Leviathan portrays the social body as a collection of individuals, but it was also thought of - and functioned - as a collection of groups. As we saw in chapter 1, medieval Europeans had conceptualized society in three basic groups: those who pray (the clergy), those who fight (the nobility), and those who work (everyone else). These groups were termed “orders” or “Estates,” and many medieval representative assemblies, including
Those of France and the Low Countries, were organized into three houses by Estate. In England, the higher-level clergy joined the nobility in the House of Lords, with the House of Commons the rough equivalent of the Third Estate elsewhere. Both the House of Commons and assemblies of the Third Estate primarily represented the interests of towns, not the majority of the population who were peasants. Only in Sweden did the peasants have a special fourth house in the national assembly with their own representatives.
The society of orders was a system of social differentiation based on function - or at least theoretical function - in society. It worked fairly well in setting out sociolegal categories for membership in representative bodies, and highlighted the most important social distinction in both medieval and early modern Europe: that between noble and commoner. Status as a noble generally brought freedom from direct taxation and rights of jurisdiction over a piece of property and the people who lived on it. Even in the Middle Ages, however, and more strikingly by the seventeenth century, the more fixed and inherited hierarchy of orders was interwoven with a more changeable hierarchy based on wealth: what would later come to be termed social class.
Within each order there were vast differences in status, power, and wealth. The clergy included prince-bishops who lived in opulent palaces and poor parish priests who farmed their own fields, while the nobility ranged from wealthy counts with vast estates to poor gentlemen with a single run-down house or knights with no land at all. In England, distinctions were made between true nobles with heritable titles, represented in the House of Lords, and gentry, who paid taxes, had no clear set of privileges, and sent representatives to the House of Commons. Everywhere in Europe the Third Estate consisted of very diverse individuals, from affluent merchant-bankers and powerful judges to poverty-stricken artisans.
Wealth allowed some male commoners to buy or gain noble titles, and female commoners to marry into noble families, so that these categories were not static; in the English county of Lancashire between i6oo and 1642, for example, more than one-third of the gentry families died out, but their numbers were replaced by wealthy socialclimbing commoners. Monarchs sometimes attempted to restrict entrance into the nobility to avoid erosion of the tax base, but the temptation to gain cash quickly by selling titles massively outweighed concerns about long-term revenue streams. The steady influx of newcomers with no military function meant that the old basis for noble status was increasingly anachronistic, but commoners’ willingness to spend vast sums of money for a noble title also indicates the continuing privileges and social cachet of noble rank. The nobility maintained its status in most parts of Europe by taking in and integrating competing social elites; where wealthy commoners did not bother acquiring noble titles, such as the Dutch province of Holland, nobles lost their social and political role.
Wealth and ability also allowed lower-level nobles to climb higher, especially once monarchs recognized that selling inflated noble titles was an excellent way to make money. James I invented the title of “baronet” in i6ii, while Spain had fifty-five titled nobles in 1520, and nearly ten times that number in 1700. In England, a noble title brought prestige and certain legal privileges, while in Spain and France it brought freedom from many taxes, so that the long-term financial implications of such sales for the royal treasury were significant.
The most common way to gain a noble title was to buy one, but the fastest way to climb in terms of title, status, and actual power was through gaining royal or princely favor at court. Courts were cultural, political, and economic centers in which rulers dispensed favors, offices, gifts, and rewards. At Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, the palace built by the king outside Paris in i66o, nobles vied with each other to carry out tasks associated with the physical needs of the monarch - bringing in breakfast, handing napkins, emptying the royal chamber-pot. Though we may view these activities as demeaning or disgusting, they offered great opportunities for personal access to the ruler, as did attendance at card-parties, festivities, and entertainments. French nobles hoping to gain positions moved to Versailles, where they lived in cramped rooms and ate high-priced cold food bought from vendors, rather than the more lavish fare they would have been served on their own estates. English and Austrian nobles were more fortunate, for their rulers continued to live much of the time in London and Vienna; though nobles had to move to be near them, London and Vienna offered far more in terms of food, housing, entertainment, and other amenities than Versailles.
Nobles themselves attended to the needs of the monarch, and they also sought positions at court for their adolescent children, especially if the young men or women were physically attractive, intelligent, and talented in music, conversation, or dance. Their function was largely to serve as decorative objects and high-status servants, and - as the name lady - or gentleman-in-waiting implies - wait for and wait on the ruler. Success at court for either an adult or adolescent called for deference, understanding of ceremony and protocol, discretion, charm, skill, and luck. For women - and for men with a few monarchs - sexual attraction could also be a powerful tool, with royal mistresses and male favorites gaining wealth, influence, and the power to dispense favors of their own.
