Medieval Society

Nobility

Two elements went into defining noble status: ceremonial elements and practical elements. Among the former were the titles, clothes, and formalities of address and respect that were customary rather than legal. The practical elements included the privilege of counsel, justice, and war that made of noble power something real and pragmatic. There were also a number of economic privileges, including coinage, markets and tolls, and control over natural resources. I'll consider each of these areas.

Counsel

The nobles in any duchy or other principality (including kingdoms) had the privilege of giving advice and counsel to their overlord. This may not seem very important, but it was a major means by which the nobles participated in decisions at court. Not all members of the nobility exercised the privilege all the time, and not all who wished to exercise it were able to do so every time, but it was there in theory from the early Middle Ages onward. It survives to this day, in the form of the idea of representation, the idea that decisions that affect citizens must take into account the desires of those citizens.

The privilege itself can be stated simply: it was the right of the nobility to be consulted by their overlord in matters of general importance. Such matters normally encompassed the decision to launch a war, to levy a tax or request a donative, to leave on crusade, to designate an heir when the succession wasn't direct, even to get advice on choice of a wife. The specifics were never spelled out clearly; they were traditional, customary, and open to adjustment and interpretation. A strong king might consult his barons only rarely, though failure to do so could also be one justification for a baronial revolt. A weak king might consult his barons so often that they would up running the kingdom.

In addition to consulting on great matters, the nobility had the right to sit in judgment on one another. When a baron was accused of some great crime, the case wasn't necessarily judged by the lord, but rather a group of nobles of roughly the same rank would form a jury of peers. Yes, that's where the phrase comes from; "peers" didn't mean just anyone, as it does today, but rather meant that a noble had the right not to be judged by his inferiors.

Justice

Besides being able to sit in judgment on one another, nobles had the right to administer justice within their own estates. High justice–matters of treason or murder or heresy–were reserved to the king, though weak monarchs sometimes granted away even this. Low justice was the province of the nobles.

Low justice included cases of assault, arson, theft, fraud (e.g., the miller cheating his customers), and even slander and gossip. If the crime were against a nobleman or a royal official, then the case went to a greater court, but all the petty crimes that happened within the manor and against the manor, these were judged by the lord of the manor. These manorial courts were one of the chief points of contact between peasants and noble authority, and were often deeply resented by the common folk. This was sometimes aggravated because the lord himself judged very few cases, instead delegating this task to a minor official who was paid out of the proceeds of fines levied.

Low justice gave a tremendous amount of power to the nobility, even if they held only one small manor. It is also an area where royal authority intruded over the centuries, if rather unevenly. In England, for example, royal justices began in the twelfth century making regular rounds through the countryside, hearing complaints and rending judgments in anything touching crown interests. These circuit courts were a direct challenge to local nobles, who subverted them at every opportunity. When you read about the "expansion of royal power" you should think of aspects such as this one, for it was at this very local, very practical level that the expansion took place.

War

We tend to think of knights when we think of nobles in the Middle Ages, and this in turn makes us think of war, the knights' primary business and justification. While technically nobles could not launch a war without the consent of their overlord, in practice a great many nobles could and did do exactly that. The right to resort to arms in order to redress a wrong (which is, after all, how all wars get justified) was another important privilege held by the nobility. As with other privileges, it was granted implicitly rather than explicitly.

The privilege brought in its train other privileges: to raise his own army and to equip it, to negotiate a truce or treaty, to make alliances and to break them, and to levy taxes to finance all this. It was quite a long time before kings tried to curb this behavior. They tried to quell it when the baronial armies were directed against the crown, naturally, but it wasn't until the fifteenth century that we see kings really making a serious, sustained effort to end this privilege. The effort took a long time, even in England and France where monarchy was strongest.

In England, for example, the effort to control private war was focused on "livery and maintenance." The word "livery" refers to the practice of the followers of a particular lord wearing a badge or hat or scarf—some symbol or sign that they were that lord's men. They might come from the lord's own estates, but more often they were hirelings, what we would call mercenaries today. They were paid–the word for this was "maintenance"–by the lord on some regular basis. This could engender a cycle of violence by which a lord found he had to be aggressive in order to gain estates with which to pay his men, which in turn required him to hire more men. It also led many lords to act as mercenary captains, seeking out wars abroad in order to win wealth.

The system could work to a king's advantage in that he could call upon a lord and know that he would get well-armed professional soldiers. It could work to his disadvantage, however, if he and the baron were in conflict with one another; he might wind up facing those well-armed professional soldiers across the field of battle. This system contributed to the chronic chaos of the Hundred Years' War in France and the Wars of the Roses in England.

Kings eventually squashed these private armies and along with them the right of nobles to wage private wars. The emphasis must be on "eventually" though, for private armies could still be found in the seventeenth century and they persisted even longer in Italy and Germany. We can also see survivals in the practice of dueling: the same principle of private redress, but restricted to individuals.

Economic Privilege

Land was a privilege of sorts, in that when a noble was granted an estate, land was part of the package. Here I will talk about other kinds of economic privileges, though; specifically, coinage, markets, tolls, and natural resources.

Coinage

Only the emperor could issue coinage; that's the tradition from ancient Rome. This right devolved to the successor kingdoms after there were no more emperors in the West. The kings in turn, over the next few centuries, granted the right to various nobles in exchange for payment or as a reward for service. In theory, the grant could be revoked by the king. In practice, the right became hereditary wherever there was a run of weak rulers.

