Pacification through State Formation

According to the dominant explanation, European elites, like European societies in general, were pacified as a result of the monopolization of the use (or means) of physical force by emerging states (Elias Reference Elias and Jephcott1983; Reference Elias and Jephcott2000; Oestreich Reference Oestreich1982; Pinker Reference Pinker2011; Tilly Reference Tilly, Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol1985; Reference Tilly1990; Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946 [1919]; Reference Weber1978).Footnote ² State formation, in this account, essentially equates to administrative centralization, crucially involving the redistribution of coercive capacity from a multiplicity of individuals (typically nobles) to a single institution (typically a monarchy). Thus European nobilities ceased to be warriors for the straightforward and compelling reason that centralizing rulers expropriated their coercive resources.Footnote ³ Charles Tilly, a major proponent of this argument, explains: “For a long time, nobles in many parts of Europe had a legal right to wage private war.… Since the seventeenth century, nevertheless, rulers have managed to shift the balance” (Reference Tilly1990: 69; see also Reference Tilly, Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol1985: 172–75).

Elias's (Reference Elias and Jephcott2000) theory of the civilizing process merits special attention in this context, since it is the most thoroughgoing application of the state-formation perspective to the problem of elite lifestyles, yet simultaneously pushes beyond that perspective in key respects. Elias takes a Weberian understanding of the state to its logical conclusions: to the extent that states monopolize violence, their subjects are alienated from violence in their very dispositions, their habitus.Footnote ⁴ Elias argues, “When a monopoly of force is formed, pacified social spaces are created which are normally free from acts of violence.… Here the individual is largely protected from sudden attack, the irruption of physical violence into his or her life. But at the same time he is himself forced to suppress in himself or herself any passionate impulse urging him or her to attack another physically” (ibid.: 369–70). For Elias, “The transformation of the nobility from a class of knights into a class of courtiers is an example of this” (ibid.: 370). In short, state formation entails pacification, of elites among others, not merely as a formal sanction but as an embodied lifestyle.

Elias goes still further in identifying a specific social mechanism linking the centralization of power in Europe to the transformation of elite lifestyles in a nonviolent direction: the royal court. As power chances tilted away from decentralized noble organization toward centralizing monarchy in the early modern period, nobles found themselves reliant on royal favor and relocated to court for their own social reproduction. In turn, courtly nobles’ high levels of interdependence imposed constraints on their bodily and affective expression, and their newfound dependence on the whims of the king produced a novel form of distinction based on polite manners and etiquette, since the king rewarded behaviors conforming to his own interest in a docile nobility. Meanwhile, wider segments of nobles and bourgeois began to imitate these manners in competition with the court nobility, inducing the latter to further refinement—a self-reinforcing cycle of downwardly diffusing bodily restraint. With the rise of the court, then, all the requirements of elite competition—attaining royal favor (from above) and guarding it against challengers (from below)—pressed toward the adoption of pacified lifestyles (ibid.: 85–87, 312–97; Reference Elias and Jephcott1983: 146–213).

To summarize: existing explanations attribute the pacification of European elite lifestyles to the monopolization of physical force. In their most robust, Eliasian version, such explanations posit a specific mechanism by which monopolization produced elite pacification: the “courtization” (Elias Reference Elias and Jephcott2000: 387) of the nobility. Indeed, in his purely theoretical statements, Elias is rather insistent that all civilizing processes pass through a courtly phase (ibid.: 389, 397), and that “stable monopolies of force” are “always first embodied in a large princely or royal court” (ibid.: 370). This is why Elias takes early modern France, the classic instance of a European court nobility, as his paradigmatic case, “the country in which this process … took place in the most direct form” (ibid.: 194).

Empirical and Theoretical Critique

In fact, not all early modern European states had a royal court at the summit of their social order, nor did they all enjoy centralized monopolies of coercion. In early modern England, the absolutist ambitions of monarchs failed, sovereignty came to be shared between crown and Parliament, rule was exercised at the local level by an amateur administration of notables, and the royal court never became a cultural model for elites at large (Bucholz Reference Bucholz1993; Corrigan and Sayer Reference Corrigan and Sayer1985; Mennell Reference Mennell1996; Pincus Reference Pincus2009). In the Dutch United Provinces (the present-day Netherlands), sovereignty was completely dispersed in a confederation of provincial estates dominated by an oligarchy of urban patriarchs, while no official monarchy, and hence no permanent court, emerged at all (Adams Reference Adams2005; Gorski Reference Gorski2003; Hart Reference Hart1993; Spierenburg Reference Spierenburg2013). Meanwhile, as Elias himself notes, the Holy Roman Empire evolved a similarly decentralized structure on a much larger scale, its numerous German princelings acting autonomously but without full sovereignty (Reference Elias and Jephcott2000: 261–65; see also Oestreich Reference Oestreich1982: 241–57). In these German territories, as well, the court “never attained central and decisive importance” (Elias Reference Elias and Jephcott2000: 189).

