Interlude
As this book attempts to find out when and how the geographical Europe became the cultural Europe, the central problem is obviously whether and, if so, when and to what extent there existed a ‘European awareness’ among the people living in Europe? Rather than addressing this problem repeatedly throughout the text, I have concentrated some of the issues involved in this ‘interlude’. To answer the question, one must first determine how those who inhabited the continent in the past actually lived. The next question would be whether, within their cultural condition, they could actually know about the various and differing regions surrounding them and, on the basis of this knowledge, understand and value each other’s ideas and lifestyles? Only then will it be possible to decide whether there was a common culture that bound together regions and countries, states and nationalities across the many natural and artificial borders that divided the European part of the world.
In the previous chapters, the many and radical changes which economy, society and culture went through in the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have been outlined. However, it is vitally important to establish that for the great majority of the population many of these changes and, indeed, the subsequent technological innovations were hardly, if at all, noticeable. Indeed, one must be aware that up until c.1800, Europe actually consisted of ‘two nations’. On the one hand, there was the agricultural population who lived their lives according to a rhythm fixed largely by nature and which remained fairly constant until the end of the eighteenth century.1 On the other hand, since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there were the inhabitants of the cities, places that in many respects remained distinct from their rural hinterlands; there, trade, banking and incipient industry flourished; there, political life was played out;2 there, new ideas were formulated and discussed in schools and universities.
Of course, there was a measure of interaction between these two worlds: economically they were increasingly dependent upon one another, and culturally they shared a number of characteristics. The relationship was stronger in Europe’s more urbanized regions, such as northern and central Italy, parts of France, southern and Rhineland Germany, Flanders, Holland and southern England. There, new notions and inventions were developed and introduced into the countryside from the towns where they were first formulated or practised – increasingly from the sixteenth century onwards.3 However, the larger part of rural Europe experienced little or no such influences up until the late eighteenth and even early nineteenth centuries.
Consequently, it has to be maintained that in the majority of cases, towns and countryside largely had their own cultures: whereas western Europe may have had some 20,000 towns, it had some 160,000 villages, where the majority of Europeans lived.4
A world of villages
From the beginnings of agriculture in Europe, in the centuries between 10,000 and 5,000 BC, until the eighteenth century AD, between 70 and 80 per cent of Europe’s population were farmers or, to be more precise, survived on the basis of agricultural labour. People worked their own farms or tenanted other people’s property, always employing their next of kin, both females and children, for the farming economy was very much a family economy. If one were born without property, one would seek employment as a farmhand on a large rural estate. But whatever their condition, people in the countryside spent their lives tied to the soil, sometimes legally but always materially. In large parts of Europe, especially the central and eastern regions, it was not even possible for them to leave the land they tilled because they were, to a greater or lesser extent, bound to their landlord in some form of serfhood.
Fundamentally, a farmer’s life was determined by the need to cultivate the soil in order to provide that most basic commodity, food. Not surprisingly, the one and only material supplication in the most important prayer of the Christian world, the ‘Our Father’, was: ‘give us this day our daily bread’. But the Old Testament told believers they had to earn this bread with their own sweat. Their success determined whether they could keep going on the right side of the line which separated survival from death by starvation, the very thin line which in our time is still so horribly obvious in the so-called ‘Third World’.5
Farming life was governed by a simple, iron regularity. Getting up with the sun to plough, to sow or to harvest, and to tend the cattle, and going to bed when dusk fell. Usually, there was no money for lighting the house during the dark evening hours. Thus, people had no opportunity to indulge in what nowadays we think of as normal forms of after-work relaxation. Moreover, a farmer’s job was a tough one; one needed all one’s strength and therefore all the sleep one could get, which was preciously little between sunset and sunrise. Moreover, the majority of the farming population was physically not very strong. The composition of the daily diet was limited and, by our standards, unhealthy. Consequently, an endemic illness caused by certain worms could account for a general weakness among hundreds of thousands of farming people.6 Healthcare was mostly unavailable to country people, since most qualified doctors lived and worked only in towns. Generally speaking, the general public’s physical condition was bad indeed. In short, most people lacked the time, the money and also the energy to spend on sports or play. As to other forms of culture, such as reading and studying, these were almost totally absent in peasant societies.
This brings us to the question of what means of communication would have enabled Europeans to become acquainted with each other’s ways of life? Before the range and quality of communication was enlarged – first with the gradual penetration of print culture in the sixteenth century, but, effectively, only with the advance of mass communication in the late nineteenth century – there were really only two channels through which information was transmitted: oral and handwritten communication and, to a lesser extent, the visual messages of paintings and frescos and, again, from the sixteenth century onwards, printed images. However, a more detailed consideration immediately shows the limitations even of these media.
Plate 6.5 This anonymous engraving from 1502 shows various aspects of agricultural labour, such as ploughing and keeping the birds from eating the newly sown seed. Until the coming of the Industrial Revolution, agriculture and the heavy manual labour associated with it – country life was no idyll – was the occupation of by far the majority of Europeans, men, women and, often, children.
