This module concentrates on the power of rank as a means of creating and maintaining social order in the early Middle Ages.
Contents:
PART 1: Social Division and Class Standing in the early medieval period.
PART 2: The analysis of class structure in Marxist terms, including a discussion of class and gender.
PART 3: The literary model of "the three estates" and the iconography associated with it.
PART 4: Class differentiation in the SEAFARER texts.
You can jump to any one of these parts by clicking the appropriate hyperlink; re-clicking "Narrative" in the side navigation bar will bring you back to the top of this section. Click here for the Bibliography.
To learn about the LINKS and IMAGES that accompany this narrative click on the appropriate hyperlink. We recommend that you consult So What? after you have read one or two parts of the narrative below.
(Note: The sources used in the narrative are listed in the Bibliography and are cited here only by page number, or by author and page number.)
A social class is "a category of persons or a collectivity distinguished by position within system of ranking based upon commonly accepted criteria of social superiority and inferiority" (NCE). Modern ideas of social classes do not correspond to medieval systems of social organization. The Dictionary of the Middle Ages maintains that "in the Middle Ages a class formed where economic position, privilege, and power came together, and only to the extent that they came together" (410). The chief elements of this definition--wealth, prestige, and power--were distributed in various ways in different medieval societies. This multi-part concept avoids the problem of imposing a single, contemporary idea of class structure on the diverse cultural evidence of the medieval period; it also draws our attention to those factors in a culture that produced and maintained the social conditions into which medieval people were born.
It is important to note that DMA definition comes from an article on class structure from 1000-1300 A.D., which encompasses only the latest of the SEAFARER texts. (LINK01 helps you analyze this source.) These dates indicate how little class in the Anglo-Saxon period has been studied in conjunction with class structures from later period of the Middle Ages. We make this observation because it is important not to associate too freely between modern, or even late medieval, ideas of class and the class structures of the Anglo-Saxon period.
In the Anglo-Saxon period, people did not think of themselves as belonging to classes as we do; rather, they were born into a fixed order of nature that allowed for very little mobility or change in one's status. But in the later Middle Ages, as the writings of Chaucer make clear, class-consciousness was highly developed and social mobility was much more easily realized. Conditions of wealth and power brought people together, and those in power understandably defined their positions against those who were not. The higher one stood in the hierarchy, of course, the more likely one was to be able to write about and pronounce on social organization. "Authority over land and labor"--labor being a term you should define--reinforced by law and tradition, was crucial to the establishment and maintenance of the class system, the MDA observes, more important than our idea of capital. Such authority was vested in landowners and in the church.
Rather than speak of three classes--the upper, the middle, and the lower--we should try to think of a continuum of power, from near-absolute to nearly nonexistent, with the church and the nobility occupying positions of power and the peasantry in a position of near powerlessness. We should view these extremes in direct relation (not isolated as classes seem to be today). We can think of society as organized into many groups within which personal status was defined: skilled professions were one kind of status group; religious professions were another; those owning land one group; those working the land another. These groups are called "function groups," and out of them, between 1000 and 1300, the broad outlines of modern class structure emerged. A distinct group of nobility shared power and influence with the Church; a diverse but powerful urban group stood not far behind; a broad group of the powerless and poor followed.
Much of the medieval evidence about social division and class standing suggests that such divisions were innate in God's plan for the universe. No less powerful is the modern tendency to accept the organization of society into certain classes as inevitable or to take such organization for granted. Our attempts to read the texts of SEAFARER in terms of social division and class standing will focus on how idea of class are economically produced and rationalized by theology, art, and literature.
The SEAFARER texts demonstrate broad social divisions subdivided into many "function groups" of the sort we discussed in Section 1 of this module. Some peasants are free, others are not and are bound to the land (see Whitelock, Ch. 5); some of the nobility have greater holdings than others; the religious are themselves organized into many categories with varying duties and powers, and consisting of representatives of many levels of secular organization.
Duby has stressed but not explained the curious prominence of the three-part model in early English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) records (Duby,Three Orders. 99, 102-5, 108). In his translation of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, King Alfred (d. 899) interpolated a reference to the three estates into his Latin source. Alfred casts this text, originally a dialogue between Boethius (a prisoner) and Lady Philosophy, as a dialogue between Reason (Old English "Mod") and Boethius's stand-in speaker, Alfred's persona. "Mod" lists the materials that a king needs in order to rule: "a well-peopled land, men or prayer, men of war, and men of work," and, in addition, lands to dwell in, gifts, weapons, ale, meat, clothing, and other material things for these three classes. This appears to be the first use of the tripartite model in Western Europe. See LINK05 for an assignment on this topic.