Does this mean that the elites of such polities were not as fully pacified? Elias (Reference Elias1996 [1989]) suggests as much in the German context. Such was clearly not the case in the Netherlands and England, however. As Pieter Spierenburg (Reference Spierenburg2013: 45–55) shows, the patrician elite that dominated the early modern Dutch Republic was actually more pacified than its continental aristocratic counterparts. They rejected as dishonorable the practice of dueling and maintained a comparatively intolerant attitude toward homicide of all kinds. In early modern England, historians maintain, the dominant, landed, and male elites, the very heirs to a feudal warrior class, remade themselves as an eminently pacified type: the polite and restrained gentleman (Arditi Reference Arditi1998; Bryson Reference Bryson1998; Carter Reference Carter2001; James Reference James1978).

Once again, it is Norbert Elias who has done the most to address the puzzling nature of such cases, describing a “self-pacification” of English elites (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a: 58). Still, Elias's explanation of English self-pacification remains incomplete. At times, he suggests that there emerged in early modern England a balance of forces between leading groups: because no single group was strong enough to defeat its opponents, they gradually learned to compromise and channeled their conflicts into nonviolent rituals (ibid.: 36–37; Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986b: 171–72). But this begs the question of how these elites learned to compromise in the first place.Footnote ⁵ Alternatively, Elias reads early modern England as a case in which the landed class monopolized power collectively: because politics was thus internal to a set of agents with shared interests, assumptions, and codes of conduct, these agents enjoyed sufficient mutual trust to pursue their conflicts peacefully (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a: 29–32). The problem here is that these same elites, in their former capacities as feudal lords, previously shared a no less unifying but patently violent code of conduct (James Reference James1978: 1–22). Again, this begs the question of how elites reconstituted their (already strong) social and cultural bonds on less violent terms.

Pacification through Elite Reproduction

This section advances an alternative explanatory model of elite pacification. While elites may indeed be pacified through the expropriation of their coercive capacities, my approach starts from the premise that elites’ own interests vary in ways that are more or less favorable to pacified lifestyles. For present purposes, I assume that all elites endeavor to reproduce their positions. Yet the ways in which they do so differ tremendously: they reproduce themselves through historically and geographically variable practices involving their material and symbolic investments in diverse arrays of institutions. The sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1994; Reference Bourdieu and Fernbach2014 [2012]: 237–42) has termed these “reproduction strategies”; the historian Robert Brenner (Reference Brenner and Roemer1986: 26–32) calls them “rules for reproduction.”Footnote ⁶

My contention is that elites’ lifestyles are shaped and constrained by the systems of strategies through which they reproduce themselves as elites. Precisely because these strategies vary across place and time, they may implicate elites in physical violence—among other skills—to a greater or lesser degree. Consequently, I expect that European elites developed pacified lifestyles in the specific, contingent circumstance that they adopted reproduction strategies, within which their personal competence in physical violence was irrelevant or counterproductive. Note that a pacifying reproduction strategy might still involve violence in its objective workings (say, by delegating it to professional functionaries). My claim, however, is that because such a strategy does not require elites to personally perform violence, it divorces violence from the subjective experience of elite life. Thus it eliminates violence from the repertoire of symbolic stances by which elites distinguish themselves—that is, their lifestyles.

My model encompasses, while extending, Elias's analysis of the French royal court. As I have suggested, the court pacified elites, in Elias's account, not merely because it served the interests of centralizing monarchs, but also because it simultaneously offered nobles an alternative but less violent means to reproduce themselves (see especially Elias Reference Elias and Jephcott2000: 394–97; Reference Elias and Jephcott1983: 155–64, 178–88). Yet courtly participation was hardly the sole elite reproduction strategy with pacifying implications. In the English case, I will show, elites’ uses of the law induced in them a similar effect. As Bourdieu himself has argued, to pursue one's interests through legal forms is “to adopt a mode of expression and discussion implying the renunciation of physical violence” (Reference Bourdieu1986: 831).

This raises the question: what were the conditions under which elite reproduction strategies varied? Following the historical sociologist Richard Lachmann (Reference Lachmann2000; Reference Lachmann2009), I posit that the strategies open to early modern elites were contingent on the evolving and combined structures of inter-elite and elite–non-elite (or class) relations in which each elite was situated (see also Brenner Reference Brenner and Roemer1986: 26, 46). Accounting for elite reproduction strategies thus requires attending to both elite and class relations as they varied over time and across cases. Figure 1 presents my model in schematic form.

Figure 1. The Elite-Reproduction Model.

To summarize: whereas existing explanations emphasize the monopolization of coercion and/or the courtization of the nobility, my approach expects lifestyle pacification everywhere that elites came to reproduce themselves through strategies that eschewed their personal use of physical force (including, but not limited to, the court), strategies that were contingent on variable configurations of elite and class relations. Of course, the specific ways in which these relations coalesced to pacify elites, or failed to do so, can only be addressed empirically, through concrete analysis of historical cases. The relative adequacy of my approach thus hinges on such an analysis.