Source: CKD RU Nijmegen
Until the nineteenth century, Europe’s farming population was largely illiterate.7 Apart from the expense involved in education, for most people a formal training was totally irrelevant. Reading, writing and arithmetic were of no conceivable use when handling a plough or a hayfork. And, moreover, how could farmers’ children have found time to learn? As soon as they knew how to walk they were expected to give a helping hand on the farm. There simply was no time or money allowing them to go to school. Admittedly, in wintertime farming partly came to a standstill. Children could have attended school then. But for most the question of how to get there would have presented a huge problem. Only rich farmers possessed a donkey or horse, but such traction animals were too valuableto agricultural work to be spared to carry children to school every day. Of course, children could have walked, but not every village had its own school – usually, these were located only in the larger rural centres or in cities of some size. Thus, a walk to school would have meant a journey of some ten or more kilometres every day. Therefore, school attendance and, consequently, learning to read and write were largely precluded, except for those who overcame all these problems and, at least in winter when their help was not needed, sought some basic education. Even those who were sent to school went there not really to learn how to read and write, but to be taught a certain discipline and some notions of how to behave.8 In short, their way of life was such that for most people thetransfer of culture through the written word was barred.
Plate 6.6 Most Europeans, being engaged in agriculture, would only use very simple implements, such as the ones shown in plate 6.5. However, in the early modern period, water was used for a variety of sometimes complex mechanical devices. The De re metallica, of Georg Agricola, whose name actually means ‘farmer’, was published in 1556. One of its many illustrations shows falling water being used to drive a wheel which then motors a pump that removes water from a shaft, thus enabling people to mine copper or iron ore, and other minerals.
Source: CKD RU Nijmegen
Other forms of large-scale communication were also lacking in the agrarian communities that comprised the larger part of Europe. For one thing, most commodities moved only short distances and in low-density flows; this provided little economic incentive for investment in road building, which obviously limited communication. Also, to people engaged in agriculture, travel, certainly travel for pleasure, was an unknown concept. Every trip cost time and money, precisely the two things farmers did not have to spare. For the majority, a visit to the weekly market was the only moment that their life on the farm and in the village community connected to the larger, outside world – a world that began in the city.
For the countryside in Europe, the city was friend and foe, nearby and yet far away, a separation, a cultural division that in many regions lasted until the nineteenth century. Entering the city gates, country folk were confronted with different habits and morals, with people who often looked down on farmers as rustics. Indeed, to city dwellers, ‘peasant culture’ was a contradiction, for the agrarian way of life was considered less sophisticated, uncivilized even: peasants could not read or write, they lived in and with nature, and many of their favourite traditions reflected the untamed, dangerous elements of that nature. A mixture of disdain and fear frequently characterized the attitude of town folk towards country folk who, in their turn, were inclined to distrust city dwellers as stuck-up cheats.9
Yet to country folk, going to the weekly market, while an economic necessity, also meant having an outing, seeing other people, hearing the stories of travelling pedlars and listening to actors and singers, who opened a window on the world, on life outside their own small village communities. But primarily the market was serious business: farmers had to sell their produce there, and to buy the necessities not available in the village. There was little time left to relax in the tavern or just stroll along the street to listen to the latest news. At most, they might hear some strange tales, told in bits and pieces, without being able to grasp the details.
People from the countryside had to leave the city before dusk, primarily because at nightfall the gates were shut, and those who did not live within the walls were expected to remove themselves. Moreover, it was not advisable to travel the Lord’s roads after night had fallen. Until the late eighteenth century, large parts of the European countryside were perilous indeed. Few people left the safety of their own surroundings for pleasure, simply because travelling was not free of danger. One should not forget that huge parts of Europe were not cultivated but consisted of vast moors and dark forests. Highwaymen could rob you of the profits of a week’s hard work, not to mention worse. Besides roving bands of professional robbers one might encounter plundering soldiers, ‘living off the land’ to improve their meagre pay, or farmers who had become penniless, landless and rebellious through failed harvests or other economic disasters; they all made the countryside a very unsafe place indeed, the more so as a regular police force was simply non-existent there. Also, the roads were mostly unpaved, unlit and not signposted. Hence, manifold dangers persisted in the rural areas of the Netherlands and England certainly until the eighteenth century, and in the remote and sparsely populated parts of Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as in central and eastern Europe well into the nineteenth century.
It was not only people, however, who made life difficult for the traveller. One might encounter imagined ghosts and spirits, who had all sorts of nasty plans up their sleeves, and even devils, like the wicked Moenen, who meets a girl Mariken, in the play Mariken van Nieumeghen, written around the year 1500 in the eastern Netherlands. This is a gripping, even fascinating tale and, moreover, a historical source which has much to tell us about the culture and mentality of ‘ordinary’ people during these centuries of transition.
On market day, Mariken, who keeps house for her uncle, a priest, walks to Nijmegen to do her shopping. She has to cover a considerable distance and in the evening, after an exhausting day and an unsettling experience with a relative, she has to go home again. Returning, as darkness falls, she realizes that she will not be able to reach home in time and starts looking for shelter in the roadside woods. There, the devil Moenen confronts her. With promises of plentiful and delicious food, of wealth and also of knowledge, he seduces her. She decides to accompany him to the big city, Antwerp, at that time the trading metropolis not only of the Netherlands but also of north-western Europe. The life they embark on there is filled with all the sins known to Christian man in the late fifteenth century: excessive food and wine, whoring and, moreover, too much seeking after knowledge of heaven and earth – a privilege not of man but of God. In presenting these pleasures, the play actually spells out a series of morals and warnings, which the spectators would have understood from their own experiences. One of the messages was: do not travel, certainly not by night – it will lead only to misery.
