Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society: Essays presented to J.R. Lander 9781487583644

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ASPECTS OF LATE MEDIEVAL GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY

EDITED BY J.G. ROWE

HsPECTs OF LATE

EDIE VAL

@ovERNMENT AND6oc1ETY ESSAYS PRESENTED TO J.R. LANDER

Published in association with the University of Western Ontario by University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1986 Toronto Buffalo London Printed m Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-8229-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Mam entry under title · Aspects of late Medieval government and society Bibliography Includes mdex. ISBN 0-8020-5695-4 1. Political science - History. 2 . Civilization, Medieval. J.R. (Jack Robert), 1921- . II. Rowe, J.G.

3. State, The. I. Lander,

320

Publication of this book 1s made possible by a generous grant from the Umvers1ty of Western Ontario.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

J.G. Rowe

vii

J.R. LANDER: A TRIBUTE

Pamela Hutchins-Orr xiii George W. R. Bowman

J . R. LANDER : A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Natural Law and Canon Law in Ockham's Dialogus

xvii

3

BRIAN TIERNEY

Leonardo Bruni Revisited: A Reassessment of Hans Baron's Thesis on the Influence of the Classics in the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis 25 ANTONIO SANTOSUOSSO

Peace and Justice around 1400: A Sketch

53

C.M.D. CROWDER

The English Realm and Dominions and the King's Subjects in the Later Middle Ages 83 RALPH A. GRIFFITHS

Richard Plantagenet (1411-60), Duke of York, as the King's Lieutenant in France and Ireland 107 T. B. PUGH

Marmaduke Lumley and the Exchequer Crisis of 1446-9

143

G.L . HARRISS

The Exchequer in Late Medieval Government, c 1485-1530 J. D. ALSOP

179

vi Contents Conflict in Government : Archbishops versus Kings, 1279-1348

213

ROY MARTIN HAINES

The Swabian League and Government in the Holy Roman Empire of the Early Sixteenth Century 247 THOMAS F. SEA

CONTRIBUTORS

277

The proposal to produce an anniversary volume of essays marking the retirement of J.R. Lander from the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario has won wide support within the department and the academic community. There are many ways to write good history, but the number of options available for compiling good Festschriften is rather limited. One particular difficulty is that to be effective a Festschrift must have a certain unity of theme, a goal not always easily attained. Essays which honour a fellow academician are usually diverse labours of love which reflect the personal concerns and current interests of the writers. However, this inevitable diversity can have its advantages. Many methods and skills are necessary even to approach doing justice to late-medieval government and society. This necessary diversity of approach is manifested in the range of essays included in this volume. In this collection, some essays have a degree of similarity to others. I have given much thought to the order in which the essays are presented so as to emphasize the unity of theme. Therefore, a certain pride of place must be assigned to two essays- 'Natural Law and Canon Law in Ockham's Dialogus,' by Brian Tierney, and 'Leonardo Bruni Revisited : A Reassessment of Hans Baron's Thesis on the Influence of the Classics in the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis,' by Antonio Santosuosso - which examine important texts and at the same time deal in the abstract with certain contemporary' notions about government and politics. Tierney's is a penetrating, original, and highly technical investigation of Ockham's teaching on natural law and how this teaching was influenced by Ockham's knowledge of canon law and the opinions of canonists. The technical nature of Tierney's approach should not deter the reader who will perceive the usefulness of Tierney's illumination of otherwise obscure aspects of Ockham's thought and the close reading and painstaking analysis

viii Preface that correct previous mistaken readings and interpretations of the great thinker. Similarly, the essay by Santosuosso is also concerned with the history of European political ideas. He too submits a famous text - in this case, the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis, by Leonardo Bruni - to close analysis and investigates in some detail the connection between Bruni' s panegyric on Florence and the Panathenaicus of Aristides (c AD 150). There has been much controversy over the development of civic humanism as a characteristic political ideology of the Renaissance. Here, Santosuosso demonstrates how much republican liberty owes to Aristides and how much more to Salutati, and his essay has the additional virtue of showing us how political concepts in the Renaissance actually developed. This essay is a testament to the value of close textual examination in gaining a larger perspective on the literary history of humanism. With C.M.D. Crowder's 'Peace and Justice around 1400: A Sketch' and Ralph A. Griffiths' 'The English Realm and Dominions and the King's Subjects in the Later Middle Ages' we move a little closer to the empirical. Crowder investigates the practical interpretation in England during the later Middle Ages of two key words - 'peace' and 'justice' - each of which has a distinctive history of meaning and significance. The first word, 'peace,' should be seen in domestic and internal contexts; international peace, a meaning with contemporary significance, did not concern most medieval intellectuals who, if they had any thoughts on the subject at all, were pessimistic about the possibility of peace in the international realm. Rather, what concerned them was peace for an individual, peace between factions, harmony and order in the realm. Concrete examples are adduced: the importance of internal peace for external relations is emphasized, as internal peace produced the practical values of inner strength and unity, creating a salutary aggression which was an essential aspect of such matters as Anglo-French ·rivalry. Thoughts about justice were equally concrete. What was the reality of a judicial decision? Here Crowder warns us against too great a reliance on the rhetoric of preachers and publicists bewailing the corruption of courts and justices. Rather, he insists that the litigiousness of late-medieval society was in itself testimony to a degree of confidence in the judicial process. That cases dragged interminably on was evidence of an unshakeable hope that justice in the end was possible and worth paying and waiting for. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Crowder presents concrete examples which illustrate the hopes of men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in ultimately obtaining justice. For all their confusion and pessimism men possessed a moderate hope that peace might be maintained and justice could be done. Griffiths' theme- nationality- is more elusive, and the issues very complex.

ix Preface What was a 'subject' and what was an 'alien'? Griffiths shows how concrete realities, for example, communal relations, worked to make new definitions and understandings of the concept necessary. What, for example, was to be made of the diverse realms of the English king? Faced with varied laws and customs that were very different from those in England, lawyers groped their way towards a broad yet flexible perception of nationality. Progress came on the empirical level. The concept of nationality developed and the perceptions of what constituted it multiplied; when practical tests were applied solutions came piecemeal. What was the status of those who might buy and sell land and bequeath it to their heirs? What of those who had the right to sue, to plead in a royal court? Above all, what was the standing of those who did business with English natives? In attempting to provide answers to these important questions, the lawyers of the day were moving towards the 'imperial' nationality of Tudor times. Griffiths' treatment is marked by considerable originality. His concern is how concepts of nationality were arrived at in practice. In the course of his investigation, he casts new light on the origins of the Wars of the Roses, a subject which the distinguished recipient of these essays has made peculiarly his own. The next two essays concentrate on individual examples. In the first, T. 8 . Pugh deals with 'Richard Plantagenet (1411-60), Duke of York,' his career and fortunes as king's lieutenant in both France and Ireland up to the year 1450 when he assumed new importance in the life of the nation. Thus, Pugh's essay is on the early career of an important and highly influential member of English government. As one of the leading magnates, Richard enjoyed great wealth (a controverted point this, cf Pugh and Harriss) and sustained much activity as a soldier and diplomat in the final phases of the Hundred Years War. This essay makes an important contribution to the understanding of the origins of the Wars of the Roses, tracing relations between this outstanding figure under Henry VI and the various personages and factions of the royal court. 'Marmaduke Lumley and the Exchequer Crisis of 1446-9,' by G.L. Harriss, concerns an individual institution, the exchequer, and the labour of Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle, to stave off bankruptcy in the royal finances. His was the task of establishing solvency faced with financial problems which were intractable and could only be postponed and never resolved. In great detail Harriss describes Lumley' s fight against accumulated debt and his search for a reasonable solution to an inherently unreasonable situation. As long as the French truce endured, the bishop could effectively perform his financial conjuring tricks. But when the truce failed, the delicate balance of payments and accumulations was upset, and Lumley retired from office, a sick man, on

x Preface the eve of disaster. This essay offers an important insight into the middle years of Henry VI as well as providing information about the workings of an important financial institution. The essay by J.D. Alsop, entitled 'The Exchequer in Late-Medieval Government, c 1485-1530,' continues the analysis offered by Harriss. Alsop undertakes a careful study of the daily workings of the exchequer to show that the institution was not antiquated, was not inefficient, and complemented the activities of the chamber and that it still played a vital role in the management of royal finances. This highly technical essay will show the attentive reader how efficient the system of royal finances really was, combining informality, flexibility, and a high degree of centralization which was effective in both the collection and disbursement of the royal finances. The essay by Roy Martin Haines, 'Conflict in Government: Archbishops versus Kings 1279-1348, forms an admirable balance to the foregoing essays on the exchequer. We return in this essay to an earlier period, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, to examine the careers of a group of men, mostly remarkable - the archbishops of Canterbury. During this period, just prior to the beginning of the long slide into complete royal control, the archbishops stood prepared to contest the will of the king and others for specifically ecclesiastical interests. They were at once competent and proud in their conviction that the welfare of the church was identical with the welfare of the community of the realm. It was a time of conflict and co-operation, a pattern familiar to all students of the High Middle Ages. Haines' contribution outlines the salient details of one of the great periods in the history of the medieval church in England. Standing at the end of this collection, and rather by itself, is the essay by Thomas F. Sea, 'The Swabian League and Government in the Holy Roman Empire of the Early Sixteenth Century.' Sea examines the product of a political and governmental situation which has seen the virtual collapse of the central government and its authority (the empire) and the emergence of other attempts to fill the vacuum efficiently and with responsibility. The Swabian League is an outstanding example of this process. Formed in the late fifteenth century, the Swabian League was intended to deal with problems the empire could not cope with. The central authority could not impose its will from above, and it was left to the Swabian League and other institutions to do what the empire could not do. Sea clearly delineates the league's composition and constitution, a balancing act of many varied interests. Concrete problems elicited many sophisticated developments. The key to the league's strength and weakness was its fundamental characteristic of being a voluntary association, a fact that explains why it was often so dilatory, so hesitant in enforcing the decisions

xi Preface of its councils and courts. Yet, it made significant contributions, for example, to the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt. This exposition of the league's inner workings adds much to our knowledge of the ideals and aspirations of late-medieval society, a society in which experimentation and elaboration were not unknown, where visions of peace and order, although obscured by cruel fact, were none the less tenaciously held. In sum, this collection of essays attempts to grasp these realities; each essay is significant in itself and collectively they are useful in advancing our understanding of some of the conditions of life in various areas of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I would like to thank Ms P. Hutchins-Orr and Mr George Bowman, advanced students in the department, for their contributions to this volume. I would like to pay particular tribute to the advice and guidance given me by William H. Stockdale, my colleague in the Department of History, and Mr G. Mulcahy of the University Library System. J. G. ROWE

J.R.LANDER: A TRIBUTE

'What condign graces and thanks ought men to give to the writers of histories who wish their labours have done much profit to the human life' wrote John Bourchier, Lord Berners, when he translated the chronicles of Jean Froissart. It is to such another in the long line of respected 'writers of histories' that this volume of essays is offered. J.R. Lander came to Cambridge University in 1940 and entered Pembroke College with four scholarships. He took the degree of BA in 1942 and served the war years in the British Civil Service. He received the MLitt from Cambridge in 1950. His university appointments took him abroad, first to the University College of the Gold Coast (University of Ghana) from 1950 to 1960, and then to Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, from 1963 to 1965. Since then he has been continuously at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, where he has filled the chair of Smallman Professor of History with distinction. J. R. Lander early became interested in English institutions of the late fifteenth century, a field which thirty years ago had received relatively little attention from modern historians. His meticulous archival research in the documents of this period - an undertaking both daunting and challenging and his judicious analysis have contributed in large measure to our changed view of this turbulent century, heretofore so obscured by legend and unreliable evidence. His achievement is widely known through his numerous articles, and his books The Wars of the Roses (1966), Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth Century England (1969; 3 editions), Ancient and Medieval England, Beginnings to 1509 (1973), Crown and Nobility, 1450 to 1509 (1976), and Government and Community: England 1450-1509 (1980). He continues to be a productive scholar and is currently engaged in the preparation of another

xiv J.R. Lander: A tribute book, The Justices of the Peace in England, 1461-1509, which will be the basis of the Joanne Goodman Lecture at the University of Western Ontario in 1986. Many honours have been conferred on J.R. Lander. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Member of the Medieval Academy of America, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and former Canadian representative on the Anglo-American Historical Committee (1974-6). Most recently, he was invited to give the lecture in Saint George's Chapel, Windsor, on the occasion of the Quincentenary of King Edward 1v, second founder of the chapel (Windsor 1983). His wide interests have deeply engaged him in university and community affairs. In Ghana he was treasurer and assistant secretary of the Monuments and Relics Commission and a member of the Ghana Museums Board. He has given unstintingly of his time and energy to the University of Western Ontario, not only in the Department of History but also on university committees and boards too numerous to mention. The task of the academic historian is twofold: he teaches and he pursues his research. Not every distinguished scholar is an inspired and inspiring teacher in the great tradition of Roger Ascham and Richard Mulcaster. But J.R. Lander has combined historical scholarship and learning with deep dedication to the concerns and problems of students and teaching. He has in great measure the gift of awakening and maintaining intellectual interests, not only in the so-called clever people but in so many who, before they went into his class, had never had a consuming interest in books. To generations of students he has proved a devoted and stimulating teacher. Undergraduates will recall his beautifully constructed lectures and his clear and thoughtful interpretations of history. He was most at ease talking on a congenial subject with his graduate class, and we will long remember the civilized atmosphere of those seminars which always met in the late afternoon in his study. In this beautiful room, surrounded by books and paintings, he would sit in his accustomed chair and listen. When we had droned out our lame productions we knew that he would give us a crucial fact, a clinching quotation, or an anecdote not to be found in any textbook; on those occasions even the shyest among us was encouraged by his kindly interest and offer of sherry. Jack Lander's students and colleagues can appreciate how much he has given of his friendship and counsel. Any appeal to him found a response that was both instant and generous. The humanity so evident in his writing is a reflection of the warmth of his personality. He is a religious man, a humorous witty man, an essentially serious man who has neither social nor intellectual prejudices. He has friends in every rank of life and in many countries of the world.

xv J.R. Lander : A tribute On behalf of all his students, fellow scholars, and many friends, this volume is offered in witness of their affection and gratitude, and the high regard in which they hold his achievements as a 'writer of histories.' PAMELA HUTCHINS-ORR

J.R.LANDER: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

1956 'Edward

IV;

The Modern Legend : And a Revision' in History 41 (1956) 38-52

1958 'The Yorkist Council and Administration, 1461-1485' in English Historical Review 73 (1958) 27-46 1959 'Council, Administration and Councillors, 1461-1485' in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 32 (1959) 138-80 Review of The Tudor Constitution by G.R. Elton (1957), in Universities (1959) 1960 'Henry VI and the Duke of York's Second Protectorate, 1455-1456' in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 43 (1960) 1961 Review of The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background by D. Hay (1961), in Universities (1961) 1962 Review of The Yorkist Age by P.M. Kendall (1961) , in History 47 (1962) 301-2 1963 'Marriage and Politics in the Fifteenth Century: The Nevilles and the Wydevilles' in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 36 (1963) 119-52

xviii

J. R.

Lander: A bibliography

Review of Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry vu by S. B. Chrimes (1963), in Canadian Journal of History 1, 1 (1966) 91-2 1966 The Wars of the Roses (London : Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd 1965; New York : G.N . Putnam's Sons 1966). Reviewed in America 115 (1966) 702, by J.J. O'Connor; American Historical Review 71 (1966) 1316-17, by B. Wilkinson ; Library Journal 91 (1966) 849, by K. B. Mcfarlane; Times Literary Supplement 7 April 1966, 282 Review of Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century by B. Wilkinson (1964), in Times Literary Supplement 27 May 1965, 243 1967 Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd 1969). Reviewed ih American Historical Review 75 , 5 (June 1970) 1438, by S. L. Thrupp; English Historical Review 85 (1970) 402, by E.F. Jacob 1970 'The Yorkist Monarchy' in History of the English-Speaking Peoples No 29 (London: B.P.C. Publishing Company 1970) Review of The Royal Policy of Richard 11: Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages by R.H. Jones (1968), in Canadian Journal of History 5, 1 (1970) 98~9 1971 'Attainder and Forfeiture, 1453-1509' in Historical Journal 4 (1961) 110-51, reprinted in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, ed E. B. Fryde and Edward Miller (London: Cambridge University Press 1971) 92-121 'Bonds, Coercion and Fear: Henry vn and the Peerage' in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed J.G . Rowe and W.H. Stockdale (Toronto : University of Toronto Press 1971) 327-67 Review of Le Haut Mayen Age occidental: Economies et societes by R. Doehaerd (1971) , in Canadian Journal of History 6, 3 (1971) 311-12 Review of The Later Middle Ages in England, 1216-1485 by B. Wilkinson (1969), in The Canadian Historical Review 52 (1971) 326-7 1972 'The Hundred Years War and Edward iv's Campaign in France' in Tudor Men and Institutions - Studies in English Law and Government, ed Arthur J. Slavin (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press 1972) 70-100

xix

J. R.

Lander: A bibliography

Review of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History ed H.L. Adelson (1971), in Canadian Journal of History 7, 1 (1972) 66 Review of Phillipe, Ong/es bleus, Jacques et Ciampi: Les revolutions populaires en Europe aux x1ve et xve siecles by Michel Mollat and Wolff (1972), in American Historical Review 77, 2 (April 1972) 494-5 1973

Ancient and Medieval England, Beginnings to 1509, Part

1, The Harbrace History of England (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. 1973) Review of Aymer de Valance, Earl of Pembroke, 1307-1324: Ba_ronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II by J.R.S. Phillips (1972), in American Historical Review 78, 4 (October 1973) 1033-4 Review of Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485 by V.J. Scattergood (1971), in American Historical Review 78, 2 (April 1973) 419-20

1974

Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England 2nd edition (London: Hutchin-

son Publishing Group Ltd 1974) Review of Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 12581267, selected by R.E. Treharne, ed by 1.J. Sanders (1973), in American Historical Review 79, 3 (June 1974) 772-3 Review of The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307-1485 by J. T. Rosenthal (1972) , in Speculum 49 (1974) 754-8 1 975 The Historical Background of St George's Chapel' in St George's Chapel Windsor Castle Quincentenary Handbook (Windsor 1975) Review of Richard II and the English Nobility by A. Tuck (1974), in American Historical Review Bo, 3 (June 1975) 623-4 1976

Crown and Nobility, 1450 to 1509 (London: Edward Arnold Ltd ; Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press 1976) . Reviewed in Choice 13 (1976) 1349; Times Literary Supplement, 26 November 1976, 1490, by S.B. Chrimes The Crown and Aristocracy in England, 1450-1509' in Albion 8 (1976) 203-18 Review of Edward Iv by C. Ross (1974), in American Historical Review 81, 3 (June 1976) 572-3

xx J.R. Lander: A bibliography 1977 Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England 3rd, and completely revised edition (London : Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd 1977) Review of War in Medieval English Society : Social Values and the Hundred Years War, 1377-99 by J. Barnie (1974), in Societas 7 (1977) 76 Review of Nobles and Noble Life by J.T. Rosenthal (1976), in The Historian 39 (1977) 756-7 1978

Review of Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social

History ed R.H. Hilton (1976), in The Canadian Journal of History 12, 3 (1978) 398-9 Review of The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536-1547 by S.E. Lehmberg (1977), in The Historian (1978) 334-5 Review of The Government Policy of Protector Somerset by M. I. Bush (1977), in Renaissance and Reformation 2 (1978) 209-11

1979 Review of The King's Council in the Reign of Edward Renaissance and Reformation 3 (1979) 89-91

VI

by D. E. Hook (1976), in

1980 Government and Community: England 1450-1509 (London: Edward Arnold Ltd; Harvard, Mass : Harvard University Press 1980). Reviewed in American Historical Review 86, 3 (June 1981) 583-4, by G. R. Elton; Choice 18 (1981) 845 'The Yorkist Council, Justice and Public Order : The Case of Straunge versus Kynaston' in Albion 12 (1980) 1-22 1982 'Family, "Friends" and Politics in Fifteenth-Century England,' paper read to the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, to which J.R. Lander was the official University of Western Ontario representative Review of The Public Career of St. Thomas More by J.A. Guy (1980), in. Renaissance Quarterly 25 (1982) 279-80 Review of John Hopton: A Fifteenth-Century Suffolk Gentleman by C. Richmond (1980), in Canadian Journal of History 17, 1 (1982) 137-8 Review of The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 13221461 by R.A. Griffiths (1981), in American Historical Review 87, 3 (June 1982) 762-3

xxi J.R. Lander : A bibliography Review of Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century by N. Saul (1981), in The Historian 44 (1982) 547-8 Review of Richard m by C. Ross (1981), in Canadian Journal of History 17, 2 (1982) 328-30

1983 'King Edward JV,' a lecture given in St George's Chapel, Windsor, during the Quincentenary of King Edward JV, second founder of the chapel (Windsor 1983) The Justices of the Peace in England, 1461-1509 (in preparation) Review of The Wars of the Roses by J. Gillingham (1981), in American Historical Review 88, 3 (June 1983) 661-2 Review of Lancastrian Englishmen by A.C. Reeves (1981), in Speculum 58 (1983) 524-5 1984 Review of The Westminister Chronicle, 1381-1394, eds L.C. Hector and 8 .H. Harvey (1982), in Speculum 59 (1984) 157-9 Review of The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370-1529 by J.A.F. Thomson (1983), in Albion 16 (1984) 170-2 GEORGE W.R. BOWMAN

ASPECTS OF LATE MEDIEVAL GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY

BRIAN TIERNEY

NATURALLAw AND CANON LAW IN OCKHAM'S DIALOGUS

An earlier approach to Ockham's theory of natural law, which still finds support in some modern scholarship, emphasized a supposed relationship between the great Franciscan's specific political doctrines and his general philosophical principles. More recently, several scholars have argued that Ockham's political theory can best be understood when it is related to the real-life controversies in which he became involved and to the arguments available to him in the commonly accepted ideas of his time, especially the ideas of the medieval canonists. In this essay, I want to argue that some further investigation of Ockham's canon-law sources can lead to a better understanding of his teaching on natural law.