Hunting as an Indicator of Elite Pacification

To adequately explain the pacification of English elite lifestyles, we must first reconstruct the timing, sequence, and social distribution of the pacification process: when, and in what order, were different English elites pacified?Footnote ⁸ Attention to intra-case variation and temporal ordering is especially useful in a single-case study of this kind since it allows a sharper adjudication of competing explanations (Wilson Reference Wilson2011: 1448). The relevant English elites in the early modern context were the monarchy, the titled nobility (also known as the peerage), and the non-noble but landed gentry.Footnote ⁹

My analysis revolves around a central constituent of these elites’ lifestyles: the hunt. Following Elias's (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a; Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986b) studies of early modern England, I view hunting as a useful indicator of the place of violence in elite lifestyles. Hunting was the most esteemed leisure activity for all three elites (Beaver Reference Beaver2008; Berry Reference Berry2001; de Belin Reference de Belin2013; Griffin Reference Griffin2007; Manning Reference Manning1993) and it was also, at first, an unapologetically violent practice. It involved literal violence against animals and it symbolically evoked violence against humans. As late as the start of the seventeenth century, huntsmen justified their pastime as training for war.

According to Elias, however, English elite hunting had largely ceased to affirm violence by the middle of the eighteenth century. The rise of the foxhunt as elites’ preferred method is especially instructive. Whereas previously dominant forms of hunting required humans to kill the quarry, fox huntsmen “delegated” killing to their hounds (Elias Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986b: 161). At the same time, the chase replaced the kill as the primary purpose and pleasure for such hunters (ibid.: 166). Foxhunting elites thus distanced themselves both physically and symbolically from violence. In so doing, they transformed hunting from a warlike exercise into a sport (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a: 19; Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986b: 155–56). This, for Elias, is strong evidence of pacification (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a: 31).

These claims have been subjected to critique (Franklin Reference Franklin1996; Stokvis Reference Stokvis, Dunning and Rojek1992; Tester Reference Tester1989), but both sides of the debate betray a rather cursory engagement with historical sources. Elias's argument rests on a single primary source, while his critics base their arguments largely on secondary works that are now out of date.Footnote ¹⁰ Here, I will marshal a much stronger evidentiary basis for the changing place of violence in English hunting by considering a range of primary-source texts and incorporating the vibrant secondary literature on the social and cultural history of the hunt. Primary sources include a prescriptive literature of hunting manuals and treatises as well as descriptions of hunting practices in letters and diaries. I also briefly situate hunting in a broader constellation of elite practices to show that the changes I document were indicative of elites’ lifestyles more generally.

Gentry-Sporting Hunting

Pacified forms of hunting appear to have taken hold first and most fully among the sixteenth-century gentry, the relatively subordinate fraction of English elites. Already in the sixteenth century, gentry hunting came to embody the sporting style that Elias (Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986a; Reference Elias, Elias and Dunning1986b) identifies in eighteenth-century foxhunting. Rather than killing per se, gentry hunts privileged riding, speed, and winning.

The sixteenth-century pacification of gentry lifestyles is evident in the history of foxhunting itself. Historians often argue that the pursuit of foxes as an elite sport was an eighteenth-century invention (Carr Reference Carr1976; Itzkowitz Reference Itzkowitz1977; Longrigg Reference Longrigg1975). Indeed, during the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, foxhunting was, officially, a low-status activity (Griffin Reference Griffin2007: 124). There is no evidence of foxhunting at court in this period, but considerable evidence suggests that among the gentry the fox was already a highly valued quarry. Numerous sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century critics claimed that the fox should have been wiped out altogether if not for the preservation efforts of gentry for purposes of hunting (Thomas Reference Thomas1983: 164; for further evidence, see Middleton Reference Middleton2005: 5–8; and, ironically given the thrust of his argument, Carr Reference Carr1976: 28–29).

What is more, by the second half of the sixteenth century, foxhunting embodied the two markers by which Elias distinguishes its modern incarnation. First, hounds, rather than humans, killed the quarry. According to the period's major treatise on English hounds, the fox should be hunted by the “gasehounde” (gazehound), which “seperateth it from the company and having so done never ceaseth until he have wearyed the Beast to death” (Caius Reference Caius1576: 8–9). Similarly, one of the few surviving accounts of a sixteenth-century foxhunt, in 1562, describes the hounds killing the fox themselves (Rye Reference Rye1865: 189). The second marker is an emphasis on riding, rather than killing, as the principal pleasure of foxhunting. Writing in 1576, John Caius drew an explicit connection between gazehounds, which hunt the fox, and a penchant for horsemanship, to the point of neglecting the quarry itself: “Horsemen use them more then footmen to th'intent that they might provoke their horses to a swift galloppe (wherwith they are more delighted then with the pray it selfe), and that they might accustome theyr horse to leape over hedges and ditches, without stoppe or stumble, without harme or hassard, without doubt or daunger, and so escape with safeguard of lyfe” (Reference Caius1576: 9). It is likewise significant that the one sixteenth-century hunting manual penned by a country gentleman, Cockaine's A Short Treatise of Hunting (Reference Cockaine1932 [1576]), was also the only text of this period to advocate the pursuit of foxes at high speed on horseback (Reference Cockaine1932: B–B2; for a discussion of the author, see Landry Reference Landry2001: 41).

