INTRODUCTION

Working definition:
A political body subject to a government and to common laws.

1. THE POWER OF THE MEDIEVAL STATE

1.1 Administrative capacity
• agents of the state
• archives and capital cities
• maps

1.2 Financial resources

Income
• revenues from lands
• court fines
• bullion manipulation
• taxation: customs, property

Negotiating taxation
• the state requires dialogue with dominant classes through
representative assemblies
• England, tax was negotiated in Parliament v. France local negotiations usually
why do the ruling classes agree to pay tax?
• royal propaganda
• opportunity to petition for legislation

1.3 Public order

How far could medieval states ensure peace and order?
• lack of monopoly on coercive force
• private armies, lack of police force
• chivalry
• Peace of God and King's Peace

Solutions?
• roving legal commissions
• insert legal officers to oversee public order: Bailli and Sénéchaussée; sheriffs?
• rely on local networks of power >> England, justices of the Peace [JPs]

2.  LIMITATIONS UPON THE MEDIEVAL STATE

2.1 Nobility and elite groups
• development of state depends on dominant classes
how persuade?
• institutionalized dialogue
• persuasion through political theory, ceremonies etc.
BUT accept it because of benefits:

2.2 Church

International organization that cuts across the power of the secular state
• appointments and provisions
• Church taxation
• law courts
• war propaganda / support:

2.3 Kingship itself: private versus public

• king as focus for state: all administration developing from his personal control
• continuity of the state?

3   THE NATION-STATE

3.1 Loyalty to the state

• Why do we feel loyalty to the state? Is it a natural state?
• How far were there genuine commitment to the medieval state? ie patriotism, national feeling?
• How far did medieval states correspond to national unit?
        England and France; Burgundy; Poland-Lithuania; Spain; Habsburg Empire

3.2 FORCES OPPOSING NATIONAL FEELING

Localism
• Regional feeling
• When would they transcend their local identity? service in army, university, government service and royal court, representative institutions

Universalism
• Latin and international Church
• Chivalric culture

3.3 Forces fostering national feeling

Language
• Language is the only definitive national characteristic
• Latin and different regional variations of vernaculars
• Official language:
        • French used in Burgundy
        • translation of chronicles into vernacular, eg France
        • use in administration by Lancastrians
        • vernacular Bibles

Anti-foreign feeling
• Concern about outsiders, others >> specifically foreigners
• Jews and Moors
• Foreign merchants
• Soldiers and invading armies

History
• National history
• 1135, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae
• 1185-1204, St Denis chronicles of France; translated in 1274
• Origin stories [origin myths]
        • Brutus and Trojans >> Britain
        • Francion >> France
• Heroes of the past
        • Charlemagne >> France and Empire
        • Arthur >> England but also Wales

Religion
• Identification of nation with God: Moses and chosen people
• National saints -- action of monasteries and state
        • Bohemia: assassinated duke Wenceslas (d.929) and Jan Hus
        • France: Saint Denis, first bishop of Paris, and Martin and Remi
        • England: St. George national feast from 1222; official saint under Edward III
• Expulsion of Jews and action against heretics
• Great military victories
• Religious status of kings

CONCLUSION

Power of the medieval state BUT limitations v. modern state
not authority over a defined territory
not authority over all its inhabitants
not monopoly on legitimate use of physical coercion
moral, as opposed to merely repressive, functions?
an apparatus of power whose existence remains independent of those who control it?