Consequently, people did not travel unless they absolutely had to. As they could not read either, they lacked the two most obvious and influential means of communication and information: contact with other people and ideas through meeting them in the flesh, and contact with other people and ideas through the written word. In short, the culture and mentality of the majority of Europeans, i.e. those who lived in Europe’s agricultural communities, were severely limited. These limitations were three-fold: material – a lack of money; spatial – distances too great to cover on foot; and mental – the lack of communication.
As a result, the factual and mental horizon of most Europeans only reached as far as they could see: to the end of the field, to the edge of the village. Every community was largely closed in on itself, had its own local culture which, despite its wealth of orally transmitted ideas, of social organization and custom, was only slightly and slowly influenced by external factors of change. Life revolved around work, was interrupted only by such moments of relaxation as the annual harvest festival – the origin of the village fair – and the many days the Catholic Church had marked as special, such as Christmas, Easter, the feast of the patron saint of the local church and a number of other ‘holy’ days – hence ‘holidays’. On those days, if no famine reigned, villagers would feast on beer and meat, there would be dance and music, as well as games, and itinerant musicians and players would perform.
Let us pause for a moment to reflect on the role of the Catholic Church, the Church of Rome. It called itself universal as, indeed, it was until about the year 1500 when all the people of western and central Europe were still Catholic. The Church tried to govern the very essence of the lives and actions of these people, as well as, precisely to guide those actions, their deepest thoughts and emotions. Each community had a church as its visual anchor, its social and cultural centre. The local priest, besides being a shepherd of souls,frequently doubled as a doctor, a village arbiter and, if possible, a schoolmaster, although most of the supposedly literate clergy often bordered on illiteracy themselves. The Church taught people to love their neighbours and to obey the ecclesiastical and secular authorities as well as telling them about the existence of heaven, hell and purgatory, where they would go after they died. Above all loomed the constant presence of a severe yet good God. Indeed, that was what the Church taught, and what, in this largely illiterate society, it showed to the people, mostly in devotional pictures. Thus, in Orvieto cathedral’s San Brizio chapel, between 1499 and 1504, the artist Luca Signorelli depicted heaven as a place where the elect lived their blissful lives: their bodies perfect, their headscrowned with garlands, surrounded by the saints and angels, all lauding God10 – for Christian heaven partly derived from the Jewish concept of it, which, simply, described it as man’s union with God. Yet, most people in rural Europe may well have preferred another vision, that of a peasants’ heaven as painted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, in whose 1567 painting of the ‘Land of Cockayne’ there was plenty of food, sex and other merry-making – precisely the things most people lacked in their daily lives.11 Significantly, however, there were, in this world, far more paintings of hell than of heaven – obviously reflecting the fears that beset people every day of their lives: of violence and torture, of illness and physical corruption.
The role of the Church presents us with an apparent contradiction. For centuries, the Roman Catholic clergy were the pre-eminent guardians of a long tradition of knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation, by means of manuscript texts. Yet their flock, the faithful, unable to read, could participate only with eye and ear in the culture that these priests controlled. Nor did the Church really want to provide extensive instruction to the masses. As an institution, it actually considered knowledge of and insight into the great problems of theology and cosmology superfluous and even dangerous for ordinary man. It would only keep him from his daily work or, worse, tempt him to a life of sin, as Mariken had experienced.
Because the clergy, at least in part, were the ‘information caste’, they wanted to preserve their exclusiveness. In fact, they derived their position from an almost magical power. Ideally, they could read and write, which already resembled magic in the eyes of many; they knew and understood more of the world than most other people did; they could explain or even predict some of the natural phenomena that so terrified most men. Not surprisingly, they wanted to retain this position of power. Knowledge was, therefore, not shared with as many people as possible. On the contrary, it was monopolized by monks and nuns in their monasteries, and by the ‘secular’ representatives of the Church, the village priests, who often were the only educated men in Europe’s rural world.
Whatever the Church chose to teach to the masses was mainly taught through the spoken word, from the pulpit, and through images, visual representations: statues and paintings. On the façades and portals of churches and chapels, on their walls and ceilings, stories from the Bible and edifying scenes from the saints’ lives were depicted for all those believers who could not read. After the advent of printing, simple and cheaply printed images were used as well.
In this world of villages and of villagers, were the inhabitants Europeans? Word and image had ensured that in the period beginning with the time that Christianity first became established, i.e. the fifth and sixth centuries, and ending c.1500, all Europeans up to the invisible dividing line running from the Baltic to the Balkans still recognized the Pope in Rome as the head of their Church. When Mariken, by Divine Providence, was brought to repent of her sins, she travelled to Rome to ask forgiveness. Everyone felt Christian in the Catholic sense. Yet what this meant in the daily routine of those who dwelt on the other side of mountains and rivers was something most people never asked. Christianity had created a common culture, but its solidarity seldom was or had to be tested in practice.