The pacified and increasingly sport-like character of gentry hunting is perhaps best illustrated by the related pastime of “coursing” hares with greyhounds, a somewhat ancient practice that the gentry embraced, transformed, and codified during the sixteenth century (Manning Reference Manning1993: 26; Thacker Reference Thacker1834: 30–31). In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century hare coursing two greyhounds chased one hare, ideally within a long enclosure called a paddock, while the human contestants stood and watched (Gascoigne Reference Gascoigne1575: 245–46; Markham Reference Markham1631 [Reference Markham1615]: 53). Coursing thus physically distanced its human participants from violence: as with foxhunting, any killing was performed by hounds rather than humans, who were in this case reduced to spectators. Clearly this was not a military exercise, and in the early seventeenth century, James I (r. 1603–1625) was to criticize it as “not so martiall a game” (quoted in Berry Reference Berry2001: 18). Finally, coursing shifted the symbolic locus of the hunt away from killing altogether, to winning. The primary purpose of the spectacle was a competition between contestants wagering on their hounds. Killing the hare, while a usual byproduct, was not the means of winning the wager. As Gascoigne explained, “In coursing at the Hare it is not material which dogge killeth hyr … but he that giveth most Cotes, or most turnes, winneth the wager” (Reference Gascoigne1575: 246). In other words, causing the hare to turn trumped killing it.

Courtly-Spectacular Hunting

Emerging more or less simultaneously among the dominant fraction of elites comprised by the monarchy and its courtly following, a different set of hunting practices also bore some marks of pacification, but in a different way and to a lesser degree. From the late 1530s, the social circle of the royal court, which encompassed most peers but relatively few gentry, witnessed a shift from par force hunting to the staged pursuit of deer in enclosed parks (for documentary and archeological evidence supporting this periodization, see Manning Reference Manning1993: 198; Thurley Reference Thurley1993: 192). I refer to this new courtly style as “spectacular” hunting. Its most prestigious variant was “bow and stable” hunting (a type of “drive” hunt), in which the hounds drove deer en masse to a viewing platform called a “stand,” where archers stood and shot them while spectators watched (Griffin Reference Griffin2007: 51; Manning Reference Manning1993: 24).

Killing with bows rather than blade weapons, courtly hunters distanced themselves from bodily participation in violence much like their gentry counterparts did. They also drained hunting of warlike characteristics: the physical enclosure of the deer fixed the outcome in advance, and herd killing effaced the martial symbolism of single combat. In the gendered interpretation of one sixteenth-century commentator, park hunting was “more meet for ladies and gentlewomen to exercise … than for men of courage to follow” (Harrison Reference Harrison and Furnivall1878 [Reference Harrison and Furnivall1577]: 27). By the same token, however, killing en masse before an audience magnified the visibility of violence—hence its spectacular style. In 1537, for instance, Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) had 240 deer slaughtered in a single bow-and-stable hunt and the following day he killed several hundred more with greyhounds, with both events staged for public viewing (Manning Reference Manning1993: 24). A similarly large-scale slaughter was documented at one of Henry's hunts in 1541 (Griffin Reference Griffin2007: 70). Ample evidence suggests that Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) and her leading courtiers were even fonder of such events (de Belin Reference de Belin2013: 19; Griffin Reference Griffin2007: 79; Manning Reference Manning1993: 201; Sabretache Reference Sabretache and Barrow1948: 67–69). Albeit a spectacle rather than a military drill, the kill remained the central ritual here, in stark contrast to coursing and foxhunting.

Because spectacular hunts were a part of court ceremonial (Manning Reference Manning1993: 200), they also signaled a shift in the enacted representation of monarchy. Important for my purposes, the new royal theatrics affirmed the symbolic value of violence even as it promoted unconditional obedience. Thus historians have interpreted the gratuitous killing of Henry VIII's spectacular hunts as explicitly designed to symbolize the executions of traitors that followed the uprisings of the 1530s (ibid.: 24, 48 n59). More broadly, a whole slew of qualities—public spectacle, massive scale, mass slaughter, predetermined outcome, even their park setting—suggest that courtly hunts were conforming to a much wider pattern: the Eurasian royal hunt, an integral aspect of kingship everywhere that strong monarchies existed (see Allsen Reference Allsen2006 for a careful analysis). Intriguingly, “The royal hunt, like the court indoors,” was “a place where behavior was modified and courtly manners inculcated,” but again, violence was symbolically central as well since the kill was clearly perceived (and valued) as violence (ibid.: 96–97, 204).

