Communities and Legitimacy
p. 75-84
Texte intégral
1Community is a difficult word for medieval historians, and so are communauté, comunità, comunidad, Gemeinschaft, gemeenschap, and I suspect corresponding words in other European languages. They are all used, not only for the population of almost any geographically defined area, but for what are mere categories of people who do not act together or share distinctive values. Those who use it seem to want it to imply something good about the collectivities they refer to: some kind of voluntary, affective solidarity, sense of togetherness, or camaraderie that Tönnies and Weber attributed to Gemeinschaften. In such groups collective activity is supposedly based on the subjective feeling of the members that they belong together, in contrast to Gesellschaften, in which activity is based on rationally motivated agreements and adjustments of interests1. But how far can “the black community”, members of a “local community” who do not know their neighbours, even “the international community” be Gemeinschaften? Are they even Gesellschaften? These two ideal types are still worth thinking about, but it is hard to distinguish them in the middle ages. Members of medieval trade associations formed to promote the members’ economic interests also held feasts and paid for each others’ funerals, while families and near neighbours obviously combined emotional attachment and economic interest.
2Given the mindless ways that the word community and its equivalents in other languages are used around us, historians need to think about the way we use it about medieval collectivities. Using medieval words is no solution. Though medievalists have tried to fix consistent legal meanings to communitas, commune, and universitas, they were used very variously in the middle ages2. It may be better to avoid quasi-technical words and think instead about collective values, solidarities, and activities. This essay will argue that the chief impediment to understanding collective activities and collective values in Europe is a teleological interpretation of them shaped by historians working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
3The study of history in the eighteenth century widened to embrace much more about whole societies and economies than it had done before. Ideas were developed about stages of history which corresponded to different kinds of society. Much attention was directed at the stage of what was called feudal government or society3. In France many oppressions became identified with the survival of what were called the feudal rights of nobles over peasants. These feudal rights were seen as intrinsically hostile to the ideas of universal individual rights that had been developing under the influence of ideas of the state of nature, natural rights, and the social contract that had originated in the seventeenth century. The American and French Revolutions spread the idea of the Rights of Man, with their implications of equality, outside intellectual circles. Another element in the mix of new ideas came from German preoccupation with the idea of peoples or nations as natural, given, permanent political communities. This idea about peoples or nations was not new, but now turned from being an assumption to being a subject for intellectual discussion. Linked with the new ideas of equality it also became a matter of conflict4.
4Then in the nineteenth century it became generally accepted that the Ancien Régime had been hostile to collective action of all kinds and that this, like feudal government and other oppressions, was (despite Tocqueville5) an inheritance from the middle ages. Many historians started from the premise that Roman ideas of public spirit and public good, along with Germanic liberties, were lost under feudal government. François Guizot, for instance, reckoned that the early medieval Franks had no sense of the public and could handle only direct relations between man and man6. Feudal society, he thought, developed from the sixth century in the complete breakdown of both Roman and barbarian society7. The only principle of association—the only effective social bond—thus became the bond between suzerain and vassal. Where that bond was lacking there was no society, no law, no obligations8. The result for France, according to Guizot, was five centuries of chaos or anarchy, with lords exercising arbitrary and despotic power in their domains9. He thought that the feudal régime was ended by the rise of the monarchy, allied with the communes, but he did not make much of feelings of collective solidarity within and between local communes or communities. Other historians made more of it, but for many of them feudal society, or feudalism as it came to be called, was the main focus of attention. For most medieval historians that meant concentrating on the landowners and their relations with each other and their kings, not, as Marx saw feudalism, on those between landowners and peasants10.
