Society and Population
On Classes, Orders and Social Position
We think of classes as being hierarchical and based largely on wealth. The richer you are, the more upper class you are. There is one continuum, that of money. It's a ladder and we are all placed either higher or lower on it.
Medieval society didn't think in these terms. It's not like people didn't recognize wealth or long for it. It's more the case that there was more than one ladder and more than one measure. There was nobility, for one, which was something you were born into or you weren't. If you were, you were on a particular ladder, regardless of wealth or anything else. Even with the order of nobility, wealth was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. A variety of other behaviors and characteristics more than offset a lack of wealth.
Another group unto itself was the clergy. You had to join this one, though you could join it quite young, and you could in theory be expelled from it. The clerical world had its own ladder, though not unaffected by other worlds. You could be noble, for example, and be in the clergy, which gave you a position the non-noble clergy could not aspire to. But a non-noble could go far; some commoners even became pope.
Beyond these were other "ladders". In the cities, for example, there was citizen and non-citizen, guildsman and non-guildsman. Among the nobles, increasingly there was being or not being at court. Those at court were starting to be called courtiers, though this became important only with the seventeenth century.
You could move up and down any of these ladders, though really the metaphor is too confining and misleading. Instead, I'll use a word that the people of the time often used: estate. You belonged to this estate or to that estate and each had its own sphere of social mobility. Some movement was affected by wealth, some wasn't.
The main point I want you to understand here is that "class" is an inadequate and ultimately misleading term. Especially if you start thinking of class conflict and that sort of thing.
Even estates, however, gives far from a complete picture of medieval social reality. Two other groupings were every bit as important as estate, and were all tangled up together. One was family, and the other was the corporation, by which I mean entities such as commune and guild. I'll talk about each of these in turn.
Estate
There was a traditional division of medieval society into three groups: those who pray (oratores), those who fight (bellatores), and those who work (laborares). It was always an oversimplified picture, even in the central Middle Ages, but it has been repeated so many times by so many writers that it's worth starting here.
These were not classes in the modern sense of the word. That is, they should not be understood as three rungs on a vertical ladder. Rather, they were three separate cuts of the pie. The word "estate" was often used, as was "order." I shall use both, rather than class, as a way of emphasizing the difference between modern and medieval perceptions. "Estate" derives from "status" and reminds us to focus on condition rather than elevation. "Order" comes from the Latin "ordo" which is also the root for "ordination." Think of orders in biology. The word also reminds us that in the Middle Ages these divisions were viewed as natural and essential to maintaining order within society.
The divisions were, however, mainly a literary trope, a way that writers had of talking about society. In practice, there were more than just three estates. Moreover, there are other ways of analyzing social structure than in these terms, for this tripartite division is not sufficient for the modern historian.
The chief shortcoming of the three orders picture is that it lumps so much of society into one pile: those who work. There is room here not only for great variations in wealth but also great variations in social prestige and social power. We need to look further.
Definitions of Social Status
We moderns tend to look at society through the relatively simple lens of money. If you have lots, you're upper class; if you have little, you're lower class. Most Americans think they're middle class, regardless of how much money they have; while much of the rest of the world thinks Americans are rich, regardless of how much money they have. But the scale is always vertical and has only the one yardstick. A mistake often made is to look at medieval society in terms of wealth. It affected social standing, without a doubt, but it did not create social standing.
Another vector of analysis is privilege, most commonly expressed in terms of law, treatment at law, or exemptions from laws. Indeed, the word privilege comes from two words—privatus and leges—that mean "private laws." We can see who was according privilege and thereby infer social groups.
The Criminous Cleric
One of the most fundamental of social divisions was that between the secular and the religious. The clergy in the Middle Ages were not subject to secular law; they had their own legal system. If a priest committed a crime—theft, assault, arson—he might be apprehended by local authorities, but he would then be turned over to the Church. The Church courts, normally under the aegis of the local bishop, would determine guilt. If guilty, the Church could choose to turn the cleric back over to secular authorities for punishment (usually corporal) or it might choose to impose its own punishment (usually fines and penance).
