This chapter’s title seems to point towards an approach to England’s medieval history popularized in the Victorian age by William Stubbs’s Constitutional History, ‘whose guiding theme was the history of liberty in England, treated with a sense of providential destiny’.1 In Stubbs’s view, as various communities within the kingdom reached political maturity, the monarch was farsighted enough to admit their spokesmen into his counsels, a process towards parliamentary government that climaxed in Edward I’s 1295 Model Parliament, representing the three estates. Historians today are less likely to depict historical change as purposeful progress, and they find more tangible matters of royal finances, court factions or patronage more significant in twelfth - and thirteenth-century England’s politics than did Stubbs with his optimistic and complacent outlook.
Modern scholars depict medieval kingdoms as networks of autonomous communities of various ranks from peasant villages to aristocratic ‘honours’ (a noble’s complex of lands, rights and privileges). Social and political theorists in the middle ages envisioned society as three divinely ordained and hierarchically ranked orders or estates, each of which had special duties towards the whole community: clergy, warriors or nobility, and peasantry. In fact, heaviest burdens bore down on the bottom of society, villeins or unfree peasants owing their lords ‘servile’ dues and labour services. Despite the value of the peasantry’s labour in fields, the upper classes unanimously held them in contempt; and art and literature portrayed them as filthy and physically repugnant, barely human.
Late twentieth-century scholars find more continuity in medieval political patterns with the late Roman and Carolingian past and less significance for the Germanic invaders’ tribal culture than did the Victorians. Because of surviving traditions of strong monarchy in England, the shift from informal government by multi-purpose servants of the royal household just after the Norman Conquest to a protobureaucracy dedicated to enhancing the monarch’s power in the twelfth century seems less sudden. Scholars today also acknowledge the continuous influence of the classics and Roman law; for example, revival of the term respublica (or commonwealth) by such writers as John of Salisbury contributed to an awareness of the political community. Thoughtful people could observe that the interests of the king {rex) and the kingdom (regnum) were not always identical and that the people’s common good could conflict with royal dynastic or personal desires. Recent scholarship questions the benefits of royal governance for the king’s subjects, aware that its predatory nature inspired their fear and hatred. Reaction against the coercive and extortionate rule of Henry II and his successors enabled a political community with interests that conflicted with the king’s will to find its voice.
Historians at the end of the twentieth century, whether Marxists or not, see change occurring through competition between power blocs or special interests. First to become aware of themselves as an interest group or community within the English kingdom were the landed aristocrats or barons. By the end of the twelfth century, they were insisting on a place for themselves among the king’s counsellors, as they watched professional royal officials and mercenary military captains usurping what they saw as their proper places at his side. These magnates assumed that they could speak for all classes within the kingdom, and only slowly did other communities gain enough political consciousness or clout to realize that their interests could conflict with those of the monarch or magnates. By the mid-thirteenth century, the knightly class, earlier defined by its military metier, had evolved into a rural gentry busy with local government, and their enhanced status gave them greater political awareness. Also by the thirteenth century, the bourgeoisie or burgesses in England’s towns had gained experience in governing municipalities and felt entitled to a place alongside the knights. While peasants had always participated in decision making at the village level, they continued to lack power in the political sphere, despite the importance of their agricultural labour. Stubbs’s view of English history as leading inevitably towards representative democracy does contain a kernel of truth, for the political community emerged as baronage or aristocracy, knights and citizens of cities became conscious of themselves as groups capable of defining their own political interests. The ‘community of the realm’ took shape through movements of resistance, reform and rebellion late in King John’s reign, 1212-16, and during Henry Ill’s personal rule, 1230-65.
World History