Those who were legally noble generally made up about 1 or 2 percent of the population, although in Spain and Poland nearly one out of every ten people was technically noble. In western Europe, nobles owned about one-half to two-thirds of the land, and in eastern Europe almost all of it. Most nobles did not own very much, however, and some, such as the impoverished hidalgos of Spain, owned nothing at all, surviving by payments for mercenary service. Middle-level nobles owned enough land to live comfortably, and often served as royal judges, commanders in princely armies, or bishops
Of smaller bishoprics. At the top were aristocratic families whose vast tracts of land might provide them with an income of more than a hundred times that of a country gentleman. The Mendoza family in Spain controlled more than eight hundred villages, and the Radziwills in Lithuania more than ten thousand.
Inheritance systems shaped the fortunes of noble families over generations, and they varied throughout Europe. In areas with partible inheritance, which included parts of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and eastern Europe, land and other property was divided among sons (and occasionally among all children), diminishing the family fortune over time. In areas such as England with a tradition of primogeniture, in which the eldest son inherited all land and the noble title, family wealth remained more concentrated. The advantages of this system were increasingly clear to nobles throughout Europe, who pushed for the introduction of primogeniture or other forms of inheritance, termed strict settlement or entail, that prohibited the sale or division of family lands. Younger sons generally received stipends of cash, but were expected to augment this with income from a government office or position in the church or military. Daughters received dowries, the size of which determined the young woman’s value in the marriage market; a larger dowry would attract higher-status suitors, though social-climbing lower nobles or wealthy urban merchants might be willing to accept a lower dowry in return for the prestige and access to power that marrying into a noble family could bring. Daughters who were sole heirs sometimes inherited the family lands and the right to a title (which they passed to their husbands) and sometimes not. Gaining this inheritance might involve a protracted legal battle with uncles or male cousins, however, who argued that gender should be more important than degree of familial relationship in determining access to land and position.
In the sixteenth century, nobles and gentry in most of Europe lived in the countryside, although in northern and central Italy, and southern France and Spain, they often lived in large households in town, where they might attend the court of the pope or a ruling duke or count. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nobles who could afford it built sumptuous houses in national and regional capitals, where they sought royal princely patronage and joined in the cultural activities of the court. They also maintained a steady round of their own social activities, especially during the “season,” the winter months when life on country estates would have been uncomfortable and boring. By the eighteenth century, nobles in western Europe did not have the independent power or vast wealth that many of their counterparts in eastern Europe did, but they maintained their privileged position.
Though nobles were increasingly attracted to city life, cities were also where the hierarchy of orders met the hierarchy of wealth most dramatically. By 1500, and much earlier in cities in Italy and the Netherlands, a number of urban merchants and bankers
Fig. 20 In this painting, the Italian artist Pietro Longhi (1702-85) shows a luxurious urban household in which women, accompanied by their servants, introduce themselves. Formal personal visits, afternoon coffees, and dances were important parts of the social “season” for wealthy women and men.
Were wealthier than all but the highest level of nobility. Over the next centuries, some of these men climbed into the nobility through marriage, service to a monarch, or purchasing a title. More of them heightened social and political distinctions within cities themselves, often beginning this process by limiting membership in the city councils
They controlled to a small circle of families. They might hope to marry into nobility, but, as in the German city of Nuremberg, they also prohibited men who married the daughters of city councilors from joining the council themselves.
The most significant distinction within cities was that between citizen and noncitizen, as we discussed in chapter 3. Urban citizenship, described in England as having the “freedom” of a city, made one a member of a corporate group with legal privileges and claims on public assistance; it also brought responsibilities, including serving in or providing troops for the city militia, and paying local taxes. Like noble titles, the status of citizen was heritable.
Cities also allowed people to purchase citizenship, especially after demographic catastrophes, and sometimes granted citizenship free of charge for special services to the city or if applicants for citizenship practiced an occupation deemed desirable, such as midwifery or surgery. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, though national capitals continued to expand and flourish economically, many smaller cities stagnated. They responded not by making it easier to immigrate, but by increasing the standard fees for citizenship to bring in more money, and granting citizenship free of charge less often. In 1599, for example, the entrance fees for citizenship in the Swiss city of Basel were raised from 10 gulden to 30, beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest immigrants. Cities often tolerated outsiders who performed needed manual labor, and sometimes developed an in-between category for permanent residents too poor to obtain citizenship, but the native-born still had distinct advantages.
In many cities, sumptuary laws attempted to create easily visible distinctions between social groups. Nobles were set off by their fine silk clothing, university-educated physicians and lawyers by their velvet - or fur-trimmed robes, servants by their rough dark clothes and aprons. Individuals tried to evade these laws by wearing the clothing restricted to the group above them, though there were fines prescribed for doing so. Wearing a disguise or attempting to pass oneself off as someone else was taken much more seriously, and could warrant the death penalty. Doing so successfully was difficult, for it meant not only acquiring different clothes, but also different speech patterns, gestures, eating habits, and mannerisms.
World History
