Conflict in Medieval Europe

Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture

Warren C. Brown, Piotr Górecki, Warren C. Brown, Piotr Górecki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351949729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Conflict is defined here broadly and inclusively as an element of social life and social relations. Its study encompasses the law, not just disputes concerning property, but wider issues of criminality, coercion and violence, status, sex, sexuality and gender, as well as the phases and manifestations of conflict and the behaviors brought to bear on it. It engages, too, with the nature of the transformation spanning the Carolingian period, and its implications for the meanings of power, violence, and peace. Conflict in Medieval Europe represents the 'American school' of the study of medieval conflict and social order. Framed by two substantial historiographical and conceptual surveys of the field, it brings together two generations of scholars: the pioneers, who continue to expand the research agenda; and younger colleagues, who represent the best emerging work on this subject. The book therefore both marks the trajectory of conflict studies in the United States and presents a set of original, highly individual contributions across a shifting conceptual range, indicative of a major transition in the field.

Chapter 1
What Conflict Means: The Making of Medieval Conflict Studies in the United States, 1970–2000

Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki

The Subject

A question that recurrently perplexes medievalists is the degree to which the past reality that is our subject is explicable in terms of concepts and categories appropriate to our present – the long present spanning the final years of the nineteenth century, all of the twentieth, and the first few of the twenty-first. Is the deep past in its essence familiar, and meaningfully and adequately comprehensible in terms of a set of late-modern analytical constructs? Or is it essentially different, and so unlike the present that its comprehension requires a thorough reassessment and recasting of that conceptual framework?¹ Medievalists, much like social anthropologists though for different reasons, have oscillated between those two intuitive points of departure for adequate comprehension of our subject and population – that is, between a presumptive confidence and a presumptive skepticism regarding the adequacy of “our” concepts and categories for meaningfully understanding “them.”

An especially important subject affected by such considerations is conflict in medieval Europe. In the present book, we define conflict broadly and inclusively to mean several kinds of interpersonal or intergroup tension, and several modes of managing that tension. One type of such tension is dispute – which may be specified as the phase of conflict which is articulated as a claim, between two or more parties, concerning some specific subject matter – but our focus extends beyond disputing, to encompass threats, promises, negotiation, ritual, use of force, and the associated range of emotions, all of which may precede, accompany, follow, or indeed take the place of, disputing. The modes of managing social tension include, on the one hand, the law, institutions, and norms in (what we would consider) a formal, autonomous sense, and, on the other, those practices by parties to conflict, and by a wide variety of other people and groups, that affect the reality of the law, institutions, and norms as aspects of lived social experience.

Study of conflict thus understood necessarily integrates social history, historical anthropology, political and institutional history, and legal history. This fundamentally interdisciplinary emphasis has informed the study of conflict by at least two generations of historians, whose most recent contributions are presented in this volume. It is therefore, at least in retrospect, something of a paradox that the initial intellectual push, just about thirty years ago, toward innovative study of conflict took the form of a strong, almost exuberant, skepticism toward several of its then-cognate disciplines – law, politics, administration, and their histories – and in particular toward the adequacy of their core concepts and categories as sources of meaningful illumination. In other words, right from its outset, inquiry into conflict in the deep past has explicitly confronted the perennial question of familiarity or difference, and resolved it, more or less explicitly, in favor of the latter.

The crucial marker of this historiographical turn was the article published in 1970 by Fredric Cheyette, in which the author called for a broad reconceptualization of what was then institutional legal history.² Cheyette’s basic premise was that, however we define it, and whatever we call it – that is, as a species of legal history, or of historical jurisprudence, or of institutional history – the phenomenon in question as reflected in the evidence was essentially incongruous with the analytical frames of reference then available in the vocabulary of law or politics. Thus, among many examples, he noted that the disputes he knew from his sources did not seem to have been resolved by application of abstract, general, supra-personal rules to particular circumstances; or by judgment, that is a formal pronouncement by a neutral third party with power to impose a resolution by virtue of its office. He responded to this quandary on three levels: first, by reassessing those concepts and categories which struck him as inadequate, above all “the law” itself – its intrinsic meaning, its relationship to other normative systems, and indeed its reality as a phenomenon at a time when it seemed unrelated to what actually happened in disputes; second, by turning directly to that latter subject, namely to (what later writers would call) the process of actual disputing; and, third, by reconceptualizing the patterns thus discerned on their own terms, so to speak. Those patterns consisted of negotiation, mediation, and compromise.

