Send Various Ordered with airSlate SignNow

Send various ordered

[Music] thank you ladies and gentlemen and thank you again to Hanson guichen I owe them a profound and deep debt of Grasse you for thank for inviting me again however I have been given a very difficult topic with not one but two incredibly difficult terms to define which was a rule II don't generally doing titles I could spend 30 minutes on each term if I wanted to but I shouldn't to get the first out of the way with first I'm going to just simply define the Middle Ages as the thousand years after the fall of Rome for the sake of simplicity even though there are obviously subdivisions which make a lot of sense most people generally divided into at least three periods the early the high and the late Middle Ages and there are definitely differences in terms of the legal order the ways of thinking about the law but I don't propose to give a-come a chronological overview because that would be a narrative and that we very boring what I want to do is identify commonalities throughout the period and have much more thematic sort of speech so I think the first topics to get to grips with though are the ideas of natural order and natural elites best place obviously to look it look for these are the definitions in democracy of the God that failed and in from aristocracy to monarchy to democracy this concept of ordered anarchy is seems to be very much bound up in also the copy and definition of a conservative this ordered anarchy is the historical empirical view of what libertarianism is or could be or was in the past and if I can briefly quote some of the deaf mission of a conservative in democracy the God that failed conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the noise of anomalies and accidents and who defends supports and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous within the realm of the humanities including the social sciences a conservative recognizes families fathers mothers children grandchildren and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental natural essential ancient and indispensable social units moreover the family household also represents the model of the social order at large just as a hierarchy exists in a family so is there a hierarchy within a community of families of apprentices servants masters vassals Knights Lords overalls and even Kings tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations the definition goes on but you already get a sense from that brief quotation and as many people know an important aspect of this idea of an actual order or ordered anarchy is a natural elite and this will be a very important part of what I'm going to be saying essentially the idea is that some people are quite obviously more intelligent more farsighted have better moral character than other people and not everyone's words will have the same force or authority internal not external Authority not it not actually imposing through compulsion if you like their words but not everyone will be a natural elite you will always however see natural aristocracy is arising what the natural order or ordered anarchy means then is not an absence of government but a government of judges and peacemakers government that doesn't create law but finds law at upholds law and a government which is asked for and a government which can be challenged and ultimately given the sack the king the various feudal or that's a different difficult term to get to grips with in terms of how it's specific manifestations but chieftains and so on and so forth the commonality is that all of this was basically stateless and yet there is from the outset for any libertarian or classical liberal or conservative in this definition at least student of history the difficulty is that the historiography is basically all wrong now I don't claim that historians get everything wrong when they act as archivists when they look for actual evidence in the physical sense when they translate things when they keep themselves to what they know they can do quite good work when they start to mess about in concepts however they're almost entirely wrong professor hoppers ambition is to be an anti intellectual intellectual my ambition is a little less ambitious it's to be an anti historian historian and there are that had been a few of these before but not enough a much neglected one is Arthur Joseph penty who was a great distributist revisionist so he wasn't right on everything but he senses a conspiracy against the Middle Ages he says and I quote feudal England was not horrible nightmare conjured up by lying historians interested in painting the past as black as possible in order to make modern conditions appear terrible by comparison so that I think there is quite obviously a conspiracy against the Middle Ages which I'll go into in a few minutes but again the problem just to dwell on English history for a few minutes is if you look for the appearance of the word Anarchy in English history one period will jump out at you and it's the eighteen or so years which were described as a time that was so awful that Christ in the words of the anglo-saxon Chronicle Christ and His angels slept now why was this this was said to be a period when law and order broke down when there was a massive and destructive terrible civil war but that's not an icky and the men at the time didn't call this in anarchy the men at the time didn't really engage in very much over conceptualization the term anarchy was applied to it in the late 19th century by the emerging historicists academics