Inventing The Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor

Author:Norman F. Cantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

II

THE CONTOURS OF MEDIEVAL GOVERNMENT

With rare clarity and skill in comparative analysis of different royal administrations, Haskins and Strayer showed the workings of medieval government. They explored the diurnal functioning of medieval administration and revealed how the clerics who were the royal bureaucrats until about 1200 and the lawyers who were the senior bureaucratic personnel normally thereafter, imposed the will of the crown upon baronial families, peasant societies, and urban communities. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that the Haskins-Strayer American administrative school of medieval history did it all on their own. Maitland’s kind of sociology of law was an inspiration and model for them, although they lacked Maitland’s delicacy and subtlety. Since the Americans themselves worked on Europe west of the Rhine, they had to rely on the reports of Karl Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen and their students for information on the German Empire, as well as the work of Geoffrey Barraclough, a British historian of medieval Germany. Strayer thought these scholars greatly overrated the sophistication of medieval German administration, and a recent writer, Oxford’s Karl Leyser, in a paradoxical way, confirms this view. Leyser’s argument is that the German monarchy didn’t need public administration because it had such strength from tribal bonds. The pioneering six-volume work of the Manchester historian Thomas Frederick Tout on the growth of English royal administration, published in the 1920s and 1930s, provided helpful information on how the king’s household slowly took on public functions. Strayer benefited personally from research assistance and advice offered him by Robert Fawtier, the Sorbonne professor who worked on the thirteenth-century French monarchy but who failed to write the big book on Philip the Fair’s government he long projected. It was Strayer who finally published this monumental treatise, in 1980. In the work of clarifying, comparing, systematizing medieval government operations and the highlighting of the contours of medieval royal administrative systems, Haskins and Strayer led the way.

In their view, the most important accomplishment of the twelfth century was the rationalization and centralization of government, which had been essentially a local, fragmentary affair until the mid-eleventh century. The great aristocratic families had provided whatever effective government or law existed; the king was generally a figurehead without power. Centralized royal government emerged first in England under the Norman kings, about the same time, with only partial success, in Germany, and finally—by the end of the twelfth century, and very aggressively—in France. The kings provided a political factor in European civilization that had been absent since the fall of Rome in the fifth century.

Government itself was radical in the twelfth century, when monarchs were attempting to impose a system of centralized social order upon the ancient baronial hierarchy. The radical, progressive quality of twelfth-century government and its dynamic impact as a meliorative social force were a cardinal principle of faith for the Wilsonians Haskins and Strayer. In their view, service to the crown became equivalent to dissent from the centrifugal feudal tradition, and it was often not the kings themselves

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