The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck
risk of similar treatment. However, making such punishment acceptable to those punished and to their families and communities, so that they submit to this treatment without revolt, is not easy. And here again, the king—the secular power—is dependent on the priest as the spiritual legitimizer. If the king as punisher is merely the tool to interpret and carry out the will of the gods, then he has to punish or he himself will be upsetting the gods, and all will suffer. So, the punishing becomes sacred—a sacrifice for the gods to keep them benevolent—disobedience to the king is sacrilege, a sin, and the whole social hierarchy, with its extraction of wealth for the few from the work of the many, gains a sacred aura, ordained by the gods.
Now, to make this all work, ordinary people can’t know much about the spiritual forces. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need priests to tell them what offends the gods and what might regain their protection. In societies that are not so unequal, where there is no wealthy elite, where everyone has the right to use the resources they need—as probably the chiefdoms included in Tsenacommacoh had been several generations earlier—religious knowledge is pretty widely available to all. Nobody needs special priests, and thus there is no way of holding the will of the gods over people’s heads. But as a society consolidates power in fewer hands, knowledge of the spiritual forces becomes secret, passed on and accessible only to specially trained and appointed religious authorities. In both diarchic England and diarchic Tsenacommacoh the religious authorities made a lot of the decisions about who had transgressed against the gods and the social order, and thus about who needed to be punished. But the priest can’t punish alone, any more than the king can; the priest can’t actually force people to submit to punishment. It is the king who has guards and armies—people to carry out violence. So the priest, though superior to the king, is nevertheless dependent on the king for material support—food, shelter, temple maintenance, and protection—and because the priest has no coercive power and cannot carry out the wishes of the gods without the king. Neither can function without the other. Without the priest, however, the king has no right to exist: the king’s legitimacy and ability to rule come from the priest.9
For both the English and the Powhatan, the sacred was the source of all authority.10 The Church for the English, the shaman for the Powhatan, spoke for that authority. In England, as in other Christian-ruled countries, it had, until the Reformation, taken the Pope or his representative to perform the ceremony that made a king a king. Consecration made him king “by the grace of God,” no longer merely a natural human, and invested him with the power to act.11 Thus for centuries in England, as in other countries ruled by Christians, sovereignty was a two-part enterprise, with the king exercising power, but only by the authority granted him by God by way of the Church.12
For aristocrats, both English in the centuries preceding Jamestown and Powhatan shortly before Jamestown, diarchy had been a useful tool, lending spiritual authority to their accumulation of wealth through tribute in money or valuables and through requiring labor or produce from ordinary people who had nothing to give but their labor or the fruits of that labor. The hierarchy that determined who gave to whom, and everyone’s position in it, was set by birth; it was God-given and natural. The spiritual authority in dual sovereignty does not necessarily have to provide justification for the extraction of wealth by an elite. However, if state formation is underway, the structure of dual sovereignty is easily amenable to that role. Threats to the legitimacy of the developing state and to elite extraction of wealth can be defined as sin, an offense to the gods and a threat to the well-being of the people. The king is then obliged to take action. The secular power carries out the punishment of sin, backed by the legitimizing spiritual authority, so that challenges to elite rule are less likely. Both the developing Powhatan empire and the English feudal state were based on such ideas.
However, as the kings in Europe in the centuries leading up to Jamestown generally began trying to get more of the wealth produced by ordinary people, this system became an annoyance. Although the backing of the Church was critical to the king’s legitimacy in exercising what force he could, there was a downside for kings and lords. Lower-level elites and the Church could keep too much of the wealth, so less got passed up the hierarchy to the king. In a diarchic structure, economic and political elites don’t have full control even if they do own the means of production; religious elites carry considerable influence and are in a position to manipulate the ideology that supports the power of kings and lords, potentially a threat to elite control. The king must, like Wahunsonacock, rule within the bounds of tradition and live up to the expectations of the priesthood and nobility for religiously defined correct kingly behavior—he is, to some extent, held in check by their interpretation of what a godly king should do.
In the old English feudal structures, control was exercised locally; punishing power was in the hands of local lords, authorized by the local church. The state in this system was a weak one, without a full monopoly on the use of force, and the religious institution was particularly strong, as least in comparison with modern states.13 Since successful exploitation depends on the ability to punish, the power to punish would have to move into the hands of the king if the king were to exploit directly, rather than through regional lords. To take more for himself, a king needed to curtail the power of the local lords.14 So when a king wanted to strengthen his position, a very likely consequence was an ongoing struggle among king, lords, and church over who has the right to punish, along with an interconnected struggle between strong church and weak state, between pope and king.15
In England, the feudal system of control broke down as the Crown began to break the power of the local lords, but when, as a result, lords could no longer enforce punishment, the king had a law and order issue.16 The king did not have a secure grip on the use of violence and therefore couldn’t punish effectively enough to keep public order, and was as dependent on honor, magnificent display, and the pageantry of office as on force to maintain his position—as was Wahunsonacock.17 Both had a plurality, not a monopoly, on punishment and on the use of force it entails, although punishing power in England was consolidated further up the hierarchy than it had been in the Powhatan polity before Wahunsonacock’s manipulations of the system.18
WHEN THE ENGLISH FIRST ENCOUNTERED Wahunsonacock and his entourage, they described him as imperial, ruling over a large number of subordinate polities, with all the splendor and power they associated with kingly behavior. He was a man of regal bearing surrounded by a deeply respectful populace who regarded him with “great fear and adoration,” a man of a “Majestie … which oftentimes strkyes awe and sufficient wonder in our [English] people.”19 There is no doubt that they saw him as royal in the same sense that they saw their own King James. Had they arrived maybe a hundred years earlier, things would have been different. They would have found instead of Tsenacommacoh a number of small independent chiefdoms, each with its own diarchic structure. Each would have its own werowance and priest exercising joint sovereignty, together making decisions about punishment and war, and collecting tribute. A lot of that tribute would have returned to the commoners who produced it, in exchange for labor, and as feasts and as gifts associated with assembling a fighting force when needed. Other gifts would have been acquired through trade; the werowance would in turn give them to high-ranking people, thus helping to ensure their loyalty.
However, sometime before Wahunsonacock, this structure had begun to change—there are a lot of arguments among scholars as to why, but it does appear that trade with Europeans or the presence of a few colonies did not initiate the change.20 However, once started, the consolidation of small chiefdoms into larger polities may have accelerated through a kind of ripple effect related to the European presence. Those polities that had to deal most directly with Europeans may have consolidated in defense; or perhaps consolidation occurred because gaining control of trade with Europeans gave one polity the clout to conquer the neighbors. For thousands of years, control of trade had enabled some polities to gain dominance over others. Their power had waxed and waned over the course of history, just as happened in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. The arrival of Europeans was at first just another source of potential trade and power. But as one polity became stronger, others may have also consolidated power, a kind of Cold War effect: if you have dangerous neighbors gaining strength, you may try to keep up. Another theory about the Powhatan consolidation is that epidemics of European diseases preceded the actual