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Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789
Myers, A.R., Parliaments And Estates In Europe To 1789
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
A.R. Myers
16 books2 followersAlec Reginald Myers (1912-1980), was Professor of History at the University of Liverpool and National President of the Historical Association 1973-76.
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November 6, 2019A short book. Less than 150 pages a good chunk of which were illustrated. So really this is an extended essay on a broad topic - Parliaments and Estates in Europe, covering a broad period period of time from the medieval period to the nineteenth century.
Early on Myers states that Among the misconceptions about the old parliaments of Europe are the notions that representative assemblies on the convenient of Europe were rare, transient, narrow in basis, and weak in power. All these suppositions are untrue. (pp23-24) The rest of the book illustrates that thesis.
Firstly Myers goes as far as taking in to discussion, even if only briefly, the Serbian Sabor and Russian Zemskie Sobor as well as the better known institutions in Western Europe. The downside of the breadth of coverage is that there is no depth - not so much as a case study - and we pass rapidly from Spain to the Netherlands via Switzerland without having broader trends or local particularities drawn out. But he does prove that representative assemblies were widespread across Europe and areas without any at some point were the exception.
Some of those assemblies were transient, or as in the case of the Estates-General in France summoned only rarely - but even in the case of France some of the provincial estates had a continuous existence from the middle ages down to 1789, the estates of Languedoc had permanent officials, collected taxes, organised and carried out public works - lack of an effective national body did not prevent the emergence of active local representative bodies.
Generally estates originally represented three or four estates (clergy, nobility and commons, with the commons sometimes split between townsmen and peasants). In Castile splitting off the clergy and nobility may have been a factor in reducing the relevance of the Cortes. Although even when all the estates were represented that did not mean that representation was proportional to population or representative of more than a fairly narrow segment of the people.
Power was perhaps the most difficult point to discuss. Powerful estates, either in terms of having effective executive powers or by being beholden to their electorate could either be discredited through failure (Denmark) or because they were too troublesome (Castile). The potentially pliable English parliament on the other hand survived by virtue of being both useful and benefiting through circumstances.
The virtue of this book is that it denies an easy Whig version of history. Contingency is everything.
Early on Myers states that Among the misconceptions about the old parliaments of Europe are the notions that representative assemblies on the convenient of Europe were rare, transient, narrow in basis, and weak in power. All these suppositions are untrue. (pp23-24) The rest of the book illustrates that thesis.
Firstly Myers goes as far as taking in to discussion, even if only briefly, the Serbian Sabor and Russian Zemskie Sobor as well as the better known institutions in Western Europe. The downside of the breadth of coverage is that there is no depth - not so much as a case study - and we pass rapidly from Spain to the Netherlands via Switzerland without having broader trends or local particularities drawn out. But he does prove that representative assemblies were widespread across Europe and areas without any at some point were the exception.
Some of those assemblies were transient, or as in the case of the Estates-General in France summoned only rarely - but even in the case of France some of the provincial estates had a continuous existence from the middle ages down to 1789, the estates of Languedoc had permanent officials, collected taxes, organised and carried out public works - lack of an effective national body did not prevent the emergence of active local representative bodies.
Generally estates originally represented three or four estates (clergy, nobility and commons, with the commons sometimes split between townsmen and peasants). In Castile splitting off the clergy and nobility may have been a factor in reducing the relevance of the Cortes. Although even when all the estates were represented that did not mean that representation was proportional to population or representative of more than a fairly narrow segment of the people.
Power was perhaps the most difficult point to discuss. Powerful estates, either in terms of having effective executive powers or by being beholden to their electorate could either be discredited through failure (Denmark) or because they were too troublesome (Castile). The potentially pliable English parliament on the other hand survived by virtue of being both useful and benefiting through circumstances.
The virtue of this book is that it denies an easy Whig version of history. Contingency is everything.
April 1, 2015
A somewhat dry history of the rise and fall of the concept of estates and their use in politics during the transition from Medieval models to modern parlaments. Somewhat choppy since local as well as nationa estates are covered in a multitude of societies and cultures. I learned much about the structure and the functioning of these bodies (and groups) over the period and how they were the bulwarks of conservative thought and action and how they were basically swept away with the French Revolution.
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