Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, clerks described society in terms of the ancient Indo-European model, which since the earliest historical times had classified people according to the tripartite religious myth of war, priesthood, and fertility. This scheme divided people into three social groups: ‘those who fight’ (bellatores), ‘those who pray’ (oratores), and ‘those who toil’ (laboratores). This tripartite model was extremely widespread, being found, for instance, in the
3 D. Barthelemy, La Societe dans le comte de Vendome de I’an mil au XlVe siecle (Paris,
1993), 19-83.
Work of Alfred the Great (849/71-99), king of Wessex; Remigius of Auxerre (C.841-C.908); Aelfric (d. 1020), abbot of Eynsham, and around 1025-30 in the writing of Adalbero, bishop of Laon (977-1030), and Gerard, bishop of Cambrai (1013-51). According to these authors, warriors, clerks, and peasants had complementary functions. Hence it was natural that the warriors whose blood was shed on the battlefield should be fed by the peasants whose sweat was spilled in the fields. The reciprocal nature of their roles was indispensable to the smooth functioning of society.11 From the twelfth century onwards, however, scholars increasingly regarded the notion of three orders as an inadequate way of describing their world. The Parisian master Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) still used it, but subdivided the laboratores into ‘peasants’, ‘the poor’, and ‘artisans’. By then scholars recognized that the tripartite model no longer served as a means of analysing a society that had become far more complex because of increasing urbanization and demographic and economic growth. Nevertheless, the model was not abandoned completely: an illuminated miniature in a manuscript of the mid-thirteenth-century, L’Ymage dou Monde of Gautier de Metz, employs this archaic motif (see front cover).
Once the ‘trifunctionalist’ model had become obsolete, writers preferred to compile long lists that confused social ranks, professions, legal status or functions, and even ages. In northern Italy, a relatively urbanized, mercantile land, as early as the tenth century we find Ratherius (c.890-974), bishop of Verona, cataloguing some nineteen different groups: civilians, warriors, artisans, physicians, merchants, lawyers, judges, witnesses, ‘procurators’, employers, mercenaries, counsellors, lords, serfs, (school) masters, pupils, the rich, those of modest status, and beggars.12 Similar classification is found later in the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis (C.1080-C.1157): clerks, knights, merchants, artisans, minstrels, penitents, the ‘poor in spirit’, labourers, children, pilgrims, judges, executioners, and the victims of torture. Such categorization became ever more refined: the Libre de contemplacio (1270) of the Catalan author Ramon Lull adds doctors, sailors, painters, and manual workers. It was generally found in moral treatises, preachers’ manuals, or confessional works, in which priests carefully adapted their advice to suit the different social ‘estates’ (status). From John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159) onwards, works written with a more overtly political purpose used the metaphor of the different parts of the body to assign a specific social place and function to each estate; their unity around the ruler, who represented the head, became a necessary condition for the survival of the body politic.
Although described by the clerks of the period primarily for pastoral reasons, these social divisions also developed their own codes and symbols, which everyone could easily recognize. In a society in which reality and appearance were easily confused, clothes neatly embodied social difference. This can be seen in the contemptuous reproach that Jean de Joinville (1225-1317), the biographer of (Saint) Louis IX of France (1226-70), once delivered to the king’s chaplain Robert de Sorbon:
Master Robert, I am, if you will allow me to say so, doing nothing worthy of blame in wearing green cloth and squirrel fur, for I inherited the right to such clothing from my father and mother. But you, on the other hand, are much to blame, for though both your parents were villeins, you have abandoned their style of dress, and are now wearing finer woollen cloth than the king himself.13
At that time nobles wore tunics and capes, long, full robes that eventually, in the fourteenth century, were superseded by more closely fitting garments: furs and fine-quality cloth in resplendent colours set them apart from ordinary people.14 Other external signs symbolized aristocratic rank, such as riding an expensive horse, sporting a falcon on one’s wrist, or displaying one’s coat of arms. Manners conferred further subtle distinctions, since they were a code by which the elites distinguished themselves from the rabble. The hero of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (1200-30) reveals the antiquity of his lineage merely through the dexterous way in which he carves meat in the presence of strangers. Extravagant feasts and liberal largesse also characterized the aristocracy, whose rites of passage (baptism, knighting, marriage, and funerals) were crucial occasions for noble sociability and ostentatious display.
Those who belonged to the less affluent sections of society were marked out quite differently. Peasants wore short, worn-out, and ill-fitting garments; courtly romances, which aimed to flatter the nobility, depicted them as hideous in appearance: weather-beaten, filthy, and stooped. Those excluded from mainstream society were also distinguished by external symbols, such as the badge stitched on the clothes of Jews or the uncovered, unkempt hair of prostitutes. In short, someone’s place in society could be known at a glance. In towns the identity of each social category was regularly displayed through grand processions: each group would parade in the appropriate attire with its distinctive insignia, in an order of precedence that reflected its place in the social hierarchy.
World History
