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Medieval Representative Assemblies: Collective Action and Antecedents of Western Prosperity Alexander William Salter Rawls College of Business Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX USA 79409 ph: 806 834 8186 em: [email protected] Andrew T. Young Rawls College of Business Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX USA 79409 ph: 806 834 1374 em: [email protected] This version: February 2017 Abstract: Medieval monarchs in Western Europe responded to financial and military pressures by instituting representative assemblies. Three estates (classes; orders) were represented in these assemblies: clergy, nobility, and burghers. In the late medieval and early modern periods, some states tended towards absolutism (e.g., France); others towards constitutional monarchy (e.g., England). The German historian Otto Hintze conjectured that territorially based assemblies were more likely to resist monarchical encroachments on their political authority than estate-based assemblies. We argue that Hintze’s conjecture can be made intelligible by a comparative institutional analysis emphasizing political bargaining and the costs of special versus common interests. Having established that territorially based assemblies provided a stronger check on absolutism than their estate-based counterparts, we then provide historical case studies of how France and England instituted, respectively, estate-based and territorially based assemblies. Keywords: medieval economic history, comparative economic development, medieval constitution, polycentric governance, political property rights, polycentric sovereignty, marketpreserving federalism JEL codes: N44, O10, O52, P50, K00 1 1. Introduction Medieval Western Europe is exceptional in having served as the cradle for enduring traditions of limited and relatively non-predatory government. Similar traditions failed to arise spontaneously in other regions of the world and recreating them after the fact has proven exceedingly difficult as a matter of policy. What were the foundations for Western European traditions of liberty? Numerous scholars have deemed this question fundamental to understanding why sustained economic growth occurred first in the West (e.g., Anderson 1991; Baechler 1975; Benson 1989; Berman 1983; Raico 1994; Weber 1978 [1922]; Hintze 1975 [1931]). In recent years, however, an increasing number of scholars have shifted their focus away from limited, non-predatory government and towards investments in state capacity (e.g., Besley and Persson 2009, 2010, 2011; Acemoglu et al. 2011; Acemoglu et al. 2015; Acemoglu et al. 2016; Gennaioli and Voth 2015).1 This literature begins with the observation that sustained economic growth occurred only subsequent to the rise of the modern (post-Westphalian) state. From this perspective, when a state builds up the capacity to suppress internal conflict, enforce the rule of law, and provide common-interest public goods, then a critical (if not necessary) condition for sustained growth is met. The limited government and state capacity perspectives are not necessarily in opposition to one another. The idea of limited government is that it is limited to functions such as the enforcement of the rule of law. Alternatively, few would suggest that substantial state capacity in Charles Tilly (1990) linked the growth in medieval and early-modern European state capacity to monarchs’ needs to finance military spending, something which Besley and Persson (2009, p. 1218) characterize as “an archetypal public good representing broadly common interests for citizens.” (Alternatively, Gennaioli and Voth (2015) note that war was often the “sport of kings” and more aptly characterized as a private good.) Ertman (1997) emphasizes the relative ability of different early-modern European nation states to develop merit-based bureaucracies; Charron et al. (2012) subsequently argue the early development of such bureaucracies is more fundamental to accounting for variation in modern-day governance quality in OECD countries than are countries’ legal origins (La Porta et al. 2008). Regarding recent history, Johnson (1982), Amsden (1989), Wade (1990), and Evans (1995) attribute the economic growth successes in East Asia to governments with high state capacity; Herbst (2000) and Centeno (2002) argue that low state capacity is a source of development failure in Africa and Latin America, respectively. 1 2 the hands of a tyrannical despot is desirable. Besley and Persson (2009, p. 1219) pose the following question: “Why are rich countries also high-tax countries with good enforcement of contracts and property rights?” Besely and Persson’s (2009; 2010) answer is that a state’s investments in fiscal capacity (to raise taxes) and legal capacity (to support markets) are complementary. In other words, rich countries are ones with states that have the capacity to raise substantial revenues and then limit their use to the provision of common interest public goods and enforcement of property rights. To wit: rich countries have large but limited governments. But while state capacity can be used towards public goods and the rule of law, it can also be a means of predation.2 Whether or not state capacity is relatively limited to the former rather than the latter use matters. Returning to the context of Western European history, few would argue that the only difference between the eighteenth century constitutional monarchy of England and the absolutist one of France was their relative levels of state capacity. Clearly it mattered how their respective state capacities were being used vis-à-vis one another. In particular, the English state was able to make a more credible commitment to enforcing property rights and supporting markets relative to its continental counterpart (North and Weingast 1989). While Western Europe generally fostered traditions of limited government, the establishments of those traditions were uneven across countries. Why did the seventeenth century witness the entrenchment of absolutism in some countries (e.g., France and Spain) while others developed into limited monarchies (e.g., England and Sweden)? In other words, following the Peace of Westphalia in 1644-8, why were some countries better able to place limits on the use of modern state capacity? 2 Admitting this is not to deny that investments in fiscal and legal capacity can be complementary. For example, a state that provides rule of law and opportunities for wealth creation to its citizens (high legal capacity) will likely face less resistance to/avoidance of its efforts to collect taxes; hence higher returns to its existing fiscal capacity. 