[The Medieval Constitution of Liberty: Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West, by Alexander Salter and Andrew T. Young, University of Michigan Press, 2023.]
The usual narrative about the political situation in the Middle Ages is so well known that it is hardly necessary to restate it. Thanks to years of public schooling and mass media, most people “know” that the political institutions of the Middle Ages were chiefly characterized by kings and princes who exercised untrammeled power. There was no rule of law, and the will of the monarch was absolute.
According to this narrative, something happened that then changed all this. Europe then became “modern” and “enlightened” and discovered the idea of freedom and limited government. Europe put medieval thinking behind it and instead embraced the rule of law, representative government, and limitations on government power.
But that’s not how it happened at all. The West’s traditions of political freedom and restrained state power do not come from a break with Europe’s medieval past. Rather, the best parts of the West’s political institutions are very much in continuity with the medieval past. It is in the Middle Ages where we find the root of today’s classical liberal concepts of natural rights, freedom, decentralized government, and limits on the rulers’ powers.
For example, in his history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico describes how extreme political decentralization, characterized in part by a relentless competition between the monarchs and the Church, made Europe unique in its historial, institutional, and ideological opposition to despotism. Murray Rothbard has also noted how absolutism of the early modern period represented a step in the wrong direction, compared to the more restrained civil governance of the centuries that came before. In the Middle Ages, the reality faced by most monarchs was hardly one of unrestrained power. Contrary to the myth that kings routinely ruled over cowed subordinates by “divine right” in the Middle Ages, civil governments of the period faced countless institutional obstacles to the exercise of power.
Although public school teachers and mass-media creators still cling to am eighteenth-century view of medieval politics, scholarship of the past sixty has revealed a more nuanced and accurate picture. Much of this work has been well summarized and synthesized by economists Alexander Salter and Andrew Young in their new book The Medieval Constitution of Liberty: Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West. As economists, Salter and Young examine the decentralized political institutions of the Middle Ages while seeking to explain how economic incentives worked to limit the powers of civil authorities. In the process, they also present a compelling retelling of the ways that medieval Europe developed institutions and a political environment that clearly contributed to classical liberal ideals of freedom.
Political Property Rights
Key to Salter’s and Young’s analysis is the concept of political property rights. These are not property rights in the true sense, but are employed here as a sort of economic model to connect political rulers to the effects of their governance. That is, the nature of political property rights within a polity tell us how much agents of the civil government are directly impacted by their own policies. The authors write:
Political property rights create feedback loops between the exercise of political power and the value of resources within the jurisdiction of power wielders. To the extent that a holder of political property rights internalizes the costs and benefits arising from their exercise, that holder has residual claimancy. Residual claimancy implies that a governance provider shares in any costs or benefits that his governance imposes on or creates for the governed. Costs and benefits arise because political property rights specify the economic resources that the holder can govern and types of governance that are permissible.
Now, in some cases, the wielders of political power are the literal owners within some of their lands. (These were the “crown lands,” and these are the areas where the prince or king directly owns the lands and other resources.) Naturally, in these cases, property rights of all varieties provide a monarch with an incentive to enhance the value of his own resources. In some other areas, however, the ruler does not directly own the lands but has some partial claim through feudal contractual arrangements. The degree to which the king has “residual claimancy” in those cases suggests to us the incentives that the prince or king faces in determining how to use those resources. In the Middle Ages, there was no sense of “public service” and no concept of the “public” in a political sense. Rather society consisted of many private individuals, families, and other associations that owned lands and other resources through private arrangements. “Political” power became a function of how much coercive power could be deployed, either as a means of enforcing legal decisions, or as a means of providing military defense. Or, as Salter and Young put it, “feudal lords were essentially private individuals who wielded de facto political power by virtue of their capabilities for violence.”
These private organizations were not states in the modern sense. Although they did possess some coercive power, they certainly did not have a recognized monopoly on the use of that power within their own territories. That arrangement appeared only later, with the rise of states. Rather, the use of coercive force in the Middle Ages rested on the exercise of contractual duties and rights, and on bargaining among many stakeholders, many of whom possessed their own potential for employing coercive power.
Salter and Young contend that the political and legal institutions of the Middle Ages—i.e., the medieval “constitution”—generally imposed many obstacles on the wielding of political power. This medieval constitution required many different types of bargaining that incentivized monarchs and other feudal lords to enhance the wealth and stability of their subjects. In other words, within the medieval political milieu, it became relatively costly for a wielder of political power to simply exploit the taxpayers. Salter and Young show how these incentives were institutionalized and sustained through a variety of institutions and phenomena.
Polycentric Political Institutions
Perhaps at the center of the medieval constitution was the inexorable fact of extensive political decentralization. This was manifested in a wide variety of polycentric political institutions which for centuries defied efforts to centralize political power within large states. Salter and Young put it this way:
During the high Middle Ages, Western European kings did not rule absolutely and the modern nation-state, with its centralization and consolidation of violence and governance, did not exist. ...The provision of defense, justice, and other forms of governance was decentralized and diffused throughout these hierarchies, with royal and noble lords having their own jurisdictions. These jurisdictions often overlapped and placed governance providers in competition with one another. However, to the extent that they were distinct, governance providers mutually constrained one another.
