Communitas regni

Writing in 1947 and aware of the appeals made by King John’s Magna Carta of 1215 to ‘common counsel’ (clauses 12, 14), ‘common utility’ (clause 42), or the ‘community of the whole land’ (clause 61), Sir Maurice Powicke made ‘the community of the realm’ both the subtitle and one of the central actors in his King Henry III and the Lord Edward. England, he supposed, was not only different but ‘best’: uniquely precocious in acquiring a sense of nationhood under the rule of law. In 1984, Susan Reynolds lit a bonfire under such exceptionalist complacencies, suggesting that appeals to ‘a natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law, and descent’, far from being uniquely English, were ubiquitous throughout most parts of medieval Europe. At the same time that a British Prime Minster was declaring there to be ‘no such thing as society’, Reynolds’s Kingdoms and Communities (rev. ante, ci [1986], pp. 421–2) sought, on the contrary, to demonstrate that social identities, and hence social conscience, were innate to all realms forged in the shadow of the Rome either of Cicero or St Peter. Where does Reynolds’s thesis now stand, almost forty years on? To judge from the present collection, as fractured and as disputatious as modern society itself. The eighteen essays collected here (all but one of them in French) reach no grand consensus. Ranging as far north as Iceland and as far east as Prague, their focus is nonetheless triangulated upon England, France and the Empire, with inevitably special emphasis upon French tendencies both centripetal and regionally centrifugal. There is nothing here on Spain or Byzantium, and, more surprisingly, nothing on the Italian communes that featured so prominently in Reynolds’s analysis. Particular questions recur. Was the king ever truly part of the community, here envisaged— like the ‘congregatio fidelium’—as something demanding both allegiance and leadership? Was he the realm incarnate, or a potentially hostile antithesis, in opposition to which a sense of political community might first be precipitated? Was this community a true universality, or something always localised and stratified, by race, nationality, language or social class? By whom was the sense of community activated, voiced, championed or defined: by a nobility of blood (as in France, or Bohemia, here with an essay by Éloïse Adde), by looser politically engaged elites (as in England or Scotland, the latter ably described here by Alice Taylor), by all free men (as in Iceland, with an essay by Grégory Cattaneo), or by tax-payers (the case of Sweden, as interpreted here by Corinne Péneau)? In addressing these questions, and in seeking to flee the dungeons of historiographical chauvinism for the high watchtower of transnational comparatives, various doors are rattled and, in some cases, forced open. Michel Bur draws attention to the rarity of ‘communitas’ or ‘communa’ in twelfth-century writing north of the Alps, more often applied to ‘common’ use of pasture or woods than deployed in any political context. There is an invitation here for lexical excavation similar to that undertaken by Pierre Michaud-Quantin in his great work on Universitas (1970). Any such enquiry should engage with the processes and expectations of ‘excommunication’: an antithesis here signally ignored. Yves Sassier traces the Roman law origins of political incorporation, especially in the city state, noting that whatever collective authority the ‘populus’ had claimed, thereafter was deemed to have been not merely delegated but entirely transferred to their rulers, be they princes, kings or emperors. A prince might have responsibilities to those he ruled (and here a comparison between coronation oaths would have been especially useful), but he remained a sovereign entity, not merely a delegate of his people. Georg Jostkleigrewe continues to scratch at the scholarly itching over terms such as ‘nationalism’ or ‘proto-nationalism’ as applied to pre-modern realties, noting the chroniclers’ emphasis on the German vernacular distinguished from the French, but thereby arriving at the surely bizarre conclusion that no medieval ‘nationalism’ can be considered to have existed, either French or German. This might have surprised the Germans at the University of Paris, who c.1447 re-cut what had formerly been the seal of the long-vanished NATIO ANGLIE, transforming it into the S NATIONIS ALEMANNIE. At the same time in their rituals they substituted the Franco-German St Charlemagne for the ‘nation’s’ former English patrons, St Thomas and St Edmund Martyr. As this suggests, the cult of saints has long proved a rich field for those in search of national or communal allegiance, from Bede, via what Colette Beaune has taught us of the Naissance de la nation France (1985), through to what in Adde’s remarks here on St Wenceslas and the Bohemians, or Taylor’s on St Andrew and the Scots, emerge as trans-European impulses. Lydwine Scordia and Karl Ubl grapple with more slippery abstractions: Scordia with the quodlibet questions of the Paris schools and their anthropomorphic imaginings of the body politic, Ubl with what is here judged the relatively meagre contribution made to debate by the newly translated Aristotle as interpreted either by Albert the Great or (the comparatively eccentric) Engelbert of Admont. Better grounded both in fact and reflection, Rolf Grosse contributes a fine essay on the princes as true heads of the German body politic, from the 