3 In this paper we contribute to an understanding of these differing experiences with state capacity. In particular, we explore a conjecture made by the early twentieth century German historian, Otto Hintze (1970 [1930]): that two-chamber (or territorially based) representative assemblies were more effective at resisting absolutist tendencies than three-chamber (or estatebased) assemblies. The English Parliament is an example of the former; the French Estates General of the latter. Relative to estate-based assemblies, we argue that territorially based assemblies tended to yield constitutional constraints on political agents that were self-enforcing (de Lara et al. 2008; Leeson 2011; Mittal and Weingast 2011). Territorially based assemblies, therefore, were more likely to prevent devolution of powers to the monarch. We begin from the premise that asking how state capacity will be used involves two fundamental questions regarding agents with political authority. First, do those agents have the incentives to pursue policies to provide common-interest public goods and abstain from predatory behavior? Second, do they have the information necessary to identify the policies that are consistent with their incentives? Only if agents with political authority have the appropriate incentives and information can we expect growth-promoting use of state capacity. Working from this premise we argue that agents in territorially based assemblies had incentives to pursue common-interest public goods. This was true to the extent that it was costly in the assembly to achieve corporate expression of anything but common-interests. Alternatively, agents in estate-based assemblies had incentives to pursue the special interests of their particular estate (class; order). Achieving corporate expression of those special interests in estate-based assemblies was relatively cheap. In exchange, additional powers would be conceded to the monarch. The costs of these exchanges would be in part imposed onto members of the other estates. 4 To the extent that territorially based assemblies were a more effective check on the absolutist ambitions of monarchs that their estate-based counterparts, it raises the question of why estate-based assemblies arose in certain parts of Europe while territorially based assemblies arose in other parts. A second contribution of this paper is to, for the particular cases of France and England, examine their histories and make intelligible the former’s institution of a estatebased Estates General and the latter’s institution of a territorially based Parliament. We proceed as follows. In section 2 we provide a discussion of some important features of the medieval Western European constitution and the politically powerful estates that formed well-defined interest groups within it. Against that backdrop, in section 3 we provide an overview of medieval representative assemblies and the distinction between those that were estate-based versus territorially based. Then in section 4 we then discuss in Hintze’s conjecture and provide a comparative institutional analysis that makes it intelligible. We then turn to a historical discussion of the institution of different assembly types in France versus England. In section 5 we describe how legacy of the Carolingian dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries was favorable to the institution of estate-based representative assemblies. Alternatively, in section 6 we elaborate on eleventh century Norman efforts to superimpose Carolingian-type governance structures upon already established Anglo-Saxon local governance structures; the result being favorable to the institution of a territorially based assembly. Section 7 concludes. 2. The Medieval Constitution Elsewhere we have argued that the polycentric governance hierarchy of medieval Western Europe had desirable incentive and information generating characteristics (Salter 2015a & 5 2015b; Salter and Young 2016).3 Governance providers within the hierarchy were ‘shareholders’ in their jurisdictions. To use the terminology of Salter (2015a), their political property rights of were bundled with their economic property rights. By a political property right we refer to a claim on returns that are associated with the exercise of political authority over specific resources. Medieval governance providers, then, were residual claimants to the returns on their governance. 4 Residual claimancy creates incentives to govern well and also informational feedback on whether one has actually governed well (in the form of higher or lower returns). The hierarchy also resembled a federalist system where lower-level governance providers had better access local knowledge while upper-level authorities could orchestrate broader collective action when desirable (Weingast 1993, 1995; Qian and Weingast 1997; de Figueiredo and Weingast 2005).5 Informational feedback on governance was strengthened by jurisdictional competition (Tiebout 1956). This was true both in the sense that individuals could attempt to “vote with their feet” and in the sense that jurisdictions overlapped, giving individuals recourse to multiple authorities.6 3 We use the term polycentric in the sense of Ostrom et al. (1961) and Ostrom (2010): a system of governance with multiple decision-making centers that are formally independent of each other but, together, may function in an interdependent system of relationships. See also Aligica and Tarko (2014). 4 E.g., a noble lorded over a realm constituted by his demesnes (personally held lands) and benefices bestowed upon his vassals. The lord was a governance provider for his vassals. Those vassals, in return, owed military service and a share of the produce from their benefices to the lord. Providing security and justice to the overall realm, then, generated returns for the lord and vassals alike. (The same can also be said for the Church hierarchy where bishops and other ranking clergy often lorded over vassals.) 5 The feudal hierarchy emanated down from monarchs in a cascade of overlapping jurisdictions. A monarch was lord over a broad realm consisting of his demesnes and the benefices bestowed upon his vassals; his vassals were principle lords (magnates) spread over the broader realm who lorded over realms consisting of their demesnes and the benefices bestowed upon their vassals; etc. This was analogously the case for the Church hierarchy and the feudal and Church hierarchies also overlapped. (Ranking clergy members sometimes did homage to monarchs and/or had vassals of their own.) 6 For example, a lord was a governance provider to his vassals. However, if the lord attempted to expropriate resources from his vassals above and beyond their feudal obligations – what was known in the Middle Ages was imposing “bad customs” – the vassal could appeal to the lord’s lord (e.g., a magnate or monarch) who was an overarching governance provider. Also, a given realm might be covered by overlapping lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. 6 An important feature of the medieval governance hierarchy that contributed to a stable distribution of political authority throughout was what we have termed polycentric sovereignty (Salter and Young 2016). Sovereignty is here used in the specific sense of Salter (2015b): when an agent with political authority can defend that authority against encroachments by other agents. The nobility was a landed warrior class; their obligations to greater lords and monarchs to whom they did homage were first and foremost military services (both their own and in the form of levies of their own vassals). For example, then, nobles collectively commanded the military might with which a monarch might try to encroach upon their authorities. The clergy, for their part, wielded the threat of damnation – or the promise of salvation! – and nobles and monarchs alike took that seriously (Asbridge 2004, pp. 5-11). An important aspect of the polycentric sovereignty of medieval Western Europe was that particular groups of individuals – the clergy, the nobility, and (starting in the twelfth century) the burghers of cities – self-consciously identified as members of a particular estate (order; class) (Duby 1980 [1978]).7 These three estates, respectively, were able to affect corporate expression of their interests and provide important checks on monarchs. The first and second estates successfully bargained for various de jure rights, privileges, and immunities (Hintze 1975 [1931]; Weber 1978 [1922]; Downing 1988, 1989, 1992). The High Middle Ages, then, gave rise to commercially focused cities whose burghers would come to represent a politically powerful third estate (Young 2017).8 7 Literary references to a tripartite system of estates can be found dating back to at least the eleventh century: “Triple then is the house of God which is thought to be one: on Earth, some pray, others fight, still others work; which three are joined together and may not be torn asunder; so that on the function of each the works of the others rest, each in turn assisting all.” The preceding was written circa 1020-1030 by Adalbero, bishop of Laon. These were the three estates of the West, to wit, those who pray; those who fight; those who labor. (The quote is found on Duby (1980 [1978], p. 5).) 