Approaches to Ockham The two approaches mentioned above need not be mutually exclusive - Jurgen Miethke combined both of them in his study of Ockham's intellectual development. 1 But it may still be useful to inquire which is the more helpful and informative approach in considering any particular aspect of Ockham' s thought. The first approach is found in various older histories of natural law. Heinrich Rommen, for instance, wrote that 'an evolution set in which, in the doctrine of William of Occam on the natural moral law, would lead to pure moral positivism, indeed to nihilism.' 2 To such writers it seemed evident that Ockham's philosophical nominalism and voluntarism precluded the development of a coherent natural-law doctrine in his works. Earlier scholastic philosophers, above all Thomas Aquinas, had seen natural law as inherent in the very being of things, which in turn reflected the eternal reason of God. But Ockham's nominalism, it was argued, excluded a belief in universal immutable principles and his voluntarism reduced all natural morality to mere arbitrary command

4 Brian Tierney - the command of an inscrutable God who could change at will any existing standards of good and evil. Such arguments lead to a paradoxical conclusion: Ockham certainly did present a doctrine of natural law in his political writings, but for him the natural law provided only a mutable, unstable, shifting standard for regulating human conduct. There are obvious objections to this whole approach. Ockham hardly ever referred to his earlier philosophical doctrines in his later works on ecclesiology and political theory. Moreover, there were good reasons for this. Ockham was convinced that Pope John xxn had fallen into heresy, and he wanted to convince the whole Christian world of the pope's error. He could obviously do this more effectively by arguing from generally accepted principles than by relying on his own controversial and suspect innovations in philosophy. Moreover, his voluntarism, his view on the absolute power of God's will, was simply irrelevant to this dispute. Ockham had no interest in demonstrating that God could have created some other moral universe - a universe in which perhaps John xxn might have been right after all. He wanted only to prove that the pope was wrong in the world that actually existed then and there, and wrong to the point of heresy. Moreover, Ockham's nominalism did not in fact prevent him from asserting that, in the actual existing world, general principles of natural morality could be discerned by human reason. Finally, it has been doubted whether any necessary implication can exist between abstract metaphysics and specific political doctrines.3 The most sophisticated formulation of the first approach to Ockham was presented by Georges de Lagarde in his La naissance de I' esprit lai"que au declin du moyen-age. 4 De Lagarde wrote more cautiously and sensibly than one might suppose from reading only his critics, but he did emphasize the destructive tendencies in Ockham' s political thought and related them to his general philosophical positions. In the generation after de Lagarde' s work appeared many scholars - among them Kolmel, Boehner, Morrall, Bayley, Junghans - criticized his central theses.5 They all found Ockham's political ideas more conservative and constructive than de Lagarde had. Kolmel in particular addressed himself to Ockham's natural-law theory. He pointed out that Ockham' s doctrine was not formulated as an integral part of his whole philosophy but as a response to the particular circumstances of his dispute with the Avignon papacy. This led to other disagreements with de Lagarde. Whereas de Lagarde emphasized the variety of natural laws in Ockham, Kolmel found a core of rational equity that gave a kind of unity to them all. De Lagarde emphasized Ockham's voluntarism, Kolmel his rationalism. De Lagarde emphasized rights, Kolmel norms. But in spite of all this Kolmel still

5 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus chided Ockham a little for departing from the beautiful simplicity of Aquinas' unified natural-law theory and seemed to regard this as a regrettable innovation. 6 Recent authors more sympathetic to de Lagarde's general approach typically express that sympathy in a moderate and cautious fashion . They acknowledge that there is no relationship of strict logical entailment between Ockham's philosophy and his political theory - one could not deduce the latter from the former. But they still discern broad areas of congruence between the two departments of his thought, and think it important to explore these congruities when evaluating Ockham's political theory. A.S. McGrade, for instance, has discussed a parallel between Ockham' s 'logical individualism' and the treatment of individual rights in his political works. Gordon Leff, emphasizing particularly the concepts of necessity and contingency, has maintained that, in discussing spiritual and temporal power, Ockham 'produced a devastating critique of the traditional assumptions about the nature of each' and that he did so 'largely by drawing upon his own wider philosophical and theological assumptions. ' 7 There seems to be no denying that resemblances exist between Ockham's philosophy and his political theory. One would expect this; after all we are not dealing with a schizophrenic. The problem for a historian of political thought is to decide whether the investigation of these resemblances has any explanatory force, whether it really advances in any significant way our understanding of Ockham's teaching. Such investigation could certainly do so if it showed that specific, unusual tenets of Ockham' s philosophy were reflected in specific, unusual tenets of his political theory. But this never seems to be the case. Sometimes the philosophical positions attributed to Ockham are too vague to be significant. (The concepts of 'necessity' and 'contingency,' for instance, were by no means Ockhamist peculiarities.) And often the political views that are correlated with Ockham's philosophy were fourteenth-century commonplaces, held by many other thinkers who adhered to different philosophical positions. When considering de Lagarde's treatment of individual rights, for instance, we have to remember that medieval law was saturated with concern for rights, a concern expressed in a crisp phrase of the glossa ordinaria to the Decretum: 'No one is to be deprived of his right except for a very grave offence. ' 8 We may recall, too, that it was Ockham's adversary, John xxn, who insisted on an original, individual right of property inhering in Adam, and Ockham who, to dispute the pope's conclusion, invented a peculiar doctrine of Adam as a sort of corporation sole.9 Treating a related question, de Lagarde, and Leff following him, emphasized

6 Brian Tierney that Ockham's legal theory recognized the existence of a kind of moral 'no man's land,' a great juridical terrain unregulated by rational moral law, a region where human will had free play, 'a zone of absolute human autonomy' as de Lagarde put it. 10 But here again we are dealing with a medieval platitude. Civil and canon lawyers and earlier scholastic philosophers all acknowledged the existence of a mass of legal rules that depended only on human choice. Roman and canon lawyers often recalled the maxim, 'What has pleased the Prince has the force of law' and the glossa ordinaria to the Digest declared simply, 'No reason can be given in matters of purely positive law ... ' 11 The canonists also liked to quote a phrase of Juvenal in discussing papal legislative power - 'in eo est pro ratione voluntas.' The human choice on which positive law depended might be expressed simply through the will of a ruler or through the tacit agreement of a people embodied in custom. In either case the function of such law was to regulate matters that were morally indifferent but that needed to be regulated in an ordered society. Thomas Aquinas made the same point when he taught that some human laws were not deduced from natural law but merely determined matters that natural law left open. 12 Vague references to 'voluntarism' or 'necessity and contingency' just do not advance our understanding of Ockham' s thought in this area. His teaching on positive law was entirely conventional; it has no significant connection with his philosophical presuppositions. These observations suggest that an investigation of Ockham' s sources might help us to understand the content of his work. Around 1328, when Ockham was residing at Avignon, the Franciscan minister-general, Michael of Cesena, ordered him to investigate the decretals of Pope John xxn, dealing with Franciscan poverty. Ockham, unhappiiy and reluctantly according to his own account, came to the conclusion that the pope's teaching was heretical. At this point he seems to have embarked on a concentrated study of the canon law relating to church property and to heresy. Many modern authors have noticed the frequent quotations from canon law in Ockham's political writings. It is very hard, however, to characterize the extent of the canonistic learning that he acquired. Certainly he never achieved a professional grasp of the structure of the whole corpus of canon law; there were always odd gaps in his knowledge and understanding. For instance, Ockham inveighed against Innocent 1v for denying that infidels could legitimately hold property or jurisdiction, apparently in happy ignorance of the fact that Innocent had presented a classical defence of infidel rights in his great commentary on the Decretals. 1 3 Again, when discussing the question whether a pope could define a new article of faith, Ockham cited an obscure commentary of Alanus on the Compilatio prima. (The text was transmitted

7 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus to fourteenth-century jurists in Guido de Baisio's Rosarium.) But Ockham could never see, or he would not admit, that his own understanding of the text was essentially the same as that of John xxn' s curial canonists.1 4 On another point, Ockham attacked John xxn for applying to the Franciscan Order the canonistic concept of a corporation as an 'imaginary person,' a 'persona ficta. ' 1 5 Rather, Ockham maintained, the order was made up of real individuals. But the canonists' 'fiction theory' - developed especially by Innocent IV again - was intended to assert precisely this point. It was because only individuals had real personality that a group of individuals (a corporation) could be considered as one person only by a fiction of the law. Gierke maintained, as a central theme of his great work, Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, that Innocent Iv's doctrine substituted an atomistic individualism for the 'properly medieval' doctrine of the real personality of the group. There are evident limits, then, to Ockham's understanding of canonistic thought. However, his knowledge went beyond a mere surface acquaintanceship with a few scattered texts of the Decretum and Decretals. When he was writing the Dialogus at Munich, Ockham complained that he had no reference works available except the canon law and the Bible. But at least he had these texts in editions that included the ordinary glosses, for he quoted from them directly, especially from Johannes Teutonicus' gloss on the Decretum. But Ockham seems to have known more than this. In his earlier studies at Avignon he would have had all the books he needed and expert canonists (like Bonagratia of Bergamo) to guide his reading. Ockham' s teaching on papal heresy has much in common with Huguccio's and I think he must have read Huguccio at some point. In the Dialogus he included a brief quotation from Hostiensis. It seems to me very probable that Ockham was also acquainted with the Rosarium of Guido de Baisio. (One passage of Ockham's Breviloquium seems a close verbal paraphrase of a text in the Rosarium.) 16 Guido's popular work, completed c 1300, presented a vast compendium of earlier, half-forgotten, commentaries on the texts of Gratian's Decretum. It could have provided a mine of information for Ockham. The substantial but little-noticed treatise on natural law at the beginning of the Rosarium is especially interesting because, in a quite unusual fashion for a thirteenth-century canonist, Guido wove together canonistic and philosophical texts - Huguccio and Johannes Faventinus and Hostiensis intermingled with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Alexander of Hales. Ockham presumably did not have all these canonistic works available to him in Munich. The most probable hypothesis is that, while at Avignon, he acquired a rather extensive knowledge of canonistic commentaries on the limited number of canon-law texts that particularly interested him, and that, in his later writings, he worked from a dossier of notes or from

8 Brian Tierney memory. This would explain why one so often encounters echoes of canonistic teachings in Ockham without any specific quotation or direct reference to a legal source. All this may be of interest in considering Ockham's intellectual formation. But evidently we need to raise here the same question that we asked earlier in considering Ockham's philosophical positions. Does an approach to Ockham's political theory through research on related topics of canon law really help us to understand his thought? Does it have any explanatory force? The answer is not obvious. Gordon Leff, for instance, was sceptical of such an approach. He began his book on Ockham with the words 'Ockham was an innovator' but then at once rejected the view that 'identification and assessment of an outlook begins with a thinker's antecedents, both intellectual and circumstantial.' On this one might observe that it is impossible to know whether a given thinker was an innovator or not, or where and how he was innovating, or how he was led to innovate unless we know the state of antecedent thought and something about the thinker's own circumstances. Many writers on Ockham's political theory- even Leff himself- mistakenly attribute to him radical novelties of thought when in fact he was restating familiar ideas of his own time. However, this argument does not quite meet Leff's main point. He realizes that in addressing some questions - questions of biography and influence - a study of Ockham's antecedents and circumstances is relevant. But he denies that such study is necessary for investigating 'the nature of the thought itself.' Leff argues on logical grounds that we must understand a system of thought before we can explore its antecedents. But this ignores all the hermeneutical problems of text and context that are discussed in so many recent works on intellectual history. From Leff's point of view it is irrelevant to ask when or how Ockham learned canon law if we are really interested in the questions, 'What did Ockham think and what was the nature of his thought ?' 1 7 I would suggest, on the contrary, that it is sometimes scarcely possible to know what Ockham did think - or even what he wrote - without some knowledge of his canonistic sources. Ignorance of them can lead to misunderstandings. For example, Leff himself misunderstands the concepts 'clavis scientie' and 'clavis potestatis' as used by Ockham and the Franciscan Spirituals because of his disinclination to consider the canonistic background of these terms. 18 In the particular area of natural law, the canonists can help us to understand both where Ockham was innovative (if at all) and what he actually meant to say. The following notes on two crucial texts will serve to illustrate these points.

9 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus

Ill Dialogus 2.3.6 This text has always seemed of central importance to students of Ockham's natural-law theory. Ockham suggests here that there are not one, but three kinds of natural law and that much of the content of natural law is mutable, sometimes it seems by the mere choice of those whom it affects. We will discuss each of the three types in turn, but in order to understand them, we first need to know a little about the context of the argument in which they occur. At this point of the Dialogus, the Master was concerned to argue that the Roman people possessed an enduring right to elect the pope, a right which could not be taken away from them without their consent but which they could assign to others by their own choice. The Disciple objected that such a claim could not be established either by divine law or human law. The Master replied that it could be justified by divine law if the term was used broadly to include all natural law. 1 9 This led him to an analysis of his three different types of natural law in search of one that would justify the right of the Roman people - and he eventually found it in the third type. 20 In the past, interpretation of Ockham's thought in this passage was impeded by textual corruptions in the two printed editions. However H. 5. Offler has recently provided an accurate version of the text. So the problem now is not so much to understand what Ockham wrote or what he meant as to decide whether his thought was in any way unorthodox or innovatory. Recourse to earlier canonistic writings is indispensable here since Ockham based his exposition explicitly on the texts of Gratian and much of his argument is a wordby-word commentary on a passage of Isidore of Seville that was included in the Decretum. It will be useful to quote this text at the outset: 'Natural law is common to all nations since it is held everywhere by instinct of nature, not by any statute; as for instance the joining of man and woman, the procreation and education of children, the common possession of all things, the one liberty of all, the acquisition of things taken by air, land, or sea. Also the return of a thing deposited or of money loaned. For this or anything like this is never unjust, but is naturally held to be equitable. ' 21 The mere quotation of the text clears up one point. It is evident that Isidore was using the term 'natural law' in several different senses; and the fact was as apparent to the first commentators on the Decretum as it was to Ockham. Indeed Ockham's threefold division of natural law will seem modestly restrained to anyone familiar with the more luxuriant imaginings of the early Decretists. Stephen of Tournai gave four meanings of the term 'ius naturale,' and then, adding 'and if you do not shudder at a fifth meaning' went on with

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another. The author of the Summa in nomine found as many as seven meanings. Johannes Teutonicus, in the ordinary gloss to the Decretum, a work which was certainly available to Ockham when he wrote the Dialogus, limited himself to four basic meanings, two of which correspond closely to two of Ockham's definitions. Huguccio added a cautionary note: 'Not all the examples of natural law given here refer to the same meaning of natural law; therefore a prudent reader will be careful to discern which example refers to which meaning. ' 22 The mere multiplication of definitions is thus traditional. The problem is whether Ockham' s specific categories conform to earlier ideas or whether they present, as Pierre d' Ailly wrote later, 'a new and very fine division of natural law.' Let us consider the three types in turn. Natural Law I. This is defined thus : 'In one way natural law is called that which conforms with natural reason, which in no case fails, such as, "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not lie," and things of this sort - in this first way natural law is immutable and invariable and indispensable as at Dist. 5 ante c.1 and Dist. 6 post c. 3. ' 2 J Later we shall need to consider in a little more detail Ockham's views on the relationship between natural law and reason as developed elsewhere in his work, but so far the doctrine put forward is entirely traditional. Gratian himself, in the texts cited by Ockham, identified natural law with the moral precepts of the Old and New Testaments, especially the Decalogue. 'There are in the (old) Law certain moral precepts like "You shall not kill." Moral mandates pertain to natural law and are shown to have never changed.' Gratian also wrote that this immutable natural law existed 'from the beginning of the rational creature' 24 and the Decretists commonly observed that reason enabled men to discern the basic principles of morality that were also set forth in Scripture. Guido de Baisio, in his Rosarium, quoted Huguccio on this: 'Natural law is divine law, namely what is contained in the Mosaic and evangelical law . . . And this law is called natural . . . because natural reason leads and impels us to the things contained in divine law. ' 25 We can therefore agree with McGrade that this first definition of natural law 'is more significant as an acknowledgment of common ground with the previous tradition than as an original contribution. ' 26 Natural Law II. At first glance it may seem different from Ockham's second kind of natural law, for here he tells us that 'in one meaning of the term natural law is not immutable.' Ockham here took up the text of Isidore that we have already quoted, focusing on the words 'the common possession of all

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Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus

things, the one liberty of all.' But existing law recognized private property and servitude, Ockham noted. So common possession and universal liberty could not belong to the immutable natural law of the first definition. Accordingly Ockham put forward his second definition: 'In another sense natural law is that which is to be observed by those who use only natural equity without any human statute or custom. It is called natural because the contrary is against the state of nature as instituted and if men lived according to natural reason or divine law it (the contrary) would not be kept or observed. ' 2 7 Thus this law existed before the Fall and it would have continued to exist if man had not sinned, if he had lived 'according to reason.' It indicated a good and equitable state of affairs, but it was not immutable like the moral precepts of Natural Law 1. It had indeed been modified by the human laws introducing property and servitude. The notion of a changeable natural law has seemed innovative, even subversive, to some modern critics. But in fact, from the time when major commentaries on the Decretum began to appear in the mid-twelfth century, the canonists showed themselves aware that some of Isidore's varieties of natural law could not be considered immutable. A decisive clarification was offered by Rufinus (c 1160). He argued that natural law consisted of 'commands and prohibitions' on the one hand and of 'indications' ('demonstrationes') on the other : 'It commands what is good like "You shall love the lord thy God," it prohibits what is harmful like "You shall not kill," it indicates what is fitting like "They shall have all things in common" or "The one liberty of all" ... ' Rufinus' doctrine came to be very widely accepted among the Decretists and they commonly explained that while the commands and prohibitions of natural law were immutable, the 'indications' could be changed by subsequent human law. 28 The argument was repeated in Guido de Baisio's Rosarium, again in a formulation from Huguccio. Sometimes, too, the canonists - like Ockham specifically identified this kind of natural law with rational equity, as in this definition from the glossa ordinaria of Johannes Teutonicus: 'In a third way natural law is called an instinct of nature proceeding from reason and the law proceeding from such nature is called rational equity and all things are said to be common by this natural law, that is, they are to be shared in time of need.' 29 The last phrase of Johannes Teutonicus may serve to remind us of another aspect of Ockham's doctrine. The relationship between natural law and property was especially important to Ockham because of his involvement in the dispute over Franciscan poverty which gave the original impetus to all his political writings, and he discussed the law that we have called Natural Law n in other works, especially the Opus nonaginta dierum (OND) though without

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developing there the threefold classification of the Dialogus.3° In the OND he explained that, although the natural law favouring community of property could be modified by human law, it could not be totally abolished since in time of necessity all things were still regarded as common. Hence a person in extreme need had a right to use the goods of another. Here again Ockham was following a common canonistic doctrine. It was introduced into Decretist commentary by Huguccio and widely adopted in later works, including the glossa ordinaria, as we have seen. In view of the subsequent development of his argument about the third type of natural law (considered below) it is interesting that Ockham referred to this right of use derived from the second natural law as 'a right of nature that cannot be renounced. '3 1 Self-preservation in some circumstances was not only a right but a duty. There is one more significant point about the second type of natural law where the discussion in the OND augments that of the Dialogus. In the latter work Ockham declared that Natural Law u could be modified for reasonable cause. But in the OND he put the point more emphatically: The right to appropriate, he argued, derived from 'a dictate of natural reason,' given the 'corrupt nature' of fallen man. Kolmel saw a significant innovation here in that Ockham based two kinds of rational natural law on the two states of man, before and after the Fall. The doctrine, Kolmel observed, is not to be found in Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. But it is to be found in Guido de Baisio, commenting on the same Isidorean text as Ockharn, and referring here to Alexander of Hales as his authority: 'Natural law dictates differently as regards common and private property . . . for in the state of nature as well instituted it dictated that all should be common; in the corrupted state of nature it dictated that some things should be private ... according to Alexander. '3 2 Once more Ockham seems to be following faithfully in the footsteps of his predecessors.

Natural Law Ill. Ockham's third kind of natural law is the most complex and interesting one. His definition was based on the authority of Isidore's text at Dist. 1 q, especially on the words 'restitution of money loaned' and 'repelling of force by force.' But the real purpose of the definition was to defend the right of the Roman people to elect the pope and their capacity to renounce that right - the starting point of this whole involved discussion of 'ius naturale.' The definition ran like this: 'In a third way natural law is called that which can be gathered by evident reason from the law of nations or other law or from some human or divine action, unless the contrary is established by consent of those whom the matter concerns. And this can be called natural law by supposition. '33 'Suppositio' is a technical term in Ockham' s logic, but

13 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus he does not seem to be using the word in any specialized sense here. His 'ex suppositione' means simply 'on the supposition that' or 'on condition that.' Thus, supposing that private property has been introduced by human law, then it is evidently reasonable that debts should be paid; and, supposing that violence actually exists (though this is contrary to natural law in the first two senses), then it is evidently reasonable that force should be repelled with force - unless, in either case, the contrary has been agreed. This last definition of Ockham may seem finally to support the view that he did invent a new kind of natural law, a shifting, changing, unstable 'ius naturale' dependent only on the will of the people concerned. But this argument can be misleading unless we understand the sense of 'ius naturale' that Ockham had in mind. So far I have been translating the term as 'natural law' but to continue to do so would be inaccurate. Ockham was really writing here about natural rights. It was the natural rights inherent in individuals or communities that they could freely renounce, not the natural laws that bound them. (A person with a right to receive payment could cancel the debt. A person under attack could waive his right of self-defence.) In this area there was a sort of progression running through the whole passage we have discussed. Ockham' s first definition of 'ius naturale' dealt with moral precepts that were immutably binding, laws in a strict sense.3 4 The second 'ius naturale' still dealt mainly with law, with principles of rational equity. Its provisions could be modified by human law but they gave rise to rights that were sometimes inalienable. Ockham's third 'ius naturale' was concerned much more with rights than with laws and with a class of rights that could be renounced by consent of their holders. The real interest of the text is that it raises, perhaps for the first time, the problem of the alienability of natural rights, which later became of great importance for natural-law theorists. Here, if anywhere, Ockham moved beyond the limits of earlier canonistic discourse.3 5 And yet, even here, most of his definition was composed out of conventional elements. Ockham began by asserting that in the whole mass of human law and human conduct there were embedded principles of 'ius naturale,' discernible by reason. This of course was standard doctrine. According to the common teaching of Roman and canon lawyers, although human laws varied from place to place and time to time and sometimes might be merely arbitrary, often they exemplified principles of rational natural law. Defining the characteristics of human laws, Isidore wrote that they should be 'honorable, just, according to nature [italics mine] ... convenient to time and place, necessary, useful ... ' and on the words 'according to nature' the glossa ordinaria commented 'i.e. natural reason. 'J 6 Among the earlier canonists, Alanus provided a definition that closely approximates that of Ockham : 'Whatever is

14 Brian Tierney naturally equitable, whether in the law of nations or civil law or canon law, is contained in natural law. 'J7 In this same gloss Alanus also offered a doctrine of ' relative' natural law essentially the same as Ockham's 'ius naturale ex suppositione.' Alanus used the technical terms 'ius simplex' and 'ius respectivum' to convey the same idea. For him, simple natural law showed what was equitable in itself, without regard to human laws; 'relative' natural law indicated what was equitable when preceding positive law was taken into account. Thus Alanus pointed out that some of Isidore's definitions of natural law could be accepted only on the presupposition that human law had already instituted private property.38 This was the same point that Ockham would make later. The final element in Ockham's definition asserted that the rights he was discussing could be renounced by consent. Specifically, he argued that the Roman people could renounce their natural right to elect the pope. As to the existence of the right, Ockham asserted that, supposing a ruler was to be appointed, then every community had a natural right to choose its own head. Hence, on the further supposition that Peter had established his chair at Rome, the Roman people had a natural right to elect the pope. But, just as the people transferred their jurisdiction to a ruler when they elected him, so they could transfer the right of election itself. And so the argument reached its conclusion. A suppositional right associated with the third kind of 'ius naturale' could be renounced by consent of the people concerned.J9 As to the originality of all this : The idea that every people had a right to elect their own ruler was becoming common in fourteenth-century political thought, so its occurrence in Ockham is not surprising or particularly significant. Also, earlier canonists had discussed the renunciation of rights in great detail, usually concluding that some rights but not others could be alienated. However, their discussions dealt with rights held under human law, not specifically with natural rights. The underlying principle was that a person could freely renounce a right that was introduced solely for his own advantage but could not do so when some public good was involved. For this reason Hostiensis doubted that the cardinals could renounce their right to elect the pope in spite of the general principle which he cited : 'Anyone can renounce his own right. ' 40 Hostiensis was unusually interested in the specific problem that Ockham raised about the electoral role of the Roman people conceived of as a natural right. Discussing the election of an emperor he declared that the Roman people held this right: 'By the common right of·every corporate body to elect a ruler for itself ... or from natural reason on which right is based.' Hostiensis also considered the residual rights the Roman people would possess in the election of a pope if the college of cardinals should become extinct during a papal

15 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus

vacancy.41 And he discussed in great detail whether the electors of the pope could renounce this right of election. But, as just noted, when he took up this point it was the role of the cardinals rather than that of the Roman people that he considered, and the cardinals held their right by positive canon law. So, here again, Hostiensis did not quite reach the point of discussing the renunciation of natural rights. Ockham did then introduce a new element into natural law theory by overtly raising this issue. To that extent he was an innovator. But it follows from all the preceding discussion that Ockham's theory of 'ius naturale' was for the most part conservative and conventional. De Lagarde was right in emphasizing the concern with rights, but Kolmel was right in pointing out that this concern arose from the circumstances of Ockham's dispute with the papacy rather than from his philosophic voluntarism. Ockham's views on natural law most certainly did not lead him to what Rommen called 'pure moral positivism' indeed to nihilism.' He insisted rather that natural law was ascertainable by right reason and that its moral principles were immutable. His argument provides a typical example of the way in which political ideas often evolve. Ockham set out to use the conventional ideas of his time in a contemporary dispute; but in applying those ideas to his own particular circumstances he made a significant adaption of them. The adaptation has a certain interest for historians of political thought because, as it happens, it raised an issue that would become of great significance in the natural-rights theories of a later age.