As you might guess, this easily and often led to disputes and hard feelings. If a cleric attacked a local, then was given no more than penance by his local bishop, the people of the neighborhood would understandably be angry. This got very tricky in cases where a clergyman perhaps joined in a conspiracy against a monarch, and by our period we see kings starting to claim certain kinds of authority over their clergy.
The legal privilege went beyond personal criminal activity to include property law as well. Here, a dispute over ownership or payment of rents or boundaries of an estate could wind up in both secular and clerical courts, each issuing a judgment. Resolution wasn't so much a matter of one court having authority over the other—medieval law was rife with overlapping and competing jurisdictions—but was more a matter of one party or the other simply running out of money or patience and would yield. Or would resort to violence.
When you read about "anticlericalism" in our course (and you will!), recall this matter of the criminous cleric. Yes, hard feelings toward the clergy included such things as jealousy of wealth or lousy morals, but it also included very pragmatic matters like local monks getting away with assault or rape, or the local monastery grabbing a bit of land.
A Jumble of Jurisdictions
It's true that the nobility were privileged. They were exempted from this or that tax, had special rights to levy their own tax or to raise an armed force, or to bring grievances directly to the king. In fact, though, many people had special privileges, even though on a modest or localized level. It's better to think in terms of jurisdictions here, areas of authority that overlapped, competed, and even duplicated. I'll give an indication of the complexity.
There were village courts, run by the villagers themselves enforcing village customary law. There were manorial courts, in practice very similar in scope and purpose but run by the local lord or his representative. There were royal and baronial courts, run by the nobility and trying cases having to do with the nobility. Towns tended to have their own courts, and indeed this is one of the chief characteristics of an incorporated medieval town, that it could try its own citizens. There were also any number of specialty courts; for example, medieval fairs often had their own courts, enduring only for the length of the fair and dealing only with disputes arising during its course.
That's just a sampling. In many ways the courts can be divided into much the same categories—the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners—except that the third group is clearly divided into rural courts and town courts. Also, whereas the literary three-fold division always was presented as clear and unchanging, we see in the law courts large areas of overlap and changing relationships over time and place.
Know Your Place
That takes care of the law, at least for the purposes of this overview. What about social status? What does that phrase actually mean? Or, rather, what did it mean in the late Middle Ages?
We know there were gradations within the orders. We frequently encounter phrases like "upper clergy" and "lower clergy" or "leading families" and the like. These were not normally clearly defined categories but were more in the nature of distinctions that "everyone" understood without needed to be particularly precise about it. It's worth looking at these gradations in a little more detail.
Distinctions were perhaps clearest among the religious. Bishops and archbishops were clearly superior to ordinary priests; one was upper clergy, the other lower clergy.
Among the nobility, the distinctions were more clearly based on wealth, but more specifically were based on title. Earls, counts, dukes, these were always members of the upper nobility. Ordinary knights belonged to the lower nobility. In between were any number of intermediary positions. Since these titles were customary, there was never a clear hierarchy of title. We do get that eventually, but not until the 17th century and even later. During the Middle Ages, status rested on the far more shifting grounds of alliances, family associations, and personal reputation.
I should also mention that royalty was a special case. All kings were noble, but once they became king all sorts of special associations accreted to them. These traditions were stronger where dynasties were long-lived, such as in France or England; they were weaker in places like Germany or Italy. Nevertheless, a king was special. This derived in part from Germanic traditions, in part from Biblical (Old Testament) foundations, and in part from a conscious and deliberate effort to draw upon Roman imperial law to bolster the special authority of a king.
This was not yet fully resolved by 1300. One tendency was to try to set the king apart, to make him something separate, with special powers such as the ability to make law simply by proclaiming it. A counter-tendency emphasized that the king was a member of the nobility, raised up by them (or his ancestors were), and required to work in partnership with them. This tension was by no means resolved by the time our course begins.
Rural Society Summary
In the countryside, then, we don't have a single social ladder. We have the nobility, some of whom are remote and far above ordinary folk, others who live near and are still superior to the peasantry but who are in some ways nearly as removed from the duke or king as is the village blacksmith.
