What had
been lacking before the 13th century was a normal conception of associative (that is, in Aristotelian terms,
political) power, rooted in practice, and distinct from lordship. The natural communities
of valley and vill, where they survived at all were too distant and weak (and
many too elevated) to impose their sociabilities as such. What Max Weber theorized
as patrimonial domination was the prevalent mode of power in the post Carolingian
societies; and lordship, sanctioned by fidelity and legitimated by protection,
was a social-relational rather than a behavioral structure. It was sociologically
personal, affective and unpolitical in nature. Counsel and (especially) consent
were not political functions but devices for ensuring and imposing the lord’s
will; for creating affective solidarities, typically in ritually ceremonious
ways, in lord-kingships, principalities, even ecclesiastical lordships.
Accordingly, the historical problem is how this prevalent mode of lordly power begins to lose its passively affective character: not only how it became progressively institutionalized, as seems to have happened with accountability and office, but also how, in courts, causes, consultations, and parleys, a new kind of discourse emerged; talking less ceremonious and deferential than engaged with issues, in which interests as distinct from rights came to be articulated. Taken together these changes may be spoken of as ‘politicizing.’
There is reason to believe that this phenomena became general in the years around 1200 . . . but the evidence is unsatisfactory. “Politicizing” should not be confused with what has been called the ‘invention of the state.” The resort to ‘verbalized rules’ instead of custom, the recognition that power resides in law(s) rather than in the ‘effluence of character,’ may have been stimulated by the Investiture Conflict, and was widely diffused by the clergy in the 12th century. The Historia Pontificalis is the work of a courtier-cleric ‘listening-in’ on a newly intense institutional life rooted in argument about right, offices, and claims. To secure such things the clergy knew how to make friends, how to exert influence. That ecclesiastical jurisdictions promoted rational, ruler-bound spheres of discourse is evident from the records of papal judges-delegate. But there is nothing in all this to show that political talk was common.
For in reality the Christian clergy and lawyers lived in a chiefly seigneurial world. They were the sons and brothers of barons and knights; they were all too familiar with the imperatives of lordship. They did not easily give upon lordly habits of approbatory consultation. Synods were held by bishops and legates who were respected and addressed as lords. Preoccupied by rights and wrongs the prelates in such assemblies were in no hurry, nor did they feel pressed, to reformulate their concerns as social causes worthy of autonomous debate and regulation. So that even in the church neither the formal adherence to written rules nor the presumably sharpened precision of curial discourse seemed to have hastened the politicizing of power. In 1215 the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council were promulgated as the lord-pope’s programme, contrived to conceal objections that may have arisen in its formulation; only for the dogmatic decrees on the Trinity and against heretical teachings did Innocent II so much as request the assemblies approval.
Still less do the records of lay power suggest that the interactiion in conventions, courts and assemblies was other than deferential, ceremonial, or judicially procedural towards 1200 . . .thye more one reads such records the more suspicious one becomes. How much is surely left out! What are we to make of the commitments of Italian communes to the Guelf cause, like that of Brescia, or to the Ghibellines, like Pisa? Yet the interested powers – let not us call them ‘parties’, For they themselves did not- cultivated alliances with communes, not causes as such . . the palpable changes of regimes in Genoa after 1190 and in Toulouse a decade later have the looks of factional action sprung from affective alliances rather than from principled commitment.
In other circumstances records could be more informative. If it had long been necessary for crusading leaders to seek consensus on ways, means, and tactics through debate, the enlarged problems of mobilization and costs imparted new urgency to decision-making at the end of the 12th century. The promotion of the Fourth Crusade was attended by a rarely explicit interaction amongst lord-barons and knights incapable of citing on their own . . the predicament of the financially pressed crusading barons was no everyday situation. But for all his testimony to engaged debate about decisions and policy, Vikllehardouin is far from doubting the preponderance of lordship and nobility in his experience. . .[ here is a whole section on the crisis in Catelonia 1173-1205, prof. Bisson’s special area of expertise, see https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/05/artifacts-of-power-by-thomas-bisson.html ] . . .
