The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the ‘non-royal’ (or ‘private’) charter corpus – that is, documents that were issued by individuals other than kings – from Kent, Mercia and Wessex between the 830s and 880s. The chapter provides an overview of this material’s content and its production contexts and processes. Canterbury dominates, since this is where a large majority of the surviving documents comes from, though there are glimpses of other settings too. A significant portion of the material from Canterbury relates to two particular ealdormannic families, though other documents demonstrate that lay and ecclesiastic people of lesser social standing also participated in documentary activity. The picture that emerges is diverse; varying practices and contexts, and different motivations for codification, reflect the richness of contemporary documentary culture. The following important themes are considered too: female participation, the relationship between royal and non-royal documentation, and the varied uses of Latin and Old English.

This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Chapter 2 turns to the evidence of royal diplomas produced by the kings of Mercia and Wessex during the reigns of Æthelwulf, Berhtwulf and Burgred. With Æthelwulf’s diplomas, we find the earliest clear evidence for centralised production of diplomas for an Anglo-Saxon king. It is in this centralised West Saxon context, furthermore, that Old English boundary clauses are likely to have been established as a royal diplomatic feature. Contemporary Mercian diplomas lack evidence for comparable production processes. Novelty nevertheless is apparent: with a royal diploma in Old English, and in the literary flair of diplomas issued for the community at Breedon-on-the-Hill. Overall, the continued importance of the Latin charter tradition for both Mercian and West Saxon kings is clear, yet there was space for experimentation, innovation and reflection on the qualities and potencies that specific languages could carry. Moreover, people were increasingly interested in the performative potential of charter production, as an opportunity for ritual action that would generate and reaffirm authority for participants.

Between the 1570s and 1680s, England established more than two dozen overseas colonies and trading posts throughout the world. In mainland North America, the colonies included Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and several other New England colonies, North and South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, colonies were founded in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Barbados, among several others, to which Jamaica was added by conquest in 1655. Various trading posts, or factories, were established—usually with the permission of the local populations—in Hudson’s Bay, India, Africa, and the East Indies. As a result of these activities, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half a million English subjects, or about ten per cent of the nation’s population, lived across the seas.

This chapter looks at local priests and their kinship relations, as recorded chiefly in archives from what is today France. The historiographical focus in this area has been on priests and their wives, but this chapter instead begins with priests and their parents, with a special focus on their mothers. The chapter then turns to priests and their children and wives, and the evidence for how priests made arrangements for these relatives, before turning to their uncles and nephews. The chapter concludes with a study of priests’ families as church owners. Overall, it argues that priests’ kinship ties were not noticeably different from those of the laity, with the possible exception of relations with their mothers, and that change in how these priests feature in charters from the mid eleventh century could be due to shifts in documentary practice.

This chapter explores the creation of the 1776 state constitutions and the question of democracy. Although the new state constitutions democratized governance in important ways, on the whole, they closely resembled the colonial governments they replaced. In Pennsylvania, the new constitution was considerably more democratic than the government it replaced. Most of the other new constitutions made only small steps toward democratizing, narrowly expanding the electorate and giving ordinary citizens slightly more influence over politics. Two states, Rhode Island and Connecticut, kept their colonial charters, which dated back to the seventeenth century. The relatively undemocratic nature of new state constitutions raises questions about the traditional framing of the US Constitution as being necessary due to the “excess of democracy” in the states.

Although liberty has been valued in various ways in many times and places, only in Europe did it become a central preoccupation before the nineteenth century, and a subject of widespread public reflection. Appeals to liberty and concerns about it found expression in two idioms: a singular one that harked back to Rome and Greece, and regarded liberty as universal or innate; and a plural one associated with the overlapping jurisdictions of ‘feudal’ society that saw liberty as an assemblage of separate rights or privileges (often taken as synonyms), attributed sometimes to custom and sometimes to higher authorities that granted them. Although distinct, the two languages were seldom seen as in tension before the eighteenth century. The chapter examines their relations in different contexts and concludes by noting that the very pervasiveness of claims to enjoy, embody, or represent liberty led to a recognition of how easily invocations of it could become rhetorical tools to justify control over others, leading to Machiavelli’s incisive reflections on the dialectical relations between liberty and domination.

This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.

This chapter examines the period in which the Merovingian kings were allegedly ‘do-nothing kings’. On the whole there was less internecine fighting, but the relative stability was poorly appreciated due to a lack of ‘great’ kings, underwhelming chronicles, and (with hindsight) the rise of the family that would replace the Merovingians as kings in 751. More successful reigns such as those of Dagobert I, Theuderic III, and Childebert III do show attention to law, administration, and aristocratic interests. The fall of the Merovingians may not have seemed inevitable or even desirable until late in the wars of conquest by the Austrasian mayor Charles Martel in the 730s.

The second chapter continues the investigation of sacrum imperium, demonstrating that while the imperial chancery used the term more and more frequently, it was only the strong Italian presence at court that kept influencing the imperial notaries to use it and other correlated terms. It is also made clear that the converse was true: when there were no Italians at court, this kind of terminology was not used, even as late as the 1220s. The investigation shows, contrary to expectations, that cities where this terminology was used could be identified, and occasionally even individuals could be pinpointed. Moreover, the presence of courtiers or diplomats from the city of Rome is clearly correlated to the appearance of the tripartite title of the Empire (sacrum Romanum imperium and sacrum imperium Romanum). Thus, the most commonly used title of the Empire for most of its existence was not only invented by the Romans, as Jürgen Petersohn demonstrated, but it was also propagated by them to the rest of the Empire and the world.