I Dialogus 1.8 This passage poses a different question and we can deal with it more briefly. The problem here is one of textual corruption - to determine what Ockham actually wrote. At this point in the Dialogus Ockham's Master claimed to be describing the content of canon law. He asserted that, along with theological doctrines and purely positive laws, the canonistic works included many moral principles that could not be supported by any reason - 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione muniri.' This is the one text of the Dialogus that seems overtly to support a 'voluntarist' doctrine of non-rational moral law. De Lagarde naturally made use of it. In spite of Ockham's statement about 'reason which in no case fails' at III Dialogus 2.3.6, de Lagarde wanted to maintain that Ockham's theory of natural law was founded on basically irrational principles. To be sure, Ockham called the permanent moral content of natural law (Natural Law 1) a 'dictate of reason,' but in fact, de Lagarde argued, no rational justification for this dictate was presented and it had to be accepted as an inde-

16 Brian Tierney monstrable postulate. De Lagarde was right up to a point. Ockham was not arguing that moral precepts could be educed by some chain of reasoning. Rather he asserted that reason could perceive them as first principles per se nota. Here Ockham was following a common scholastic usage. 42 Evidently the word 'reason' was being used in a special sense. Still it would seem perverse for de Lagarde to translate 'dictamen rationis' as 'imperatif irrationel' ... except that he could appeal to this one text of Ockham - 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione muniri' - to support his interpretation. Francis Oakley also quoted the same text in an article maintaining that Ockham formulated an essentially voluntarist theory of law. 4J Kolmel, who found the text inconsistent with his view that Ockham's natural-law theory was basically rational, could only suggest that we ought not to take it literally since it was inconsistent with other passages in Ockham' s work. In fact our text stands out awkwardly as a major obstacle to any coherent, consistent interpretation of Ockham's natural-law theory. Even in his earlier ethical writings, where he did not specifically develop a theory of natural law, Ockham often asserted that right reason was a guide to moral conduct. 44 In his political writings he frequently referred to a rational natural law, and in the Dialogus itself, in the passage already discussed, he found a rational basis for each of his three types of natural law. Such considerations led George Knysh, in an unpublished study,45 to doubt the authenticity of the printed version of Ockham's words (and indeed the whole text of the Dialogus in Goldast is notoriously full of corruptions). It might still be argued that Ockham was not a wholly consistent thinker and that he might well have presented differing views in different, widely scattered parts of his work. We can carry the argument further, however. It is not difficult to show that, within the actual context of the discussion in which it occurs, the reading given in our printed texts is simply impossible. The text is corrupt: the problem is to determine how it can reasonably be amended. The corruption becomes evident if we consider first the broader context of the discussion, then the specific setting of the critical words. At this point in the Dialogus Ockham was concerned to argue that theologians were better qualified than canonists to determine whether any given assertion was orthodox or .contrary to faith. It could be argued on the other side that various definitions of faith were in fact contained in the books of canon law. Ockham responded to this with the rather audacious assertion that canonists were in general not the best exponents of canon law. As for texts of Roman law embedded in the canonistic collections, civilian jurists were more expert; as for nearly all else, theologians and philosophers could provide a more profound insight into the texts. It is at this point that our disputed passage occurs:

17 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus The books of the canonists are nothing but collections of authorities ... in which some purely theological matters are declared and expounded, as in those in which heresies are condemned ... Also certain purely moral principles are transmitted in them which can be defended by no reason [moralia .. . quae nulla possunt ratione muniri] as is plain in many chapters of the Decretum and Decretals. And some things are commanded and prohibited in them which are merely positive, dependent on human will, and which can reasonably be changed or altogether abrogated, as appears at ... di 9 Sicut quidem ... As regards the moral principles which can be supported by no reason, if they are universal ... canonists can in no way excel those who are endowed with natural reason and learned in moral philosophy ... 46

This passage raises several questions. The first one is: What has happened to the whole body of rational natural law which Ockham made so much of elsewhere? It has simply disappeared from this account of the content of church law. It is odd that the Disciple - who is usually full of objections - did not notice the omission, and all the more so since in the dialogue surrounding our passage both Disciple and Master referred, in quite conventional fashion, to a natural law known by reason as a part of canon law. At the outset of the discussion the Disciple acknowledged that theologians might have a better understanding of some aspects of canon law- 'especially those that are derived from theology or natural reason and that are not merely positive. ' After hearing the whole passage quoted above, the Disciple again stated that the Master's argument sounded convincing as regards 'theological matters and imperial laws and those that are purely moral and natural.' But there was no 'moral and natural' law in the description that the Master had just given, if we follow the printed texts. Then the Master himself referred to ' natural law, which is not only found in the Law and the Gospel but also in true moral philosophy.' This is consistent with the view Ockham often expressed elsewhere that moral law was known by reason - hence it would be accessible to moral philosophers - but it seems inconsistent with the specific text we are discussing. But the text is corrupt. The fact will be evident to a reader who approaches it with any elementary knowledge of the canonistic works that the Master claims to be describing. The disputed words - 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione muniri' - occur twice in the passage quoted. At the first occurrence the Master referred to 'moralia which can be supported by no reason, as is plain in many chapters of the Decretum and the Decretals.' But these 'many chapters' do not exist. Gratian and the canonists following him used the term 'moralia' in a quite different sense to designate those teachings of the Old Testament that belonged to natural law and were accessible to human reason .

18 Brian Tierney

(Ockham actually quoted the relevant text of Gratian making this point a little farther on in the present discussion.47) The canonists distinguished the 'moralia' of the Old Testament from its 'ceremonial' precepts precisely because, for these latter, 'no reason can be given. ' 48 Elsewhere in the Dialogus, Ockham called attention to this distinction of the canonists, again quoting Gratian. 49 At the second occurrence of our text, if Ockham actually intended to write 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione muniri' then his argument makes no sense. Ockham asserted that, in expounding these 'moral principles which can be supported by no reason,' the canonists 'in no way excel those who are endowed with natural reason and learned in moral philosophy. ' But if the 'moralia' under discussion had no rational basis then these moral phil•ophers would have had no special competence to discuss them. If we adhere to the printed text Ockham's argument is a simple non sequitur. Clearly Ockham must have intended some different meaning. A final solution of this crux will require a critical study of all the manuscripts of the Dialogus. Meanwhile it is easy to think of various possible emendations. Perhaps the simplest solution, from a paleographical point of view, would be to suppose that Ockham wrote 'moralia quae naturali possunt ratione muniri. ' That would make good sense in the context of the argument and abbreviations for 'naturali' and 'nulla' could be very similar in a fourteenth-century hand. But no manuscript evidence is available to support this reading. There are other solutions however, for which some preliminary manuscript evidence can be offered. Referring to the merely positive laws which were subject to variation, Ockham (according to Goldast) cited Dist. 9 Sicut quidem . But there is no chapter with the incipit Sicut quidem in Dist. 9 or anywhere else in the Decretum . The closest parallel is Dist. 14 c2 (Sicut quedam) . There Pope Leo 1 wrote : 'Sicut quedam sunt que nulla possunt ratione convelli ita multa sunt que aut pro necessitate temporum aut pro consideratione etatum oportet temporari . . . [italics mine].' This is the text Ockham had in mind. A Florence manuscript of the Dialogus gives the correct reference to Dist. 14 c2 and the corresponding reading in Ockham's text, 'moralia que nulla possunt ratione convelli.' Ockham meant to assert here what he asserted so often elsewhere, that moral precepts were immutable, not that they were irrational. It is still not easy to see· how 'convelli' became changed to 'muniri' in the printed editions. But Knysh 's suggestion of an intermediate form - 'mutari' - proves valuable here, for the Florence manu:;cript does in fact give 'mutari' at the second occurrence of the text.5° The most likely sequence of events is this: Ockham originally wrote 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione mutari' on both occasions, giving the sense of his canonistic text correctly, but slightly paraphrasing it as he often did with canonistic citations. Then, in one man1

19 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's

Dialogus

uscript tradition, a creative scribe, noting the discrepancy between Ockham's words and the actual text of Dist. 14 c2, substituted the 'correct' word 'convelli' at the first occurrence of the text. And, in another manuscript tradition, a careless copyist mistranscribed 'mutari' as 'muniri' on both occasions. For a final version of the text we must await H. S. Offler's critical edition of the Dialogus. For the present it seems clear at least that we can abandon the reading 'moralia quae nulla possunt ratione muniri' and the interpretations of Ockham's thought that have been based on it. Finally, given Ockham's well-known views on the relative merits of canonists and theologians, it is a pleasing irony that in this instance a little canonistic learning is needed in order to understand what Ockham, the theologian, was trying to convey to his readers. APPENDIX

After this essay was completed, I was able to check several more manuscripts of the Dialogus. All of them give the readings 'convelli' and 'mutari' in place of the two occurrences of 'muniri' in the printed editions. The reference to Distinctio 14 of the Decretum is given in various forms - as 14, xiv, xiiii, and (incorrectly) as ix. In medieval scripts an Arabic '14' can look very like a Roman 'ix.' It seems that at some stage of the transmission '14' was mistranscribed as 'ix,' the form that appears in the Lyon edition of 1494. Then this was reprinted as '9' in Goldast's edition. The following transcript is from Vatican Vat lat 4097. Variant readings are given from the Goldast edition (G), the Lyon 1494 edition (L), and from the following manuscripts: Florence, Laurenziana Plut xxxv1 dext 11 (F), Frankfurt, Staatsbibl lat quartt 4 (F1), Vatican, Vat lat 4001 (V1), Vat lat 4096 (V2), Vat lat 4098 (V3), Vat lat 7196 (V4), Reg lat 370 (V5). Quedam vero pure moralia traduntur in eis que nulla possunt ratione convelli sicut in capitulis decretorum et decretalium patet innumeris. Quedam autem precipiuntur in eis et prohibentur que sunt pure positiva ex humana dependentia voluntate que pro necessitate et utilitate possunt rationabiliter variari seu penitus abrogari ut patet extra, de consanguinitate et affinitate, c. Non debet et di. 14 Sicut quedam ... Quantum vero ad pure moralia que nulla possunt ratione mutari si universalia sunt nee in memoria nee in intellectu possum canoniste naturali preditos ratione et in philosophia instructos morali

10

20

Brian Tierney

et perfectos in scientia rationali excedere quoquomodo. 1 vero) etiam F1; pure) pura V2 2 possunt ratione] trp. V1; convelli] muniri G L; in capitulis decretorum et decretalium patet innumeris) patet in multis capitulis decretorum et decretalium Fi G L 4 in eis] om. V3; pure) mere F G L, pura V2 5 dependentia voluntate) trp. F1 G L; que] hec autem V1 V5, autem V2 6 seu] et Fi G L V1 8 di. 14] xiv di. c. F1 , di. 9 G, di. ix L V2 V3, di. xiiii V1; quedam) quidem G L V1, quidam V3; vero] om. F V1 V2 V5 ; pure) pura V2, om . G L 9 possunt ratione] trp. F1; mutari] muniri G L 10 in intellectu] om. in V2 V5 11 preditos ratione) trp. Fi G L; instructos morali] trp. F1 G L 12 perfectos in scientia rationali) in scientia rationali perfectos Fi , in scientia naturali perfectos G L, in scientia perfectos naturali V3, perfectos in scientia naturali V1 V2 V5 NOTES

1 J. Miethke Ockhams Weg zur Sozialphilosophie (Berlin 1969) . Miethke provides a good bibliography of earlier work on Ockham. 2 H. Rommen The Natural Law (St Louis 1947) 58 (first published as Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts in 1936) 3 C. Zuckermann 'The Relationship of Theories of Universals to Theories of Church Government in the Middle Ages : A Critique of Previous Views' Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975) 57M4 4 G. de Lagarde La naissance de I' esprit lai'que au declin du moyen-age 1st ed, 6 vols (Paris 1934-6), 2nd ed, 5 vols (Paris-Louvain, 195~63). A similar point of view was presented in M.J. Wilks The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 1964). 5 W . Kolmel 'Die Naturrecht bei Wilhelm von Ockham' Franziskanische Studien 35 (1953) 39-85, and 'Wilhelm Ockham - der Mensch zwischen Ordnung und Freiheit' in Miscellanea mediaevalia, ed P. Wilpert (Berlin 1964) 204-29 ; P. Boehner 'Ockham's Political Ideas' Review of Politics 5 (1943) 462-87; J.B. Morrall 'Some Notes on a Recent Interpretation of William of Ockham's Political Philosophy' Franciscan Studies 9 (1949) 355-69; C.C. Bayley 'Pivotal Concepts in the Political Philosophy uf William of Ockham' Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949) 199-218; H. Junghans Ockham im Lichte der neueren Forschung (Berlin-Hamburg 1968)

21

Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus

6 De Lagarde responded to Kolmel in the second edition of his Naissance . Kolmel reiterated his views in Regimen Christianum (Berlin 1970). 7 A. S. McGrade 'Ockham and the Birth of Individual Rights' in Authority and

Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullmann,

ed, B. Tierney and P. Linehan (Cambridge 1980) 149-65 ; G. Leff William of Ockham : The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester 1975) 616. The problem of relating Ockham's philosophy to his political theory is complicated by the fact that the philosophical works themselves are undergoing major re-evaluations by modern scholars such as Boehner. For a more positive approach to Ockham see, for example, H.A. Oberman The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge Mass 1963) . 8 Decretum Gratiani ... una cum glossis (Venice 1600) gloss ad Dist. 56 c6. The view that Ockham first introduced the concept of individual, subjective rights, advanced by Villey, is unpersuasive. See M. Villey La formation de la pensee juridique moderne (Paris 1962) 226-72 . 9 Breviloquium, ed R. Scholz (Stuttgart 1944) 3.15 , 138 10 De Lagarde Naissance v1 (1946) 122; Leff Ockham 633 11 Inst . 1.2.6; G1. ord. ad Dig. 3.1 .1.3. On positive law in general see G. Le Bras, Ch. Lefebvre, and J. Ram baud L' age classique 1141r1378: Sources et theorie du droit (Paris 1965) 385-96. 12 Summa theologiae 1.2ae 95.2 . (Guido de Baisio quoted this passage in his

Rosarium . )

IV Commentaria ad x3 .34.8; Ockham Octo quaestiones 1.11 in Guillelmi de Ockham opera politica 1, ed H.S. Offler (Manchester 1974) 47. Compare Breviloquium 3.1 107-8. 14 On this text see my Origins of Papal Infallibility (Leiden 1972) 194-5, 226. Compare I Dialogus 1.14 in M. Goldast Monarchia S. Romani imperii 11 (Frank-

13 Innocent

furt 1614) 421.

15 Opus nonaginta dierum c6, Opera politica 1 366

16 See 'Ockham, the Conciliar Theory, and the Canonists' Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954) 41r70 at 45. 17 Leff Ockham xv 18 Ibidem 642 and Heresy in the Later Middle Ages 1 (Manchester 1967) 241 , 246, 249. See the comment in my Infallibility 188. 19 The identification of divine and natural law was very common in Decretist sources. See, for example, Dist. 1 c1, 'Omnes leges aut divinae sunt aut humanae. Divinae natura constant ... ' 20 The argument has an obvious relevance to the actual circumstances of the times - the election of the antipope Nicholas v in Rome and the role of the emperor in the affair.

22

Brian Tierney

21 Dist. 1 q 22 Many Decretist texts on natural law are printed in R. Weigand Die Naturrechtslehre der Legisten und Dekretisten von Irnerius bis Accursius und von Gratian bis Johannes Teutonicus (Munich 1967). For the ones cited above see 148,196,219,255. 23 Goldast Monarchia 932, 'Uno modo dicitur ius naturale illud, quod est conforme rationi naturali quae in nullo casu fallit, sicut est, non moechaberis, non mentieris, et huiusmodi ... ius naturale est immutabile primo modo et invariabile ac indispensabile, dist. 5 § nunc antem et dist. 6 § his ita respondetur ... ' Earlier (Goldast 812) Ockham had noted that God could make exceptions to natural law of this sort. But this was not due to any novel 'voluntarism.' Earlier writers often made the same point with reference to the same Old Testament examples that Ockham cited. For canonistic examples see Weigand Die Naturrechtslehre der Legisten 407-43. 24 Gratian Dist. 5 ante Cl, Dist. 6 post c3 25 Guido de Baisio Rosarium decretorum (Strasbourg 1473) np, Dist. 1 ante c1. For other texts see Weigand's index, sv 'Naturrecht; als (natiirliche) Vernunft.' 26 A.S. McGrade The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge 1974) 178 27 See Goldast Monarchia 933 . The text here is corrupt and we have used the corrected version presented by H.S. Offler in 'The Three Modes of Natural Law in Ockham: A Revision of the Text' Franciscan Studies 37 (1977) 207-17 at 212 : 'Aliter dicitur ius naturale, quod servandum est ab illis. qui sola equitate naturali absque omni consuetudine et constitutione utuntur. Quod ideo dicitur naturale quia contraria est contra statum nature institute et, si homines viverent secundum rationem naturalem aut legem divinam, non esset servandum nee faciendum. lsto modo et non primo modo ex iure naturali omnia sunt communia ... ex quo concluditur quod ius naturale uno modo accepto vocabulo non est immutabile ... 'In using· the awkward double-negative form 'contrarium est contra statum nature' Ockham perhaps had in mind the parallel phrase of Aquinas, 'natura non inducit contrarium' (Summa theol 1.2ae 94.5 ad 3). 28 Weigand Die Naturrechtslehre der Legisten 147, 388-94 29 G1. ord. ad Dist. 1. q 30 See my Medieval Poor Law (Berkeley-Los Angeles 1959) 32-5, and for a more detailed treatment, G. Couvreur Les pauvres ont-ils des droits? (Rome 1961). 31 Opus nonaginta dierum c65, Opera politica n 577-8 32 Rosarium ad Dist. 1 q. See Summa .Fratris Alexandri IV (Quaracchi 1948) 348. The relevant text is usually attributed to John de la Rochelle. 33 Goldast Monarchia 933 ; Offler 'The Three Modes of Natural Law in Ockham' 213: 'Tertio modo dicitur ius naturale illud, quod ex iure gentium vel alio aut ex

23 Natural law and canon law in Ockham's Dialogus

34

35

36 37 38

39

40

41 42

43

44

aliquo facto divino vel humano evidenti ratione colligitur, nisi de consensu illorum, quorum interest, contrarium statuatur. Quod poterit vocari ius naturale ex suppositione .. . ' Of course, in a broad sense, every natural law can be said to imply a right. A precept such as 'You shall not steal' implies that one's neighbour has a right to his property. Ockham understood this, as did the canonists, but he was not concerned with the point in the present discussion. The whole problem of Ockham's contribution to the growth of natural-rights theories still awaits a definitive treatment. See the comments of R. Tuck Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge 1979) 22-4. G1 . ord. ad Dist. 4 c2 Weigand Die Naturrechtslehre der Legisten 228 Weigand Die Naturrechtslehre der Legisten 228 : 'Item sciendum [est] quod [et] est ius naturale simplex et respectiuum. Simplex quod sine precedenti positione juris positivi demonstrat aliquid equum esse quale est istud "deum diligere", "omnia esse communia". Respectiuum est quod demonstrat aliquid equum habito respectu ad precedens ius positiuum, quale est hoc : " adquisitio eorum que celo" etc.; nisi enim apponatur prius aliquem hominem habere proprium non erit istud equum "acquisito" etc.' Guido de Baisio quoted an analogous doctrine from Laurentius in his Rosarium ad Dist. 1 c2. Laurentius taught that some laws were 'bona et equa simpliciter,' others 'equa respectu alterius iuris quod est iniquum vel minus equum.' This point does not seem to have been raised before in discussions on natural law, but in the background was a large body of medieval speculation on alienation of sovereignty. See P.N. Riesenberg Inalienability of Sovereignty in Medieval Political Thought (New York 1956). Hostiensis Commentaria ad Decretales (Venice 1581). For a general discussion see Com ad x 3.31 .16 112v, and for the cardinals in particular, Com. ad x 1.9.10 91v. Com ad x 1.6.34 6or; ad x 1.6.6 38v III Dialog us 2.1.15; Goldast Monarchia 884. Compare Thomas Aquinas 'The precepts of natural law are to practical reason what the first principles of demonstrations are to speculative reason' (Summa theol. 1.2ae 94.2.3). De Lagarde, Naissance v1 (1946) 144 nu; F. Oakley 'Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition' Natural Law Forum 6 (1961) 65-83 at 68; Kolmel 'Naturrecht' 54, n67 D. W. Clark 'William of Ockham on Right Reason' Speculum 48 (1973) 13-36; L. Urban 'William of Ockham's Theological Ethics' Franciscan Studies 33 (1973) 310-50; K. McDonnell 'Does William of Ockham Have a Theory of Natural Law?' Franciscan Studies 34 (1974) 383-92

24 Brian Tierney 45 G.D. Knysh 'Political Authority as Property and Trusteeship in the Works of William of Ockham' (PhD thesis, London University 1968). Knysh suggested that for 'muniri' we should read 'mutari. ' On this see below. 46 Goldast Monarchia 405 (the Dialogus was also printed in an edition of Lyons 1494; but Goldast's version was reprinted from this text. Hence the two printed versions do not provide two independent witnesses) : 'libri canonistarum non sunt nisi quaedam collation es ex auctoritatibus ... in qui bus quaedam theologica pure explicantur et declarantur sicut in illis in quibus haereses damantur ... Quaedam vero pure moralia traduntur in eis, quae nulla possum ratione muniri, sicut patet in multis capitulis decretorum et decretalium. Quaedam autem praecipiuntur in eis et prohibentur quae sunt mere positiva ex humana voluntate dependentia, quae pro necessitate et utilitate possum rationabiliter variari et penitus abrogari ut patet ... di 9 sicut quidem ... Quantum vero ad moralia quae nulla possum ratione muniri, si universalia sunt, nee in memoria nee in intellectu, possunt canonistae naturali ratione praeditos et in philosophia morali instructos et in scientia naturali perfectos excedere quoquo modo.' 47 Ibidem 406 ho, citing Gratian's comment at Dist 6 post c3 48 Gt ord. ad Dist 6 post c3 49 III Dialogus 2.2.15; Goldast Monarchia 915 : 'moralia mandata ad naturale ius spectant atque nonnullam imitationem recepisse monstrantur.' But again the text is corrupt. For 'nonnullam imitationem' read 'nullam immutationem. ' 50 Ms Florence, Laurenziana Plut xxxv1 dext 11 f3ra . The same readings ('convelli' and 'mutari') occur in ms Frankfurt, Staatsbibl lat quart 4. I am grateful to Dr Rega Wood and Professor H. S. OHier for supplying transcripts from these two manuscripts .

