Chris Wickham on medieval assemblies

Most of the time I am happy to be in a rather out-of-the-way location, surrounded by huge piles of snow (well, maybe not that part, but snow kept me at home today); occasionally I wish I were someplace where I could just drop in to London's Institute of Historical Research, and hear someone of the quality of Chris Wickham ( not too many of those actually) talk about a subject that interests me both as a medieval historian and as a historian of democracy. On November 17, Wickham gave a paper entitled "The Culture of the Public: assembly politics and the ‘feudal revolution,'" and I was not there!

Fortunately, Jonathan Jarrett of A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe was there, and with his usual generosity he has now reported on it. A short excerpt from the report:

His key points were, roughly, that the ideal of an assembly of free men giving you as ruler legitimacy in your actions is always important, and that throughout the Middle Ages someone doing something can add legitimacy to their action by arranging that it happens in public before witnesses.² Despite this, large-scale public assemblies stop [he is talking about the era of the "feudal transformation"].³ Local courts remain roughly the same, but the top stratum of the social stratification is lost. (You see the similarity to my earlier pitch.) The new assemblies of, for example, counts and their followers, don’t have the same function of placing actions in public, because they are closed; the ‘public’ are disenfranchised and it doesn’t seem to matter...of course bishops continue to use such tactics throughout the Middle Ages when they need to take some action onto a higher level, the best examples being the councils behind the Peace of God. So there are many ways to deploy a public gathering in the pursuit of the reinforcement, or indeed the destabilisation, of power.

His conclusion was however that the most effective assemblies are regular ones. An assembly that someone knows is going to happen gives them stability. They can bring the case then, so they don’t need to ravage your lands now; they will be able to protest, albeit in a stage-managed fashion, so violent action now is both less legitimate and less necessary. On the other hand, ad hoc assemblies show weakness, and are often disrupted or produce unexpected results (”Dieu le veult! Dieu le veult!“) With observations like this, and more work on how assemblies are used both by their organisers and participants, we might have another wedge with which to open up this topic over which we continue unwillingly to trip.

As so often in discussing the history of democracy and developments that lead to or undermine it, questions of scale and who is the "public" are all important. I hope that Chris decides to publish something about this, and relate the question of "public" to the notion of representation found in later parliaments. In what sense are the parliamentary Commons the "Commons of England?" For that matter, in what sense are a group of bishops "The Church?"

Image: the Council of Vatican II.