Among the common folk, some peasants while not rich, own multiple tracts of land, have employees, serve on local juries, and are elevated enough to put on airs. Some might even get appointed to local offices. Others, though, live on the very fringes of society; tolerated, occasionally employed, but also shunned in hard times.
In addition to these two social circles, commoners and nobles, were the clergy, who included not only the local village priest (who might be himself the son of a peasant) but also the members of the local monastery. They lived among secular society, yet were in significant ways also apart from it.
Town Society
In the towns, social structure was more complex. Although the terms varied, most towns had "the better sort" and "the lesser sort." In Italy the terms were explicit: the popolo grasso and the popolo minuto—almost literally, the fat cats and the little people.
Typically, the "better sort" comprised only a handful of families—only twenty or thirty or sixty, even in the larger cities. There were no titles as there were for nobles or the clergy, nor legal distinctions. Rather, everyone simply knew who was the better sort. Those who weren't, fell into the "lesser sort" bucket.
The better sort led processions. They tended to serve in government, though they could choose a more private life. In Strasbourg, there was an annual dance, and the only families invited were those of the better sort. If you got an invitation, you were in. If not, then not.
These social distinctions were not the only distinctions in a town, though. Rather, they were the distinctions between the citizens, and most of those who lived in a town were not citizens. The clergy, which made up a significant percentage of the population, were not citizens. The same social distinctions applied here as in the countryside, though, so that a parish priest did not get invited to the same social functions that the local bishop would.
Similarly, there were members of the nobility who resided in towns. Some held a residence there but mainly lived in the country. Other towns forced their rural nobility to move into the town, so the citizens could keep a better eye on them. Regardless, everyone among the citizenry were commoners, so the nobles always regarded themselves as socially superior.
There were also resident foreigners, many of whom were merchants, and these tended to bring their social status with them. At the lower end, there were many non-citizens who were simply workers. Outside the guild structure (belonging to a guild always was socially more prestigious that not belonging to a guild, even if the guild were quite ordinary), often working as day laborers, these people could often be found among the "followers" of this or that great family. They belonged to a district, a section of town, and most of their loyalty was to that district and its patrons.
A further step down were the poor. In the cities this meant anyone who was on the public dole, whether provided by the Church or the city, whether permanently or temporarily. Even within this group, most cities distinguished between their "own" poor and those who migrated into the city during times of war or famine. When you read about cities ejecting the poor and closing their gates, it's this latter group that is meant.
One final word, about guilds. By 1500 (less so in 1300), guilds had a near lock on social and political position in most towns across Europe. Citizenship and membership in a guild were synonymous in many, widespread in many more. The "greater" and "lesser" hierarchy got reflected in the guild structure—you will read about this explicitly in regard to Florence. A good deal of the civil unrest you will read about in this course has to do with those lesser guilds vying for a piece of the political pie. In the same way that being born noble or common tended to set limits to the range of your social mobility, so membership in a guild set limits as well. One major difference: it was possible to change guilds, and therefore have at least a chance at changing one's status.
It's Only Money
So, we have two axes for talking about medieval society: the law, and social status. How does wealth play into this? After all, I started this section by saying that modern society is all about money (and fame), whereas medieval society rested on different foundations. But, surely money counted, right?
Sure it did. The real question is in what way did it matter and how was its influence felt? This will also let us consider the converse: ways in which money did not matter.
Can't Buy Me Love
It's easier to start with ways in which money did not affect social status. The clearest case is crossing the divide between the secular and the religious. No amount of wealth could make you a priest. Now, it's quite true that rich men might buy a cardinal's hat for a nephew or whatever, but the move from being a layman to being a priest was all but incidental to such a transaction. Money was buying power; the religious angle was a by-product. Sometimes, indeed, the uncle was terribly crushed to discover that the young nephew suddenly got religion on them and turned out to be all but worthless to the family.
