Late Medieval Polities and the Problem of Corruption

Abstract

This chapter explores how politics and private interest affected the anticorruption apparatus gradually put in place by French, English and Portuguese kings between 1250 and 1500. This apparatus was comprised of judicial prosecution and procedures for appointing and replacing officials, rules defining the duties and duration of office, improved record-keeping and accounting practices and mechanisms for administrative supervision. The chapter also argues that these royal regimes were structurally incapable of punishing and restraining corruption effectively and in a sustained manner, essentially because they could not control political society directly and because political constraints and their dependence on informal service often made a strict approach to corruption injudicious. Late medieval states, therefore, were confronted with the dilemma of having to fight corruption with inadequate means and without unduly disturbing the social and political equilibrium on which their authority depended.

Wool Smuggling and the Royal Government in England, c.1337–63: Law Enforcement and the Moral Economy in the Late Middle Ages

“…It worked, therefore, through people occupied primarily with their own concerns, conflicts, and disputes, and the potential for this system to be directed by these private concerns was significant. 150 The influence of members of the landed aristocracy, for example, in shaping and sometimes appropriating the delegative nature of royal law in the localities for their own ends has long drawn historiographical attention. 151 In terms of the regulation of the export trade in particular, the royal council considered the customs service, staffed with officials who were supposed to hold property locally, to be permeated with corruption.…”