“[I]t has nothing to do with feudalism. It has to do with the experience of power.” (p. 307). Thomas Bisson’s innovative approach in this book is to abandon long-tried attempts to impose concepts of feudal government onto the long twelfth century and in their place look through the eyes of contemporaries to see the “experience of power”. “Lordship”, the preeminent instantiation of power, was fundamentally a personal, effluent, affective experience, and Bisson attempts to demonstrate the evolution of that experience into what might finally and fairly be called systems of government in the thirteenth century. These systems are not, however, coherent, political, public, or official in the twelfth century. Rather, they evolve out of the responses by lord-kings to “conflicting aspirations (…) for lordship and nobility, and for justice”. The former prompts the development of coercive, violent baronial lordships of constraint, while the latter aspiration is found in the cries of both the oppressed peasantry and the violated church and in the designs of lord-kings to rein in the lesser nobilities and expand and confirm their own royal domains. The power of lordship devolves upon ever lower classes of aspirants to nobility; this prompts violent crises at micro and macro levels in the twelfth century; and lord-kings struggle to rescue their lands from this violence while maintaining a fundamentally personal concept of their lordship and the importance of fidelity over accountability in the offices of their subordinates.

Chapter II traces the “age of lordship”, beginning with a penetrating description of the “Old Order” of power, a theocratic structure of personal lordship tied by tradition to a rhetoric of public order, yet “a passive zone of consecrated authority (…) neither constitutional nor (in the modern sense) political” (p. 30). The fundamental shift in the eleventh century that becomes the linchpin for Bisson’s entire narrative is the diffusion of lay lordship to ever lower and more local levels of power, in which the ever growing numbers of petty “nobles” turn to an exploitative, coercive, and violent exercise of power to define themselves in their quest for nobility over against the peasantry. Thus, the practical effects of this diffusion of coercive lordship stood in conflict with the (clerical) notion of lordship built on a biblical model of service. The trajectory of the growth of baronial coercive lordship is also to diffuse the personal justice with which the king was invested, a trajectory that will eventually force the removal of justice more and more to a legal or “governmental” sphere.

Chapter III then explores in greater detail the “experience of power” during this evolutionary period (1050-1150). The papacy receives the first treatment and begins to assume in Bisson’s narrative its role as a control against which to understand the crises and resolutions of lay power. As an elected office with theoretical claim to lordship of some kind over all of Christendom, the papacy both anticipates developments in the purely secular sphere and offers a contrastive background against which to read those developments. Bisson’s treatment in turn of the various secular realms of Europe and the expression of lordship and power in them is both attentive to the fundamentally different contextual situations in each of them while also making clear the continuities that form the core of his argument. What each case study reveals is the broad diffusion of lordship onto the petty nobles, their violent and coercive use of their ambitious power, and the strains this abuse was putting on the system as a whole. Furthermore, Bisson places the locus for these coercive lower lordships squarely in the castle: the centers by which they held their power, built by coerced labor, then housing the armed bands of knights that would violently exact the land and money the petty noble needed to grow his power. The lordship of the kings, still defined and acting personally, required these petty nobles in fief and fidelity to exercise control over their growing kingdoms; yet, cheapened by diffusion, this king-lordship was increasingly unable to uphold the responsibilities of the regal power to the public order that were still expected.

These strains explode in Chapter IV into crises of power that envelop all of Europe, as Bisson’s less-than-exhaustive catalogue (pp. 188-190) demonstrates. Despite the differences between each situation, two intertwined aspects—symptoms more than mere causes—are revealed to be common to them all. First, succession crises set the stage for specific explosions of disorder. Second, the ambitions of petty nobles to insert themselves into those crises in the hopes of winning advancement or even kingship itself complicates and expands the disorder. Bisson’s case study of the murder of Charles the Good in 1127 reveals the convolution of these strains. A lord-count, Charles was murdered by his own provost’s family (!) for ruling that, despite the immense wealth they had accumulated over several generations of comital service, they were still of unfree status. The ultimate crisis, therefore, was “of lordship, not a political experiment” (p. 266): a test of the bonds of personal loyalty more than anything else. Infidelity was the watchword of the crisis, not corruption.

