Class, Status, and Order

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CLASS, STATUS, AND ORDER

CLASS, STATUS, AND ORDER. All human societies require systems of classification. These systems straddle the imagined boundary between the ideal and the real, creating a standard by which society can assess, judge, and, if necessary, punish. Early modern Europeans inherited from their medieval ancestors a system of classification called the society of orders, yet they lived in a world increasingly structured by economic status, which modern societies have termed a society of classes. Historians long accepted three simple propositions about European social classification: The Middle Ages had a society of orders; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a society of classes; and early modern times had neither, forming a sort of battlefield in which "classes" overcame "orders."

These primitive constructs, the first relying heavily on a sociolegal definition, and the second on often artificial economic categories, provide deceptive simplifications of the most complex human activity: social differentiation. Medieval writers described a society of three orders: prayers, fighters, and workers. This description had real political meaning, because the three orders of so many European medieval representative bodies, like the Estates-General of the Low Countries, were the clergy, the nobility, and the towns.

This simplified general version of the society of orders, however, masked a far more complex system of classification, above all within the "workers," those who were neither members of the clergy nor of noble status. The three-orders model suggested that a wealthy merchant or powerful judge belonged to the same social classification as a rural day laborer. Viewed from the perspective of a rich urban merchant, only an aristocratic snob could take seriously such a view, yet a noble rightly, and legally, could insist that one was either noble or commoner, that the distinction of social order mattered.

NOBILITY AND STATUS

The legal nobility of any European society typically included 1 or 2 percent of the population, but in kingdoms such as Castile or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 10 percent of the population held legal nobility. In western Europe, this group owned half or more of the land; in east central Europe, the nobility owned a far greater percentage. Within the nobility, four distinct categories stood out. Three-fourths of the nobility had little wealth. In east central Europe, such a noble might own a single village, or even part of a village; in western Europe, they would own neither a fief nor a château. In France, at the end of the seventeenth century, 80 percent of the nobility fell into this category. In Poland or Hungary, wealthy peasants sometimes enjoyed a much higher standard of living than poor nobles. The impoverished petty nobles of Castile, the hidalgos, provided many of the conquistadores for the Spanish Empire and even foot soldiers for the king's army.

Next up the ladder came the local lords, who held rights of Herrschaft in German lands or of high justice in most of the rest of continental Europe. These people provided the state function in much of rural Europe. Politically, they often demanded "republican" institutions such as provincial estates and an elected local judiciary. They had enough wealth to live comfortably in the countryside; their courts, and their social prestige, made them the dominant social group in much of rural Europe. By the seventeenth century, many of these people held state offices, such as royal judgeships, through which they controlled local society.

Although European political and social theorists and governments tried to maintain the fiction that this group of nobility provided a permanent, ordered social and political elite, in fact, in much of Europe this group had a steady influx of newcomers. Wealthy urban merchants and lawyers bought rural estates and gradually insinuated themselves into the nobility by means of marriage, social behavior, and political participation. Such permeability mattered little in a place like Poland, where nobles formed 10 percent of the population, so social mobility took place primarily within the nobility, not into it. In England or France, however, a constant flow of commoners became noble (France) or joined the gentry (England). In Lancashire, between 1600 and 1642, more than one third of the 750 gentry families disappeared and were replaced by a like number of newcomers. The carnage of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) or of the sixteenth-century religious wars created massive shortages of nobles in England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries. Each society had need of nobles in order to function; the new families replaced the ones who died out, casualties either of war or of demographic forces. Noble families also intermarried with wealthy commoners; above all, noble men married wealthy non-noble women.

The regional nobility, what some historians call the "second nobility," provided the crucial link between the base of village lords and the great aristocrats. These second nobles served as clients of the great nobles, yet they provided patronage to those at the local level. Their families often held minor bishoprics or headed middling abbeys or convents; the men served in princely armies and commanded fortresses or local noble militias.

