In this book, Bisson explores the political consequences of the economic and social changes that swept Europe in the long twelfth century. He focuses on two competing technologies of power, one based on personal will, fidelity, and coercive force, and the other on policy, debate, and accountable service. He argues that the twelfth century saw these two modes of power clash; from the crisis of their meeting emerged the seeds of modern European government.
Bisson's story begins with lordship, which he presents as an unpolitical mode of power rooted in the will of its wielders. Lordship dominated the powerless by violence. It was rooted in emotions and ambitions rather than political association and policy. Its symptoms, therefore, were imprecise and unpredictable dominion by those with power, and constant efforts by their servants to become powerful in their own right by subjugating those whom they could.
Lordship emerged, says Bisson, in tenth-century France as the armed in their castles subverted Carolingian public institutions, forced the unarmed or less armed into submission, and imposed oaths of fealty on them. From France, it radiated outward into all parts of Europe (a progress Bisson depicts with a striking map on p. 63). Nevertheless, the idea of public order survived. And in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, it regained strength as economic growth dislocated power relationships. Lord-kings and lord-princes found that they could increase their power by better accounting for their resources and making their revenues more reliable. They therefore started to experiment with more accurate accounting of both resources and service, thus undermining the arbitrary and imprecise nature of lordship. They also began to engage with their people and watch over their interests; assemblies, which had served as ceremonial and affirmative venues for lords, began to act politically. Eventually, multiplying lawyers glossing legal texts gave voice “to the deeply subverted presumption that public order was right order” (p. 470).
To support this narrative, Bisson draws on a breathtaking array of sources from across Europe; he leads us through social and political turmoil in Spain, Flanders, and Poland as well as in England, France, Germany, and Italy. In the process, he demonstrates clearly that great changes took place during the twelfth century. Nevertheless, he leaves open questions about the nature of those changes and about the terms in which he describes them. For example, he uses the word “government” in a quite specific way. Government involves the delegated, routine, and accountable exercise of power by competent officials (p. 101). Government follows, and is thus constrained by, policy rather than arbitrary whim; governmental councils and assemblies deliberate the distribution of resources rather than publicly enacting and celebrating the lord's will (p. 397). This understanding of government is modern. It is not at all clear that it matches what people in the twelfth century or before understood as government or public order (though he does show persuasively that a language of public order persisted even when lordship was at its strongest). It does not have to; Bisson is perfectly entitled to seek the origins of modern ideas and institutions in the past regardless of whether contemporaries saw or understood them. But he seems often to equate his idea of government with medieval ideas of public order, to see as disorder all other ways of organizing or expressing power, and to argue that his subjects did the same.
Bisson views lordship as the antithesis of normative order. He says openly at one point that he sees no evidence of castellan elites thinking of their lordships in normative terms, because they left no domain surveys and no evidence of routine accountability (p. 47). The famous Conventum written in the 1020s by Hugh IV of Lusignan (to which Bisson refers on pp. 51–52), however, shows that at least one castellan lord understood lordship in thoroughly normative terms and that he sought to hold his lord William V of Aquitaine accountable on those terms. Hugh's norms had to do not with accountable estate management or the duties of office, but rather with how lords and vassals were supposed to treat each other, and in particular with the castles and lands that Hugh thought he was owed by inheritance, by dint of loyalty and service, or as recompense for loss.
Although Bisson marshals a great deal of evidence, the very scope of his book forces him to be selective; however, he only seldom pauses to explain why he has chosen to highlight the voices that he has, or why we should listen to them rather than others. His choices tend to mask the voices of those who understood order and disorder in terms other than his. For example, while discussing the great crisis in Flanders that followed the murder of Count Charles the Good in 1127, Bisson presents the citizens of Bruges as uniformly aggrieved at the slaying of their protector and anxious to restore comital order (p. 262). He does not mention those citizens of the town described by Galbert of Bruges who sympathized with or supported the clan who had carried out the slaying.
There is much in this book that is thought provoking. Bisson confronts us with societies marked by violence, by ruthless ambition, and by coercion and oppression. He shows clearly that some people were victimized by lords and that those who criticized lordship often did so in terms evoking Carolingian ideas of public order. He also demonstrates how economic change prompted lord-rulers to promote improved accountability and to engage with other interest groups in ways that foreshadowed bureaucratic and parliamentary government. But by casting his narrative exclusively in terms of disorder versus public order, and by defining them as he has, Bisson has placed his subjects within a framework of analysis that may not fit them and is arguably incomplete.
