The market
Fifteenth-century Europe had experienced centuries of commercialisation and urbanisation. In some regions (notably north Italy and the Low Countries) a third or more of the population lived in towns, and over most of the continent one in five people gained their main livelihood from industry or trade. Despite the mid-fifteenth-century trading slump, the ‘bullion famine’ and other troubles, a busy local and international trade in agricultural produce continued, and indeed in some cases shows signs of stimulation rather than depression. Although the numbers of potential customers fell, and the purchasing power of the nobility suffered, the survivors had surpluses to exchange. Peasants were consumers as well as producers; the increased demand for cheap and middle-quality woollen and linen cloth, and iron for tools and domestic implements, helps to explain the expanding rural industry of the period. Elderly peasants in Quercy would make agreements with their successors to hand over the holding, in exchange for a basic allowance (almost a pension), the details of which enable us to glimpse what contemporaries regarded as the necessities of life. In addition to bread grains, oil, salt, wine and pork, each old peasant would receive annually clothing worth £2 tournois (about twice the value of a pig). Cumulative purchases on this scale by millions of peasants created a formidable market.
Production for sale, which enabled cultivators to pay rents in cash and buy manufactured goods, was often conducted on the largest scale on the lords’ demesnes (increasingly in the hands of farmers), but also involved a high proportion of the peasantry. Responses to demand can be seen in the changing mix of crops — for example, in England the barley acreage grew in line with the increase in ale and beer drinking. In Germany vineyards expanded, and were planted in new regions because more people could afford wine. But the market could also encourage large-scale regional specialisation, such as extensive rye cultivation in north-east Europe, which supplied the towns of the Low Countries, allowing the peasants of that region to devote more land to industrial crops. During the fifteenth century grain exports from Danzig increasingly reflected the quality of the harvest in the Low Countries. Similarly Norway imported Baltic corn and concentrated on dairying and fishing.
The increased demand for meat, and especially beef, in the population centres of the Low Countries and the Rhineland promoted a large-scale international cattle trade. The animals were reared in Denmark, Hungary and Poland, and then travelled along well-established drove roads, via fairs and other points of sale to the urban butchers. Numbers of cattle exported annually from Denmark increased from 2,000 in 1423 to 13,000 in 1484—5. In southern Europe specialisation in livestock encouraged the development of organisations to manage transhumance, not just the Spanish mesta, but also in Provence, Tuscany and southern Italy. Sicilian agriculture developed its specialisations, with the growing of corn (for export) in the west of the island, pastoralismin the uplands of the north-east, and wine production concentrated on the coast. Maltese cultivators found that they could profit best from the commercial economy by growing cotton and cumin for sale abroad, while wheat was imported.
Towns influenced the countryside more directly when their inhabitants acquired land, as they did in growing numbers in the vicinity of cities as different as Lyons and Wroclaw. Townspeople regarded land as a safe investment, and used it to grow both some food for their own consumption and raw materials for urban industries. Often they introduced no new techniques, but in the case of Valencia urban capital contributed to irrigation schemes and the development of a fertile agricultural region. Townsmen changed the rural economy more often by investing in rural industry, by building mills for fulling, iron working and paper making, and acting as entrepreneurs organising and exploiting the work of the artisan cloth-workers.
The peasants
Peasants accounted collectively for the bulk of agricultural production. They operated within constraints, but were not controlled entirely by their social and natural environment. They defended their interests and made difficult choices in adapting their farming to new circumstances. Reduction in rents and improvements in conditions of tenure and personal status did not automatically follow from the scarcity of people. Lords clung to their power and dues for as long as possible. Also lords and states were constantly developing new ways of acquiring income from the peasantry, and these were often resisted.
The fifteenth century saw rather fewer large-scale peasant rebellions than either in the preceding, or in the following, centuries, but peasants were still involved in numerous negotiations, law suits, petitions, confrontations and village agitations, the records of which enable us to see the issues that troubled them, and some of the ideas that lay behind their actions. Often they were concerned with the removal of old exactions which they regarded as burdensome and unjust. English peasants quietly but effectively refused to pay servile dues like tallage and collective fines, and secured reductions in their main annual rent payment, the ‘assize’ rents. The Catalan servile peasants, the remences, campaigned more publicly against the ‘bad customs’, by which lords could take a share of the goods of a peasant dying intestate or without legitimate heirs, confiscate a peasant’s chattels if his wife committed adultery, fine a peasant whose house burned down, and exact a payment for guaranteeing the property settlement at a peasant’s marriage. These customs went back two or three centuries, and had acquired a symbolic meaning as a badge of servile status. The crisis after the Black Death sharpened antagonism, as lords attempted to maintain the old dues, and specifically caused resentment by imposing them on peasants who had taken over vacant holdings. Encouraged by some vacillating support from the monarchy, the remences attempted to negotiate composition payments with the lords, and took part in civil war in 1462—72 and an uprising in 1484—5 before the bad customs were finally abolished in 1486.