5German historians were the first to be much concerned with local communities, whether rural or urban. W. E. Wilda started the serious work on guilds which went on in the nineteenth century. Guilds for him, like “mark communities”, expressed the love of sociability that he thought deep-rooted in the Germanic character11. Germans who were concerned about current politics, and wanted to understand how Germany had reached its nineteenth-century condition, believed that, however divided at present, it was a nation with a glorious imperial past and an even older heritage of law and liberty12. Emphasis on the close affective communities, as well as on the freedom and loyalty, of the ancient Germans came at a time when voluntary societies of all kinds were burgeoning in Germany and when lawyers in universities and in government service were struggling with the problem of what groups ought to have legal rights or not, and why. This preoccupation with the distinction between groups that could act at law as single persons with “legal personality” and those that could not, combined with ideas of the inheritance of Germanic law, led them to read back nineteenth-century concerns and the categories of nineteenth-century into the middle ages13. As the century wore on, problems of industrialization and worry about trade unions gave a new edge to all these questions, making the middle ages, with its small towns and supposedly brotherly guildsmen, look increasingly attractive to middle-class historians. Nostalgia for medieval towns, villages, and guilds was not restricted to Germany, or to conservatives, as the example of the English socialist, William Morris, shows. What made Germany’s contribution to ideas about medieval communities and medieval law so important and long-lasting was the intellectual quality, the richness of ideas linking past and present, that were evoked by the political, social, legal, and economic circumstances in which German lawyers and scholars found themselves in the nineteenth century.
6There is much more to be said about the nineteenth-century study of the middle ages and the Ancien Régime. One point that must be made, even in this short sketch, is that there is nothing disrespectful in suggesting that we ought to rethink some of the ideas and interpretations of nineteenth-century scholars. Natural scientists do not respect Newton or Planck any less because physics has advanced since their times. We are deeply in debt to the historical giants of the time and what their achievement left to us, above all in their study and printing of medieval texts: learned, tedious, and selfless work from which we profit and which we ought to do more of ourselves. We can nevertheless think about some of their interpretations.
7On the subject of collective values and activities the first idea or assumption that we have inherited from the nineteenth century and that I want to question is that the early middle ages lacked communities and any sense of the common good. It seems to rest on the premise that communities—that is, groups with collective values and activities—are somehow difficult and have to be formed. The second is the assumption that liberty, equality, and community go together, so that collective activity in Europe has been essentially connected with aspirations to equality and democracy. Collective activity therefore tended toward opposition to rulers, and rulers tended to be suspicious of it. The third is that true and effective community is only achieved, or is best achieved, when a collective group is independent and has what is called legal personality or corporate status. These underlying assumptions survived into the twentieth century in the minds of a good many, though not all, historians—and some still survive now. It seems to me entirely reasonable that nineteenth-century historians, in the context of their time and with the knowledge they had, should think of Europe as having progressed from a society in which the strongest bond was that between lord and vassal to the formation of communities in which collective activity fostered communal feeling and greater equality. But we now know much more about medieval society and we can see more clearly how the political and intellectual context in which our predecessors wrote affected their interpretations. That is not to claim that our own view is any less distorted by our contemporary assumptions and prejudices, but increased knowledge can at least correct some distortions that we have inherited from the past.
8For one thing we know far more about societies outside Europe. Anthropologists have found much collective activity in societies that had never heard of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That suggests that the nineteenth-century assumption that liberty, equality, and community go together needs more thought. Equality is not necessarily conducive to collective values and collective activity. However distasteful we—or some of us—find it, inequality may make cohesion easier. Subordination is more likely to be accepted and combined with solidarity in societies where people have not been brought up to believe that they are all born as free, equal, and separate individuals whose submission to authority is voluntary and contractual. They may accept their subjection as part of a natural, ordained, and legitimate pattern of hierarchy in which superiors and inferiors each fulfil their functions14. Perhaps we do not need to worry about the origin of medieval communities or the way that they cut across the supposedly dyadic vertical relations of feudal society. Perhaps communities were always there, in the sense that groups of people acted together over long periods, and took their mutual responsibilities and solidarities largely for granted in a way that may be harder in a culture that fosters competitive individualism. The contrasts between feudal and communal, Herrschaft and Genossenschaft, made sense in the nineteenth century but do not translate easily into medieval terms.
9There does not seem to be any evidence that there were no collective values and activities before what is called the rise of communes in the twelfth century: those who cling to this belief explain the supposed lack of “community” at peasant level before then in various ways. The real reason, I suggest, is the scarcity of evidence or the failure to use what evidence there is, such as records of the settlement of disputes in assemblies of the senior and more prosperous men of an area. Such assemblies, though far from democratic, were apparently regarded as legitimate judges of local custom and authoritative representatives of their neighbours. There are also occasional records that reveal collective liability to pay taxes or penalties to kings or other lords, and to repair bridges, fortifications or roads. Collective action was needed by rulers and taken for granted as a legitimate part of legitimate government, provided it was not subversive. The sense of community was probably strongest among people who knew each other and shared interests and responsibilities—not that strong and close community always meant harmony. Human communities are seldom without conflict but conflict does not destroy them provided they have means of resolving it that seem legitimate to them.
