High Social Status and the Right To Do Violence

What was the “system of noble combat?” It rested on a basic legal idea very alien to the modern mind: the idea that there was an intimate connection between high social status and the right to do violence. As [historian Jonathan] Dewald writes, the pre-eighteenth-century nobility had “habits of violence, public and private.” More than that, they had as a matter of law privileges of violence. Nobles were marked off from their social inferiors not just by their titles, not just by their dress, not just by their wealth, but also by their privileges, symbolic or real, of inflicting violence on others. Historically these privileges of public and private violence included “high justice” (the privilege of sentencing dependents to death), the privilege of hunting, the privilege of thrashing inferiors, and the complex privilege that goes by the name of “the right to bear arms.” The character of these privileges varied over the centuries, but from the central Middle Ages onward the symbolism of the law of noble status was consistently a symbolism of the “right of the stronger,” as the medievalist Wolfgang Schild has put it. Noble status was largely defined and displayed by the right, whether or not exercised, to commit violent acts.

[Historian Johan] Huizinga’s “noble combat” was prominent among these symbolically charged privileges. High status was partly defined by the privilege of doing violence not only to inferiors but also between equals, and aristocracy, as one medievalist has said, with a shade of exaggeration, was based “first and foremost on the capacity to assert oneself in and through combat.” In that sense, engaging in combat was closely akin to such acts as sentencing one’s dependents to death: it was a resonant marker of high status rich in the symbolism of “the right of the stronger.”

— The Verdict of Battle, pp. 141

Author’s emphasis in italic. Mine is in bold.