Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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It was precisely the strength of the English mediaeval monarchy that permitted its ambitious territorial adventures on the continent, at the expense of France. The Hundred Years’ War, during which successive English kings and their aristocracy attempted to conquer and hold down huge areas of France, across a hazardous maritime barrier, represented a unique military undertaking in the Middle Ages: aggressive sign of the organizational superiority of the insular State. Yet the strongest mediaeval monarchy in the West eventually produced the weakest and shortest Absolutism. While France became the home ground of the most formidable Absolutist State in Western Europe, England experienced a peculiarly contracted variant of Absolutist rule, in every sense. The transition from the mediaeval to the early modern epochs thus corresponded in English history – despite all local legends of unbroken ‘continuity’ – to a deep and radical reversal of many of the most characteristic traits of prior feudal development. Naturally, certain mediaeval patterns of great importance were also preserved and inherited: it was precisely the contradictory fusion of traditional and novel forces that defined the particular political rupture that occurred in the island during the Renaissance.
The early administrative centralization of Norman feudalism, dictated both by the original military conquest and the modest size of the country, had generated – as we have seen – an unusually small and regionally unified noble class, without semi-independent territorial potentates comparable to those of the Continent. Towns, following Anglo-Saxon traditions, were part of the royal demesne from the outset, and hence enjoyed commercial privileges without the political autonomy of continental communes: they were never numerous or strong enough in the mediaeval epoch to challenge this subordinate status.1 Nor did ecclesiastical lords ever gain large, consolidated seigneurial enclaves. The mediaeval monarchy in England was thus spared the respective dangers to unitary government that confronted feudal rulers in France, Italy or Germany. The result was a concurrent centralization, both of royal power, and of noble representation, within the total mediaeval polity. These two processes were, in fact, not opposites but complements. Within the parcellized system of feudal sovereignty, extra-suzerain monarchical power could in general only be sustained by the assent of exceptional vassal assemblies, capable of voting extraordinary economic and political support, outside the mediatized hierarchy of personal dependences. Mediaeval Estates can therefore virtually never, as pointed out earlier, be directly counter-posed to monarchical authority: they were often the precise precondition of it. In England, Angevin royal authority and administration had no exact equivalent anywhere in 12th century Europe. But the personal power of the monarch was soon by the same token followed by precocious collective institutions of the feudal ruling class, of a uniquely unitary character – Parliaments. The existence of such mediaeval parliaments in England from the 13th century onwards was, of course, in no way a national peculiarity. What was distinctive about them was rather that they were both ‘singleton’ and ‘conglomerate’ institutions.2 In other words, there was only one such assembly, which coincided with the boundaries of the country itself, not a number for different provinces; and within the assembly, there was no three-fold division of nobles, clergy and burghers such as generally prevailed on the Continent. From the time of Edward III onwards, knights and towns were regularly represented alongside barons and bishops in the English Parliament. The two-chamber system of Lords and Commons was a subsequent development, which did not divide Parliament itself along Estate lines, but basically marked an intra-class distinction within the nobility. A centralized monarchy had produced a unified assembly.
Two further consequences followed from the early centralization of the English feudal polity. The unitary Parliaments which met in London did not achieve the degree of meticulous fiscal control nor the rights of regular convocation which later characterized some of the continental Estates systems. But they did secure a traditional negative limitation of royal legislative power, which was to become of great importance in the epoch of Absolutism: it became accepted, after Edward I, that no monarch could decree new statutes without the consent of Parliament.3 Viewed structurally, this veto corresponded closely to the objective exigencies of noble class power. In effect, since centralized royal administration was from the start geographically and technically easier in England than elsewhere, there was proportionately less need for it to be equipped with any innovatory decretal authority, which could not be justified by inherent dangers of regional separatism or ducal anarchy. Thus while the real executive powers of English mediaeval kings were usually much greater than those of French monarchs, for that very reason, they never won the relative legislative autonomy eventually enjoyed by the latter. A second comparable feature of English feudalism was the unusual fusion between monarchy and nobility at the local judicial and administrative level. Whereas on the continent, the court system was typically divided between segregated royal and seigneurial jurisdictions, in England the survival of pre-feudal folk courts had provided a kind of common terrain on which a blend of the two could be achieved. For the sheriffs who presided over the shire-courts were non-hereditary royal appointees; yet they were selected from the local gentry, not from a central bureaucracy; while the courts themselves retained vestiges of their original character as popular juridical assemblies in which the free men of the rural community appeared before their equals. The result was to block the development either of a comprehensive bailli system of professionalized royal justice or of an extensive baronial haute justice; instead, an unpaid aristocratic self-administration emerged in the counties, which was later to evolve into the Justices of the Peace of the early modern epoch. In the mediaeval period itself, of course, the equipoise of the shire courts still coexisted with manorial courts and some seigneurial franchises of an orthodox feudal type, such as were to be found all over the Continent.
At the same time, the English nobility of the Middle Ages was fully as militarized and predatory a class as any in Europe: indeed it distinguished itself among its counterparts by the scope and constancy of its external aggression. No other feudal aristocracy of the later mediaeval epoch ranged so far and freely, as a whole order, from its territorial base. The repeated ravages of France during the Hundred Years War were the most spectacular feats of this militarism: but Scotland and Flanders, the Rhineland and Navarre, Portugal and Castile, were also traversed by armed expeditions from England in the 14th century. English knights fought abroad from the Forth to the Ebro in this age. The military organization of these expeditions reflected the local development of a monetarized ‘bastard’ feudalism. The last feudal array proper, summoned on the basis of land tenure, was called out in 1385, for Richard II’s attack on Scotland. The Hundred Years’ War was essentially fought by indentured companies, raised on the basis of cash contracts by major lords for the monarchy, and owing obedience to their own captains; shire levies and foreign mercenaries provided supplementary forces. No permanent or professional army was involved, and the scale of the expeditions was numerically modest: troops dispatched to France never numbered much more than 10,000. The nobles who led the successive forays into Valois territory remained basically freebooting in outlook. Private plunder, ransom and land were the objects of their ambition; and the most successful captains enriched themselves massively from the wars, in which English forces again and again outfought much larger French armies mustered to expel them. The strategic superiority of the English aggressors throughout most of the long conflict did not lie, as a retrospective illusion might suggest, in control of sea-power. For mediaeval fleets in Northern seas were little more than improvised troop-transports; mostly composed of temporarily empressed merchant bottoms, they were incapable of patrolling the ocean regularly. Fighting ships proper were still largely confined to the Mediterranean, where the oar-driven galley was the weapon of real maritime warfare. Running battles at sea were consequently unknown in Atlantic waters in this epoch: naval engagements typically occurred in shallow bays or estuaries (Sluys or La Rochelle), where contending ships could lock together for hand-to-hand combat between the soldiers aboard them. No strategic ‘command of the sea’ was possible in this epoch. The coasts on either side of the Channel thus lay equally undefended against seaborne landings. In 1386, France assembled the largest army and fleet of the entire war for a full-scale invasion of England: defence plans for the island did not even contemplate arresting this force at sea, but relied on keeping the English fleet out of harm’s way in the Thames and luring the enemy to conclusions inland.4 In the event this invasion was cancelled; but the vulnerability of England to maritime attack was amply demonstrated during the war, in which destructive naval raids played a role equivalent to military chevauchées