Was the english king/royal family also “not as important as we usually think there were” or is that more of french thing?

theaudientvoid:

racefortheironthrone:

It’s really complicated, and depends what period you’re talking about. So jere’s how I’d explain the relative power of English and French monarchs:

Under Charlesmagne, there was a relatively powerful bureaucratic state left over from the days when his ancestors who served as “mayors of the palace” (i.e, majordomo) to the Merovingian kings gradually usurped authority from their erstwhile monarchs (not unlike the Tyrells and the Gardeners). The counts (the main direct vassals of the king) were supervised by palace inspectors, whose job it was to keep an eye on the counts and in extreme cases recommend they be removed from fiefdoms for disloyalty or incompetence – as fiefdoms were considered a gift from the Emperor for the lifetime of the count.

At this time, the kings of the Franks were substantially more powerful than any of the warring heptarchs of the Anglo-Saxons. 

After Charlesmagne’s death, this system gradually broke down, partially because his empire was divided between his three sons and then a lot of infighting took place between and within each of the three sections, but more significantly because the weakening of central authority empowered the regional nobility. The assembly of nobles got the right to decide who got appointed as inspectors, inspectors were now chosen from within districts, all of which meant that they became weak and corrupt. At the same time, fiefdoms became seen as property of the landholder to be inherited by their sons, and taking away a fiefdom was seen as a violation of the social contract. Over time, this meant that the king could only maintain power by giving away land, but then didn’t have land to give away in the future to keep their followers loyal, and it meant that the king’s own land diminished:

At the same time, in England, the Kingdom of Wessex was one of the few Saxon kingdoms to survive the Vikings, and under Alfred the Great reformed its military, its taxation system, military and civilian infrastructure, and legal system, which allowed the West Saxons to annex London, Kent, and west Mercia, then eastern Mercia and East Anglia, then Northumbria, at which point they controlled virtually all of England.

When William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson in 1066, this entire kingdom fell into his personal possession, an enormous windfall in feudal terms. And the Norman Kings of England managed the hell out of their new acquisition, what with the Domesday Book, the invention of the Exchequer, etc. 

For a while, this gave the Kings of England (who were still Dukes of Normandy, remember) more clout than the King of France, especially when the Kings of England managed to get their hands on the western half of France (note the dark blue on the map below represents the lands of the King of France):

However, French Kings from Phillip Augustus onwards were able to capitalize on disunity within the Angevin Empire, the growing wariness of French noblemen in eastern France about the expansion of said Empire, and the troubled reigns of Richard I and John I, to expand his holdings at the expense of the English. Normandy, Anjou, Vermandois, Touraine, and Auvergne were retaken by Phillip Augustus, then Louis the Lion seized control over Toulouse through the Albigensian Crusade, giving the French king a far more contiguous realm.

The English bounced back in the early phase of the Hundred Years War, allowing them to reconquer much of what they’d lost in southwestern France as well as adding the Pale of Calais into their territory, but even at their height they never got back their former north/northwestern provinces. 

Eventually, however, the French recovered, and the mobilization against the English allowed the French monarchy to further their consolidation over their own territory. 

It’s interesting. The English nobility at the same time had both less and more power than their French counterparts. English nobles had far less judicial authority over their own lands; the counties were administered by royally appointed sheriffs rather than counts and the King’s justices reserved for themselves the right to decide most non-trivial legal cases. At the same time, though, English nobles got to sit in parliament, and in so doing, got much more of a say in how the country as a whole was run.

True. Although in no small part, Parliament was there to ensure voluntary compliance with taxation and thus boost crown revenue, further empowering the crown. Power has many axes…