8 Medeival cities were important sources of wealth and administrative human capital to both monarchs and the nobility. As such, they “were able to negotiate crucial freedoms from external authority by playing off noble and 7 The role of these political powerful estates in representative assemblies will be fundamental to our discussion of the Hintze conjecture that follows below. 3. Medieval Representative Assemblies A number of scholars have emphasized the rough balance of power between medieval monarchs and political powerful estates.9 These political powerful estates sought corporate expression of their interests through the representative assemblies that arose throughout medieval Western Europe. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monarchs responded to financial and military pressures by instituting assemblies that drew their representation from the estates (Russell 1982; North and Weingast 1989; van Zanden et al. 2012, pp. 844-877). Monarchs leveraged these assemblies towards political and financial support for their policies.10 In exchange for their consent to additional taxes and/or military levies, the estates received various rights and immunities. It may seem surprising that monarchs would take the lead in providing their subjects with a forum for collective bargaining. However, this fact is made intelligible by Congelton’s (2007, 2011) theory of constitutional bargaining within the “King and Council” template. Medieval monarchs desired the estates to commit to military resources (both manpower and financial). Insisting on too burdensome obligations would have led to low effort, shirking, and avoidance. king[;] [f]ixed sums of money [...], artisanal weaponry, and administrative specialists were exchanged for clearly stipulated rights, freedoms, and immunities” (Downing 1989, p. 217; see also Rörig 1967, ch. 3). 9 Examples include Weber 1978 [1922]; Hintze 1975 [1931]; Baechler 1975; Berman 1983; Downing 1988, 1989, 1992; Anderson 1991; Raico 1994; Finer 1997; Stark 2011, chs. 14-16; Salter 2015a; Young 2015a; Salter and Young 2016. Weber (1978 [1922], p. 283) argues that: “Historically, the separation of powers in Europe developed out of the old system of estates.” Hintze (1975 [1931], p. 305) states likewise: “The representative system of government that today gives the political life of the whole civilized world its distinctive character traces its historical origins to the system of Estates of the Middle Ages.” 10 These assemblies had antecedents in the tribal customs of Germanic barbarian groups that succeeded the Western Roman Empire (Downing 1989; Barnwell and Mostert 2003; van Zanden et al. 2012). See Young (2015a) for a discussion of these early Germanic institutions circa 50 BC-50 AD and how they were influenced by Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. 8 Alternatively, committing to lower burdens was not credible since, ex post, monarchs had incentives to renege. By providing the estates with representation in an assembly, monarchs established a forum that allowed them to credibly concede some authority in exchange for the desired obligations. These assemblies can be broadly divided into assemblies that were estate-based and those that were territorially based. The territorially versus estate-based typology was introduced by the German historian Otto Hintze (1970 [1930]).11 Generally, estate-based assemblies had three distinct chambers, each one of which drew its representation from one of the estates (clergy, nobility, or burghers). Alternatively, territorially based assemblies typically had two chambers where the representation of one or both of the chambers was drawn from multiple estates. The empirical examples of estate-based and territorially based assemblies include, respectively, the French Estates General and the English Parliament. The French Estates-General was composed of three chambers with representation drawn from the clergy, nobility, and burghers (commoners) respectively. Alternatively, the English Parliament was (and still is) composed of two chambers. The House of Lords drew its representatives from both the nobility and clergy. The House of Commons was a later development, beginning with invitations to the burghers of major town to attend Montfort’s Parliament of 1265; it met as a distinct chamber for the first time in 1341. However, by the end of the medieval period the members of the nobility factored prominently in its representation (Wasson 1998).12 While representatives from different estates intermingled in both the Lords and Commons, each member represented a particular To our knowledge an English translation of Hintze’s 1930 essay is not available. Our characterization of the Hintze typology is based on Ertman (1997). 12 “During the medieval period plebian butchers, bakers, and tallow chandlers were elected as representatives of the boroughs. [...] [But] roughly from the accession of Elizabeth I to the early years of Victoria’s reign, four out of five MPs and most peers were patricians or the founders of landed families, and Parliament was the framework on which the national elite was structured” (Wasson 1998, p. 27). 11 9 county or borough. Unlike the French Estates-General, then, representation in the English Parliament ran first and foremost along territorial lines. The French Estates General and the English Parliament will motivate our historical backgrounds and explanations in sections 5 and 6 below. Also, the basic structural details provided above will serve to anchor our theoretical arguments in section 4 below. However, those arguments generally apply to other territorially based (e.g., the Dutch Republic and Sweden) and estate-based (e.g., the German principalities and Spanish kingdoms) medieval representative assemblies. 4. The Hintze Conjecture Otto Hintze conjectured that estate-based assemblies, relative to their territorially based counterparts, were more likely to concede powers to a monarch and promote ‘constitutional drift’ towards absolutism. For example, in his view the two-chamber English Parliament was “structurally stronger, and hence better able to resist the blandishments of ambitious rulers” than the three-chamber structure of the French Estates-General.13 This is not a conjecture for which Hintze himself provided a defense. In this section we provide a comparative analysis of estate-based versus territorially based assemblies. In doing so, we emphasize, first, the common interests that existed amongst representatives of those assemblies based on the political property rights that they each held in relation to one another. Second, we emphasize how the structure of an assembly (estate- or territorially based) helped to determine the extent to which those common interests would find corporate expression vis-à-vis estate-specific (special) interests. In particular, members of different estates were “intermingled” in a territorially based assembly. This intermingling made 13 Quoted and translated by Ertman (1997, p. 21). 