History · Ch 4 — The Three Orders
Introduction
Introduction
Setting the Scene: Europe After Rome
This chapter examines the social, economic and political changes that reshaped western Europe between roughly the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. After the western Roman Empire collapsed, successive waves of Germanic peoples from eastern and central Europe moved into and settled regions of Italy, Spain and France. With no single political authority left to keep order, military conflict became frequent, and the ability to gather resources to defend one’s land grew critically important. Out of this need, European society organised itself around the control of land — a system that blended older Roman administrative traditions with the customs the Germanic peoples brought with them.
Christianity had been the official religion of the Roman Empire from the fourth century onward, and it survived Rome’s collapse, gradually spreading further into central and northern Europe. In the process, the Church itself became one of the largest landholders in Europe and a major political power in its own right.
The Three Orders, Defined
The chapter’s central idea is that medieval European society came to be understood as divided into three broad social categories, or ‘orders’: Christian priests, landowning nobles, and peasants. How the relationships between these three groups changed over time is one of the key threads running through several centuries of European history.
The three orders were not simply a description of medieval society — priests, nobles and peasants — but a whole way of explaining why society was organised the way it was, with each order understood to depend on the others.
How Historians Know This
Medieval Europe left behind an unusually rich body of evidence, and over the last century European historians have used it to reconstruct the history of entire regions — sometimes even individual villages — in remarkable detail. This has been possible because so much material survives from the period: records of landownership, prices and legal disputes; church registers of births, marriages and deaths, which let historians trace family structures and population change; church inscriptions that reveal the activity of traders’ associations; and songs and stories that capture the flavour of festivals and community life. Together, these sources let historians study both slow, long-term change — such as population growth — and sudden, short-term upheaval, such as a peasant revolt.
Among the many French scholars who studied feudal society, one of the earliest and most influential was Marc Bloch (1886–1944). Bloch belonged to a generation of historians who argued that history was about far more than politics, diplomacy and the doings of great men — it also had to grapple with geography and the shared attitudes and behaviour of ordinary groups of people. His book Feudal Society examined European, and especially French, society between roughly 900 and 1300 in extraordinary detail, covering social hierarchies, the management of land, and the popular culture of the age. Bloch’s own career ended in tragedy: he was shot by the Nazis during the Second World War.