In the modern world, state power can be so easily expanded and abused largely because it is monopolistic in nature. Although there is some degree of competition between modern states—fortunately, there is no single world government—this competition is quite muted compared to what existed within the medieval constitution. The sheer number of independent polities, coupled with overlapping jurisdictions within many complex feudal arrangements, greatly reduced the monopoly power that could be exercised by any single monarch or any other wielder of political power. Put in more concrete terms, a subject of a monarch who felt himself aggrieved by the local prince could, with relative ease, appeal to other local peers or near-peers for legal relief. This type of competition incentivized monarchs to avoid widespread abuse of subjects. Under these conditions, Salter and Young write: “We should expect rulers constrained by competition to be more sensitive to the needs of those whom they govern than rulers who do not face that constraint.”
Even today, the residue of the medieval embrace of polycentric governance continues in political arrangements found in confederations and federal states. As Salter and Young note, this style of governance is truly ancient: “Polycentric sovereignty in Western Europe did not appear magically out of thin air; rather it was a legacy of both the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire and the settlement of Germanic groups within its frontiers.”
These arrangement were often quite complex, providing different legal frameworks and contracts which distributed political power (to use Raico’s words) “among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties.” Or, as Salter and Young put it: “Polycentric sovereignty characterized Western Europe generally, but the balances of power between different estates and monarchs varied across regions and polities. This variation determined the bargaining positions of particular cities and the alliances that they sought.”
Among these various polycentric powers, Salter and Young chose to focus largely on the medieval towns, which formed an important component of what we now call the “estate monarchies” of the Middle Ages. The estate monarchies recognized a distribution of power between the monarch, the nobility, the clergy, and—later on—the towns. As the authors show, the towns added to the intensity of the political competition fostered by polcycentric political power. As centers of wealth, and as the home of the rising bourgeoisie, the towns offered an escape from the agrarian feudal power centers, further intensifying competition and, at times, creating more constraints on those who wielded political power.
Representative Assemblies
The towns also came to be important components of the representative assemblies that developed in the Middle Ages. These are the organizations that later developed into what we now call legislatures and parliaments. To some extent, these assemblies imposed limitations on how monarchs could impose their own political agenda. As Raico puts it, these representative assemblies were a sort of “democracy of the taxpayers.” Naturally, the taxpayers sought some means to limit the extent to which the monarchs could exploit the towns, the nobility, and others.
Moreover, in the earliest days of these assemblies, the members were assumed to be armed—reflecting earlier Germanic tribal forms of governance—which emphasized the two-way relationship between the monarch and those assembled. Those arms could be used to either support the king, or to oppose him.
As Salter and Young point out, however, the representative assemblies could also be manipulated to manufacture support for the monarch. While the assemblies formally existed to limit the monarch’s power, in many cases, the assemblies also could be used to simply provide an imprimatur or rubber stamp for the monarchs who, as time passed, learned to use the assemblies to enhance the monarch’s power. That is, Salter and Young describe how eventually “representative powers were ... a requirement from above, not a demand from below.” The assemblies could be used to send the message that the king’s desires enjoyed the approval of the people overall.
Even if the king could, at times, use the assemblies for his own ends, the fact that there remained a perceived need to organize approval and “representation” through various institutions showed that the monarchs often felt they must engage in costly bargaining and negotiation. To fail to do so risked upsetting the political property rights that sustained both ruler and ruled in a state of relatively beneficial co-existence.
Continuity, not Rupture
The “received” narrative on the Middle Ages tells us that modern ideals of natural rights and limited state power were an invention of post-medieval thought—developing perhaps even as late as the so-called Enlightenment. Salter and Young are among the most recent scholars to show that this is certainly not the case, and that, when it comes to understanding modern ideals of political freedom, “[T]he High Middle Ages mattered. It was no mere residual. ...[T]he right narrative is one emphasizing continuity and development with the medieval constitution, rather than a rupture.”
Unfortunately, these notions did not develop free from competing ideologies that sought to justify the consolidation and centralization of state power. With the rise of “renaissance” and “enlightenment,” also came larger and stronger states, coupled with larger standing armies, and the beginnings of the bureaucratic state. In turn, state power overwhelmed the old medieval constitution of competition and a “political property rights” regime that made monarchs and other rulers more sensitive to the costs of governance. In other words, the modern state broke free of the old constitution, and as Salter and Young conclude, “Because the size and scope of states has increased so much, the de facto constraints upon them may bind less tightly.”
In recent decades, scholarship on medieval decentralization, taxation, property rights, and political restraint has grown increasingly vast. Thanks to the work of Salter and Young, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty can serve as both a helpful introduction to this literature, and as a useful reappraisal for those seeking the historical roots of the liberal ideology of freedom and free markets.
Read More:
- “How the Rivalry Between Church and State Made Europe More Wealthy and Free“ by Ralph Raico
- “Why Taxes Were So Hated in the Middle Ages“ by Ryan McMaken
- “Should Libertarians be Monarchists?“ by Ryan McMaken
- “Why Lending Money (at Interest) Is Not Usury in the Modern World“ by Ryan McMaken
Image credit: Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans, mathematician and inventor of a mechanical astronomical clock, via Wikimedia, public domain.