ANTONIO SANTOSUOSSO

LEONARDO 'RRUNI REVISITED : A REASSESS~ OF HANS BARON'S THESIS ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE CLASSICS IN THE LAUDATIO FLORENTINAE URBIS The Laudatio Florentinae Urbis by Leonardo Bruni engaged Hans Baron's attention for many years. It was the subject of a number of his studies; 1 it was central to his book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance; 2 and it was the focus of a later important article.3 In this last-mentioned article, published in 1968, Baron related some of the themes of the Laudatio to its Greek source, Publius Aelius Aristides' Panathenaicus. Baron's aim was to connect the imitation of classical sources to his thesis that the appearance of civic humanism coincided with the turmoil generated by Giangaleazzo Visconti' s threat to Florence. According to the German historian the Laudatio was, after the Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, the most important piece of writing of Bruni's youth. 4 The panegyric revolves, said Baron, around a twofold thesis: the greatness of ancient Rome is her republican freedom; Florence as the heir of republican Rome is also her disciple and successor in the struggle for freedom in contemporary Italy. Through this thesis Baron conveyed a number of ideals fundamental to the history of both civic humanism and humanism as a whole. In an approach reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt, and indirectly of another great Swiss historian, 0 . C. L. de SismQDdi, Baron attributed a number of important 'firsts' to the slim booklet that Bruni wrote in the summer of 140.3 or summer of 1404.5 The Laudatio is 'our major document' of the Florentine reaction to the threat that Milan posed to Florence in the later 1.390s and early 1400s. 6 It is the first work to reproduce 'the total view' of a city from both a geographic and an historical perspective7 and 'the first attempt to discover the secret laws of optics and perspective. ' 8 It is a presentation imbued with mathematical calculation, geographic regularity, and proportion - an approach quite different from any of those advanced in the Middle Ages.9 The work is also witness to the rise of a school of thought - which would reach its climax with

26 Antonio Santosuosso

Machiavelli and Guicciardini 10 - that maintained that checks and balances are necessary to prevent the misuse of constitutional power, and that civic virtue in a republican system cannot exist if the citizens are not free and not able to accede to political office. 11 Finally, the Laudatio also lays claim to Florentine cultural leadership in ltaly 12 and it is 'the most interesting source' for the history of a period when rhetoric, classicism, and new Greek studies came to the fore. It testifies to the emerging importance of Greek, and it is the first work to profit 'substantially' from Greek. 1 J Writing not long after the publication of The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance Cesare Vasoli readily accepted Baron's interpretation. 1 4 Baron, says Vasoli, could have strengthened his argument by adding more comments on the political meaning of the Laudatio and by making a more direct connection between the historical conditions and the development of Florentine society. 1 5 Yet the Laudatio is certainly an important document on the historical origins of civic humanism and on the relationship of Renaissance culture with the ideal republican city. Vasoli also emphasized another aspect of the Laudatio: the work linked the generation nurtured on the ideals of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Luigi Marsili, and Coluccio Salutati with the young intellectuals influenced by the teachings of the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. 16 In the introduction to a recent English translation of Bruni's work Ronald G. Witt has reiterated the importance of that work. 1 7 Witt looks at the panegyric mainly from the political angle. With an eye to the developments of subsequent centuries (especially the eighteenth, it seems) he sees the Laudatio as the combination of a variety of ideas: it presents a republican appraisal of ancient history; it defines liberty as self-government; it puts forward the idea of career open to talent; it stresses the psychological role of liberty in human creativity; and it praises the virtue of rule by the middling classes. 1 s Witt's main emphasis, and more original analysis, is on Bruni' s belief that 'political liberty is only possible where citizens obey and rule themselves.' 19 It is, Witt says, a concept which goes back to Cicero. The Roman writer believed that monarchy was incompatible with liberty and that the fundamental basis of liberty was equality before the law and equality of basic political rights. 20 Although others had used some aspects of Cicero's viewpoint earlier, Bruni was the first to combine all its elements in a new form. 21 The Laudatio is, Witt maintains, 'an original work of seminal importance in the history of republicanism. ' 22 The only note discordant with the recent chorus of approval on the importance of Bruni's Laudatio has been raised by Jerrold Seigel in an article written in 1966. 2J Besides challenging the dating of the work (1400 or 1401 for Seigel, summer of 1403 or summer of 1404 for Baron) 24 he has argued

27 Leonardo Bruni revisited that the sentiments expressed in the Laudatio which at the surface seem 'civic' are on the whole conventional. Politics, he says, was never Bruni's 'major concern.' 'His career was that of a practicing rhetorician, and his association with Florence was formed in terms of it.' He wrote the Laudatio because he wanted to further his candidacy as chanceilor. 2 5 Unlike Seigel, Baron, Vasoli, and Witt counter the old argument that the Laudatio is little more than mere imitation of its Greek model, Aristides'. Panathenaicus, and is thus devoid of originality. Baron, creative and daring in so many of his statements, did not really dispel this accusation; his article on the topic treats the subject quickly and incompletely and does not offer an elaborate and systematic comparison of the structure and the text of the Laudatio and its classical model. 26 The fact is that as long as we do not know exactly what Bruni copied, how he copied it, and what he added to his panegyric, we cannot be completely sure of the validity and importance of the Laudatio. In other words, an analysis of the Laudatio and the Panathenaicus is essential both to assess the validity of Baron's thesis and to shed, in the process, some light on the often repeated assertion that inspiration from and imitation of the classics were fundamental to humanist works. The Laudatio Florentinae Urbis was written when Bruni was about thirtythree years of age at the moment of the 'crisis,' if we accept Baron's interpretation, that led to the transition from rhetorical to civic humanism and is a key document in this transition. 2 7 However, the panegyric is even more important because it is an early evidence of the pervasive influence of Manuel Chrysoloras on Bruni's generation. 28 Chrysoloras (1350-1415) was the founder of Greek studies in Italy. After a brief stay in Greece in 1394 he came back to Italy in 1397, at Salutati's invitation, to teach Greek in Florence. He remained there until 1400 exercising an enormous influence on the first truly humanist generation - such people as Bruni, Niccolo Niccoli, Palla Strozzi, and Pier Paolo Vergerio. 29 Chrysoloras' Florentine house became 'a sanctuary for study,' as Eugenio Garin says.3° He gained for himself the reputation of being a man of great wisdom, scholarship, and competence and left behind him a heritage which would shape the course of the Italian Renaissance. Probably it is through him that such people as Bruni and Vergerio inherited their reverence for the classical past of Greece. Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati provided them with the glories of Rome, Chrysoloras with the splendour of ancient Athens. The model that Bruni chose for his panegyric was Aristides' Panathenaicus, a work which was probably delivered in AD 155.31 Other possible alternative models include Isocrates' Panathenaicus and Pericles' speech on the Athenians fallen in war in Book II of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. Neither, however,

28 Antonio Santosuosso

was an ideal model. Isocrates' work offered much less than Aristides': the Panathenaicus is the weakest of Isocrates' compositions. Completed at a very late age, it shows the handicaps under which it was written - 'at a time of life when Isocrates lacked but three years of having lived a century and when Isocrates was in a state of infirmity such that anyone else similarly affected so far from attempting to write a discourse of his own, would not even be willing to listen to one worked out and submitted by another. 'J 2 Moreover, the topic itself - Athens' pan-Hellenism against Sparta's parochialism - was not well suited to the ideals Bruni wanted to convey in his writing. Pericles' speech is beautiful in its conciseness and eloquent in its vigour;JJ yet it was unsuitable as the focus of the speech did not quite match the issues which faced Florence in the early fifteenth century. Pericles' words were a call to duty to continue the war against Sparta; Bruni's were an afterthought on a danger gone by, not a danger yet to be met. Aristides' work was ideal. Publius Aelius Aristides was born in Hadriani, northern Mysia, in AD 11.7.H He was an author celebrated in his own time and much less by posterity. He tried to conform to the highest canon of Atticism and to imitation of Demosthenes in his speeches. Moreover, most of his works reflect his deep religious intensity. The Panathenaicus was written as a reflection on a particular change in the history of Athens. After the defeat at Chaeronea in 338 BC Athens never regained her political and military importance. However, by Hadrian's time, about five centuries later, she experienced a return of the old glory not on the battlefield but among contemporary intellectuals. In a world dominated by Rome, Athens became the centre of the culture of the time. It was during this period that a new generation of sophists such as Dio Chrysostom and Aristides proclaimed again their faith in Hellenism and in Athens as the nourisher and educator of the whole of Greece and eventually of mankind. A form through which their praise of the heritage of ancient Athens was conveyed was the panegyric. The Panathenaicus, which was written in AD 150, is an example of this proHellenistic trend and of the genre.35 The French scholar Andre Boulanger has recently had very few kind words for the Panathenaicus : he considers it to be a fairly shallow work, showing no great erudition in its historical sections, totally devoid of originality, and simply synthesizing all the commonplaces of the genre.3 6 The most recent student of the treatise, Joseph W. Day, however, does not share Boulanger's views. He sees in the Panathenaicus not only the influence of the great historians of the past but also a product of the local Athenian tradition which survived 'in some oral or other vital form . '37

29 Leonardo Bruni revisited

Day might be correct in his assessment of the work as a most important document of the popular tradition in Athens. Yet from anesthetic viewpoint one cannot but share Boulanger' s view that the Panathenaicus is nothing else but a mediocre literary work. However, from this minor product of a rather secondary figure Bruni was able to create a small masterpiece. Bruni's opening of the panegyric is clearly patterned upon the Panathenaicus . The outline of the proems of both works follow the same guidelines. Both insist that the task before them is hard; that their eloquence will have a difficult time doing justice to such a splendid topic; and that they could have easily chosen a different order of discussion of the various themes. Bruni also uses phrases which he clearly translates from Aristides: Panathenaicus .. . many have often said that it is not easy to find a starting point ... [Behr 1 3 (7 )13 8

Laudatio . . . it is not an easy thing to say which subject is to be treated first. [Kohl 136 (proem, 14-15, 233)]

. . . let none of you condemn the whole attempt for rashness and simplicity if we undertook a contest so obviously great ... [Behr 9 (3)]

.. . this city is of such admirable excellence that no one can match his eloquence with it. · [Kohl 135 (proem, 15-16, 232)]

Yet the emphasis of the authors is different. Aristides is preoccupied with showing that he is going to do what previous orators have not done - he is giving a picture of the whole topic, not just a discussion of sections of it. Bruni adopts a more humble approach. He feels less sure of his talent; yet 'we have seen several good and important men who have spoken concerning God himself, whose glory and magnificence the speech of the most eloquent man cannot capture even in the smallest degree.' However, 'this vast superiority' has not kept them from 'trying to speak insofar as they are able about such an immense magnitude. Therefore, I too shall seem to have done enough if, marshalling all competence, expertise, and skill that I have eventually acquired after so much study, I devote my all to praising this city, even though I clearly understand that my ability is such that it can in no way be compared with the enormous splendor of Florence,' [Kohl 135-6 (proem 16-18, 232- 3)]. A discussion of the geographical setting of the cities follows the proem in both works. Aristides and Bruni introduce the topic with words which are fairly similar :

30 Antonio Santosuosso Panathenaicus I think that I should not shame you, if I appear to speak as if on behalf of my own city and as a participant of some of its virtues. For the nature of our country will appear to agree with the nature of its people. The land is not now, nor was it ever a proper home for other people; nor ought its people to have inhabited another land instead of this, nor did they ever change it, but they remained where they were. [Behr 15(8)]

Laudatio As we may see several sons with so great a resemblance to their fathers that they show it obviously in their faces, so the Florentines are in such harmony with this very noble and outstanding city that it seems they could never have lived anywhere else. Nor could the city, so skillfully created, have had any other kind of inhabitants. [Kohl 1.36 (1, 15-16, 2.3.3))

The key point in both Aristides and Bruni is that the inhabitants of Athens and Florence are in full harmony with their physical setting. Moreover, Bruni clearly follows Aristides' guidelines in emphasizing the central position of Florence in relationship with her territory : Panathenai.cus ... as if to the bearing of a shield, all things Greek from every extreme are directed to this centrally located land, and on all sides Greeks encircle its territory, some from the sea, some nearby on the mainland, as is meet for the common hearth of the race . . . The city occupies the same position in its territory as the land does in Greece; for it lies in the very centre of a central land, inclining only so far to the sea that the harbours show clearly whose they are. And as a third centrality, there rises clear aloft through the midst of the city, what was the old city and is now the present Acropolis, like a mountain peak, not to be the last part of the city, but so that all the remaining body of the city encloses it, where the high and central point coincide, a thoroughgoing ~dornment and the final boundary marker of the good position of the land. For as on a

Laudatio The city itself stands in the center, like a guardian and lord, while the towns surround Florence on the periphery, each in its own place. A poet might well compare it to the moon surrounded by the stars, and the whole vista is very beautiful to the eyes. Just as on a round buckler, where one ring is laid around the other, the innermost ring loses itself in the central knob that is the middle of the entire buckler. So here we see the regions lying like rings surrounding and enclosing one another. Within them Florence is first, similar to the central knob, the center of the whole orbit. The city itself is ringed by walls and suburbs. Around the suburbs, in turn, lies a ring of country houses, and around them the circle of towns . The whole outermost region is enclosed in a still larger orbit and circle. Between the towns there are castles - these safest of refuges for the peasants

31 Leonardo Bruni revisited shield, where circular layers of hide have been put on in succession to one another, the Acropolis is the fifth at the boss, the fairest of all, which concludes the whole sequence: if Greece is in the centre of the whole earth, and Attica in the centre of Greece, and the city in the centre of its territory, and again its namesake in the centre of the city. [Behr 21 (15-16)]

- with their towers reaching into the sky. [Kohl 144-5 (1, 3-15, 140)]

... their [suburbs'] beauty and adornment have become the beauty and adornment of the city. For they have the same meaning that gateways do for palaces, and stars enclosing the moon, one poet would say ... [Behr 17 (11)]

The relationship between the Laudatio and the Panathenaicus is then literal in a number of instances, for instance, in the image of the buckler, the analogy of the stars surrounding the moon, and the series of areas enclosing the city with a number of concentric circles as the accompanying diagrams show. What Bruni has done is to keep intact the conceptual structure provided by Aristides and to substitute Florence and her surrounding territory for Athens and her territory. Bruni also repeats arguments similar to Aristides' when he switches to the description of the city from the viewpoint of the climate: Panathenaicus It [Athens] has received so proportioned a lot in its atmosphere overhead and the blendings of its seasons, that could it be said with propriety, it would be a thing to be prayed for. For it is free of everything unpleasant; and equally while it shares in every good faculty, it has escaped whatever disagreeable qualities attend each of these . . . For as far away as one stands from the city, moving in this or that direction, he finds either more heat

Laudatio This city was set neither in the high mountains, so that it would present itself impressively, nor in a broad plain of fields, so it would be open on every side. Rather, this city has both advantages according to the most prudent and best opinion, for one cannot live in high mountains without intemperate climate, without harsh winds, without storms, without great discomfort and hazard to the inhabitants; nor are immense and vast plains without the drench-

32 Antonio Santosuosso

Panathenaicus

Acropolis B .Athens c Athenian territory o Greece E earth

A

or cold than necessary, so that in this spot alone is there deficiency where excess is painful and where deficiency is more advantageous . But such is the abundance of good fortune, that the cities which hold Ionia and are colonies of this city seem to enjoy the best climate of all the other races, as if they had shared in some other natural attribute. Therefore one would not speak of the northerly and southerly sectors by name, or of the other two regions of the land. But without qualification the region on the one side of it can be defined as north, and on the other side as south, and east and west whatever is upland and lowland, and it can be said that the territory itself is as it were at the crossway of all points, a kind of common ground, where all the sectors are blended, beneath, one might say, the very Acropolis of heaven

Laudatio

Palazzo della Signoria B Florence c walls and suburbs o country houses E towns F larger orbit

A

ing rays of the sun, without impurity of air, without a hazy humidity. Therefore, having avoided these potential discomforts, Florence very prudently was situated where it is midway between the dangerous extremes (a proven principle for all things), both remote from the evils of the mountains and distant from the dangers of the plains. Hence, though Florence knows both kinds of environments, it possesses a mild and pleasing climate. The mountains of Fiesole face north like a kind of bulwark for the city and repel the immense force of the cold and the headlong rush of the strong northern wind. To the east, where the force of the wind is less, the hills are smaller. And in the other directions, the fields lay open to the sun and to the southern breezes. Therefore, in the area of the city there is a great

33 Leonardo Bruni revisited and the empire of Zeus, and which in fact is the lot of Athena and a place proper to her deeds and nurslings. [Behr 23-5 (18--19)]

tranquility and a fine climate, so whenever you leave Florence, in whatever direction you set out, you meet either a greater cold or a hotter sun. [Kohl 137 (1, 40-16, 233-4)]

Aristides' account is dry and less imaginative; Bruni's is poetical and powerfully evocative, but basically they are the same. Yet even in these apparent translations ad sententiam Bruni departed significantly from the model. For instance, the introduction of the topic itself shows that the authors have different ideas in mind. For Aristides it is the first statement on a major point of what constitutes Athens' superiority over the rest of Greece - the indigenous character of her population. For Bruni it is the first step towards the presentation of his city from a physical viewpoint. On this he will tread waters uncharted by Aristides. Bruni dwells with dramatic eloquence on the beauty of his Florence. The reader sees developing before his eyes the image of a magnificent city alive with throngs of happy people, meeting in public squares, conversing and interacting with each other [Kohl 137-42 (1)] . Around them you do not see the filth you might find elsewhere, for the city is proud of its cleanliness - a quality that is not just a surface virtu~lm.t a most important characteristic of the Florentine population. The river which crosses the site is an avenue of 'utility' and an image of 'pleasure' [Kohl 139 (1, 23-5, 235)]. But the most important feature of Florence is, besides her cleanliness, the magnificence of her buildings. In the manner of a man who was a spokesman for the ruling class and himself soon to be member of it, Bruni dedicates the longest part of this section to the houses of the men of means, both in the city and in the countryside: .. . I return to the homes of the private citizens, which were designed, built, and decorated for luxury, size, respectability, and especially for magnificence. Indeed, what could be more pleasant and more beautiful to the sight than the entrance courts, halls, pavements, banquet halls, and other interior rooms of these homes? And how beautiful it is to see the well-ordered spaciousness of many of the homes and to view the curtains, arches, the panelled ceilings and richly decorated hung ceilings, and (as in many homes) the summer rooms separated from the winter ones. In these living quarters you find beautiful chambers decorated with fine furniture, gold, silver, and brocaded hangings and precious carpets. But am I not silly to go on enumerating these things? Even if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron, I could not possibly describe all the magnificence, wealth, decoration, delights, and elegance of these homes. [Kohl 140 (1, 18--29, 236)]

34 Antonio Santosuosso And as Homer writes of the snow that it falls thickly on the mountains and hills and covers the ridges of the mountains and finally the fertile fields, in like fashion handsome buildings cover the entire region outside the city and all the mountains, the hills and the plains, so that they seem more to have fallen from heaven than to have been constructed by the hands of men. How magnificent, how well designed, how well decorated are these buildings! Indeed, these country houses are even more spacious than those in Florence, for they were designed and constructed on very spacious sites and greater care was taken to make them comfortable and pleasant. As a result, no one who lives in them lacks room, or colonades, or gardens, or stands of trees. What can I possibly say of the rooms and banquet halls, which are more magnificent and ornate than anything imaginable? And near these homes you find wooded groves, flowery meadows, pleasant river banks, sparkling fountains , and - best of all - the nature of the place itself fit for delight. Indeed, the very hills seem to laugh and to exude a certain joyfulness, of which visitors never seem to tire and which never grows stale. [Kohl 141 (1, 19-34, 237)] In spite of what Seigel says, Bruni was an intellectual in whom political motivation was always uppermost. It is not surprising then that he should conclude his section on the architecture of the city with the building which symbolizes its political power - Palazzo della Signoria: To be sure, in the center of the city is a tall and handsome palace of great beauty and remarkable workmanship. This fine building bespeaks by its very appearance the purposes for which it was constructed. Just as in a large fleet it is an easy matter to pick out the flagship that carries the admiral who is the leader and head over the other captains and their ships, so in Florence everyone immediately recognizes that this palace is so immense that it must house the men who are appointed to govern the state. Indeed, it was so magnificently conceived and looms so toweringly that it dominates all the buildings nearby and its top stands out above those of the private houses. Indeed, I do not think that I ought to call this building simply a 'fortress ' but, rather, 'fortress of the fortress .' The minute you step away from the city walls you are surrounded on all sides by many buildings, so that the latter ought to be called the 'city' while this thing surrounded by walls could be more correctly be called the 'fortress.' [Kohl 141 (1, 7-19, 237)]

35 Leonardo Bruni revisited Exclamations of visual pleasure are not the prerogatives of Florence's inhabitants but of any visitor approaching the city. This is an idea that originates from the Panathenaicus : 'Since this is the form and situation of the land, it is not easy to describe with what delight, charm, and pleasure merchants or those who have come to learn or on business from time to time put into port, except in so far as one should call them as witnesses. For thus in every way the soul is first purified and exalted, indeed in preparation for the spectacle of Athens, as if receiving preliminary initiation in some sacred rites .' [Behr 17(12)) Yet while the initial wonder of the visitor of Aristides' Athens seems an end in itself, Bruni uses the wonder of his city's guest as a prelude to Florence's military power: Surely anyone who comes to Florence is amazed when at a distance he sees from the top of a mountain the massive city, beautiful and splendid, surrounded by many country houses. Nor does Florence's beauty at a distance become sordid when you come close, which happens when something is not really beautiful. But all things are so arranged and gleam with such true beauty that the closer you come to this city, the greater grows your appreciation of its magnificence. Thus the villas are more beautiful than the distant panorama, the suburbs more handsome than the villas, and the city itself more beautiful than its suburbs. Hence, when newcomers enter the city they forget the beauties and architecture of the outlying area because they are so stunned in their admiration for the splendor of the city itself. [Kohl 142 (1, 36-8, 237-8)) As soon as they have seen the city and have inspected with their own eyes its great mass of architecture and the grandeur of its buildings, its splendor and magnificence, the lofty towers, the marble churches, the domes of the basilicas, the splendid palaces, the turreted walls, and the numerous villas, its charm, beauty, and decor, instantly everyone's mind and thought change so that they are no longer amazed by the greatest and most important exploits accomplished by Florence. Rather, everyone immediately comes to believe that Florence is indeed worthy of attaining dominion and rule over the entire world. For this reason one can understand how extraordinarily wondrous this city is whose beauty and magnificence cannot be adequately comprehended or related in words. For just as actual sight has more effect than a report, so opinion is inferior to a report. [Kohl 143 (1, 32-5, 238-9))

36 Antonio Santosuosso This description of the city is striking for a number of reasons. First, it embodies values which will be typical of the entire Renaissance civilization the sense of moderation and sobriety and of proportion, balance, and geometrical regularity: 'Do nothing,' he says, 'for ostentation nor allow hazardous or useless display, but instead use great moderation and follow solid proportion' [Kohl 137 (1, 37-9, 233)]. Although the idea that all things fit together in a harmonious whole is found also in the Panathenaicus, Bruni elevates this classical concept to new heights. It is the leit motiv of his whole presentation: 'all things are so arranged and gleam with such true beauty that the closer you come to this city, the greater grows your appreciation of its magnificence, [Kohl 142 (1, 2-4, 238)]. This concept will reappear many times throughout the panegyric but never more strongly than in the presentation of the Florentine constitution. The topic of cleanliness, which is completely absent in Aristides, also points to a more sensitive historical approach on the part of Bruni. Cleanliness was a major problem in every early ·modern European city where most hygienic facilities were often missing, where baths were normally unknown, domestic animals roamed the streets, and toilet facilities, if any, were primitive. The most striking part of Bruni's presentation of the city is, however, his portrayal of the new sense of power and prestige which seems to have been common in Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century. This is the time when Brunelleschi's Dome (1430s) would replace Giotto's Campanile (1330s) as the symbol of the city's political presence.J9 During Giotto's time Florence had been a city proud of her merchants and craftsmen. The linear structure of the Campanile had well reflected these values. Brunelleschi's Dome, sprawling in the centre of the city and dominating the countryside, became instead the embodiment of Florence's control beyond the perimeter of her walls and over the contado. It was to be the image of Florence as an imperial power. This image is clearly found in Bruni's message, twenty-seven years before the building of the Dome, a message which will be repeated at many levels of the Florentine experience from the imbued sense of governing in her ruling class to the claims of Florence to be a state devoid of political subservience either to the emperor or to the pope. 4° Bruni also follows Aristides in his discussion of the Florentine territory as provider of resources; yet he emphasizes different aspects. Aristides presents Athenian achievement not on the basis of soil fertility (for its territory is 'barren land') but on its mineral resources ('veins of silver can be seen like drops passing through the whole mountain district' [Behr 27(23)]) and on the discovery of crops [Behr 31-7 (31-8)]. The emphasis on crops is especially important in Aristides because the Athenians made of their discovery a gift

37 Leonardo Bruni revisited to other men so that they - 'the sons of the Gods' and 'the foster-children of the Gods' - became 'the ancestors of the common way of life of all men' [Behr 37(38)]. The Laudatio drops any reference to the gods and emphasizes instead 'the abundance and quality of the crops' and the 'large harvest of the fields .' The Florentine countryside 'gives this [their own] population together with the populous city not only the necessities of life but even makes them independent of outside help either for necessities or even for luxuries' [Kohl 145 (1, 16, 17, 22-4, 240)]. Within Aristides' structure, Bruni dwells on aspects more typical of the Florentine economy: the Athenian territory is barren land; the Florentine landscape is the supplier of all the necessities of its inhabitants. The next major section in the Panathenaicus is dedicated to the honour that the gods have shown towards Athens [Behr 37-43 (39-48)]. There is no similar counterpart in the Laudatio. Bruni is usually silent on divine help or, if he mentions it, he does it briefly or in passing. This trait distinguishes him sharply not only from the very religious Aristides but even more from his medieval predecessors. In the next section, which deals with the population, Bruni follows again the conceptual structure of the Panathenaicus . The opening of the argument seems to be patterned upon the Greek model: Panathenaicus

Laudatio

... this is like beginning to praise a feast from the dessert. Now I shall tell of the most native and greatest fruit and adornment of the land, that which comprises and contains all of its endowments. [Behr 27(24)]

Occupied with describing the other beauty and magnificence of this great city, I had almost forgotten that I should really be talking about the people, the size of the population, and the virtue, industry, and kindness of the citizen-body, which is Florence's greatest treasure and among the first things that ought to come to mind. [Kohl 148--9 (1, 21-5, 243)]

However, crucial differences appear even at this state; Aristides' words ('most native and greatest fruit') herald his message: Athens has primacy as 'the first country of man' because 'like spring-water, the Athenian race rose from the bosom of the earth, taking its beginning from itself' [Behr 29(26)]. The Laudatio, hinting instead at the more political tones of Bruni's panegyric, emphasizes the 'kindness of the citizen-body' ('humanitate civium'). Here Bruni departs significantly from his Greek model.