In the event, however, English monarchs and courtiers were never as deeply invested in spectacular hunting as were the gentry in their sporting style. During the early seventeenth century, James I made a concerted, if partial, effort to revive par force hunting at court precisely in virtue of its martial character (Berry Reference Berry2001: 17–18; de Belin Reference de Belin2013: 19–20). In England, then, spectacular hunting largely terminated with the Elizabethan court itself at the end of the sixteenth century (Stokvis Reference Stokvis, Dunning and Rojek1992: 123–25).Footnote ¹¹

In sum, the hunting evidence suggests that the pacification of royal and courtly-noble lifestyles did not advance as far as that of the gentry during the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. While some courtly hunting practices physically distanced their participants from violence, they neither (a) marginalized the symbolically privileged position of violence within the ritual, nor (b) were they ever fully institutionalized. Table 1 summarizes the martial, sporting, and spectacular styles of hunting and their varying social bases.

Table 1. The Space of Elite Lifestyles: Hunting, ca. 1500–1640.

The Rise of Foxhunting

The diffusion of the sporting hunt to all elites is best captured by the dramatic rise in status of foxhunting that commenced during the Restoration period (1660–1688). Even the prescriptive literature, conservative by nature, conceded the point. Writing in 1674, Nicholas Cox “could never find [in foxhunting] that Pleasure which has been represented to me by some of its Admirers,” but he admitted it to be “a recreation much in use and highly applauded by the generality of the nobility and gentry” (Reference Cox1928 [1674]: xii; see also Blome Reference Blome1686: 87). In fact, monarchs, too, applauded foxhunting by this time. Charles II (r. 1660–1685) was known to be one of its proponents (Landry Reference Landry2001: 12) and it was probably the centerpiece of James II's (r. 1685–1688) hunting repertoire. The latter's correspondence with his son-in-law William of Orange makes frequent reference to foxhunting (Table 2 provides excerpts). Of James's twenty-two letters to William that reference hunting (preserved in Britain's National Archives), nine (41 percent) mention foxhunting, a much higher proportion than any other quarry.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, foxhunting was not merely the whim of a monarch known for his personal idiosyncrasies but rather extended across noble and courtly society. The duke of Monmouth, the duke of Buckingham, Lord Grey of Uppark, and Lord Arundell of Wardour, all onetime Restoration courtiers, kept foxhound packs between the 1660s and the 1680s (Carr Reference Carr1976: 28; Longrigg Reference Longrigg1975: 58–59).

Table 2. Excerpts from James II's Letters to William of Orange.

Source: The National Archives (of the United Kingdom), State Papers (TNA SP) 8/3, f. 243, 251, 355; TNA SP 8/4, f. 44, 106.

But how did elites hunt the fox? The available evidence suggests that from the later seventeenth century onward all adhered to the sporting style invented by the pre-Civil War gentry in which hounds, not humans, did the killing. Cox plainly stated, “Let the Hounds kill the Fox themselves” (Reference Cox1928: 100, emphasis his), and his contemporaries concurred (Blome Reference Blome1686: 89; Stringer Reference Stringer1714: 170). Also like their gentry forebears, foxhunting elites treated the chase, rather than the kill, as the defining moment of hunting. By the early eighteenth century, Arthur Stringer (Reference Stringer1714: 165–73) could recommend that foxes be pursued only with the fastest horses and hounds, and contemporary critics were deriding foxhunts as “little more than riding and running” (Essay on Hunting 1733: 29).

Explanations of the rise of foxhunting have traditionally looked to a declining deer population in early modern England (Carr Reference Carr1976; Itzkowitz Reference Itzkowitz1977; Longrigg Reference Longrigg1975). By this logic, elite hunters turned to the fox because it was the most available quarry, not because they were becoming averse to violence (Franklin Reference Franklin1996: 436–38; Tester Reference Tester1989: 164–66). Recent analyses, however, suggest that the decline in deer has been seriously overestimated. Mandy de Belin's detailed investigations reveal that even in Northamptonshire, an epicenter of foxhunting innovation, deer remained an equally viable alternative throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Reference de Belin2013). Iris Middleton documents prominent nobles and gentry in eighteenth-century Yorkshire who preferred to hunt the fox despite possessing well-stocked deer parks (Reference Middleton2005: 7). We are thus justified in seeing the turn to foxhunting as due to a cultural shift among elites, rather than blunt environmental constraints.