The first chapter deals with the phrase sacrum imperium in the period 1125–1167. It starts out as a rare occurrence in imperial Italy when the locals sought German imperial assistance and, at the same time, a staple phrase used by Latin diplomats to address the Byzantine emperor. However, Sulovsky shows that after the Second Crusade (1147–1149), the German imperial court increasingly adopted elements of the sacral terminology of the state, as used in the Byzantine east, when dealing with Italian affairs. When Barbarossa’s second Italian campaign (1158–1162) was being planned in early 1157, the term sacrum imperium finally appeared in a document issued by the imperial chancery. However, whereas previous scholars could not tell who the author behind the text was, Sulovsky argues that it was the senior notary Albert of Sponheim, who had introduced other innovations as well, and who had taken part in both the aforementioned crusade and in Frederick’s first Italian expedition as a high-level diplomat. Moreover, Albert adopted sacrum imperium both from the Italian and Byzantine usages to the German one, so that he could convince the letter’s addressee, his fellow crusader Otto of Freising, to join the Italian war.

The law of the virtual Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, combined with customary law, like Salic law, or Saxon Law. Roman law was rediscovered and studied in the first universities in Western Europa. Legal scholars of the day made comments and thus developed so-called canon law: a mix of roman, medieval and religious law. At the same, as a result of feudal relations, quid pro quo documents, like the magna Charta and Joyous entries, emerged, granting different classes different privileges and rights in turn for assistance, tax and loyalty to a ruler. This marked the beginning of conditional power and the rule of law.

Chapter 5 turns to the economic sphere, with special attention to the emergence of the modern economic corporation, as a competitor par excellence. I examine its origins in medieval antecedents, how post-revolutionary US was the ideal environment for its initial cultivation and elaboration, and its subsequent development in Europe and beyond. The economic firm is in many ways the ‘ideal type’ of the modern corporate actor, but I am concerned to show in the next two chapters that new corporate actors in the political and ideological/cultural spheres are also crucial to the general domestication of competition in liberal societies.

The sixth chapter examines the relationship between coutumiers as texts that describe custom, and custom in practice. The difficulty with discussing this is that the coutumiers only begin to be cited in court records at the very end of the thirteenth century and very rarely even then. This was not unusual for the lay courts of northern France in this period, which cited ‘custom’ and not lawbooks or specific precedents. I discuss the relationship between the coutumiers and representations of practice – as filtered through its documentary record-keeping – in two ways. On one level, this chapter shows how at least some people were thinking about court cases that they presided over, took part in, witnessed or heard about. On another, this chapter demonstrates how the coutumier represents practice differently from other remaining records and how coutumier authors used what they saw in practice to extract principles and articulate general rules. Through the coutumiers, we can see how individual actors reshaped specific cases and transactions into general principles, and those general principles into a body of customary law.

This chapter considers the close relationship between child rulership and innovative political and administrative adaptation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Cases of child kingship prompted adaptations to some of the tools of governance, but the boy king’s presence and active contribution were often still crucial. The chapter turns first to the documentary evidence and the diversity of administrative experimentation before focusing on the enduring significance of children’s participation in rule. The third and final section examines practical adjustments to and contemporary representations of counsel, a fundamental instrument of royal rule which could be even more crucial when a boy was king. Overall, the chapter presents an alternative narrative of child rulership which stresses aspects of innovation, adaptation and co-operation. Considering shifts in documentary culture, royal government and consilium by the thirteenth century also reveals the extent to which many of the practical solutions adopted during a period of child kingship differed much more profoundly across time than they did geographically.

This chapter foregrounds children’s involvement in documentary culture as a crucial element of their early political, spiritual and social education within the royal family. The chapter first addresses the documentary celebrations of children’s lives and children’s incorporation within intercessory prayers. Children were not dynamic actors in such cases, but these examples provide valuable evidence for the web of interwoven obligations, influences and expectations around them. As boys advanced through childhood, their active participation, political assent and testimony became important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule. After considering how charters reveal children’s importance as political actors, the chapter finally turns to examine shifts in documentary culture between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries which altered children’s status in royal documents. Young boys still had important roles to play in spiritual intercessions, familial actions and dynastic celebrations but, by c. 1200, royal charters were no longer as prominent a forum for displaying their centrality to rulership, especially not on an individual testimonial basis.

Medieval societies did not exclusively and inflexibly conceive kingship as the remit of a mature man, even if adult male rulers were more typical. This introduction shows the urgency and timeliness of looking beyond the ‘unspoken hegemony’ of adulthood to understand the intersections between childhood and kingship. Focusing first on the interconnectedness of representation and reality, the chapter highlights the necessity of uniting an emphasis on children’s lived experiences as political actors with an examination of cultural representations of ideas about childhood and rulership. The introduction then turns to consider three essential components which shape this study’s methodology: a comparative approach, a diachronic analysis and a holistic approach to the sources. This section argues for the importance of contextualising child kingship within a wider comparative framework which accounts for political, social, cultural and legal change. It also sketches the benefits of adopting a broad approach to the source material which incorporates chronicle, documentary, didactic, epistolary, legal and literary sources.