38 Antonio Santosuosso The political message is (Baron is completely correct on this) an important part of Bruni's work. The 'race' ('genus') of the Florentines, says Bruni, originates from Rome - a city from which 'come more examples of virtue than all other nations have been able to produce until now.' Rome was a city known for the nobility of its people, its wealth, grandeur, magnificence, and dominion over all people 'on this side of the ocean.' Therefore, Florence, as the descendant of Rome, has 'by hereditary right' dominion over the entire world : 'From this it follows that all wars that are waged by the Florentine people are most just, and this people can never lack justice in its wars since it necessarily wages war for the defense or recovery of its own territory [Kohl 150 (n, 15-16, 26, 29-33, 244)). The issue of dominion over the rest of the world is secondary to Bruni's argument. What is of main interest to him is the republican system which the Florentines have inherited from their founders. Florence was founded by republican Rome when the Roman people were free and in possession of virtue and skill in arms : 'For this reason I think something has been true and is true in this city more than in any other; the men of Florence especially enjoy perfect freedom and are the greatest enemies of tyrants' [Kohl 151 (n, 23-6, 245)). Leaving aside the na·ive and boastful assumption of Florentine dominion over the world, this is one of the more original sections of the Laudatio, even if we give credit to the fact that, as it shall be explained later, Bruni owes part of the idea to Coluccio Salutati. Yet, here too Bruni might have received inspiration from the Panathenaicus. Aristides also had mentioned that among the gifts that Athena gave to the Athenians was 'a form of government free from the rule of one man' [Behr 39 (43)] . The next section on the generosity shown towards political exiles comes as a surprise not for what Bruni adds to the Panathenaicus but for what he fails to do. Aristides' words are a proud testimonial to his city's generosity towards those banished from other Greek states. It is an idea which Bruni repeats almost word for word:

Panathenaicus

Laudatio

The greatest and most universal of their benefactions was the reception and consolation of unfortunates from every place. For there is no race in Greece, one might say, which is unfamiliar with this city, and on occasion did not dwell here. But cities and races came and found refuge in it; and

Because of Florence's reputation for generosity, all those who were exiled from their homeland and uprooted by seditious plots, or dispossessed on account of the envy of their fellow citizens, have always come to Florence as to a safe haven and unique sort of refuge. Hence there is not

39 Leonardo Bruni revisited of individuals almost all the most famous men. [Behr 45 (50)] ... all the Greeks thought that they were secured by two anchors, a true belief: each privately called his original land his country, but all named this their common home, and ranked the former second, and the latter first. [Behr 49 (54)]

one in the whole of Italy who does not consider himself to possess dual citizenship, the one of the city to which he naturally belongs, the other of the city of Florence. As a result Florence has indeed become the common homeland and quite secure asylum for all of Italy. [Kohl 159 (111, 28-34, 251)]

... although it [Athens] is the oldest of Greek cities, it is as it were the country and common hearth of the race by its admission of those from everywhere rather than its precedence in time. [Behr 53 (61)) Bruni keeps this approach of translation ad sententiam throughout this section. Even when he makes some additions to Aristides' argument he does so without changing the tone of the discourse: Panathenaicus

Laudatio

.. . it [Athens] showed its usefulness for all men not only by what it sent them of its own, but also by the offer of its soil to those who sought refuge in it from without and its acceptance of all men as part of itself. [Behr 53 (61)]

The acts of generosity performed actually are even greater than this policy might seem to require, for exiles are not only received with a welcome hand if they are not completely unworthy but also are often helped with gifts in kind and in money. Maintained by such gifts, the exiles can remain in Florence with complete dignity or, if they prefer, they can return to their own homeland and try and recover their property there. [Kohl 159--60 (111, 40-4, 251-2)]

This is surprising in a man like Bruni who could easily have magnified Florence's generosity by drawing from his own personal experience. He himself had been born elsewhere but was making Florence his home. He could have easily elaborated this idea which instead copies ad litteram from Aristides:

40 Antonio Santosuosso Panathenaicus . .. no Greek will be without a city, so long as there is a city of the Athenians, but to whomever this befalls, they will find a new country. [Behr 51 (56)]

Laudatio

Hence, no one will ever think that he really lacks a homeland so long as the city of Florence continues to exist. [Kohl 159 (m, 38-9, 251)]

All other sections of the Panathenaicus are dwarfed in comparison with the praise of Athens' virtue in war. More than sixty per cent of the oration4' is dedicated to this topic. This is quite unlike the approach that Bruni uses in the Laudatio. Even though in Bruni's panegyric there is no dear demarcation between the section on the generosity towards political exiles and Florentine virtue in war, we find that only one-third of the Laudatio is dedicated to those topics, even if we include both of them.42 Bruni again borrows the conceptual structure from the Panathenaicus. Counterparts of the main themes of the Laudatio can be easily found in Aristides' work. 43 Bruni' s insistence on the fearlessness of the Florentines is the equivalent of Aristides' description of the courage shown by the Athenians against the Persian war machine. Athens' military prowess, against both the Persians and the other Greek states, is one of the leit motivs in the Panathenaicus. Bruni's statement that Florence has engaged in campaigns for the benefit of others is paralleled by Athens' role in the war of the Heradides. Bruni's description of Florence as the defender of the liberty of Italy ('the whole of Italy has been liberated from the yoke of servitude by Florence on more than one occasion') [Kohl 166 (m, 34, 256)) is similar to Aristides' comments on the wars that Athens fought 'in the hunt for this single quarry, a secure freedom for the Greeks from the barbarians' [Behr 15~1 (210)). Finally, the personality of Florence's arch-enemy Gian Galeazzo Visconti is to some extent similar to Darius' in the role he played in Athens. While there is no doubt that Bruni adopts the conceptual structure provided by the Panathenaicus, his emphasis is quite different. In what would later become a trademark of Renaissance historiography Bruni makes no use of legends in his account, an approach quite unlike what Aristides does for the period before the Persian Wars. Also, except at the end of the discourse, Bruni makes no reference to religion, and even when he refers to it, he qualifies it very quickly: 'all these accomplishments have been credited by Florence to the will of Almighty God. Always possessing a certain modesty, Florence has preferred to credit its deeds to divine intervention rather than claim them on account of its own virtue' [Kohl 168 (m, 17-22, 258)) . Also, while Aristides' main theme is not so much Athens' struggle against

41 Leonardo Bruni revisited the Persians but Athens' superiority over the rest of the Greek states, for Bruni Florence's superiority over the other Italian cities is secondary. His primary concern is the general praiseworthy behaviour of the Florentines. The problem is that while Aristides could use Darius or Xerses as a foil for his viewpoint, Bruni does not really have a counterpart in the Florentine context. Even when Visconti makes its appearance with words reminiscent of Aristides' interpretation of Darius, Bruni can dwell only briefly on this aspect and, when he does, he is forced to distort the historical situation by presenting Visconti and Milan, an Italian and an Italian state, with overtones which suggest that their qualities are foreign to Italy: Florence's struggle against the Visconti is compared to Rome's fight 'contra Cimbros, contra Teutones, item contra Gallos' [Kohl 167 (III, 26-7, 257)]. Finally, in spite of what Baron says, Aristides does not portray the Persians mainly as the enemies of freedom. The Athenians' struggles against the Eastern invaders is the fight of a civilized people against barbarians for the benefit of the whole of Greece. Aristides' main foe is not Darius nor Xerses after all but Sparta and her followers. The idea that Athens fought for the 'freedom' of the Greeks is, for instance, soon qualified by the statement that she 'accomplished these great and noble deeds despite frequent opposition from the Greeks, all of whom as it were pulled against it' [Behr 161 (212)]. Bruni's quarrel is not with the other Italian states. Visconti is the foil to express his idea of republican freedom, not the symbol of barbarism attacking civilization: Florence, he says, 'fought for the freedom of all Italy' [Kohl 166 (III, 29-30, 256)] . This idea acts as a prelude to the section on the Florentine constitution which is the most original part of the entire work. After the long presentation of the deeds in war of the Athenians Aristides spends some time in discussing the Attic tongue and then goes on very briefly to mention the honours shown to Athens. 44 There is no counterpart to the brief section on the honours shown to Athens. Also, while Aristides dedicates a fairly long section to language, Bruni does away with the topic in just a paragraph, saying that the Florentine language is 'the clearest and purest speech' ('purissimo ac nitidissimo sermone') of Italy as Aristides says the Attic language was for Greece. Yet the role of cultural imperialism that the Greek writer suggests for the Attic tongue, in spite of what Baron suggests, barely enters Bruni' s mind. 45 Bruni' s interest is focused in the next topic - the constitution. In the last section before the peroration Aristides lists a number of achievements which he associates with Athens. Among them he mentions the constitution. Clearly, for Aristides the constitution is only one among many topics and certainly not the most important. 46 However, Bruni devotes about

42 Antonio Santosuosso

fifteen per cent of his panegyric to the constitution. Harmony and order, he says, are the keynotes of all Florentine institutions and laws: it is an 'harmonious constitution whose harmony pleases both the eyes and minds of man.' It includes 'nothing ... that is ill proportioned, nothing improper, nothing vague; everything occupies its proper place, which is not only clearly defined but also in right relation to all other elements. '47 If harmony and order are the elements which permeate all aspects of the constitution, its basic features are justice ('without justice there can be no city') and freedom ('without which this great people would not even consider that life was worth living'). These two principles 'are joined ... to all the institutions and statutes that the Florentine state has created.' The system is so arranged that 'no one in Florence ... stands above the law' for all conditions of men must submit to the law [Kohl 169 (Iv, 11, 12-13, 17, 259)]. Moreover, checks and balances make sure that the upholders of the law do not become tyrants [Kohl 169 (Iv, 23-6, 259)]. This last point leaves the door open for Bruni to list and comment on the various magistracies of the city [Kohl 16974 (Iv)] - a departure not only from Aristides but also from any medieval commentator before him. However, he owes something to Aristides even in this section. Bruni's idea of political justice is clearly borrowed from the Panathenaicus: Panathenaicus

Laudatio

The city was the first to teach that wealth should not be favoured or admired. For it never exalted the very rich, but it thought that it owed them only the privilege of not being wronged on this account; nor did it ever slight those of superior virtue, but inferior wealth, with the idea, I think, that it was shameful, while believing that not their richest, but their most trustworthy servants were the best, when men claim to be free , for their worth to be defined by possessions, and for each one not to be regarded in the light of what he is. This city alone has not changed the natural order of things, nor has it made what is third in the rank of nature first in that of law, nor did it act as it can be seen that some of those who claim to be phi-

All classes of men can be brought to trial ; laws are made prudently for the common good, and they are fashioned to help the citizens. There is no place on earth where there is greater justice open equally to everyone. Nowhere else does freedom grow so vigorously, and nowhere else are rich and poor alike treated with such equality. In this one also can discern Florence's great wisdom, perhaps greater than that of other cities. Now when very powerful men, relying on their wealth and position, appear to be offending or harming the weak, the government steps in and exacts heavy fines and penalties from the rich. It is consonant with reason that as the status of men is different, so their penalties ought to be different. The city has judged it consistent

43 Leonardo Bruni revisited losophers act, when they speak in this way concerning these matters, but in fact always bow low and yield to whomever they perceive to be richer than themselves. It was not seen to install in office, to confide in, and to think worthy of every honour those of the highest property classes, but those who had the best character, as if whoever was superior in regard to virtue, would be superior in every way. [Behr 289 (390); see also 271 (392)]

with its ideals of justice and prudence that those who have the most need should also be helped the most. Therefore, the different classes are treated according to a certain sense of equity; the upper class is protected by its wealth, the lower class by the state, and fear of punishment defends both. From this arises the saying that has been directed very often against the more powerful citizens when they have threatened the lower classes; in such a case the members of the lower class say 'I also am a Florentine citizen.' With this saying the poor mean to point out and to warn clearly that no one should malign them simply because they are weak, nor should anyone threaten them with harm simply because someone is powerful. Rather, everyone is of equal rank since the Florentine state itself has promised to protect the less powerful. [Kohl 173-4 (1v, 10-29, 262)]

However, in spite of this shared idea of political justice, the dissimilarities between the two panegyrics are striking. As I have already said, in the Panathenaicus the constitution is just another of the many themes; in the Laudatio it is a major one. In the Greek work there is no specific analysis of Athenian institutions; in the humanist panegyric the various institutions are analysed one by one. Aristides sees the Athenian constitution as a mixture of all three traditional types; Bruni presents the Florentine constitution clearly as a democracy. Moreover, most of the themes that Bruni associates with Florence, such as rule of the majority, checks and balances, and the extension of constitutional equity and protection to foreigners, are absent from the Panathenaicus. The only point that the two works share is the claim that their constitution is the best, and that power in their state is not the prerogative of the wealthy but of people of superior virtue. The peroration, very brief in both works (a paragraph each), is devoted in the Panathenaicus mainly to the people of Greece with a brief reference to Athena, and in the Laudatio, in an unusual departure from the rest of Bruni's discourse, as a vote of thanks to God and the Virgin. 48

44 Antonio Santosuosso On the whole, the major debt that Bruni's Laudatio owes Aristides is in the conceptual structure which served to establish a rational order in the description of the Florentine' s own world. 49 This is clear when we compare the structure of the two works as the accompanying table shows: Panathenaicus

Laudatio

proem [7-13 (1-7)] geography [13-27 (8--23)] indigenous population [27-31 (24-30)] discovery of crops and their sharing [3.1-7 (31-8)] honour of the Gods towards Athens [37-43 (39-48)] generosity towards other Greeks [43-61 (49-74)] virtue in war [61-229 (75-321)] Attic tongue [229-37 (322-30)] honours shown to Athens [237-9 (331-4)] superiority of Athens [229-75 (239-79)] peroration [275 (402-4)]

proem [135-6 (232-3)] geography [136-49 (233-43)] fertility of Florentine territory [145 (240)] foundation of Florence [149-54 (243-8)]

generosity towards political exiles and virtue in war [154-68 (248--58)]

the Florentine constitution [168--74 (258--63)] Florentine tongue [174 (263)] peroration [174 (263)]

As the table shows, Bruni discarded completely one of the main themes of the Panathenaicus - the honour that the gods and other cities show towards Athens. He adopted the rest although he was never guilty of slavish imitation. Even when he just translated Aristides he often changed the emphasis, for example, in the proem, the peroration, and the reception of political exiles. What he did elsewhere was to accept the model's conceptual structure but to develop it along different lines, for example, in the treatment of Florence's origins and her virtue in war. At other times he departed completely from the original, for example, his portrayal of the physical aspect of Florence and her constitution. The debt that the Laudatio owes its model is clear; yet Bruni' s work goes much beyond what Aristides had in mind in his panegyric of Athens. Bruni' s deviations from the model might have been caused in part by his understanding of the proper way of translating the classics, in part by his acceptance of sources other than Aristides, and in part by a conscious desire to put forward ideas different from those in the model. Later in his life, around mid-1524 or mid-1526,5° Bruni wrote a treatise on correct translation, De recta interpretatione. I do not think it proper, however,

45 Leonardo Bruni revisited

to use a work written some twenty years after the Laudatio as an accurate guide to the ideas in the Laudatio. A better mirror might be the assumptions current at the time of his composition of the Laudatio. It is clear by comparing Bruni's work with the Panathenaicus that he looked at Aristides' panegyric with the same approach that Coluccio Salutati urged the humanist Antonio Loschi to take in his revision of the Iliad. An earlier translation of Homer's work had been done 'word for word.' The translator had been wrong, said Salutati : he would have been better to 'consider things, not words.' In his revision of the translation Loschi should aim to make 'use of both unchanged and unaltered words, add decoration and such splendor of language that you display and echo that Homeric quality which we all have in mind, not only in the poetic imagination of the work, but even in its language. '51 Salutati's advice is at best vague. After all, he was suggesting the revision of the Iliad to a man who knew no Greek;5' however, his words are a good indicator of the normal humanist approach to certain translations during the first half of the fifteenth century. This was an idea which Bruni endorsed5J and which Giannozzo Manetti put more clearly than anyone else: We recall that we have fully and openly proved and confirmed by certain argument and by the authority also of many most outstanding men that no literal translation can be laudable and perfect, and we have demonstrated that there is great diversity between the translators of poets, orators and historians and the interpreters of philosophers and theologians and that manifestly there ought to be. For it is licit for these first converters of poets, or orators or historians to amplify the arid, meagre and thin for the sake of elegance and ornateness, and to omit the obscure and to translate more lucidly according to their will.H

As Eric Cochrane states, Bruni, in the manner of most Renaissance humanists, 'looked upon models as guides, not as authorities, and he defined "imitation" - imitatio -as an incentive, not as an impediment to originality. "55 It was 'a stimulus to engage in fresh and original observations. '5 6 If some of the deviations from the model evolved from the way that Bruni and his fellow humanists used the writings of antiquity, the inspiration for Bruni's departure from the classics must also be sought in the use and development of other sources, besides the Panathenaicus, and of course in the political environment of the time. Leaving aside the political environment to which Baron has dedicated so much of his scholarship,57 let us look at the other sources. As explained earlier, both Isocrates and Thucydides use themes that Bruni

46 Antonio Santosuosso adopted in the Laudatio, but there is no reason to assume that Bruni followed them instead of Aristides, for the author of the Panathenaicus had already incorporated the ideas of his intellectual predecessors in his work. Bruni, however, owes a clear debt to Cicero. The concept of the meaning of freedom and of a republic vis-a-vis the rule of one man go clearly back to the Roman writer.5 8 However, the most important influence must have been Salutati. Bruni's political views are often the logical conclusion of his friend's beliefs, not only in the Laudatio but in all of his works. The Laudatio reflects some of the ideas which are found in Salutati's Invectiva ad Antonium Loschum, for example, Florence's love of freedom, her Roman origins (Salutati does not tie them to Florence's defence of liberty), the idea of the city as a community based on the obedience of the laws, Florence as a cultural centre holding primacy in Italy, and most of all Florence's geographical position.59 In all fairness to Bruni, he develops Salutati's ideas at length and with sophistication. The most important connection between the Laudatio and the lnvectiva is a long passage at the end of Salutati's work: I cannot believe that my Antonio Loschi who has seen Florence, or someone else, whoever has seen her, could deny, unless he is completely a fool, that she is truly the flower and the most beautiful spot in Italy. Which city, not only in Italy but in the whole world, is safer within the ring of her walls; who has more prestigious palaces, more beautiful temples, more handsome buildings, more splendid porticoes, a larger number of public squares, larger roads, a more accomplished population, more famous citizens, a greater amount of riches, a more fertile soil? Which one has a more lively location, a more healthy climate; which one is more clean, has a greater number of wells, sweeter waters, more active crafts; who is more admirable in every thing? Which one has richer villas, more powerful towns, more villages, more skillful country workers? Which city without a harbour has a greater traffic of merchandise? Where is to be found greater commerce, a greater variety of exchanges, more ability in difficult transactions? Where would you find more illustrious persons and, without mentioning the names of the infinite number of such people for the sake of avoiding boredom, men who are more praiseworthy because of their actions, more courageous because of their armed endeavours, more powerful because of their dominion over others - in all more famous? Where can you find Dante, where Petrarch, where Boccaccio?60

The passage is interesting because it provides a summary of most of the elements contained in the geographical section of the Laudatio - the beauty of the palaces, churches, lodges, squares, and roads; the vision of a city surrounded by strong walls; the appealing climate; the towns, villas, castles; the

47 Leonardo Bruni revisited praiseworthy citizen-body; the nourisher of great men; and the concept of the prestige of Florence in Italy. In conclusion, Baron is correct when he claims that Bruni' s main debt to the Greek writer is in the conceptual structure of the Laudatio. However, Bruni borrows from the Panathenaicus more heavily than the German historian suggests. Moreover, Baron overemphasizes Bruni's originality in the portrayal of the geographical environment surrounding Florence. Actually, this is not the most important aspect of this section, where Bruni follows Aristides fairly closely. Much more important and original are his delight in Florence's cleanliness and the obvious pride that he takes in the houses of the wealthier and more powerful people of his city. The same type of observation applies to the connection between the Persian Wars and the struggle of Florence for the freedom of Italy. Baron misreads the intentions of Aristides. The Panathenaicus does not emphasize the issue of liberty (Athens) against tyranny (Darius or Xerses) but the struggle of civilization (Greece) against barbarism and the issue of the superiority of one city (Athens) over all the other Greek cities. What Bruni does in the Laudatio is to borrow the theme which best suits his work and forget all the rest. Bruni was proud of his Laudatio although later in life he seemed to admit that it lacked subtlety. 61 He was also aware that its rhetorical elements tended to affect the historical basis of his panegyric. However, he believed that if the writing of history should be 'pledged to objectivity,' the function of the panegyric was 'to inspire the reader by effective oratory, even at the expense of exactitude in details. ' 62 The Laudatio soon found imitators.63 Pier Paolo Decembrio followed its guidelines in his panegyric for Milan in 1436 and Enea Silvio Piccolomini for a literary portrait of Basel in 1438. Twenty or thirty years later the Laudatio found its way even to England when Thomas Chaundler adopted it in his account of the episcopal town of Wells. Yet the Laudatio also became soon outdated. By the end of the century the rapid development of a new sense of history made Bruni's work seem rather primitive in terms of its political philosophy and rhetorical exaggeration. Yet the Laudatio remains important as a mirror of the approaches and values which characterized Italian civilization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It brings forward a new historical sense (Bruni dismissed religious intervention and makes no use of legends); a sense of proportion, harmony, and geometrical clarity; the concept that the republican type of government was the only system in which individual freedom could prosper; and the creative way in which humanist scholarship used the classical heritage.