It was Professor Holt himself who pointed out that when John de Lacy and Gilbert fitz Reinfrey submitted to King John in January 1216 they were obliged not simply to renew their personal fidelity to John but also renounce their adherence to the ‘king’s enemies’ and to the ‘charter of liberties’ they had wrung from the king; their fidelity, that is, to a ‘cause’, to a ‘political progamme’. Whereas the king and the pope had rejected their enterprise as conspiracy, there is reason to believe that the rebellious barons had arrived at a new way of conspiring by subordinating their personal rights to a collective interest that was, indeed, subversive of lord-kingship. Of ‘politicking’ in our modern sense there must have been plenty, to be sure, but it is the avoidance of that meaning that holds the hope for making historical sense of power in the crisis of the Magna Carta. John succeeded in sundering the adversarial solidarity of the barons, here again the sources resist all inflection of novelty. Circumstances pushed the rebels towards self-defining power that fell short of overt redefinition. Caps 12 and 14 of the Charter, which by prescribing ‘common counsel’; might appear to have spelt out a practical definition of collective interest, were silently dropped from the re-issues of 1216 and after. Yet as time swiftly showed, the insistent reality of a consultative role for the general interest in English society had overtaken the reticence of custom.
[ Lordship was predicated on superior force exercised in the exaction of ‘tributes’ ( of which there all sorts both customary and ex tempore) from peasants, town folks and traveling merchants and supported by alliances formed with Kings, other Lords and barons both greater and lesser. The “Crisis of the 12th century” was precipitated by an expansion of world trade, innovations in technology and improvement in the climate which expanded wealth and gave rise, in the absence of systematic record-keeping or bureaucratic control by the great lords themselves well as their dependency on knights themselves to secure the tenures, to the ambitions of the vassals and retainers and lesser barons to secure financial independence and grandeur.
“When I first came to Leon,” wrote King Alfonso IX wrote in his preamble to his statutes of 1188,” I learned therefrom plaintiffs and my other vassals that my kingdom was greatly troubled by malefactors who had willfully perverted the state of the realm.’ Some seized property out of hatred. Others assaulted persons on the pretext of their servility, and their goods. Others just stole, secretly or openly. Other seized property as if it were pledged. Still others thought lightly of helping themselves to the food water, and fodder of neighbors or their tenants or of seizing by force from travelers. The easier it seemed to oppress lesser men the harder one tried.”
The castle building craze that spread across Europe during this period was directly related to spread of such banditry. Not only were they built by the forced labor of peasants, they served as secure bastions to exploit them, defend against self-aggrandizing neighbors and control routes of trade.
Though situated in a much later period, Allessandro Manzoni’s romantic tale The Betrothed is an excellent representation of these sorts of affairs. Bisson’s account of the uprising of the Capuchins of Velay @1182 against oppression challenging ‘customary’ patrimonial dominion also provides key insights into what was happening.
There was not enough wealth for all who wanted and had the capacity to seize it. The church and lay authorities gradually came to the conclusion that it was in their own interests to engage in the politics of common interest and public well being, thus laying the ever precarious foundations of European government as we have come to know it. . . I pray my synopsis is not too narrow or crude.]
Accordingly, the historical problem is how this prevalent mode of lordly power begins to lose its passively affective character: not only how it became progressively institutionalized, as seems to have happened with accountability and office, but also how, in courts, causes, consultations, and parleys, a new kind of discourse emerged; talking less ceremonious and deferential than engaged with issues, in which interests as distinct from rights came to be articulated. Taken together these changes may be spoken of as ‘politicizing.’
There is reason to believe that this phenomena became general in the years around 1200 . . . but the evidence is unsatisfactory. “Politicizing” should not be confused with what has been called the ‘invention of the state.” The resort to ‘verbalized rules’ instead of custom, the recognition that power resides in law(s) rather than in the ‘effluence of character,’ may have been stimulated by the Investiture Conflict, and was widely diffused by the clergy in the 12th century. The Historia Pontificalis is the work of a courtier-cleric ‘listening-in’ on a newly intense institutional life rooted in argument about right, offices, and claims. To secure such things the clergy knew how to make friends, how to exert influence. That ecclesiastical jurisdictions promoted rational, ruler-bound spheres of discourse is evident from the records of papal judges-delegate. But there is nothing in all this to show that political talk was common.
For in reality the Christian clergy and lawyers lived in a chiefly seigneurial world. They were the sons and brothers of barons and knights; they were all too familiar with the imperatives of lordship. They did not easily give upon lordly habits of approbatory consultation. Synods were held by bishops and legates who were respected and addressed as lords. Preoccupied by rights and wrongs the prelates in such assemblies were in no hurry, nor did they feel pressed, to reformulate their concerns as social causes worthy of autonomous debate and regulation. So that even in the church neither the formal adherence to written rules nor the presumably sharpened precision of curial discourse seemed to have hastened the politicizing of power. In 1215 the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council were promulgated as the lord-pope’s programme, contrived to conceal objections that may have arisen in its formulation; only for the dogmatic decrees on the Trinity and against heretical teachings did Innocent II so much as request the assemblies approval.
