The Nobility in the European Middle Ages

Extract

One of the most impressive testimonies to the unity of mankind lies in the fact that certain basic features of social structure have been determined in different areas by the existence of similar conditions. Thus in ancient Egypt, in Japan, in early American cultures and among Indo-European peoples sociological analysis shows the rise of aristocracy to have been due to the coincidence of certain irrational, deepseated, retrospective convictions with certain economic conditions. Repeatedly the evolution of a ruling class runs back into that prehistoric darkness when related tribes first united to form a primordial political community; in the earliest historic age of such a community we find the members of this regarded as descendants of the gods or even as their earthly embodiments. It is on this belief in their divine origins that the great base their claim to a monopoly of political and economic power, the latter including disposal of the labor of the unfree. The same belief leads them to perpetuate themselves as a caste; their family lines must not be contaminated by the blood of the low-born. The mass of the free-born accepts this social order as divinely ordained. There is no sign of any consciousness of oppression nor thought of revolt against the privileges of the aristocracy. The latter for its part carefully heeds the rights of common mortals. There is either no tradition of a golden age of equality, or if there is some legend of a lost paradise, it fails to incite revolt against an order sanctified by immemorial existence. A society based on respect for an hereditary aristocracy that monopolized the best land could not be subverted by any forces generated solely within the lower classes. Discontent could become revolutionary only through the cultural developments that made it possible to ask the question, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”