious orders became extremely wealthy and controlled huge tracts of land. The military orders were especially powerful because they were composed of armed monks.
The great power and wealth of certain dioceses and religious orders created tension between the Church and feudal rulers. Feudal kings frequently sought to control the appointment of bishops and abbots and were always watching for any attempt by the Church to rob them of their rightful revenues and patrimony, that is, their property. The threat of excommunication was usually sufficient to persuade a recalcitrant king to bend to the Church’s wishes. However, as feudal monarchs began to centralize their political power during the late medieval period, they were able to gain control over the appointment of important bishops and abbots within their realms. Eventually, the military orders were suppressed and disbanded and their lands and properties were confiscated by the crown. The most famous of the disbandments was the brutal suppression of the Knights Templar in France in 1310. The French king Philippe IV (r. 1285–1314) arrested all Templar knights within his kingdom on charges of heresy, tried and tortured many, and executed about sixty who refused to recant, including the order’s grand master, Jacques de Molay.
The clergy served an important politico-cultural function in medieval Europe. They comprised its intellectuals, and as such they interpreted the meaning of Scripture, elaborated Church doctrines, and carried on the traditions of classical philosophy and science inherited from Rome. Through its networks of monasteries and its cathedral schools, as well as its dominance of emerging universities, the clergy came to be respected for its learning as well as feared for its enforcement of canon law, under which, among other things, it could accuse people of heresy (i.e., adherence to a religious teaching contrary to Church dogma) and execute them, usually by burning at the stake. Few people outside the clergy and the nobility were literate, and within the nobility, men were more likely to be literate in Latin, the language of religion and government, and women in the vernacular, or the language of the common people. This gave the literate clergy enormous power because the Church communicated legal and moral ideas. As one historian put it, the Church was “the main, frail aqueduct across which the cultural reservoirs of the Classical World now passed to the new universe of feudal Europe, where literacy had become clerical.” 23
What unity there was beyond the local village or town came not through identification with a political association (e.g., a state), but through the system of religious signs institutionalized by the Catholic Church throughout Europe. This semiotic system was visual and aural. Therefore, the cathedrals and liturgy (i.e., rituals and ceremonies) of the Church served not only the religious function of reinforcing and strengthening faith, but the sociopolitical function of anchoring identity in Christendom, that universal community to which all Christians belonged.
Note that many areas within Europe were not thoroughly Christianized until well into the high Middle Ages, that is, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The clergy did not simply pronounce and propagate Catholic dogma on an already believing and, hence, accepting people. The establishment of Catholic dogma was a struggle, a political act that often involved persuasion, the use of terror, and military force. For example, Charlemagne ordered 4,500 defeated Saxons to convert on the battlefield or die. They chose to remain loyal to their pagan gods and were put to the sword. 24 Moreover, the Church’s official liturgy was continually contested by local religious practices drawn from pagan religions. People of all ranks prayed to local saints, practiced magic, and believed in miracles, practices that the Church combated. With respect to witchcraft, the Church targeted women especially, believing, according to one historian, that “legions of the Devil were led by evil women who anointed themselves with grease from the flesh of unbaptized children, who rode stark naked on flying broomsticks or on the backs of rams and goats, and who attended their nocturnal ‘sabbaths’ to work their spells and copulate with deamons.” 25
Thus, medieval political theory conceived of the world, God’s creation, as a unity, a whole governed by Him for the good of His subjects. Humanity was potentially a single unity under God’s rule. To define and interpret the meaning of community and collective life, the clergy relied on the idea of the corpus mysticum, the mystical body of Christ, which had roots in the early days of Christianity. Christ’s body, the human element of which was believed to have died on the cross at Calvary, and the spiritual element, which is supposed to live forever at God’s side, symbolized the unity of the spiritual and the secular, of faith and reason in human life. In St. Augustine’s famous phrasing, human life is divided between the City of Man and the City of God. The City of Man referred to man’s physical and secular needs, a world of necessities in which the potential for sin and evil was great, but in which men also needed to develop reason. The City of God referred to the spiritual in human life, the orienting of men and women toward eternal happiness in God. Reason, especially as expressed in classical philosophy, was the human means toward knowing God; hence the continuing importance of Roman and Greek legacies in feudal Christianity.
