Lordship, Liberty, and Liberties in Medieval Europe

LORDSHIP, LIBERTY, AND LIBERTIES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE by Helen McManus∗ Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship , and the Origins of European Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) xxviii + 677 pp., ill.; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) vii + 376 pp.; Liberties and Identities in the Medieval British Isles, ed. Michael Prestwich (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008) vii + 225 pp. This essay considers three recent volumes in medieval political history. Two are monographs, and one is an edited volume, the result of a conference . All serve to open new areas of scholarly endeavor. These books variously challenge the concepts of politics, the state, and government as anachronistic or otherwise problematic in the context of medieval Europe. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century and Liberties and Identities in the Medieval British Isles both explore specific practices and experiences of rule within the structures of the medieval order. Both books caution against a hasty equation of medieval lordship and our ideas of government and the state. The edited volume provides a series of geographically focused studies of a particular structure of lordship. It exemplifies the kind of research that might complement and complicate the pan-European perspective proffered by Thomas Bisson. The third title, The Lust for Liberty, is a lively history of popular revolt in late medieval Europe. Samuel K. Cohn’s highlights the diverse agency of the people in matters political. Bisson’s The Crisis of the Twelfth Century is a political history of lordship and its transformation. By lordship, Bisson means a mode of power that proceeds “affectively” and is experienced “personally, palpably , physically,” as opposed to “publicly and institutionally” (11). Power in the twelfth century, that is, should not be interpreted as “government .” Bisson specifically eschews narratives of progress from violent lordship to rational government. Instead he conveys the multiple ways in which practices now associated with government began to infiltrate and inflect the established practices of lordship, and the extent to which these variously took hold and lapsed. The result is an almost 600 page tour de force which merits its length. ∗ Department of Political Science, UCLA, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 900951472 . HELEN MCMANUS 250 Of the three books, Bisson’s has the narrowest focus, yet has perhaps the greatest potential to change the terms of debate and initiate new conversations. It is a remarkable balance of breadth and depth, or of regional specificity and Europe-wide generalizations. The book’s geographic reach extends across Europe, but examples from England, France, and Spain (especially Catalonia) dominate. Bisson’s study ranges from 875–1225, but the bulk of his argument addresses the years 1050–1225. The earlier period appears only in the second chapter, which provides a broader context for Bisson’s argument both historically and with reference to the debates (printed in Past and Present in the 1990s) in which this book finds its beginnings. The main contributions of this book are found in chapters three to six, all lengthy analyses of lordship across multiple regions. A division of these chapters at the year 1150, combined with a selection of images inserted between chapters 4 and 5, implies that the book might best be read as composed of two parts. Chapters 3 and 4 present the experience of power and the crises of power until 1150. These chapters register the prominence of violence and “bad lordship” across Europe, and relate this to what Bisson finds to be the remarkable instability of lordship. The oppressive exercise of power over subordinates, that is, took place in the context of a widespread crisis of power among lords themselves. Chapters 5 and 6 reveal the ways in which the crises of lordship were subsequently addressed by emerging conceptions and practices of lordship and office-holding. Throughout the book Bisson emphasizes the extent to which office-holders—bailiffs, sheriffs, and others whose enjoyed privileges delegated by a higher lord—would themselves be thought of and addressed as lords. This migration of lordly power into the lower levels of the hierarchy is no small part of the pervasive culture of...