Property and protest: Political theory and subjective rights in fourteenth-century England

Review of Politics

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 323-344

  Nederman, Cary J ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001663046     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500019409     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)
2. and C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
3. The classic contributions to this research are: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
4. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
5. Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
6. and Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
7. A recent study that recapitulates and develops the arguments for continuity between later medieval and early modern teachings is Arthur P. Monahan, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300-1600 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).
8. J. H. Burns, "Introduction" to J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 2.
9. The diffusion of rights language in seventeenth-century England has been explored by Thomas A. Home, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605 - 1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
10. For recent applications of Locke's rights theory, see A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
11. and Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
12. Quentin Skinner, "Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections," in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. J. Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 39.
13. The classic statement of this position is Michel Villey, "La genese du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d'Occam," Archives de philosophie du droit 9 (1964): 97-127.
14. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 20-31.
15. Janet Coleman, "Medieval Discussions of Property: Ratio and Dominium According to John of Paris and Marsilius of Padua," History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 209-228;
16. "Dominium in Thirteenth-and Fourteenth-Century Political Thought and Its Seventeenth-Century Heirs: John of Paris and John Locke," Political Studies 33 (1985): 73-100;
17. and "Property and Poverty," in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 607-648.
18. Brian Tierney, "Tuck on Rights: Some Medieval Problems," History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 429-41;
19. "Contiliarism, Corporatism, and Individualism: The Doctrine of Individual Rights in Gerson" Cristianesimo nella stork 9 (1988): 81-111;
20. and "Origins of Natural Rights Language: Texts and Contexts, 1150-1250," History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 615-46.
21. Support for Tierney comes, for instance, from Charles J. Reid, Jr., "The Canonistic Contribution to the Western Tradition: An Historical Inquiry," Boston College Law Review 33 (1991): 37-92
22. and Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200-1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 5,123-24.
23. For the salient issues, see Coleman, "Property and Poverty," p. 633.
24. As I have pointed out in "Conciliarism and Constitutionalism: Jean Gerson and Medieval Political Thought," History of European Ideas 12 (1990): 199-200.
25. A prime example of this is Pennington, The Prince and the Law, which cobbles together wholly disparate and fragmentary juristic sources into a supposedly coherent constitutional theory.
26. For a more extensive examination of the difficulties implicit in this project, see my review of his book in Parergon, N.S. 12 (1995): 223-225
27. Home, Property Rights and Poverty, pp. 22-24, 41-72;
28. David McNally, "Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First Whigs," History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 17-40.
29. For a brief summary, see David Wootton, "Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution," in Burns and Goldie, Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, pp. 412-413
30. The classic examination of the English radical thought of the period remains Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972).
31. Ashcraft argued for the need to place "Locke in much closer proximity to the Levellers and to the radical political theory they developed than has previously been supposed" (Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986], p. 165).
32. Elements of this reading have been challenged by, for example, David Wootton, "John Locke and Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics" Political Studies 40 (1992): 79-98
33. and Gordon Schochet, "Ashcraft on Locke," Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 491-510.
34. For a recent examination, see John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 205-291
35. Skinner, "Modernity and Disenchantment," p. 40.
36. In the volume edited by Joseph Moisant, De Speculo Regis Edwardi III (Paris: J. Picard, 1891).
37. Moisant, however, believed the tracts to be the work of Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, an attribution convincingly refuted by James Tait, "On the Date and Authorship of the Speculum Regis Edwardi," English Historical Review 16 (1901): 110-115. This misascription in no way detracts from Moisant's edition, which will be cited in the text (with translations by the present author) according to the recension (either "A" or "B") and section number.
38. For example, the treatise receives no mention whatsoever in either Burns, Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought or Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
39. The only recent remark on its ideas that I have encountered is in Jean-Philippe Genet's "General Introduction" to Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), pp. x-xi.
40. The dating was first established by Tait, "On the Date and Authorship."
41. It was confirmed, and the authorship of Pagula finally established, by Leonard Boyle, "William of Pagula and the Speculum Regis Edwardi III," Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 326-336
42. The circumstances of its composition have been analyzed in an unpublished paper by Cary J. Nederman and Cynthia J. Neville, "The Origins of the Speculum Regis Edwardi III of William of Pagula."
43. For the details of Pagula's life, see Leonard Boyle, "The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 5 (1955): 81-110.
44. George Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, trans. H. B. Clarke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 172.
45. On the context for purveyance in later medieval English life, see A. B. White, Self-Government at the King's Command (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), pp. 97-123
46. and J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-1341 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1975), pp. 15-16.
47. Cary J. Nederman, "Welfare or Warfare? Medieval Contributions," International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1 (1986): 219-234.
48. See Duby, Early Growth of the European Economy, pp. 174-77
49. and Coleman, "Property and Poverty," pp. 607-617.
50. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 15.
51. Tierney, "Tuck on Rights," p. 431.
52. Coleman, "Medieval Discussions of Property," p. 226.
53. Tierney, "Origins of Natural Rights Language," pp. 633-637
54. Maddicott, English Peasantry, pp. 15-23.
55. Although it must be pointed out that, here and there, jurists began to change their attitudes towards commercial wealth during the late Middle Ages. See Ugo Nicolini, La proprieta, il principe e iespropriazione per publica utilita (Milan: Giuffre, 1952), pp. 15-36
56. and John F. McGovern, "The Rise of New Economic Attitudes in Canon and Civil Law, A.D. 1200-1550," The Jurist 32 (1972), pp. 39-50.
57. For the use of "just price" arguments in medieval Europe, see John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1: 264-269
58. and Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 24-25 and passim.
59. On the foundations of Marsiglio's doctrine of consent, see Cary J. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor Pacis (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 75-79, 83-94.
60. See the texts edited by Genet, Four Englbh Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, for a comparison. Given the very concrete observations made by William, it is odd that Genet characterizes the Speculum Regis Edwardi III as "highly polished, theoretical and scholastic" (pp. x-xi).
61. On the background to modern resistance theory, see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: 302-348.
62. On awareness of this doctrine in the medieval ius commune, see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ibid., 2: 124-127
63. and McGovern, "The Rise of New Economic Attitudes in Canon and Civil Law," pp. 43-44.
64. There was considerable medieval precedent for the view that God might authorize violence against an evil ruler; for example, see Cary J. Nederman, "A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury's Theory of Tyrannicide," Review of Politics 50 (1988): 365-389
65. John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali, ed. F. Bleiestein (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1969), chap. 7.
66. John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali, (1969), Ibid.
67. Another rare case of a late medieval theorist firmly resisting this trend was Marsiglio of Padua, who insisted in his Defensor Paris that individuals must retain their power to consent to laws even if the ensuing legislation is "less useful." In sum, individual consent takes priority over objective definitions of common benefit. On this remarkable argument, see Nederman, Community and Consent, pp. 75-79.