Ever since Cheyette’s article, these approaches have remained fundamental to the study of medieval conflict, especially in the United States. The first, conceptual, is a constant search for the best constructs and words whereby to imagine conflict in the deep past – a search which is consistently, though with varying intensity, informed by a sense of presumptive inadequacy of “our own” concepts and categories for a social reality very different from “ours.” The second, empirical, is a close perusal, deliberately free of the supposed earlier conceptual baggage, of source evidence for answers to what actually took place in medieval conflict, especially dispute. The third, behavioral, is the expression of the empirical fruits of that perusal in an updated set of concepts and categories, all derived from, and descriptive of, patterns of interpersonal action, such as negotiation or compromise, rather than institutions, legal procedures in a formal sense, or rules and their application.

Cheyette’s contributions were especially important and timely in 1970, a relatively early moment in a broad intellectual ferment that affected scholars in several disciplines, and spanned at least the full subsequent decade. Its central area of inquiry was conflict in societies far removed from their academic observers in terms of time, space, and culture. Considered in retrospect, three broad areas of this ferment seem especially important to the study of conflict in one such region – medieval Europe – ever since Cheyette wrote. The first was an acute awareness of the existence of radically different societies, coupled with an optimistically robust presumption of their fundamental intelligibility – to one another, and, in particular, to academics working within one such society, namely the transAtlantic West around the middle of the twentieth century.

Those were years of a marked interest in social anthropology, an interest that in itself was a culmination (and an early reassessment) of several generations of prior engagement between Western academic observers and non-Western societies, first, in the interwar period, of colonized populations, then, in the 1950s, in the context of decolonization. Within those earlier generations, societies of both Native, pre-contact America and of Africa in particular had furnished social anthropologists empirical material for the study of conflict and its management, and of those phenomena which – from the observers’ perspective – comprised, in those societies, the law.³ By the 1960s, and the onset of the particular post-war and post-colonial ferment with which Cheyette himself engaged in the article of 1970, conflict and the law – always two central topics of social anthropology, sociology, and history – inevitably gravitated into the center of attention, and remained there ever since.

In the course of these generations, a recurrent theme in the resulting assessments has been the difficulty, if not impossibility, of expressing the relevant range of phenomena by means of words and concepts appropriate to twentieth-century substantive law, administration, and jurisprudence. One result has been a collective realization of an enormous diversity in human arrangements for the management of conflict, and for the creation of specialized social roles and norms related to that management – the domains of social reality where social anthropologists look for “the law” of their subject populations. Another has been a sharp abandonment of concepts and categories drawn from twentieth-century law, administration, and jurisprudence – above all, “the law” itself, and “the state” – and a search for fully alternative conceptual tools to encompass an enormously varied phenomenon, within which “our” legal system and its descriptive terms are not only not a workable standard, but in every sense an exception.

The second area of intellectual ferment spanning the later 1960s and the 1970s was a strong interest among scholars from various disciplines in jurisprudence, both in the exact sense of theory of law, and, more broadly, in the applicability of analysis drawn from that theory to the realities of non-Western societies. This was a period of creative synthesis and debate about the essential, defining attributes of the law, its relationship to other normative systems such as morality, justice, custom, and force,⁴ and the variability of these issues across time and space.⁵ Cheyette’s article directly reflects such issues. The author opened the article by posing his quandary squarely in terms of jurisprudence: he asked, in part rhetorically, whether what he discerned in the primary evidence was in any meaningful sense “law” at all.⁶ Ever since he wrote, a latent but quite perceptible subtext of the study of medieval conflict has been just this question of jurisprudence projected on the past: a persistent uncertainty of just what “law,” or “conflict,” or related words “mean,” in their essence, and within the context of this particular different and exotic society.

