Nelson, Janet L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe. London: Hambledon, 1986, pp.
195–237.
NOBILITY
. One form of nobility or another dominated the society of Gaul and France from the
Bronze Age to the Revolution of 1789. Most scholars now believe that the nobility of
landed magnates that presided over the western Frankish kingdoms between ca. 620 and
1200 (designated potentes, proceres, magnates, or principes as commonly as nobiles)
was formed in the 6th and early 7th centuries by the fusion of the premigration nobility of
the Frankish and other Germanic tribes who settled in Gaul with the remnant of the
Roman senatorial nobility already established there. The united nobility of the later
Merovingian and Carolingian eras had no privileges enshrined in law, but its members
were distinguished from inferior orders not only by the possession of villa-estates and the
luxurious lifestyle their income made possible but by the rights of lordship they exercised
over their extensive households, free tenants, and clients and by the virtual monopoly
they enjoyed over the higher offices of the palace, the provincial administration, and the
church. During the first seven centuries of Frankish rule, the nobility remained a small
group closed in principle to any but the descendants of its original members. In practice,
it was probably not completely closed, for the united nobility of the Frankish kingdom
abandoned both the patrilineal structure and the surnames characteristic of the Roman
senatorial gentes in favor of the amorphous and shifting “sibs” of the Germans, which
were marked only by sets of latinized German “leading names” and traced their noble
ancestry as much in female as in male lines. This arrangement must have permitted the
occasional admission into the nobility of both men and women with only one noble
parent of either sex. Kings could and regularly did confer rank within the nobility by
granting the temporary tenure of a high office or “dignity” (honor or dignitas), such as
those of duke, count, and bishop. During the civil wars of the 9th century, the leading
nobles succeeded in making the guberna-torial dignities hereditary in principle in a single
lineage, thereby depriving the king even of the power of promotion and demotion except
in extraordinary circumstances. Between ca. 987 and 1193, the kings of France conferred
no important lay dignities outside of their own immediate family.
The emergence first (between ca. 850 and ca. 950) of hereditary duchies, counties, and
viscounties and then (between 990 and ca. 1100) of hereditary castellanies carved from
their territories, changed both the nature of noble power and the structure of the noble kin
group, for the transmission of these dominions to sons by primogeniture soon led to the
reemergence of patrilineal “houses” that normally took both their identity and (from ca.
1050) their new, hereditary surname, from the dominion held by their chief. The
indivisibility of the family dominion (derived from its official origin or feudal condition
or both) tended to affect the transmission of all other patrimonial property in noble
houses, and not only daughters but younger sons of nobles tended to receive much
smaller shares of their parents’ estate than had been the case before 1000. After ca. 1150,
the patrilineal surname was increasingly reinforced by a patrilineal emblem, the “arms.”
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