chapter eightThe Monarchical State of the
Later Middle Ages
In thelater middle ages the two principal meanings of statuswhich
had crystallized in the legal systems of France and England—on the one
hand the condition, peaceful or troubled and in need of legislative
reform, of the whole realm or commonwealth, on the other hand the
legal standing of the classes of persons who made it up, culminating in
‘the state of the king’—began to coalesce into a political theory of the
monarchical state. Very much the king’s instrument in a violent world,
the status regis et regniwas tempered to a new strength in the Anglo-
French war, but it was more than simply the power to tax and deploy
armies. Rather, the monarchical state was what made taxing and mili-
tary adventures possible: the administrative offices and procedures, and
the very sense of the kingdom as a political entity, which had grown
from the king’s exercise of his first duty to give laws and justice to his
people. Extended to this état monarchique,the Aristotelian analysis of
constitutions acquired a new depth.
‘The state of the realm’ and political continuity
It was the idea of the status regni, not of the nation, that had allowed
rulers and their ministers to come to an understanding of a country as
a continuous and a continually reformable entity, while theorists
remained attached to the classical term civitas(‘city’) and pursued the
ideal of a ‘perfect community’ (communitas perfecta). Kings had never
been so idealistic: they sought stability rather than perfection in their
realms, and even when stabilitasbecame status, it long retained a con-
servative, immobile quality. Yet the activity of legislation carried
forward a people united in what Aquinas termed ‘political communion’,
under the guidance of prudentia, the virtue necessary for ‘the rule of a
good ‘The state of the king’ and government for the common
The first element of prudence was memory, because it dealt with
contingent events, not necessary truths, and looked to remembered