Indeed, even when Restoration-era elites did hunt the stag—the quintessential par force quarry—they seem to have focused more on riding than on killing. Writing specifically of the “hart” (the most prestigious kind of stag), Richard Blome made this point in 1686: “But now adays few hunt the Hart as they ought, for they give not their Hounds leisure to hunt, so that it is more properly said the Horses hunt than the Hounds; and there is so many on Horsback that can neither blow, hollow, or do any thing belonging to Hunting as they ought” (Reference Blome1686: 83, emphasis his). Even royal stag hunting now privileged riding over killing, contemporary observations suggest. In 1661, the diary of Samuel Pepys (Reference Pepys, Latham and Matthews1970: 152) recounted “a great match of hunting of a Stagg the King [Charles II] had yesterday,” and admired “how the King tired all [his courtiers’] horses and came home with not above two or three able to keep pace with him.” Note that Pepys declines to mention whether the stag was caught and killed, emphasizing instead the sport-like competition between Charles II and his courtiers. Clearly, Charles was not orchestrating such hunts as either military exercises or spectacles of violence. Rather, by the Restoration, monarchs, too, pursued the sporting style first developed by the pre-Civil War gentry.Footnote ¹⁴ In summary, the hunting evidence suggests that all English elites had adopted relatively pacified lifestyles—those that minimized the symbolic status of violence—by the later seventeenth century.

The Rise of Legal Reproduction

With the exception of the clergy, all elites in late medieval England reproduced themselves through martial strategies. By this I mean that these elites, like other European nobilities, claimed the vocation of warriors, “whose mission … justified their right to be supported by the labour of others” (Duby Reference Duby1977: 8; for England, see James Reference James1978: 1–22; Stone Reference Stone1965: 200). This claim, in turn, was sustained by elites’ relationship to the peasantry (inter-class relations), which rested on serfdom (Bailey Reference Bailey2014; Hilton Reference Hilton1983). If premodern, non-capitalist social formations generally involved “extra-economic” means of surplus extraction, including physical force (Marx Reference Marx and Fernbach1981 [1894]: 926; Polanyi Reference Polanyi1957: 55–57, 69–71), serfdom in particular saw lords directly organizing those means on their own manors (Anderson Reference Anderson1974: 19; Brenner Reference Brenner, Aston and Philpin1985: 228). That is, it fused economic exploitation with politico-military domination at the level of the individual manorial lord. As a result, serfdom gave lords both the capacity and the need for expertise in violence (for the various forms of manorial coercion, see Allen Reference Allen1992: 61–62; Bailey Reference Bailey2014: 16–17). Such elites thus partook of a martial lifestyle.Footnote ¹⁵

By the mid-fifteenth century, however, serfdom in England was dead: peasants had attained personal freedom, emancipating themselves from the coercive discipline of the manor (Allen Reference Allen1992: 64–66; Bailey Reference Bailey2014: 23–36, 60–61; Hilton Reference Hilton1983: 33–59). Such a significant shift in class power threatened elite positions (Brenner Reference Brenner, Aston and Philpin1985: 272; Byres Reference Byres2009: 39). It was in this context that the gentry hit upon an alternative set of legal reproduction strategies. Fifteenth-century gentry, to a degree previously unwitnessed, acted in the House of Commons, the county administration of justice, and the common-law courts to defend their positions.Footnote ¹⁶ They did so by such means as maintaining wage controls and master-servant regulations (forged by parliamentary statute and upheld by county administration), trying cases of trespass and riot as county justices of the peace,Footnote ¹⁷ and suing for trespass or otherwise asserting exclusive property rights as petitioners to the common-law courts (Comninel Reference Comninel2000: 28–31, 45–46; Corrigan and Sayer Reference Corrigan and Sayer1985: 39; Keen Reference Keen2002: 87–120; Lander Reference Lander1989: 7–12; Simpson Reference Simpson1986: 45). That this marked a fundamental reorientation of gentry activity is attested by the very growth of judicial and legislative institutions at this time. Such institutions had deep historical roots in the English Middle Ages, but they remained much less developed as long as lordly power rested in the manor. In the fifteenth century, by contrast, the House of Commons was radically transformed from a petitioning into a fully legislative body (Corrigan and Sayer Reference Corrigan and Sayer1985: 27; Smith Reference Smith1999: 4–6), the justices of the peace substantially expanded their capacities (Lander Reference Lander1989: 1–16), and the common law rapidly replaced customary jurisdictions (Simpson Reference Simpson1986: 13–20).