10 it relatively costly for a monarch to strike bargains with one estate as the expense of the others; it also meant that corporate expression of inter-estate (common) interests was more likely than that of estate-specific (special) interests. Alternatively, in estate-based assemblies special interests were more likely to be expressed; bilateral deals between a monarch and a particular estate were more likely to be struck. In relating the expression of estate-based interests versus common interests to tendencies towards absolutism, the expression of the latter tended to check such tendencies. Representatives in medieval assemblies were important governance providers of the realm: high ranking nobles and clergy (and, later on, the leading burghers of towns). These governance providers had political property rights that were bundled with economic property rights; they were shareholders in the realms for which they provided governance and, therefore, residual claimants to returns associated with that governance (Salter 2015a; Salter and Young 2016). They benefited when their governance benefited the governed. When the jurisdictions of governance providers from different estates overlapped, their common interests would be defined by their being shareholders in the same assets. Furthermore, in relation to a monarch providing overarching governance, the common interests of lower-level governance providers would be in the monarch providing common-interest public goods to the broader realm. In medieval Western Europe, that essentially amounted to the provision of security and justice (Southern 1992 [1953], pp. 145146). The corporate expression of common interests in a representative assembly would tend to check expansion of a monarch’s powers and limit his activities to governance provision consistent with a generality norm (Buchanan and Congleton 2003 [1998]). In this context, a generality norm refers to a representative assembly’s likelihood of promoting collective action 11 that is welfare-enhancing. Collective action can be aimed towards the provision of public goods or the protection of property rights: what Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998]) refer to as ‘non-discriminatory’ collective action. But collective action can also be predatory; aimed towards special rather than common interests (Buchanan 1975). Whether or not a representative assembly tends to promote common interests and welfare-enhancing collective action – as opposed to special interests and predation – will depend on its institutional structure. An assembly that promotes non-discriminatory collective action would advise a monarch to limit his internal activities to the provision of justice and security in a way that generated broadly shared benefits without imposing undue costs in terms of encroachments on lower-level governance. (Providers of the latter, all else equal, would have better access to and ability to utilize local-level knowledge.) The assembly would also advise a monarch to pursue military campaigns only when there was a credible external threat to the realm.14 And, of course, the assembly would not grant its consent to a monarch proposing to act against this advice. But assemblies were not automatically non-predatory. In addition to common interests were also well-defined estate-specific special interests in medieval Western Europe. Feudal bonds were based on the principle of voluntary contract (Bloch 1968a [1939], pp. 145-162; Vinogradoff 1968 [1922]). Vassals and lords agreed to arrangements of reciprocal obligations, typically involving the former promising military support in exchange for a grant of land (a fief or benefice) from the latter. The military support consisted primarily of the vassal’s own service, a levy of their vassals, or scutage (i.e., a tax that served as a buyout of the feudal obligations). 14 While aggressive military campaigning could generate benefits in the form of plunder and new lands it is unlikely that those benefits would be enjoyed broadly. Members of the second estate, as the military elite of any medieval monarch’s campaign, would have captured most of the benefits. They expected to be able to keep what they plundered as compensation for their military services; they also expected to have newly conquered lands allocated to them as benefices after the fact. 12 Given the standard form of these arrangements and the obligations that they entailed, members of the second estate had special interests in relation to their monarchs. Members of the first estate also had special interests. These were, of course, bound up in the overarching institution of the Church. A well-known example of the first estate’s interests coming into conflict with those of both the second estate and monarchs is the Gregorian reform and investiture controversy episodes of the late eleventh century. The Gregorian reform called for a clear distinction between ecclesiastical and worldly matters, including forbidding clergy to do homage to laymen and provide military services.15 This further distinguished first estate special interests from those of the noble warrior class. Furthermore, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries prosperous cities were able to leverage their wealth to bargain with monarchs, nobility, and Church for rights of selfgovernance (Young 2017). The third estate’s special interests were decidedly different from those of the first and second since burghers’ livelihood was commerce.16 Nobles and clergy tended to look upon commerce with disdain. Also, commerce raised legal problems that neither lay nor ecclesiastical judicial procedures could deal with efficaciously and expeditiously: the “multiplicity of authorities governing the town itself offended [the burgher] as obstacles to the proper control of business transactions [...]” (Bloch 1968b [1940], p. 354). Each estate’s special interests were also linked to the governance of the other estates’ resources. This created opportunities for inter-estate rent-seeking. For example, in the eighth century Frankish nobility were able to increase their land holdings through Charles Martel’s 15 See Fukuyama (2011, ch. 13) for an overview; also Bisson (2009, pp. 197-212), Southern (1992 [1953], ch. 3), and Wickham (2016, pp. 113-117). Whereas members of the nobility would prefer that their lord monarchs be able to appoint bishops for their territories, the first estate stood to benefit from that power being wielded exclusively by the papacy. 