The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  This period saw the triumph of the military nobility; it also saw the weakening of Byzantion’s world position. The persistence of ancient forms in state and city, which had given the empire its strength and superiority, was holding up development; the west was gathering the forces that were to bring it up to the Byzantine level — an achievement villainously expressed in the treacherous sacking of Byzantion in 1204 by the men of the fourth crusade. Above all, despite internal struggles, the Byzantine town could not compete with the communes of the west as a centre liberating new social and economic forces.

  The conflict and merging of Arab and Byzantine elements created for a while new peripheral societies which generated powerful energies. These societies, however, lacked the capacity for development beyond a certain point; they perpetuated many of the Byzantine weaknesses in an intensified form. In Islam from the outset the rulers had a readymade stereotype of theoratic authority. The tribal assembly did not generate forms such as we see in ancient Athens and Rome, or in Anglo-Saxon England with its folk courts. No steady and effective class conflict could come about: that is, conflict within a system which provides a framework of continuity, so that the conflict can drive society ahead into new forms without breaking it up.

  We may compare east and west again in the matter of military tenures. In the east we find the Ottoman timariot or the Moghul jagirdar holding an allotment of land (temporarily, at least in principle) or rather getting land revenue in return for services; but we do not find the growth of an aristocracy with anything like an independent basis, even when a regime was far in decay. In the west the kings had continually to face a body of lords settled firmly on the land, with rights of renunciation of fealty, the diffidatio of Anglo-Norman England or the desonaturalizacion of the Aragon nobles, ricoshombres de natura.[575] Throughout, the kings had to consider and somehow control powerful barons. In such a situation, if anarchy was to be avoided, there was a need for counterweights on the royal side, including a strong administrative and coercive apparatus. The ceaseless tension between king and lords — who both needed one another, but could never find a point of stable balance in their relations — had a vital effect on every aspect of the situation, allowing all sorts of interstices, deadlocks, or contradictory interests, to develop, through which the burghers or peasants could in different ways at different times assert themselves. A simple and solid alliance of king and lords to hold down the lower classes would have been liable to produce stagnation; and something of such an alliance, though not in any massively articulated form, did exist in late Anglo-Saxon England. At least that element existed to the extent of producing what we have called the archaic aspect of the society; the great value of the Norman intrusion was that it shattered the consensus for all time and sharply and pervasively stimulated class conflict, thus freeing the potentialities of the English situation in a way that could hardly have been done from within.

  The existence then of continual conflict between king and barons, who each needed the other, stopped them from simply making an alliance against the commoners except at moments of extreme crisis, and made possible the deep rooting of the idea that the king’s law was an essential mediator and dispute-settler at all levels, however imperfectly the idea may have been put into practice at any given moment. There was security of landed property to an extent quite absent from Asiatic systems, including that of the Moslems, and justice was more fully embodied in definite laws. These laws might be harsh and weighted against the peasantry in many respects; but they were far less arbitrary in their application than anything in the legal systems of the east. Only a comparatively small area of life was covered by Islamic canon law, Shari’a, and this provided no protection against arbitrary action from above. Hence the growth of a large body of lawyers in the medieval west. Their activities might often stir popular indignation; but without them the state and its legal systems could not have evolved as they did — nor in time could the revolts from below have achieved their clarity of goal.

  The fact that the west had its inheritance of Roman Law could not by itself have brought about this development; but at almost every phase it helped to consolidate the emerging forms. If we turn to China we find that throughout its history there was nothing like the series of mediating and conflicting factors which make up medieval Europe.

  Many further factors might be mentioned that made for a vital complexity, diversity, density, and at the same time brokenness of structure, in western societies: a continual balance and imbalance of forces that made possible effective pressures from below. Even geography helped. The way in which the sea spread around and into the area was useful for trade and for the definition of regional frontiers. The area could be split into a large number of sizeable regions, which could be effectively organized without (apart from such an area as Norway) being too cut off from one another. The ancient world had in general been able to bring about such coexisting regions only in the form of city-states. Now larger units, variously interacting, could be organized — units that in turn could expand and become strong centres of development, Old Castile in Castile, the district round Paris in France, London and the home counties in England. The stronger areas could then in turn draw in outlying territories such as Brittany, Wales, Granada, Navarre and Ireland, not by large-scale conquest but by prolonged warfare and penetration — though the movement outwards did not always succeed, as when Spain tried to take in Portugal, or England and Scotland. There was much destruction and suffering, but also much enriching integration, in which trade played its part. The movements, piratic, trading and colonizing, of the Scandinavians and Normans produced the last largescale upheavals and new integrations in this European pattern we are sketching out.

