Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, 1300-1600

Project Information

STATE

Grant agreement ID: 677502

DOI

10.3030/677502

Project closed

EC signature date 21 June 2016

Start date 1 September 2016

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 496 875,00

EU contribution

€ 1 496 875,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - STATE (Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, 1300-1600)

Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Next to capitalism, the state is one of the defining elements of modern society that has its roots in the Late Middle Ages, so that historians have to offer laymen and -women an accurate, empirically tested interpretation of how states emerged and what the nature of the pre-industrial state was. Despite a vast body of research that was developed since the late twentieth century, a critical aspect of state formation was still badly understood, namely governance. Historians agree that states came into being through the centralization of fiscal and military resources in the hands of princes and their administrations, but what was missing from the picture so far was the evolution of princely governance between the fourteenth- and the sixteenth centuries. While established scholarship long endorsed a view in which governance was also centralized at the expense of local political actors, this project aimed at a critical test of this long-established concept of state formation as centralization through the hypothesis that state formation was in fact a mix of centralization and decentralization: to harness elite support that was needed for the development of new tax systems and increasingly large princely armies, princes were happy to delegate local governance to these elites.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Together with my team – two postdocs, two doctoral students, and two research assistants – I tested the hypothesis about the selective decentralization of government as a component of state formation through an empirical study of seigneurial lordship. Seigneuries were precise geographical circumscriptions in which public governance was not the prerogative of the state but the private property right of a member of the local elite. Traditionally imagined as a stumbling block for state formation, historians have long assumed that the power of seigneurial elites waned with the rise of the fiscal and military state in the Late Middle Ages, but we investigated the possibility that princes were in fact happy to respect seigneurial lordship and even to endorse the creation of new seigneuries in return for elite support for fiscal and military innovation. As a analytical framework, we selected five regions in England, France, and the Low Countries for comparative analysis, as each of these regions displayed crucially different characteristics in terms of state formation, urbanization, and so on. For England, we relied on earlier research on Warwickshire, leaving the team four other case-studies

The first postdoc, Dr Erika Graham-Goering, prioritized the interplay of royal governance and seigneurial lordship in fourteenth-century Languedoc, which led to two important articles. The second postdoc, Dr Jim van der Meulen, focused on Guelders, and also published two important articles.
The first doctoral student, Gert-Jan Van de Voorde, follows the case-study of Languedoc in the fifteenth- and early sixteenth centuries, whereas the second doctoral student, Ysaline Bourgine de Meder, studies fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Normandy. Both doctoral students suffered greatly from the closure of the archives due to the Covid19 pandemic so that they had to refrain themselves from subsidiary publications next to the dissertation. Ysaline Bourgine de Meder will contribute a chapter to the conference proceedings of the closing conference of the ERC project, whereas Gert-Jan Van de Voorde has publications on side-projects.
The PI himself, together with one doctoral student that was not funded by the ERC but by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and two research assistants, Mathijs Speecke and Sander Berghmans, tackled the most labour-intensive case-study of all, that is, Flanders between the mid-fourteenth- and mid-sixteenth century. This leads to a research monograph, authored by Frederik Buylaert and Miet Adriaens, next to a contribution to the conference proceedings of the concluding conference of STATE.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

While the project was in some ways far more difficult to carry out than originally anticipated in the original project – the “high risk”-aspect of the research was real, and compounded by practical problems due to the Covid19 pandemic – the team has effectively tested the research hypothesis. The answer is a cautious confirmation of the hypothesis. On the one hand, the creation of new seigneuries by elites with princely support was and remained rare because of the well-organized resistance to such ploys by other political actors, notably towns. On the other hand, the key claim of STATE stands in the sense that governance was clearly not centralized between the fourteenth- and the sixteenth centuries. In fact, princely administrations continued to rely on seigneurial administrations: both circuits of power worked in tandem, rather than in conflict.
Next to this, the STATE project has yielded a highly unexpected but relevant bonus, in the sense that our data sets are highly relevant to ongoing debates on that other behemoth in European history, that is, the birth of capitalism. Economic historians are long puzzled as to why specific parts of the Low Countries were “cradles of capitalism”, i.e. displaying precocious trends towards economic innovation. Our mapping of seigneurial landscapes has revealed that these regions were relatively free of elite constraints in the form of seigneuries, a thesis that was articulated in New Institutional Economics in the 1970s, but which had defied empirical verification so far. We are happy to say that this project has killed two birds with one stone.

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