16 Bloch (1968b [1940], p. 353) notes that feudal-era European languages did not even have words to clearly distinguish between towns and rural villages. However, as early as the eleventh century the French word bourgeois was being adopted, in various forms, across Europe to indicate individuals living by commerce. Towns were essentially defined by the fact that burghers inhabited them. 13 expropriation of Church properties. Alternatively, under the rules of Charles’ son and grandson (Pippin III and Charlemagne) the Church was able to utilize the military services of nobility towards establishing the Papal States in northern Italy. In these cases, one estate gained at the expense of another and in exchange for granting greater powers to the monarch. Charles Martel, who effectively ruled for puppet monarchs, gained enough support from the second estate to continue ruling with an empty throne after the death of King Theuderic IV. Pippin III subsequently assumed the Frankish throne and had the move legitimized by Pope Zacharias. Charlemagne was then crowned “emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III. (See section 5 below.) Whether or not a representative assembly tended to check or promote the expansion of monarchical powers would seem to depend on whether common interests or estate-specific special interests were more likely to find corporate expression. We argue special interests were more likely to find corporate expression in estate-based assemblies. In discussing Hintze’s conjecture, Ertman (1997, p. 21) offers the following insight that is relevant to our argument: “the overriding concern of the individual chambers [in an estate-based assembly] was to protect and, if possible, extend group-specific [estate-specific] privileges” (p. 21). Of course, representatives of a particular estate had special interests regardless of whether they were all in one chamber or spread across chambers. However, having all representatives of a particular estate were in single chamber reduced the costs associated with achieving corporate expression of those special interests. Representatives of that estate met together in a single dedicated forum within which to formulate those interests and representatives from other estates were not present to provide contrary discussion and/or disruption. Since the costs of expressing those special 14 interests were reduced it also followed that collective bargaining over those special interests with a monarch was cheaper. Figure 1a illustrates the sort of inter-estate rent-seeking and political bargaining to which an estate-based assembly was conducive. The king, bishop, and rook chess pieces represent, respectively, a monarch and the first and second estates. (The third estate is omitted for simplicity.) Either estate could affect corporate expression of its special interests and bargain with the monarch over those special interests at (relative to a territorially based assembly) low costs. Affecting those special interests typically involved obtaining estate-based privileges (dashed lines) that allowed them to extract rents from the other estate (dotted lines). In exchange for these privileges/rents, an estate would be willing to concede additional powers to the monarch (solid lines). Note that a particular estate could, taking the collective strategy of the other estate as given, find exchanging privileges for additional monarchical powers to be desirable despite the fact that a tendency towards absolutism was ultimately bad for both estates. An estate-based assembly reduced the costs of corporate expression of estate-specific special interests. Conversely, placing each estate in a separate chamber raised the costs of inter-estate coordination; potentially leading to a classic prisoner dilemma type of problem. Despite the fact that coordination would make both estates better off by checking tendencies towards absolutism, high costs of coordination could imply that even rational collective action on the part of each estate promotes those tendencies. Alternatively, in a territorially based assembly the costs for a particular estate to affect corporate expression of its special interests were higher. Representatives of each estate were intermingled in one or more of the assembly chambers; formulation and discussion of special 15 interests could encounter disagreement and disruption from representatives of other estates. (In the absence of a dedicated forum for representatives of a particular estate, a monarch would find it costlier to engage that estate in collective bargaining.) Conversely, the intermingling of estates would have promoted inter-estate communication and coordination. As illustrated in figure 1b, in a territorially based assembly representatives from different estates were more likely to express common interests and insist on a monarch providing common interest public good (dashed lines). Insisting on common-interest public goods would have amounted to checking the expansion of monarchical powers (solid lines) to limit a monarch to providing desirable levels of security and justice internally and protecting the realm from credible threats from without. But given that territorially based assemblies were more likely to check the absolutist ambitions of monarchs than their estate-based counterparts, why in the first place did territorially based assemblies arise in some places (e.g., England) while estate-based assemblies were instituted in others (e.g., France)? The next two sections provide case historical case studies that lend some insights into this question. 5. The Carolingian Legacy of Estate-Based Assemblies In the vacuum created by the fifth century disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, a number of barbarian groups migrated and settled within the imperial frontiers. Roman governance institutions faded away while Roma elites faced a world where their status was no longer secure. Alternatively, barbarian elites found themselves in a position to govern while not necessarily having the experience and resources to do so effectively. As Romans and barbarians alike adapted to this brave new world they laid the foundations for the de facto politically powerful first and second estates of medieval Europe. 16 In response to barbarian migrations and settlements many Roman nobles sought offices in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (Mathisen 1993). As expressed by the fifth century senator and prolific letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris: “our nobility has decided [...] to give up either its homeland or its hair” (p. 89). Imperial office holding was characteristic of the senatorial class; something in terms of which the nobility defined itself. The Church offered senators the opportunity to hold the sort of offices that had the Empire could no longer offer (pp. 93-94).17 With the influx of senators came wealth and patronage networks; “the cathedral church by 500 was often the largest local landowner (and therefore patron), and, unlike in the case of private family wealth, its stability could be guaranteed – bishops were not allowed to alienate church property” (Wickham 2009, p. 59). 18 While Church offices offered an escape route to members of the Roman elite, most individuals were not so lucky. Violent force was no longer concentrated in a military that was, at least in principle, centrally controlled and directed. Individuals increasingly relied on reciprocal ties of protection and service to provide them with security: “the lone, unaided individual was virtually condemned. There was no choice but to enter the service of a magnate and thereby gain his protection” (Riché 1993 [1983], p. 37). Being on the protection-providing end of such relationships brought status and power. Nobility came to be defined, first and foremost, by one’s ability to offer security and justice to one’s vassals; and that ability was a function of one’s Since the conversion of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century, the Church had come “to mirror the Empire’s administrative and social structures. Episcopal dioceses reflected the boundaries of city territories [...]. Further up the scale, the bishops of provincial capitals were turned into metropolitan archbishops, enjoying powers of intervention in the new, subordinate sees. [...] From 370s onwards bishops were increasingly drawn from the landowning classes, and controlled episcopal successions by discussion amongst themselves” (Heather 2006, p. 126). 