The great aristocratic families above them—families like the Esterházy in Hungary, the Schwartzenberg in Bohemia, the Furstemburg in the Holy Roman Empire, the Radziwill in Lithuania, the Corsini in Florence, the Mendoza in Castile, the Rohan in Brittany, the d'Arenberg in the Spanish Netherlands, and the dukes of Bedford in England—had fabulous resources. Even here, new families could join the highest ranks of the aristocracy: Montmorency and Guise families rose to unprecedented heights in sixteenth-century France. Guise and Montmorency started the process of inflation of noble titles in France: They were the first people outside the royal family to obtain the title duke. Even so, France had only eleven duke-peers in 1589, as against forty-eight in 1715. This same inflation of titles happened everywhere in the West, whether in the proliferation of English "baronets" (a title invented by James I in 1611) or the tripling of titled nobles in Austrian lands between 1606 and 1657. The kingdom of Naples had ninety-nine titled nobles in 1528, but 649 in 1750; Spain had fifty-five titled nobles in 1520, but 528 in 1700.

These new titles undermined the status system, while simultaneously reinforcing it. Giving noble titles to prominent and successful commoners kept them from creating an alternative hierarchical system that would challenge the traditional one of the nobility. In those societies, like Holland, in which wealthy urban merchants did not seek to join the nobility, the merchants did, in fact, create a new social and political hierarchy, in which the nobles had virtually no role. In the Estates of Holland, the towns held twenty-four votes, while the collective nobility of the province had only one.

The aristocrats lived in stunning luxury. The Esterházy had their own private orchestra; Franz Joseph Haydn, in service to Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, wrote his Farewell Symphony to convince the prince not to leave the musicians behind when the family went on a summer visit to its great palace at Esterháza. Where a middling noble might own several lordships, the duke of Infantado (Mendoza family) held lordship over nearly eight hundred villages. In the kingdom of Naples, 95 percent of the communities lived under the legal jurisdiction of a feudal lord, a situation common in many other parts of Europe.

Income levels within the nobility varied sharply. A well-to-do provincial French noble in the sixteenth century might have an income of 2,000 French pounds; the greatest aristocrats, like the Guise, Bourbon, and Montmorency families, took in 150,000–200,000 pounds a year (the cardinal of Lorraine, a Guise, reached 300,000). Comfortable nobles in England might possess 100 acres, while the Russell family, dukes of Bedford, owned more than 100,000. They got even wealthier in the eighteenth century, with the development of Russell Square in London, which survives as a lovely example of Georgian architecture. In Spain, the great aristocrats—Mendoza, Guzmán, Toledo—had landed revenues of 50,000–60,000 ducats a year; as in France or England, Spanish aristocrats, or those in the kingdom of Naples, had 100 times more income than a well-to-do country gentleman. Even these figures pale in comparison to the wealth of the magnates of the East; families like the Radziwill owned tens of thousands of villages. The humblest Spanish hidalgo held the same noble status as a Furstemburg or a Zamoyski, but the status conferred by wealth and political power made them effectively part of two different social groups.

COMMONERS AND SYSTEMS OF STATUS

The three-orders model common in French-speaking areas did not necessarily apply elsewhere. In England or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the representative bodies had only two estates: Lords and Commons in England; Senate and Diet (nobility) in Poland-Lithuania. The English House of Commons or the lower house of the Polish Sejm or Hungarian Diet represented the same group of people, those whom the English termed the landed gentry. In continental Europe, unlike in England, these people held legal noble status. Other states, such as Sweden, had a Fourth Estate for the peasants.

The evolving representative bodies of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries provide clear evidence as to the changing system of social differentiation. In the fourteenth century, in most parts of Europe the third order was simply the towns. No one really "represented" the peasants because they were not citizens, and only citizens could be represented. In the Holy Roman Empire, in parts of east central Europe, and in parts of France, these peasants were not free people: they were serfs, and thus could not possibly be citizens.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the third order often came to be called the Third Estate, and it explicitly included peasants. Flanders already had village assemblies in the fourteenth century. By the late sixteenth century, meetings of the French Estates-General gave rise to village assemblies, which elected deputies to bailiwick assemblies, and which drew up lists of grievances for the king. The bailiwick assemblies elected deputies to the Estates-General and created regional grievance lists. Nobles or urban elites would certainly not have accepted the proposition that peasants were citizens, but peasant participation in the political process—the defining mark of citizenship—created uncomfortable ambiguity.