Thus the mental world of Europeans, of farming communities in particular, differed greatly from what we can imagine today. What occupied Europe’s rural population? Certainly few or none of the things we fill our lives with. There was no television, no films, no radio, even. There were no newspapers and, for most people, no books. Sport did not exist either as an organized leisure activity, or as passive entertainment. Indeed, outside the circles of the aristocracy and the well-to-do urban middle classes, leisure was not a known concept.12 Politics hardly played a role, at least, not in the sense of national or world politics, if only because there was virtually no information that would have elicited public debate. Moreover, political parties, party programmes, all the things that nowadays stimulate political awareness or discussion did not exist either. Only in the big cities did any sort of political consciousness actually exist.
Of course, people knew about wars, but mainly as events which periodically occurred in their own world: until the end of the seventeenth century, small or great wars were waged somewhere in Europe every year. Yet ordinary people hardly understood the larger issues behind them as there were no news analyses and commentaries. War was simply a part of daily life, incomprehensible, as was so much else; it was certainly not an intellectual or moral problem.
What did actually occupy people, historians have tried to infer from the stories they told each other, the songs they sang and the poems they recited. In the evenings, especially in winter, the villagers gathered together to listen to storytellers and singers – local men or travelling ones – who were the preservers of the complex collective memory of the village community, circumscribing a world at once local and cosmic, through tradition and myth. Stories, songs and poems were passed on orally, from generation to generation. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that assiduous scholars began to collect and record them: the German J.G. Herder in the late eighteenth century and, later, Charles Perrault, in France, and the brothers Grimm, again in Germany, carried out pioneering work in this field. They, and a host of other scholars who studied popular culture, or folklore, gave us a chance to look back into the past through those stories, to uncover the lives and probe the minds of those who did not normally record their actions,ideas and feelings. Although these tales are heavily filtered by time, by centuries of oral transmission and, of course, by the writing of their final recorders, the other sources which document the life of ordinary people certainly are as biased, if not more so. For though secular and ecclesiastical records yield fascinating insights, too, they nearly always represent popular culture through the eyes of educated middlemen – clerks and chroniclers, for whom the world of written words was the dominant narrative, into which the world of ‘others’ had to be fitted.13 Combining all available sources, and using visual and material evidence as well, historians nowadays venture to present an image of what went on in that largely oral culture.14
People were mainly occupied by what conditioned their daily lives. Food and eating, therefore, dominate many stories: the misery caused by the lack of it and the joy when there was plenty for a change can be sensed in almost all texts. Sexuality was also important, without, however, being unrestrained.15 Especially in the countryside, people enjoyed sex rather freely and talked about it openly until the nineteenth century, when a large-scale civilizing campaign staged by the Churches and the urban middle class declared many things sexual to be taboo; this situation was only reversed in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, from a psychological perspective entirely different from ours, sexuality was probably much more essential than we can imagine now. Not only was it necessary that many children be born in order to guarantee the reproduction of the species and ensure that adults had someone to take care of them in old age, since society made no provisions for this, also, according to psychologists, sexuality, letting go of oneself, was actually the only way to escape the fear of the transitory nature of life and of inevitable death.
Death, for the average European, was always uncomfortably close. Infant mortality was appallingly high and most of those who survived still died between the ages of 30 and 40. And then, of course, there were wars. Whether great or small, they seemed to be waged continuously. With everyone having some experience of war in their own life, it was spoken and sung of a great deal, if only to defy the threat and the misery it caused.
Finally, natural phenomena, such as lightning and thunder, comets and solar or lunar eclipses, played a very important role in tales, poems and songs; they, too, threatened everyday life, the more so as they were not yet understood. Hence, ghosts and spirits and also witches and wizards constantly appear in all sorts of stories. The former were the manifestations of the incomprehensible, of all those things for which no simple remedy could be found; the latter, if properly managed, were potential helpers in the ongoing struggle with this other world that seemed the continuation of daily life. Indeed, fear in the face of a world that, rather than orderly, presented itself as chaotic and unruly, was perhaps a central emotion in this Europe. To master this fear, people devised all sorts of strategies that were entirely rational within their mental paradigm. Not surprisingly, the supreme vision of an ordered world, where there was no fear, no want, no suffering, was paradise, a garden as unlike actual nature as possible: an ‘enclosed garden’ where every valley had been made plain, everything crooked straight.16
The one organization that helped people create order was, of course, the Church, the keeper of a faith that may be interpreted as the collective attempt of the people living in Europe to bring man and nature into a balance, to make comprehensible, acceptable and livable what was incomprehensible, unacceptable and unlivable without the help of God and the promise of heaven: the misery of every new day, the pain of life with its many illnesses, its unavoidable death, and the question of what the purpose of it all was. Yet precisely because much of what the Church tried to teach was relatively complicated, people needed concrete help, and sought refuge with those same wizards and witches, as well as with sayings and charms. Most of these forms of culture, albeit denounced as superstition by the Church, were in fact the very forms of a vast, ancient repertoire that the Church had not absorbed into its own arsenal of ritualistic action devised to make life controllable.17 Indeed, the priests themselves often acted within and made use of a complex scenario of primeval ways and means which were definitely not accepted by the small group who defined right speaking and acting within the Church. This situation has caused historians to ask to what extent this culture really was Christian at all, in its ideal sense, rather than a complex mix, under different names, of more ancient beliefs branded as ‘paganism’ by the Church.18
A world of towns
The majority of city dwellers consisted of salaried labourers and free artisans, with a ‘middle class’ made up of entrepreneurs in various fields of trade and industry, as well as professional people who served the needs of these groups in so far as they necessitated the creation of written records: lawyers, public notaries and town officials. This, in turn, presupposed another group of people: teachers, at various levels, who were capable of instructing all these men in the arts of literacy and numeracy. For besides reading and writing, arithmetic had become increasingly essential, especially to urban society. What with bookkeeping, handling an abacus, trying to account for constantly shifting exchange rates between the hundreds of different monetary systems, measuring the contents of ships and carts, of tuns and bales, Europe, urban Europe, was becoming a rational, measurable, quantifiable society.19
Whereas these teachers might be priests or monks, i.e. part of the clergy who constituted a considerable proportion of the population in almost every European city up until the sixteenth century – indeed, even the fabric of the city was itself often dominated by the sometimes huge, walled properties of churches and monasteries – this situation changed when the influence of the Church decreased; in the course of the sixteenth century, secular, professional teachers began to set up schools as well.