18 This stability was enhanced by the increasing de facto (though official impermissible) heritability of ecclesiastical offices. An episcopal dynasty could consolidate a substantial amount of patronage and power (Mathisen 1993, pp. 91-92). 17 17 wealth and prowess in violence. The medieval nobility was a landed warrior class (Bloch 1968a [1939], pp. 145-146); Bloch 1968b [1940], pp. 288-292; Southern 1992 [1953], pp. 110-117). During the seventh and eight centuries, an ambitious Frankish family rose to power in the region of modern France, Belgium, and western Germany; eventually supplanting the Merovingian dynasty that had dominated Frankish politics since the late fifth century.19 Beginning with Pippin I (of Landen; c. 580-640) a number of this family’s members served as Mayors of the Palace for Merovingian kings and, over time, increasingly gained political power.20 By around 731, Charles Martel (“The Hammer”; d. 741) had consolidated this political power and was in effect, though never in title, king of the entire Frankish realm.21 Today we refer to Charles and his descendants at the Carolingians. The Carolingians took impressive steps towards reuniting Western Europe as a single empire; most notably under Charlemagne, crowned “emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III on Christmas day 800.22 In pursuing their imperial aspirations the Carolingians attempted to leverage the first and second estates towards legitimizing their authority and building state capacity. Doing so involved striking bargains with each of the estates, both explicit and implicit; often placing them in opposition to one another. It is not surprising, then, that the Carolingian legacy fostered representative assemblies that were estate-based. 19 When not referenced otherwise specifically, many factual details regarding the Carolingians are drawn from Riché (1993 [1983]). Before Charles Martel it may be more accurate to speak of the rise to power to two allied families, the Pippinids and Arnulfings. 20 Mayor of the Palace was the most powerful, non-royal position in Frankish courts. In particular, Mayors wielded substantial political power when monarchs who were in their minority or otherwise weak sat on the throne. In many cases, Mayors were the effective rulers of their realms, as in the cases of both Charles Martel and his son Pippin III (until the latter officially assumed the throne). See Wickham (2009, pp. 116-119), Wickham (2016, pp. 36-38), and the discussion below. 21 Indeed, when the ineffectual Merovingian King Theuderic IV died in 737, no new king was elected during the last four years of Charles’ life. 22 He styled himself as “Augustus and emperor governing the Roman Empire”. The distinction between the title conferred by Leo III and that used by Charlemagne was not inconsequential. See Riché (1993 [1983], pp. 120-123): “[T]here remained two conceptions of the empire, and this variance foreordained the conflicts between popes and emperor that later marked the history of medieval Europe” (p. 123). 18 After consolidating his political power, Charles Martel set about investing in state capacity. To do so he leveraged the institution of vassalage, strategically granting benefices of land to nobles throughout Gaul and Germany in exchange for their faithful service as agents of local governance and revenue collection. To carry out this sort of endeavor without unacceptably depleting his and his family’s landholdings, Charles undertook extensive confiscations of Church properties, a practice that was continued by his sons Carloman and Pippin III (“The Short”; Mayor of the Palace 741-751; r. 751-768).23 The Carolingian project in building state capacity was foundational to medieval feudalism.24 It also represented a substantial transfer of wealth from the clergy to the nobility. Contemporaries would have perceived the Carolingian project in terms of a conflict between the collective interests of the nobility versus those of the clergy. But all else was not equal. First, one notes that Church authorities were not helpless in the face of such encroachments. Bishops and other high-ranking clergy were often also great lords with the ability to raise armies. Second, the Church in Rome was threatened by Lombard kings in northern Italy: first King Liutprand (r. 712-744) and then King Aistulf (r. 749-756).25 Thus the Church sought protection from the Carolingians. Third, the Carolingians wanted to both expand their realm and be accepted as legitimate within the realm they already controlled. (Recall that 23 The most solidly controlled realm of the Merovingians was divided into two primary territories: Neustria in the west and Austrasia in the east. When Charles Martel died Carloman became Mayor of the Palace in Neustria; Pippin III in Austrasia. In 747 Carloman decided (whether voluntarily or not we will never know) to withdraw from secular politics and join the clergy in Rome. 24 As Innes (2005, p. 74) notes: “[T]he rising dominance of the Carolingian family at the court […] fractured allegiances and broke the ties which normally bound court and localities together, particularly around the fringes of the Merovingian world.” The Carolingian project was therefore one of building “bonds of association and loyalty which entrenched their dominance of the political community” (p. 75). In regards to shaping medieval European feudalism, Innes discusses how Carolingian territorial expansions led to a vertical differentiation of the feudal hierarchy (pp. 75-76) and, under Charlemagne, the norms that, first, obligations of service at all levels of the feudal hierarchy were ultimately in reference to obligations to the king/emperor and, second, that horizontal bonds of fealty could not create obligations that superseded those between an individual and his king/emperor (pp. 80-82). 25 The Lombard threat receded temporarily upon the death of Liutprand who briefly shared the throne with and then was succeeded by his nephew Hildeprand “The Useless” who as a leader was considered, well, useless. 19 the Merovingian dynasty still held formal claim to the throne.) As the overarching spiritual authority of Latin Christendom, then, the Church had something to offer the Carolingians. These three factors came together in in political bargaining between Pippin III and Pope Zacharias (r. 741-752). Charles Martel had died in 741 and by 747 Pippin was by himself the effective ruler of Gaul and eastern Germany. (In 743 Pippin and his brother Carloman identified a young man believed to carry Merovingian blood in a St. Bertin monastery and installed him as a puppet on the throne as Childeric III.) Pippin sent envoys to Rome with instructions to question the pope “concerning the kings in Francia, whether it was good or not that they then had no royal power.” Zacharias was savvy enough to recognize a softball when it was lobbed his way: he replied: “it is better to call him a king who had royal power rather him who did not” (Riché 1993 [1983], p. 67). Upon the return of his envoys with Zacharias’ response, Pippin duly called the leading men of Francia to an assembly in November of 751 during which he was elected king.26 Pope Zacharius died within months of Pippin III’s election but his successor Stephen II (r. 752-757) had not forgotten the papal quid and was eager to cash in the Carolingian quo. He travelled to Paris to personally remind Pippin of his obligations and to plead for Frankish assistance in Italy. Pippin traveled to Rome in 754 where Stephen consecrated him as king. Over the next couple of years, Pippin attacked the Lombards and secured the territory between Rome and Ravenna for the papacy. The former capital of the Western Roman Empire and then the Ostrogothic Kingdom, Ravenna had been under Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) control since 540 until the Lombards had put the exarch of Ravenna to death in 751. Pippin not only secured a substantial buffer zone between Rome and the Lombard Kingdom; he also “donated” the Ravenna exarchate to papacy in 756. In doing so he not only strengthened the Catholic 26 Poor Childeric was tonsured and sent back to his monastery in St. Bertin; he died a few years later. At the time of Pippin III’s election, Childeric had already bore a son, Theuderic. He was sent of to a different monastery in Fontanelle. 