10Medieval solidarities and the sense of community were not merely local. The populations of all units of government, from villages and lordships up to kingdoms, seem to have been thought of as peoples, gentes, populi, nationes—three words often used interchangeably—who thought that they shared a common descent, customs, and law, and were therefore perceived as given, natural, political communities15. Though in reality the boundaries of kingdoms and other units of government were changed by power-politics and conquests, they were not thought of as just the areas that their rulers happened to rule. When smaller units were absorbed, they often survived as subordinate units of government with their own senses of solidarity and community. Kingdoms, like lesser units of government were, moreover, supposed to be ruled by and with the advice of their greater men, who represented the rest just as the more prosperous, established and older men in local assemblies represented their neighbours. Consultation was an important factor in the legitimacy of royal government and did not diminish royal authority. According to the Carolingian scholar Alcuin, who knew the realities of secular government, God the Father himself took counsel when creating Man16.
11Some historians of the earlier middle ages talk about societies then as stateless. This is odd, considering that maybe 90% or more of their populations lived under coercive government. The age (or at least the eighth to eleventh centuries) is better described, as it was by Timothy Reuter, as the age of assembly politics17. Some early medievalists focus particularly on the interpersonal relationships and conflicts between kings and nobles and between individual nobles, families and factions, and see politics as driven by ambitions and jealousies and distrusts. High politics then, as in other ages, provoked ambitions and rivalries, especially when kings died without obvious successors, but chronicles, on which nineteenth-century historians largely relied, tended to concentrate, like newspapers today, on what was unusual and shocking. Despite conflicts, many nobles attended assemblies, gave counsel, asked for concessions, and submitted disputes to lawful judgement. Even rebels very seldom demanded complete independence. Assemblies were an essential part of government: decisions about it were announced at assemblies that included many of those who would have to carry out what had been decided. They therefore needed to agree or at least acquiesce in decisions. Those who attended royal assemblies and fought in royal armies may have been more conscious of their kingdoms as communities than were others, but the demands of government that reached down beyond them and the appeals for justice that went up to them from below suggest that humbler people knew about their kingdoms too.
12Consultation at all levels of government aimed at unanimity or at least consensus, which was probably made easier to achieve by acceptance of hierarchy as well as by the absence of the modern belief in doing politics through parties with conflicting principles and policies. Numerical majorities seem to have been used only, or chiefly, for decisions by small numbers of more or less equal status. Members of higher status in any assembly probably always had most influence, but the more important the matter to be decided the wider the consultation that was apparently thought desirable.
13What changed in collective activity from around the twelfth century was that, as a result of increased economic and demographic growth, and of more active and professional government (what Weber called bureaucracy), more written records were made—and more have been preserved for us to use. Charters were issued, demands for service and taxes were recorded, and disputes began to be settled in something like what we think of as law-courts dominated by professional lawyers, rather than in all-purpose assemblies of local worthies. But charters did not create communities: they were granted to existing communities that asked for them. Academic and professional lawyers or government officials still did not make any regular distinction between groups that had what is now called “legal personality” or “corporate status” and groups that did not. When rulers forbade collective activity they did so because they thought subversive or rebellious groups were more dangerous than individual subversives or rebels. Collective activity among peasants and townspeople was still needed by rulers, so long as it suited the needs of government. No one seems as yet to have tried to work out rules about secular rights and responsibilities that belonged only to individuals as opposed to groups, or what sort of group could or could not acquire them and how18.