Moreover, peasant rebels, as in the German Peasants' Revolt of 1525, demanded freedom (abolition of serfdom) and a wide range of rights, such as the ability to elect their own pastors. The tie between "freedom" and citizenship was so strong that in England most towns referred to citizenship as "the freedom." In Worcester and countless other English towns, no one could carry on any trade unless he held citizenship. Whether in England or in the towns of western Germany, urban citizenship could range as high as half the adult male population (York), or it could drop to 20 percent or less (Bristol). In early-sixteenth-century Italy, the great Humanists Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) debated the proper proportion of citizens, with Machiavelli suggesting a more "democratic" system and Guicciardini opting for an aristocratic republic, such as that of Venice. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, towns took Guicciardini's advice; they became progressively more oligarchic, whether it was the vroedschappen of the Dutch cities or the consulates of the Italian ones.

Noble pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, the status gap between a peasant and a member of the patriciate of Amsterdam, Augsburg, or any other major city mirrored that between a great aristocrat and a poor country noble. Peasants might have status within their village communities; outside them, they did not. Church authorities, drawn from the nobility and the urban elites, viewed the peasants as little better than pagans, sending out "missionaries" to convert these nominal Christians to the official brand of religion. Burghers, in contrast, had real political and economic clout; within their towns, they also had exalted social status. In the state, their social status remained contested; order-based conflict between nobles and commoners remained a norm of European life. That conflict should not obscure, however, the many other fault lines of European society. Status depended everywhere and at all times on one's relationship to others, and it thus took into account a wide array of factors. Because it depended on such relationships, status was also public: it had to be displayed in order to exist.

SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION

European societies attempted to legislate social distinction. Virtually every town and every state had its sumptuary laws, which carefully defined who could wear different sorts of clothing. In most places, only nobles could wear silk; only members of royal families could have gold or silver thread woven into their clothes; only princes could have certain precious furs line their collars. Sumptuary laws also defined socially appropriate colors, following the model of the famous imperial purple of the Byzantines. Naturally, everyone sought to wear the clothing restricted to the social group above them: Nobles tried to sneak gold thread into their clothes; merchants tried to wear silk.

Sumptuary laws sometimes defined what people had to wear, as well as what they could not. The authorities particularly singled out groups who were in one way or another outside of mainstream society. The group could be a religious minority like Jews, who often had to wear a Star of David or a yellow hat. It could be those who broke certain moral rules, like prostitutes, who sometimes had to display a sign of their profession and status. It could be lawbreakers: Criminals could wear their marks of distinction on their skin—a "V" for thief (voleur) in French-speaking lands, or the infamous scarlet "A" for an adulteress in England. A woman's or man's clothes invariably situated her or him within the known social order and thus provided the social transparency so beloved of the authorities. Almost all European states outlawed disguises and nicknames for that reason. Those who sought to subvert the social order could do so simply by putting on a costume, as at Carnival, or by using a sobriquet, a nearly universal practice among craft journeymen. Women, too, used these second, public names, clear evidence of their participation in the marketplace.

Everyone had to display his or her status publicly, especially on certain festive occasions. The public nature of status meant that elites had to engage in what we would call conspicuous consumption in order to express, and thus make manifest, their status. A duke or a prince had to live in a great château, had to wear fine silk clothing, had to act as a generous benefactor to his loyal followers. A local lord had to maintain social distance with his neighbors, yet he had to bestow marks of his esteem on chosen servants: Lords and ladies often acted as godparents to children of wealthy peasant tenants. In Flemish or Italian or German towns, a rich merchant or wealth lawyer longed to be asked to do municipal service, just as a member of the English landed gentry obliged willingly when asked to sit as an unpaid judge at the Quarter Sessions.

