review Scott Waugh

Closure Theory and Medieval England

In the last fifty years, the basic features of the economy and society of medieval England have become more and more distinct as historians, excavating a mass of sources have steadily reconstructed social institutions and charted the changes they underwent in the five centuries after the Norman Conquest. The record-keeping of the English medieval government and other institutions has provided the foundation for studies of individual manors, villages, estates, regions, towns, and families, to the point that the English countryside and population are perhaps better known than any other region in Europe during the same period. As techniques used to analyze the historical data have improved, a deeper understanding of different groups and individuals has emerged. Perhaps the best known example of this refinement has been the use of manorial court rolls. Once used simply to reconstruct manorial organization, they have now been made to yield information regarding the demography of peasant families, the structure of village society, and the place of women in the peasant family and community. The transformation of social institutions has also become clearer. The rise and catastrophic drop in population, the shifting nature of overseas trade in wool and cloth, the flow of specie into and out of England, the increasing differentiation within all ranks of society, and the place of women, clergy, and merchants in a world largely dominated by agrarian pursuits have all been intensely scrutinized and specified to the point that their broad outlines are widely accepted by historians. Much of this social history has been empirical, constructed out of the documentation relating to particular institutions, such as a manor or estate, using previous studies of similar organizations as a blueprint. Nevertheless, various social or economic theories have informed debates about the overall course of English social history in the later Middle Ages and the causes of particular changes. Sweeny, Dobb, Hilton and other historians used a Marxist framework to analyze the transition from feudalism to capitalism, viewing lord-peasant relations as exploitative and eventually producing resistance and rebellion. Brenner has built on this tradition to fashion a comprehensive explanation of English social and economic development based on class structure and its attendant contradictions, tensions, and conflict. His work was, in part, a response to the Malthusian-Ricardian argument put forward by M.M. Postan and John Hatcher, in which the motor for change was the fluctuation of the population within a technologically stagnant agricultural system.
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Though both sides agreed on the general population trends between 1000 and 1500, they split on the causes and consequences of those shifts. Brenner argued that population change alone could not explain the decline of serfdom and the beginnings of the agricultural revolution in England because the same forces in France and Eastern Europe produced precisely opposite results. Alan MacFarlane has carved out yet another theoretical position, based on the rational choice theory of neo-classical economics, in which individuals acting in the market place were responsible for producing capitalism in England. Ideally, therefore, a survey of the economy and society of later medieval England should explain these interpretative currents as well as the historical reality on which they are based. Indeed, the two cannot be separated. To his great credit, S.H. Rigby has crafted a lucid and comprehensible account of the theoretical underpinnings of these historical controversies alongside a comprehensive survey of what is known about the English society and economy in the later Middle Ages.1 As Rigby points out in opening his book, all historical investigations proceed from some theoretical base, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, so that it is important to make explicit their role in historical explanation. Rigbys secondary goal is to demonstrate the nature of historical explanation, as well as the ability to ascribe causes to historical change, by using the debates about medieval social change as a prime example. Marxism Without Liabilities Rigby does not pretend to be neutral in his exposition. After briefly exploring the strengths and weakness of both Marxist and Parsonian theories of social stratification, which have informed much of the historical work in this field, Rigby embraces social closure theory, as defined by Parkin and Murphy, to remedy what he sees as the shortcomings of these other models of social organization. He wants to retain the sense of dichotomous conflict that is so central to Marxist analysis of class relations and the integrative, binding force of functionalism while shedding their liabilities. Rigbys major complaint with Marxism seems to be that it is essentially reductionist. Without denying that people were broadly grouped into large classes, such as lords and peasants, which clashed over property rights or access to the means of production, Rigby stresses that society was also divided vertically into groups whose members had a common set of interests which overlapped with but were not identical to those of a broader class to which they might belong. Social closure theory, derived from Weber, views society as a collection of self-defining groupssystacts in Runcimans terminology which compete with one another for resources and develop strategies to exclude and dominate other groups based on a variety of characteristics. These subordinate groups then develop strategies of their own, called usurpationary closure, to wrest power from dominant groups or at least to correct the political imbalance between them. This conflict did not necessarily push historical change in any particular direction, as Marx predicted of class conflict. By using closure theory, Rigby argues, historians, on the one hand,
1 S.H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender, MacMillan Press, London 1995, 45 HB, 15.50 PB.