Why did the gentry embrace these legal reproduction strategies? Although a definitive answer is beyond this essay's scope, it is useful to consider the gentry's relatively subordinate position vis-à-vis other elites (inter-elite relations). While the decline of serfdom threatened the martial reproduction of all elites, the gentry were uniquely ill-equipped to redeploy their martial skills in other contexts. In fact, they had always sustained their warlike vocation in part through personal service to monarchs and greater noble lords (Keen Reference Keen2002: 71–86; Stone Reference Stone1965: 201–2). The law thus offered the gentry a more secure means of reproducing themselves in a post-serfdom era that saw the destabilization of lordly authority.Footnote ¹⁸

Inter-elite relations also help to explain the further consolidation of gentry legal reproduction in the sixteenth century. By this time, monarchs and many peers had converged on a novel reproduction strategy as well: an emergent court society in which the crown secured a patrimonial following in exchange for patronage and perquisites (Brenner Reference Brenner1993: 653–54). Unlike early modern France, though, where the monarchy's sale of ennobling offices incorporated rising elites (Anderson Reference Anderson1974: 97; Lachmann Reference Lachmann2000: 130–31), sixteenth-century England produced a highly restrictive court society. As I have noted, the crown exhausted its patronage on the peerage, to the exclusion of the much broader gentry. Richard Lachmann has shown that the unintended consequence of this policy was actually the constitution of an autonomous power base for the gentry (Reference Lachmann1989: 150–60; Reference Lachmann2000: 106–13, 173–76). Because magnate peers—but only they—were reorienting themselves to court, gentry assumed an unrivalled command of county administration, along with the parliamentary districts that county power conferred (see also Gleason Reference Gleason1969: 49; Mingay Reference Mingay1976: 39–50). By the century's end, the gentry were overwhelmingly reproducing themselves through legal forms and means. Indeed, by this time, service as a justice of the peace and a member of Parliament was expected of all gentlemen of standing (Gleason Reference Gleason1969: 3; Smith Reference Smith1999: 23).

Thus far, I have endeavored to explain a shift in gentry reproduction from martial to legal strategies. Attributing the gentry's pacification to this shift now requires identifying what it was about the law that conditioned a pacified lifestyle in the gentry.

The Pacifying Effects of Legal Reproduction

Post-serfdom gentry came to defend and advance their positions through the law specifically by promulgating written rules (statutes) in the House of Commons, executing and interpreting those rules as county justices, and lodging petitions in common-law courts. The common law was a parallel system of rules forming the cumulative result of individual case outcomes. Legal settings thus rewarded skills like writing, speaking, and technical knowledge—that is, skills useful for manipulating legal codes. They did not require martial competence, physical prowess, or other skills in violence. As Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1986: 815–16) has argued more generally, the law's ability to serve external functions (including elite reproduction)Footnote ¹⁹ owes precisely to its form as a relatively abstract and self-referential linguistic system, which lends it the pretense of universality. Thus legal action, however instrumental and coercive, always works through, and because of, nonviolent procedures like the interpretation of texts, the act of writing, and more generally “the use of forms and formulas as weapons” (ibid.: 817, 844, 849–50).

Early modern England was no exception: historians’ descriptions show that by the sixteenth century the House of Commons, the commissions of the peace (the organizations staffed by justices of the peace), and the common-law courts all privileged these kinds of linguistic and intellectual skills, including formal deliberation, debating technique, interpretation of precedent, speech-making, and writing (for the Commons, see Dean Reference Dean1996: 5–33; Graves Reference Graves1985: 19–36; for the commissions, Fletcher Reference Fletcher1986: 87–115; Gleason Reference Gleason1969: 96–115; for the courts, Prest Reference Prest1972: 115–31, Reference Prest1986: 11–48). As Keen states with regard to the commission of the peace, “It called for qualities other than martial ones (though by no means incompatible with these)” (Reference Keen2002: 163–64).

In order to attain these qualities, gentry households increasingly invested in formal education for their sons at university or the law schools, the so-called inns of court. As late as the mid-sixteenth century, a relatively small minority of justices of the peace had received university or formal legal training, but by 1640 a large majority could claim such a background (Corrigan and Sayer Reference Corrigan and Sayer1985: 63; Gleason Reference Gleason1969: 86–88). In the House of Commons, for which we have more exact numbers, the proportion of members of Parliament who had attended Oxford, Cambridge, or an inn of court grew from 38 percent in 1563, to 55 percent in 1593, to 70 percent in 1640–1642 (Stone Reference Stone1964: 63).Footnote ²⁰ Educational institutions served to transmit the nonviolent legal skills described above: “The formal teaching of both universities and inns continued to be grounded on disputations and aural exercises throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … they tended to cultivate ‘a dexterity in devising or meeting arguments and a readiness in applying acquired knowledge’” (Prest Reference Prest1972: 116). They also became agents of pacification in their own right. During the sixteenth century, the inns of court passed a series of orders to regulate manners, prohibit weapons, and punish violent behavior; their effect, by 1640 or so, was to completely eliminate serious forms of violence by the student body (see the evidence in ibid.: 91–100).

