‘the three orders’, the clergy, the warriors, and the workers, appears as
a widespread concern in the eleventh century. The feudal constitutions
of the Emperor Conrad and his successors distinguished between
capitaneiand valvassores(military vassals with the right to be tried by
their peers), and below them citizens and ‘rustics’.^156 In the twelfth
century the Emperor Frederick I proclaimed it a ruler’s duty to care for
the status singulorumas well as for the state of the commonwealth,
particularly for the well-being of churchmen ‘of whatever dignity, state,
degree, order or condition’.^157 The Sachsenspiegel attempted to fit
society into seven orders, corresponding to the seven ages of the world
and the seven canonical degrees of relationship: these were the king, the
bishops and heads of religious houses, lay princes, free land-holders, a
class of ‘jurymen’, and servants and dependents, with the vassals of
prelates inserted rather artificially to make a seventh grade.^158 Apart
from a new emphasis that all members of society, of was stat wirdikeit
oder wesenthey might be, must join in keeping the peace, the only
change in the late medieval scheme of German society was the addition
of the towns (Stette) after the nobles (but sometimes before the knights)
in the addresses of the vernacular Landfrieden. Everywhere the chief
among the stimuli to classification was the growing economic and
political importance of the bourgeoisie, who needed to be given a place
in society in relation to nobles and churchmen.^159
The burst of royal legislation in thirteenth-century France and
England ‘to reform the state of the kingdom for the better’ was
primarily concerned with the rights and obligations of classes of indi-
vidual, who in the words of the Livre de Josticewere all, ‘castellan,
vavassor, citizen, villein’, under the hand of the king.^160 Strangely, it was
the Jews, marked by disabilities rather than rights, who were the first
group to be defined by the French kings’ stabilimenta. A ruler had to
balance the value of Jewish money-lending, and of the money he and his
lords could extort for protecting the Jews, against the Church’s
condemnation of usury, and against the popular hatred, sometimes
encouraged by the Jews’ debtors, of these ‘murderers of Our Saviour’.
At the beginning of their reigns Philip Augustus, Louis VIII, and
222 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^156) G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined,tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago UP,
1980); Menat, Campagnes lombardes au moyen âge, 586; P. Wormald, The Making of English
Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, i (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 459.
(^157) Friderici I Diplomata, 1158–1167, 193. 23 , 218. 20 , 263. 28 , 288. 28 , 315. 40 etc.;
1168–1180, pp. 92–3; Constitutiones, 1298–1313, pp. 33 (no. 37); 1325–30, pp. 170 (no.
262), 258. 15 , 314. 40 (the royal ‘state’); 1350–3, 15. 11 , 17. 10 , 21. 8 , 26. 41 , 27. 26 , 56. 11 , 573;
cf. ibid.55. 30 , for a papal order to absolve an excommunicate as the restoration of his state.
(^158) Sachsenspiegel Landrecht, ed. Eckhardt, 72 (I, 3); cf. above, pp. 96, 115–16.
(^159) Constitutiones, 1298–1313, 371; cf. above, p. 89.
(^160) Q. Griffiths, ‘New men among the Lay Counselors of Saint Louis’, Medieval Studies, 32,
p. 258.