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can avoid being trapped in Marxist dilemmas about base and superstructure and can examine social categories such as gender which are incompatible with a class analysis, while on the other, can avoid falling into the functionalist trap of over-emphasizing social harmony at the expense of group conflicts which rent medieval society. Armed with this theory, Rigby moves across the landscape of medieval England, re-examining familiar historical and theoretical landmarks in the light of social closure. He begins with relations of production and the distribution of property rights in the countryside and towns before looking at the principles of closure in relation to the nobility, clergy, women, and Jews. Along the way, Rigby quite usefully tests the theoretical assumptions of historians who have debated various topics. The battles over the nature of economic expansion and decline in the later Middle Ages have been fought out among three groups: followers of Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo who see population as the prime mover; monetarists who claim that the economic data on prices can be better explained by monetary shifts than by population change; and Marxists, notably Brenner, who base their explanation on the dynamic of class relations between lords and peasants. Rigbys explanations of these theoretical viewpoints are lucid and his criticisms of each trenchant and informative. For someone new to the field, they provide a secure foundation for understanding how historical interpretations of the transformation of medieval English society have been shaped. In addition, Rigby supports his analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of those debates with a remarkable array of data culled from the vast literature of historical findings about every sort of institution and social grouping in medieval England, as well as with a broad selection of contemporary writings. His inclusion of lengthy explanations of the place of women and Jews in medieval society, along with his discussion of social ideology, is both welcome and novel. What is refreshing in his reportage is the way in which he fits interesting details together to construct a reliable yet sophisticated understanding of English medieval society. The question, which Rigby poses in regard to the Marxist concept of the feudal relations of production, is whether the theory of social closure tells us anything which we did not know already.2 Put another way, can closure theory explain medieval social relations and social change in a more satisfying manner than other theories? Rigbys proposition is that the terms of closure theory, such as exclusion, usurpation, or dual-closure, help us to classify and to make sense of natural phenomena, meaning the features and changes of English medieval society.3 Is this taxonomy preferable to Marxist or functionalist terminology, in the sense of either being truer to the historical record or clearer in explicating medieval phenomena? The Clergy Rigby makes the best use of closure theory in his description of the clergy, which provides a good example of the complex layering of
2 3

Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 14.

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medieval society. As he demonstrates, while the clergy can be counted among the nobility in terms of property and power, the ways they gained access to property via office rather than inheritance and defined themselves through education and spirituality clearly set their order apart from the rest of the nobility. Indeed, just prior to the period covered by Rigbys book, the hierarchy of the Church was engaged in a struggle with many of its own members to resist the powerful force of inheritance by insisting on clerical celibacy. The Gregorian reform movement took great pains to distinguish the power of the clergy and their place in society from the laity in general. Despite that exclusionary movement, the Church and the nobility were deeply intertwined in a symbiotic but sometimes uncomfortable relationship. The technical expertise of the clergy, in writing, administration, and law, became essential to rulers and nobility intent on consolidating their political and economic authority from the twelfth century onward. Clergy were omnipresent in the halls of government as well as on seigneurial estates, where they contributed to the professionalization of staff whose function was to extend the power of princes and landlords over subjects and tenants. All the same, the laity resented the clergys privileges, the wealth that they amassed, and the spiritual and temporal powers that they exercised. Ecclesiastical courts were viewed to some extent as rivals of seigneurial or royal courts, and as a result deeply distrusted. The clergy resented the authority exercised by laymen over appointments to Church livings and the intrusion of secular authority into their jurisdiction. Clerics were prominent members of parliament, which in the fourteenth century experienced outbursts of anti-clericalism and attacked clerical privileges. It is the dynamic quality of this