Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050–1250, Volume II

Social Networks

Kim Esmark, Lars Hermanson, Hans Jacob Orning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000037340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050-1250, Volume II explores the structures and workings of social networks within the elites of medieval Scandinavia to reveal the intricate relationship between power and status.

Section one of this volume categorizes basic types of personal bonds, both vertical and horizontal, while section two charts patterns of local, regional and transnational elite networks from wide-scope, longitudinal perspectives. Finally, the third section turns to case-studies of networks in action, analyzing strategies and transactions implied by uses of social resources in specific micro-political settings. A concluding chapter discusses how social power in the North compared to wider European experiences. A wide range of sources and methodologies is applied to reveal how networks were established, maintained, and put to use – and how they transformed in processes of centralizing power and formalizing hierarchies.

The engagement with and analysis of intriguing primary source material has produced a key teaching tool for instructors and essential reading for students interested in the workings of medieval Scandinavia, elite class structures, and Social and Political History more generally.

1 Introduction

Kim Esmark, Lars Hermanson, and Hans Jacob Orning

Social Resources

This book is the second volume of the three-volume book project Nordic Elites in Transformation, c. 1050–1250. The first volume, Material Resources, treats the Nordic elites’ economic sources of power (landed property, tribute, trade, taxation, etc.) and the third, Legitimacy and Glory, deals with cultural strategies used by the elites in order to justify their rank and rule. In the present volume, Social Networks, the aim is to analyze how the Nordic elites applied various forms of social resources in the creation of and competition for dominant positions in society. During the era under scrutiny, lordship, status, and hierarchy were to a large extent based on direct personal relations. Delegated authority through the holding of titles and offices certainly existed, but in an only vaguely institutionalized “face-to-face-society” even such authority tended to be based on and indeed merge with personal and social power. Thus, what we wish to highlight in this volume is the variety and interplay of social bonds connecting and empowering members of society’s elites, including relations of both horizontal and vertical nature: family and kin, friends and followers, neighbors, patrons and clients, religious communities, intellectual networks, and so forth. Also closely connected to these relationships were various forms of delegated authority manifested by prominent titles and offices associated with political and religious institutions, such as church and monastic organization and kingship. How were these many different kinds of social bonds established, maintained, perceived, represented, challenged, or transformed, and first of all: How did people from the Nordic elites make use of such bonds in actual practice?

Elites

The choice of elite (from French élite, lit. “chosen person”) as key analytical term throughout this book series is a conscious one. Elite is a modern sociological concept, flexible and open to neutral analysis of social power in a way that “native” categories such as nobility, aristocracy, and landed men are not. These and similar categories found in the medieval sources were themselves both products of and stakes in the social struggles that defined medieval society’s hierarchies, and thus cannot be taken as analytical starting points. To get beyond the purely descriptive approaches of past discourses and stimulate sociological reflection one needs an exogenous concept – like “elite.” That obviously doesn’t mean we avoid speaking of principes, magnates, milites, clerici, høvdinge, and so forth. These were the terms by which medieval people described, distinguished, and indeed constructed the social divisions and leading groups within their own world. They are therefore all-important objects of study, but they are not analytical, scientific terms.

