The medieval/early modern ones were plenty damn lazy, given that “not working for a living” was pretty much the definition of their social identity and actually doing a day’s work would be acting like a serf.
However, I would say the main difference is that the medieval/early modern nobility had two things that occupied a good deal of their time:
- estate management: even though most of the “shop floor” work was done by stewards and bailiffs and the like, the lords did spend a lot of time on the management side of land management.
- a monopoly on political power: in the premodern era, pretty much all jobs in politics were held by nobles or nobles who had joined the clergy; there were seats in Parliaments or Diets or Estates, there were places at court or in royal government/administration, there were judicial positions, there was the aristocratic domination of the army, etc.
After the economic/social/cultural/political transformations of the 17th-20th centuries that could collectively be described as “modernity,” the nobility lost those “places” in society. On the land side, they either lost a lot of their land or shifted their money into more liquid capital (which meant they could move to the city) or gave into the need for fully professional management (ditto, with a side of absentee landlordism). On the politics side, the rise of mass democracies, professionalized civil services, and militaries, abetted in no small part by the fact that the aristocracy had enthusiastically blundered their way into tons of increasingly bloody wars meant that noble titles shifted from a necessity to a liability.
What was left was their traditional pursuit of the “gentle life.”
“Those who have not lived in the eighteenth century in the years before the Revolution…” yada yada yada…
Speaking of which what do you make of the phenomenon in the eighteenth century highlighted by some historians and mentioned by Mike Duncan in his first podcast on the French Revolution, the fact that the feudal hierarchy prevented some aristocrats from engaging in merchant trade and that some merchants wanted to be aristocrats. You also see that during the Renaissance, where the Medici started out as upwardly mobile banking magnates and ended up becoming decadent feudal nobility.
Oh man, that’s a really contested question in the historiography, in no small part because of how Marx based a lot of his theory about the bourgeoisie being a progressive force in history on the supposed conflict between them and the backwards feudal nobility during the French Revolution. The problem is that, as subsequent historians have discovered, a lot of the biggest industrialists and capitalists in France on the eve of the Revolution were noblemen in the mold of the Redwynes, and most of the bourgeoisie in France in 1789 were not industrialists or capitalists (although this would change enormously after the nobility were wiped off the map and the Industrial Revolution actually started to emerge in France, where it came a bit later than the UK) but rather a combination of liberal professionals (many of whom were working for the monarchical state, especially the lawyers) and rentiers who lived off of the returns from public sector bonds and who tended to aspire to join the nobility.
So it’s complicated: there were plenty of aristocrats who were intensely capitalistic in their behavior, and there were plenty of aristocrats who hated capitalism because of the way that it elevated the nouveau riche above those with noble status but nothing else. Likewise, there were some bourgeoisie who wanted to become aristocrats and others who wanted to tear down the very idea of nobility.
Generally, I think it depended on one’s position relative to the economic and social changes going on: if you were a nobleman with the liquid capital to invest in the commercial and industrial revolutions, it was easy to shrug off the taboos against being “in trade”; if you were a nobleman who was skint, you tended to reinforce those taboos as a defensive reaction to the loss of relative status. If you were a bourgeois who was successful in making their way up the ladder from lawyer to judge to nobleman or from rentier to courtier, than you were just fine with the idea of aristocracy; if you were a bourgeois who had been shut out of further advancement because some titled idiot had snatched up the political office or military commision you’d been counting on, resentment could easily replace aspiration.
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