The ruling elite, the urban patriciate might consist either of the wealthiest entrepreneurs or of a mixture – sometimes through intermarriage – of this group and of nobles from the surrounding countryside. The latter, however, might themselves be descended from traders or bankers who, in earlier generations, had acquired landed estates and sometimes even titles of nobility. For the distinctions between classes, especially in those regions where trade and industry became important, were certainly not as rigid as is often assumed.20 Nobles would invest or even actively participate in banking and trading, and wealthy tradespeople would retire to the country to enjoy a more ‘noble’ life, building luxurious houses, collecting books and paintings, if only portraits of faked ancestors and, invoking that most aristocratic of privileges, going out to hunt.
Economic life, in the city, was of a different nature from that in the countryside. Artisanal production could be family-centred, as of old, with both women and children being integral parts of a ‘family economy’, but it often developed into big enterprises,employing dozens or even hundreds of workers, sometimes assembled under one roof in a system of proto-industrial manufacture.
Trade, too, could be small-scale, specialized and local, or cover many products and regions, and conducted by firms who set up networks of ‘counting’ houses all over Europe, such as the firm of Francesco Datini, the ‘merchant of Prato’, one of the richest men in fifteenth-century Europe. Normally, entrepreneurs liked to staff these offices with family members, being the most trustworthy, for the ties of kinship, even outside the conjugal family, were felt strongly, as is still common business practice in Asia. However, when more capital was invested, the need to expand, to specialize and to attract the most capable men soon resulted in the employment of non-relatives as well; for a long time, however, it was customary that a newcomer marry one of his boss’s daughters.
Meanwhile, increasing competition in the urban economy, especially in times of crisis, such as those in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, resulted in a growing tendency to prevent women from taking an active role in the production process. All over Europe, the corporations or guilds wherein production in any field was mostly organized, adopted rules which forced women, who had set up business for themselves, or had inherited it from their deceased husband, to either remarry, choosing a male member of their guild, or to sell out to such a person. This is not to say that women did not work. The poorer ones most certainly did, especially in the big cities, where they would be likely to make up most of the marketing population, or else serve in the more affluent households.21
With changing labour relations, a shift in gender roles came about as well, especially among the prosperous trading classes. Men who tried to emulate the elite would prefer their womenfolk not to work. Those families who could afford to exempt their females from participation in the labour process often did so, aping the wealthier groups in society, especially the (titled) aristocracy who still functioned as the cultural role model. As in the aristocracy, the main role of a prosperous bourgeois woman now became one of providing her husband, and his family, with preferably male children to continue the line and to inherit the property, but she should not interfere in business or encroach on other male domains.22 For aristocratic women did not normally work. In the upper reaches of the nobility, they would lead a life of luxury, participating in court society, showing off the status of their husband’s family. At most, such noble ladies would supervise a large household. Still, this might entail very practical work as well, as is evident from that fascinating cache of documents called the ‘Paston Papers’, which reveal the life of a well-to-do English landowning family at the end of the fifteenth century.23 Indeed, Margaret Paston often acted as her husband John’s steward during his absence, mostly on military duty; she managed his estates, advised him on his business and legal affairs and even took decisions on her own. But though the Pastons owned manor houses and castles, Margaret’s lifestyle would seem to have been more bourgeois than aristocratic. Among the high nobility, women would mostly not demean themselves with such tasks.