relationship between the clergy and laity, resulting from the tensions between the two groups, that Rigby wants to emphasize. Yet the vocabulary of closure theory, with its hard distinction between individualist or collectivist closure, does not make the complexity of the historical circumstances more intelligible nor does it explain why the situation arose or the direction that it took. Indeed, to some extent, the theory can be misleading as applied to medieval England, precisely because of its exclusionary emphasis; that is, groups gain coherence by defining the grounds on which outsiders are excluded from membership. Yet the symbiosis between the nobility and clergy, for example, was of critical importance in explaining how they maintained their respective powers and authority in society; interdependence was as important as simple exclusion. Perhaps the use of the theory explains why Rigby does not examine at length the forces that helped to give groups or classes in medieval society internal coherence and cohesion. For example, within the clergy, chapters, councils, convocations, visitations, and other kinds of assemblies provided arenas for discussing and debating policy and thereby binding the clergy into a cohesive group. Although legislation could be divisive when it aimed at subordinating or suppressing particular clerical groups such as the Lollards, the process of creating and publicizing rules was as important in creating a sense of clerical identity as the effort to exclude dissidents or laymen. Similarly, affinities, tournaments, feasts, and parliamentary gatherings provided shared experiences and values that could overcome individual differences and produce a sense of common enterprise. They helped to bind the nobility and gentry into a single class. The military experience
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of the upper ranks of English society, with its emphasis on valour and martial ability, decisively set those ranks apart from other social groups and gave them a practical and ideal form of comradeship which helped to reinforce their political and social power. Kings certainly appreciated the solidarity that these practices engendered and took measures to ban tournaments and other kinds of assemblies during periods of political tension. Yet retaining could just as well exacerbate competitive rivalries within the ranks of the nobility and, at times, tear it apart. Nobles and the Use of Force Rigby largely leaves the military role of the nobility to one side, concentrating instead on the tectonics of its relations to different social groups, especially the peasantry. Yet, the nobilitys military experiences, like the ecclesiastical customs of assembly and counsel, enhanced the exclusionary force of the entire class, as peasants came to understand. Indeed, Brenner has highlighted the cohesiveness of the English nobility as one of the crucial factors in explaining why English lords were able to maintain authority over the peasantry longer than their counterparts in France did. Rigby expresses some doubts about the usefulness of the Marxist concept of extra-economic coercion or, to be fair, about the consistency of Marxist theory regarding the use of the term.4 Yet it is hazardous to neglect the physical power that undergirded seigneurial authority in the Middle Ages, especially since peasant response to what was deemed excessive seigneurial demands in the later Middle Ages took the form of armed revolt, which had to be put down by force. Military power and the use of physical force were real aspects of medieval society, which need to be analyzed in order to understand the dynamics of class relations. Another aspect of those relations that demands explanation was the development of sophisticated techniques to assert social and political authority, or exclusion. The nobility did not rely on force alone to maintain dominance over the peasantry. As suggested above, the later Middle Ages saw the growth of a variety of professional, or proto-professional, groups which developed distinctive bases of power as agents of the crown, nobility, or community: lawyers and administrators. To be sure, these groups were not large and, in the case of lawyers, cannot be defined solely in terms of their role in relation to seigneurial authority. Yet, seen from the other side, they were indispensable to the running of estates, courts, and government, especially since jurisdiction over land and individuals and the protection of rights to property and other economic assets were so essential to the maintenance of the seigneurial class. Since literacy was necessary to their work and either clerical or lay masters could employ them, many were drawn from the clergy. Yet most were probably laymen, emerging from the socially nebulous world that lay between the nobility and peasantry because of the opportunities administrative and legal work presented for social improvement. From the twelfth century onward these groups, especially the lawyers, developed specialized forms of training, as can be seen in the rapid proliferation of handbooks, manuals, and compilations used for teaching and practice.
4