The third area of intellectual ferment, fully underway in 1970, and in a sense continuing ever since, was a strong measure of ambivalence about “the law” and its history as historical subjects. At the time Cheyette was formulating his article – that is, in the later 1960s – medievalists and other historians had long de-emphasized the law as an autonomous, let alone fundamental, dimension of social reality, and focused instead on social structure, process, and transition – conceived in terms both materialist and cultural, under the direct influence of the middle generation of the Annales school, of a then-current emphasis on methods borrowed from the social sciences, and, as ever, of several variants of Marxism. Within that context, Cheyette’s article was a crucial moment in a return by historians to central issues of legal history, but from a new perspective, informed by the other two areas of contemporary intellectual ferment.

The intellectual outcome of this ferment, across the broad spectrum of disciplinary specializations, was a shift of attention by those scholars who were skeptical about “the law,” but interested in the social phenomena to which that word refers, toward behavior (or, in more updated language, practice) – that is, an inquiry into specific, concrete interpersonal activities that occur in the course of transactions which an earlier generation would have called “legal.” Following Cheyette’s lead, much of the resulting focus has been on disputing – that is, on the adversarial phase of conflict – but students of conflict in its broad sense have focused on a range of related practices, including threats, expressions and experience of emotion, feuding, uses of ritual, strategies of access to people who mattered, and the resulting patterns of “politics,” such as lobbying and representation. Whether focused on disputing or not, inquiry into law and conflict as in the first order a domain of interpersonal activity has remained fundamental among medievalists in the United States, ever since Cheyette’s contribution of 1970. This fact is clearly reflected by the essays in this book, including, indeed, Cheyette’s own.

The nearly two decades following the publication of Cheyette’s article – the years 1970 to 1988, to be exact – were a time of luxuriant expansion of several kinds of scholarly output which, while initially quite distinct from one another, emerged as crucially important for the subject of conflict in medieval Europe. One such area of output was directly concerned with dispute and the logic of disputing, along behavioral lines similar to Cheyette’s. The first study of this kind, and the model for such work among historians, was Stephen White’s article about conflict in Western France published in 1978.⁷ With explicit debt to his colleague, White applied Cheyette’s emphasis on dispute, mediation, and compromise to a particular body of data from a particular region of Europe. In the process, he tested, confirmed, and modified Cheyette’s earlier model, and pioneered a genre of detailed study of conflict and dispute to which he himself has been a key contributor ever since.

History and Anthropology

Meanwhile, in the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, social anthropologists have pursued essentially parallel inquiries, based principally on African evidence from the post-colonial period. Above all, Simon Roberts and John Comaroff, working individually or in collaboration, produced between 1977 and 1983 a remarkable series of studies which, between them, outline what may accurately be described as a full-fledged theory of conflict, that is, an exceptionally rich and coherent model of what actually happens in the course of dispute.⁸ The model is built on very careful inquiry into behavior – by the parties, by other significant agents, and by broader social groups – and on the normative systems on which the actors drew. Especially innovative and important was Comaroff and Roberts’ attention, in their two joint contributions of 1977 and 1980, to the significance of norms as an aspect of behavior. With elegant simplicity, they noted that norms matter in conflict above all not because they govern (or fail to govern) behavior, but because they are invoked, that is, are themselves a resource in behavior; and they used that insight as a basis for an elaborate model of the social and political logic of their invocation, and of the management of conflict in reference to them.

Although not explicitly so formulated, this result was an answer to one of Cheyette’s major challenges of nearly a decade earlier: namely, the possibility of reconceptualizing the familiar, received categories of legal history so as to accommodate the realities of soc...