Running a large household was increasingly the task that fell to women from the affluent middle class. This, however, led to new ideals about femininity as well. A ‘good’ woman was, first, a good mother and, second, a good housewife. Yet it has to be said that while women in this group generally retreated from active participation in public life, their hold over their families increased, and with it their power to shape the conduct of all involved.24
This became more evident as economic specialization, greater wealth and the desire to demonstrate that wealth and the way of life that went with it, all resulted in a situation wherein such traditional practices as using the house as an office, a shop and a warehouse at the same time were discontinued. With the separation between work and home amongst the more prosperous urban groups came an awareness of the home as a private place where, within the intimacy of the family, presided over by the mother, people lived a life different from the one they presented to the public.25
What life was like in these bourgeois households, where there was both leisure time and money to spend on a comfortable, hospitable interior, on good food, on lighting in the evening, and so on, is shown in contemporary painting, especially from such a quintessentially urban, bourgeois society as that of the Dutch province of Holland – even though these pictures may have had some moralistic purpose, depicting desired instead of actual behaviour. They show mothers keeping an eye on their children while preparing dinner, as well as, in the evening, people sitting around the table, playing cards or singing together, or reading by themselves – such as the old man with his glasses, who has fallen asleep over his book.
With growing wealth and, consequently, bigger houses, notions of privacy not only separated the house from the office or the shop, but also came to extend to the spheres of parents on the one hand, and children on the other. This seems specifically to have affected the experience of sexuality as something that belonged to the adult domain of married life. Nevertheless, the various bodily functions and, indeed, the body itself were not yet surrounded with the notions of intimacy, shame or taboo that they were to acquire in the nineteenth century: in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings, while women publicly breast-fed their children, one sees men urinating in public as well, although the latter was already associated with rustic boors rather than with refined urbanites.
All this, in turn, also contributed to the genesis of the concept of childhood amongst the more well-to-do people. After infancy, the period during which they were being cared for by their mother, young boys and girls, though they might be physically able to participate in work as, indeed, their counterparts in the working classes both in the countryside and in towns were forced to do, now entered into a stage of childhood; people became aware that the young needed time to grow up, and had to be further educated, in relative freedom.26 Still, we should realize that the moment these children were considered to have reached adulthood occurred in their early teens rather than, as nowadays, in their early twenties.
Although during the period c.1400 to c.1800 most educated people theoretically defended the position that man and woman were created equal, at the same time women were increasingly seen as docile, subservient even. In many countries, women’s legal rights were limited. In parts of Germany, a woman could not even stand trial because, de jure, she was considered to be like a child, who could not be held responsible for a crime. Indeed, if women failed to comply with the new ideals, they might be branded as ‘different’, as bad women. Some scholars have seen this development as the birth of the concept of the evil witch, who was to become a disciplining warning to European women until the end of the eighteenth century, when the last witches were burnt at the stake. Of course, the phenomenon of the witch was far more complex, involving the psychology of close-knit communities, with their need to define insiders and outsiders and, equally, the need to project tensions onto specific persons, as scape-goats.27
In their turn, men were impressed with the notion that they were chosen to take on a double responsibility: as the ‘pater familias’, they were both the provider for their household and their family, as well as its public face.
The institution of marriage was the ideal basis for such ideas. However, in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a great variety of forms of concubinage had come into use, were condoned and indeed often sanctioned by the Church. Thus, it was quite common for a couple to enter upon an engagement to be married at the church door and then to return home and live together as man and wife until the wife became pregnant; when this proof of the viability of the relationship had been obtained, the couple would return to church for the final marriage vows at the chancel steps and then proceed to the altar for Eucharist. This explains why, in contemporary paintings of French weddings, the bride radiantly shows her pregnancy. However, numerous constructions undesirable to the Church had been devised, as witnessed by Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’, who married five times at the church door without finalizing her vows. All kinds of secular relationship rituals existed as well; for example, when prospective partners sealed their intention to live together by jumping over a broom in front of witnesses.
While the Church was losing control over marriage and sexuality, the State became increasingly concerned about an ordered society, preferably one in which working males, the majority of tax-paying subjects, could be held responsible for the rest of the population, their families. Hence, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the two powers joined forces, trying once more to legalize and sacralize marriage as the only institution in which sexuality could be expressed, and out of which legitimate offspring could be borne, and the family or household as the fiscal basis of society, its legal microcosm. It was understood that in both, the father would rule supreme.28
Much like the countryside, towns, too, whether great or small, were not quaint, idyllic communities, as nineteenth-century romantic writers or twentieth-century conservationists would sometimes have it. Admittedly, some research indicates that neighbourhoods were seemingly comfortable, close-knit groups, where the quarrels that occurred were solved through the intercession of the community’s representative, where people attended each other’s funerals, even paying a penalty if they failed to turn up, and where annual gatherings were organized in the form of huge drinking and eating parties to physically and symbolically stress group harmony.29 Other case studies, however, tell of poisoned letters, of abuse and defamation, of violent quarrels ending in murder and of people trying to kill their neighbours using black magic.30
Increasingly, the wealthy tended to congregate in a safe, comparatively spacious and clean part of town, usually its centre, while the poor would live on the periphery. However, as urban populations grew and overspilled the area protected by the city walls – most European cities were walled until the middle of the nineteenth century – the poor would go and live in new but often very squalid quarters which, if only for that reason, were looked upon disdainfully by the more affluent burghers. Houses here would be built of wood, and have straw roofs well into the nineteenth century. In most cities, the majority of streets often remained unpaved, and mostly unlit at night. Closed sewage systems were absent and dirt was piled on the streets and in backyards. Consequently, all kinds of illnesses spread easily, creating havoc amongst the population, especially those who lived in cramped surroundings. Also, crime in violent forms was quite normal, even in the bigger cities, where there was already some kind of police system. Prostitution, too, showed itself quite openly; it was not yet morally frowned upon, and heavily punished only when it brought syphilis into the armies.31
Both phenomena are amply attested to in such major towns as seventeenth-century papal Rome, where a prominent citizen, Giacinto Gigli, filled his diary with notes of murders, rapes and, indeed, rampant ‘superstition’, as well as describing the vain efforts of the papal government to increase the moral tone of this capital of Catholic Christendom. He also noted the ways in which the authorities reacted to many kinds of undesirable behaviour, setting the ‘stage’ for death – for serious crimes, until the end of the eighteenth century, were harshly dealt with: criminals were burned at the stake, hanged or quartered, while noblemen might claim the privilege of being beheaded – such public executions were meant to show what the norms of society were, and impress upon onlookers that order would always be restored.32 The people would flock to these theatrically presented occasions, sometimes giving in to an almost orgiastic celebration of sin and redemption.33
Two worlds?
