Even though current historiography still preserves the concepts of ancient and medieval history devised in the nineteenth century, it is becoming steadily more apparent that these divisions – generally drawn up with political history in mind – are unsatisfactory for the historian of the economy or society. In these fields there is a longue durée from the decline of slavery in the third century to the first significant use of machine power in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, undeniable developments in the techniques of production or in the relations between men force us to mark out certain stages in this long period, one in which Europe entered on the stage of world history. At what point was there a transition from the shrunken and undynamic structures still associated with Germanic or Graeco-Roman custom (the two were in this respect very similar) to structures in which the relationships between men and men and a production generating profits announced a more ‘modern’ economic climate? The question is not otiose; the answer will determine the view one takes on the ‘infancy of Europe’. In fact, almost all the observations which one can make, whatever the preoccupations of individual historians, point to the tenth century as the age of growth, of take-off, of rising, or some such phrase. In 898 we find the word feodum used in southern France to mean a tenancy by military service; in 910 the foundation of Cluny opened up a new phase in the history of spirituality; in 920 villages began to move on to hilltops in central Italy; in 955 the Magyars were definitively beaten; in 970 the series of commercial contracts surviving from Venice began; in 980 the gold of the Catalan parias arrived at Barcelona, and there are other similar examples from all spheres of economic activity.
This transformation of the old world was indeed a ‘revolution’, if one is prepared to concede that the word does not have the same implications as it does in our own epoch but refers to a slow, indeed a very slow, transformation of the framework of human life. The judgements made by historians on this major turning point in the history of Europe are often marked by scholars’ own philosophical convictions. Those persuaded of the fundamental correctness of Marx’s analysis will see here the beginnings of a ‘feudal’ era, which set up, often violently, a kind of tacit contract between a lord who protects and a worker who feeds him; others who remain faithful to ‘Romanist’ theories will see a generally peaceful transformation from the structures inherited from antiquity to a newer version, determined by conditions equally new; others again will refuse to believe in this transformation and search ardently for proofs of continuity. I find it hard to believe that this latter group can be in the right: it seems to me fairly evident that a new order did indeed establish itself, one which did so with all the slowness familiar to the historical anthropologist but which nevertheless gradually coloured a society nine-tenths of which, it should hardly be necessary to repeat, lived in the countryside. It is necessary to begin by saying a few words about these country-dwellers.
First of all, the two feelings which until then had oppressed everyone in Europe – fear and violence – still dominated. Enthusiasm was not on the agenda; it may be that by the thirteenth century both feelings had come to be held in check, but it is hardly credible to say this about the millennium, even if the well-known ‘Terrors’ of that fateful year were produced by the dreams of romantic historians. Shortages constantly threatened; one could even say that with the population growing faster than technical progress, their grip tightened; the acts of cannibalism noted for 1033 are a well-known example of this. The fear of want, that fear which prostrated the faithful before an oppressive and vengeful God, did not end, then. Nonetheless, some solutions began to appear in relationships of neighbourhood, profession and family, which we shall return to later. As for the violence of the armati (warriors) and the ‘terrorism’ which they have been described as exercising: the barriers erected against it – justice and the Peace of God – were as yet perhaps not very effective, but unbridled vendetta and constant plunderings were on the decline after 1050 or so. The raiding by warriors, werra as it is known in the texts, continued to wreak havoc and misfortune, but it tended towards feud rather than ‘warfare’. Gratuitous cruelty and sadism were becoming individual rather than collective failings. The superiority of the stronger expressed itself increasingly in representative and symbolic behaviour: one had to astonish and provoke the admiration of those who could no longer be exploited unrestrictedly. To eat more than necessary, to distribute alms and gifts, not to move about except with a vast entourage, these were the marks of the dominant, the ‘noble’ man. In such a world of gift-giving, well known to anthropologists, the gesture took on its full value as a symbol: it validated all serious commitment, replaced writing, which was only just beginning to revive, and even speech; the latter, even in the form of oaths, only acquired force from the gestures which accompanied it. A final point, perhaps the most important one here: in southern Europe there was a written law, whether or not we call it Roman, and in the north such law had also been introduced in the writing of law-codes. But who knew how to read these except for a handful of professionals? It follows that the lot of men was largely governed by custom, both spoken and performed. Day-to-day attitudes were shaped by the past, all novelty being in principle both bad and dangerous; this conservatism of spirit was appropriate to a society slow to move. Historians may well attempt to classify individuals into small juridically defined groups, but in fact, in this period, people were what other people thought they were.