The right to mint coins is potentially powerful, though few rulers had both sufficient understanding and sufficient information to exploit it effectively. An example of where it was exploited can be seen in Burgundy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The right generally included rights over mines, for the mints needed a supply of silver (mostly) and gold (rarely) and copper. A good deal of metal came in the form of old coins called back and melted down. In their turn, the nobles contracted with specialists: miners and their associated merchants, plus minters. The nobleman typically held the mint itself and financed the equipment and paid the salaries of those who worked there.

Natural Resources

Again inherited from Roman traditions, all natural resources in theory belonged to the crown. This included most especially forests and mines. And again, these rights were generally granted away up to the twelfth century and were gradually reclaimed in the later Middle Ages and early modern period.

I have already mentioned the rights over mines. This includes not only the mining of precious metals, but also all other metals and things like alum and even oil. By 1400 or so, rights over mining had devolved and decentralized to the point where kings directly controlled almost none, and even the nobility had granted long-term leases to merchants and even to local peasant associations. A tactic used by cash-strapped nobles in the late Middle Ages was to grant a long-term lease in exchange for an immediate cash payment, in order to finance a war or a marriage or simply to pay off some other debt. Merchants loved this arrangement because they would take over the mine and increase its productivity, pocketing the profit.

Forests were another major natural resource. To most nobles, the forest represented nothing more economically significant than a place to go hunting, but the forest did play other roles. It was a source of wood for burning and of charcoal for furnaces. This became of major importance in areas where iron and other smelting operations were present. The big oak forests of western Europe were a place for village pigs, and the noble received income from the village for this right.

Rivers and lakes were another area where the nobles had the right of exploitation. Others had to request and pay for the privilege of fishing in the waters, or to erect a dam. One very important use of rivers and streams was to power mills. On many estates, the only mills permitted were those run by the noble lord, who leased them out as a grain mill or saw mill or whatever.

In short, while agriculture provided the main source of income, you should not forget that the land provided multiple sources for wealth, and that the nobility had direct control over these. In general it is fair to say that they did not in fact direct these operations; rather, they leased them out to specialists in exchange for income. In the early modern period you might hear about a new style of noble (or gentry) who tried to reform their estates and operate them on a more efficient basis. In part this consisted of the lord becoming actively involved in the exploitation of the natural resources.

Markets and Tolls

The last area I'll describe is the right of the nobles to establish markets and to impose tolls. In parts of Europe this right was the source of a great deal of wealth: for example, the counts of Champagne granted the right to hold market fairs (for our purposes here, a market and a fair mean the same thing) that became so successful that the counts in the twelfth century were among the richest nobles in France.

The granting of a market was a sort of no-lose proposition, at least on the face of it, for it cost the noble next to nothing. He merely gave to a town the right to hold a market at a particular time and for a particular duration. He typically extended his protection to the merchants as they travelled to and from the fair, allowed the merchants to hold their own courts for settling disputes, and sometimes might provide soldiers to help keep the peace. In return, he might rent out the stalls to the merchants, or receive a cut of each sale, or simply receive a lump sum payment for each market session.

A fair could be granted but that didn't mean it would be successful. By the fourteenth century, nobles were granting markets all over the place and many of them simply failed. Tolls, however, were more widely successful (though these could fail, too).

At its simplest, the lord would simply block a road. A man would be posted there and you paid him to let you pass. If you didn't pay, there was typically a castle nearby (within eyesight) and some armed men would swoop down on you and extract payment in cash or kind. More ambitious tolls could be found along rivers, where the boats not only had to pay but might also be forced to transship their goods from one boat to another, with the noble getting profit not only for the toll but also for the shipping.

The Rhine River became notorious for its heavy tolls. A cargo would go a few miles in one boat, get unloaded and weighed and a toll paid, then put into another boat which itself would proceed only a few miles more. At its worst there were over two hundred tolls down the length of the river. But overland roads could be as bad. At least there were no bandits on the river. On the roads, bandits could be anywhere and they could do far worse than levy a toll. As you might suspect, there was a thin line between a noble enforcing a legitimate toll and a noble simply robbing any merchant who travelled by. Indeed, the problem became so widespread in late medieval Germany that it gave rise to a term: robber baron.

I said earlier that tolls could fail. At least on overland roads, if the situation got too onerous or dangerous (for example, during periods of war), merchants might resort to taking another route. We have many cases where roads shifted. This left the toll without an income. In some areas (late medieval Switzerland is one example, and Savoy is another), the lords took steps to restore peace at least in part so they could bring back the merchant traffic and the associated profit from tolls.

Summary

This has turned out to be a long page, but I've still only touched the surface. The main point to remember is that the privileges of the nobility included a number of very specific, very practical rights that gave them direct control over men and money. They ruled not out of some theory, or because of respect or even fear, but because they held rights that let them wage war against their enemies, dispense justice within their estates, influence events at the regional or national level, and collect income to finance these activities. One of the significant developments of the late Middle Ages and especially the early modern era is a long-term economic crisis in that the expenses of the nobility went up faster than did their ability to increase income. This was due in part because their privileges were (and were understood to be) fixed and inflexible. The other significant development is that the nobility saw their privileges circumscribed or even taken away, and they became ever more dependent upon kings and events at the royal court. Or else they became rural gentry, independent but incapable of making an impact outside their own estates.