Comparing and criticizing states of commonwealths
In later medieval and early modern Europe war and diplomacy fostered
the comparison and criticism of the laws and institutions of individual
commonwealths and a sense of their distinctive histories. The com-
parison of constitutions appears already in Philippe de Mézières’s
allegorical pilgrimage to test the moral currency of European kingdoms
and city-states. During the Hundred Years War Frenchmen and English-
men made propaganda out of the workings of each others’ polities,
especially (since the royal will was their very foundation) the fortunes of
their kings, the French (for instance) labelling the English as habitual
murderers of their rulers as well as disturbers of other nations’ peace.^1
It is true that from 1327 to 1649 Englishmen killed kings whom they
did not know what to do with, once they had deprived them of their
‘state’ for misgovernment, for to keep alive a captive king invited the
fate of Simon de Montfort. But in fact the political commentators of
fifteenth-century England absorbed the royalism of French writers.
Thomas Hoccleve, a high-living clerk in the privy seal office at West-
minster who drew on the doctrines of Giles of Rome in his Regiment of
Princes, a work in English verse he completed in 1411, begins by
lamenting his personal ill-fortune, but then remembers how ‘not long
ago | Fortune’s stroke down-thrust estate royal’ (in the person of
Richard II).^2 In the course of the fifteenth century the French political
tract of 1347 was put into English as The III Consideracions Right
Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince, and Christine de
Pisan’s influential work of 1406–7 was translated as The Body of
Polycye.^3 Around 1436, a work called The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye
introduced a new theme: it proclaimed the command of the sea, ‘which
of England is the round wall’, to be as vital as good governance at
home, if an English ruler was to keep the realm in peace and any
foreign prince from making ‘fade the flowers of English state’. No one
had been able to withstand the ‘majesty’ of the Saxon king Edgar,
whose ‘labour for the public thing’ had added the construction of a
great navy to the enforcement of the ‘right and laws of his land’—a
combination of good policies the writer believed was shown again by
Henry V, that recent king ‘of most estately magnanimity’.^4
296 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^1) P. S. Lewis, ‘War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France and
England’, TRHS, 5th ser. 15 (1965).
(^2) Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 30.
(^3) Four English Political Tracts, ed. Genet, 174–219; The Middle English Translation of
Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, ed. D. Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977).
(^4) The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ed. Sir George Warner (Oxford: Clarendon Press), lines