France and England : The Growth of National Communities

 The great struggle of the papacy and the empire in the thirteenth century was fought out
in Italy and Germany.
 Magna Carta, the great charter which the barons in1215 forced King John to seal, played
dominant role in English history in 13th century. It defined, in formal language, specific
limits to the King’s right over his subject and their lands in England.
 Henry’s III government was unfortunately such as to make the great territorial barons of
his realm very suspicious. While the activities of his officials seemed to be undermining
their privileges at home, the king chose to favour men of foreign extraction more highly
than them, and spent money freely in unsuccessful venture abroad.
 When the baronial leaders began to discuss the conditions on which they would grant the
extra-ordinary taxation, it soon became clear that the confirmation of the Great Charter
could no longer be enough.
 A committee of great men was therefore set up to look into matters which called
reformation. They were at work for over a year, and in the end produced a series of
demands to the king, which are very revealing.
 These demands for reform were the rallying cry of those who followed Simon de
Montfort in the confused civil war which ended only with his death at Evesham in 1265.
They make it plain that the rights of the king over his tenants, and their rights over their
in turn, were no longer regarded in England as matters which could be treated separately.
 By demanding in effect that all questions of free tenure should be settled by the same
law, and normally in the same courts, the baronial leaders were recognizing that the
kingdom should be regarded as a single community, with a single directive government.
 Edward I, in contrast to his father, was shrewd in his ambitions and a great warrior. He
conquered Wales, and very nearly conquered Scotland, and he fought a long war in
Gascony against the king of France.
 Above all, Edward sought to give publicity to the reasons which dictated the turns of his
policy. This cast a consultative atmosphere over the whole business of government.
 It had been customary in England in the past to call on representatives of local
communities to appear before the king and his council when matters affecting them were
being adjudicated. These representatives were bidden to come ‘with full power for
themselves and for all the community shire to counsel and consent to those things… shall
be agreed upon.’
 In 1297,when, owing to the wars with France and Scotland, the burden of taxation had
been heavy for three years, Edward for the first time found himself in serious difficulties
with his subjects.
 England was a rich kingdom, whose farmers were the chief suppliers of raw wool to the
European market.

 The internal history of France has strong similarities with that of England in this period.
But there is one great difference, which at first sight seems to make their developments
 almost antithetic. Where England we see limits being established on royal absolution, in
France we see the growth of absolution itself.
 Louis IX was not a genius in the ordinary sense of the word. What made him impressive
to his contemporaries was his continuous effort to live up all the that was considered
highest in very diverse, but thoroughly conventional ideals.
 This was what won him veneration from men in very varied walks of life: the churchmen
for his piety and alms-giving: from knights for his chivalrous courage and his zeal for the
crusade: from subjects for the impartiality of his justice.
 Philip IV, the successor of St. Louis. The first thing that we can notice is the growth of
professionalism. The king’s judicial council has become a body of professional judges,
the Parlement, the formal record of whose judgments goes back, significantly, to Louis’s
own reign.
 Thus in France in Philip IV’s time there appeared an institution very reminiscent of the
English parliament, the Estate General.
 In Estate General, the nobility of the provinces and the third estate were kept apart, the
stage management of the assemblies and the propaganda for royal policy, and last it did
not fix grants of taxation.
 Through the Estate General and the provincial assemblies, a sense of common interest,
communal obligation and communal effort was fostered by careful propaganda.

 In these two kingdoms in this period, the same notion can be seen gaining ground. It is
the notion that the realm constitutes a community which is legally and socially whole and
self-sufficing in temporal matters. It was only in France and England, moreover, that this
idea was taking hold: similar development attest its growing significance elsewhere.