Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe

Conclusion

Thomas N. Bisson Conclusion People feared the great in the twelfth century, and wondered who was great. Men with power, worried when they lacked status or recognition, struggled to secure customary—that is, legal—assurance of rank. It is a characteristic oddity that ministeriales tainted with servitude often rose higher in their societies than the untainted famuli., mayors, and provosts of western France. But it is clear that service created power. By the later eleventh century one no longer needed to seek out kings to rise and gain; dukes or counts would do, and not a fewof these could envy the engaging courtliness of greater castellan lords and barons. Domination not office, lordship rather than kingship, waspreponderant in this aristocratic world. That domination was masculine no one could doubt. But women could partake of such masculinity when circumstancesrequired (or permitted), and they shared more fully in the conceptualizing of dynastic power than historians of government have allowed. Nobility and lordship, the latter especially,loom larger than ever in our understanding, whether by virtue of a more searching inquiry into the old problematic of aristocraticsocieties, or by virtue of newly directed studies of sacrality, theology, and biblicalexegesis.Law may seem lesscentral than is habitually supposed, not for lack of good examples of "lawful societies" but because (perhapsevenin Flanders)it could be used or evaded so easily as to invite us to substitute societal or ideological norms for its characteristic function. And perhaps also because we are enabled to see more clearly that judicial process sometimes laycloser to strategic action, to power than to law. Likewise strategic or instrumental was the diverse resort to ritual and commemoration inthe royalcourts of England, France, and Leon. On the other hand, canon law assumed prescriptive force in the mechanisms of spiritual courts delegate in the later twelfth century. And asjudges virtuallymade "new law" in the twelfth century, many could see how official action differed attractively from the affectively proprietary ways of lordship. Was this to insinuate a specifically clericalmodel of power> Perhaps so, 330 Thomas N. Bisson but it would be mistaken to conclude in terms of secularand religious cultures of power. Ideas of office, of functional qualification,may be known to us as ecclesiastical ideas in the twelfth century, but they were easily referred to laylordship both in its expression and its perversion. Bishops like kings and castellans were vulnerable to charges of (lordly) violence and excess . Nevertheless, our studies of lordship, courts, esoteric expression, and exegesis touch on a subsistent preoccupation with peace as an imperative of moral order that may be recognized asa characteristically clerical theme. It has often been suggested that the religious peacewas secularized in the twelfth century, yet it may prove instructive to think of pacification as a persistently clerical—and cultural—influence on the remodelling of justice in the twelfth century. Here as on other salient points we merely look out on beckoning fields. Prospectors, we envisage no new synthesis.We can see more clearly what topics here omitted or merely touched on—violence, politics, office, and literacy, for example—would contribute to a better understanding of the seed-time of European government.What happened in the twelfthcentury was that ways of interacting and of thinking about power werejuxtaposed or run together more easily than in societies with well developed and specialized institutions and discourses. An example from yet another pertinent topic, accountability, will illustrate this point. Toward 1118 the monk Lambert of Saint-Omer was at work on his illuminated liberfloriduswhen he ran out of parchment while copying Saint Anselm's Cur Dem homo. It looks as if he drew on a (discarded?) fiscal account for the local domains of the Count of Flanders in order to carry on, scraping the parchment bare to make way for his theological text. Luckily for us, a few inked strokes of the account escaped erasurewhere to this day in the manuscript's binding they attest to the confluence of the sublime and the ephemeral. Lambert was filled with lofty imaginings about God's power manifest not only in inspired texts but also in the genealogies of kings and counts and the histories of peoples and of natural things. Did he also understand, even practice, the incipient culture of fiscal control? Or was that work for harder-headed brothers whom he had to raid or cajole? We do not know, and our ignorance is the deeper for the misfortune that the palimpsest Flemish account of ca. mo (?) istoo incompletely preserved for...