Another important writer, the homilist Ælfric, who lived a century after Alfred, used the tripartite motif several times. In one homily he writes about the "oratores, laboratores, bellatores" (those who pray, work, and fight) as a necessary social construction. "The worldly soldiers ought not compel the servants of God to the worldly battle, away from the spiritual struggle," he warns, saying that it is better for those who pray to overcome invisible rather than visible enemies, and that great harm will follow if men of God leave the Lord's service. (Skeat, Lives of Saints, 2:120-22). These are the only texts, besides Ælfric's Colloquy, which is discussed below, that name the three estates in Old English. Other references to rank in our sources are not so explicit.
Class analysis is a discipline that owes a great deal to the work of Karl Marx (1818-83), who made class struggle and class standing important concepts in the formal study of social organization. Marx's writings about class are based on a monumental thesis about class struggle that is offered as an explanation for all social change. In The Communist Manifesto (published in 1848 as Manifesto of the Communist Party), Marx and Engels asserted that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
This thesis has been widely repudiated, in both theory and practice. Nor is it likely that another of Marx's contributions, his hope for a classless society, will be realized any time soon. One of the failures of Marx's view of class is the expectation that working classes could be radicalized, although it is more often the case that such groups "tend to be conservative, if not reactionary, in their political views" (NCE 312). Adventurousness in political ideas requires economic security, and the desire for economic security seems to lead to upward mobility. Thus the stable class boundaries needed for the concerted movement of one class against another seldom materialize, with the result that class-based political action is rare. Tensions between classes emerge in economic depressions and recessions.
But Marx's contribution to political thought far outstrip the value of his arguments about the importance of class conflict. Marx and Engels knew that their idea of class was heavily dependent on the social structures of the industrial world. In the Manifesto they also observe that "in the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, manifold gradation of social rank," quite different from the orders of the modern world. Relating the medieval and the modern in their minds were such features as "the direct relation between the owners of the conditions of production and the direct producers," or, in other words, the land-owning aristocracy and those who worked the land and whose labor in other forms produced goods from raw materials. (This summary is drawn in partly from Bottimore, 75.)
Class analysis is currently a very important force in academic writing, partly because of the impact of feminist scholarship on the revision of the historical narratives used to construct national identity. One important issue raised by revisionary scholarship is the origins of scholarly disciplines themselves. Gerald Graff, referring to a theory of "social control," writes that literary studies were, in the last century, seen "explicitly and openly as a means of reinstating cultural uniformity and thus controlling those unruly democratic elements" that had begun to enter higher education. We know from many quarters today that issues of class and rank are considered very important to the business of education at many levels. (LINK02 takes up some of Graff's points.)
One issue that is easily overlooked is the intersection between rank or class distinction and those of gender. This is a particularly important point since, many feminists argue, the organization of class structures are patriarchal. For example, a feudal lord occupies a paternalistic role in relation to a subordinate, just as slaver owners took paternalistic attitudes towards slaves. Such attitudes encouraged two views--first, that slaves (or the poor) could not take care of themselves because they were like or simple; and second, that these exploitative relationships were as natural as kinship relations between parents and children.
These patriarchal attitudes in class and race relations have their counterpart in gender relations as well. Just as workers were subordinated to those who owned the means of production, working women were subordinated to working men. Thus the oppression of men in the working classes was intensified for the women who were oppressed by the men as well as by the owners. In our discussions of rank and social relations, therefore, it is important to remember that within the systems that oppressed workers there was another, that cut across class boundaries.
The effects of this social division in the historical record are important: women are underrepresented in discussions of the medieval economy. The basic unit of production was the household, and the "labour force," Rodney Hilton writes in an article on women traders in the Middle Ages, was based on the unit of the family. Thus the social domination of the family by the male automatically created economic and legal domination in its wake. In matters of trade and commerce, which negotiate class relations, women were therefore very constrained. They were "socially and politically subordinated," Hilton says, and the social order was "legitimated" by what Hilton calls "a hierarchy of celibate (male) priests" (205). The apparatus of writing--court records as well as fiction--was in the hands of men; women could bring suits but were rarely jurors, Hilton notes. Thus just as we see working classes divided against themselves in a system that allowed even poor workers to oppress those who had less than they (e.g., in the discussion of shepherds in the SEAFARER Labor module), we see that systems of rank also disadvantaged women and favored men, creating another intra-class rivalry. (LINK03)
The DMA tells us that when "early medieval men thought of the social order, they thought of families and their place in them, not of classes," and that the family decided one's place in the social order (411). To Carolingian nobles, this source adds, "family" meant "a loosely organized, more or less horizontal group of paternal and material kin," often living and working together. This horizontal concept changed in later periods to a vertical one, however, as lines of descent became important as ways to mark property rights. One emerging sign of this vertical pattern is the surname (or last name). "Nobles thus developed a concept of family that separated them from peasants," and family names marked this difference. Even into the late Middle Ages many peasants did not have last names (see DMA 412-12). Today calling someone by a first name is still, in some situations--e.g., doctor and patient--a sign of superior power.