20 Church’s position in Italy; he made the pope a secular ruler and also ensured that the Lombard displacement of the Eastern Church, a competing spiritual authority, was not undone. As Pirenne (2001 [1937], p. 227) notes: “[T]he Pope felt that he was protected from his enemies, and that the orthodox faith was safe, but also that he was obliged to rely absolutely on Pippin’s protection.”27 When Pippin III died in 768 the Frankish kingdom was left under the rule of his sons, Charles and his younger brother Carloman. The latter died in 771 leaving Charles (“The Great”; Charlemagne) as the sole king. Charlemagne expanded his kingdom substantially, including securing Aquitaine Gaul, expanding into Bavaria and Saxony, and conquering the Lombards in northern Italy. He visited Rome in 774 to celebrate Easter, insisting that he and Pope Hadrian I (r. 772-795) swear oaths of mutual fidelity and protection before he entered the city walls. Charlemagne then had his father’s “donation” read and affirmed; then Charlemagne additionally granted the papacy Corsica and the duchies of Benevento and Spoleto. On the part of Charlemagne this was more than a simple affirmation of his father’s donation. The papacy could not defend its frontiers as defined by Pippin III in 756. Furthermore, those frontiers were a source of tension with the Lombards, at that time ruled by the formidable King Desiderius (r. 756-774). Charlemagne had married the Lombard king’s daughter Desiderata in 768. Given the hostile intentions of Desiderius and other Lombard princes towards the fledgling Papal States, Charlemagne found himself in a difficult position. Ultimately, Charlemagne chose to send Desiderata back to her father, affirm himself as “patrician of the Romans and the guardian of the papacy (Riché 1993 [1983], p. 97), and march his army across the Alps in 773. His Easter visit to Rome coincided with the nineteen-month siege of the Pavia, 27 The Great Schism between the Western and Eastern Churches would not occur until 1054. However, even in the early medieval period the competition between the Roman papacy and patriarchy of Constantinople for spiritual authority was an important one. On the relationships between early Carolingians and the Church see Riché (1993 [1983], pp. 293-295), Pirenne (2001 [1937], pp. 221-224), and Wickham (2009, pp. 376-377). 21 the Lombard capital. When the siege ended Charlemagne had himself crowned King of the Lombards, insisting on all princes and magnates doing him homage. Six years later, the Church would again, as in the case of his father, legitimize Charlemagne’s (now much broader) authority in Europe. On Christmas day 800, Pope Leo III (r. 795-816) crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans. The legacy of Carolingian rule in modern France and other areas on the continent, then, was one of state capacity built upon bonds of homage and fidelity. These bonds came in exchange for benefices granted to nobles, and those benefices came in part from Carolingian secularization (expropriation) of Church properties. However, the Carolingians employed their new vassals and state capacity towards securing the Church’s authority, in part through the establishment of Papal States in northern Italy. This created complex relationships between the interests of the Church (first estate), the nobility (second estate), and the Carolingian monarchs. Given this backdrop it is unsurprising that when monarchs called representative assemblies to seek advice and consent that those assemblies were organized to facilitate each estate’s corporate expression of interests. Indeed this was the case at least as far back as Charlemagne: Each year before the summer campaigns, he convened the conventus generalis, or “general assembly,” where great matters of state were discussed in common. […] A prearranged agenda was proposed for debate and approval by separate lay and cleric blocs that made up the assembly (Riché 1993 [1983], p. 125). As a specific example from an 811 capitulary, Charlemagne specifically implored members of the nobility and clergy to “meet at the palace in separate groups, to discuss complaints about counts having trespassed on episcopal territory and vice versa (de Jong 2005, p. 110; Riché 1993 [1983], pp. 125-126). (These complaints were proving disruptive to Charlemagne’s campaigns.) 22 6. England: The Local Governance Legacy of the Norman Invasions While Carolingian governance institutions eventually made a mark on England, they did not do so until the eleventh century when the Normans attempted to superimpose them on already welldeveloped Anglo Saxon institutions of local governance. These institutions of local governance became fundamental to the rule of English monarchs. Given these institutions and the prominence of local (non-noble; non-ecclesiastic) personages in the administration and judicial system, residents of English counties were less likely to perceive their collective interests along the lines of particular estates. Furthermore, since they needed these local personages to effectively govern it behooved monarchs to grant them representation in the assembly. England’s institutions of local governance can be traced back to the unique circumstances of its barbarian settlements during the decline of the Western Roman Empire. In Roman Britain, the imperial military presence had effectively disappeared by the beginning of the fifth century (Heather 2009, p. 278). Unlike on the continent where large barbarian confederacies such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and combined Vandals-Alans formed to face imperial armies, relatively small barbarian retinues could effectively plunder the island (Young 2016). Abandoned by the imperial military and threatened by raids by Picts (from modern Scottland) and Scotti (from modern England) Roman elites sought to bargain for protection with the Anglo-Saxons in exchange for land and food subsidies (Heather 2009, pp. 277-278). But the Anglo-Saxons were not a cohesive group with which meaningful bargains could be struck. As the Anglo-Saxons migrated across the North Sea, Romans soon found themselves overrun by numerous armed retinues, the result being the establishment of a number of small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. 