I’ve been reading a lot of medieval/renaissance history books lately, and the royal courts certainly come up a lot. I don’t quite understand what the people in the royal court actaully did. I know they dressed well, and that sometimes they slept with each other, but surely that wasn’t their main role? Were they mainly around for entertainment? Or advice? Or did everyone sit around bowing to each other for eight hours a day?
They did…well, court stuff. Even in a feudal society, where individual barons and knights have a lot of individual power, the king still has to oversee the entire thing, and spend some time governing, and crushing various barons, or else the country would go to pot. Of course, the king couldn’t do all this alone, so he had a royal cabinet. In England, in the middle ages, you have positions like the Lord High Chancellor, who is the official mouthpiece of the king and his chief advisor (and, who interestingly enough, was usually a member of the clergy(, the Lord High Treasurer, who kept the books, the Lord Chamberlain, who was in charge of the royal family’s personal property and served as a royal appointment secretary, the Lord High Justice, who oversaw the law courts, and a bunch of other positions.
Of course, all these people would have assistants themselves. The King and the Queen would also have a personal staff, aside from the professional staff, so you’ve got your ladies-in-waiting, for example, or your court musician or painter. You’ve also got people who are wards of the king, or just live there, for whatever reason…various relations, for example. You’re also going to find what today would be called lobbyists…noblemen, clergymen, and distinquished commoners, who all want the king to do something about something.
And, basically, there’s your royal court. There was a bunch of sleeping with each other, and entertainment at court…lot of gambling, a bunch of hunting, etc. There were even more internal politics. Since, in a governmental system like that, your fortunes were dependent on whether or not the King liked you and would give you power, there was a lot of jockeying for position, and trying to get noticed,
Basically, it’s a lot like asking, “What do the people at the White House actually do?” There’s a lot of dressing well, entertainment, and, as we’ve seen in the past, sometimes sleeping with each other, but the main role is administration. Consider the White House a modern court. It might help.
The historian, J. M. Beattie, in his monograph on the court of George I, answered this question with the succinct comment that, ‘Dukes did not open doors for themselves’.
For many royal servants, their job was literally to stand around bowing to each other for eight hours a day. (Bowing while sitting was definitely a faux pas.) Partly this was show - the more servants he seemed to have, the more powerful the king would appear - and partly for security, to make sure that only the right people got access to the monarch. Other servants were required to prepare the meals, to clean the palaces, to maintain the gardens and to provide transport. The numbers soon added up. Remember that it was not just kings who had large households. Any great magnate employed dozens, even hundreds, of servants. Kings had to keep up with, or, even better, outshine the Jones.
Large households also made political sense. Royal service was an honour and there were few easier ways to gain the support of a powerful noble than to give him and his relatives some cushy jobs at court. Astute kings knew this and usually created jobs specifically for this purpose. The favourite way of doing so was to divide existing jobs so that several people held it in rotation over the course of the year. This means that figures quoted for the size of royal households can sometimes be misleading as not all the servants would have been on duty at the same time. This also gave the servants the chance to return home and show off to their neighbours.
Finally, royal servants, or at least the more important ones, gave the king people to hang out with.
Powerful nobles (with their retinues of relatives, servants, etc) were expected to spend considerable periods at court. This suited the king because it made it easier for him to keep an eye on them, and judge how loyal and reliable they were. But even more so it suited them, because (a) it reflected well upon them that the king required their attendance, and (b) it kept them at the centre of power, where they could meet other powerful nobles and senior government officials, and they could be more influential than if they spent their entire time in whatever part of the country they happened to own their estates.