Kings

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.

Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors).  The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.

Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings.  A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.

Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).

 God and Jesus were often referred to as kings.  With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.

Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions.  We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England.  (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)

William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings.  In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.

Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament.  Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters.  Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.

Kings of course would have liked to be absolute.  James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy.  But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant.  By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).

In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.

The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king.  George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down.  The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap.  Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.

Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy.  Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

For more on medieval government, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback

 

The "Three Orders" and medieval historians

 If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that it is simply false that medieval society was tidily divided into three orders.  The idea of "orders of society" had long been around, because medieval people (like us) liked to create categories, but these were theoretical rather than official.  For example, one theory was that society's three groups were cloistered virgins (monks and nuns), secular clergy (priests and bishops), and lay people.  Or perhaps there were just two, the unchaste and the virgins (these two could become three if married people became a third category).  Or maybe the two divisions of society were the powerful and the weak.  Or simply men and women.

The division of society into "those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor" was proposed in the early eleventh century and then ignored until the creation of the French Estates General in the fourteenth century, where the Estates were churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy townspeople (wait, you say, what happened to peasants? well they didn't count).

It shows you how little influence the "three orders" had that England's Parliament, established slightly earlier, had only two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.  The Lords included both church leaders and secular nobles, whereas the knights of the shire, who would have been in the "second estate" in France, were instead part of the Commons with the wealthy townspeople.  (And you note there arr still no peasants.)

(Parliament then and now meets in Westminster, near the church where King Charles III will soon be crowned.)

So even though there was no tidy division into three orders in the Middle Ages, there's always been a sense that there were different statuses in society.  Church men and women had different lives than powerful lay people, who in turn were different from townspeople or from peasants.

Interestingly, historians who study the Middle Ages loosely follow the eleventh-century theory about society's divisions in choosing what to study.  Given a choice of three groups, most historians choose only one, or at most two.  That is, someone might study the nobility and the church but pay little attention to peasants (or townspeople).  Or, as is the case with the many French historians who write regional monographs, one might study nobles and peasants but essentially ignore the church.  Interestingly, scholars essentially never study both peasants and the church, although some have focused their research on urban areas and included both urban churches and townspeople.

And of course even one of these groups provides plenty of opportunity for study.  Within the church there are monks, nuns, priests, friars, bishops, popes, and various hangers-on.  And the study of religion and religious ideas goes well beyond the study of people within the church.  Knights and nobles can be studied for their families, for their role in politics, for ideas of chivalry, for medieval warfare.  The "everybody else" group included 80-90% of the population, everything from desperately poor laborers to wealthy merchants, so there's lots there to study.  And women can be treated as a separate group within all of these.

If "society was divided into three orders" was as simple as high school textbooks might lead you to believe, medieval historians wouldn't still be writing exciting new books and I wouldn't have a blog with over 500 posts and no end in sight.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on society during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Iceland

 Iceland is a parliamentary democracy, established on an island with a lot of volcanoes (a source of geothermal heat and electricity), one of the world's largest islands (in Europe second only to Great Britain, being bigger than Ireland), and a member of NATO.  Sounds sort of normal and boring, right?  But it's a country shaped by its medieval past even more than most of the rest of Europe.

The first human settlers of Iceland came from Scandinavia during the ninth century.  They found good land for their sheep and governed themselves through what was called the Althing (meaning the thing that has everyone represented), now considered the world's oldest parliament, even though it didn't meet for a century or so from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.  It's back in business now, and Icelandic people are intensely proud of its ninth-century roots, making it 400 years older than Britain's Parliament.  In the year 1000, the Althing voted to adopt Christianity, the only example we know of where people voted to become Christian, rather than a ruler deciding to convert and converting his people.

From Iceland, explorers went to Greenland and to what is now maritime Canada, although the New World settlements were short-lived and the Greenland colony eventually died out after several centuries.  The other Scandinavian countries claimed Iceland as their own at various times, most recently Denmark, but in 1944 the Icelanders became their own independent democracy.

The main economy of Iceland, both then and now, was based on sheep raising and fishing.  Wool is used to make lovely warm sweaters, which you can buy in the convenient gift shop at the airport if you're changing planes or have a layover.  The Icelandic word usually translated as "meat" means lamb or mutton by itself, and then there's "cow-mutton" (beef), "pig-mutton" (pork), and so on.  

The big problem with raising sheep is that they keep all the plant life cropped short.  In fact, gracious English manors in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries used to keep sheep to take care of the lawns.  But after the early Icelanders cut down the local trees, to build ships or open up grazing lands, trees were gone for good, any seed that somehow arrived from the mainland being nipped off before it could grow.  (These days Iceland plants and protects trees.)

These peaceful medieval sheep-farmers wrote sagas, accounts of historical events like the adoption of Christianity or the discovery of the New World, that also included a whole lot of feuds, insults, and people killing their relatives.  Although these are sometimes seen as glorifying violence, in fact they are about not getting into those situations in the first place, and women are often portrayed as the peace-keepers.

The sagas were written in Old Norse, the ancestor of the languages now spoken in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  In Iceland, the everyday spoken language is still very close to Old Norse.  Proud of their medieval linguistic heritage, the Icelanders have avoided adopting modern words from other languages, instead creating new words from Old Norse roots for things like television or internet.  Children learn Danish in school, which they consider a simple language, good for talking to Scandinavians who have given up on complex declensions and conjugations.

They have also continued the tradition of having surnames based on a parent's name.  So "Peterson" as a last name originally meant "son of Peter," but in Denmark-Sweden-Norway these have just become hereditary, so Torvald Peterson's kids will all have the last name Peterson, not Torvaldson or Torvaldsdottir.  Not so in Iceland!  There each person's surname is quite literally so-and-so's daughter or son.  Torvald Peterson's daughter might be Kristin Torvaldsdottir.  The phone book is arranged by first name, not last name.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Scandinavia, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.