  There was one more factor of great importance in begetting this fruitful balance-imbalance: the Christian Church, which had characteristics unlike those of any other ecclesiastical organization, ancient, Buddhist or Islamic. Here was a highly centralized and disciplined corporation, fiercely and ruthlessly destroying all competitors, pagan or heretical, and yet confronting secular states with which it might come variously to terms but could not subdue. It held its own traditional and steadily expanded set of ideas, and possessed a very strong cohesive inner force, produced by its rigid systems and its unchallenged appeal to supernal sanctions, which in particular played on the sense of guilt of a violent, deeply divided and oppressive world, and on the fear of death afflicting the inhabitants of such a world. Growing up inside the bureaucratic structures of the Roman imperial state, it had taken over many forms and methods of that harshly authoritarian system, with which it had once struggled. It had thus learned to maintain comparatively sophisticated forms of organization even in the worst periods of the Roman breakdown. The emerging tribal states learned much from it, using its clerics for their administration as they grew more stable; but the church played an even more important part in the creation of Europe when in the eleventh century it began to break its compact with the theocratic state and to assert its claims to a superiority which, though based on theological dogmas, asserted its rights to all sorts of independencies and dominances that impinged on the secular state. The conflicts of church and state from the eleventh century onward can thus be seen as the conflicts of a pair of superimposed states, both of which claimed to be uppermost in a great many important matters. The tensions inherent in such a situation might weaken at moments, but were ready to reappear at any challenge on either side, and provided a permanent aspect of the medieval world.

  There is the further point that the church itself was divided into ‘religious’ and seculars, monks and priests. One section, at least in theory, totally repudiated the world (money, marriage, family, forms of social grouping), while the other sought to carry on in the world, with its upper levels aping all the pomps and grandeurs of the secular rulers and nobility. There was a deep contradiction here, which did much to stimulate critical and heretical thought. As we have seen, the relations of the religious and the seculars under
went many changes over the years, especially after about 1100; but the contradiction they represented persisted throughout the medieval epoch.

  The existence of two systems of law, secular and canon, also had the effect of keeping before men the possibilities of choice and the need for discussion and inquiry. This effect operated increasingly from the eleventh century onwards, as the church widened the area of its claims. The study of secular law became important in the universities. We saw how Gregory (Hildebrand) stirred up much more than he had bargained for. In considering Roman law, men thought much on ancient Rome itself and its empire; and this trail led to such views as those set down in Dante’s Monarchia: that the empire (the secular order, with the Holy Roman Emperor as its supreme ruler) was the instrument for the realization of the ends of the human race as a whole, of humana civilitas. By means of the empire ‘the blessedness of this life’ can be attained, a blessedness ‘which is figured by the terrestrial paradise’. Such concepts were as far as possible removed from what Pope Gregory himself thought of the secular state and his thesis that all political authority had a ‘sinful origin’.

  In his Letter to the Bishop of Metz, 1081, he declared,

  Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from men who were ignorant of God, who by pride, robbery, perfidy, murder, in a word, by almost every crime at the prompting of the devil, who is the prince of this world — have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals, that is, over mankind?

  We can understand why the German bishops protested that his doctrines were stirring up the common folk.[576]

  The church also, by claiming the right to assert its overriding power against all the many states of the west, provided the idea of an ultimate European unity. If asked for some term to cover the common civilization of the west, men would have used some such term as Respublica Christiana or Christianitas; yet an early Spanish chronicler could describe the victory at Poitiers over the Saracens in 732 as the work of Europeenses. In due time men began to recognize the imperial state behind the Rome of the martyrs and to apply ideas from the ancient world to the present.

  We must also consider the nature of the city in the west, where a mixture of elements from the ancient world merged with elements from the tribal present to produce with many variations a body politic that had remote affinities with that of the old city-state, though developing inside a different social whole. Nothing at all similar could be found in the east. Not that there was any lack of eastern cities. European travellers were for long astounded at the many huge and thriving cities of the east; and Moslem civilization was always urban rather than rural, since it inherited the strong urban tradition of the east Mediterranean. But the Moslem city was politically inert, enclosed as part of a burdensome bureaucratic establishment without any inner drive to self-government. Over it stood not bishop or baron but a theocratic kingship. When we turn to the early communes of Italy and Flanders we step into another world.