The slow expansion of this period, which was only just beginning before the millennium, presents historians, however aware they may be of the issue, with two problems which have still not been fully resolved. First, they are tempted to place the beginnings of these developments around the middle of the tenth century,that hidden turning point of medieval history.Here sources are so thin on the ground, especially north of the Loire and of the Alps, that one has to say in all honesty that we can assume but cannot prove. For this reason there is no shortage of historians to discuss the role played by the Carolingian era. Contrary to what is believed by German historians in particular, the role of the Carolingian dynasty is not a particularly interesting topic: its effects beyond the Channel or the Pyrenees, and even in southern France or Italy,were non-existent or negligible. But it is worth talking about the importance one should give to the period between 700 and 800 as a harbinger of things to come. Anglo-Saxon kings, Frisian merchants, Iberian princes, the Frankish aristocracy, the litterati of Italy created a movement which pre-dated Charlemagne, and one might even say that they made him possible. In matters of canon law, in the reinforcement of the nuclear family, in the reform of the church, in the revival of the role of the state, in the taste for antique culture, the period was not negligible. Nevertheless, I do not believe that the changes brought about were universal, and in the two areas to be dealt with here, the economy and rural society, the legacy of the ‘Carolingian era’ was minimal, and little of it can be traced after about 950 or 1000. A ‘mere surface ripple’, as Georges Duby has put it. The other problem is probably still more difficult: that of the ‘causes’ of the European awakening. This is a classic demonstration of the chicken-and-egg problem: what was cause, and what effect? Technical progress? But how can we determine it? An easing off of the assaults which had afflicted Europe since the third century? But there were still Vikings or Normans in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Magyars until the millennium and Saracens until the end of the eleventh century, quite apart from the internal werra, which was hardly a peaceful affair. Demographic expansion is something more certain, and we shall return to it, but where, when and why? Perhaps we can talk of a slight improvement in the climatic conditions in western Europe, favouring an increase in plant life and in human and animal life as well, because this is a datum which is clear, unquestionable and certainly not without effect. The evidence is indisputable: from 850/900 onwards the beech climbs the foothills of the Alps and the Bohemian mountains; the birch yields ground in Scotland and Scandinavia; both the sea and malaria retreat in the coastal marshes. I am not competent to say why these changes took place, but the Christians of this period, if they noticed these phenomena, might perhaps have seen in them the sign of a God finally appeased.
These Christians in their turn, even if they have not left us very numerous sources, did indeed note some of the essential changes which struck them: demographic growth, new family structures and the establishment of fortified residences are referred to in hagiography, biography and historiography, while charters register changes of fortune or status. Iconography remained impoverished and conventionalised, but rural archaeology has compensated for this, and in the last fifty years, especially in northern and north-western Europe, has provided new evidence on human habitat, tools and utensils. The ‘dark ages’ are lightening a little.
New Forms of Land-management
Since even excavations do not provide an indisputable image of what was going on before the millennium, textual evidence ought to alert the historian to the changes taking place amongst human groupings. The first sign of this is the appearance of new terms to denote equally new forms of exploitation of the soil: cella and curtis decline, and even villa tends to take on more of the meaning of ‘village’; mansus persists, as does hide, but the words lose their association with obligations and come to mean merely ‘a holding with a house’. Terms denoting fragments of land – sors, massa, quarterium, area, locus – follow close behind, and these features are evidently very different from the mansionale, villare and casale of an earlier period. At the same time unambiguous expressions underline the movement of population: congregatio hominum, instauratio tenimentorum. In short, there are obvious signs of a transition from the former fluidity in the rural habitat to the framework shaping the rural life with which we are familiar today. These are signs of a regrouping and a taking control of men, reassembled into fixed points within the cells of the seigneurie, a process which I have termed encellulement.
Besides the general causes for the upheavals which Europe knew at this time, spoken of earlier, various explanations have been offered for these concentrations of population. The decline of tribal wars, for example, and the turning by warriors to more local horizons have been used to explain the quest for authority and profit which required a closer control over the inhabitants of the countryside. So has a decline in rudimentary agricultural methods such as gathering, shifting animal husbandry and long-fallow cultivation, which imply a fixing of the cultivated area and a more determined exploitation of the uncultivated area. It has also been suggested that the evolution of family structure was accompanied by the presence or the persistence of human groupings such as the hundred (centena, hundreda) or even simply parishes. All these possible explanations – even though the prime mover in the chain of causation would still need to be identified – are not mutually exclusive, and none of them will be privileged here. But it will be necessary to examine the clearest signs of a movement whose beginnings are perhaps found between 920 and 950 om the southern flank of Europe, between 980 and 1050 in the region from the Atlantic coast to the Rhine, and still later beyond the Channel and the Rhine, even if this periodisation is perhaps principally determined by the survival of sources.
If the general tendency towards a disaggregation of the great domains of the early middle ages is borne in mind alongside the effects we have just seen, it seems certain that, by contrast with these elements of disintegration, there was a hard core of demesne lands which resisted all tendencies towards dismemberment, and there were even powerful trends towards the accumulation of lands, especially in the hands of churches and the chief holders of banal powers. Ecclesiastical documents, for example, show the abbey of St Emmeram in Regensburg holding 21% of its lands in demesne between 1000 and 1030; in England, the figures for the abbey of Burton and the bishopric of Winchester are 40% and 22% respectively. Establishments like Farfa or Monte Cassino in Italy, Seo d’Urgel or Liebana in Spain and Saint-Amand or Saint-Bavo in Flanders largely succeeded in reconstructing their patrimonies, often at the expense of allodial peasants who sought protection from these monasteries. As far as we can trace their activities, lay magnates did the same: in Catalonia, Provence and Latium, where documents reveal their activities after 950, there were substantial concentrations of estates (congregatio fundorum). Economic motives evidently lie at the root of this, for the appetite of the rich was directed towards soils with good yields or tithes providing a reliable income which was stopped by uncanonical means from reaching its intended recipient. The church, of course, legislated against this (the councils of Trosly and Coblenz, in 909 and 922 respectively) or protested (Ingelheim and Saint-Denis, in 948 and 992 respectively) or threatened (Seligenstadt in 1022); but in vain.
