exiguous governmental duties characteristic of the mediaeval polity. Recourse could be had, of course, to credit from merchants and bankers in the towns, who controlled relatively large reserves of liquid capital: this was the earliest and most widespread expedient of feudal monarchs when confronted with shortage of income for the conduct of affairs of State. But borrowing only postponed the problem, since bankers normally demanded secure pledges from future royal income against their loans.
The pressing and permanent need to acquire substantial sums outside the range of their traditional revenues thus led virtually all mediaeval monarchies to summon the ‘Estates’ of their realm from time to time, in order to raise taxes. These Estates became increasingly frequent and prominent from the 13th century onwards in Western Europe, when the tasks of feudal government had become more complex and the scale of finance involved in them correspondingly demanding.2 They nowhere acquired a regular basis of recall, independent of the will of the ruler, and hence their periodicity varied enormously from country to country, and within countries. However, these institutions should not be regarded as contingent or extrinsic growths on the mediaeval body politic. On the contrary, they constituted an intermittent mechanism that was an inevitable consequence of the structure of the early feudal State as such. For precisely because the political and economic orders were fused in a chain of personal obligations and dues, there was never any legal basis for general economic levies by the monarch outside the hierarchy of mediate sovereignties. In fact, it is striking that the very idea of universal taxation – so central to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire – lapsed altogether during the Dark Ages.3 Thus no feudal king could decree imposts at will. Every ruler had to obtain the ‘consent’ of specially assembled bodies – Estates – for major taxation, under the rubric of the legal principle quod omnes tangit.4 It is significant that most of the direct general taxes which were slowly introduced into Western Europe, subject to the assent of mediaeval parliaments, had been initially pioneered in Italy, where the initial feudal synthesis was most tilted towards the Roman and urban heritage. Not only did the Church levy general taxation on the faithful for the Crusades; municipal governments – compact councils of patricians without investiture or rank stratification – had no great difficulties in imposing taxes on their own town populations, still less on a subjugated contado. The Commune of Pisa actually had property taxes. The peninsula also initiated many indirect taxes: the salt monopoly ovgabelle originated in Sicily. Soon a variegated fiscal pattern developed in the main West European countries. English princes relied mainly on custom duties because of their insular situation, French on excises and the tattle, and German on intensification of tolls. These taxes, however, were not regular grants. They normally remained occasional levies down to the end of the Middle Ages, during which few Estates ever yielded to royal rulers the right to raise permanent or general taxation without the consent of their subjects.
Naturally, the social definition of ‘subjects’ was a predictable one. The ‘estates of the realm’ customarily represented the nobility, the clergy and the urban burgesses, and were organized either in a straightforward three-curia or a somewhat distinct two-chamber (magnate/non-magnate) system.5 Such assemblies were virtually universal throughout Western Europe, with the exception of Northern Italy where the urban density and absence of feudal suzerainty naturally inhibited their emergence: the Parliament in England, fitats-Generaux in France, Landtage in Germany, Cortes in Castile or Portugal, Riksdag in Sweden, and so on. Besides their essential role as the fiscal faucets of the mediaeval State, these Estates fulfilled another critical function in the feudal polity. They were collective representations of one of the deepest principles of feudal hierarchy within the nobility, the duty of the vassal to provide not only auxilium, but consilium to his liege-lord: in other words, the right to give his solemn advice in matters of gravity affecting both parties. Such consultation did not necessarily weaken the mediaeval ruler: in foreign or domestic crises, it might well strengthen him by providing welcome political support. Outside the particular nexus of individual homage relationships, the public application of this conception was initially confined to the small number of baronial magnates who were the tenants-in-chief of the monarch, formed his entourage, and expected to be consulted by him in important affairs of State. With the growth of Estates proper in the 13th century because of fiscal exigencies, the baronial prerogative of consultation in the ardua negotia regni was gradually extended to these new assemblies, and came to form an important part of the political tradition of the noble class as a whole, which naturally everywhere dominated the Estates. The ‘ramification’ of the feudal polity in the High Middle Ages by the growth of Estates institutions from the main trunk, thus did not alter the relationship between the monarchy and nobility in any unilateral direction. These institutions were essentially summoned into existence to expand the fiscal base of the monarchy, but while fulfilling this aim, they also increased the potential collective control of the nobility over the latter. They should not therefore be regarded either as mere checks or tools of royal power: rather they reduplicated a pristine balance between the feudal suzerain and his vassals in a more complex and effective framework.
In practice, the Estates remained sporadic occasions, and the taxes levied by the monarchy relatively modest affairs. One important reason for this was that the problem of an extensive paid bureaucracy had not as yet interposed itself between the monarchy and the nobility. Royal government throughout the Middle Ages relied to a considerable extent on the services of the very large clerical bureaucracy of the Church, whose top personnel could devote themselves full-time to civil administration without a financial charge on the State, since they already received ample salaries from a separate ecclesiastical apparatus. The higher clergy who century after century provided so many of the supreme administrators of the feudal polity – from England to France to Spain – were themselves, of course, mostly recruited from the nobility, for whom access to episcopal and abbatial positions was an important social and economic privilege. The stepped feudal hierarchy of personal homage and fealty, the corporate Estates assemblies exercising their rights of voting taxes and deliberating on affairs of the realm, the informal character of an administration partly maintained by the Church, a Church often staffed at its summit by magnates – all these formed a legible and intimate political system binding the noble class to a State with which, despite and through constant conflicts with specific monarchs, it was at one.
The contrast between this pattern of the mediaeval Estates-Monarchy and that of early modern Absolutism is marked enough for historians today. It was naturally no less – far more – so for the nobles who actually lived through it. For the great, silent structural force impelling a complete reorganization of feudal class power was inevitably concealed from them. The type of historical causality that was at work in dissolving the original unity of extra-economic exploitation at the base of the whole social system, by the spread of commodity production and exchange, and recentralizing it at the summit, was not visible within their categorial universe. For many individual nobles, it meant new opportunities for fortune and fame, which were avidly grasped; for many others, it signified indignity or ruin, against which they rebelled; for most it involved a protracted and difficult process of adaptation and conversion, across succeeding generations, before harmony between class and State was precariously restored. In the course of this process, the late feudal aristocracy was obliged to abandon old traditions and acquire many new skills.6 It had to shed military exercise of private violence, social patterns of vassal loyalty, economic habits of hereditary insouciance, political rights of representative autonomy, and cultural attributes of unlettered ignorance. It had to learn the new avocations of a disciplined officer, a literate functionary, a polished courtier, and a more or less prudent estate-owner. The history of Western Absolutism is largely the story of the slow reconversion of the landed ruling class to the necessary form of its own political power, despite and against most of its previous experience and instincts.
The Renaissance epoch thus witnessed the first phase in the consolidation of Absolutism, when it was still comparatively close to an antecedent monarchical pattern. Estates persisted in France, Castile or the Netherlands up to mid-century and flourished in England. Armies were relatively small, mainly mercenary forces with only seasonal campaigning capacity. They were led in person by aristocrats who were magnates of the first water in their respective realms (Essex, Alba,
