World History

Unit 3: The World in Transition

Chapter 10: The Rise of the Middle Ages

22. Thu, Nov 14, 2013

There are many aspects of early Mediaeval society that are worth exploring. Its evolving concepts of the law, its institutions, including the backbone of the Church, and its long unfolding history.

The book describes three forms of justice, notable more for being colorful than for being the norm. Trial by combat and trial by ordeal were certainly known, but there were other forms of justice that were a good deal more like our own. Under Edward I of England, jury trial became at least a standard, and standards of investigation and evidence (though different from our own) were considered and used. Compurgation was fairly common.

It is definitely worth knowing where the dominance of the mounted knight came from in mediaeval Europe. The various technological changes that led to the state of affairs one finds in the twelfth century and later are worth seeing in context of one another.

The lyrical depiction of chivalry in the book is an interesting admixture of truth and fiction. There was an idealized vision of the knight, yes, and it did lead to the formation of many young knights. At the same time, it was not entirely uniform, and (as with any other code of law or behavior) it was not always followed. Knighthood arose from practical necessity as a military reality, and not for the sake of the glamor it conferred on these fighting men.

To say that the beliefs of the peasants of the Middle Ages were often as superstitious as they were Christian is doubtless true, but it's probably also worth noting that this was not confined to the Middle Ages. People in the twentieth century were still sacrificing black roosters at certain seasons of the year, in reasonably modern and enlightened countries. People here now still believe in horoscopes and say "bless you" when someone sneezes. (While there's nothing particularly superstitious or pagan about blessing someone, the rationale behind it — namely that the soul leaves the body when one sneezes and needs to be blessed so that it can't be caught by the devil — is patently silly.)

According to your textbook, many of the provisions of Magna Carta applied to ordinary people. This is largely false: they have since come to be extended to commoners, but were at the time almost exclusively about the rights of barons. The book also claims that the document was not considered important at the time — which is ridiculous: otherwise why would John himself and many of his descendants have been forced to sign it repeatedly over the next several centuries?

• What are the underlying notions of law at work here? There are at least three strands that come together: Roman law (positive law, which we discussed earlier, canon law (church law, which was largely based on rescript — we'll talk about that), and common law (traditional law that relied on the way things have always been done). What do they have to do with one another, and what happens when you put them together and mix them up?
• What are the practical consequences of having two contending power structures — church and state — both of which claim, at various points through history, ascendency over the other? We'll talk about the doctrine of the Two Swords a bit.
• What does something like the "code of chivalry" really mean to a society? How did the knight come about? What is his place in the social and economic reality of the time?
• Historians often measure the progress of certain complex relationships by points of demarcation where those relationships have changed. In particular, for the Middle Ages, it's common to draw an arc of the dominance of the Papacy with three points — Gregory VII, Innocent III, and the collapse of the worldly dominance of Rome with the Avignon Papacy. We can familiarize ourselves with those points, but it's also worth asking whether that's a method that's worth pursuing in a larger sense. Are those marker points really definitive? What do they tell us about the times (often centuries) that come in between? This will have something to do with what we talk about next week as well.

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