The Hierarchic Conception of Society by Johan Huizinga

When, somewhat more than a hundred years ago, medieval history began to assert itself as an object of interest and admiration, the first element of it to draw general attention and to become a source of enthusiasm and inspiration was chivalry. To the epoch of romanticism the Middle Ages and Chivalry were almost synonymous terms. Historical imagination dwelt by preference on crusades, tournaments, knights errant. Since the history has become democratic. Chivalry is now only seen as a very special efflorescence of civilization, which, far from having controlled the course of medieval history, has been rather a secondary factor in the political and social evolution of the epoch. For us the problems of the Middle Ages lies first of all in the development of communal organization, of economic conditions, of monarchic power, of administrative and judicial institutions; and, in the second place, in the domain of religion, scholasticism and art. Towards the end of the period our attention is almost entirely occupied by the genesis of new forms of political and economic life (absolutism, capitalism), and new modes of expression ( Renaissance). From this point of view feudalism and chivalry appear as little more than a remnant of a superannuated order already crumbling into insignificance, and, for the understanding of the epoch, almost negligible.

Nevertheless, an assiduous reader of the chronicles and literature of the fifteenth century will hardly resist the impression that nobility and chivalry occupy a much more considerable place there than our general conception of the epoch would imply. The reason of this disproportion lies in the fact, that long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike or courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility  as the foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.

So this mistake, it may be argued, is theirs, and our conception of the Middle Ages is right. This would be so if, to understand the spirit of the age, it sufficed to know its real and hidden forces and not its illusions, its fancies and errors. But for the history of civilization every delusion or opinion of an epoch has the value of an important fact. In the fifteenth century chivalry was still, after religion the strongest of all ethical conceptions which dominated the mind and the heart. It was thought of as the crown of the whole social system. Medieval political speculation is imbued to the marrow with the idea of a structure of society based on distinct orders. This notion of ‘orders’ is itself by no means fixed. The words ‘estate’;  and ‘order,’ almost synonymous, designate a great variety of social realities. The idea of an ‘estate’ is not at all limited to that of a class; it extends to every social function, to every profession, to every group. Side by side with the French system of the three estates of the realm, which in England, according to Professor Pollard, was only secondarily and theoretically adopted after the French model, we find traces of a system of twelve social estates.

The functions or groupings, which the Middle Ages designated by the word ‘estate’ and ‘order,’ are of a very diverse nature. There are, first of all, the estates of the realm, but there are also the trades, the state of matrimony and that of virginity, the state of sin. At the court there are the ‘four estates of body and mouth’: bread-masters, cup-bearers, carvers, and cooks. In the Church, there are sacerdotal orders and monastic orders. Finally, there are the different orders of chivalry. That which, in medieval thought, establishes unity in the very dissimilar meanings of the word, is the conviction that every one of these groupings represents a divine institution, an element of the organism of Creation emanating from the will of God, constituting an actual entity and being, at bottom, as venerable as the angelic hierarchy.

Now, if the degrees of the social edifice are conceived as the lower steps of the throne of the Eternal, the value assigned to each order will not depend on its utility, but on its sanctity –that is to say, its proximity to the highest place. Even if the Middle Ages had recognized the diminishing importance of the nobility as a limb of the social body, that would not have changed the conception they had of its high value, no more than the spectacle of a violent and dissipated nobility ever hindered the veneration of the order itself. To the catholic soul the unworthiness of the persons never compromises the sacred character of the institution. The morals of the clergy, or the decadence of the chivalrous virtues, might be stigmatized, without deviating for a moment from the respect due to the Church or the nobility as such. The estates of society cannot be but venerable and lasting, because they all have been ordained by God. The conception of society in the Middle Ages is statical, not dynamical.

The aspect which society and politics assume under the influence of these general ideas is bound to be a strange one. The chroniclers of the fifteenth century have, nearly all, been the dupes of an absolute mis-appreciation of their times, of which the real moving forces escaped them. Chastellain, the historiographer of the dukes of Burgundy, may serve as an instance. A Fleming by birth, he had been face to face, in the Netherlands, with the power and wealth of the commoners, nowhere stronger and more self-conscious than there. The extraordinary fortune of the Burgundian branch of Valois transplanted to Flanders was in reality based on the wealth of the Flemish and Brabant towns. Nevertheless, dazzled by the splendor and magnificence  of an extravagant court, Chastellain imagined that the power of the house of Burgundy was especially due to the heroism and the devotion of knighthood.

God, he says, created the common people to till the earthy and to procure by trade the commodities necessary for life; he created the clergy for the works of religion; the nobles that they should cultivate virtue and maintain justice, so that the deeds and morals of these fine personages might be a pattern for others. All the highest tasks in the state are assigned by Chastellain to the nobility; notably those of protecting the Church, augmenting the faith, defending the people from oppression, maintaining public prosperity, combating violence and tyranny, confirming peace. Veracity, courage, integrity, liberality, appertain properly to the noble class, and French nobility, according to this pompous panegyrist, comes up to this ideal image. In spite of his general pessimism, Chastellain does his best to see his times through the tinted glasses of this aristocratic conception.