The universal idea of Christendom, then, both retarded the emergence of an understanding of a territorialized political community and made available a powerful alternative communal identity across the otherwise politically fragmented lives of medieval peoples. 26 Within this alternative imagined Christian community, the political was subordinated to the religious, as was reason to faith. Christianity rested on what one historian, trying to make sense of the motivations behind the Crusades, has called a “spiritual restlessness,” the emotional, passionate, and all-consuming longing for God that was inscribed in the Christian idea of faith. 27 Rather than considering social conflicts as mediated and resolved by the institutions of secular rule, people in the Middle Ages relied on local religious practices informed by the Church’s teachings. In order to use Christianity in constructing the modern territorial state, its principles and signs would have to be reinterpreted; and they were, as we will see.
The Second Estate: Nobility
During the early centuries of the medieval period, no social or legal distinctions existed among vassals. By the twelfth century all members of the feudal hierarchy, from the greatest lord to the pettiest knight, believed they belonged to the same social group, a belief based on their ownership of politico-military power. Thus, a nobility (or aristocracy) was created whose social purpose was governing and fighting; it dominated European political and military affairs until the nineteenth century. Initially, the nobility was a military caste whose members often came from humble backgrounds. When they were not making war, vassal-knights passed their time practicing with arms, carousing, and intriguing in the lord’s court. Hunting and hawking were popular sports. They engaged in tournaments, or mock combat, designed to maintain and improve their martial skills, in search of which some knights traveled far and wide across Europe. These knights-errant, as they were called, spread medieval culture and feudal institutions from northwestern Europe, where they had developed, to the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, eastern Europe, the British Isles, and the Holy Land during the Crusades. 28
The Crusades, which were military expeditions instigated by popes and undertaken by the Christian kings from 1096 until 1270 to take the Holy Land from the Seljuq Turks who had themselves taken Jerusalem from the Fatimids, gave rise to the idea that the vassal-knight was a soldier of God, a defender of the church, a protector of widows, orphans, and the poor, an avenger of evil, and a savior of “damsels in distress.” This ideal was codified into a system of personal conduct called chivalry (from the French chevel, meaning horse), which prescribed that knights live according to strict rules called courtesy (from the word court ). The gentleman (from the French gentilhomme ), or man of good lineage, in addition to being a great warrior, was expected to have polished manners, a high moral sense, and knowledge and skill in the social arts of courtly life. 29 This cult of chivalry enhanced the misogyny that was common among the nobility.
The development of the notion that vassal-knights were socially superior to others because of their bravery and devotion to duty, honor, and good manners eventually gave rise to the idea that such status could be acquired only by birth, although lords could acquire more vassals, some even low born. Thus, the right to be made a vassal-knight became hereditary. Gradually, the nobility became privileged, that is, subject to its own legally recognized rights and obligations. Certain occupations, deemed incompatible with noble status, such as trade or commerce, were legally forbidden to the nobility. Nobles were also forbidden from working with their hands in agriculture or at manual occupations. Such activities were considered to be contrary to the honor and breeding of the nobility. The nobility itself came to be subdivided into various legally recognized ranks based on wealth and power, to which specific legal privileges and obligations were attached. The most powerful and prestigious were, of course, kings, followed by dukes, counts, viscounts, and knights. 30
The development of recognized ranks and hereditary privilege gave rise to the art and science of heraldry, which arose from the need to identify armored knights, whose faces were hidden by their helmets during combat, and involved the painting of individual signs of recognition, such as a chevron, lion, or cross, on shields. Such signs came to be legally associated with a particular knight and were passed from father to son through the generations. Thus, the heraldic device became a legal symbol of family continuity and noble standing.
The Third Estate: Bourgeoisie
In some kingdoms, especially England, the third estate referred to all commoners, whereas in others it referred primarily or exclusively to town dwellers. In all kingdoms, the third estate was dominated by the bourgeoisie, or burghers (town dwellers), who were for the most part merchants and artisans.
