holder of it should therefore be liable to an action for waste if he ran it
down. The sum of a landowner’s various interests in land, including
what he might hold as security for loans, made up his ‘estates’.^218
‘Estate’ acquired a technical sense in French legal procedure also, in
the royal lettres d’étatprotecting from law-suits the property of officials
while they were away on the king’s business and of aristocrats serving
in his wars. The restoration of a person’s ‘state’ in terms of his property
was a principle of canon law, also discernible in imperial actaand in the
proceedings of parlement, that a disputed right should be held in statu
in quo estwhile the suit was in progress.^219 An ordinance of 1345
recognized that the merchants of France were greatly damaged by the
obtaining of ‘letters of respite and state’ by their debtors.^220 In both
France and England the landed aristocracy were quintessentially ‘great
states’ by reason of their property. The polysemy of ‘(e)state’ made it
specially able to catch the multiple facets of social authority. The
fifteenth-century English translation of a French political tract of 1347
gives advice as to how ‘kynges, Princes and othir lordys and estates may
condue [conduct] theire estatz, and how the seid grete lordys of
this worlde may knowe and sette good governaunce in their owne
persoones, in their peeple and in theire seinieuryes and lordshippes’: a
prince or ‘greet estate of this worlde’ must ‘see that his householde, his
demaynes, his meynee and servauntz and alle his othir menage ben well
rewlid and governyd’.^221 (At the end of the middle ages the ruling oli-
garchy of a town like Coventry or Gloucester could also be called ‘the
mayor and the states’.)^222
The lay aristocracy ranked behind the higher clergy, who were
marked off as the first estate by the possession of legal privileges which
no less defined and confined their role within the state of the realm. The
clergy as a whole—men identifiable by their tonsure—covered the entire
spectrum of wealth and poverty: they were supposed to be at least of
free status, which did not stop parsons in England from sometimes try-
ing to claim parochial chaplains as their servants under the terms of the
Statute of Labourers.^223 They were treated as constituting a separate
‘estate and member of the commonwealth’ because of their function,
236 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^218) J. H. Baker and S. F. C. Milsom, Sources of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750
(London, 1986), 52–3; RPii. 170b (46); ibid. vi. 206a, for a good example of the variety of
‘estates’ in land in 1482.
(^219) Les Olim, ii. 180 (xxix), 347 (xxxii); G. Tessier, Diplomatique royale française(Paris,
1962), 235, 265.
(^220) Ordonnances des Roys de France, ii. 240–1 (c.8), 507 (c.11), iv. 432, 576, 661 etc.
(^221) Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. J.-P. Genet, Camden 4th ser.
18 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 174, 180–1, 183–5.
(^222) Examples in OED, s.v. state, 25.
(^223) Bertha H. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers (New York, 1908),
187–9, 213, and appendix, 11–12, 141, 171, 432–3.