The above survey is, necessarily, a very general one. It synthesizes innumerable details about the equally innumerable local, self-centred and enclosed communities that comprised rural Europe. It juxtaposes these communities with the often different economic, social and cultural reality of towns. Obviously, such a representation can always be invalidated by citing individual cases wherein the differences between town and countryside appear less extreme. Specifically, in terms of culture, towns, especially smaller ones, greatly resembled villages, in that there, too, one would encounter widespread illiteracy, the predominance of oral traditions, little proof of communication with the wider world and many manifestations of what the Church called superstition.
Yet if one looks at Europe from about the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, bearing in mind all the details presented so far, one must conclude that there existed a deep chasm in European society. It was a chasm that was not only economic and social but primarily cultural in nature.
Inevitably, the mass of peasants, living in their communities limited by the walking-distance horizon, with no appreciable means of communication, had a restricted world-view. Consequently, most people lived in great fear of everything that was not familiar and hence different. People or things that were ‘different’ were easily seen as alien, even dangerous.34 Thus, all kinds of phenomena in the physical world surrounding them, but also, of course, illnesses, threatening as they were, were often blamed on witches. The belief in witches, while being of all ages and cultures was, in the last decades of the fourteenth century, spreading through Europe. By that time, the Church itself was changing its position, and enlarging the power of the Inquisition to deal with it. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘witch craze’ raged; consequently, some 40,000–50,000 women and men died, most being burnt at the stake. Geographically, the phenomenon was concentrated in central and northern Europe,35 and continued in regions where the Reformation took over. Indeed, in the Roman Catholic Mediterranean parts of Europe, there seems to have been little witch-hunting and even less prosecution than in the Protestant world. It is, however, important to accept that it was not an irrational outburst; the lawyers and judges involved were men who tried to make sense of the accusations that led to and, indeed, the confessions that were made during the trials, finding that the people they faced had made a pact with the Devil – which was a sin, because it aimed at the subversion of God’s plan for the world – and were engaged in working harm on their ‘neighbours’, on their society by supernatural means.36 This also helps us understand why the craze ended: i.e. when the better part of Europeans ceased to believe that such meansexisted, which was sometime during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Still, why the ‘witch craze’ occurred when and where it did has not yet been satisfactorily explained.
Nor were local cultural forms consciously experienced as part of a communal European tradition. After all, education, if it reached people at all, reached most of them only as an attempt to learn to read and write. Even if they succeeded, a simplified version of the message of the Bible, frequently reduced to allegories and metaphors, was often their only frame of reference. To them, the culture of Greek and Roman antiquity was a closed book. Also, many of the finer points – some historians would even argue the essence – of Christianity eluded them. Travel, unless professionally necessary, was a senseless and useless action. From itinerant preachers and pedlars they might have heard, though vaguely at most, about the Mediterranean, about the worlds of Byzantium and Islam; they would probably have known even less about the worlds beyond the wide seas. The past, history, consisted of stories about the village and the village community in earlier times and of folk tales and legends which put everything strange and incomprehensible in its place in a largely magical context. In short, most people lacked any reference that could give ‘Europe’ the status of a concept, let alone make it a lived reality; at most, it was a meaningless word.
Crossing a ‘border’, such as a river or a mountain, one would encounter people living according to different social codes, showing different habits and often speaking different tongues as well, for even within a single-language community, the various dialects would not be understood. Hence, the concept of solidarity was applied only to the limited community of a person’s own village or city. Beyond their family, people were attached first and foremost to their patria, their Heimat or their native soil. Some, but certainly not all, felt themselves part of the regional state that would have absorbed the village or city in days of old: these might be farmers’ sons who, as soldiers, had served a regional leader, or village administrators who visited the regional capital with some regularity.
Regional leaders themselves – low- or high-ranking nobles and city administrators – equally held to their particularistic outlooks. This was certainly the case when they had to defend their power against an increasingly mighty central elite: the nobility at a princely court and the senior administrators who were the main instruments of state formation in the emerging capital cities. In view of this complex situation, it was a long time before people finally began to feel part of the new, larger political structures that were slowly being formed.