Nor could money turn a commoner into a nobleman, nor the lack of it turn a nobleman into a commoner. Here, the exceptions are more significant. Money, plus marriage, could eventually ennoble a family. It might take several generations before the local noble society truly accepted the upstarts, but there's no doubt that without the money the change could never have happened. This was particularly the case in our period, as the nobility found itself increasingly strapped for funds, saw its expenditures rising (sometimes very quickly), and found traditional sources of revenue utterly unable to keep up. By 1500, merchant families could quite deliberately aim to manipulate its wealth in such a way as to move into the landed aristocracy. Being noble was always better than being common, no matter how rich.
In the other direction, if a noble family fell into financial distress, its usual tactic was to mortgage property and sell assets. If they did this enough, and ended with too little (or no) land, they would then find that they could no longer arrange marriages with other noble families. They were forced to marry commoners. If the next generation similarly failed to keep land, they would begin to be regarded more as wealthy peasants than as nobles. Some doggedly clung to their titles: the stereotype is of the German knight who works his own farm, has no armor or horse, but who insists on being called Herr by the locals. But it happened everywhere—think of Don Quixote.
Money, Money
Very well, where did money matter?
In the countryside, it mattered little. It was land that mattered, and a great deal of evidence has been accumulated showing that peasants were very active in the real estate market. They bought and sold parcels of land whenever they could, always seeking to acquire land but always dividing it out again among heirs. There was a great deal of pressure here in the earlier 14th century, while the Black Death relieved that pressure by killing off so many people.
In the towns, money mattered very little to the lesser sort. That is, it was important in terms of making a living and maybe even improving one's shop or home, but no amount of money could make a tanner important. Some trades were simply "dishonorable" and that was that.
Among the better sort, however, money had already by 1300 become hugely important. There, among the goldsmiths and apothecaries and cloth merchants, people had learned how to use money to make money. They'd learned how to build financial empires. They'd learned, too, that this brought political influence, which in turn could be used to further the family's interest while protecting it from its enemies. We'll see this in the case of the Medici family in Florence. It's here, among the great merchants of northern Italy, the Low Countries, Aragon, and southern Germany, that we get a dynamic that feels more familiar. Money was much more important in affected social status. We see, for example, legislation trying to control the size of wedding feasts, or the number of pearls a woman might wear in public. Money alone seemed able to make someone who ought to be lesser appear to be greater. It needs to be remembered, though, that this was only a tiny slice of the urban population, which in turn was only a tiny slice of the general population of Europe.
Family
Of course family was important. Family is always important, always forms part of the very foundation of society. Family in the Middle Ages, however, was both more important than you might think and took on different forms than you might expect.
When we say family we most often mean those who live in the same house, excluding live-in servants (if we have any!). There are other times, though, that "family" means something wider. A family reunion, for example, entails more than one household. Someone researching family history is including an even wider circle of people. If a scholar encounters the word "family" in a document, what meaning should be taken?
So it was in the Middle Ages, but with more nuances. Famiglia in Italian, la famille in French, familie in German, typically included servants and other dependents. In the narrower sense, it was only those living under the same roof. In the wider sense it could include a great many people who were dependent upon the family in one way or another. In other words, the wider sense of family included everything we would include, but more besides. Sometimes those dependants would be called "clients" (clientela), which doesn't mean client like an attorney has, but people for whom the head of the family was a patron, a man who would vouch for them and protect them and help them, in exchange for which they owed him loyalty and support. The word patron comes from the same root as the Latin for father (pater), which shows the family-like relationship.
The Nuclear Bomb
A common myth about medieval families is that they were "extended" — that is, that a medieval household consisted of multiple generations all crowded together into one house. Depending on the slant of the stereotype, this either emphasized poverty and squalor, or it emphasized nurturing and family solidarity.
That's not how it worked. Any static description of a household is a bit like a broken clock: it's right only twice a day. There were times when a given house might hold only a married couple. Later, it might be the couple with children. If they were wealthy enough, they might have one or more servants. As the children grew up and got married, they moved out, the women into the homes of their husbands, the men into their own houses. As the couple grew old, they might stay in their home or they might yield the home to one of their children and go live in a smaller place. Not unlike how things work today.
