Gotham Diary:
Chinese Music
15 July 2013

We were lucky with the weather. It was grey, and a bit sprinkly, but cool (coolish), and breezy — comfortable balcony weather. Almost everyone was out there. And then, about an hour after the party was supposed to end, the restaurant where I’d made a reservation for dinner called to ask if we were still coming. We were! On his way out, Will went through the rooms, calling out, “The party’s over! The party’s over!”

We were celebrating the engagement of Ms NOLA and Messir di T, and most of the guests were friends of theirs whom we hadn’t met. I was not surprised to find that they made up a clever and appealing bunch — what other sorts of friends would the happy couple have? I kept thinking of them as “the young people,” but that’s kind of silly, as they’re all in their mid- to late-thirties and quite grown up. You could tell as much from what they didn’t drink: wine and Arnold Palmers. The hard liquor was seriously dented, and a good deal of the beer. Still, I could have had twice as many guests, and we shouldn’t have run out of anything. Not a problem: aside from three gigantic bottles of seltzer, I’ll go through the leftovers in a couple of months. Except for the sideboard by the kitchen, the apartment looks as though nothing happened.

It was also Ms NOLA’s birthday, and when she left our party, she went to another. The wedding will take place in October, in King’s County. I realized that I’ve known Ms NOLA for a quarter of her life; our friendship is only a slight bit older than this blog.

For the party, we hired a bartender and a server, and I ordered canapes from Agata & Valentina. (We could have used a few more of them.) Bill and Jhon ran the party beautifully, but they complimented me, when they left, for being “pretty organized.” Most of my preparations for the party involved tasks that I had been putting off for a few months, but I did spend an afternoon reconfiguring the kitchen for the party — clearing out the refrigerator, clearing off the countertops. The burners on the stove were almost completely covered by a large, sturdy pastry board. One of the tubs in which Will’s toys are stored in the blue room was emptied for beer and ice, while a third, nesting under the other tub, went into the kitchen as an ice chest. (The tubs come from Gardener’s Supply, and are as colorful as they are versatile. Every once in a while, somebody gets plastic right.)

When the party started, I found myself drifting into a slight haze. There was nothing more for me to do, except of course to be sociable, and, while that came easily enough, I could not quite unbend my mind from the four-day exercise of getting ready. Also, Kathleen had booked our Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco — a happy event that, right now, has  melancholy undertones. (I am not quite at liberty to say why we’ll be flying across the country for the holiday — not just yet, but I’m sure that the astute reader will guess.) I could not, in any case, snap out of a certain pensiveness that, while it didn’t interfere with my duties as a host, made it difficult to remember much in detail. Suddenly, an hour after it was supposed to end, the party was over!

But everyone seemed to have had a good time, and Ms NOLA said something really quite lovely in her note of thanks the next day. I couldn’t ask for more.

***

At dinner last night, Kathleen asked, and I can’t recall quite why it was on her mind, where the English rule of primogeniture came from. (This is the rule according to which land passes automatically to a landholder’s eldest son upon his death. It must be borne in mind that land could not be devised by testament.) It had been a long time since I’d read any English legal history — I’ve been more concerned with the somewhat disingenuous invention of the feudal system by Italian lawyers, in the eleventh century — and my brain flashed a COBWEBS! alert. But in my stumbling response, I got it mostly right, as we found when, back at home, I pulled down Volume II of Pollack & Maitland, and I read the chapter on the law of inheritance to Kathleen. The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I is mostly the world of William Maitland, and his crisp, irony-edged style is beautifully Edwardian (that would be Edward VII, of course, and a bit in advance, as the book was published in 1895). I was surprised at how really readable he is, even when laying out abstruse cases. Infusing the thousand-plus pages is Maitland’s conviction that the development of medieval English law, while never systematic, was always driven by a desire for efficiency. That may sound strange, even anachronistic, but in fact it was the simplifications that rebounded on themselves, creating the complications that, by the Nineteenth Century, made wholesale reform necessary. (And, indeed, today’s British law is a bullet train to our American Toonerville Trolley. It has occurred to me that we declared independence so that we could preserve the ancient sport of adversarial litigation.) Maitland is amused, almost to the point of condescension, by the attempts of Glanvil and Bracton — legists writing before and after 1200 — to explain the law of their day as if it were governed by philosophical principles, but he is also mindful of the legal historians of his own century, many of whom were quite similarly naive.