in particular the word anarchy was applied to it by a historical called John round who was a student of the Wikus Dorian Stubbs and so already you can see really historians in some senses can be a hindrance rather than a help in terms of explaining this conspiracy I know what to talk too long about it but penty offers a few possible explanations he borrows them from william Cobbett he says he he says that the reason basically is but there were so many people living on the plunder of the monasteries of the guilds following the Middle Ages and consequently interested in maintaining a prejudice against the Middle Ages is the easiest way of covering their tracks so I think that could be a bit extreme it doesn't hold in every case but certainly there is an element of self-interest in such a catastrophic Mis conceptualization of this entire period of a thousand years and so to begin to get to grips with the Middle Ages there are various concepts which are very familiar to a libertarian or classical liberal or conservative audience I think one of the most important is that of kinship everything was dependent on families communities and trust the household was the basic unit and this has been defined as a unit of comradeship and trust groups of households came together as hundreds and counties counties and hundreds came together to form duct cheese and Dutch cheese to form King to form kingdoms kinship bonds are really one of the main keys to understanding such an incredibly simple and elegant legal order for instance you look at some of the earliest legal orders the salic law the laws of Ethelred also the Edict of the Lombard King Roth re in 643 these are all very interesting they give long lists of misdemeanors if you like and money payments for them the system of money payments was obviously it obviously made a lot of sense and indeed it's obviously much less expensive for society than putting a criminal in prison of making the victim pay for him and you had this very detailed schedule of payments so much for cutting off an ear so much for cutting off a leg and so much for breaking an arm and then they they specified about multiple or compound fractures and so on and so forth and a very important payment was that of the were guild which was the man price if you like which obviously varies from person to person which on the face of it seems unjust it seems to say that some human life is less expensive than others but well in a social order some people have different roles and can you can entirely understand why some people be seen to be more valuable the kinship relations however existed parallel to lordship relations communities would often voluntarily at least in the early Middle Ages commend themselves to the protection of Lords and the central concept here is that of fealty fealty is distinct from obedience fealty means faith if you like and faith that leads to any believer or to anyone who I'm no linguist but I'm sure there's some etymological root it's a two-way street all the greats lead all the great theorists understood and all the practitioners misunderstood at their own cost that a loyal Lord a loyal Lord had loyal vassals a loyal King had loyal subjects again this is bound up with the taking of oaths which were given incredible significance for instance the the German coronation oath from the 10th century is fascinating it takes the form of an interrogation it's not terribly precise but if I can just quote let the Lord Archbishop question the prince in these words wilt thou uphold the holy faith transmitted to thee by Catholic men and follow after righteousness endures Olli Church and her ministers and this is the important one whilst thou rule and defend this realm which is vouchsafed to thee by God according to the righteousness of thy fathers and here the king or would-be King must answer insofar as I am able with divine aid and the succor of all his faithful I swear to act faithfully in all things then the archbishop must address the people and ask them if they will submit themselves to the commands of the prince and governor and then there must be an acclamation of yay-yay our men yes yes so be it and the positioning of that oath is itself symbolic of a attempt and it was often very successful of guarding against any kind of absolutism only after the oath does the king become only after that is he acclaimed King and that was actually a fascinating oath on the other side of the of the relationship from attributed to Aragon some people say I'm not an expert but some people say this is actually mythical and it didn't happen but in any case it's what I'm going to say is very very much symptomatic of the way they thought about law and kingship the Aragonese nobles said that they would they said we who are each individually as powerful or as great as you and combined much greater agree to listen to your commands if you protect our liberties and if not not and ok that the right of resistance to kingship was very very well established very clear many theorists were very clear that tyrannicide was absolutely fine there were two main approaches really that you could take to to meet evil law that of customary law or that of the natural law law from God and in both cases not obeying the law as a king had very very dire implications and so Manigault of Loudon Park says that a unfaithful King should be expelled as if you were an unfaithful Shepherd the papal party had great men such as john of salisbury who said that a king who misused his power could be killed because he had been given a great gift from