1060s attempting to seize collective control through their claim to regency, from 1076 meeting in diets without their king, thereafter seeking to banish Henry IV as a threat to his own realm. Long before the chaos of the 1250s and 60s, Grosse suggests, the princely claim to stand between the emperor and God regularly and significantly diluted imperial pretensions to sovereignty. In consequence, the power vacuum of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had deeper roots than are sometimes acknowledged. Similarly deep is Frédérique Lachaud’s probing of English communal politics, here traced thirty years before Magna Carta (and with a degree of debt to Latham’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin) to the ‘tota communa liberorum hominum’ of the 1181 Assize of Arms. This is an excellent survey, although the roots it traces extend deeper still. What, for instance, of the (adjectival) ‘communis consilio baronum totius regni Anglie’ of Henry I’s coronation charter (1100), or the ‘communis emendatio totius regni mei’ of Henry II’s (1154)? What, more significantly, of the (fully reified) ‘communa comitatus et legalium militum patrie’ invoked by the Assize of Northampton (1176)? With an outsider’s eye for oddity, Jörg Peltzer notes the evolution of what had been Henry II’s essentially personal court officers into self-proclaimed national institutions: the Montfort, later Lancastrian, stewardship ‘of England’, the Bohun constableship, the Vere chamberlainship, and so forth. Striving after independence from any particular king, such titles were cauterised, first and deliberately by Edward I, then by the fall of Thomas of Lancaster. By such means did the English nobility, and hence English nationhood, follow a path at variance to that of the German prince-electors. In point of fact, the earl of Leicester’s ‘dapiferatum Anglie et Normannie’ appears in a charter of the future Henry II at least as early as 1153, and the Vere chamberlainship ‘of England’ as early as 1141 in charters of Henry and his mother which are generally considered authentic. Even the Hommet constableship ‘of Normandy’, referenced as early as the 1170s, was surely intended as a deliberate disassociation from the rival English constableship claimed by the Bohuns and before them by the disgraced Henry of Essex, styling himself ‘Henricus de Essexia constabularius Angl(ie)’ at least once before 1154 (Lambeth MS 241, fo. 58v). Here again we encounter gnarled English roots over which it would be easy to trip. And so we come to France, and no fewer than five of the essays in this collection. What is most remarkable here is their writers’ willingness to accept a version of nationhood and community very different from that adopted elsewhere. Thus Dominique Barthélemy notes the tendency to celebrate victory at Bouvines (1214) as a collective triumph by king and barons: the community of the realm personified in bloodlines. Isabelle Guyot-Bachy stresses the role of war in Flanders, long after Bouvines, in supplying a common enemy against whom the French, royal and noble, might unite. Likewise the account of France’s international diplomacy supplied by Jean-Marie Moeglin reveals a king accompanied into negotiations by bishops and barons, here interpreted as a ‘community’ where in England the equivalent companions of Henry II or Henry III would immediately be dismissed as a ‘court’ and its ‘courtiers’. Moeglin is undoubtedly correct to consider treaties as arrangements negotiated between realms rather than rulers, not least because they might outlast the lifetime of any particular king. Even so, the French nation as described here, as in slighter pieces by Laurence Moal (on the Capetian efforts to assert authority over Brittany) and Jean-Christophe Blanchard (on the geographical focus, or rather lack of it, to a series of late-medieval French armorials), is a specifically noble entity. This is to stray far from the English conception of ‘communitas regni’, in Maitland’s (and for that matter George Orwell’s) estimation a more complex and granulated ‘communitas communitatum’. In other words, for all of Susan Reynolds’s incendiarism, we still find ourselves confronted by disparities both of fact and perception. As Maitland, Marc Bloch and, more recently, Alan Macfarlane have all pointed out, England had strong and centrally manipulated county courts. All Englishmen were liable to pay royal taxes, and all, free and unfree, men and women, were governed by a common law. Even before 1066, no English earl was properly an earl without the king’s approval. Elsewhere things were different. Germany, Bohemia, France and Scotland had local and regional assemblies controlled by princes and peers, only loosely subordinated to royal or imperial control. In France and Germany, tax exemption was both a birthright of nobility and one of the chief advertisements of caste. Scotland, Bohemia and to some extent Germany developed collective traditions of regency, enabling nationhood to evolve even in the absence of a king. In Scotland this actively promoted royal dynastic succession. In Bohemia or Germany it steered towards kingship’s obliteration. No man is an island entire of itself. Yet by the same token, things that may appear homogeneous or ubiquitous from the watchtower, down in the dungeons continue to reveal very specific and often strongly contrasted peculiarities. Vive la différence! Es lebe der Unterschied

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