Still less do the records of lay power suggest that the interactiion in conventions, courts and assemblies was other than deferential, ceremonial, or judicially procedural towards 1200 . . .thye more one reads such records the more suspicious one becomes. How much is surely left out! What are we to make of the commitments of Italian communes to the Guelf cause, like that of Brescia, or to the Ghibellines, like Pisa? Yet the interested powers – let not us call them ‘parties’, For they themselves did not- cultivated alliances with communes, not causes as such . . the palpable changes of regimes in Genoa after 1190 and in Toulouse a decade later have the looks of factional action sprung from affective alliances rather than from principled commitment.
In other circumstances records could be more informative. If it had long been necessary for crusading leaders to seek consensus on ways, means, and tactics through debate, the enlarged problems of mobilization and costs imparted new urgency to decision-making at the end of the 12th century. The promotion of the Fourth Crusade was attended by a rarely explicit interaction amongst lord-barons and knights incapable of citing on their own . . the predicament of the financially pressed crusading barons was no everyday situation. But for all his testimony to engaged debate about decisions and policy, Vikllehardouin is far from doubting the preponderance of lordship and nobility in his experience. . .[ here is a whole section on the crisis in Catelonia 1173-1205, prof. Bisson’s special area of expertise, see https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/05/artifacts-of-power-by-thomas-bisson.html ] . . .
It was Professor Holt himself who pointed out that when John de Lacy and Gilbert fitz Reinfrey submitted to King John in January 1216 they were obliged not simply to renew their personal fidelity to John but also renounce their adherence to the ‘king’s enemies’ and to the ‘charter of liberties’ they had wrung from the king; their fidelity, that is, to a ‘cause’, to a ‘political progamme’. Whereas the king and the pope had rejected their enterprise as conspiracy, there is reason to believe that the rebellious barons had arrived at a new way of conspiring by subordinating their personal rights to a collective interest that was, indeed, subversive of lord-kingship. Of ‘politicking’ in our modern sense there must have been plenty, to be sure, but it is the avoidance of that meaning that holds the hope for making historical sense of power in the crisis of the Magna Carta. John succeeded in sundering the adversarial solidarity of the barons, here again the sources resist all inflection of novelty. Circumstances pushed the rebels towards self-defining power that fell short of overt redefinition. Caps 12 and 14 of the Charter, which by prescribing ‘common counsel’; might appear to have spelt out a practical definition of collective interest, were silently dropped from the re-issues of 1216 and after. Yet as time swiftly showed, the insistent reality of a consultative role for the general interest in English society had overtaken the reticence of custom.
[ Lordship was predicated on superior force exercised in the exaction of ‘tributes’ ( of which there all sorts both customary and ex tempore) from peasants, town folks and traveling merchants and supported by alliances formed with Kings, other Lords and barons both greater and lesser. The “Crisis of the 12th century” was precipitated by an expansion of world trade, innovations in technology and improvement in the climate which expanded wealth and gave rise, in the absence of systematic record-keeping or bureaucratic control by the great lords themselves well as their dependency on knights themselves to secure the tenures, to the ambitions of the vassals and retainers and lesser barons to secure financial independence and grandeur.
“When I first came to Leon,” wrote King Alfonso IX wrote in his preamble to his statutes of 1188,” I learned therefrom plaintiffs and my other vassals that my kingdom was greatly troubled by malefactors who had willfully perverted the state of the realm.’ Some seized property out of hatred. Others assaulted persons on the pretext of their servility, and their goods. Others just stole, secretly or openly. Other seized property as if it were pledged. Still others thought lightly of helping themselves to the food water, and fodder of neighbors or their tenants or of seizing by force from travelers. The easier it seemed to oppress lesser men the harder one tried.”
The castle building craze that spread across Europe during this period was directly related to spread of such banditry. Not only were they built by the forced labor of peasants, they served as secure bastions to exploit them, defend against self-aggrandizing neighbors and control routes of trade.
Though situated in a much later period, Allessandro Manzoni’s romantic tale The Betrothed is an excellent representation of these sorts of affairs. Bisson’s account of the uprising of the Capuchins of Velay @1182 against oppression challenging ‘customary’ patrimonial dominion also provides key insights into what was happening.
There was not enough wealth for all who wanted and had the capacity to seize it. The church and lay authorities gradually came to the conclusion that it was in their own interests to engage in the politics of common interest and public well being, thus laying the ever precarious foundations of European government as we have come to know it. . . I pray my synopsis is not too narrow or crude.]
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