Addressing the Public: Rituals, Gestures and Charters

Abstract

We have seen how the size of a public mattered, as did the location in which it gathered. But how was this public addressed? Answering this question brings us to the core of the differing traditions of English and German historical scholarship. Among historians of Angevin and Plantagenet England, greater emphasis is commonly placed on the tools and mechanisms of royal administration, and relatively little attention has been paid to how these formed part of a process of political communication. In the context of rebellions, for instance, the primary focus has been on nature and the importance of financial and bureaucratic reform to rebels.1 In Germany, by contrast, scholarship has increasingly focused on what Gerd Althoff has termed ‘symbolic forms of communication’,2 that is, on ideas, concepts and claims conveyed largely through gestures, ceremonies and rituals,3 rather than (though not necessarily to the complete exclusion of) the spoken or written word. This has served to exacerbate and deepen a perceived gulf between German and English politics: the one administrative—bureaucratic,4 the other concerned with issues of honour and ritual.5