48 Antonio Santosuosso There is no doubt that Bruni patterned his Laudatio on Aristides' Panathenaicus. However, his was not simple imitation. He borrowed the conceptual structure and arguments from the Panathenaicus; sometimes he imitated entire passages, but he also departed significantly from Aristides' panegyric although not always in the way that Baron suggests in his works. NOTES 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

See the five articles under the general title 'Leonardo Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae Urbis' in his Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento (Cambridge, Mass 1955) 6!r113. Hans Baron The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton 1966) Hans Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' in his From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni : Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago and London 1968) 151-71 . This book also contains 'Chronology and Historical Certainty: The Dates of Bruni's Laudatio and Dialogi' 102-37. Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio, 151 'The Date of the Laudatio : Summer 1403 or Summer 1404?' in Baron Humanistic Political Literature 97-104 Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 151 Baron Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance 196 Ibidem 200 Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 15~4 Ibidem 164 Ibidem 196, 171 Ibidem 167-8 Ibidem 151 Cesare Vasoli 'Considerazioni sulla "Laudatio Florentinae Urbis" di Leonardo Bruni' in his Studi sulla cultura de/ Rinascimento (Landuria 1968) 48-68. This article appeared first in Annuario 1961-1962 de/ Liceo Ginnasio Statale F. Petrarca di Arezzo ns 2 (1962) 271-91. Ibidem 49 Ibidem 68 'Introduction' to L. Bruni Panegyric to the City of Florence, tr Benjamin G. Kohl in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Ronald G. Witt and Benjamin G. Kohl (Philadelphia 1978) 121-33. Although

49 Leonardo Bruni revisited

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29 30

31 32

this is not stated in the book it is clear that Witt is responsible for the introduction. See, for example, 126 n 12, where he refers the reader to 'my [Witt's] Coluccio Salutati.' Ibidem 124 Ibidem 131 Ibidem 125 Ibidem 126 Ibidem 128 Jerrold Seigel ' "Civic Humanism" or Ciceronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni' Past and Present 34 (1966). See also Hans Baron's rebuttal ' "Professional Rhetorician" or "Civic Humanist" ' Past and Present 36 (1967) 21-37 Seigel ibidem 24; Baron 'The Date of the Laudatio: Summer 1403 or Summer 1404 ?' 97-104 Seigel ' "Civic Humanism" or Ciceronian Rhetoric?' 23, 24, 26 Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 15171. On this the comments made by F.P. Luiso in Levere lode de la inclita et gloriosa citta di Firenze composte in latino da Leonardo Bruni e tradotte in volgare da Frate Lazaro Padova, ed F. P. Luiso (Florence 1889) xxv-xxxn are useful but not enough as Vasoli already pointed out in his article 'Considerazioni sulla "Laudatio Urbis Florentinae" di Leonardo Bruni' 49 n 3 On Bruni's date of birth see Hans Baron 'The Year of Bruni's Birth and Methods for Determining the Ages of Humanists Born in the Trecento' Speculum 52 (1977) 582-625; on the crisis, Baron The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance; on the date of the composition of the Laudatio see n 5 Vasoli 'Considerazioni sulla "Laudatio Florentinae Urbis" di Leonardo Bruni' 68 This statement assumes that the majority of the generation to which Salutati belonged had not accepted yet humanist values as their world view. Eugenio Garin 'The Humanist Chancellors of the Florentine Republic from Coluccio Salutati to Bartolomeo Scala' in his Portraits from the Quattrocento, tr Victor A. and Elizabeth Velen (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, and London 1972, 1st Italian ed 1963) Aristides in Four Volumes . 1: Panathenaicus Oration and Defense of Oratory, tr C.A. Behr (London and Cambridge, Mass, 1972) J 'Panathenaicus' in Isocrates, tr George Norlin (London and New York 1929) 11

539 33 See the version in Thucidydes The Peloponnesian War (London and New York 1919) 1, Book 11, xxv-Lxvm. 34 On Aristides' life see the brief note in Aristides in Four Volumes vii-xiii.

50 Antonio Santosuosso 35 On Athens and her development see Joseph W. Day The Glory of Athens : The Popular Tradition as Reflected in the Panathenaicus of Aelius Aristides (Chicago 1980) xiii. 36 Andre Boulanger Aelius Aristides et la sophistique dans la province d'Asie au ne siecle de notre ere (Paris 1968) 362-72 37 Day The Glory of Athens xvi, xvn, 175 38 The texts which I have used in my analysis is the Panathenaicus 6-274 in the Harvard University Press edition quoted in note 31 above. The editor of the Greek text is also its translator, C.A. Behr. For the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis I have followed the text in Hans Baron From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni 23263. Although my analysis was based on the original texts, all the passages in this essay are cited in English to make the argument accessible to the largest possible number of scholars. All references to these works, in the text and in the notes, are to the translations cited above. For the Panathenaicus the number in parentheses refers to the origin11l text; for the Laudatio, the numbers in parentheses refer to the part, lines, and the page of the original text. I have followed C.A. Behr's translation for the Panathenaicus 7-275 in the Loeb edition, cited in note 31, and Benjamin G. Kohl's translation of the Laudatio in The Earthly Republic, ed. Ronald G. Witt and Benjamin G. Kohl 135-75. 39 Giulio C. Argan The Renaissance City, tr S.E. Barsnelt (London 1969) 23-6 40 On this, see Lauro Martines 'Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton 1968) 456 ff 41 Of 404 paragraphs, 246 [61-229 (75-321)) are dedicated to Athenian deeds in war. 42 Of 31 pages, 10 (111 248-58) discuss Florentine generosity towards political exiles and virtue in war. 43 Compare Panathenaicus 61-229 (75-321) with Laudatio 154-68 (in) . 44 Panathenaicus 22c,-37 (322-30) on the Attic tongue and 237-9 (331-4) on the honours shown to Athens 45 On language, Laudatio 174 (Iv, c,-15, 263). Bruni dedicates only three lines (1517) to 'littere.' On language and literature, Panathenaicus 22c,-37 (322-30). On Baron's interpretation of this section in Bruni's work see 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni' 151 . 46 On Athenian achievements, Panathenaicus 23c,-75 (335-401). On the constitution, ibidem 265-71 (383-93). 47 Laudatio IV, 35-8, 258; 1-8, 259 : 'Sed cum foris hec civitas est, tum vero disciplina institutisque domesticis. Nusquam tantus ordo rerum, nusquam tanta elegantia, nusquam tanta concinnitas. Quemadmodum enim in cordis convenientia est, ad quam cum intense fuerint, una ex diversis tonis fit armonia, qua nichil auribus iocundius est neque suavius, eodem modo hec prudentissima civitas

51 Leonardo Bruni revisited

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

ita omnes sui partes moderata est inde summa quedam rei publice sibi ipsi consentanea resultet, que mentes atque oculos hominum sua convenientia delectet. Nichil est in ea preposterum, nichil inconveniens, nichil absurdum, nichil vagum; suum queque locum tenent, non modo certum, sed etiam congruentem: distincta officia, distincti magistratus, distincta iudicia, distincti ordines.' Compare Panathenaicus 275 (402-4) with Laudatio 1v, 18-33, 263. On this, see also Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 158. Baron The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance 554 n 25 Jerrold Seigel Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom , Petrarch to Valla (Princeton 1968) 11~17 Ibidem 116 Ibidem 119--20; also 'Introduction' to the translation of Laudatio in Witt and Kohl, eds The Earthly Republic 122-3 Quoted in Charles Trinkaus In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London 1970) 558. Eric Cochrane Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago and London 1981) 3-4 Baron The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance 195 See ibidem; also Gene Brucker The Civic World of Renaissance Florence (Princeton 1977). 'Introduction' in Witt and Kohl, eds The Earthly Republic 125. Also, Ronald G. Witt Coluccio Salutati and His Public Letters (Geneva 1976) especially ch v Compare Coluccio Salutati 'lnvectiva in Antonium Loschum Vicentinum' in Prosatori Latini de/ Quattrocento, ed Eugenio Garin (Milan and Naples 1962) 15 (on Florence's love of freedom), 17 (on Roman origins), 33 (on obedience to the laws), 35 (on geography, cultural centre, and primacy). Ibidem 35 Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 152 Baron The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance 218 On the impact of the Laudatio see Baron 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio' 152-3.

C.M.D. CROWDER

PEACE AND

USTICE AROUND 1400: A SKETCH

The parliaments of the later years of Henry vi's minority, like the kingdom itself, faced formidable problems : divisions within the ruling council, a declining war effort, and advancing insolvency. These were the issues which confronted the parliament that assembled on 8 July 1433 . Councillors were blaming the council's leading member, the duke of Bedford, for failures in France; and the newly appointed treasurer, Lord Cromwell, produced in parliament a financial statement which showed the excess of expenditure over revenue to be insupportable. The chancellor, whose office it generally was on such an occasion to open parliament with an address which set the tone of its business, was John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells. It is not surprising that Stafford chose to address this parliament in generalities and platitudes which could neither offend those charged with the government of the kingdom in the king's name, nor deepen the divisions between them. He put before the Lords and Commons some thoughts on two central concepts of political life - peace and justice - and as usual the outline of those remarks was recorded in the Rolls of Parliament. 1 For his theme the chancellor took a verse from the Psalms: 'Suscipiant montes pacem populo et colles justiciam' (Psalms 71 : 3, Vulgate) . He developed this text in commonplace terms by identifying the three estates of the realm and pointing to their particular responsibilities in conducting its affairs on the foundations of peace and justice. Thus, the mountains are the lords spiritual and temporal and their particular contribution to the well-being of the kingdom is 'pax, unitas et vera concordia absque fictura vel dissimulatione.' The hills stand for the knights, gentry ('armigeri'), and merchants. To this middle estate ('militibus et mediocribus') belong the political virtues associated with justice: 'equitas et mera justicia absque manutenentia et pauperum oppressione. ' The role of the third estate in the bishop's scheme was fittingly passive. Stafford

54 C.M.D. Crowder identified the 'populus' with those who worked the land, artificers or craftsme·n, and 'vulgares.' The political virtue which he supplied for these common people was obedience: 'voluntaria regi et ejus legibus obedientia absque perjurio et murmuratione.' According to the summary of the chancellor's speech in the Rolls of Parliament, he did not have much to add to his identification of the three estates and their functions within the realm. He undertook that the king would discharge his office of rule over the estates by guaranteeing them their recognized liberties without disturbance ('omnibus et singulis libertatibus et quietantiis'); but how the lords could ensure peace, how the middle ranks should ensure justice, and how faithfully the common people would obey was not explained. The chancellor's only prescription was at the end of his speech where he issued the standard instructions for the Commons to meet in their accustomed place, and for those with complaints of injustice to proceed through the triers and receivers of petitions who had been appointed in the normal way. There was nothing unusual about these admonitions. They were commonplaces of political and social analysis and had parallels in many other statements of this kind. 2 The bishop who expressed such ideas on this occasion was equally typical of his calling. John Stafford had been appointed chancellor more than a year before this parliament met and he held the office until the discredit of Henry vi's government drove the earl of Suffolk into exile early in 1450. Despite that long tenure of high office and his promotion to the see of Canterbury in May 1443 Stafford is not one of the familiar figures of Lancastrian England, either as an agent of royal blundering or as archbishop. 3 Nevertheless he is an appropriate mouthpiece for this conventional and wellintentioned advice to the rulers of the kingdom assembled in parliament. The Stafford name suggests some connection to one of the great and one of the wealthiest families in England; and while John Stafford was chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury, Humphrey Stafford, sixth earl of Stafford, was created duke of Buckingham. This added dignity had nothing to do with John, as far as is known . Rather, it recognized the family's long and distinguished service to the crown, especially military service in the wars against Scotland and France. 4 For John Stafford, the prelate, was only obliquely connected with this distinguished family and it is not as straightforward a task as it would seem from the prominence of the man and of the family to trace that connection. John Stafford is classed by J. T. Rosenthal as one of the bishops of the latemedieval church in England whose background was noble, even if his connection to the earls of Stafford is acknowledged to have been distant.5 He was, in fact, only partly noble. His father was Sir Humphrey Stafford of Southwick,

55 Peace and justice around 1400

in the parish of North Bradley which lay in the most westerly hundred of Wiltshire, over against Somerset. This knight's descendants made marriages which gave them a broad connection with landholders of the knightly class in Dorset and Somerset as well as Wiltshire. The primary land holdings of the earls of Stafford were in Staffordshire, although they had accumulated wide lands by 1400; and it was in Staffordshire that Sir Humphrey Stafford's father, Sir John, had held his lands. Sir Humphrey's mother was a daughter of Ralph, the first earl of Stafford. Sir Humphrey, the son, acquired Southwick in West Wiltshire by marrying the heiress to that estate. John Stafford, the prelate, who was born in this Wiltshire village, bore his knightly grandfather's name; but his noble blood came from his connection to the earls of Stafford through his grandmother. His tie with this great family was further attenuated by his illegitimate birth. Sir Humphrey, his father, had a legitimate heir, another Humphrey, who was distinguished from his father by the sobriquet 'with the silver hand.' As well as this legitimate son by the wife who brought him Southwick, the first Sir Humphrey fathered the future chancellor and archbishop on a village girl of North Bradley whose name was Emma. To his credit Bishop John made no bones about this illegitimate descent and honoured his mother at her death with a handsome tomb in the church of North Bradley. 6 There is no means of knowing whether the bishop, when he addressed the estates of the realm in his opening speech to parliament in 1433, had in mind that he himself had associations with the mountains, with the hills, and with the 'populus' of his figure. However, he was himself a prelate connected, if distantly, with a family prominent among the peers of the realm; his father had been a knight and his own half-brother succeeded his father in that rank; and his mother was sprung from the 'cultores' and 'vulgares.' Moreover, John Stafford's ecclesiastical career illustrates typical features of the successful clerical 'cursus' of his day. From his law degree at Oxford through his early service to Archbishop Chichele, which in the course of a decade took him through the leading offices under the crown to the chancellorship, John Stafford followed a path which was untypical only in its apparently uninterrupted success. Archdeacon, then chancellor of Salisbury and holder of that bellwether of royal patronage, the deanery of St Martin's le Grand, while still holding his earlier canonries at Wells and Exeter, then dean of Wells for a year before his promotion to the bishopric - the list of his benefices in Emden' s Biographical Register reads something like a role model for the ambitious and successful clerk, particularly when it is remembered that in the same years that he advanced through these positions in the church he was keeper of the privy seal, then treasurer of England. From the time of his studies at Oxford, Stafford was identified with Archbishop Chichele's plans for improving the

56 C.M.D. Crowder standards of clerical learning, and Chichele' s voice is said to have been influential in the appointment of Stafford as his successor at Canterbury. Gascoigne does not let his illegitimate birth pass unnoticed and associates Stafford, along with other court bishops, with the indiscretions of Bishop Pecock, charging him for his failure to use his metropolitan authority to correct the errors of that independent man. 7 Given Gascoigne's eye for the successful clerical career Stafford does not come off too badly. A familiar occasion, a typical spokesman, standard sentiments: is it due any attention? Particularly, is it due attention in a contribution to a collection of papers assembled in honour of an historian whose characteristic quality is his consolidation of a firm documentary base for his reconstruction of England in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries? It may readily be admitted that the present essay does not aspire to compete with Jack Lander on his own ground. Yet my own experience has shown that his most effective contributions to the illumination of the period which his many writings have achieved fall where his touch has been lightest and yet his understanding of the period has been most penetrating. In particular student readers have appreciated his perceptions in Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London 1977) and their mentors have also profited by them, more perhaps than they are always .willing to own! It is just because the remarks addressed by the chancellor to the Lords and Commons at the opening of parliament in 1433 are so normal that they deserve more than a passing glance. They are due a deeper analysis than they can be given here. Peace and justice are basic concepts for any society; they are so clearly 'motherhood issues' to be pursued and accomplished by any responsibly moral polity that we may assume too readily that we know what they involve. Yet what values did contemporaries in the first half of the fifteenth century attribute to peace and justice? These are not questions that can be readily answered. If the historian's art deals chiefly with asking questions that can be given satisfactory answers, these are perhaps questions which should not be asked at all. Nevertheless a contribution intended to record the recognition due to a historian of J. R. Lander's standing affords an appropriate opportunity for an exploratory essay on the values commonly ascribed in late-medieval society to peace and justice, tentative as the results are bound to be. Those results are unexpected. Given the practice of courts in a period where complaints about the distortion of justice by maintenance and violence were continual and universal, ther{9 is point to a reminder that resort to those same courts was as constant and widespread as the complaints. The concept of justice seems to have been recognizably similar to that held today, despite the regular disappointments in practice. Peace, however, seems to have conveyed a very

57 Peace and justice around 1400 different set of relationships to men of the late Middle Ages than it does to us. Yet the opposition between peace and war, the exclusion of one by the other, would seem a universal contrast, because it seems to be an inherent one. As a first step in this exploration it is natural to look for the source of Bishop Stafford's sentiments in 1433. His association of peace with justice was a normal one, part and parcel of the familiar nature of the sentiments which he addressed to parliament. The text which provided his theme was taken from the third verse of Psalm 71 (Psalm 72, Authorized Version): 'Suscipiant montes pacem populo, et colles justiciam.' The next verse continues: 'Judicabit pauperes populi et salvos faciet filios pauperum, et humiliabit calumniatorem.' Although the bishop had no use for this affirmation of the judgment of the poor being for their salvation and protection, and may well not have read the verse in such a way, the psalmist in these verses is sketching the rule of the messianic king. In verse 7 he reaffirms the association of justice and peace in the time of the messiah who is to spring from David's line: 'orietur in diebus eius justitia et abundantia pads, donec auferatur luna.' The psalmist is here reflecting the usual associations of those glorious days to come. Sometimes pairing them and sometimes praising them separately, the visionaries of the Old Testament scriptures see peace and justice having a prominent place in the messianic future. Truth and faithfulness are frequently connected with peace and justice, and all these qualities together are signs of and means to salvation within the divinely appointed design. 8 In another messianic passage Isaiah predicts that when the spirit of God is poured out on his people: 'et erit opus justitiae pax, et cultus justitiae silentium et securitas usque in eternum' (Isaiah 32:17). Correspondingly the denial of peace will be accompanied by the subversion of justice according to a later passage from the same collection of prophecies: 'viam pads nescierunt et non est judicium in gressibus eorum,' and so on (Isaiah 59:8) . One of the most dramatic associations of peace and justice is an image conjured by the psalmist in a passage which is not messianic, but in which he looks for a continuation of God's mercies to his people, if Israel recognizes his care for them by obedience : 'Misericordia et veritas obviaverunt sibi : justitia et pax osculate sunt. Veritas de terra orta est et justitia de caelo prospexit' (Psalm 84 :11-12, Vulgate; Psalm 85 :10-11, Authorized Version). The ideas which are brought together in these passages are reiterated in many messianic prophecies and in admonitions in the psalms. There is no certain way of showing the extent to which these biblical sentiments penetrated the minds of those who read and of those who heard them. The psalms were a continual part of the church's liturgy and the messianic prophecies were read on festivals which attracted large congrega-

58 C.M.D. Crowder tions. Passages like those which have been quoted would be directly accessible to only a small minority of lay people, and one can be sure that hardly any of Stafford's 'populus' would have been able to apprehend them, or to comprehend them when they listened to or could hear all that went on in public worship. There may nevertheless have been an indirect effect. Those who were most likely to have been influenced by these ideas and associations by assimilation, after the manner of water dripping on a stone, were the clergy who had direct access, at least in form , to their source. Preaching is usually acknowledged as a common channel for the transmission of clerical insights to the laity. It was not necessarily the only one. By the fourteenth century at least there was growing provision for the education of young children by conscientious parish priests;9 and, although his life was not a leisured one and his spirituality might have been rudimentary, it was not only in a sermon or through the confessional that the priest communicated with his parishioners. The limitation for the historian who seeks to penetrate these obscure areas is that it is the preaching that has left a familiar record. The late-medieval concept of peace is not easy to establish. In the light of our current western preoccupations, where justice is largely taken for granted and our apprehensions are about the preservation of peace, it is a point worth noting. English preachers, for example, who, as we shall see, provide a jaundiced view of contemporary justice, have little to say about peace. 10 The views that they express about the military class of lords and knights indicate that they fall short in military ability, not that they excel in it. Those among whom the kingdom should have found the warriors for its defence are so immersed in the delights and pleasures of peace, and they find the extortions and oppressions which peace offers so profitable, that they have no stomach for war. They are craven soldiers when they have to fight. This is indeed the kind of portrait which could be expected in the literature of complaint which was so fashionable around 1400. 11 The concern for peace was greater in France than in England at this time partly because of the Hundred Years War, but more especially because of political divisions within the kingdom. The theme of peace can be introduced through a celebrated French sermon which set out the case for peace as it was then understood. In November 1408 the assembled French court was addressed by the chancellor of the University of Paris on this topic. 12 The occasion was not altogether unlike the sermon to parliament by the chancellor of England which has already been analysed. Both speakers reflect the same social values and share the same understanding of the source of political authority and its responsibilities. Both addressed political divisions which were embittered because the king was not able at that time to exercise his rightful and necessary

59 Peace and justice around 1400 authority. The chancellor who spoke on this occasion in the name of the University of Paris and of the French church was Jean Gerson. There was no one in France, perhaps in Christendom, whose intellectual reputation stood higher. He was also a noted preacher, committed to the pastoral and psychological needs of his hearers. He regularly insisted on the moral basis of all actions, personal or political. 1 J In this sermon to the court he confronted a change in French policy towards the Great Schism. France had newly accepted the call from the cardinals of the rival papal obediences to a general council, a remedy which the French hitherto had opposed. King and church had soon to choose representatives for that council which was to meet at Pisa in March 1409. The king's council, however, had recently been polarized by the assassination of the king's brother, the duke of Orleans, at the instigation of the king's cousin, the duke of Burgundy. In this involved, delicate, and tense situation Gerson's theme was simple and short: 'Veniat pax.' He repeated his theme and its significantly adapted French translation at regular intervals throughout the address, as if it were a mantra: 'Veniat pax; reviegne paix.' His message, in literal terms, was 'Think peace.' He cited with approval Jeremiah 29:11: 'ego cogito cogitationes pacis et non afflictionis,' and he urged all those with positions of authority and responsibility to follow that example. As is often the case the structure of this sermon is involved and it is not easy in the surviving text to relate the parts of Gerson's development of his theme to the whole; but at the beginning and at the close of the homily the longest passages insist that peace is the end and foundation of good lordship and of sound royal rule. The sermon and its message epitomize the conservative nature of Gerson's views, and its development exemplifies once more the international currency of opinions that expressed the close association of peace with justice and of both with truth and mercy. That association provides the moral basis for Gerson's insistence on the acceptance of peace as the condition for deciding French policy. He is concerned not so much with policy in the schism as with the context in which that policy will be made. He insists on the domestic peace of France, the containment of the court factions and rivalry which will stifle French influence if they cannot be put aside. The peace to which the chancellor repeatedly urges his audience to commit itself is peace within the realm. This peace is not concerned with neighbours or external enemies; it is peace among those of the same blood, of the same royal blood, in fact. 1 4 Just as later Bishop Stafford equated peace with unity and unfeigned concord among the nobles of Henry vi's council, so in 1408, addressing a similar political vacuum in the reign of Henry vi's French grandfather, Gerson insists on internal unity as the essence of peace and has no thought for external relations. 1 5

60 C.M.D. Crowder The factious rivalries in the French court were as persistent as the illness of Charles VI which gave them their opportunity, and a few years later Christine de Pisan confronted similar conditions to those in which Gerson had spoken. Her Livre de la paix offered her prescriptions. The peace of which she writes is the same as the peace of which Gerson spoke: peace which will provide the guarantee of internal unity within the kingdom, not peace with neighbours or adversaries outside the kingdom. Christine is naturally aware of the long tradition of war between France and England, and it is precisely to provide against this external danger that peace within the realm is vital. As a publicist and a woman who sought to influence opinion at the French court Christine de Pisan is an interesting figure. 16 Her origins were Italian and not French, having come to France as a child on her father's appointment as Charles v's physician and astrologer. Her upbringing around the French court was confirmed by her marriage to a squire of the duke of Burgundy; but he died in his prime and Christine was left to fend for a young family while the once familiar channels of court patronage passed her by. A woman in a man's world, she wrote for a living in order to attract the support of a new generation of courtiers, who were less successful in the conduct of policy than their predecessors had been under the guidance of the wise Charles v and who were not sympathetic to all the values of his time. Christine was an eclectic and repetitive author, borrowing a lot from others and repeating her own work in successive treatises. These journalistic qualities ·reflect the demands of her personal situation and the unchanging divisions which were more or less coeval with her life. Unlike Gerson she did not move in intellectual circles; but for all these reasons and on account of her mixed heritage her views are more rather than less likely to be representative. While the Livre de la paix was being written the Burgundian-inspired riots in Paris led by Caboche in April and May 1413 supplanted the ruling Armagnac council. Christine had been prompted to take up the theme of peace in the previous September by the open conflict during the summer of 1412 between Burgundy, the king's cousin, and his uncle the duke of Berry. The work is addressed to the dauphin, Louis, a third generation of the royal house. He is urged to follow the example of his grandfather, Charles v, Christine's paradigm of royal rule. Early in the book the young dauphin is praised for his recognition that there must be a reconciliation between the leaders of the two factions and for his contribution to bringing it about. He had recognized the perils of division and the countervailing fruits of unity. 1 7 He is urged to follow David in the Psalms: 'Enquier paix et la poursuis' (Psalms 33 :15 Vulgate; Authorized Version 34:14). The reconciliation of 1412 for which the dauphin is praised was short-lived, like so many before it and after it. So when she came to write