14Whether more continuous and effective government from the twelfth century on made for more or less sense of community is hard to say. Although professional administrators and lawyers took over some matters earlier left to local decision-making and activity, the more regular demands of government still required a good deal. They also spread knowledge of what went on in the parliaments and estates that replaced the old, less well-recorded assemblies. Maybe this involved the direct participation of a wider proportion of the population—though I wonder about that. The multiplication of records produced references to the community (communitas, commun, etc.) of the kingdom in England, France, Scotland, Sweden—and maybe other polities, including some whose solidarity is now discounted because they never became modern states whose historians fondly trace their growing “nationhood”19. Even in late medieval Germany, so often portrayed as falling apart, German commentators felt a political solidarity, despite the lack of constitutional structures to maintain it20. Traditional political units, whether or not they were effectively or independently ruled, were still thought of as communities. Being a community, united in a just and rightful hierarchy, was part of their legitimacy.
15As for the local communities, whether urban or rural, that secured charters to remedy their grievances, what they most wanted was a measure of freedom to rule and judge themselves according to their own customs. Towns and cities with varying degrees of autonomy were republics (in our sense of the word) rather than monarchies, but their governments look very unrevolutionary, with the rich in control and the poor apparently accepting this, provided they were ruled justly21. There is much evidence of resistance among peasants to demands for new services, and of resentment of the legal unfreedom that made demands harder to resist22, but most of the complaints that are recorded both in town and country (with a few thought–provoking exceptions) were against abuses of the system rather than demands for its overthrow23.
16Sympathetic historians may be tempted to suppose that people at the bottom of medieval society resented what we see as the gross unfairness of their position, even when their rulers were honest and benevolent. But I suggest that we should not assume that either representative democracy or any form of socialism are such obviously universal objects of desire that people in past societies must have wanted something of the sort. Little as I share medieval ideas of hierarchy and inequality, I doubt whether most people at the bottom of medieval society thought that they should be equal to those above them or whether medieval governments would have seemed more legitimate to their subjects if they had been more like ours24. Perhaps, but it cannot be assumed.
17Such knowledge as I have gets steadily less from the fourteenth century on. My impression is that collective activity did not so much increase or decrease as change under the pressure of economic, political, and legal change. The solidarity of units of government may have weakened when their assemblies were divided into estates and separate myths of descent for different classes were developed25. Local communities may have been weakened where government became increasingly centralized and bureaucratic, and where legal developments eroded peasant rights of property and participation in local government. Academic and professional lawyers began to try to distinguish the sort of groups that could litigate from those which could not. Although the rules, such as they are, about incorporation or legal personality were not worked out until the nineteenth century, the collective activities of peasants and workers began to be restricted from around the sixteenth26. How far that stopped collective activity and values is another question.
18By the nineteenth century ideas about the relation between individuals and communities had changed fundamentally. As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, nineteenth-century historians, whether conservative, radical, or something in between, inevitably absorbed some of the ideas and assumptions of their time. They came to believe that collective activities were controversial in themselves, and not part of normal human behaviour. It was generally assumed that people in the early middle ages started with no collective solidarities and that when they came to form what historians saw as communities they were aiming for the kind of collective rights and activities that the nineteenth century recognized. I doubt that medieval people aimed at such rights, or at the rights of the twentieth or twenty-first century either. All through the middle ages (and maybe for longer, but I leave that to others) ideas about what were called communities, and their legitimacy, and how they should be structured, were different from ours and we cannot understand them if we see them as merely leading to ours. Teleology is a bad guide to understanding.
Notes de bas de page
1 M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, J. Winckelmann (ed.), 5th edn. Tübingen, Mohr, 1976, pp. 21-23, or id., Economy and Society, G. Roth, C. Wittich (eds.), New York, Bedminster Press, 1978, pp. 40-43. Paragraph 4 (pp. 22-23 in German, pp. 42-43 in English) is particularly important on supposedly racial or linguistic links.
2 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997 [1984], pp. I-II (on the foolish use of “communities” in the title), pp. 61-64, 97-98, 135, 318, et passim.
3 I discussed the historiography of feudalism in “The use of feudalism in comparative history”, in B. Z. Kedar (ed.) Explorations in Comparative History, Jerusalem, Hebrew University Magnes Press, pp. 191-217, at 198-204 (or, more briefly, in Kingdoms and Communities, op. cit., pp. xvi-xviii).
4 S. Reynolds, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good, Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina press, 2010, pp. 132-138.