Society sought differentiation through other means, such as food or language. In some cases, laws created restrictions on food, especially game: Deer in England or wild boar in France were "royal game," which could be eaten only by royals or by royal permission. Throughout Europe, the right to hunt marked off a nobleman. Social differentiation by food, however, tended more often to rely on price. The most expensive bread in many European towns bore the name of "chapter bread," so called because initially only the bakery of the rich cathedral chapter had the right to make it. Town governments spoke of bread fit for consumption "only by the country people," whose coarseness was proverbial. Governments sought to limit access to imported spices. Increasingly, town dwellers differentiated themselves from rural people by the type of food they ate: Urban consumers ate more meat, especially "butcher's meat" (beef and mutton) and wheat bread; peasants ate little meat (and then small game) and rye bread. Outside of wine-producing regions, urban consumers drank far more wine than rural ones, a distinction less evident in those regions where people drank beer or cider (apple or pear). Church authorities, too, interfered in diet: Butcher shops in Catholic areas had to close during Lent, when religious sanctions prevented meat consumption, and Jews everywhere in Europe faced strict dietary laws supervised by their rabbis.

The groups seeking to climb the social scale often tried to emulate their social "betters," who, in turn, sought new ways to differentiate themselves. This process accelerated exponentially in the eighteenth century. "Proper" members of society adopted new manners, such as eating with forks, using porcelain plates, and creating individual "places" at a dinner table. When common people began to use forks, too, the elite began a progressive differentiation of plates, utensils, and glassware, creating elaborate dinner settings that could not be duplicated by the middling and poor. Soon manuals of etiquette appeared in one language after another. Elites consumed new foods, such as vegetables and fruits introduced from the Americas or from Asia, or fancier wines, such as Champagne (France) or Tokai (Hungary). The world market provided elites with tea and coffee, and soon the coffee house/café sprang up in major European cities. Some of these houses, like the famous Demel in Vienna, still exist, selling fancy pastries to clients who linger to read the newspapers provided for the clients. These newspapers, another eighteenth-century innovation, also changed the rules of status, because they provided a new forum for public opinion.

Language offered another everyday, ubiquitous means of social differentiation. The first sentence out of one's mouth invariably established social relationship: Landlords used the familiar second person (du/tu /thou) when speaking to peasants; the latter replied using the polite, plural form (Sie/usted/vous/ you). In workshops, the master said "thou," the journeyman or apprentice said "you." Nobles insisted that they alone had a right to madame/signora/pani or their male equivalents; urban elites salivated at the prospect of hearing someone call them madame or pan.

In early modern societies, status affected an individual every time she or he appeared in public. Status determined how others spoke to you (and you to them), what you wore, where you sat, where (and even if) you marched in parades, where you stood in church—even where you were buried. The middling and lower status people of a village had to settle for the cemetery; the village elite were interred under the church floor. One's status fluctuated at all times: Status depended on the status of those with whom you interacted, even at the highest levels of society. Spanish court etiquette was legendarily rigid, but Spanish practice spread to Austria and France. Commoners greatly resented the public manifestations of their lower status: The grievances prepared by the Third Estate's regional assemblies for the French Estates-General of 1789 universally demanded that their deputies not suffer demeaning treatment. At the opening ceremonies, the stubborn sartorial resistance of some deputies of the Third Estate, who violated court etiquette by donning their hats in the presence of the king, a privilege reserved for nobles, galvanized the Third Estate's collective resistance to the old order and provided a public display of commoner unity that helped set in motion the French Revolution.

Ordinary people had many opportunities to express their status, perhaps none so dramatic as parades or festivals. Two surviving festivals provide fascinating glimpses of the old ways. The Procession of the Holy Blood, at Bruges (Ascension Day), began in the thirteenth century. The parade presents a series of stories from the Christian Bible, beginning with the Old Testament, continuing through the life of Jesus, and ending with scenes from Flemish life. Just before the reliquary of the Holy Blood, the parade offers tables covered with the many goods one could buy in Bruges, from local cloth to Asian spices. In early modern times, the great guilds, like the weavers or the grain merchants, major monasteries, and the chief foreign communities (Italians and English) all had their own banners, which preceded floats; the minor guilds, like the shoemakers, had to settle for a place in a phalanx of a score or more such banners. Parades such as this one took place all over Europe, and every guild, every religious house, every quarter of the city fought valiantly to preserve its place in the order of march or its role in the festivals. Court records are filled with violent confrontations about group status, which often led to fatalities. Those same records tell a similar tale of personal status: Innumerable cases of violence began with verbal assaults on the status or honor of a neighbor.

