Daily Inspiration Quote by J. M. Roberts

A tidy jab at the myth of linear progress: Roberts compresses a millennium of European history into one humiliating contrast between Rome's public-facing legal confidence and medieval power's private illiteracy. The move is rhetorical as much as factual. By invoking laws "on boards in public places", he isn’t just describing an administrative practice; he’s staging a society where authority expects to be read, scrutinized, even contested by a sufficiently literate public. Literacy here is civic infrastructure, not personal self-improvement.

Then comes the twist of the knife: "even kings remained illiterate". The word even does the work, flipping our assumptions about hierarchy. If the top can’t read, the system can’t plausibly claim transparency. Law becomes something you hear, not something you can verify. That implies dependence: on clerics who mediate texts, on scribes who control record-keeping, on ritual and reputation over documentation. The subtext isn’t merely that medieval Europe was "backward", but that power without literacy is power that must be performed, delegated, and insulated from lay inspection.

Roberts, a big-sweep historian, is also signaling how fragile institutional memory can be. Rome’s posted law suggests standardization and a shared reference point; medieval illiteracy suggests governance that can be intensely personal, localized, and vulnerable to manipulation by whoever holds the pen. The line quietly frames literacy as political technology: when reading is common enough, authority has to speak in writing that can outlast it. When it isn’t, authority can survive on opacity.