What is more, even if legal and martial skills were compatible in principle—a possibility that Keen allows—they must have conflicted in practice, given the significant investments of time and resources required to master either of them. As early as the 1450s, social critics were decrying a loss of martial competence among those gentry who favored legal pursuits (Keen Reference Keen2002: 96; Lander Reference Lander1989: 84). By the late sixteenth century, a classificatory schema had emerged among the gentry themselves that valorized legal and humanistic training in explicit opposition to martial service (the latter intriguingly grouped with the royal court). As a pamphlet of 1586 voiced the viewpoint of the “country” (basically, gentry landowners), gentlemen should send their sons to be educated at university or the inns of court, but “To serve in [the royal] court, or follow the war, we account these lives rather lewd than laudable” (quoted in Walzer Reference Walzer1965: 243). In short, investing in violence expertise was not merely superfluous but counterproductive to gentry reproduction through the law, and the gentry perceived it as such.

Finally, there are notable affinities between the law and sport itself (of which foxhunting was an early manifestation). Both trial procedure and sport embody highly competitive but physically restrained rituals.Footnote ²¹ Thus historians have interpreted civil litigation, a wildly popular practice of early modern English elites, as a nonviolent alternative to feuding, a sort of sublimation of physical combat (Manning Reference Manning1993: 211; Prest Reference Prest1986: 297; Stone Reference Stone1965: 240–42). This is again consistent with Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu1986: 831) broader claim that the law owes its efficacy to the way that its formalistic structure mediates and retranslates the otherwise direct and physical confrontation of antagonistic interests. It also suggests another way in which law promoted pacified cultural practices like foxhunting: by direct transfer of rituals from the former to the latter.

The gentry's legal reproduction strategy, then, was a functional substitute for the court in Elias’ (Reference Elias and Jephcott2000; Reference Elias and Jephcott1983) account of French elite pacification. Like the court, the law pacified elite lifestyles because it required elites to defend their social positions with the use of nonviolent skills.

The Diffusion of Legal Reproduction

Perhaps the court would have become an effective mechanism of pacification in England had it managed to incorporate a broader cross-section of elites, affording them viable reproduction strategies. Instead, during the seventeenth century the law expanded from its gentry base to become the primary reproduction strategy for monarchs and peers as well. The result, as we have seen, was the diffusion of pacified lifestyles to all English elites. Entwined processes of elite and class conflict again help to explain this outcome.

The historical record of the seventeenth century attests to the superior social power of legal relative to courtly institutions, founded on their superior capacity for elite reproduction.Footnote ²² When the policies of Charles I (r. 1625–1649) threatened property rights, among other elite values, in the 1630s, many county officials refused to enforce them. This was a key condition for the Civil Wars and the destruction of the court during the 1640s (Lachmann Reference Lachmann2000: 113; Zagorin Reference Zagorin1969: 115–16). Although the monarchy returned in 1660, the Restoration settlement financially subordinated the crown to Parliament, confirmed the supremacy of common-law jurisdiction over the royal prerogative, and eliminated any alternative to justice of the peace administration in the counties (Corrigan and Sayer Reference Corrigan and Sayer1985: 78–83; Fletcher Reference Fletcher1986: 351–73). And when James II sought to circumvent the monarchy's growing dependence on Parliament, he was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and Parliament achieved statutory control over the royal succession itself (Brewer Reference Brewer1989: 112–25; Pincus Reference Pincus2009: 474–86). Thus the monarchy came to reproduce itself exclusively through the legal instruments that the gentry had long employed.

Unsurprisingly, with the growing eclipse of the court, the peerage, too, came to find and pursue its interests with the law. In the later seventeenth century, historians argue, even peers began to abandon the court in favor of Parliament (in this case the House of Lords) as their primary means to influence the monarch (Bucholz Reference Bucholz1993: 11; Smith Reference Smith1999: 176). The law became the tool with which peers defended and advanced their positions with respect to non-elites as well. England's largest and largely noble landowners expanded and consolidated their estates via legal means from the Restoration onward, through either enclosures—enacted as statute and backed by common law (Comninel Reference Comninel2000: 31–42)—or buying out leases with help from an emerging mortgage law (Allen Reference Allen1992: 78–104).

In summary, by the later seventeenth century both peers and monarchs had come to reproduce themselves through the legal institutions that the gentry had been the first to fully embrace. Thus peers and monarchs, like the gentry before them, were invested in institutions that rewarded nonviolent skills and codes. In making this point we need not deny the violent effects of England's legal institutions, especially as experienced by non-elites.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, the very presence of the law meant that elites’ personal, physical relationship to violence was heavily mediated, not unlike their relationship to the killing of foxes. As a result, peers and monarchs converged on the pacified lifestyle initially forged by the gentry. Pacified lifestyles in England diffused from the gentry to elites as a whole because the legal reproduction strategy did so.

The pacification of English elite lifestyles, then, was part and parcel of English state formation: what are Parliament, local administration, and the law in general but state institutions? What explains pacification in the English case, though, is neither the coercive expropriation nor the courtly incorporation of the traditional landed elites, as existing models would have it. Instead, both elite pacification and the peculiar form of the English state stemmed from the ongoing and ultimately successful efforts of the gentry to reproduce themselves in the context of changing elite and class relations.Footnote ²⁴