It has long been traditional to use the tradition of "the three estates" as a way to represent the organization of medieval society. Both Jacques LeGoff and Georges Duby have discussed the tradition of the "three estates": oratores, bellatores, laboratores: those who pray, these who fight, and those who work. This model is also called the "trifunctional" model, a term which indicates its three-part structure and the interdependence of the model's three parts. It is usual to concentrate on the activities of the first two estates, the Church and the aristocracy. The reason is a stunning paradox created in part by the nature of the evidence that survives. As Duby explains, "In the history of the world no civilization appeared to be more completely rural than that of the Middle Ages;" peasants were the largest element of the population. But, as Duby notes, "the medieval peasant had no history." While few sources record life in the countryside, those documenting life in the court and ecclesiastical life grew to enormous proportions.
LeGoff points out that the first two categories were united "in regarding the inferior order of workers, laboratores, with the utmost contempt. He writes: "Labor was thus discredited by association with the baseness of the class that monopolized toil." [Note: "monopolized toil" is an ironic expression.] The Church explained the serf's lowly condition as that of society's scapegoat, invoking man's servitude to sin. Labor's disgrace was the result of original sin. . . . "(110). (See our discussion of the relation of labor to sin in the first part of the Labor module narrative.)
Duby writes that the growth of rural economy in the eleventh century created an awareness of "the part that production played in the social organism, of the role of that surplus product of peasant labor that fed specialists in both kinds of combat, spiritual and temporal, a surplus consumed by the soldiers of both armies." Thus the existence of the poor, who were merely "there" in previous eras, came to be seen as a source of profit. The "poor" came to be thought of instead as "villagers" or "peasants" and seen as part of a system of production. Previously the obligation to feed masters had fallen outside the "people" of a culture onto its slaves. "After the year 1000," Duby writes, ". . . this burden came to be borne by all `rustics.' Toil was the common fate of all men who were neither warriors nor priests" (Three Orders 159). Duby cites evidence that "labor and its derivatives referred much less to the fecundity of manual work than to its pain, its humiliating pain": for the word dolor (sorrow) is substituted for labor (work) (160).
Duby presses his point about the fundamental inequity resulting from this association of work with spiritual inferiority and the effectiveness with which the nobility learned to exploit the connection. The poor stood at the lowest social level, closer to beasts than to angels. This impurity was not just physical, however, but also spiritual: it indicated that they were not only most in need of salvation, but that salvation would be most difficult for them and that they must strive harder for it, pay more for it, than other social ranks. Duby writes:
Bent low to the ground, the servile were compelled to toil over the earth, to cook, to wash, to wrest food from the soil and prepare it for the table, whereas the "nobles," whose genus shared the blood of kings, whereby they enjoyed the benefits of a higher degree of illumination, might accede to sanctity, and had both the duty to protect the poor and the right to exploit them. Class division and seigniorial oppression were thus justified by a natural inequality residing in impurity. Nevertheless, the deep-seated impurity of the laborers, who sweated and stank and coupled like animals, might be redeemed through physical pain, just as the warrior, who made love less crudely and who killed not hogs but men, might, by making a gift of his life to the good cause, redeem the less repugnant faults with which his soul was tainted. (Three Orders 166)
The pain in which the poor lived out their lowly lives was a sign of their sinfulness; and because they were sinful they had to suffer in order to be redeemed. The argument, however circular it was, offered a powerful rationale for ignoring the welfare of those at the bottom of the social scale.
