There were States in Medieval Europe: A Response to Rees Davies

Rees Davies’s questioning of the current fashion for talking about medieval states (Davies, 2003) is characteristically stimulating and persuasive. Not surprisingly, in view of his references to my essay on the historiography of the medieval state (Reynolds, 1997), I nevertheless find it not persuasive enough. I agree with a lot of what he says but the main thrust of his argument seems to me to perpetuate the tendency of medieval historians to isolate themselves from discussions from which they could profit and to which they could have much to contribute. I quite agree in deploring the fashion for using the word state in discussions of medieval polities without any explanation of the category to which the supposed state belongs and why it belongs there. I also quite agree that we should not go back to the old political history and its concentration on high politics or join in the teleological search for the origins of modern states. But politics and power matter. Historians who live in societies in which power is exercised in part through states have reason to think about the characteristics of this kind of polity, whether states existed in the periods they study, and the difference between societies with and without states. In other words, we should neither blindly follow the fashion for using the word nor stubbornly avoid it, but, as Davies suggests, think about our “prior category assumptions” when we use it. Some historians who specify what they see as the defining characteristics of states in their period seem to start from what they think was new or important in that period, as do the early modernists who focus on absolutism, standing armies, regular taxes, bureaucracies, or professional diplomacy, or the later modernists who emphasise communications, education systems, economic policies, and the general contrast with the “traditional” states of the Ancien Régime. All this is fair enough in describing the characteristics of particular sorts of states, though the novelty of the chosen characteristics sometimes suggests that ideas about earlier polities come from old textbooks. Even less adequate is the way that many European (and not just British) historians seem to think