However, one should also remember that in the new states at least, the ‘ordinary man’, unable to even understand people from neighbouring villages, could certainly not talk to his ‘fellow citizens’ from another region. After all, in most countries there was still no single ‘national’ language, taught to and spoken by everyone.37 Until the fourteenth century the English elite spoke French and therefore experienced difficulties communicating with the English-speaking population at large, while the Norwegian elite used Danish for much longer. In Spain, the inhabitants of Catalonia or of the old kingdom around Valencia, vexed by their subjection to the Castilians, considered foreign oppressors from the region around Madrid who did not speak their language, emphatically tried not to use Castilian, if only to express their deep-rooted opposition. In France, the majority of the inhabitants of Provence or Brittany thought of themselves as nations which, unfortunately, had failed to withstand the imperialism of the kings, who hailed from the region around Paris. If only for that reason, Bretons and Provençals did not master the language now called French – originally the Parisian dialect. It also meant that they were usually unable to understand the officials who ruled them in the name of the government in the capital. Thus, communication between, for example, city officials in Gascony and the Parisian bureaucrats was possible only through an interpreter.38Indeed, until the nineteenth century, many ‘French’ people spoke languages or dialects of languages which their fellow countrymen could hardly understand.39
All over Europe, central governments attempted to codify one of the languages in their state as the ‘national’ language and to impose this, by force if necessary, on the entire population of the state; yet it was a policy which, due to prevailing illiteracy, did not yield large-scale success until the introduction of general compulsory education in the nineteenth century. Only then did the farming population in the more isolated parts of France feel themselves to be French citizens.40 And as for the Northern Netherlands, reading the minutes of the Nijmegen city council in the seventeenth century one could be forgiven for thinking that they were written in one of the varieties of Low German that even nowadays is spoken in the Rhineland and Westphalia; it little resembled the standard Dutch that is now the country’s language. Indeed, people did not feel Dutch but rather identified themselves as Frisians, Gueldersmen or Hollanders; yet, to most even that would be a futile form of reflection.41
In consequence of all this, the ‘great tradition’, culture as a system of ideas and ideals articulated in the whole of Europe, was not a part of the thoughts or the lives of the masses. Obviously, an idea of ‘Europe’ did exist, held by the few who were knowledgeable about the earth’s shape and did not think a map an incomprehensible, unreadable document. Yet for most of these people, too, it remained a geographical notion only. Europe as a dream of cultural unity continued to function in and for the very limited group who had invented it: the intellectuals, the scholars and others who had had the benefit of education and who were able to travel, to see other places and meet other people – in a nutshell, the elite. They were ‘the people with history’, members of an increasingly self-conscious, cosmopolitan and, to a very large extent, urban society.
By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European elite had slowly changed both in composition and in outlook, growing more complex. Besides the monks and the warriors, the merchants had been acquiring increasing economic power since the twelfth century. In the succeeding centuries, this power was also translated into political terms and forms. Thus, the elite was by no means a closed circle any more. It was composed of the leaders of the First Estate, the lords spiritual, the clergy with their Christian and thus, according to their own definition, universal culture embracing the whole of Europe and, indeed, the worlds beyond. It was also composed of the leaders of the Second Estate, the lords temporal or the nobility, who, it is true, had participated in that culture since the eighth and ninth centuries but who had begun to think more and more ‘nationally’ within the framework of the various budding states where their power lay.
However, increasingly in evidence was a Third Estate, made up largely of wealthy entrepreneurs and professionals, the most powerful group in the urban middle class. Their bases were the cities; as these often had become largely independent of government control, the urban elites felt that, unlike the noble-military class and the clergy, they did not fit into such large unities as State and Church, which transcended local borders. Partly as a result, they formed values that were different, at least to a certain extent. Though their banking or trading connections might give them an international outlook, economically, politically and culturally they would more often have a very local orientation. And while they would model their material culture on the example of the older elite, genuinely aristocratic values, especially those associated with knightly culture, remained alien to them. Looking for economic and political power, they sponsored both education and the sciences, if only for utilitarian motives. They were also an important factor in the development of controlled tolerance, but, yet again, would largely profess it for pragmatic reasons. For tolerance or, to frame the idea in a larger context, the idea of a civil society, regulated by rules of law which applied to each and every person indistinctly, proved an essential prerequisite for the expansion and power of this group.
Regardless of their socio-economic complexity, at the same time this elite unequivocally remained a cultural upper class because of its common background. After all, it consisted of people who accepted the ideology of Christianity because they were raised in Christian doctrine from childhood. Its members also shared common norms of civilized behaviour; these came into existence precisely during these centuries as a result of the increasingly literate interaction between classical antiquity and Church teaching, an interaction particularly expressed in formal further education but also in such tracts as written by the Rotterdam scholar Desiderius Erasmus, on child education, the relationship between man and wife, between parents and children, etc.
These three groups of clergy, nobility and urban bourgeoisie – both independently and through increasing interaction – became the main agents of a variety of new developments which, from the fifteenth century onwards, began to alter the world that, in this very period, was called Europe.