It was a Christian society which accepted, in and over the animist world where magic held many in thrall, the sovereignty of God and his laws. A priest might use folklore to convey the Christian message and expect allegiance so long as he endorsed paramount loyalties to family and parish. He might lose them if he objected too strongly to vendetta, charivari, and other forms of collective violence or simply to his parishioners’ preference for tavern over church. Catholic or Protestant, he might preach against superstition, but he was as likely to denounce the witch as to curb her persecutors. He might see no end to his war against ignorance and sin; and he might falter in assurance of the love of God for suffering humanity. No more than any layperson was he immune to doubt and despair. But the evidence is unambiguous: the framework was hardly shaken. It was Christian doubt or Christian pessimism, all under the judgment of God. The priest in the confessional or the Protestant minister, Bible in hand, could look to that transcendent idea to support his vision of heaven’s joys or hell’s torments, of the infinite glory of God and the angels as portrayed by artists in the new Baroque style and of the machinations of the Devil and his minions.
The churches were the grandest expression of the corporate ideal, which shaped life at all levels and which can be seen in the Christian rites invariably used to enforce rules and cement fellowship. It also informed the guilds, corporations, and colleges that served the needs of craftsmen and tradesmen, inhabitants of cities, and scholars. The idea that society was composed of orders was given perhaps excessively precise form by the lawyer Charles Loyseau in his Traité des Ordres (1610), but it serves to stress the significance of precedence. It was assumed that society was hierarchical and that each order had divine sanction. Wherever man found himself, at prayer or study, under arms or at work, there were collective rights and duties that had evolved as a strategy for survival. With them went the sense of belonging to a family of mutual obligations that had been a civilizing aspect of feudal society.
Feudalism, as a set of political arrangements, was dead by 1600. But aspects of feudal society survived, notably in the countryside. Various forms of personal service were owed by peasants to landowners and, in armies and courts, assumption of office and terms of service reflected the dealings of earlier times when power lay in the ownership of land. At the highest, providing cohesion in the intermediate phase between feudal and bureaucratic regimes, the patron-client relationship contained an idea of service that was nearer to medieval allegiance than to modern contract. Liveries might be out of use, but loyalty was owed to “my lord and master”: a powerful man such as Richelieu could thus describe his service to a greater patron, Louis XIII, and would expect the same from his dependents. Envisaging such a society, the reader must dismiss the idea of natural rights, which was not current until the last decades of the 18th century. Rights accrued by virtue of belonging, in two ways: first, as the subject of a prince or equivalent authority—for example, magistrates of a free town or the bishop of an ecclesiastical principality; second, as the member of a community or corporation, in which one had rights depending on the rank into which one was born or on one’s craft or profession. Whatever the formula by which such rights were expressed, it would be defended with tenacity as the means of ensuring the best possible life.
Christian, corporate, feudaclass="underline" each label goes only some way to defining elusive mentalities in preindustrial society. The elements of organization that they represent look artificial unless the domestic basis is taken into account. The family was the lifeblood of all associations, giving purpose and identity to people who were rarely in crowds and knew nothing like the large, impersonal organization of modern times. To stress the family is not to sentimentalize it but to provide a key to understanding a near-vanished society. The intimacies of domestic life could not anesthetize against pain and hunger: life was not softened and death was a familiar visitor. Children were especially vulnerable but enjoyed no special status. Valued as an extra pair of hands or deplored as an extra mouth to feed, the child belonged to no privileged realm of play and protection from life’s responsibilities. The family might be extended by numerous relations living nearby; in Mediterranean lands it was common for grandparents or brothers and sisters, married or single, to share a house or farm. Especially in more isolated communities, inbreeding added genetic hazards to the struggle for life. Everywhere the hold of the family, and of the father over the family, strengthened by laws of property and inheritance, curtained life’s narrow windows from glimpses of a freer world. It affected marriage, since land, business, and dowry were customarily of more weight than the feelings of the bride and groom. But into dowries and ceremonies long saved for would go the display required to sustain the family name. Pride of family was one aspect of the craving for office. Providing status as well as security in a hierarchical society, it was significantly weaker in the countries, notably the United Provinces and England, where trading opportunities were greatest. Nobles and gentlemen
Between persistent poverty and the prevailing aristocratic spirit several connections can be made. The strong appeal of noble status and values was a force working generally against the pursuit of wealth and the investment that was to lead, precociously and exceptionally in Britain, to the Industrial Revolution. In France a nobleman could lose rank (dérogeance) by working, which inhibited him from engaging in any but a few specified enterprises. The typical relationship between landed gentleman and peasant producer was still feudal; whether represented by a range of rights and dues or by the more rigorous form of serfdom, it encouraged acceptance of the status quo in agriculture. Every state in Europe, except some Swiss cantons, recognized some form of nobility whose privileges were protected by law. Possession of land was a characteristic mark and aspiration of the elites.
The use of the two terms nobleman and gentleman indicates the difficulty of definition. The terms were loosely used to mark the essential distinction between members of an upper class and the rest. In France, above knights and esquires without distinctive title, ranged barons, viscounts, counts, and marquises, until the summit was reached with dukes and princes of the blood. In Britain, by contrast, only peers of the realm, whether entitled duke, marquess, earl, or baron, had corporate status: numbering under 200, they enjoyed few special privileges beyond membership of the House of Lords. The gentry, however, with assured social position, knighthoods, armorial bearings, and estates, were the equivalent of Continental nobles. With the nobility, they owned more than three-quarters of the land: in contrast, in France by 1789 the nobility owned barely a third. In northern and eastern Europe, where the social structure was generally simpler than in the west, nobles—dvoriane in Russia, szlachta in Poland and Hungary—were numerous. In these countries, many of those technically noble were in reality of little importance and might even, like the “barefoot szlachta,” have no land.