5 A. de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Paris, Michel-Lévy frères, 1856, I. 4.
6 F. Guizot, Essais sur l’histoire de France, Paris, s. n., 1833 [1823], pp. 81, 98, 122-123; id., Cours d’histoire moderne: histoire de la civilisation en France depuis la chute de l’Empire romain jusqu’en 1789, Paris, s. n., 1828-1832, vol. 4, pp. 94, 137, 298.
7 Id., Essais sur l’histoire de France, op. cit., pp. 351-370 (quotation on p. 362); id., Cours d’histoire moderne…, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 299-317, vol. 4, pp. 77-103.
8 Id., Cours d’histoire moderne…, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 317.
9 Id., Essais sur l’histoire de France, op. cit., pp. 354-358.
10 E. g. F. W. Maitland, Constitutional History of England, Cambridge, The University Press, 1946 [1908], p. 143; M. Bloch, La Société féodale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1939-1940, vol. 1, pp. 95-117, vol. 2, pp. 249-250; cf. S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 17-22. For the acceptance of this idea of “feudal society”, e. g. A. Blok, “Variations in Patronage”, Sociologische Gids, 16, p. 367.
11 W. E. Wilda, Das Gildenwesen im Mittelalter, Halle, s. n., 1831, pp. 4, 56-57.
12 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, E. Moldenhauer, K. M. Michel (eds.), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970-1979, vol. 1, Die Verfassung Deutschlands, pp. 461-468, 550-551, 575-576; vol. 12, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 419-426.
13 T. Nipperdey, “Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert”, in H. Boockmann et al., Geschichtwissenschaft und Vereinswesen im 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972, pp. 1-44; W. H. Riehl, Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutsche Sozial-Politik, vol. 1, Land und Leute, Stuttgart, J. G. Cotta, 1857, pp. 79-82 et passim.
14 Aristotle, Politics, I. 2; III. 4-7; L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 36-63, 91-93; C. Helliwell, “A just precedency: the nature of equality in anthropological discourse”, History and Anthropology, 7, 1994, pp. 363-375, though cf. M. Jolly, “Epilogue: Hierarchical Horizons” for criticisms and later literature on the subject.
15 S. Reynolds, “The idea of the nation as a political community”, in L. Scales, O. Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 54-66.
16 “Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesim”, in PL 100, cols. 515-570, at col. 520 (interrog. 36).
17 T. Reuter, “Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth”, The Medieval World, pp. 432-450.
18 S. Reynolds, “The history of the idea of incorporation or legal personality: a case of fallacious teleology”, in S. Reynolds, Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity: England and Western Europe, Aldershot, Variorum, 1995, no. VI.
19 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities…, op. cit., p. 262; Sweden, Diplomaterium Suecanum, vol. 3, B. E. Hildebrand (ed.), Stockhom, 1842, 1850, no. 2199 (1319).
20 L. Scales, “Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation?”, in L. Scales, O. Zimmer (eds.), Power and the, op. cit., pp. 166-191.
21 E. g. S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities…, op. cit., pp. 192-193, and “The Writing of Medieval Urban History in England”, Theoretische Geschiedenis, 19, 1992, p. 52.
22 R. H. Hilton, “Peasant movements in England before 1381”, Economic History Review, 2nd. ser., 2, 1949, pp. 117-136 (repr. in his Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism, London, Hambledon Press, 1985, pp. 122-138).
23 P. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 60-71, 180-182 (and n. 23 on p. 364), 296-300; id., “Peasant anger in the late middle ages”, in B. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past. The social uses of an emotion in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998, pp. 171-188; R. Faith, “The ‘Great Rumour’ of 1377 and peasant ideology”, in R. H. Hilton, T. Aston (eds.), The English Rising. Papers presented in 1981 to the annual conference organized, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 43-73.
24 Pace e. g. J. Dunn, “Trust and political agency”, in D. Gambetta (ed.), Trust, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1988, pp. 82.
25 S. Reynolds, “Our forefathers? Tribes, peoples and nations in the age of migrations”, in A. C. Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall… Essays presented to W. Goffart, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 27-28; P. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, op. cit., pp. 105-130.
26 S. Reynolds, “History of the idea of incorporation…”, op. cit.
Auteur
Institute of Historical Research, London
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