Ibid., pp. 49-57.

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John Balls impassioned call in 1381 to behead all lawyers, escheators and others who had been trained in the law or dealt in the law because of their office is but one indication of the place these specialists occupied in relations between classes, as well as the hatred that their work had inspired among the peasantry. Even though Ball tarred them with the same feather, neither the nobility nor the professional groups who served them would have seen these administrative agents as belonging to the elite. They were brought into the orbit of the nobility through service and retaining, features of medieval England, which set it quite apart from modern society. Class relations between landlords and peasants should certainly be analyzed in terms of their economic content, but it is important to remember that they were expressed in the formal legal terms of tenure, the requirements for holding land. Rigby does a good job of examining the legal expression of peasant landholding, and those forms of relations were mirrored at the top of society in feudal tenure. The lords appetite for retaining was omnivorous, so that once land ceased to form the basis of relations between lord and man, contracts were invented which mimicked the chief features of feudal tenure and which could be applied to a host of needs. The creation of affinities was of fundamental importance in organizing the higher ranks of society, in maintaining the power of the elite, and in providing channels for the distribution of wealth, whether in the form of spoils of war or fees for service. For the client, entry into a contractual relationship with a lord could be the first step in social advancement, giving him the backing of a powerful patron as well as material rewards. Affinities, from the sprawling retinue of a great lord such as John of Gaunt to the few knights and household staff of a local lord, were a commonplace of late medieval society whose role in politics and warfare has received considerable attention. They need to be placed in the broader context of medieval economic and social relations to demonstrate how relations among individuals and groups were historically expressed. Exclusion and Cohesion The point here is not to fault Rigby for not providing a more fulsome description of lawyers, administrators, and affinities in his survey, but rather to suggest that closure theory, created to describe the features of modern society, can obscure or elide many features of a developing agrarian society such as medieval England. It is not clear, for example, where one would place these groups in the taxonomy of systacts that Rigby describes, for they constituted neither classes, nor orders, nor estates, nor status-groups, nor castes, though they were more clearly identifiable as groups per se than women taken as a whole. Rigbys assertion that individuals are ...members of a variety of... overlapping social sets is hardly debatable, but what is important to know is the historically specific ways in which those sets are formed and interact. Similarly, Rigby goes on to stress the competition which exists among individuals and groups, but it is equally important to understand the alliances and cooperation that enabled groups to function together or to assert their power over others. As a social model, closure theory helps us understand only one dimension of those historical relations. Closure and exclusion focus attention
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on action at the boundaries among groups and presuppose conflict or tension, begging the question how groups achieve internal coherence. Another example of social relations, marriage, illustrates the problem. Rigby touches on it briefly to make the incontrovertible point that marriage was an expression of the subordination of women to men exclusionary closure and, in the case of peasants, an expression of class power, for all marriages were arranged by men while landlords sometimes dictated marriages of their peasant tenants. Yet marriage was also and still is a social act involving the transfer of property, the establishment of potential lines of inheritance, and the formation of alliances. Within the nobility and gentry, marriage alliances were constructed with great care to enhance opportunities for bringing inheritances together as well as to solidify bonds among powerful families. Marriage performed a similar function within affinities, giving the group greater solidity by overlaying the vertical ties of clientage with powerful horizontal bonds of family relations. Marriage occasionally offered younger sons or those on the outskirts of the class opportunities to advance socially by acquiring womens land. Marriage strategies within the ranks of peasant communities likewise aimed at consolidating wealth within families or status groups in the village. It is thus important not only to see how groups excluded others, but also to understand the instruments by which classes and groups created a self-identity (consciousness) and exercised power and authority among other classes and groups. A single act, such as marriage, could have varying consequences and should be seen to have been at once inclusive and exclusive. Society as a Moral Whole Capturing the push and pull of these social forces is difficult because value judgements are such an important part of historical writing, leading different historians to emphasize domination over cohesion or vice versa. It is made more difficulty by the fact that those forces were fluid, and language tends to freeze their dynamism in specific terms or metaphors. Rigby, for example, criticizes historians for relying too heavily on the geological metaphor of stratification because it emphasizes only one (vertical, class) dimension of an individuals place in society, while individuals also related to one another on another (horizontal, orders) plane. Before geology became a science, people relied on other metaphors to describe social relations, and in the Middle Ages images of the three orders and the social body were the most prevalent. Rigby uses them to underscore his argument that classes and orders were not mutually exclusive. Both metaphors also emphasized what contemporaries viewed as the necessary relationships binding society into a whole; no single element could exist independently of others, and reciprocal obligations and benefits linked them all. The ideal of medieval society, as expressed in ideological writings, was of a moral whole, in which individuals belonged to mutually dependent groups interacting with one another according to a pattern of ethical relations. These metaphors were moral idealizations, but have the virtue of capturing in a manner that neither the image of stratification nor the concept of orders does the interlocking nature of medieval social relations. It is not clear that the addition of another layer of language, of systacts and closure, brings us
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any closer to that reality than the medieval metaphors do, or helps us understand what medieval people were trying to express when they used those metaphors. It is the process of formation and of the interaction of social groups as they evolved with respect to one another that is of interest to the historian, and, indeed, to the theorist interested in trying to distil the essential features of that process. This inter-group dynamism was important in another way it produced change. Rigbys quarrel with Marxism also involves his rejection of the attempt to find a single, causal explanation for historical change, which he argues is illusory or misguided.5 Nineteenth-century theorists saw history as moving, inexorably, in certain directions, and their theories were intended to explain the direction of change. Rigby claims that closure theory similarly aims at explaining change: Any account of the social structure of late medieval England must...first characterize the particular systacts which were created by its historically specific forms of social exclusion and establish the extent of the usurpationary closure mounted against such exclusion. It must then consider the extent of change in the forms of such exclusion during the late medieval period and offer an explanation of such change, including an assessment of the role of usurpationary closure in bringing it about. Later on, Rigby argues that conflict arising from social exclusion was a crucial determinant of social change.6 Yet, these statements are simply Marxist analysis in different clothing. It is not clear what, precisely, social closure explains about society and social change that cannot be discovered using Marxist analysis. It is important to be sensitive to its problems and shortcomings, which Rigby highlights, but very little is gained by abandoning it in favour of a terminology which tends to underestimate the richness of the historical record. A survey need not provide a thorough historical revision of social theory to be successful, yet it is a pleasure to read such an ambitious effort. Students or general readers will find an altogether reliable and satisfying account of English society in the later Middle Ages along with a penetrating analysis of the predominant theories that have shaped our understanding of the period. Even if they do not come away persuaded of the value of closure theory as a satisfying replacement for the alternatives, they will have gained an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of them all.

5 6

Ibid., pp. 141-3. Ibid., p. 144.

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