One important point of inspiration for this line of thought is the international collaborative project Les élites dans le haut Moyen Âge occidental (2002 to 2009).¹ Following some of the basic theoretical considerations underlying the research of this project, we define “elite” as those members of a society who hold a socially elevated position, whether in terms of wealth, political power, cultural prestige, social networks, knowledge, or some other relevant asset, and who are recognized by others as legitimately possessing such a position in a certain context.² Evidently, then, the elites included kings, queens, and members of the royal kin, but also men and women of the lay aristocracy; landowning magnates; castleholders and their knights; bishops, abbots, and other prominent ecclesiastics; learned clerics at royal, episcopal, and noble courts; leading townspeople and masters of guilds or other associations; influential elders at local thing assemblies; stewards and bailiffs; wealthy merchants; and well-to-do bønder. In other words, the elites included more than just those in control of political power in the narrow sense and should not be conceived of as a coherent or homogeneous class. Just like today, the elites in medieval Nordic society encompassed powerful people of many different sorts, who occupied a variety of positions and roles in social space, and who could often be at odds with one another. The analytical term elite is thus a relational one and may reach from the top echelons deep into local communities: It is really the specific context that determines whether a person or a group of persons can be considered “elite.” Again, the inclusiveness – or vagueness – of such a definition is deliberate. As pointed out by Chris Wickham, the analytical utility of the concept of elite (as opposed to, e.g., aristocracy) “is precisely that it resists definition: it directs our attention to the ‘minorité qui dirige’, and asks us simply how that process of direction or domination worked – and how it changed.”³

Networks: Practice and Strategy

In an attempt, nevertheless, to concretize what marked out medieval elites, Wickham suggests an ideal type (in the Weberian sense of Idealtypus) of nine elements: wealth, ancestry, public office or title, Königsnähe (nearness to the king), legal definition of elite status, peer recognition, wider societal prestige, display, and expertise/training.⁴ What basically bound all these elements together, however, and made them operational, was social networks. This is forcefully underlined in a concluding remark of the Élites dans le haut Moyen Âge occidental project, according to which

the history of the elites of the high Middle Ages, as we have tried to retrace it, is perhaps more than anything a history of connections and of networks… . It is certainly the possibility to belong to one of those networks, to be integrated in the more or less complex web that serves to support domination, which makes you a member – or not – of a certain elite.⁵

It is a central effort of our book to describe the history, structural composition, and geographical scope of Nordic elite networks, be they on a local, regional, or “transnational” scale. But more importantly than just mapping structures, we aim to analyze how social resources were used. To borrow a phrase of Stephen D. White’s, bonds of kinship, like bonds of patronage, vassalage, and others, were “things that medieval nobles made (though not exactly as they pleased) and with which they did things – or tried to do things.”⁶ Such bonds functioned as capital in the sociological sense, assets that provided the necessary framework for almost any effective socio-political action, whether aiming at cooperation or at competition.⁷ Great emphasis is therefore put on practice and agency: What did men and women of the elites actually do to shape and modify local hierarchies and power relations? How did individuals and groups make use of family, marriage, and/or friendship to enhance or defend their elevated status in society? How were personal ties and networks mobilized and adapted to changing contexts? How did “new” kinds of social capital (e.g., royal and clerical offices) interfere and interplay with “traditional” social resources (kinship, friendship) in particular micro-political constellations? Norms associated with various social bonds (loyalty, reciprocity, service, etc.) provided both a limiting framework for action and the necessary flexible tools to bend and negotiate this framework in actual practice. Analyzing the social resources of the elites therefore implies an appreciation of the strategic, creative element of socio-political action; of the ways people constructed and negotiated social bonds in a dialectic of action and discourse; of self-interested practical considerations and publicly avowable customs and norms.

A Nordic Perspective

The geographical scope of the book encompasses the Scandinavian kingdoms and Free State Iceland. Thus, the focus is on the Nordic world, but the socio-political perspective leads us to view this world in a wider cross-national context. Medieval elite networks often extended beyond the boundaries of individual realms, connecting royal and noble families, lords, friends, and members of ecclesiastical organizations and communities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland to social peers from neighboring regions and even beyond the Nordic world. In practice, power brokers of the upper layers of society operated in a vast political arena and rarely saw themselves restricted by conceptions of national or ethnic borders when looking for marriage partners, useful friends, or allies. Their scope for maneuvering was wide, and in communicating with one another, members of the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish royal houses seldom addressed each other in their capacity as representatives of realms or dynasties. Instead they emphasized vocative forms linked to the social and emotional sphere such as “beloved brother” (delectus frater), “close relative” (cognatus), and “friend” (amicus). It was these kinds of obligatory relationships that influenced how power holders acted, or were supposed to act, in political matters. Local elites of lesser stature evidently did not connect across regions to the same extent, but bonds of patronage and practices of intercession “upwards” meant they were often linked up with larger cross-national networks nevertheless. All this hardly differed from conditions on the wider European continent. In trying to take systematic methodological account of this, the present book deviates from much previous Nordic research, which more or less unconsciously has taken national borders as a natural background for analyses of power and politics. In this book such borders are of minor importance – as they were back then.

