experience to provide ‘good council concerning future things [de
futuris]’. (Reaching purposefully into the future, Aquinas’s body politic
seems to inhabit the aevum, which is poised between timeless eternity
and the accidents of time, along with the angels, and with the ruler him-
self in his public role.)^1
Though he knew the teaching of the classical writers that memory
was a store of images in the mind’s eye, to be preserved by a hard-learnt
mental discipline, Aquinas appreciated the value of written record as
an aid to memory, giving the example of official lists of soldiers or
counsellors.^2 But political memory was preserved best of all in the acta
and établissementsof rulers. Just as collections of charters were the
memories of the great landed families, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon law-
codes registered the histories of kingdoms as more than a bare succes-
sion of events. By the later middle ages statutes and plea-rolls embodied
a mass of experience with the aid of which the procedures of govern-
ment might be continually reformed and developed, experience which
became more accessible and compelling as the record moved from Latin
into the vernacular languages.^3
Adherence to the simplicities of a ‘good old law’ enshrined in un-
written custom ceased to be a practical ideal with the growth of terri-
torially extensive kingdoms under ambitious rulers.^4 Aquinas’s pupil
Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus), writing for the future King
Philip IV the most widely read of the medieval treatises ‘On the govern-
ment of princes’ (De regimine principum), distinguished between ‘cities’
and ‘kingdoms’ in terms of self-sufficiency. No city, in its everyday
sense, could be a communitas perfectaon its own, for none could con-
tain all the arts, those of the smith, the weaver, the corn-merchant, the
vintner, and the rest. Human life required men to establish the commu-
nitas regni, which brought together the resources of a number of cities.
Political continuity 253(^1) Aquinas, Summa Theologica[ST], I [Prima Pars], quaestiones 77, art. 8 ad 4, 78 art. 4,
conc., 79, art. 6–7, 89, art. 6 ad 1, 93, art. 1 ad 3 and art. 7 ad 3; STI–II [Prima Secundae],
qq. 50, art. 3 ad 3, 51, art. 3, conc., 57, art. 4 ad 3, 90, art. 2, conc., art. 3 ad 3; STII–II
[Secunda Secundae], q. 49; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory(London, 1966), ch. 3; for
the aevumsee: STI, q. 10; E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies(Princeton UP, 1957),
275–84; and F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending(Oxford UP, 1966), 72 ff.
(^2) STI, q. 24, art.1, conc.
(^3) P. J. Geary, ‘Land, Language and Memory in Europe, 700–1100’, TRHS,6th ser. 9
(1999), 171; P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century,
i. Legislation and its Limits(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 45 ff., 416 ff.; cf. Sarah Foot,
‘Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England at the End of the
First Viking Age’, TRHS, 6th ser. 9 (1999), for the ‘invention’ of ‘public memory’; see also
J. Hudson, ‘Administration, Family and Perceptions of the Past in Late Twelfth-Century
England: Richard FitzNigel and the Dialogue of the Exchequer’, in The Perception of the Past
in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. P. Magdalino (London, 1992), for the grasp of pre-Conquest
history through the Anglo-Saxon laws.
(^4) M. T. Clanchy, ‘Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law’, History, 55 (1970).