The other side of this process, the disintegration of large estates, can be fairly precisely dated by the development of acts recording sales or exchanges of lands between laymen and the church, which is evidently a more striking sign of a search for profit than the decrease of gifts made in alms; the effect of the latter was no doubt much the same, but the spiritual component can distort our judgement. In almost all the regions where it has been possible to count such things, the peak of change appears to fall between 950 and 1025. This is true of the changes in alotissements11 in Lotharingia, of gifts in Germany, of the dissolving of contracts of aprisio in Languedoc. It is difficult, especially given details, which get in the way, to follow the broad trend of exploitation in different regions each with its own peculiarities. We may simplify by distinguishing between three large zones with different trends.
England, the Seine basin and its neighbouring regions, the main part of Lotharingia and Germany displayed two related trends. The first is the weakening of the ties, which in these regions had been strong, between dependent tenancies and the remaining lands held in demesne. The Villikationsverfassung, to use the German term (the ‘manorial system’ of English historians), began to break down, especially on its edges, where more distant centres gained their autonomy.One of the human consequences of this relaxation was to cause the lord’s hand to fall more heavily on those peasants remaining under his control. From Dijon to Lorsch, from Saint-Bertin to Regensburg, the tenants close at hand were severely exploited, while their counterparts further away largely freed themselves. The other feature is the division of the unit of exploitation into two (Halbhufe) or four (Viertel, quartier vergée), or even eight, as in England (bovate). The typical holding shrank from 10–12 hectares to 3 or 4, and the new terms which appear, croada in Lotharingia (from corvée?) or the boel imported by the Scandinavians, seem to imply the same size.
Southern France and northern Spain, where the links between the different parts of the estate had always been loose, followed a different route. The initial core, the mas doumenc, the domenicatura, lost control over outlying holdings. Since the dependent holdings in this zone seem to have had single tenants and not to have been distributed in parcels across the fields as they were further north, each of the mas thus liberated was able to form a new little unit. There was often a survival of a render (tasca, agrière), which recalled the ancient domanial link, and this can be seen in words like condamina which reek of dependency,but these are mere fossils. Besides, the comparatively dispersed nature of settlement and the extent of uncultivated lands in those zones not much favoured by nature allowed the expansion of these isolated mas, often by usurpation, up to a size of several dozen hectares.
Italy remained a special case, even if we disregard the contrast between the Lombard plain and the rest of the peninsula. Here the curtis held out against disintegration in some areas, but two elements shook this coherence: the leases granted per libello to the peasants gave them a lot of elbow-room, largely to their benefit, if their holding (sors) was not in the immediate ambit of the curtes; and in Latium if not in Lombardy the phenomenon of encellulement (here known as incastellamento), which here took precocious and powerful forms, broke up the domanial network more completely than in any other region.
These varied developments had important consequences for the general condition of dependants. The loosening of ties with the demesne affected services first of all, especially day-works and plough-works. The time was near when the lord, tired of seeing these performed badly or not at all, would have them commuted for a money payment, liberating the well-off peasant and crushing the poorer one. Then the rents which custom would gradually fix at an unchangeable level became divided into two parts: a render in kind or in silver (once it had begun to circulate again) at a bearable level, or else a portion of the harvest (tasca, champart) whose interest for the tenant lay in the possibility of escaping from the consequence of climatic fluctuations, so that he would try to make this a more general practice from about 1020–30, especially on newly cultivated lands. In this context we must also note that the subdivision of peasant tenures reached a new low level, around 3 or 4 hectares (though still with immense variations – in Catalonia around 1050 between 1 and 19 hectares, for example!). This situation can be explained in two ways: either, and this is the optimistic view, technical progress meant that 10 hectares were no longer required to feed a family, or else demographic growth and the evolution of the family proceeded so fast that they forced the break-up and an overloading of tenements.
We can now see why we needed to make this survey of cultivated lands before examining the environment. The allodialists, whether large or small, who continued to direct their exploitation of the land, and the tenants, overcrowded or not, who were freed from ‘demesne’ constraints, formed a mobile mass, juridically freer and available to be regrouped. True, powerful owners already possessing their ‘men’ or even their slaves continued to exist. Equally, the disintegration of the ‘system’ had its negative aspect, for example the worsening of the lot of the poorest. But the general effect of encellulement was positive.
By Robert Fossier in "The New Cambridge Medieval History" v.III, edited by Timothy Reuter, Cambridge University Press USA/UK, 2008, excerpts pp. 27-30 and 42-45. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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