No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
A complaint among twelfth-century English moralists and chroniclers was that monarchs were choosing “men raised from the dust” to be their ministers and counselors instead of members of old noble families. They charged that the king was choosing as his courtiers orfamiliareslow-born men—plebes, ignobiles, evenrusticiorservi—allowing them to usurp places that belonged to the aristocracy. This chorus of complaint began in the time of William the Conqueror's sons. Only then didnobilesandcurialesbegin to divide into two distinct groups, and new administrative posts provided opportunities for new men to rise to greater wealth and influence. The early twelfth-century monastic chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that William the Conqueror “raised up the lowest of his Norman followers to the greatest riches.” Often cited is his complaint about Henry I, “So he pulled down many great men [illustres] from positions of eminence …. He ennobled others of base stock [de ignobili stirpe] who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favors on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans.” The author of theGesta Stephanialso complained that Henry I took men of low birth [ex plebeio genere], who had entered his service as court pages and enriched them, endowed them with wide estates, and made them his chief officials. Another chronicler, Richard of Hexham, made a similar comment, although in admiring rather than condemning language, “He oppressed many nobles because of their faithlessness; he elevated to high honors many commoners [ignobiles], whom he found to be upright and loyal to him.”
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.