It is as a general rule convenient for the lord that he should have but one heir to deal with; but as already said, the lord’s convenience has here to encounter a powerful force, a very ancient and deep-seated sense of what it right and just, and even in the most feudal age of the most feudal country, the most feudal inheritances, the great fiefs that were almost sovereignties, were partitioned among sons, while as yet the king of the French would hardly have been brought to acknowledge that these beneficia were being inherited at all. It is the splendid peculiarity of the Norman duchy that it was never divided. And, as this example will show, it was not always for the lord’s advantage that he should have but one heir to deal with: the king at Paris would not have been sorry to see that great inheritance split among co-heirs. And so we can not believe that our Henry III was sorry when his court, after prolonged debate, decided that the palatinate of Chester was divisible among co-heiresses. A less honest man than Edward I would have lent a ready ear to Bruce and Hastings when they pleaded for a partition of Scotland. That absolute and uncompromising form of primogeniture which prevails in England belongs, not to feudalism in general, but to a highly centralized feudalism, in which the king has not much to fear from the power of his mightiest vassals, and is strong enough to impose a law that in his eyes has many merits, above all the great merit of simplicity.

In my rambling way, this is how I answered Kathleen’s question. English primogeniture was a consequence of  the “splendid peculiarity of the Norman duchy.” The Norman story is one of the most exciting in dynastic history. In little more than two centuries, a band of Norse brigands pillaging the Seine and the rest of the northwest peninsula (or quasi peninsula) of what is now France transformed themselves into the liege men of a leader on whom a Frankish king bestowed the title of count; the count’s successors took to calling themselves dukes; and in 1066 Duke William successfully invaded England and assumed the crown. At first, he and the Saxon aristocracy tried to get along, but they didn’t try very hard, and soon the antagonistic Saxons were eliminated and replaced by loyal Normans in one of the great land grabs of all time. William became, without a doubt, the most powerful man in Europe. Unlike the Continental rulers, he did not have to worry about local customs and ancient practices, because he faced no powerful opposition with an interest in upholding them; whatever got in his way, he paved right over it.

Maitland’s remark about the French king’s attitude toward the hereditability of beneficia — an earlier term for what would later be regarded as feudal holdings — is worth pausing over. When William was paramount in England, the French king had only just consolidated his control of the Ile de France, a territory much smaller than Normandy (not to mention England). Nominally king of France, he was effectively king of the Ile de France, period. He could squawk all he liked about the hereditability of beneficia, which, back in the days of Charlmemagne, reverted to the crown upon the death of the holder, so that the king could hand over the land’s income to some new strongman. As royal power dwindled, the sons of strongmen, often strongmen themselves, did as they liked, and the king might mumble some words about appointing the new strongman to take his father’s place without so much as a breath about inheritance. The French king never had the power — not even in the blazing days of the Sun King — to lay down any general law of inheritance, or to ride roughshod over local practices. It took the French Revolution to sweep all of those away, seven hundred years after William, and six hundred after his equally formidable great-grandson, Henry II, bent English law to their liking.

It took a while, as I read, to remember the meanings of such terms as scutage and sokeman, gavelkind and borough English, but when Maitland began talking about seisin (as a key concept in the inheritance of land by half-blooded siblings), I had to put the book down. We had a professor in law school who was fond of saying that English property law was like “Chinese music,” full of notes that make no sense to Western ears. In fact, Chinese music is Top Forty in contrast to property law, and seisin is one of the strangest notes at all. It is unlikely that Maitland’s explanation, which I am looking forward to re-reading, might be surpassed.