The End of Feudalism and the Gradual Rise of the Absolutist State
Notes on the collapse of Medieval socio-political structures—Church and State in political theory—‘The Absolutist Age’—Some longer-term effects
A perceptive reader remarked that the article ‘Knights at War’ touched on one of the less-popularly appreciated aspects of the Renaissance—the end of feudalism and the dawn of the ‘Age of Absolutism’. This is exactly correct as the period which succeeded the Middle Ages witnessed a remarkable growth in political power and the instruments of administration required to wield it. It is therefore in the dying embers of the Middle Ages that we can discern the outlines of the modern state slowly taking shape. This was a general trend, visible across Europe. While it was a very complex transformation covering a couple of centuries there was a clear pattern. What follows here is just a rough sketch.
As a political and social force, Power, by which we mean the central governing force within a territory, was steadily increasing from the High Middle Ages (1200s) onwards. There were of course periodic checks on this tendency, the most notable and enduring being Magna Carta in 1215 when England’s barons forced King John to accept limitations on his power. Magna Carta was not so much about introducing novel restraints on those governing but rather re-establishing what was supposed to have always been customary. It was not the people at large that checked the power of the monarchy, since the majority were not in any position to do anything concrete and legal about it anyway. Thus we should not see it as some sort of democratic milestone. Rather, it was an act carried out by the aristocracy.
As the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote in the twentieth century, liberty is an aristocratic quality and its origins in the Middle Ages can be traced directly to the nobility who were jealously guarding their own independence from interference by either kings or the church.1 Since these nobles were the exact same people who did most of the fighting on behalf of kings, rulers were careful not to annoy them too much or interfere in their private domains. Nevertheless there was a kind of social equipoise whereby those subordinate to these powerful lords could appeal to the higher authority, the king, in cases of mistreatment. Thus feudalism was supposed to be a carefully balanced system where each had responsibilities as well as rights. Furthermore there was also the important fact that the nobility technically did not own land in their own right but held it in trust from the king.
Medieval kingship had both feudal and theocratic functions. At its heart the feudal system was based on the law of contract. The English thirteenth century jurist Henry de Bracton stated that the feudal contract created a legal bond between a lord and his vassal. This legal bond made it possible to see the king as part of the feudal system and meant that both parts of the contract operated on the basis of consent. As Walter Ullman noted, “The essential nature of a contract was that both parts of it had to become active: for the keeping of a contract two were (and are) necessary. The further consequence was that there was the possibility of cancelling, that is, repudiating the contract (the so-called diffidatio) if the one party had failed to act in conformity with the contract; for instance, if disloyalty were involved.”2
One of the crucial and enduring aspects of Magna Carta can be found in the 39th chapter which stated that: “No freeman shall be captured and imprisoned or disseized or outlawed or exiled or in any case harmed, except by a legitimate court of his peers and by the law of the land.” As Ullman stated, the concept of “the law of the land” was “not that law which the king had issued, but that law which was approved by both the king and the barons, and which was the result of the working of the feudal contract, which was a joint effort; in other words, a law that was common to him and the barons.”3 The law of the land was what would later be referred to as common law.
King John Signing the Magna Carta Reluctantly by Arthur C. Michael, via Wikimedia Commons.
Magna Carta is rightly seen as a fundamental expression of English liberties and it was with good reason that it became crucial to later legal and political arguments against despotism. The contractual nature of feudalism was obviously not just an English phenomenon but was present across the European continent and became one the Medieval era’s most enduring political and legal legacies. Despite this, however, the system as a whole clearly began to break down by the later Middle Ages and by the end of the era there was a clear and recognisable trend towards the centralisation of government.
One of the major causes for the transformation of Medieval society was the greatest pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Clearly, exact numbers are not available but it is estimated that up to sixty per cent of Europe’s population was killed by the plague. No social estate was left untouched. Of course, this had clear and measurable effects on how society and the economy operated. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes:
“The consequences of this violent catastrophe were many. A cessation of wars and a sudden slump in trade immediately followed but were only of short duration. A more lasting and serious consequence was the drastic reduction of the amount of land under cultivation, due to the deaths of so many labourers. This proved to be the ruin of many landowners. The shortage of labour compelled them to substitute wages or money rents in place of labour services in an effort to keep their tenants. There was also a general rise in wages for artisans and peasants. These changes brought a new fluidity to the hitherto rigid stratification of society.”
In England, following the Black Death we see the emergence of yeoman farmers, a phenomenon typically seen as an important factor in the longer-term emergence of the middle class. In addition to this, across Europe the later Middle Ages were also racked by dynastic power struggles and wars, some of which lasted a very long time. During these wars a significant proportion of the aristocracy were killed. For example, as noted on the Substack Aristocratic Fury:
“Among the lesser nobility of 15th century France, about one-fifth of the family names disappeared with each generation. In the course of a century, most of the group had been replaced by new families. More or less the same happened in Germany. In lower Saxony, just over half of the noble families disappeared between 1430 and 1550. In two regions of the Rhineland, fewer than one-fifth of the 15th century noble families survived in 1550. In Spain, only six of the noble families prominent in 1300 survived to count among the fifty-five titled nobles of 1520. In England, out of 136 peerage families in 1300, fewer than half survived in the male line by 1400, and only sixteen survived in 1500.”
In England, the fifteenth-century conflict between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, known as the Wars of the Roses, would prove to be the single greatest destructive force on the aristocracy until the First World War over four centuries later. As a consequence of this devastation, the institution of aristocracy had no choice but to admit new blood and it was during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we see the influx of bourgeois families into the upper classes. Perhaps no greater example of such ascendant fortunes can be seen than the Boleyn family who within just a few generations went from being a normal bourgeois family to having a daughter married to the king (Henry VIII).