23 Some scholars characterize the Anglo-Saxon migration in terms of “elite transfer”: the Anglo-Saxon elites co-opted existing local institutions and governed with the aid of local leaders (Heather 2009, ch.6 and the works cited therein). Other scholars argue that the Anglo-Saxons decimated the Romano-British sociopolitical infrastructure to the extent that the emergence of a large-scale successor state was impossible (Ertman 1997, p. 159 and the works cited therein). Either way, the result was a predominance of local-level governance institutions that would survive into the thirteenth century and fundamentally affect the structure of English Parliament. Given the backdrop of numerous Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, England would experience centuries without a dominant polity. Such a dominant polity finally arose with King Egbert’s Wessex in the early ninth century. Over the next century England suffered Viking invasions, but the Wessex kings halted and then reversed the Vikings’ progress; in doing so they established a single overarching English polity in the mid-tenth century. In doing so, the Wessex kings superimposed Carolingian models of royal county-level administration upon existing shire-level local governance structures (Campbell 1986a, 1986b; Ertman 1997, p. 162). Following William the Conqueror’s invasion (1066) the Normans moved to install members of their own elite into governance positions, such as those of county sheriffs. Being familiar with the Carolingian–type royal governance, however, the Normans preserved the local governance structures upon which it had been superimposed (Ertman 1997 pp. 163-164 and the references cited therein). The Normans and Plantagenet kings that followed made important innovations to central governance (most notably the chancery, the Exchequer, and royal circuit justices) (Hollister and Baldwin 1978). However, in doing so they always maintained the cooperative relationship between central and local governance: “Whatever improvements were 24 made at the center, the key to the effective operation of English government lay in the shires, or counties [...]” (Ertman 1997, p. 165). The Wessex kings formulated their policies in the forum of a royal council (witan). Important matters such as legislation were vetted in a larger version of this council (witangemot) that included high-ranking nobility and clergy (Loyn 1984, pp. 140-154). Following the unpopular taxes of the Plantagenet kings Richard and John, Magna Carta (1215) built upon the tradition of the witangemot and stipulated that the king would levy extraordinary taxes only with the consent of a Magnum Concilium that included the ecclesiastical and lay magnates. However, local governance structures remained fundamental to the administration and adjudication of the realm. Relative to on the continent, then, the claim that an assembly of the first and second estates spoke for the general community seemed tenuous (Cam 1953). As early as 1254, King Henry III had set a precedent by inviting each shire to send two knights as additional representatives. His successor King Edmund I (1272-1307) additionally invited two representatives from each borough (Brown 1989, pp. 156-157, 161-169). These Great Councils – referred to as Parliaments by the end of the thirteenth century century – had, by the 1330s, settled upon a structure consisting of a House of Lords containing between 40 and 100 lay magnates and about 50 ecclesiastical magnets; a House of Commons containing 74 shire representatives and about 150 representatives from the boroughs (Brown 1989, pp. 169, 173-174, 178-179, 182-183, 188, 202).28 The territorially based English Parliament provided, relative to its estate-based continental counterparts, a strong check on monarchical encroachments. By no means was the check always effective; in particular, the early Stuarts (James I and Charles I; ruled 1603-1649) moved towards absolutism. However, that 28 See Richardson and Sayles (1961) for the argument that the overall structure of Parliament was set by the end of the thirteenth century. 25 absolutism proved transient, halted by the English Civil War. Following the Restoration, a reinvigorated and Whig-led Parliament pressed its constitutional claims, resulting in the Glorious Revolution and the permanent establishment of a constitutional monarchy. 7. Concluding Thoughts We began this paper by briefly surveying how scholars shifted their attention from protoliberalism (divided government, checks and balances, etc.) to state capacity as an explanation for the West’s material prosperity. The mechanisms highlighted by scholars of state capacity, such as fiscal and legal capacity, are important, and deserve serious attention both in terms of how they arose and how they function. Because any acceptable social scientific explanation must specify the incentives agents face and the information agents possess as they contribute to the development of, or act within already established, institutions, economic analyses of the constitutional bargaining processes that resulted in modern states will be crucial to a persuasive story. It is in this sense that we claimed our analysis was complementary to the existing literature on state capacity. But in a broader sense, there are also significant tensions between our project and the state capacity project. The state capacity literature implicitly treats the rise of Western liberalism and Western economic enrichment as separate problems. If modern growth and development is due to state building and its associated rise of merit-based bureaucracies, then the mystery of what McCloskey (2007, 2011, 2016) calls the ‘Great Enrichment’ can be answered separately from the question of why political liberalism rose in the West. The latter may still be an interesting question for scholarly research, but it is not intrinsically related to the former. This is our point of departure. Without disputing the empirical claims of the state capacity literature, we 26 interpret these findings as a consequence of features of governance institutions that resulted in the antecedents of political liberalism. In fact, we contend our perspective is necessary for state capacity to make any sense as an explanation for the wealth and poverty of nations that is acceptable to social scientists. Comparative institutional analysis gives us powerful explanations for what institutional features take self-interested and bounded rational agents and channel their behavior into beneficial social outcomes. Constitutional political economy adds insight into the consequences of constitutional exchange for the makeup of institutions. Applied historically, these fields can point to specific incentive- and information-aligning features of institutions that resulted in Western prosperity. Without specifying these, theories of development that single out state capacity are limiting themselves to mere institutional morphology, rather than economics or political economy. We answered the questions of general Western prosperity, and variation in prosperity across particular Western polities, by pointing to specific features of medieval representative assemblies that were sufficiently ingrained as to persist into early modernity and the statebuilding era. Since the features of institutions that align incentives and generate information are conceptually separable from historical institutions that performed (or failed to perform) these functions, our analysis may suggest institutional mechanisms that can result in wealth-producing governance more generally. 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Poli cal Bargaining in the Context of an Estate-Based Assembly CONCESSION OF POWERS CONCESSION OF POWERS PRIVILEGES (SPECIAL INTERESTS) RENTS FIGURE 1b. Poli cal Bargaining in the Context of a Territorially Based Assembly CHECK ON POWERS CHECK ON POWERS COMMON INTEREST PUBLIC GOODS 36