The Three Estates and Other Mediaeval Trinities

The notion of Three Estates is familiar to most readers of mediaeval literature and to most serious readers of the criticism devoted to this literature; it refers to a tripartite model of society which distinguishes three social classes: first-estate oratores (a clerical class), secondestate bellatores (a military class), and third-estate laboratores (a working class).1 Yet what modern scholars are willing to consider variant of the three-estates formula varies considerably. In the following paper, I do not attempt to demonstrate the existence or frequency of a threeestates "theme" in mediaeval literature — the reader may refer to the studies cited in the notes for far more examples than will be included here. Rather, I wish to consider the question "what constitutes a true variant of such a theme?" What, for example, is the relation between the mediaeval formula of three social classes (a formula stated explicitly in many mediaeval works) and Dumézil's ideological model of "trois fonctions" (a model derived from earlier texts containing no explicit reference to a tripartite model of society)? And is it useful to include as a variant of the Three Estates those mediaeval "estates" satires that simply list social classes without relating these classes to a tripartite model?