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.

 

Historian as Necromancer

Historians are necromancers.  We make the dead sit up and speak.

This is especially true of medieval historians.  Modern historians have a whole lot to work with, crop yields, polling results, transcripts of Congressional debates, the amount of steel that goes into a tank.  Medievalists in contrast have what people in the twelfth (or whatever medieval) century decided needed to be remembered, and therefore decided to preserve, either in a chronicle or in charters.

So our memories of the medieval past are heavily influenced by theirs.  We do have archaeology to tell us more things about their material culture, but for the most part historians today have to listen to what writers in the past wanted us to hear.  That is, we have to listen to the voices of the dead.

This is fine.  For the most part, we would rather know how a chronicler characterized a bad harvest ("Unheard of.  Horrible.  God is punishing us for our sins.  The people in that nasty duchy I've heard of turned to cannibalism.") than to have an exact sense of the ratio of grain harvested to grain planted.

It does mean that we have to know how to ask questions.  If someone tries to ask medieval sources a question that they are not prepared to answer, one will get no reply.  "What percentage of a city's streets were paved?" for example will get no answer.  However, "Were cities admired for paving their streets?" or "Did city councils worry about the cost of street paving?" will get lots of answers.

The way I see it, medieval writers have been waiting for many centuries to speak.  If we try to force them to answer questions they have no interest in answering, they will keep stubbornly silent.  If we ask them what they would like to tell us, it will be hard to get them to shut up.

So we are necromancers, speakers to the dead.  A necromancer is a kind of wizard, one who deals in dark arts.  Any fiction writer is a wizard too for that matter (on which see more here), someone who can persuade readers that imaginary people who are no more than ink on a page (or pixels on a Kindle screen) are worth worrying about.  Writing is an act of tremendous power.  Medieval authors who made deliberate choices what to preserve in writing, on expensive parchment with laborious hand-written words, knew this.  We should too.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016