Order as social closure I: the nobility

Abstract

So far we have analysed the social structure of late medieval England in terms of its relations of production and property rights. Yet for many sociologists and historians, to apply this kind of class-based analysis to societies such as medieval England involves an anachronistic imposition of our own preconceptions about society onto people who saw social relations in ways which differed markedly from those which seem obvious to us. For such writers, the division of society into a hierarchy of economic classes which we in the twentieth century take for granted was not the key to pre-industrial social structure. Instead, they see societies such as medieval England as composed of orders or estates defined by their status and privileges and whose social position ‘rested upon the esteem accorded by the society to the functions performed by each estate’. Such estate functions had ‘no necessary connection with the production of goods or with any other economic activity’, although the ownership of wealth was of ‘much importance’ for the internal hierarchy of each order. Unlike modern society, where everyone enjoys a legal equality and where classes are relatively open and fluid, a society of orders presupposes the inequality of man: ‘Each member of society occupied a fixed place in the social structure, and each knew his superiors and gave them his loyalty and obedience.’