Towns came into existence when commercial activity in Europe revived after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Initially, trade was of little importance for the Germanic kingdoms. Manors were self-sufficient and produced almost no surplus. Roman roads over which trade could flow had fallen into disrepair. By the eleventh century, however, commercial activity began to grow and urban life revived. Trade began between certain areas of western Europe where a surplus of a locally produced good, such as woven woolen cloth in Flanders, was traded to another area that had a surplus of other locally produced goods, such as the honey, furs, and hunting hawks of Scandinavia. Surpluses of French wines were traded for the tin, lead, and silver of England, especially after the conquest by the Normans, who preferred wine to ale. The Crusades also were made possible by increased trade: the Crusader kingdom in the Holy Land needed supplies, and pilgrims needed transportation. Thus the northern Italian towns of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice became important shipbuilding and trading centers. 31
As commercial activity grew, a class of merchants who traveled from place to place developed. The fragmented structure of feudal governance created special problems for these merchants, especially the localized customary law that limited the validity and uniformity of contracts over time and across space. Laws governing commerce were “under the rule of a patchwork system of local customs, influenced in varying degrees by Roman law.” 32 Moreover, “procedure in the secular feudal courts was uniformly slow, arbitrary, and unfair to the lower orders of society . . . characterized by reliance upon an oral tradition of custom maintained by the lord and his officers and judges.” 33
Eventually, these itinerant merchants looked for places where the local lord would allow them to settle and extend them the privileges necessary to carry out their commercial activities. This included stabilizing and extending the law that applied to commerce, often by combining elements of canon law and the law that traveling merchants had themselves devised to facilitate and normalize trading practices across multiple feudal legal jurisdictions, called “ merchant law. ”34
Usually, merchants settled near ports, river crossings, castles, monasteries, or cathedrals. It was not long before major castles and monasteries had bourgs (from the Latin burgus, a district removed from a castle) or merchant settlements, nearby, which had been granted a charter, or franchise of privileges and rights in exchange for the payment of a sum of money or an annual income to the local lord. 35 Thus, those who lived in such settlements, which eventually grew into towns and cities, enjoyed a distinctive legal status that distinguished them from the nobility, clergy, and serfs. Town charters applied to the collective whole, not to individuals. Towns, because they were centers of commercial activity, became economically and militarily self-sufficient. Town dwellers surrounded themselves with defensive walls and raised their own militias. People who lived in towns were free because they were immune from laws that regulated the feudal system beyond their walls. Serfs who escaped to a town and lived within its walls for a “year and a day,” without being claimed or identified, became free persons and received the town’s protection.
The merchants who settled the first towns organized themselves into a guild (from the Anglo-Saxon geld, meaning self-governing ) for protection, mutual aid, and governance. As the towns grew and attracted artisans, such as cobblers, weavers, dryers, fullers, butchers, bakers, tanners, wheelers, coopers, pullers, and smiths of various kinds, new guilds were formed in each trade or craft. Guilds regulated these occupations and their levels of activity by controlling the training and licensing of those who practiced them and by preventing competition. Each guild set forth detailed regulations concerning the method of manufacture, price, and quality of its goods. Before being admitted to a guild, one had to learn its trade or craft by becoming an apprentice to a master practitioner, the number of which in a particular area was controlled by the guilds. After a certain amount of time the apprentice had to produce a masterpiece to be inspected by the officers of the guild to prove his ability to practice the trade or craft. 36
At the bottom of the lord-vassal system were the serfs, the lowest of whom were attached wholly to the land of the lord on whose manor they resided. Above these serfs were serfs who had land of their own. Serfs were not slaves because, unlike slaves, they had certain rights and privileges. The lord could not harm his serfs and was obligated to protect them from enemies. A serf had a right to his land and to his wife and family. As with the nobility, the male was considered the head of the serf’s family, although women often performed considerable work. In addition, serfs enjoyed the right to rest on holidays (holy days), which could number as many as fifty a year in addition to Sundays. In exchange for these rights and protections, the serf gave the lord a portion of his produce or rent or labor for special tasks, as well as a tithe, that is, 10 percent, to the Church. He was also obliged to work several days each week on the lord’s land as well as perform extra work for him during ploughing, sowing, and harvesting. The serf also had to pay to use the lord’s mill, bake-oven, brewery, winepress, and stud animals.