Thus, by the sixteenth century the aristocracy was no longer purely a warrior class. Fighting became an increasingly expensive pursuit. In fact there was much less of an expectation for nobles to fight and far fewer participated in wars than had been the case among their forbears. Kings were no longer reliant on the support of a martial aristocracy and in the absence of this important counterbalance to royal power, the historical pendulum swung in favour of kings. It was during this time that there was an increasing trend towards an administrative aristocracy. In France this latter component grew considerably over the following two centuries such that the noblesse de robe—those whose title came from the possession of administrative or judicial posts—came to outnumber the noblesse d’épée or traditional nobles of the sword.
Europe, 1328. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Europe, 1500. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
During the sixteenth century the rate of administrative centralisation quickened. Technological developments aided the process. The advent of the printing press made books far more readily available and affordable and information was able to spread quickly and easily. Improvements in transportation made the world a smaller place and consequently enabled those at the political centre to retain a firmer grasp on their domains than would have been thinkable during the Middle Ages. An increasing stock of bureaucrats was on hand to collect information and enforce the control of the crown. In France, for example, since the latter stages of the Hundred Years’ War it had been possible for kings to raise large tax revenues without any form of consent. While there were still a multitude of local and national assemblies, these played no part in lawmaking and in effect existed purely to present grievances to the king, who in turn could simply ignore them. Francis I (r. 1515-47) continued this trend in policy, taking local government out of the hands of local magnates and transferring it to royal officials.4
The longer-term trend favoured monarchical power. Both the idea and the practice of absolute monarchy were taking shape. It is important to note that, while gradual, this was a major shift in political thought and practice. There is a widespread popular idea that absolutism was the standard operating model of monarchy before the emergence of constitutional monarchy in the late seventeenth century in England. This is false. As already noted, Medieval monarchy was a much more balanced institution and retained many features of ancient Indo-European leadership where the king was the ‘first among equals’ of the aristocracy, in contrast to the despotic models of monarchy in the East where one ruled and everyone else followed. However, as the balanced socio-political structures of feudalism disintegrated at the end of the Middle Ages, kings seized their opportunity and embarked on a major process of centralisation, weakening other intermediary institutions in society.
This process occurred across most of Europe and played an important role in one of the sixteenth century’s dominating phenomena, the Reformation. Some kings and princes made use of Protestantism’s challenge to the Catholic Church to strengthen their own position. To justify these manœuvres they claimed that the church had exceeded its own proper role and therefore that they (the secular rulers) were merely restoring the proper balance.
The church had always claimed the right to check the power of kings. In a theoretical and philosophical sense this relationship was referred to as the ‘Doctrine of the Two Swords’. The idea goes back to the days of the Church Fathers and Augustine had in the fifth century famously delineated two separate spheres—the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man. This itself was based on the famous passage in the Gospel of Matthew 22:21 where Jesus instructed those listening to “Render therefore unto Caesar the thing which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
In later ‘Two Swords’ theory, God, it was stated, had ordained two main authorities on Earth—the church and the king. The former was supposed to govern the spiritual aspect of man's existence, the latter the secular. Just how these two swords operated in tandem was a matter of dispute. Already in the fourteenth century the Italian scholar Marsilius of Padua had in Defensor Pacis (Defender of the Peace, 1324) enunciated a view of the two swords which accorded far more power to the king or prince than the church was happy to accept. From Marsilius’ point of view, it was the church that had far overstepped its divine remit and was engaging in excessive interference in the secular realm, a concept that would later be referred to as ‘Caesaropapism’. Some of the themes covered by Marsilius provided useful ammunition to later Protestant theologians and theorists who sought to justify secular authority over against the corruptions of the late Medieval church.
As Geoffrey Elton pointed out, it is superficially true that the Protestant Reformers aided the political development of the age in enhancing the status of secular rulers and helping consolidate political units. However, we must be mindful of the fact that this process was also happening more broadly, including in those states which were either barely or not touched at all by Protestantism. If we survey Europe more widely:
. England and France had gone a long way towards establishing political uniformity and subjecting all the realm to the rule of one king.
. Charles V provided unified government for the Spanish kingdoms and attempted to turn the Netherlands into a sort of federated state.
. In both Lutheran and Catholic German principalities, rulers imposed their authority on all individuals and interests under their rule.
. The rise of Russia could be tracked through the establishment under Ivan III (1462-1505) of a Muscovite state free from Tatar suzerainty, the subsequent absorption of Tver (1478), Novgorod (1478-94) and parts of the Ukraine (1503). Following, we see under Vasily II (1505-33) the addition of Pskov (1510), Ryazan (1521) and Smolensk (1522). The grand duke became the tsar, power was centralised resulting in a reduction in the liberties of the noble class (boyars) and the Church. Violent unrest among the boyars was brought to an end by Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’.
. The exceptions to the general rule occurred in central Europe but that was entirely due to circumstances outside princely control. The ever-present threat of the Ottomans and Russian pressure on Poland-Lithuania brought to an end the attempt at state-building by the Jagiellon. Nevertheless, their Habsburg heirs carried out where they had left off and in Bohemia and Hungary succeeded to some extent in centralising government at the expense of the aristocracy.5
Absolutism did not suddenly emerge and the period known as the ‘Age of Absolutism’ did not immediately follow the end of the Middle Ages. As tends to happen, it was a process. Royal absolutism began to take shape in the sixteenth century yet it was not until the seventeenth century that it would reach its full flower. While this phenomenon occurred just about everywhere in Early Modern Europe by far the most prominent early examples occurred in France, which in the seventeenth century came to eclipse Spain as the predominant power in Europe.
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