This failing to see the social importance of the common people, which is proper to nearly all authors of th

e fifteenth century, may be regarded as a kind of mental inertia, which is a phenomena of frequent occurrence and vital importance in history. The idea which people had of the third estate had not yet been corrected and remodeled in accordance with altered realities. This idea was simple and summary, like those miniatures of breviaries, or those bas-relief of cathedrals, representing the tasks of the year in the shape of the toiling laborer, the industrious artisan, or the busy merchant. Among the archaic types like these there is neither place for the figure of the wealthy patrician encroaching upon the power of the nobleman, nor for that of the militant representative of a revolutionary craft-guild. Nobody perceived that the nobility only maintained itself than to the blood and riches of the commoners. No distinction in principle was made, in the third estate, between rich and poor citizens, nor between the townsmen and country-people. The figure of the poor peasant alternates indiscriminately with that of the wealthy burgher, but a sound definition of the economic and political functions of these different classes does not take shape. In 1412 the reform program of an Augustinian friar demanded in all earnest that every non-noble person in France should either devote himself to some handicraft or to labor, or  be banished from the kingdom, evidently considering commerce and law as useless occupations.

Chastellain, who is very naïve in political matters and very susceptible to ethical delusions, attributes sublime virtues only to the nobility and only inferior ones to the common people. “Coming to the third estate, making up the kingdom as a whole, it is the estate of the good towns, of merchants and of laboring men, of whom it is not becoming to give such a long exposition as of the others, because it is hardly possible to attribute great qualities to them, as they are of a servile degree.’ Humility, diligence, obedience to the king, and docility in bowing ‘voluntarily to the pleasure of the lords,’ those are the qualities which bring credit to ‘cestuy bas estat de Francois’ ( This low estate of the Frenchmen.)

May not this strange infatuation, by preventing them from foreseeing future times of economic expansion have contributed to engender pessimism in minds such as that of Chastellain, who could only expect the good of mankind from the virtues of the nobility?

Chastellain still calls the rich burghers simply villeins. He has not the slightest notion of middle-class honor. Duke Philip the Good was wont to abuse his powers by marrying his archers or other servants of lesser nobility to rich burgher widows and heiresses. To avoid those alliances, the parents on their side married their daughters as soon as they reached marriageable age. Jacques u Clercq mentions the case of a widow, who for this reason remarried two days after the burial of her husband. Once the duke, while engaged in such marriage-broking, met with an obstinate refusal from a rich brewer of Lille, who felt affronted at such an alliance for his daughter. The duke secured the person of the young girl; the father removed with all his possessions to Tournay, outside the ducal jurisdiction, in order to be abler to bring the matter before the Parliament of Paris. This brought him nothing but vexation, and he fell ill with grief. At last he sent his wife to Lille ‘in order to beg mercy of the duke and give up his daughter to him.’ The latter, in honor of Good Friday, gave her back to the mother, but with scornful and humiliating words, - Castellain’s sympathies are all on the side of his master, though, on other occasions, he did not at all fear to record his disapproval of the duke’s conduct. For the injured father he has no other terms than ‘this rebellious rustic brewer,’ ‘and such a naughty villein too.’

There are in the sentiments of the aristocratic class towards the people two parallel currents. Side by side with this haughty disdain of the small man, already a little out of date, we notice a sympathetic attitude in the nobility, which seems in absolute contrast with it. Whereas feudal satire goes on expressing hatred mixed with contempt and sometimes with fear, as in the Proverbes del Vilain and in the Kerelslied, the song of the Flemish villagers, the code of aristocratic ethics teaches, on the other hand, a sentimental compassion for the miseries of the oppressed and defenseless people. Despoiled by war, exploited by officials, the people live in the greatest distress.

The innocents must starve

With which the big wolves fill their belly every day,

Who by the thousands and hundreds hoard

Ill-gotten treasures;

It is the grain, it is the corn,

The blood, the bones of poor people

Which have ploughed the earth

And therefore their souls call

Upon God for vengeance and woe  to lordship.

They suffer in patience. ‘The prince knows nothing of this.’ If, at times, they murmur, ‘poor sheep, poor foolish people,’ a word from the Prince will suffice to appease them. The devastation and insecurity which in consequence of the Hundred Years’ War had finally spread over almost all of France, gave these laments a sad actuality. From the year 1400 downwards there is no end of the complaints about the fate of the peasants, plundered, squeezed, maltreated by gangs of enemies or friends, robbed of their cattle, driven from their homes. They are expressed by the great Churchmen, who favored reform, such as Nicolas de Clemanges, in his Liber de lapsu et reparatione justitiae, or Gerson in his political sermon Vivat rex, preached on November 7, 1405, in the queen’s palace at Paris, before the regents and the court. ‘The poor man’- said the brave chancellor –‘will not have bread to eat, except perhaps a handful of rye or barley; his poor wife will lie in and they will have four or six little ones about the hearth or the oven, which perchance will be warm; they will ask for bread, they will scream, mad with hunger. The poor mother will but have a very littler salted bread to put in their mouths. Now such misery ought to suffice; but no: -the plunderers will com, who will seek everything .  .  . Everything will be taken and snapped up; and we need not ask who pays.’

