
Power is Lazy: Political Lessons from the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is fascinating because it is a huge period, and encompasses enormous social change, which led to western society today — and yet in many ways its people are very recognizable, despite very different social structures.
The ways people lived, and the rules governing their lives, were highly varied, in complex ways. But as time went on, some things tended to lead to others across Western Europe. That is, some “rules” of societal evolution seem to emerge — they hold a little more often than they do not — and give a sense of the dynamics of what was in fact changing imperceptibly to those who lived through them.
Fines Become Fees
Lords levy fines to discourage activities they don’t like, such as beer brewing out of peasants’ homes. But the peasants keep doing it anyway, because it’s too important, and feels like their right. In time, the fines just become a cost of doing business that everyone gets used to, including the lord. Even he stops calling it a fine, and it’s just a fee for brewing. It works out for him, because he never really wanted to waste time policing these things in a more serious way, and makes money for doing basically nothing.
Gifts Become Obligations
In the middle ages, custom often took the place of formal rules and contracts: legal appeals to custom carried immense weight. So any action that happened regularly and for a long enough time became enshrined as ‘customary’ — and therefore necessary. Especially at the tumultuous beginning of the period, small gifts might secure a friendly relationships with a local strongman. But after a few years, he expects it, and will come looking if you don’t deliver. Later on, peasants who gave their lord anything extra soon regretted it, because it became a normal tax in kind.
Gifts are therefore very dangerous, because they reinforce and expand a servile relationship. And it’s very hard to reverse that.
Payments Replace Labor and In-Kind Taxes
The backbone of the medieval agricultural system was dependent villages who owed taxes to their local lord. These taxes took the form of in-kind food payments and also labor, with peasants working on the lord’s land a few days a week. If peasants didn’t show up, they were fined. Eventually, these become fees, like we’ve already discussed, for not working (or wealthier peasants would pay someone else to work in their place). Over time, this became more common, because with access to better markets, peasants had more physical money (specie) to pay with; and lords liked money because it proved useful for hiring mercenary armies. Labor and in-kind payments faded away, in favor of a more market-centric society.
Slaves Become Serfs
Although slaves were an immensely important economic force in the Roman Empire, they almost disappeared by the height of the middle ages. The Church argued against enslaving fellow Christians, but economic forces were probably a greater force for change.
On one hand, it was just much harder to get slaves in the middle ages than it had been during Roman times: a powerful, expansive empire captured them in its conquests, but the comparatively weak, fractured kingdoms that followed couldn’t do this. On the other hand, slaves actually took a lot of administrative and legal apparatus to manage. With the loss of the centralized Roman state, it may have just been too hard to control slaves in a profitable way. It was much easier to settle them on the land and then demand some taxes. Then they take care of themselves, with less overhead.
Controlling people directly was harder, in other words, than becoming a rentier.
Free Men Become Dependent
At the same time that slaves were being settled as farmers, independent farmers were becoming more dependent: they were becoming serfs. Although serfs controlled their farm activities and land (communally with other peasants) they owed labor and taxes, and legally were tied to their land — they couldn’t stop farming. Free individuals became dependent by pledging themselves to a lord; and many people did so.
Why? Some pledges were certainly under duress. But peasants also gained something by pledging. Lords both physically protected their serfs and tried to keep small farms viable to protect the serfs’ livelihood — because it was in the lord’s interest for them to keep farming and paying taxes. Some peasants also pledged in exchange for acquiring land from the lord. (This was carved off his personal domain; again, because it may have been easier for him to collect taxes on a farmer than try and manage peasant labor directly.)
Lesson: Power is Lazy
It takes effort to monitor and control people; to enforce divisions; to police minor transgressions; to manage. It’s easier to allow people freedom, but profit from that freedom all the same. When someone new comes into power, they will start with direct, hands-on control. But over time, their laziness will prevail: they will delegate and retreat into their palaces. Often this has been good for the less powerful — and they can help the process out by offering to manage themselves. Pretty soon, more freedom follows.