In cities, family structures could be more complex. There's more evidence of truncated families—bachelors, singles living in groups, multiple families sharing expenses. Family connections among the better sort were even more complex, with servants and apprentices and live-in nephews and neighborhood clients all in some sort of relationship with the family, and with brothers and uncles and grandfathers in their own complex of relationships. You will go far in your understanding of medieval urban politics if you understand the family dynamics involved. This is why medieval politics so often reads like soap opera.
Corpora
I've used the Latin here to help you not to think of "corporation" in modern terms. It had little to do with business. Medieval society was filled with various organizations that helped define, facilitate and constrain social interaction. Where such organizations exist in modern times, they play a decidedly peripheral role. There are still certain private clubs of exclusive membership that serve as the scene for political and business deals, but they are nowhere near as numerous or powerful as they once were.
Guild
We can divide guilds into three groups: craft guilds, merchant guilds, and religious guilds. There was overlap, both in form and function, but all three types can be found just about everywhere in European towns in our period.
Guilds As Social Bodies
I talk elsewhere about the economic functions of guilds. Here I want to consider their social role.
Many guilds originated not in a trade but as a charitable association (and therefore related to religious duties) or as a drinking club—that is, as a purely social entity. These might get associated with a particular trade and wind up as a carpenters guild or whatever; conversely, the guild might have started as an association of artisans that then added charitable and social activities. Either way, by 1300, all three aspects were part of most guilds. (I'm going to stop saying "most" here; nothing that can be said about guilds was universally true, not even within a single region at a particular time; so, understand that every generalization I make about guilds will have exceptions)
The chief formal event of a guild was a drinking night. At some events there might be feasting, but the drinking night was more like a night out at the club. The purpose was to talk, sing, drink, and generally pal around. We have almost no records of what went on at these events, from our period (we have some descriptions from the 16th century and later). But it seems clear from later accounts that these events were a way to reaffirm and re-state affinities and alliances, a place to reconcile feuds, and so on. Not, it appears, to do business, though business might be facilitated. These were more purely social in focus.
The guild would also have feasts, inviting more than just the masters. Feasts were often associated with this or that saint, so that St Margaret might get a window in the cathedral donated by the Shoemaker's Guild, and the Shoemakers might have a feast on her saint day, and perhaps carry her image in a town parade. Like other social events, the feasts were a way to re-state social relationships (who sat at the head of tables, was served first, etc.), as well as a way for the families within the guild to tend to relationships.
Those parades I mentioned were also important. These were at the neighborhood level, at least, or were city-wide. At these events, the guilds could state their relationships one with the other: where the parade began and ended, who marched where, the magnificence of dress and display, and so on. Individuals found their place in the larger society within the context of their guild. This is one of many reasons why those not in guilds were not in the heart of urban society but were on its fringes.
Commune
A commune was simply a self-governing body, usually urban but not necessarily so. The word comes from the idea that everyone within the commune had common interests and would come together to promote and defend those interests. By "everyone" they naturally didn't mean everyone, but meant only those who had interests they could share; that is to say, people with property and money. The poor, the Church, and other groups within the community were to be protected by the commune, not participate in it, in the same way in modern society children are protected by the government but do not participate in it.
Most of the communes we'll meet will be large cities and most of what we will read there will be about politics, but this should not lead you to overlook the social importance of the commune. You will be able to see this relationship most clearly in Brucker's book on Florence, but watch for it elsewhere, too. Put simply, the commune was a source of honors, privilege, and status, so it was a major stage on which social positions were taken.
Parish
The parish was important both in the countryside and in the city, for it was the fundamental unit of organization in the Christian Church. By itself it had no particular social significance. In the countryside, that's about all there is to say, because the village was the principal social unit for the peasants. I'll return to the countryside later.
Parishes existed in towns as well—several parishes. Even very small towns, with populations of a thousand or two, would have two or three or four parishes, and these coincided more or less with neighborhoods. In the larger cities, there would be dozens. The parish helped reinforce the sense of neighborhood identity.