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  Not that things were made easy for the burghers of the west. On the contrary. The early growth of strong feudal controls, from Spain to Scotland, ensured that they did not get anything like complete independence, while the nature of the towns and their inhabitants, and their relation to the whole situation in which they grew up, ensured that they would not remain inert cells in a larger system. They slowly but steadily found a secure basis on which to struggle for the rights and privileges they most needed. In eastern (non-Byzantine) Europe towns tended to be garrisoned centres for a colony planted by the king; they were often alien in speech and character to the surrounding population and for long could not fruitfully interact with that population. The belt in which urban communities were able to develop their own political life ran from north Italy up to west Germany, the Low Countries, and along the Baltic. In Italy the town brought the nobility under its control and became the dominant political entity; but this very success broke down the growth of larger political systems in which the town might have played its part and in time led to an impasse; the towns became specialized feudal enclaves unable to stir or support the political struggle driving feudalism towards the final working out of its contradictions. In Germany the town separated itself from the near principalities, with something of the same effect in the long run. The Hanseatic League, the Lombard League, and the Hermandad or Brotherhood of Basque ports, could not evolve into true federations., the links remained comparatively external, without moving towards larger political or economic integrations. The Italian cities turned into petty principalities, partly through absorbing aristocratic elements which had at first been disturbed by them. The result was a set of unstable units, interacting only at certain levels, and unable to move into anything like a national system. Venice and Genoa remained republics and, like Athens of the fifth century B.C., they devoted their energies to building little empires — mostly outside Italy, as Athens had build an Aegean system. The decisive development occurred only in the Lowlands and in England — the two areas that were to produce bourgeois revolutions long before the rest of Europe.

  In England the towns did not gain such independence as the Italian communes or the Hanseatic ports; the struggle for self-assertion went on as an integral part of the movement towards nationhood in which the burghers were increasingly important from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The Low Countries were cut off from the general development of the Holy Roman Empire by the river system that gave them access to the sea and stimulated economic activities, and by close links with England and north France, so that the towns were neither completely independent and separate, nor simply dominated by feudal lordships. Urban and feudal forces could conflict and merge, finally consolidating into a sort of proto-nationhood under the Burgundian overlordship of the fifteenth century and then maturing in the long struggle against Spanish domination. In England the same sort of development went on, but in a less sharp and particularist way, in forms that made for stable nationhood far beyond what the Netherlands could attain in the seventeenth century.[577]

  Thus, because of the complexity of the situation and its multiple potentialities, the later Middle Ages saw a welter of varying trends, interactions, and intermediate forms, with all sorts of counter-attacks from the more backward-looking nobilities, who wanted to take advantage of greater profits while clinging to or reintroducing forms of serfdom to preserve their controls. The Italian city despot was a miniature precursor of the absolute monarch, while England and Holland drove on to create the first bourgeois nations.

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  We must beware of seeing any single line of movement from serfdom to capitalist wage systems. There is however one key factor that runs through all the centuries of feudalism, from the days when the barbarian states emerged coherently on the Roman ruins to the breakthrough of the bourgeoisie in Holland and England, and this is the struggle for feudal rent. The big growth of international trade, the industrialization of Flanders, Brabant, Liège, Lombardy and Tuscany, with the appearance of large commercial centres like Venice, Genoa, Bruges, Paris and London, all came after feudal developments of agriculture and were ultimately dependent on them. They were products of the feudal process and by themselves could not have transformed it. The increase in production for the market extended and deepened the existing stratifications among the peasant producers. The rich peasants became richer, and the poor, poorer. But they became a different kind of rich and a different kind of poor, especially after the thirteenth century. Now the better-off peasant was concerned rather with sending his surplus to market than with consuming it; and he kept his eye open for more land and began to employ more wage-labour — drawing on landless men rather than smallholders. Such peasants resisted the extraction of their surplus-rent by the lords, and in this resistance they had the alliance of the poorer sections of their class, who were fighting against being driven down to a bare subsistence level. The struggle for rent sharpens and in the fourteenth century reaches the stage of general revol
t (Hilton).[578]