virtu-ally the first English commentary on the practice of comparisons itself. Comparison is criticized as tending to the unethical and the un-Christian, but it plays the role here of supporting social norms as well. There is still a sense that people cannot, compared to each other, improve themselves, and it is a crossover sort of perfor-mance; medieval social complacency and religious charity pushing back against something perhaps a bit too egotistical or simply too this-worldly.
Lydgate’s final four lines quoted above deserve attention and might be pro-found. It is possible, on the framework that he provides, to see that comparison is especially odious because it is futile, an operation akin to what philosophers call a category mistake. There are places, we might imagine, where one can usefully evaluate and compare, but there are others in which the operation is both idle and conducive to unhappiness. It is not, on this account, possible for comparison to be a useful practice in such human cases.
and the king is bound to the laws. For the purposes of seeking out practices of comparison, it is clear that the two species of monarchy are being set up in paral-lel. In the event, one is represented typically by France, one by England. However, this is only part of the comparative story: The second framing comparison is the contrast between the Civil Law and the English or Common Law. In Chapter 19, the chancellor moves to answer the Prince’s question as to whether the “laws of Eng-land deserve to be adjudged as fitting, effective, and convenient for this kingdom of England as the civil laws are for the Empire.” Then he says an interesting thing:
“Comparisons, indeed, Prince, as I remember you said at one time, are reputed odi-ous, and so I am not fond of making them but you will be able to gather more effec-tively whether one more richly deserves praise than the other, not from my opin-ion, but from those points wherein they differ, the superiorities of the more ex-cellent law will appear after due reflection. Let us, therefore, bring forward some cases of this sort, so that you can weigh in a fair balance which of the laws shows its superiorities better and more justly”.46
First, this maxim reveals a self-conscious reference to John Lydgate’s conclusion about the pernicious character of comparing, but one also learns from Fortescue the reasons why comparison is deemed valuable. He makes clear that comparison is a form of demonstration. Certainly, on that basis, one can imagine both the illustrations of the cadaver tombs and the discussions of Walter of Henley coming to mind. In taking this mode, Sir John turns to the things themselves in conjunction with each other rather than to his own “opinions.” The idea is that comparative thinking forces a sort of discipline onto those making the judgement.
The method of observation via comparison would seem to be a strong tendency of Fortescue’s thought. “In order that these things may appear more clearly to you, consult your experience of both governments; begin with the results of only royal government, such as that with which the king of France rules his subjects; then examine the practical effect of the royal and political government, such as that with which the king of England rules over his subject people.”47His injunction here to
“consult your experience of both governments” really lays the stress on reflection as investigation. This move has the effect of bringing things together in tandem in order to draw out further concrete reflection. This is the cognitive and logical core of comparison as a mode of thought.
In substance, Fortescue moves through a series of targeted examples and com-pares the facts—as he sometimes fancifully sees them—and opens out the
argu-(4th series, 1934): 117–147 and Felix Gilbert, Sir John Fortescue’s ‘dominium regale et politicum’, in:Medievalia et Humanistica, II (1944), 88–97.
46 Fortescue/Lockwood,On the Laws and Governance of England, 29.
47 Fortescue/Lockwood,On the Laws and Governance of England, 49.
ments and logics that allow one law to be assessed in this limited respect against the other. The examples are the use of juries rather than mere witnesses; the use of torture; the different definitions of a bastard; or the question of maternal versus paternal importance in the legal status of children. His conclusion is perhaps un-surprising, because he finds that the civil law is deficient in justice. More important for the dynamics of comparing, Fortescue can properly be cited as the origin for a cluster of comparative attitudes between France and England with considerable resonance in English national reflection.
The discussion of legal comparison can widen out to social and ethnic compar-ison, and it did so naturally within Fortescue—in part, because his analysis of the difference between France and England is based partly on a perception that two very wealthy countries had, in part because of their legal constitutions, produced very different results for their people. According to him, the French people suf-fered arbitrary billeting of the king’s armies, they had to pay tax if they wanted an essential such as salt, and they were so impoverished that they had to drink wa-ter; whereas to quote him, in England, “They do not drink water, except those who sometimes abstain from other drinks by way of devotional or penitential zeal.”48
This needs a lot more reflection and investigation, but the emergence of the popular national kingdom especially in the context of warfare might well have pro-vided an impetus for comparative political thinking. In that realm, as often as not, comparison’s otiose quality was easier to overlook than within the realm of personal and moral reflection. Certain sorts of comparison tended to social disharmony, as Lydgate argued. But comparison across national lines not only helped to inscribe those national lines, but to give national or ethnic units their own content, and this included validating pride or superiority. Here we can compare Bacon’s thinking on religion and Fortescue’s on laws to see how comparison enabled sharper, more ob-jective reflection, even as it might work to strengthen the prejudice built into the framework.49When it came to nations, comparison was less important, because the odium was perhaps more acceptable.
If in personal religious or ethical life, comparison was apparently frowned upon, its methodological powers of demonstration, with a hint of the objective, could brush off such incivility in other quarters. War and the needs of the king-dom wanted the truth that comparison might deliver. Other sorts of comparative 48 Fortescue/Lockwood, On the Laws and Governance of England, 52.
49 This was by no means a natural path. A work of nationalist vigour, such as George Warner (ed.),The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power 1436, Oxford 1926, shows rel-atively little clearly comparative thought. There is arguably even less in John Gough Nichols (ed.),William Worcestre’s Boke of Noblesse, London 1860: for Worcestre the French might be dishonourable but they and the English are not really compared. Indeed, if there is a com-parative turn it comes in the guise of learning lessons from history, a potentially interesting avenue for further reflection.
practices, however, such as whether money was weighed correctly so that bread could be sold honestly, became routinized practices or networks. They remained comparisons but methodological ones. This does not mean that they might not gather political importance later when the poor were urged to eat cake or when the use of the metric system might have meant selling beer or milk in some size that was not an old-fashioned pint.
Tracing the differences between one sort of comparison and another, seeing how they worked together and worked against each other, will be the big job in un-derstanding the dynamics of comparison in medieval England or anywhere else. It would not be right from this selective survey to say that comparison was a common mode of reflection in medieval England. One might argue that it was an embed-ded form in terms of market operations and money transactions. However, in social and ethical life, it developed a complicated and limited place. Its disruptive charac-ter in some social contexts was at least suspected. The religious element here was important too. The suspicion that Lydgate brought was not isolated. One should trust that Fortescue saw his point in earnest, even if he was willing to push care-fully forward. It is an interesting moral turn, attempting, in the very moments that comparison was rearing its social head, to push back against it. A sermon of around 1400 stressed that looking at each other’s religious performance when we hoped to be saved was pernicious. The preacher feared the logic of competition, making people act as if it were a race to heaven; and for him, that idea was part of what was wrong with much contemporary religion, “We shulden reste in this hope that we shal come to hevene, and leve ich veyne comparisouns.”50These lines come from work associated with that proto-Protestant heresy, native to England, known as Lollardy, initiated by the Oxford philosopher John Wyclif. Here one finds com-parison dangerous to the soul. Vain comcom-parisons indeed. In the end, one finds that the tentative medieval use of comparison examined here has turned up some rather revolutionary comparers of law and religion, but also some strong and perhaps for-gotten warnings about the perils of using comparison at all. Medieval ambivalence toward comparison set limits to its use.
50 Thomas Arnold (ed.),Select English Works of John Wyclif, volume 1: Sermons on the Gospels,Oxford 1869. Sermon XVII for the “the sevententh sondai aftir trinite”, 42. These are not now taken to be by Wyclif but by his followers.
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