The attempts by lord-kings to stem this violent disorder in the later decades of the twelfth century form the subject of Chapter V. The tensions between the princely courts and the kings over them comes to the fore, and the methods of the lord-kings to curtail and co-opt the lower nobles become what Bisson calls “the intrusion of government”. The central example is the process by which accountability for the functions of rule begins to evolve from a strict basis in the fidelity of the king’s ministers and vassals—which Bisson considers linked to the practice of prescriptive accountancy—“towards an accountability of office”. The demographic and fiscal growth of these centuries—an impetus to the diffusion of lordship—make the exploitation of the royal domain by prescriptive accountancy more and more ineffectual. At different times in different places, and in different ways, lord-kings and their “courts” recognized the inefficiency of the prescriptive method and began to introduce periodic, probatory audits. The growth of bureaucracy ran hand-in-hand with the increased demand for and issuance of charters of franchise, and though the personal relationship of fidelity was still at the center of the king’s court, oaths begin more and more to express the duties of office in addition to those of personal service.

In his final chapter, Bisson brings his story into the thirteenth century to show that, though “government” in the form of ever more associative assemblies becomes a recognized and integral part of the exercise and experience of power, it is still understood through the lens of a personal king-lordship, for “the claims and pretences of castellans remain insistent, the accountability of agents and servants problematic” (p. 429). His examinations of literary and cultural expressions and celebrations of royal power demonstrate the continued prevalence and even greater reliance on the rhetoric of “celebratory lordship”. Yet, the continuing pressure of violent baronial oppression eventually gives rise to a nascent, “politicized” counteraction for peace, effected through an increased “engagement” by the lords with their subjects. This “engagement” is typified in the assemblies and “parliamentary” systems of which Magna Charta provides the most spectacular example. Even in 1215, however, the contemporary conception of Magna Charta’s necessity is not understood in terms of political office but in the concrete failure by King John to fulfill his affective, personal role of the lord-king, a failure by which he abnegated the bond of fidelity with his barons by which he could effectively rule.

Two overriding tendencies inform Bisson’s approach to the long twelfth century. First, he is supremely conscious of the conceptual problems created by the temptation to read its history through our own lens of what the government of the state means. He is at pains to avoid this pitfall and to allow the time period to speak to us on its own terms, though we may at times find them quite foreign. As he says in the Epilogue, “[g]overnment distinct from lordship (…) was hardly to be found” (580). The second tendency flows from this, and is the recognition of the profound and, for us, disturbingly normal role of violence in the twelfth-century experience of power. The long arm of lordship into the lowest levels of the power structure—a French bailiff addressed as “Lord” whose will to command was absolute in his village—had deep and lasting consequences in the later Middle Ages, its arbitrary exactions a reality despite the growth of official organs of state.

Bisson’s rejection of the models of feudalism and statism and allowance of the contemporary experience to speak for itself is perhaps the greatest achievement of this book. Tracing the experience of power allows him to offer a fresh and insightful picture of how lordship functioned in these centuries and complements continued efforts to understand the pivotal changes the twelfth century brought to the European world. It is indeed important to note his insistence that his work is complementary to and not antagonistic toward our other conceptual frameworks of renaissance and reformation. Bisson is eminently not a religious scholar, but he is at least conscious of the fact that he has taken little account of the more positively vibrant movements of twelfth century life. If at times he seems to force his framework of violence and power into the silences of the records, especially for the earlier centuries and chapters, the later records seem to vindicate this move more than betray it. Perhaps the most disingenuous claim of the whole work is the dissatisfaction Bisson claims in the Preface with the writing of “new historians” (p. viii), for his own writing suffers from structural and stylistic problems: seemingly stream-of-consciousness at times, it is marked by frequent anacoluthon and sentences without predicate or verb. Despite its verbal clumsiness, however, the work’s conceptual rigor comes through. The culmination of a life of studying these structures and experiences of power, it provides a valuable and convincing portrait of the origins of these structures in medieval Europe. ( )

Thomas Bisson specializes in the XIIth century with knowledge and a masterful narrative. Superb. ( )