ABSTRACT

When we teach the Middle Ages, we often present a notion of the “Three Orders”: “Those who work,” “Those who fight,” and “Those who pray,” in the formulation of the bishops Adalbero of Laon (d. 1031) and Gerard of Cambrai (d. 1051). There was a much broader concern in the Middle Ages about “orders” that went far beyond the sociopolitical orderings of the Golden Age posited by Adalbero and Gerard. This selection from Constable’s longer work on “The Orders of Society” describes the eleventh-and twelfth-century commentary that divided society into two, three, four, or even seven parts, often at the same time. Constable discusses the ordo monasticus or the ordo clericus as “ways of life” which are not yet separated into monastic or religious orders or administrative institutions. The “ideas of hierarchy and authority,” and the practice among monastic and clerical writers of looking for “a deeper meaning in the observable world,” as Constable puts it, led medieval writers, almost all of whom were clerical or monastic, to describe their world using comparisons to biblical duos, triads, and quartets. Such biblically based schemes of social organization allowed eleventh-and twelfth-century clergy to discuss “orders” in terms of their relative purity and aided in the elevation of the clergy that was central to Church reform in this period when clerics assimilated the monastic virtues into their own order. These efforts can be recognized as part of the intellectual ferment of the twelfth-century’s program to organize its sources and ideas. Such formalized schemes also had political significance when they both separated clergy from laity and placed the Church or the Pope at the top of both diagrams, as we see in Figures 3.1 and 3.2. This selection comes from “The Orders of Society,” in Giles Constable, Three Studies in Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 251-66, 289-304; notes have been renumbered.