Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

by William T. Cavanaugh

In his On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Strayer narrates the gradual accretion of power to royal courts beginning in the twelfth century. The first permanent functionaries were estate managers hired to centralize, regularize, and keep account of the extraction of revenues from the lands and populations subject to the king." Next to develop were royal courts of law. Courts of law were originally simply royal courts, that is, the "great men" who surrounded the king and made up his household. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were increasingly called upon to settle disputes, frequently by knights and lesser landholders asking for protection against the wealthier nobles. The royal courts that developed were thus important to the king's struggle for power with the nobility. In general, the law became the principal tool of centralization and bureaucratization. By the fourteenth century, the governing apparatuses surrounding the king had "acquired their power largely by developing their judicial institutions and by protecting the property rights of the possessing classes" (p. 61). By the fourteenth century, war had made royal courts increasingly reliant on taxation, which in turn required inviting representatives of the propertied classes to give their consent in occasional nonvoting assemblies. Such assemblies generally succeeded in shifting the tax burden more heavily onto the unrepresented classes (pp. 58-68).