European society contained many dichotomies: noble-commoner; ecclesiastical-laic; free-unfree; urban-rural; rich-poor; intellectual labor-manual labor; worthy-unworthy; female-male; educatedunlettered. Status in early modern Europe revolved around all of these distinctions, which frequently overlapped: Serfs usually lived in the countryside, worked with their hands, were commoners and mostly laic. Peasant farmers of a certain standing invariably viewed themselves as among the worthy people, yet those above them on the social scale rarely did so. That same dynamic operated in towns: Artisans' masters were certain they were among the worthy people (gens de bien; los buenos), but merchants and the professionals (lawyers and the like) were just as certain that the artisans were not. The distinction between the worthy and the unworthy had profound practical consequences. Everywhere in Europe courts privileged the testimony of the worthy people, described in the records as witnesses "worthy of faith," and discredited the testimony of those "without attestation," that is, for whom no substantial member of the community could vouch.

Status played a much different role in early modern societies than it does today because they were self-policing. Local citizens had to make arrests and bring the accused to a local judge. Status thus came to play a critical role in the maintenance of local order. In almost all cases, local authorities had to rely on a combination of personal status and the implied threat of future force to make society work. Such status could come from a variety of sources. As in the Middle Ages, nobility could confer such status; royal office could confer status; wealth could confer status; family connections could confer status; personal ability could confer status; education could confer status. This last category is easily overlooked, but the power of the fully literate swimming in an ocean of illiterates was simply staggering in its practical and social implications.

Modern scholarship has often ignored the individual dimensions of status. Historians have debated the importance of "merit" in noble self-image, to cite but one example. The records of the time speak eloquently about the role of merit, of personal worth, as judged by the community. In early seventeenth-century Brittany, the duke of Brissac, lieutenant general of the king, marshal of France, held the universal esteem of his contemporaries. Brissac was a man of considerable abilities, and the documents reflect the status his achievements brought him. His son, duke of Brissac and lieutenant general of the king in his own time, although theoretically holding the same status, received none of the respect accorded his father. Contemporaries made disparaging (and accurate) remarks about his lack of ability; he did not succeed his father as marshal of France. Where the father had been a major power broker, the son had little influence.

Similar examples existed everywhere in early modern Europe, not simply among the aristocracy but among all levels of society. Within the framework established by order, class, occupation, religion, education, gender, age, and many other factors, an individual, female or male, had considerable room to establish an individual status of her or his own. Merit, combined with money, could even enable a family, rarely an individual, to achieve considerable social mobility. The man who made a fortune could reasonably expect his children to rise to a new social level. In France, the great-great-grandson of a draper could become minister of war and the leader of the aristocratic faction at court. In Poland, the grandson of a petty local noble could even be elected king, as in the case of John III Sobieski (also Jan Sobieski, 1629–1696; ruled 1674–1696). Throughout Europe, the supposedly frozen world of the guilds, which historians long thought became progressively more restrictive in membership, in fact allowed constant mobility. In town after town, half or more of the artisan masters were immigrants, making for a staggering turnover in masterships over the course of several decades.

Neither classes nor orders offer a compelling analytical category for examining status in early modern society. Among other factors, status involved wealth, birth, gender, occupation, and education; moreover, any given person's status reflected a mixture of his or her personal standing and the standing of the family, and sometimes occupational group, of which he or she was a member. Status was thus individual and collective, which allowed many European societies to maintain the fiction of immobility—the group remained the "same"—while simultaneously permitting the social mobility, by individuals, necessary for any functioning human society.

See also Advice and Etiquette Books ; Aristocracy and Gentry ; Citizenship ; Equality and Inequality ; Mobility, Social ; Sumptuary Laws .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Castiglione, B. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by G. Bull. Harmondsworth, U.K., and Baltimore, Md., 1976. The manual of early modern noble behavior, written in the early sixteenth century by an Italian nobleman.

Gluckel of Hameln. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln. Translated by M. Lowenthal. New York, 1977. Memoirs of a late 17th-century female Jewish merchant.

Ménétra, J. Journal of My Life. Translated by A. Goldhammer. New York, 1986. Memoirs of an 18th-century Parisian glass maker.