61 Peace and justice around 1400 the second book of her exhortation to internal peace, after the Cabochien rising, Christine repeated the message. There are two things she tells the dauphin which are especially necessary in order that you may always enjoy the benefits of peace: 'l'une est avoir a memoire sans oubly et devant Jes yeulx le mal qui vient par guerre et bataille.' The other means which Christine identifies as propitious for the conservation of peace is to keep the nobles united to him and among themselves. Any trace of rancour which might rekindle the old divisions must be extinguished at once. 18 In keeping with the association that has already been seen to have been commonly accepted in this period, once Christine has established the virtue of peace she urges on the dauphin the need for justice. Every subject must receive his due according to his actions. 1 9 Although Christine writes here of a distributive justice, broadly conceived - the reward of the good for their merits and the punishment of the wicked for their wrongdoing - she is not unmindful of the exercise of justice through the courts. For here again, with a range of citations from Cicero, Seneca, Boethius, and the Bible, she condemns the temptation for judges to trim their judgments according to the rewards which they were offered, and she insists on the obligation of the wise ruler to ensure that impartial justice is accessible throughout the realm. Following peace and justice, magnanimity and force (which comprises authority) and power and leadership are urged on the dauphin as the equipment of the successful ruler which will lead to the military effectiveness demonstrated in the reign of Charles v. Gerson and Christine de Pisan put together their ideas about peace and what it could achieve during the long truce which broke the Hundred Years War between England and France into distinct periods. One of the voices which was influential in promoting that truce in the 1390s had been Philippe de Mezieres. Like Christine, de Mezieres was only so-so French. France was his country of birth and no doubt of his formation; but before returning in his maturity to act as an adviser to Christine's admired Charles v, he had devoted his ability as knight and counsellor to the rulers of Cyprus on the Christian frontier with Islam. By the 1390s, an old man living in retreat with the Celestines in Paris, Philippe's absorbing interest, indeed his obsession, was with the preparation of a crusade. Because a crusade would and should require the combined forces of the Christian west, he was an advocate of peace between England and France. 20 It is not irrelevant for the concept of peace at the time that all that was accomplished by de Mezieres and others who were working to the same goal was, not peace, but a truce. As was to be the case with Gerson or Christine de Pisan, de Mezieres did not have a view of peace as an absolute, such as it was conceived at least in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Peace was not an end but once more a means; and in de Mezieres' case it was the means to organize an effective crusade, a counterattack against the foes of Christendom who had expropriated its holy places in Palestine. Just as it takes two to quarrel, it takes two to make peace; and the agreement of Richard II and Charles VI in 1396 to mark the reconciliation of their two kingdoms by a royal marriage did not go beyond a truce to a full settlement because of opposition on each side to any change in the long-established confrontation. As Bishop Stafford was to note in 1433 internal peace was the responsibility of the nobility; but peace between kingdoms was a threat to their familiar and profitable way of life. Many of the military class felt threatened not only by the loss of wages and of the opportunity for spoils and ransoms, but still more by a loss of identity. In both kingdoms the vocation of the ruling class was to arms. Peace between them endangered the skills learned and the character formed in generations of fighting . It would be one more change among the many that disturbed the last two decades of the fourteenth century. 21 Devotion to peace presumes a horror of war. Horror of war was growing at the end of the fourteenth century as the exposure of western kingdoms to its costs in money, material, and values became increasingly constant and widespread. Yet even those who sought to moderate the losses from war did not therefore contemplate the disappearance of war as a regulator of relations between men and polities. This was the ambiguous position taken by Honore Bovet in his influential work L' Arbre des batailles. 22 Bovet was a contemporary of Philippe de Mezieres. Not as much is known about his activities, which in any case were on a more limited scale. A Benedictine monk and little younger than de Mezieres he served the government of Charles VI in administrative and diplomatic missions; but he was no more a representative Frenchman than the crusading knight. He was not only a member of an international religious order, but he came from Provence and the south of France seems to have remained his home. Besides, the outline of this apparently pacific monk's treatise on war was lifted from a similarly titled work by John de Legnano, an Italian lawyer who responded to the chronic state of war among the principalities and republics of fourteenth-century Italy by formulating some rules and conventions which could restrict the damage of war. Honore Bovet is likely to have encountered the free companies operating in the Rhone valley but precisely where he derived his knowledge and experience of war is not clear. Yet he added particularity and liveliness to the work of the Italian lawyer and made it popular and influential among those who undertook to instruct the chivalric class in the following century. 2 J Developing the old and disregarded exemptions of the Peace of God, which should

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have shielded the non-military classes of clergy, merchants, peasants, women, and children from the hazards of war, Bovet proposed a series of measures to regulate the conduct of war as between armies and individual knights or soldiers. In a full 132 chapters he explored, on the basis of biblical and canonical prescriptions, the rights and obligations of combatants as well as the immunity of non-combatants: but, far from condemning war, he upheld it. From the beginning there had been war in heaven, and here on earth war was necessary to contain and correct the wrong done by one man to another and one kingdom to another. 24 To the modern ear he is offensively direct, so that it is with an effort that one recalls that the overwhelming bulk of this monk's treatise was written in order to mitigate the harm inflicted by war. Unlike de Mezieres, Bovet does not declare an open season against the infidel: it is legitimate to recover what has been seized from Christians, but no more than that.25 Yet he does not doubt that war conforms to divine law. He notes that war has been condemned becau~e of the evil done in war. 'I tell you this argument is worthless,' Bovet responds. 'For the truth is that war is not an evil thing but good and virtuous; for war by its very nature seeks nothing other than to set wrong right and to turn dissension into peace, in accordance with Scripture. And if in war many evil things are done, they never come from the nature of war, but from false usage.' As a parallel he comments that the actions of an unjust judge do not discredit justice; and he continues: 'Thus we must understand that war comes from God, and not merely that he permits war, but that he has ordained it.' The example of Joshua is cited and the Old Testament actions of the Lord of Hosts in general. 'And for this reason we must accept and grant that war comes from divine law, that is the law of God: for the aim of war is to wrest peace, tranquillity and reasonableness from him who refuses to acknowledge his wrongdoing. ' 26 There could be no clearer statement of a belief. These views of French publicists of the period on each side of 1400 on peace certainly were affected by the civil dissensions which afflicted their country. That does not make them unrepresentative, because internal strife was as much a common experience for the polities of western Europe in the later Middle Ages as external war. The trend to absolute monarchy in the sixteenth century was a natural adjustment. For relations between France and England around 1400, as well as farther afield, peace did not carry the same meaning as it came to hold later, after exposure to firmer central rule had had an effect. It was a more restricted concept than it grew to be; and fortunately the restriction was matched by the limited damage which could be accomplished by the military technology of the time. Was it the same with the concept of justice? On the face of it the resources for imposing justice around 1400 were

64 C.M.D. Crowder also limited. Was this similarly a term of more restricted range and impact than it has come to be at a later time in consequence of the general growth of the powers of government? The English preachers of that time, who had little to say about peace, were eloquent on the score of justice. From what they had to say about justice and about those responsible for exercising justice it would seem that its application was entirely inadequate by any standards, let alone by comparison with what is expected from courts practising in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, or in the western tradition generally, today. The delivery of justice contradicted the biblical stereotype in every respect. Justice was not even; it was not merciful. On the contrary, justice was weighted in favour of the strong and of the rich. The practice of justice in late-medieval England was not worse than elsewhere; probably it was better. 1 7 Nevertheless the impression of its defects was uniform and constant, whether it comes from official records, from sermons, from literature or the performance of plays. In a review of such sources an observer meets an appalling scepticism about the quality of justice to be had at the hands of judges either of the royal courts or of courts Christian. Justice is corrupt and oppressive. It is a weapon in the hands of the powerful to be used against the weak. For English preachers who were contemporary with Chaucer the representative judge was Pilate, the governor who 'preferred man's drede, afore the drede of God. ' 18 For he chose to submit to the immediate pressure of the Jews in Jerusalem for fear that they would impeach him to the emperor, if he did what he knew to be his duty. In one of the plays of the Towneley cycle Pilate compares himself to the judges of late-medieval England. Like them he has power to dispose of cases at his whim: 'Supporte a man to day, to-morn gans hym then. On both parties thus I play, and fenys me to ordan the right. ' 1 9 For these and many other commentators the source of perversion is money or gifts and the readiness of the judges and their assistants to be suborned by their greed. 'Among the common people they call it law to win thereby, but soothly law it is none. For gold or silver or some other gift will turn the law anon, and make the wrong as it were very right, and of the right the wrong. 'J 0 Brom yard, Brinton, Wimbledon, the more celebrated homilists of the later fourteenth century in England, all speak with one voice on the corruption of justice, it seems. Rarely in their utterances is there found an admission that among the plaintiffs, defendants, advocates, jurors, notaries, and judges there is an occasional man of scruple that 'well and truly ruleth well the law, both in spiritual law and temporal law after their conscience. 'J 1 Such a catalogue of corruption in the strictures of preachers causes no surprise. It seems merely to corroborate other evidence, where judges are dismissed for venality on a wholesale scale, where great men buy the services

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of sheriffs and their retainers terrorize juries when they have to or disrupt the proceedings of a court where they cannot be certain of a favourable verdict.32 Petitioners to parliament complained of abuses of this kind almost annually.33 The relative freedom with which gangs of well-connected ruffians took the law into their own hands in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England have provided historians with vivid and diverting stories.H It seems only too evident that the practice of justice on a foundation of principle rather than in response to the exercise of power was a distant hope for that time and that place. Such pessimism was not confined to the workings of the law. It has been noted that the age of Chaucer was characterized by a widespread literature of complaint. Before accepting this picture of the English courts and their administration of justice in this period as the normal standard of the time, account should be taken of this fashionable pessimism. The notion that the conduct of justice would always be corrupt may have become the accepted model for what could be expected to happen; but it was always expressed in terms of social criticism, as part of a literature of complaint.35 Corruption of justice was not the standard and norm. The most bitter attacks on the practices of the time portray an acknowledged abuse. That is the reason for the harshness of the denunciations. Even if the critics may be resigned to the entrenchment of privilege and power, they recognize that condition as an abuse : they do not accept it as the normal standard. For the standard of what was just was divinely established. It was set in the teachings and the example of the Scriptures. That standard, particularly as expressed in the Last Judgment, was, indeed, terrible. The pictorial demonstrations of its awesome and irreversible nature were widespread in churches great and small across the land. 36 Yet awesome as the Day of Doom was, its fatefulness was tempered by qualities inherent in the judgment. For this judgment, being the judgment of God, was true and it was tempered with mercy. Not only did it deal in truth and repudiate all falsehood and corruption; not only was it a merciful judgment: in being true and merciful the Last Judgment was able to reverse the wrongs which had been characteristic of the temporal order that was coming to an end. It was a saving action which put right earlier wrongs and put them right for eternity. This was the standard of justice which the critics of judicial practice in late-medieval England accepted inherently and intuitively, because it was provided by the most authoritative of all sources, revelation and reason. Only the learned, and maybe not all of them, were able to give a coherent account of this; but it does not necessarily follow that the premises were not widely understood and accepted. Naturally the publicists are prone to dominate the record which the historian receives. Occasionally a stray record provides a correction. For the

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presumptions about justice entertained in the period around 1400 the story of the attempts of the village of Wolvercote to establish independence of the parish of St Peter's in the East within the city of Oxford affords a striking example. In 1416 these villagers carried their aspirations to the length of the Sacra Rota Romana; and there their effort was rebuffed. The telling of the tale is heightened by the curious chance that the record of these events is preserved in a mid-sixteenth-century English translation of a single and isolated document from the hearing before the Rota; but fortunately it contains both the court's sentence and the auditor's award of costs. In brief the story is as follows.37 Wolvercote was a village in the meadows along the River Cherwell to the north of Oxford, some two or three miles outside the town wall. Ecclesiastically it was attached to the parish of St Peter's in the eastern part of Oxford and, together with the chapel of St Cross, which lay just beyond the east wall, Wolvercote was one of three constituents of the parish. As with many other outlying parts of parishes, the parishioners at Wolvercote established a chapel for their convenience and by degrees they sought to establish greater independence from the parish church. In May of 1415 they had obtained from Pope John xxm a privilege which allowed them rights of burial in Wolvercote on the ground that the distance, compounded by winter flooding, hindered the regular burial of their people in the churchyard at St Peter's.38 Loss of burials meant loss of the pious offerings made at the time of burial; and so the revenues of St Peter's suffered. They had suffered even more seriously in recent years as a result of the establishment of New College within the parish.39 The college occupied a considerable area which, at least potentially, was suitable for houses, from which people from time to time would have been carried for burial. Yet the college had obtained papal privileges, more widely ranging than the one accorded to Wolvercote, and including the right to bury deceased members of the college community in their own cemetery without compensation to St Peter's. Compared to Wykeham's magnificent corporation, the parishioners at Wolvercote hardly seemed formidable; but about the same time that they had obtained the privilege from John xxm they had tacitly reinforced their aspirations to autonomy by withholding their customary contribution to the costs of repairing the nave of the parish church. St Peter's did not confront Wolvercote on the issue of the cemetery, as it did in the case of New College, possibly because it was already clear that the parish's claims were going to fail in that suit. 4° The churchwardens at St Peter's laid charges against Wolvercote for defaulting on its share of the cost of repairs in the court of the archdeacon of Oxford, the natural court of first instance. That

67 Peace and justice around 1400 such a routine dispute fetched up in the Rota, the highest court of Christendom in effect, was the result of the initiative of Wolvercote. John Actwellis and Thomas Wythye, presumably two villagers, who are described as 'proctors or wardens of the goods of the church or chapel of Wolvercote,' would not recognize the court of the archdeacon of Oxford and appealed to the Holy See. 4' They gave their reasons. They did not recognize the official who was deputizing for the archdeacon. The surrogate exercise of an archdeacon's jurisdiction was long familiar, but in this case the official was not acceptable to the appellants: he may not have been impartial. The chief reason for the appeal by the two wardens is stated twice in the introduction to their petition for papal intervention and is worth quoting : 'But wheras, most Holy Father, for the favours and power of the said contrary party the said declarants cannot hope to obtain fulness of justice, supplication is therefore made to your Holiness ... ' and they invoke a judgment in the Rota to settle their dispute with St Peter's.42 The case was duly committed to and heard by the auditor, Laurence Sachse, and in the middle of December 1416 he gave his judgment - against Wolvercote. The village was still to be answerable for a third share of the cost of repairs to the nave of the parish church, as had been the custom in the past. The decision was underlined in March 1417 by the auditor's award of forty-two gold florins as costs against Wolvercote - a very substantial sum. In the same year a composition between the representatives of the chapel and the parish settled the sum due for repairs as an annual payment of 3s 4d - which continued to be paid until the middle of the nineteenth century and was resumed in the 1920s. This may not seem a very remarkable story. Wolvercote was not the only village to take claims in defence of its perceived rights to the Roman curia. Two hundred years earlier the villagers of Rosny to the east of Paris laid before the pope their defence of the much graver issue of the free status which they claimed, not once but at least three times and in the face of repeated disappointments.4J Yet suitors from the 'populus' to the Roman curia are not so common that their presence fails to attract attention. The transition from the meadows and fields outside Oxford to the central court of Christendom required very considerable material and mental adaptation. The distance to be covered and the expense of travel or communication were the most obvious factors. 44 Once that obstacle, probably the simplest, was overcome, the legal procedures of the court were arcane and technical and required expert knowledge and guidance. Those with experience knew that the outcome was uncertain and often indeterminate, leading to reviews and appeals. Further expense was involved at every stage. In 1416 there were added complications, although the men of Wolvercote

68 C.M.D. Crowder were unlikely to have been aware of them. In the very same month that the privilege for burial at their chapel had been issued to Wolvercote in his name, John xxm had been deposed by the Council of Constance. This was the first step in the final resolution of the Great Schism. No successor was elected until November 1417, two and a half years later. Under ordinary practice of the church's law all administration, which was conducted in the name of a particular pope, was suspended during a vacancy in the papal see, although on this occasion the Rota continued its sessions during the vacancy. 45 How much of this would have been on the minds of John Actwellis and Thomas Wythye when, on behalf of the chapel of Wolvercote, they defied the local archdeacon's court and made the appeal which took their routine and trivial case to the papal court? Not very much, one would imagine; although it would seem impossible that they would not have realized that costs were involved of an order a great deal higher than those usually met in a village community. What is remarkable is their implicit confidence in making such an appeal. Despite the many unfamiliar and uncertain factors, the men of Wolvercote or their leaders believed that there was a hierarchy of authority which stretched continuously from the stresses of their local situation to the supreme authority of Christendom. They had recently proved that system with the concession which they had won over burials; and now they were prepared to put it to the test again in the belief that they could win a further step in ecclesiastical autonomy by winning exemption from their obligations for the repair of the distant parish church, which now was not even their final resting place. That they were not successful had nothing to do with the system; their failure reflected the weakness of their case. For their appeal duly reached its intended destination: an auditor was assigned to hear it; 46 and as principals on one side of the dispute, the wardens of the chapel of Wolvercote obtained the services of John de Scribanis to steer their case through the required steps of the Rota's procedure. De Scribanis was no novice. He had been a leading official in the earlier Council of Pisa, a role which he continued in the papal camera once that council was over and which he exercised throughout the Council of Constance. During the first three decades of the fifteenth century he was the proctor at the curia most sought after by English litigants. Wolvercote could not have done better for itself. 47 The idea of appealing to Rome could have been suggested to Wolvercote and its wardens by the example of St Peter's in the East itself. The vicar of the parish church, Vincent Wykyng, had been an appellant in the Rota in 1415 in the course of his own attempt to have John xxm reverse the privileges over burial which New College had obtained from earlier popes, to the impoverishment of his church, as he claimed; but he was no more successful in

69 Peace and justice around 1.400

that dispute than Wolvercote later proved to be. It has been noted that the villagers justified their appeal with the claim that they could not expect to obtain even-handed justice in Oxford. Nothing certain can be said about the grounds for their apprehension. Wykyng, who may himself have been in Constance earlier in 1.41.5 when he took the opportunity to press his case against New College, was certainly in Oxford in December 1.41.5. 48 The archdeacon's official to whose jurisdiction Wolvercote objected was John Barton, and he is known to have been in Oxford in 1.41.2-1.3, again in December 1.41.5, and possibly in the intervening period. That is not a convincing basis for establishing any collusion against the interests of Wolvercote by these two university clerks. If some mischievous influence on the course of justice was anticipated, it may have been the recognized wealth of the parish which could be used to suborn a local court; although the wardens of Wolvercote, who contemplated an appeal to the pope, likely knew that the lion's share of that wealth had been appropriated by Merton College for more than a century. Particular information is neither too plentiful nor readily accessible. 49 By 1.400 the suburban character of the settlement, which has already been noted, was probably its most distinctive feature: it lay at the northern edge of the real suburbs, which had accommodated the growth of Oxford beyond its North Gate, on or near the road which crossed the river Thames by the medieval bridge at Godstow. Godstow Abbey had been the landlord of Wolvercote since Henry II had granted the village to the nuns.5° On the opposite bank of the River Cherwell from Wolvercote had lain the important royal manor of Headington until it was enfeoffed in the twelfth century. The inhabitants of Wolvercote could have known the privileges attached to holding in ancient demesne.51 A survey of 1.279 recorded some thirty peasant households, all villeins save one. A third of them were full virgaters, the others half-virgaters. In this and the following century at least one substantial peasant family can be identified. In the more accessible secondary accounts there are traces of the village's ability to defend its rights when they were threatened. Port Meadow lay between Wolvercote and Oxford, and on Port Meadow the citizens of Oxford had common grazing rights. There is record of conflict over rights in these meadows between the city and Wolvercote at their northern end; in 1.494, 1.51.8, and 1.562 the villagers stood up for their rights in Port Meadow, and as late as 1.970 their rights were finally vindicated. Holywell manor was another part of the parish of St Peter's in the East which lay outside the walls of Oxford. At different times, particularly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and again early in the seventeenth century, Holywell was claimed by the city as part of its liberty. Not so with Wolvercote, probably because it lay that much farther afield. The mayor of Oxford's annual cir-

70 C.M.D. Crowder cumambulation of the jurisdiction which the city claimed passed along the southern boundary of Wolvercote. It embraced the anomalous Northgate hundred, a comparatively recent jurisdiction which incorporated the parishes and settlements lying immediately north of the city on the way to Wolvercote. Little can be added from the available sources for the ecclesiastical ambitions of Wolvercote apart from some indications that the chapel generated a considerable income and that in 1630 the vicar of St Peter's in the East chose to base his ministry in Wolvercote rather than in the parish church. 5' If nothing else, this collection of random information across the years affords a picture of a village community to which controversy and litigation were not new. Occasions for conflict, secular and ecclesiastical, lay all round them. The profile is not unusual. Villagers in England were a sturdy lot around 1400, so far as it is possible to generalize.5J Widely scattered evidence suggests that they were part of a markedly hierarchical local society which threw up its own leaders. They had seen their numbers decimated and worse in the ravages of the Black Death during the middle years of the fourteenth century, and the survivors had learned hard lessons in face of the efforts by lords to retain their economic advantages as if nothing had changed. As the changing agricultural organization of manors took hold, the richer or more enterprising villagers had taken advantage of the opportunities to increase their incomes and improve their economic and legal position. Oxford was much less directly affected by the risings of 1381 than Cambridge; but the stirring events of that summer were distinctive in their distribution rather than in their substance, and their impact was not confined to the areas which had been affected directly. In 1433 Bishop Stafford had reason to remind his listeners in parliament that among the peasantry there were 'pauperes' who needed the protection of their social superiors; but there were also other members of village communities capable of giving a lead in the protection of their own and community interests. In Wolvercote there were John Actwellis and Thomas Wythye, ready to take the claims of their chapel for independence to the papal curia.5 4 There is a lot that is not clear in this story, a situation not unfamiliar to the medieval historian; but the fact that stands out is that those who acted in Wolvercote' s interest acted in the belief that justice could be had, that an appeal to the pope was a recognized way of obtaining it, and that the undertaking was worth the costs involved. This belief was entertained despite the prevailing reputation of the church courts. From Chaucer to the Reformation parliament or later the corruption of these courts by avarice is a byword. The preachers whose comments on the exercise of justice have already been cited made no exception for the church courts. For Thomas Wimbeldon 'the court which is called more spiritually christian is more cursed," in respect of the

71.