Another and quite opposite attitude towards the poor coexisted with this one. Derek Pearsall has discussed the "idealization" of poverty in the Middle Ages. If we consider Duby's and LeGoff's arguments, we must wonder how such idealization could have come about. Pearsall also points to a fundamental problem in distinguishing between poverty and the poor; poverty, meaning "the lowest level of subsistence commensurate with comfort," is different from survival. The philosophical (and indeed religious) ideal of poverty, so long as it includes comfort, is thus very different from poverty as experienced by men and women in the Middle Ages; it was not their comfort but rather their survival that was at stake (Pearsall 168).
The sources are partly responsible for the bias against those at the bottom of the social scale, the workers, but the scholars using them have perpetuated this imbalance. Traditional disciplinary versions of the Middle Ages re-created, over time, homologous systems of warfare, chivalry, aristocratic entertainment, shared (communally accepted) spiritual values, and consumption without production. The reigning syntheses favor aristocratic values and indeed have created the impression that chivalry itself was the Middle Ages, a time of lords, ladies, tournaments, and religious piety. The life of the medieval peasant, by comparison, is, if not taken for granted and ignored, then simply appropriated. Here, for example, is the conclusion to Rosalind Hill's essay, The Labourers in the Field.
As you read Bede, you read the story of the saints and heroes of the church, but always in the background you will see the decent, godfearing layman, travelling, fighting, working in his fields, building his house; you will meet him in prosperity and in sickness, in birth and in death. Limited in imagination and often violent in action, he was the instrument by which, in the last resort, the teaching of the church was transmitted. . . . Of all the labourers in the field, he is the least remembered; but without him the work of the missionaries would have been in vain. (15)
This paragraph condenses several typical attitudes. First, the layman is devout, neither saint nor hero (that is, belonging to neither of the first two estates) but devout nonetheless. The layman is also patronized as lacking intellectual ability and excelling in physical strength, more animal than human. What is important is that his devotion made possible the continuity of the Gospel: what his labor supports (gender identity is taken for granted here too, of course) is the Church's teaching, which is its production, not its consumption. The paragraph even echoes marriage vows ("in prosperity and in sickness, in birth and in death"--cf., "in sickness and in health, until death do us part"), as if to stress the unified nature of the society being described. Hill at least mentions the existence of peasants. Too often medieval scholarship, literary in particular, ignores them or uses them in ways similar to those of some medieval authors.
Scholars of Middle English are familiar with the power of Chaucer's Knight's Tale to create aristocratic views of Chaucer's time. But this text, like others, actually represents multiple cultural forms--whether they draw our attention to them or not--and sometimes even asserts them against each other. In this tale Arcite, who wished to return to Emily, his loved one in Athens, "chaunged his array, / And cladde hym as a povre laborer." It was lucky for Arcite--who, even when he is dressed as a poor man has a squire with him--that his nobility of character survived the illusion he perpetrated; he received the income to which he was accustomed (TheKnight's Tale 1408-45). Exiled from love, he reappeared as a laborer, only to complete the correlation of happiness with social standing by reclaiming love in triumph, however brief, as the knight he really was, and without having to bear for long the inconveniences associated with the life of manual labor he feigns. (LINK04)
Paul Strohm reminds us that this model was an ideological commonplace long before Chaucer's time, and that the gaps and lines dividing these three estates had long since been filled in with a plethora of new classes such as the class of professional managers Chaucer belonged to. Strohm emphasizes that the model's "ideological work is accomplished in part through `illusion': its omission of classes outside the model the three estates, its relative neglect of social interdependence, its suggestion that the system it describes exists beyond time and change." But, as a cultural myth "beyond time and change," the model retains its power to identify and enforce categories of difference. Duby shows that the three-part model, never a cultural constant, changed both in both form and significance in phase after phase of struggle between monarchial and monastic power; he thus demonstrates the power of the model clear as a force in space and time.
We want to stress that, despite our emphasis on the three-part model, there are other ways to generalize about the social organization of the medieval period. Some include the association of peasants with the countryside and agriculture, and the association of merchant and noble classes with urban centers--not cities at first, but large monastic organizations that served as units comparable to cities as a focus for trade and navigation (see The Monastery in SEAFARER). The usual pattern situates nobles at the top and peasants at the bottom, groups that accounted for up to 90% of medieval people (DMA 416). But two other groups, the clergy and merchant-citizens, figured into this pattern; thus the neat three-part model does not seem to hold, even for the early period, when at least four divisions are clear. (Whitelock's Beginnings of English Society contains a good section on the complex subdivisions of classes, Chapter 5.)
Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon
We might think here of the heroic world of Beowulf, in which domestic labor certainly is performed even though the poem does not acknowledge that kind of production. Vida Dutton Scudder, an Anglo-Saxonist writing in 1898, described that world by saying that, "In battle, the common people hardly exist, even to be slain; in revel the queen herself is cup bearer, for no vulgar hand may minister to the princely warriors." (LINK06)
Another famous Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, which commemorates a fight between the English and Vikings in 991 near Maldon, in Essex, identifies some of the men who are about to fight as belonging to non-aristocratic classes: "Then Birhtnoth began to place his men at their stations; he rode about and advised them, taught the troops how they should stand and hold the place and bad them grasp their shields aright, firm in their hands, and have no fear. " (Norton Anthology 1:82) These fighters are identified as "no more than a home guard: inexperienced farmers and laborers conscripted for the local defense" (Norton 1:81). (LINK07)
Among the features that help us recognize the functions of power groups in the SEAFARER texts are family and land ownership. There are numerous examples in Bede's History, as we have seen. Indeed, the story of the conversion of the English as Bede tells it is largely an aristocratic affair, for it is the story of the conversion of a succession of royal houses (and sometimes there reconversion after a lapse). It has been suggested by Patrick Wormald that this focus on the aristocracy creates an important link between Bede and such poems as Beowulf, for that text, like Bede's narrative, is the story of heroic deeds. In Bede's case it is one holy hero after another: Edwin, Cuthbert, and others.
The Lives of Ceolfrith and Leofgyth
We know that both Ceolfrith and Leofgyth came from noble families whose wealth and traditions are discussed in the texts. The monastery, we know (see Monastic Life in SEAFARER), had hierarchies of its own. Many monastic customs, especially those concerning daily religious devotion, were adopted by those living outside the monastery. Nobility retired to monasteries to pray, and this association of the most powerful levels of society with the monks' traditions certainly attached prestige to those practices and ensured that they would be adopted by others living at less influential social level. It is important to remember that it was not easy for the poor to join monasteries, although it was, in the Anglo-Saxon period, one of the monastery's duties to look after the poor. Ceolfrith and Leofgyth have aristocratic backgrounds, and they function as leaders and as examples to others. Ceolfrith's example of generosity to the poor is his own father, who as part of the king's retinue was always concerned about the welfare of those less fortunate (Ch. 34). Ceolfrith is likened to a good worldly ruler, in the manner of his father (34), who served in the king's "personal retinue" and who delighted in serving the poor. We hear a familiar story about feeding the poor at a banquet (34); Ceolfrith's father and mother invite the king, but war prevents him from coming. Thus they invite all the sick and needy (who were not, however, their first choices), and wait on their poorest guests.
References to rank in the Life of Leofgyth (or Leoba) resemble those in Ceolfrith's life. The monasteries described at the opening "were of old founded by kings" and "surrounded with high and stout walls, and supplied with a sufficiency of income by a reasonable provision; one a monastery of clerics, and the other of women" (2). The abbess of the women's monastery is known as Tette, who is "noble certainly by the dignity of secular family--she was, in fact the king's sister but much more noble by the goodness" (3), a familiar equation of distinguished birth and moral righteousness. In addition, Leofgyth's parents (Dynna and Æbbe) are nobility. The nurse who predicts that, although sterile, they will have a child is "rewarded" "with the gift of liberty, because she had predicted there such future joys. . ." (6). In addition, on the continent, we see additional links between the monastery and the nobility when Boniface, Leofgyth's famous cousin, builds a monastery at Fulda with the support of Carloman, king of Austrasia (17).
Rank in The Voyages
The accounts of Ohthere and Wulfstan give us insights into a different kind of class system, one in which the Church plays no part. We know that Ohthere trades in ivory (walrus tusks) and that he brought some to King Alfred as a form of tribute (4). It is interesting to see that the narrator of the voyage (someone in Alfred's court) recognizes that Ohthere is "a very rich man" but has to add that he is rich "in those possessions which their riches consist of, that is in wild deer." The Anglo-Saxon writer continues: "He was among the chief men in that country, but he had not more than twenty cattle, twenty sheep and twenty pigs, and the little that he ploughed he ploughed with horses" (5). These latter are among the material goods used to differentiate rank by wealth in England at this time, but not in non-agricultural territories such as those from which Ohthere.
Just as Ohthere pays tribute to Alfred with ivory,the people known as the Finnas pay to Ohthere's people. In Estland, we find, wealth and rank determine practices regarding burial.
For a start on discussing the attitudes towards class in the Colloquy see LINK08.
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