god and misusing such power was an insult to God those were the two broadly liberal minded interpretations of law and the legal order it seems to me the the detrimental one which started to come in in the later Middle Ages was the resurrection of the Roman law where the principle was that of sovereignty the Roman law said the there is one source of law it is the Emperor or King whereas customary law and even church opinion on law which was passed what abstract and more and and walking not entirely that the same as customary law they they both agreed that the law should not be one of sovereign territory allottee whereas the Roman law flatly contradicted that and indeed if you wanted to introduce however the Roman law into the medieval structure you would come across great difficulties the medieval order was very strong at resisting status developments Alfonso the tents of Castile in the 13th century his court produced a great legal work called the CIT parted as the seven parts and this is seen as one of the great moves towards the Roman law and yet even this concedes that a king should always listen to the great men that he should always in changing the law or bringing in new laws although the concept was alien to them he should always heed the words of the great men in anglo-saxon the Whitin and so you have a very decentralized legal order from the bottom to the top and it's it is to be questioned whether the legal order had any hierarchy at all because while all of the main text books and all the court books if you like paint a picture of feudalism as a structure sort of like that with a definite top and definite gradations that was not necessarily the case that the standard idea is that the king was the top then Prince's Dukes Earls and so on and so forth well King the the French Kings were often themselves the vassals of mere counts or bishops that doesn't make any sense in the pyramid version of feudalism and another another idea is that feudalism was not only a pyramid but a pyramid within a specific territory well that's also nonsense because it was all that it was often the case that Lords would have laws but whole territory from various laws across what we would see today as territorial boundaries the count of Luxembourg was nominally a vassal of the German emperor but he also held a pension from the French King and such arrangements were often very sensible often very useful you could decide which jurisdiction you wanted at a time there's an even more interesting example John Toole was an fief to four Lords I think all of them counts and there is a particular case of him describing how he will balance these obligations he says if it should happen that the count of Grand Parade should be at war with the countess and count of champagne for his own personal grievances I will personally go to the assistance of the count of grand prey and will send to the countess encounter on prey if they summon me the Knights i over the fief which are held of them but if the count of grand prey shall make war on the countess and count of champagne on behalf of his friends I shall serve in person with the countess and count of champagne and I will send one night to the count of grand prey to give the service owed from the fief which I'll die held of him now whether john tool actually had to fight against his own men we don't know but it's a very interesting idea at least but and this wasn't unique at all you saw men such as the great night William Marshall serving multiple kings of multiple territories and at the time of the Third Crusade William Marshall was a vassal of Richard Coeur de Leon the Lionheart who was away on crusade John Richard the Lionheart brother decided to rebel against Richard William was also a vassal of him later when John became King and lost Normandy William was well he he owned lands in he held lands in Normandy but when Philip Augustus took Normandy he may to retain his lands and he managed to work out a compromise where he decided himself to be the Lord to be the man of the the French King in what we would nowadays call France and the English King in what we would nowadays called England and so you see that there is really there are at least two main differences between the modern way of thinking about law and the modern way of doing law the first is that the hierarchy in feudalism even though it's there's an awful lot said about it is pretty opaque pretty diffuse it can even be downright upside-down and another difference is where there was something like territorial rule it wasn't exclusive and it wasn't absolute for instance clergymen could be they had the right to be tried by members of the church rather than secular courts so there was no ultimate jurisdiction there was no one person or one institution which controlled or felt that it owned everyone in a given area and there were very different views of the person of the king you don't see until the 17th century anything like the so called Divine Right of Kings this is the view that the king is somehow always and everywhere inspired by God or accountable only to him a very instructive comparison is between James the first of England and King st. Louis the ninth of France James the first of England wrote a lot for a king at least and he finds himself to be an intellectual but he wrote two books relevant to his view of the estate of kingship and one of them was addressed to his son and it was a manual on how to be a king how to be a ruler and it makes a very unpleasant reading it essentially says you're the boss you can do no wrong whereas