Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

Via Lisa Outhwaite

‘Related to these differences was a peculiar status system. England had no formal blood nobility, while such a nobility did develop in France. It was true that ‘England had an aristocracy as powerful as any in Europe – more powerful perhaps…’ At the top was a narrow group of earls and ‘barons’, who were in the thirteenth century being endowed with privileges. Yet somehow these privileges took a different shape from those on the Continent. They were ‘of an almost exclusively political and honorific nature; and above all, being attached to the ‘fief de dignite’, to the “honour”, they were transmissible only to the eldest son. In short, the class of noblemen in England remained, as a whole, more a “social” than a “legal” class. Although, of course, power and prestige lay with this group, it was ‘too ill-defined not to remain largely open.’ Thus ‘In the thirteenth century, the possession of landed wealth had been sufficient to authorize the assumption of knighthood, in fact to make it obligatory.’ Therefore ‘in practice, any family of solid wealth and social distinction’ never ‘encountered much difficulty’ in obtaining permission to use hereditary armorial bearings.

Bloch’s story is that there was a confusion of ranks up to the Norman invasion, and during the crucial twelfth and thirteenth century England did not move in the continental direction. No nobility based on law and blood, no incipient ‘caste’ in Tocqueville’s sense, emerged. This, as his predecessors had argued, gave the English aristocracy their enduring flexibility and power. ‘It was mainly by keeping close to the practical things which give real power over men and avoiding the paralysis that overtakes social classes which are too sharply defined and too dependent on birth that the English aristocracy acquired the dominant position it retained for centuries.’

Much of the continent moved towards Tocqueville’s caste and absolutism. For particular reasons one island retains a balance of forces and a dynamic tension between parts of the institutional structure. This would provide shelter for the inventions and ideas of its larger European neighbours’

– F.W Maitland and the Making of the Modern World, by Macfarlane.