In the larger cities there were also districts—perhaps as few as four (quarters) or as many as the seventeen in Siena. A district was more than an arbitrary unit, although town governments tended to use them to assign fire or police or military duties. The leading families tended to rule by district, this district belonging to this family and that district to that family. Every district had its traditions and were openly in competition with the others. We can see this manifested in the palio of Siena, its famous horse race; or in the bridge fights of Venice and other towns with canals and bridges.
Pays
I've used the French word here, because I can't find an English one that will serve. It gets translated to "country" but that word has a specific modern meaning that is profoundly different from the period we are studying. "Region" might work, but the English word is too neutral. "Neighborhood" conveys more of the tone, but that word's too narrow. The fact is, we have rather lost the meaning of the word in modern times, especially in America.
The pays was one's true homeland. It's where everyone spoke the same language (and the same dialect of that language), where they ate the same sort of foods, wore the same kind of clothes, and regarded each other as natives and everyone else as foreign. Their folk tales were in common, their jokes, their festivals.
People in general felt loyalty first at the level of the pays, and this operated at every level. For example, if a reforming bishop sent in trained priests to a locality, they might be resisted because they were "foreigners". Local loyalties were one powerful factor in the ability of the Cathars to resist attempts to stamp out that heresy. It was behind the persistent loyalty to England of the "French" of Guyenne. It was a factor in why the dukes of Burgundy had such a hard time creating a single state out of their holdings; indeed, it was a major factor in the difficulties faced by monarchs across Europe.
Christendom
The largest grouping was Christendom. It's a truism that "Europe" didn't exist at this time (though the idea was starting to emerge). When western Europeans thought in terms of "us" versus "them" they spoke about Christendom—a realm, a dominus with roughly the same associations and reverberations as "kingdom" (note the -dom ending on both words). Christendom was the dominus, the realm, of Christ.
Exactly what this meant was a little fluid. It tended to be used more by Latin Christians than by the Greek Orthodox or other churches, and when used they tended not to mean to include the Greeks, Syrians, Copts, Russians, etc. But if the context were wide enough, then these other groups might be included (e.g., when speaking about Islam).
While there was no real loyalty to Christendom, it was nevertheless a powerful symbol that could be evoked. During our period, it was called upon repeatedly in the wars with the Turks. It also formed part of the rhetoric for the wars against pagans (specifically, in our period, the Lithuanians).
Conclusion
In your textbook, Denys Hay presents European society from a different angle: from the perspective of orders; specifically, clergy, nobility, townsmen, and peasants. That's a valid and useful approach as well. As Hay himself points out, it's how the people of the time tended to write about social structure. I offer this essay as a complement, not a contrast, to that information. You should also try to consider the portrait of Florentine society painted by Brucker in light of by this essay and Hay.
There remains the question of change over time. Changes in family structure are extremely difficult to document, but it seems clear that the impact of demographic crises led to significant changes in family size and sometimes even family relationships. In the longer run, though, the family is more fundamental and does not change in the space of a couple hundred years. The nuclear family was at the core of European society in 1300 and remained so in 1500.
Corporations, on the other hand, changed in significant ways. Their social function changed little: they were formal associations for mutual assistance, both social and economic. The change was in the number (a steady growth in guilds) and in their political power (a more complex story here, with both gains and losses). The big change here comes after our course, during the Reformation.
The fundamental religious unit of society was the parish and this did not change during our course. The significant change there was more administrative, as bishops were able to exert a more direct influence on local parish priests, but the social and religious functions of the parish remained untouched, even in the face of catastrophic events.
Likewise, the pays continued to exert a primary loyalty for nearly everyone. We do see the very first beginnings of a recognition of something larger, of the "nation" as embodied by the king and royal government, but only in a few places (England, France, Spain) and only fitfully as yet. Still in 1500, a man when asked to identify himself would reply "a Cornish man" or "Provençal" or "Swäbischer" before he would answer English or French or German.
And, finally, what about "Christendom"? This one is a little trickier, for it's among the humanists of our period that we start to hear references to "Europe" rather than "Christendom". It's very late, though, and very restricted, and would not become general until the 17th century. The concept in our period was still unchanged at its heart. What changed was the understanding of what was included by the term, for the eastern frontiers of Christendom were very much in flux.