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avarice of its officials, than the sheriff's court. Ecclesiastical judges are notable for their affection for the 'pecuniary penalty. '55 John Brom yard is no less severe on the church courts generally and on the avarice of the papal curia in particular.56 It was this common view of the church courts which had generated Wolvercote's appeal from the archdeacon's official. There is a real dilemma in deciding whether more attention is due to contemporaries' actions or to their words. Can the action, or rather the premises of the action, taken by the men of Wolvercote outweigh the complaints not only of the preachers, but of representatives to parliament and the periodic corrections imposed upon its officials by the crown as the natural source of justice in the realm? To the point already made that the existence of complaint implies the possibility of correction can now be added a reminder that the system of justice which sprang from the obligations of the king to his subjects was not the only system of justice in the land. Two other systems existed that were no less familiar to the predominantly rural population of medieval England. There were the church courts and the manorial courts. What was the attitude to these different jurisdictions on the part of villagers? The modern observer has little or no experience of the judicial activity of church court and manorial court. In his effort to transpose himself into the past it is difficult for the historian not to be affected by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence of the jurisdiction of royal courts. One obvious reason for this dominance is the better preservation of royal records. A contributory factor is that the crown closely monitored and controlled the activity of the church courts and provided a resource, on appeal, when justice was not done or not attempted in the lord's court.57 A further reason is the close association throughout the medieval period of justice with administration. The ubiquitous duties of the sheriff or the wide-ranging jurisdiction of the general eyre over legal and administrative complaints are evidence of the overlap of two functions of government which become distinct at a later date. Despite the disappearance of the eyre and the decline of the sheriff's office in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the separation of the two functions had not developed far in later medieval England. Justice, therefore, was prone to be seen not in exclusively moral terms, as to what should be achieved, but more in practical terms, as to what likely could be achieved, weighing experience of what traffic the system would bear. For this reason actions are as eloquent as words and discussion; and in this respect, despite falling far behind in terms of extant evidence, church courts and manorial courts have an importance because they were there to be used. As to their use by a rural population it may seem that the courts Christian would make a lesser impression than would be the case for an urban population. For all those who were

72 C.M.D. Crowder not 'clerici' the impact of the church courts was confined to spiritual questions and morals. The same moral controls, or attempted controls, which are recorded in chapter act books for the precincts of cathedrals, were not possible in the more dispersed or less closely observed settlement of the countryside.58 Peasants, generally, did not dispose of so much property as the representative townsman, and their wills and the church's jurisdiction over them are correspondingly less prominent. Nevertheless church courts touched the lives of countrymen at many points, either individually in matters of faith and morals or concerning their obligation to pay tithe and other church dues, or collectively in providing for the material needs of the parish church and churchyard. The course which Wolvercote pursued, taking its case to the Rota, may be exceptional, but the circumstances from which the case sprang were commonplace. The jurisdiction of the church courts and the way in which they conducted their business, therefore, had a part in forming the prevailing view of justice. For the villagers at Wolvercote and elsewhere the manorial court was the most instrumental influence on their view of justice and its practical working. It was the most familiar influence and the best established, with its roots in the co-operative agriculture of the village community. At present more and more evidence is being accumulated to differentiate one peasant from another, and a range of status and wealth is amply documented in those villages which have been most closely analysed. It has never been easy to generalize about the English peasantry as a whole and the research of the last fifty years has made it more, not less difficult. Moreover the variation of peasant fortunes increased as the breakdown in demesne farming in England in the course of the fourteenth century offered enterprising tenants, whatever their legal status, the opportunity to prosper. The growing number of well-documented cases showing the development of individual enterprise has prompted the suggestion that the collective solidarity of the village community was no longer a directing factor in the rural society of England after the thirteenth century.59 Yet there remain too many indications to the contrary: unenclosed common fields, the common responsibility for the preservation of order, the collective assessment for raising national taxation, the obligation to constitute a community court for the village or manor, joint responsibility as parishioners: these and other habitual functions mean that there has to be a place around 1400, in the English countryside, both for the differentiation of individuals and for the recognition of collective solidarity. A sense of justice, in the broadest terms, was essential for the regulation of conflict between these diverging social trends. In terms of social justice it was expressed in many acts of resistance to restrictions on the part of lords, and ultimately in the revolt of 1381, which included an apocalyptic appeal to the original equality

73 Peace and justice around 1400 found in the biblical story of the creation of the world - 'when Adam delved and Eve span ... ' and so on. Any such slogan pitched the stakes unnaturally high and was bound to fall on deaf ears in the case of the majority of marching peasants, from only a handful of counties. Their aims in escaping from legal and economic restrictions were much more basic and practical. At the same time it is a mistakenly hard-headed correction to discount entirely the effect of such sublime aspirations on the liberating progress towards making bondmen free. In the more restricted sense of justice before the law and its practice in the courts the distinction between bond and free was undoubtedly counting for less long before 1400, in cases before the royal courts as well as in manorial courts. The conclusions drawn by Anne and Edward DeWindt, from a very complete, quantitative examination of eyre and assize records for Huntingdonshire in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, represent the activity of the king's justice on circuit in the county as the culmination of villagers' experience of the practice of justice in the courts at subordinate levels. This continuous chain of judicial and legal activity required the participation of villagers, from their own manorial court in the vill to the occasional hundred court and sheriff's tourn, and to the county court under the presidency of the sheriff. At all these levels free tenants and customary tenants or villeins were exposed to the practice of justice before and under the law; and from that experience they formed impressions of what could be expected of the king's law and his agents, as elsewhere they formed impressions of what could be expected from judicial authorities in the church and from their own peers in the viii. The DeWindts note, among many other instructive observations, that villagers of one kind or another were plaintiffs or defendants in rather more than half of those Huntingdonshire pleas in which the social status of the litigants can be identified. Apart from their place as parties to suits, villagers appeared before royal justices as jurors, pledges, attornies, and witnesses. No doubt they were subordinate players when the nature of and the consequences of their causes are set beside those of litigants of higher status, such as the local knights or equivalent landholders or of those comparatively few lords whose holdings gave them regional importance. Yet quantitatively, as a group, so the DeWindts show, it is the villagers of Huntingdonshire who are the chief users of the eyre. It has even been suggested that this particular form of decentralizing the king's justice broke down under their demands. 6o It is a long stride from Huntingdonshire in the 1280s to the uplands of the northwestern border counties of England four centuries later. The conduct of justice in this independent part of the realm in the late seventeenth century has led Alan Macfarlane, in his latest revision of the social character of late-

74 C.M.D. Crowder medieval and early modern England, to argue that the expectation that the court system and its administration, locally and from the centre, would habitually punish the guilty was a normal and regular aspect of life in even the remotest counties. 61 Yet these four centuries demonstrate as much continuity as change; and it is possible to argue that in this earlier period too the normal expectation was that justice in the modern sense of the term could be obtained; that is, a fair, judicial exercise of the law to ensure that actions were attended with the consequences that they deserved. Indeed, there was much evidence that this was not the case: that just desserts could be evaded and that equal justice could be overthrown by political power and wealth. However the evidence of that kind comes from the higher levels of society which held the power and wealth which they could use to their own advantage. Those humbler people who have been seen to have been engaged in the work of the legal system in many ways at all levels were denied that opportunity. They had to count on the operation of a social principle to secure their rights, that is on justice as we now understand it. Bishop Stafford's sketch of the way in which political society was organized in Henry vr's time was a stereotype, widely adopted in his time; but from the arguments presented here it is possible that the exercise of justice was founded on those whom he called 'vulgares' and 'inferiores' as much as on the intermediate class to whom he attributed the main responsibility for its exercise, the 'milites' and 'mediocres.' By contrast, the bishop's first category, the prelates and magnates, who were responsible for maintaining peace, were more limited and less modern in their appreciation of their task than was the case with their social dependents. NOTES

1 Rotuli parliamentorum (1278-1503) 6 vols, ed J. Strachey et al. (London 176783) JV, 419. Dr J. S. Roskell has commented briefly on the social stratification which Stafford outlined in this address, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 24 (1951) 171-2. 2 S. B. Chrimes English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (London 1936, repr 1966) 81-126. The place of the chancellor's address is repeatedly noted in this work, see index, sv 'Parliament, chancellor's sermons to.'· For a broader treatment of estates in Chaucer and earlier literature, see Jill Mann Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge 1973). 3 Authority for what follows on Bishop Stafford and his family connections will be found in George E. Cokayne The Complete Peerage, ed Vicary Gibbs, n (1912) 388; JV (1916) 327-8; ed G.H . White, xn, pt i (1953) 173-82; Carole Rawcliffe The Staffords : Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham , 1394-1521 (Cam-

75 Peace and justice around

4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12

13

1400

bridge, 1978) (especially chapter 1), for the Staffords; and for the bishop, A.B. Emden A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1500 (hereinafter BRUO), m (1959) 1750-2; W.H .H. Rogers 'Stafford of Suthwyke' Wiltshire Notes and Queries 3 (1900) 193-202; Victoria County History, Wiltshire vm (1965) 221-2; Dictionary of National Biography xvm, 862-3. The Buckingham title was transmitted to Duke Humphrey by his mother who was the daughter and eventually heiress of Thomas of Woodstock, Edward m's youngest son. Thomas had held the title and so had his son. Much of the revenue to sustain the dignity of duke also came from the same inheritance. J.T. Rosenthal The Training of an Elite Group: English Bishops in the Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia 1970; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society ns 60 pt 5), 8, 50 After her son's birth Emma seems to have passed the rest of her life as a religious at Canterbury. Rogers 'Stafford of Suthwyke' 195. Gascoigne, as well as advertising Stafford's bastardy, alleges that he himself had sons and daughters by a nun when he was in bishop's orders : Loci e libro veritatum, ed J.E.T. Rogers (Oxford 1881) 40, 231 A brief statement of these themes is provided by D.M. Crossan and P. de Letter in New Catholic Encyclopaedia VIII (New York 1967) 72-7. Nicholas Orme English Schools in the Middle Ages (London 1973) 59-70 and Education in the West of England, 106fr1548 (Exeter 1976) 7-8, 10-11 John Barnie War in Medieval English Society (London 1974) 117-38. Barnie makes a good deal of the strength of pacifist sentiment in England around 1400, and includes sermons by Bishop Brinton among his evidence; but the absence of an entry for 'peace' in the index of G.R. Owst Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford 1966) suggests that it was not a stock theme for preachers at the time of the Hundred Years War. Some of Chaucer's work, such as The Tale of Melibee, conveys a criticism of war and its attendant evils, but half the references to peace in J.S.P. Tatlock and A.G. Kennedy A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (np 1927) are greetings or admonitions and the like rather than moralizing comment. Owst Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England 319-38. For the critical tone of much of the written and spoken expression of the later fourteenth century, see Anne Middleton 'The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard 11' Speculum 53 (1978) 94-114 and Barnie War in Medieval English Society. Basil Cottle The Triumph of English, 1350-1400 (London 1969) 66H, is less impressed with the pacifist tone of English literature in the age of Chaucer than Barnie. Jean Gerson Oeuvres completes, ed P. Glorieux VII pt 2 (Paris 1968) 1100-23 (no. 396). The date for this sermon is the one suggested by Glorieux, xv. It is in French, appropriately for the secular audience. The thesis of Dorothy Catherine Brown, 'Aspects of the Pastoral Theology of

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14 15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Jean Gerson' (PhD thesis, Queen's University, Kingston 1979), is being revised for publication. It will document Gerson's credit in this aspect of his career. Gerson, Oeuvres vu pt 2 1121-2 Ibidem, especially 1114. At a still earlier date peace was an individual quality or condition, a man's personal mund, as instanced, for example, by Alan Harding The Law Courts of Medieval England (London 1973) 14-15. The facts of Christine's life are taken from the introductions to the editions of the three overlapping works which contain her view of peace, coupled with justice, as essential for internal rule rather than external relations : Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles v, ed S. Solente 2 vols (Paris 193640 ), written in 1404; Livre du corps de policie, ed Robert H. Lucas (Geneva 1967), written in 1407; and Livre de la paix of Christine de Pisan, ed Charity C. Willard (S'Gravenhage 1958), written in 1412-13. The statement of her views on peace is taken from the last of these. 'Car puis qu'il est ainsi qu'il convient tout royaume perir ou ii a disencion, est chose certaine que par le contraire, c'est paix et amour, ii est preserve et conserve,' Willard Livre de la paix 62. In the Livre de la paix each chapter is headed with a text. For the third chapter of the first part of the work the gospel's prediction of troubles for the kingdom or house divided against itself is used (Matt 12:25). 'C'est assavoir tiegnes !es princes en amour de toutes !es parties, tant en le benivolence de toy comme en I' amistie d' entre eulx par tel mantien et si sagement qu'ilz aient cause de remanoir en paix et non faire au contraire,' ibidem 92. 'Et a dire que est justice, c'est si comme une loyalle despensiere qui distribue et depart a un chascun tel part et portion qui lui est due par ses faiz, sois de bien ou de ma!,' ibidem 95. For this discussion the Epistre au Roi Richart of the summer of 1395, in which de Mezieres sought to persuade Richard II to join with Charles VI in his crusading design, is most relevant. P. de Mezieres Letter 'to Richard II, tr G. W. Coopland (Liverpool 1975) makes this arcane work more accessible, although the editorial comment on the text is modest. Coopland's introduction on de Mezieres' life can be supplemented by Aziz S. Atiyah The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London 1938, repr New York 1970) ch vu; Philippe de Mezieres' Campaign for the Feast of Mary's Presentation, tr W. E. Coleman (Toronto 1981) 11; M. V. Clarke Fourteenth-Century Studies, eds LS. Sutherland and M. McKisack (Oxford 1937); repr Freeport, NY 1967), 286-92; and J.H. Harvey 'The Wilton Diptych : A Re-examination' Archaelogia 98 (1961). The Great Schism in the church was matched by similar, if less critical divisions in the German empire and in the Spanish kingdoms. In the closing decades of the fourteenth century there were social upheavals in Flanders, Italy, and France

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23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

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as well as in England. The Turks advanced steadily into southeastern Europe; and the economic recession which followed the Black Death was generally at its lowest point. The standard edition by Ernest Nys (1883) being a rare work, I have used The Tree of Battles by Honore Bonet, an English version with introduction by G. W. Coopland (Liverpool 1949). It is also the principal source for extant biographical information on Bonet. N.A.R. Wright 'The Tree of Battles of Honore Bouvet and the Laws of War' and M.H. Keen, 'Chivalry, Nobility and the Man-atarms,' two contributions to War, Literature and Politics in the Later Middle Ages, ed C. T. Allmand (Liverpool 1976), are also useful. The former gives references (u-13) for the form of Bovet's name. Coopland The Tree of Battles 21-5. Christine de Pisan transmitted much of L'Arbre des batailles in French and Caxton translated her rendering into English. His readers knew of the book from earlier English authors, and some thirty years before Caxton, Gilbert of the Haye had translated it into Scots. There was a Spanish adaptation and the work was familiar to the Burgundian nobility. Ibidem, 81, the opening of the work, and J:J:8-19, the second chapter of the second book. The 132 chapters on rules of war constitute the fourth book, which is by far the longest. Ibidem u6-8 Ibidem u 5 This is the conclusion of Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison The Justice and the Mare's Ale (Oxford 1981). Sir John Fortescue was emphatically of this opinion; but see J.R. Lander's qualification in Conflict and Stability in FifteenthCentury England 3rd ed (London 1977) 162. Owst Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England 344 Ibidem 495 Ibidem 343 Ibidem 345 J.R. Maddicott Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenthand Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford 1978; Past and Present Supplement 4) illustrates the corruption of justice astride 1300. See also Richard W. Kaeuper ' Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer' Speculum 54 (1979) for an indication of recent literature; and compare M. McKisack The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford 1959) 205. E.F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485 (Oxford 1961) 46~3, offers examples of interference with justice by retainers; and compare English Historical Documents, 1327-1485, ed A.R. Myers (London 1969) 484, 489-90. Anthony Goodman, A History of England from Edward 11 to James I (London 1977) 283-6, summarizes the classic misfortunes of the Pastons.

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33

34

35

36

37 38

39

Villagers recognized the need for maintenance in their own protection; G. 0. Sayles Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench VI (London 1965; Selden Society 82) xxvi. Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, ed Charles Plummer (London 1926) 27-8, provides references and lists the main parliamentary complaints of the first half of the fifteenth century. E. L. G. Stones 'The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville in Leicestershire and Their Associates in Crime,' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser 7 (1957) 117-36; J.G. Bellamy 'The Coterel Gang : An Anatomy of a Band of Fourteenth-Century Criminals' English Historical Review 79 (1964) 698-717. Commenting on these incidents Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision (New York 1976) 150-2, 157, 169-70, suggests that they may have been attempts to secure natural justice by self-help. Compare Kaeuper, ' Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England' 737 for a similar observation. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England 182-3, reproduces a report of a more generally representative disturbance of justice in Bedfordshire. The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed Thomas Wright (London 1839) 224-30, prints a Latin poem of the beginning of the fourteenth century on the corruption of the royal courts. The iconography of justice, as one of the cardinal virtues, is marginally relevant to this discussion and is too large a topic to be tackled; but those who cannot consult the indexes at Princeton or the Warburg Institute may make a beginning with Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed Engelbert Kirschenbaum SJ, 2 (Rome 1970) 466--72 and G. de Tervarent Attributs et symboles dans I' art profane, 1450-1600 (Geneva 1958) sv 'Justice.' It will be found at some length in Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum (hereinafter AHC) 13 (1981) 67-77, 111-24. By the generosity of Dr Janet Cooper, who will be responsible for the article on Wolvercote in the volume of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire which includes Wootton Hundred, I have been supplied a copy of a draft comment on the village by a predecessor in the editorial preparation of that volume. The first mention of a chapel at Wolvercote is said to be 1236, but architectural evidence indicates that it was built a century earlier. This feature is not noted in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments City of Oxford (London 1939) 154-5. The draft article mentions two histories of the church at Wolvercote which I have not been able to see, but which I am told add nothing for the dispute of 1416. For John xxm's privilege see Calendar of Papal Letters VI (London 1904) 441. For the dispute between St Peter's in the East and New College, see AHC 12 (1980) 319-411 .

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40 The date at which Wolvercote initiated its appeal over its contribution to repairs to the parish church is not known. In the parish's dispute with New College it will have been evident by December 1415, if not earlier, that St Peter's was not likely to obtain a judgment rescinding New College's privileges, as it wished, ibidem 352-6. 41 Ibidem 13 (1981) 111 42 Ibidem 111-12 43 These incidents provided Marc Bloch with the substance of an article of 1939, readily accessible in translation as 'From the Royal Court to the Court of Rome' in Change in Medieval Society, ed Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York 1964) 3-13. The tradition of defending villagers' rights and interests in Rosny-sur-Bois was still alive during the Great Schism: F. Cheyette ' La justice et le pouvoir royale a la fin du moyen age fran~ais' Revue historique de droit fran,ais et etranger 4e ser, 4oe annee (1962) 374-5. 44 Mrs M. W. Labarge has recently provided a comprehensive view of Mediev~l Travellers (London 1982), but only for 'the rich and restless.' The author notes, however, that these noble travellers were often accompanied on their journeys by officials and servants, 210. 45 E. Friedberg Corpus Juris Canonici 11 (Leipzig 1891) 946--9, 1135-6. Compare P.M. Baumgarten Aus Kanzlei und Kammer (Freiburg 1907) 158-63. 46 In the absence of a recognized pope the auditor was acting on a commission from the council : AHC 13 (1981) 7(>--1. 47 De Scribanis only attended three critical stages of the hearing on behalf of his clients. He otherwise presented no case for their appeal, leaving the court to the proctor for St Peter's in the East: ibidem 71. This may reflect de Scribanis' opinion of his client's claims; but for the proctor's reputation with English clients, see ibidem 103-4. 48 Ibidem 12 (1980) 354. For John Barton see BRUO (1957) 122. 49 The completed account of Wolvercote to be published in the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, will improve matters. The material so kindly made available to me is more informative about the chapel than the community in the medieval period. The most consecutive published account of the medieval history of the area north of Oxford reaching to Wolvercote is H.M. Cam 'The Hundred outside the North Gate of Oxford' Oxoniensia 1 (1936) 113-25. I have also used the published volumes of Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, particularly 1v and v. There is an older account in Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford, composed in 1661-1666 by Anthony Wood 1, ed Andrew Clark (Oxford 1889) 335 ff. 50 In 1392 John de Kirkeby, chaplain of Wolvercote, was forbidden to visit the nuns in the abbey: V.C.H., Oxon. 11 (London 1907) 73. A John de Kirkeby,

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chaplain, was appealed in 1385 by another felon of robberies committed in Berkshire in 1374 by a band of Oxford clerks: Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1.381.85 568--9; and in 1395 the same man, probably, was pardoned for having led a riotous attack on Welshmen in Oxford, with Thomas Speek, chaplain, and others, on 1 and 2 April 1389 : Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1.391-96 605---6; BRUO u (1958) 1054. This John could have been the chaplain of Wolvercote and the source of the opposition of the parishioners there to St Peter's in the East and its vicar; but this is all circumstantial speculation. For rights in ancient demesne the well-known suit between the villagers of King's Ripton and the abbey of Ramsey is instructive : Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts 1: Reigns of Henry III and Edward 1, ed F.W. Maitland (London 1889; Selden Society 2) 99-129. For the enfeoffment of Headington to one of the Empress Maud's Breton followers see V.C.H., Oxon. v (London 1957) 160, and Cam, 'The Hundred outside the North Gate of Oxford' 118. The draft typescript mentioned earlier gives the information that in 1341 a ninth was assessed against the revenues of the chapel at 13li 6s 8d; and that in this and the following century the church was provided with a north chapel, a west tower, and a rebuilt chancel. In 1483 the farmer of the great tithe for Merton College, exercising its right as rector, obliged himself to pay 100s a year for Wolvercote; Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis , 1485-1.521, ed H . E. Salter (Oxford 1923; (Oxford Historical Society 76) 17, 232 . For the situation in 1630 see V.C.H., Oxon IV 399. There was no curate at Wolvercote and church and cemetery were ill-kept at the time of Bishop Atwater' s visitation, 151720; Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln 1.51.7-1531. ,, ed A. Hamilton Thompson (Lincoln 1940; Lincoln Record Society 33) 140. Sir John Fortes.cue provides the most forceful statement of this impression, if not the most objective one : De laudibus legum Angliae, ed S.B. Chrimes (Cambridge 1949) 6~71 , 8~. There is the better documented evidence in the writings of R.H. Hilton and others. The draft material sent to me by Dr Cooper records that a Thomas Attwell of Wolvercote left 2d to the high altar in the church at Wolvercote in 1543 . It is possible that this was another leading family in the village over a considerable period. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England 280, 317. ' Pecuniary penalty' was a popular description of the time, and Wimbeldon added the comment that if it is a medicine, it dese1ves to be called a laxative medicine for purses rather than for souls : ibidem 280. An English poem, attributed to the time of Edward 1, expresses a villager's disenchantment with church courts in terms similar to the Latin strictures on the royal courts which have already been noted,

81

56 57

58

59

60

61

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Wright Political Songs of England 155-9. Chaucer's Summoner, Pardoner, and Friar are familiar examples of the same abuses. Owst Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England 24()-53 . The venality of the papal curia was also a prominent target of reformers at the Council of Constance. I have had the opportunity to go through the papers of Dr E. B. Graves, who died recently. They include an unusually large collection of fiches recording disputes that affected the competing claims of English royal and papal jurisdiction from the thirteenth century onwards. The collection is at present in the temporary care of the author of this essay. It is interesting, all the same, to see moral cases, such as adultery, being judged in manorial courts (Maitland Select Pleas 29, 97, 98, 162) as well as more familiarly in the bishop's audience (E. Bowker An Episcopal Court Book (Lincoln 1967; Lincoln Record Society 61] Index of subjects, sv 'Adultery,' 'Brothel,' 'Incontinence,' 'Marriage'). Alan Macfarlane The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (New York nd; London 1978), especially chapters 5 and 6, which indicate the main literature. Macfarlane' s revisionist essay has provoked many thoughtful reviews. Among the more recent of them are judicious comments by Paul Hyams English Historical Review 96 (1981) 605-7 and D. Levine Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1981) 669"""76. Generally criticism has found Madarlane's arguments flawed : C. Dyer Economic History Review 2nd ser, 32 (1979) 600-1; J. Hatcher Historical Journal 22 (1979) 765-8; S.L. Waugh Journal of Economic History 39 (1979) 770-2; and R.H. Hilton New Left Review 120 (1980) 10()-11. Royal Justice and the Medieval Countryside : The Huntingdonshire Eyre of 1286, the Ramsey Abbey Banlieu Court of 1287, and the Assizes of 1287-88, ed Anne R. and Edwin B. DeWindt (Toronto 1981) 2 vols. The peasant presence at the general eyre is summarized in 1 74--6. Paul Hyams, Kings, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England (Oxford 1980), especially 125-60, 161, 201-19, takes a less optimistic view of villeins' access to the royal courts. In Royal Justice and the Medieval Countryside 1, 8, the DeWindts cite Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England 86, in support of their claims; and see, in a similar sense, J.Z. Titow English Rural Society 120