Kings and Queens of Europe

The Medieval monarch established order and unit within the chaos of the post-Roman Europe. The best example of how this worked was in England. England was a small kingdom, not much larger than some of the great duchies of France or Germany. An active king could visit most parts of his realm with some regularity. Moreover, a long series of conquests (especially 1066) had prevented the rise of strong provincial rulers or the development of deeply entrenched provincial institutions. Because no areas had been monopolized by provincial dynasties the king still had lands and rights of justice in all parts of his realm. Because his lands and rights were so widely dispersed he had to have agents everywhere —sheriffs and bailiffs, keepers of castles and forests. Keeping track of the income produced by hundreds of different sources made plain the need for a central financial office: the English Exchequer of the early 12th century. The Exchequer kept meticulously detailed records; it had a highly professional staff; it became so solidly established that it could function even in periods of civil war. Moreover, if all titles were based on grants or confirmation by the king, then it was natural that the king and his court would be asked to settle disputes over possession of land and the rights which went with land. "Court" is of course an ambiguous word; at first it meant no more than the great men—bishops, barons, and household officials—who were with the king. But even in the 11th century some of these men were more apt to be called on to deal with legal problems than others, and during the 12th century a group of royal justices appeared. Soon there were circuit judges, juries, writs. The new procedure of the royal courts was designed to cut down delay, to get quick, easily enforceable decisions in cases where decisions had been hard to reach. There was a deliberate attempt to reduce complicated problems to simple questions that could be answered by men with little knowledge of law or of remote events. Thus in cases involving land tenure the most common question was: "Who was last in peaceful possession?" not "Who has best title?" The question was answered by a group of neighbors, drawn from the law-abiding men of the district in which the property lay. They gave a collective response, based on their own knowledge and observations; there was no need for testimony and little opportunity for legal arguments. This procedure rapidly developed into trial by jury… an improvement on earlier, irrational procedures such as trial by combat or ordeals. In any case, knights, lesser landholders, and ordinary freemen in England found that the jury gave them some protection against the rich and the powerful. They flocked to the king's courts; by the 13th century all cases of any importance and significance whatever were heard by the king's judges. The royal government had succeeded in involving almost the entire free population of the country in the work of the law courts, either as litigants or as jurors. Local privileges and customs did not have time to harden into divisive institutions. The judicial and financial systems created in the 11th and 12th centuries could operate uniformly throughout the country. The king's justices, or even the king himself could give final judgments at once and anywhere. There was no need for elaborate individual negotiations with hundreds of lords and local communities when a tax was to be raised; the Council, and later the Parliament, could speak for the whole realm. Conversely, the English government could rely on unpaid local notables to do a great deal of the work of local administration. Energies which elsewhere were wasted in the defense of local privileges could be used in England to help the central government carry out its policies. If the English bureaucracy was inefficient, it was so at less cost than in other nascent states. Medieval states were law-states. They had acquired their power largely by developing their judicial institutions and by protecting the property rights of the possessing classes. A corollary of this emphasis on law was an emphasis on the right of consent. Existing usages, guaranteed by law, were a form of property and could not be changed without due process. Here is the background to the invention of Parliament: the principles that important decisions should be made publicly, that customs should not be changed without general agreement, that consent was necessary when the superior needed extraordinary additions to his income formed part of the general climate of opinion. These meetings, where important men of all classes came together, were convenient occasions for voicing grievances, for demanding investigations and reforms. All of this work of unifying the nation around functioning law courts was the conscious policy of King Henry II. He knew exactly what he was doing. His courts, often with his personal presence presiding, rendered fair justice. And the results of this justice was a united nation. It was exactly this unified nation that forced King John to sit down at the table and sign the most important Medieval document of them all: the Magna Carta. (some of the above text is taken from a very famous book by the historian Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classics, 21) Paperback.)

WEEK 13

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