“The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined”, by Georges Duby, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, With a Forward by Thomas N. Bisson

 

392 pages, The University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226167725

In The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, prominent Annales historian Georges Duby offers a tripartite view of medieval French society, a construct which depicts men separating themselves into a triple hierarchy: Those Who Pray; Those Who Fight; Those Who Work. He considers how this medieval theory of orders originated, discusses its complex history and shows how different interests – cultural, political and economic – were involved in its creation and use. The Three Orders also shows how the tripartite schema came to occupy a central position in social thought and clarifies the manner in which feudal society viewed itself.

Beginning with a brief examination of a popular early 7^th Century treatise on the Three Estates of France, Duby then jumps abruptly back to the period in which the notion that French society was thus divided was born. Essentially, the bishops of the tottering Capetian state drew upon older imaginings of hierarchical order to project a new rationale for royal power and peasant subservience; their tripartite scheme collapsed with the monarchy itself, only to be resuscitated in the 12^th Century with the creation of the Feudal system and the conflict between Capetians and Plantagenets contributed to a definitive restoration of monarchical trifunctionality.

In tracing the fortunes of the Three Orders, Duby shows how this tripartite scheme came to occupy a central position in social thought and clarifies the manner in which feudal society viewed itself.