Feudal Constitutionalism
Recall that rendering the king counsel was one of the major feudal obligations of every vassal. A king received advice from two sources: his curia, or court, composed of his closest companions and household retinue, and a great council, usually convened on major holidays such as Christmas and Easter, composed of the upper members of the nobility and higher clergy of the realm as well as important members of the bourgeoisie. When the upper nobility and clergy became too numerous for the council to perform useful work, delegates were chosen from the three main estates of the realm—nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie—to attend. These delegates did not represent individuals but were delegates from the estates from which they were chosen—that is, the group of people having the same legal status or position to which bundles of rights, privileges, and obligations were attached. Thus, representation in the feudal state meant the representation of corporate groups such as the nobility and clergy, and eventually included other corporate groups such as lawyers, professors, and physicians. 37
Thus the feudal “state” was “constitutional” in that the great council of the three estates represented the realm to the king, voiced protest, restated rights, gave advice, and agreed to financial requests. Together, the crown and the estates governed the feudal “state.” However, because the king needed the consent of the estates to obtain access to their financial resources, especially to raise taxes to fight wars, a struggle ensued between the crown, on the one hand, which needed the money, and the council of estates, on the other, which had it to give but expected justification. 38 This struggle intensified in the late feudal period when a military revolution increased the cost of war well beyond that which any individual monarch could afford from his private coffer.
Summary
Reflecting on the feudal period of fragmented political communities presses us to recognize that the modern territorial state is a historically contingent creation. The feudal constitutional struggles between crown and estates, out of which the political space of the modern state would emerge, developed from a complex juxtapositioning of Germanic and Roman institutions and understandings of the political world. The distinctive political architecture of the feudal “state” was one in which economics, social status and custom, and political power were tightly intertwined. In the modern state these will become separate fields related hierarchically. In the next chapter we turn to the long historical process in which this new political space was invented.
Endnotes
Note 1: Joseph R. Strayer, Feudalism (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1965), 15–20. Back.
Note 2: Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 21–35. Back.
Note 3: Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt, 1998). Back.
Note 5: Strayer, Feudalism, 29–30. Back.
Note 7: Strayer, Feudalism, 34. Back.
Note 9: R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 86. Back.
Note 11: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Medieval Civilization (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968), 193. Back.
Note 13: Ibid., 204–205. Back.
Note 15: Ibid., 212–227. Back.
Note 16: Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 14. Back.
Note 17: On the biblical sources see Angela M. Lucas, Women in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pt. 1, and R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Back.
Note 18: Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 11. Back.
Note 19: “The law generally held that a married woman could not draw up a contract, take a loan, or take any person to court on civil matters without the consent of her husband, not only because the husband managed joint property, but also because of her very status as a married woman. ” (Italics added.) Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 92. Back.
Note 21: Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 129. Just to give one indication, in England between 1330 and 1475 it was estimated that among the nobility “46 percent of all men died violently after their fifteenth year: in wars, tournaments or by execution during civil wars.” Back.
Note 22: Ibid., 140–142, 145–152. This was the case in the towns as well. For example, in the thirteenth century one contemporary source reports that in “the guilds of Paris . . . out of a hundred occupations women engaged in eighty-six!” Ibid., 6. Back.
Note 23: Perry Anderson, Passages From Antinquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), 131. Back.
Note 24: Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, 215. Back.
Note 25: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 437. Back.
Note 26: See especially Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), chap. 4. Back.
Note 27: For the idea of “spiritual restlessness,” see Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 50. Back.
Note 28: Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Culture Change 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 29: Andrea Hopkins, Knights (New York, London, and Paris: Artabras, 1990), 99–123. Back.
Note 30: Sidney Painter, The Rise of Feudal Monarchies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), 29–30. Back.
Note 31: David Nicolas, The Growth of the Medieval City (New York: Longman, 1997). Back.
Note 32: Michael E. Tigar and Madeleine R. Levy, Law and the Rise of Capitalism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 26–27. Back.
Note 35: Painter, Feudal Monarchies, 72. Back.
Note 37: Alexander Passerin D’Entrèves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 90. Back.
Note 38: Painter, Feudal Monarchies, 1–4. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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