Change and/or Continuity?

Another purpose of the book is to re-evaluate established interpretations regarding change and continuity. In most previous Nordic historiography the grand narratives of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries have been dominated by the themes of state building, christianization, and the diffusion of writing, and they have often tended towards a rather linear, progressive-evolutionary, almost “whiggish” transitional scheme. In focusing on interrelations and strategies of living actors rather than legal and institutional developments, the present book aims to arrive at a more nuanced view. To borrow a phrase of Fredric Cheyette’s, our ambition is to study “first, the individuals in their particular, complex networks of relationships and, second, the systematic practices and transactions in which they engaged.”⁸ By approaching the transformations of elite social power in the period from this perspective, we hope to bring out more of the friction, conflict, ambiguity, dis-continuity and dis-connectedness that (also) formed part of the historical processes.

These processes were not utterly directionless, of course. Thus, an overarching structural context for the book’s studies of particular actors and networks may be construed as processes of [1] transition from loosely unified kingdoms coexisting with local power bases to more organized polities wherein local power holders were gradually subordinated; [2] friction between loyalty based on reciprocity and consensus and loyalty founded upon a formalized hierarchy; [3] gradual formalization of socio-political relationships, promoted primarily by church and royalty; [4] centralization of power and concentration of social resources, implying reduction of the multiplicity of power bases and strengthening of royal and ecclesiastical authority.

With reference to these general trends and tendencies we specifically hope to explore the extent to which in practice traditional social resources were abandoned in favor of new ones during our period: Did the strengthening of royal and ecclesiastical power imply that traditional face-to-face ties of family, local patronage, and horizontal friendship lost their importance, or did inherited social structures continue to exist alongside new kinds of paid service and delegated office? Did gradual centralization and institutionalization alter hierarchies and privilege new groups, or did established elites continue to dominate by adapting to transformed conditions? How did new ways of reasoning about authority, service, and order influence established norms of honor and reciprocity and conventionalized practices of political communication and competition?

The Structure of the Book

The chapters of the book are organized in three sections. The first section, entitled “Social Bonds, Social Resources,” aims to outline some basic features of kinship, patron-client relationships, and horizontal bonds – three main types of social ties that united and divided members of the medieval Nordic elites and constituted their sources of social power. The three chapters of section one will serve as framework and conceptual reference point for the studies presented in the following sections.

In section two, “Patterns of Networks,” the structures of various elite networks are traced and mapped in six chapters. Applying a wide range of sources and methodologies, these chapters focus on runic evidence for aristocratic networks in late Viking Age Sweden; kinship webs between magnates in Scandinavia and Rus’; Anglo-Scandinavian connections and their transformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; local complex networks underlying the Sagas of Icelanders; the implications for elite networks of clerical education and papal legatine activities in the North; and bonds of friendship and patronage uniting Friars Preachers with religious communities and lay nobles in the thirteenth century.

Section three then turns from wide-scope, longitudinal mappings of network patterns to “networks in action”; that is, case-studies of the ways social resources came into play in situated practice. How did particular groups and individuals within the lay and ecclesiastical elite apply social resources – “family, friends, and followers” – in competition for power and prominence in specific (micro-) historical settings? Six chapters explore the marriage strategies of a prominent Icelandic chieftain; the role of feasts and gifts in local patron–client relationships in late Free State Icelan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Section I Social Bonds, Social Resources
• Section II Patterns of Networks
• Section III Networks in Action
• List of Contributors
• Index