King st. Louis the Knights writing to his son Philip who had become a Philip the third has a very different view of what it means to be a king a very different view of the consequences if you behaved badly and he cautions his self to behave a certain way he says that a king should be just merciful virtuous all the things you would expect he also says very specifically quote if you should discover that you are in wrongful possession of anything even if possession of it was acquired by your ancestors surrender it forthwith similar advice was given to a member of Lewis family by Pope Clement the 4th who says very specifically if someone comes to you with a claim against you if you're a judge in your own case you need to make sure that the burden of proof rests on you now it's very difficult to expect someone to judge against themselves in their own case but there was some expectation of such virtues and always there was this specter of what might happen if you didn't obey the the rather vague oaths that you would make at your coronation Magna Carta for instance was reissued several times throughout the 13th century and later on and you see similar thing elsewhere in the comms on the continent and so Phillip Phillip who became Phillip the third was being given very practical advice by his father not just his father wasn't just telling him to be a good boy and so there is no sense in the middle-ages of molix being somehow sacrosanct or divine in fact it's only very late on in England that the English King starts to call himself and wants others to call him his majesty that that came about in 1399 with richard ii one of the first absolutists you only start to see that towards the end of the period and so just trying to I've got very little time left briefly say a few words about the role of the church opinion is divided about the role of the church in restraining monarchs books even Francois Jizo the great philosophic historian who is generally critical of the church says when I quote at the epoch under consideration the temporal was mere force I'm governor burrell brigandage the church however imperfect her notions still were concerning morality and justice was infinitely superior to such a temporal government as this the cries of the people continually pressed her to take its place when a pope or the bishops proclaimed that a prince had forfeited his rights and that his subjects were absolved from their oath of fidelity this intervention without doubt subject to various abuses was often in particular cases legitimate and salutary it was in other words very important and to have a organization or an institution which was not a state but which which commanded the loyalty of people and allowed them to to from time to time rise up and tell the king where to go and just that a phrase that jumps out that of fidelity again fidelity and faithfulness this this was a very important concept and these oaths however could be dissolved they weren't entirely indissoluble for instance well the best example is from the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem where the court of the burgesses of Jerusalem would very very easily dissolve any oath of homage or fealty but you would see it elsewhere if any one party reneged on their oath or behaved badly it was said that you had the right to withdraw your faith in the other party and so I could go on for much longer than I I'm running out of time and so I will just say that the Middle Ages had stored up incredible treasures Lord Acton would have broadly agreed he said looking back over the space of 1,000 years which we call the Middle Ages to get an estimate of the work they had done if not towards perfection in their Institute's at least towards attaining the knowledge of political truth this is what we find representative government was unknown to the 8th which was unknown to the ancients was almost universal the methods of election were crude but the principle that no tax was lawful that was not granted by the class but paid it that is that taxation was in separable from representation was recognized not as the privilege of certain countries but as the right of all not a prince in the world said Philip de Komine can levy a penny without the consent of the people slavery was almost everywhere extinct and absolute power was deemed more intolerable and criminal than slavery the right of insurrection was not only admitted but defined as a duty sanctified by religion the issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery the political produce of the Middle Ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes by privileged associations and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man further said Lord Acton how did the sixteenth century husband the treasure which the Middle Ages had soared up the answer is not very well to illustrate my thoughts on the matter in in a proper way would would take much longer but if I can end with a few choice words of verse from Macaulay Oh for that ancient spirits which curbed the Senate's will Oh for the tents which in old time whitened the sacred Hill in those brave days our fathers stood bravely side-by-side they faced the Marcion fury they tamed the fabian pride they sent the fiercest Quintus an outcast forth from Rome they drove the hottest Claudius with shivered fascism but what their care bequeathed us our madness flung away all the ripe fruit of threescore years was blighted in a day exalt she proud patricians the hard-fought fighters earth we strove honor it was in vain for freedom tis no more thank you