73852 The nobility state relationship (7)

196 • Antoni Mączak

a professional one ar the Inns of Court. While it is an open ąuestion how much wisdom they were absorbing, they were undoubtedly meeting people and creat-ing a dose nation-wide ‘structure of politics'. Colleges and Inns of Court may be added to ‘the points of contact’ put forward by Sir Geoffrey Elton.²⁰ Easier access to education tended to shorten the distance to the top.

Systems of inheritance have be en broadly discussed by legał and economic his-torians but much remains to be discovered about their correlation with the politi-cal role of the nobilides. Primogeniture had two major conseąuences: it left the inheritance unimpaired by the fertility of the family, but increased the danger ofits eztinction. If noble parents were blessed with sons, there was the problem of find-mg appropriate positions for the younger ones. Countries with partible inheritance became known for the diminution oflanded property and the growth of the petty nobility.²¹ But this phenomenon was not restricted to them alone.

The petty nobility created sodal problems for the noble estate as a whole. Con-ventional wisdom locates them in Asturia, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya, as well as in Poland and Lithuania, but in fact they were broadly dispersed. Their existence depended on the morę or less liberał application of noble freedoms largely deter-mined in the Middle Ages: the Hermandad de Guipuzcoa in 1397, and Fuero Viejo de Wizcaya in 1452 secured fiscal and legał (criminal and civil) freedoms to ałl inhabi-tants of those proyinces.²² Hidalgos, perhaps symbolized by Don Quixote, lived in both towns and countryside. For Castile at that period they can be estimated at between 2 and 2.5 per cent of the population.²³ That group could hardły be dassi-fied as a single entity, but it strongły influenced Spains sodal mentality and her image abroad.

Far to the east, a numerous sodal group within the landed sodety, best defined as noblemen-freeholders, was constandy endangered sodally and economicalły by their richer neighbours. They also had little chance of their noble status being recognized by the bureaucracy of the centralizing State in Brandenburg-Prussia, while most of them retained it in Poland—Lithuania.

It may be seriously ąuestioned, whether these marginal groups within the nobility should be considered in relation to power. But in some cases they should Poor but free men readily volunteered for military service. In the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands they were used as a permanent defence force; Poland followed that example in Podolia. Also in Poland—Lithuania, hosts of petty nobles used to be summoned for support by the morę powerful nobles of the area as voters at Diets or as a potential rank-and-file force in feuds. But on the other

²⁰ Elton (1983).

Chapters by J. P. Cooper, E. Le Roy Ladurie, and J. Thirsk in Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson (1976).

Ibid. 168.

²² Vazquez de Prada (1978), 168,701.    ²³

hand, Polish petty nobles were sometimes becoming consdous of their strength as kin groups, and tried to blackmail their patrons. This created peculiar struć* tures in local politics and gave them a particular flavour.

In some countries and periods the lesser nobles seemed to become an independent political force. In a way that was in some respects anarchie, this manifested itself in the later Middle Ages as Raubrittertum (brigandage). In vańous parts of Germany the knights took achrantage of their princes’ weakness and formally declared a feud against towns and / or simpły robbed on the roads. Neumark, in north-eastem Germany, was proverbial in this respect. In Bohemia, many of the noble adherents of the Hussite movement were indicted for robbery in the crinń-nal courts. This potential for violence, a manifestation of a grave sodal crisis, was a conseąuence of the smali nobility’s economic weakness deepened as a resuk of the plummeting value of rents in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuńes.

Such conflicts were limited to particular localities (with the notable escepuon of the Knights’ War in Germany of 1522-3) but, being endemic, they created a generał problem which the emerging modem State would eventualiy have to śolve. It did so by adding muscle to law enforcement and judidal power in the localities, and by giving the lesser nobles civil or military employmenL

The petty nobles expected jobs, protection, and assistance from substanńal and wealthy landowners. In Denmark, for instance—but in other countries as wefl— sernnts and other followers of the substanńal nobles could be granted coats of arms which were a variant of the lord’s arms, but just after the Reformańon and secularizańon of Church property this sodal stratum yirtualły disappeared and only a few families managed to enter the noble estate.²⁴

Few generał observations can be madę on that group because relatwe poverty and formal membership of the noble estate was their only common denominator. Petty nobles and younger sons of morę substanńal families often vohmteered as soldiers (Doppelsóldner), or at least were espected and called on to do so. Some pracńsed law, often in dependent posińons. In Poland during the later sisteenth and the seyenteenth centuries, petty (but not the poorest) nobles filled the ranks ofthe lower Catholic dergy. Conversely, unquesrionable personal success created a noble. Whereyer possible, soldiers daimed noble status and servants dose to their masters used their authority for the same goal. The petty nobility hardły became an independent force of any importance but could be used in the seryice ofbrute force in feuds and facńonal conflict.

Needless to say, the aristocrades had different problems. In the domain State, Amtmann (German), lensman (Danish), starosta (Czech, Polish), or whatever he was called, had for all pracńcal purposes a *private’ share in the pubhc sector (even if these terms were not yet dearly disńnguishable). Leaseholding of public