| Abstract | Paper -a:
To many nowadays it seems self-evident that social structure in the Middle Ages was based upon wealth and military power, but that was not necessarily how medieval people perceived it. Saxo, and to a lesser extent Sven Aggesen and the Icelandic author of Knytlinga saga, equated those who were entitled to power and riches with those who had honour and civic and military virtue, whilst representing other groups (often seen as one group, populares or plebs) as fractious, gullible, greedy and disruptive to general order. This paper will look these attitudes in the light of other sources for Danish history of the 12th and 13th centuries, such as the law codes and letters, and question whether the privileged had any empathy at all with those who were less fortunate.
Paper -b:
Although the distinction between the poor and the rich was indisputably clear throughout the middle ages, there appeared from the 12th-century onwards some cases where low-born men managed to climb the social ladder through recruitment as officials in royal courts. However, this kind of mobility in the rigid class structure of medieval England caused heated criticism, if not attack, among the clerical strand of the courtly milieu. In this paper, I will discuss the emergence of this criticism among 12th-century courtly clerics in the court of Henry II of England as a topos in the genre of court satire.
Paper -c:
In the proposed paper we are analyzing the controversial nature of the relations between the two attributive characteristics of the Norwegian and the French elites of the 13th century: fortune and authority. We will focus on the alterations of the financial status that occurred both inside the elite and in its relations to the whole society. Our analysis of the structures of power is based on several criteria: personal and quantitative variations of the group membership, the structural and functional connections inside the elite. The proposed comparative analysis validates the question of similarity and singularity of the historical processes considered.
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