new privileged class. For a certain class of citizens to be condemned,
by virtue of their birth, to political disfranchisement
is as flatly against every principle of democracy as for a certain
class of citizens to enjoy exclusive rights by reason of birth.
The Florentine democracy was, in truth, rather to be called an
oligarchy, if we accept the best definition of democracy (see
Thucydides vi. 39), namely, that it is the rule of the whole,
while oligarchy is the rule of a part only.
It is in these aristocratic cities, of which Venice was the most fully developed model, that we can best see what nobility really is. It is in these only that we can see nobility in its purest form—nobility to which no man can rise and from which no man can come down except by the will of the noble class itself. In a monarchy, where the king can ennoble, this ideal cannot be kept. Nor could it be kept in the later nobility of Rome. The new man had much to strive against, but he could sometimes thrust himself through, and when he did his descendants had their jus imaginum. But at Venice neither prince nor people could open the door of the Great Council; only the Great Council itself could do that. That in the better times of the aristocracy nobility was not uncommonly granted to worthy persons, that in its worse times it was more commonly sold to unworthy persons, was the affair of the aristocratic body itself. That body, at all events, could not be degraded save by its own act. But these grants and sales led to distinctions within the ranks of the noble order, like those of which we get faint glimpses among the Roman patricians. The ducal dignity rarely passed out of a circle of specially old and distinguished families. But this has often been the case with the high magistracies of commonwealths whose constitutions were purely democratic.
From this purest type of nobility, as seen in the aristocratic commonwealths, we may pass to nobility as seen in states of greater extent—that is, for the most part in monarchies. There are two marked differences between the two. They are differences which seem to be inherent in the difference between a republic and a monarchy, but Rural nobility. which it would be truer to say are inherent in the difference between a body of men packed close together within the walls of a city and a body of men—if we can call them a body—scattered over a wide territory. The member of a civic nobility is more than a member of an order; he is a member of a corporation; he has no powers, he has hardly any being, apart from the body of which he is a member. He has a vote in making the laws or in choosing those who make them; but when they are made he is, if anything, more strictly bound by them than the citizen of the non-privileged order. To be a fraction of the corporate sovereign, if it had its gains, had also its disadvantages; the Venetian noble was fettered by burthens, restrictions and suspicions from which the Venetian citizen was free. The noble of the large country, on the other hand, the rural noble, as he commonly will be, is a member of an order, but he is hardly a member of a corporation; he is isolated; he acts apart from the rest of the body and wins powers for himself apart from the rest of the body. He shows a tendency—a tendency whose growth will be more or less checked according to the strength of the central power—to grow into something of a lord or even a prince on his own account, a growth which may advance to the scale of a German elector or stop at that of an English lord of a manor. Now many of these tendencies were carried into those Italian cities where the civic nobility was a half-tamed country nobility; but they have no place in the true civic aristocracies. Let us take one typical example. In many parts of western Europe the right of private war long remained the privilege of every noble, as it had once been the privilege of every freeman. And in some Italian cities, the right, or at least the privilege, of private war was continued within the city walls. But no power of imagination can conceive an acknowledged right of private war in Rome, Venice or Bern.
The other point of difference is that, whatever we take for the origin and the definition of nobility, in most countries it became something that could be given from outside, without the need of any consent on the part of the noble class itself. In other words, the king .or other prince can ennoble. We have seen how much this takes away from the true notion of nobility as understood in the aristocratic commonwealths. The nobility is no longer all-powerful; it may be constrained to admit within its own body members for whose presence it has no wish. Where this power exists the nobility is no longer in any strictness an aristocracy; it may have great privileges, great influence, even great legal powers, but it is not the real ruling body, like the true aristocracy of Venice.
In the modern states of western Europe the existing nobility
seems to have for the most part had its origin in personal service
to the prince. And this nobility by personal service
seems commonly to have supplanted an older nobility,
the origin of which was, in some cases at least, strictly
immemorial. In this way the later nobility of the
Nobilities
in early Western Europe.
thegns was in England substituted for the older nobility
of the eorls. Now the analogy between this change and the
change from the Roman patriciate to the later Roman
nobilitas is obvious. In both cases the older nobility gives way
to a newer; and in both cases the newer nobility was a nobility
of office. Under a kingly government office bestowed by the
sovereign holds the same place which office bestowed by the
people holds in a popular government. This new nobility of
office supplanted, or perhaps rather absorbed, the older nobility,
just as the later nobilitas of Rome supplanted or absorbed the
old patriciate. In our first glimpse of Teutonic institutions, as
given us by Tacitus, this older nobility appears as strictly
immemorial (see Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 185 sq.),
and its immemorial character appears also in the well-known
legend in the Rigsmal-saga of the separate creation of jarl, karl
and thrall. These represent the three classes of mankind
according to old Teutonic ideas—the noble, the simple freeman
and the bondman. The kingly house, where there is one, is not
a distinct class; it is simply the noblest of the noble. For,
as almost everywhere else, this Teutonic nobility admits of
degrees, though it is yet harder to say in what the degrees of
nobility consisted than to say in what nobility consisted itself.
The older nobility is independent of the possession of land;
it is independent of office about the sovereign; it is hard to say
what were the powers and privileges attached to it; but of its
existence there is no doubt. But in no part of Europe can the
existing nobility trace itself to this immemorial nobility of
primitive days; the nobility of medieval and modern days
springs from the later nobility of office. The nobles of modern
Europe are rather thegnas than eorlas. The eorl of the old system
would doubtless commonly become a thegn under the new, as
the Roman patrician took his place in the new nobilitas; but
others could take their place there also. The Old-English laws
point out ways by which the churl might rise to thegn’s rank,
and in the centuries during which the change went on we find
mention—complaining mention—both in England and elsewhere,
at the court of Charles the Simple and at the court of Æthelred, of
the rise of new men to posts of authority. The story that Earl
Godwine himself was of churlish birth, Whether true or false,
marks the possibility of such a rise. A still wilder tale spoke
of Hugh Capet as the son of a butcher of Paris. Stories like
these prove even more than the real rise of Hagano and Eadric.
In England the nobility of the thegns was to a great extent personally displaced, so to speak, by the results of the Norman Conquest. But the idea of nobility did not greatly change. The English thegn sometimes yielded to, sometimes changed into, the Norman baron, using that word in its widest sense, without any violent alteration in his position. England. The notion of holding land of the king became more prominent than the notion of personal service done to the king; but, as the land was held by the tenure of personal service, the actual relation hardly changed. But the connexion between nobility and the holding of land comes out in the practice by which the lord so constantly took the name of his lordship. It is in this way that the prefixes de and von, descriptions in themselves essentially local, have become in other lands badges of nobility. This notion has died out in England by the dropping of the