Statesmen, too, make themselves the spokesmen of the miserable people, and utter their complaints. Jean Jouvenel laid them before the States of Blois in 1433, and those of Orlean’s in 1439. In a petition presented to the king at the meeting of the States of Tours in 1484, theses complaints take the direct form of a political ‘remonstrance.’

The chroniclers could not help reverting to the subject again and again: it was bound up with their subject-matter.

The poets in their turn took hold of the motif. Alain Chartier treats it in his Quadriloge Invectif, and Robert Gaguin in his Debat du Labourer, du Prestre et du Gendarme, inspired by Chartier. A hundred years later La Complainte du povre Commun et des povres Laboreurs de France of about 1400, Jean Molinet was to compose a Resource du petit Peuple. Jean Meschinot never tires of reminding the ruling classes of the fact that the common people are being neglected.

O God, see the indigence of the common people,
Provide for it with speed:

Alas: with hunger, cold, fear and misery they tremble,
If they have sinned or are guilty of negligence toward Thee,

They beg indulgence.
Is it not a pity that they are bereft of their goods?
They have no more corn to take to the mill,

Woolen and linen goods are taken from them,

Only water is left to them to drink.

This pity, however, remains sterile. It does not result in acts, not even in programmes, of reform. The felt need of serious reform is lacking to it and will be lacking for a long time. In La Bruyere, in Fenelon, perhaps in the elder Mirabeau, the theme is still the same; even they have not yet got beyond theoretical and stereotyped commiseration.

It is natural that the belated chivalrous spirits of the fifteenth century join in this chorus of pity for the people. Was it not the knight’s duty to protect the weak? The ideal of chivalry implied, after all, two ideas which might seem to concur in forbidding a haughty contempt for the small man; the ideas, namely, that true nobility is based on virtue, and all men are equal.

We should be careful not to overrate the importance of these two ideas. They were equally stereotyped and theoretical. To acknowledge true chivalry a matter of the heart should not be considered a victory over the spirit of feudalism or an achievement of the Renaissance. This medieval notion of equality is by no means a manifestation of the spirit or revolt. It does not owe its origin to radical reformers. In quoting the text of John Ball, who preached the revolt of 1381, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was them the gentleman?’ one is inclined to fancy that the nobles must have trembled on hearing it. But, in fact, it was the nobility themselves who for a long time had ben repeating this ancient them.

The two ideas of the equality of men and of the nature of true nobility were commonplaces of courteous literature, just as they were in the salons of the ‘ancien regime.’ Both derived from antiquity. The poetry of the troubadours has sung and popularized them. Every one applauded them.

Whence comes to all sovereign nobility?

From the gentle heart, adorned by noble morals . . .

No one is a villein unless it comes from his heart.

The notion of equality had been borrowed by the Fathers of the Church from Cicero and Seneca. Gregory the Great, the great initiator of tye Middle Ages, had given a text for coming ages in his Omnes namque homines natura aequales sumus. It had been repeated in all keys, but an actual social purport was not attached to it. It was a moral sentence, nothing more; to the men of the Middle Ages it meant the approaching equality of death, and was far from holding out, as a consolation for the inequalities of this world, a receptive prospect of equality on earth. The thought of equality in the Middle Ages is closely akin to a memento mori . . . .

How is it that one is a villein and the other assumes the name of gentility, of you, brothers? Whence comes such nobility? I do not know, unless it springs from virtues and the villeins from all vice, which wounds: you are all covered with the same skin.

Jean le Maire de Belge, in Les Chansions da Namur, purposely mentions the exploits of rustic heroes, to acquaint the nobles with the fact that those they treat as villeins are sometime animated with the greatest gallantry. For the reason of these poetical admonitions on the subject of true nobility and human equality generally lies in the stimulus they impart to the nobles to adapt themselves to the true ideal of knighthood, an thereby to support and to purify the world. In the virtues of the nobles, says Chastellain, lies the remedy for the evils of the time; the weal of the kingdom, the peace of the Church, the rule of justice, depend ontyem. – ‘Two things,’ it is said in Le Livre des Faicts du Mareschal Boucicaut, ‘have by the will of God, been established in the world, like two pillars to sustain the order of divine and human laws .  .  . Chivalry and Learning, which go very well together.’ “Learning, Faith and Chivalry’ are the three flowers of the Chapel des Fleurs-de-lis of Philippe Vitri; it is the duty of knighthood to preserve and protect the two others.

 

Long after the Middle Ages a certain equivalence of knighthood and a doctor’s degree was generally acknowledged. This parallelism indicates the high ethical value attaching to the idea of chivalry. The two dignities of knight and of a doctor are conceived as the sacred forms of two superior functions, that of courage and of knowledge. By being knighted the man of action is raised to an ideal level; by taking his doctor’s degree the man of knowledge receives a badge of superiority. They are stamped, the one as a hero, the other as a sage. The devotion to a higher life-work is expressed by a ceremonial consecration. If as an element of social life the idea of chivalry has been of much greater importance, it was because it contained, besides its ethical value, an abundance of aesthetic value of the most suggestive kind.