Rebellions against new exactions included the Bundschuh risings in Germany in 1439 and 1493 provoked by taxes and complaints of judicial abuses, the Irmandada of Galicia in 1467 against growing seignorial dues and bullying, and the revolt in Normandy of 1434—6 where the resentment against taxes was sharpened by the fact that they were imposed by English conquerors. In Majorca, the exploitation of peasant debts by urban money lenders provoked a long-running and sometimes violent campaign against the towns.
Small-scale frictions between lord and peasant were especially characteristic of Germany, where in some regions attempts were made to impose new forms of serfdom, and to encroach on common rights in woods and pastures. Resistance came from village communities, led by the better-off peasants, the probi homines, who bargained with the lords over customs, the results being recorded in statements of rights and obligations, the Weistumer. The community could back up negotiations by such collective actions as offering money to buy areas of common land or to redeem lords’ rights, and by refusing rents and services which were in dispute. In the east such resistance was led by the schulz, the official originally appointed by the lords to administer the village. We often see the growing formality of community organisations at this time; in the south-west of France the villages acquired consulates and assemblies like the towns, and paid their rents collectively.
All of this seemed to the lords like insolence and sedition. To quote a Bavarian monastery’s court records, peasants ‘held in contempt our orders and have also within the holiness of our monastery attacked us with rough coarse words and ... threatening gestures’. From the peasants’ point of view they were gaining self-respect and the ability to stand up for themselves. We can see in their actions and utterances an alternative view of society, emphasising collective values, and advocating egalitarian ideas, like the rebels in the county of Forez in 1422—31 who looked back to the classless society of the time of Adam, and believed that the nobility should work. The Catalan peasants believed in an ancient state of freedom, arguing that the ‘bad customs’ had been imposed as a fixed-term punishment by Charlemagne. Peasants were encouraged in their confidence and independence of mind by improvements in their conditions and new opportunities; their undoubted successes led them to persist in resistance to authority.
Many peasants lived under weak lordship, or had no lord at all, and even those on whom lordship imposed considerable burdens were usually able to buy land, sell produce and generally exercise some choice in their agriculture. The size of holdings depended partly on peasant calculations of the most convenient and efficient scale of production. In contrast with the large amounts of land (forty hectares or more) held by some yeomen and farmers in western England or northern France, middling holdings of ten to twenty hectares seem to have been most successful in Languedoc or Normandy, while smallholdings, as we have seen, continued to be viable in the Low Countries or parts of northern Italy. Historians have often assumed that large units of production were necessary for innovations in technology or increases in efficiency and market orientation. But this supposition is not supported by the ability of tenants of quite small holdings to change their methods. The shift in the balance between arable and pasture, use of intensive husbandry and crop specialisation were also adopted by middling or smallholding peasants.
Peasant society changed, but not uniformly. In parts of southern Europe, such as Languedoc and Tuscany, the labour shortage encouraged the formation of close and complex family units under a patriarchal head. In northern Europe the peasant family was weakened by the demographic crisis. This encouraged migration — on a small scale from village to village, but also over longer distances, leading to the repopulation of more productive land, like the Parisian region after it had suffered devastation from war.
For all of its apparent bargaining strength when dealing with outside authority, the village community suffered internally from divisions between wealthier and poorer peasants, and conflicts between individual interests and common welfare. Struggles broke out between the majority of villagers and those individuals who sought an unfair share of resources (by putting large numbers of animals on the common pasture) or who privatised their assets by enclosure or by cultivating their land in their own style. These problems were not usually resolved within our period, and it must be emphasised that in many ways — the ‘poor tables’ and almshouses provided for indigent villagers, for example — peasant communities seem to have increased their cohesiveness in the fifteenth century. In consequence they acted as a restraint on the more innovative, ambitious and selfish peasants.
Lords, towns and the state
Enterprise and initiative were by no means confined to the peasantry. The nobility, often depicted as in retreat in this period, in fact actively defended their position. In some cases this took the form of rear-guard actions to preserve their privileges, like those conducted by the Catalan nobles for most of the century. Historians remark sometimes on the apparent inertia of institutions, leading to the survival of archaic systems of lordship, but in such cases we should not underestimate the effort required to maintain rents and judicial power in the face of peasant obstruction. In Germany the nobility went on the offensive, especially in the south-west, by introducing new forms of personal serfdom. Peasants were tied to their holdings, being forced to pay heavy fines for permission to leave, or to find substitute tenants. Some lords insisted that permission was needed for a serf’s marriage. Lordship was consolidated by making exchanges with neighbours, so that serfs who had left their lord’s territory were brought back under control. Nowhere else in Europe was the seignorial reaction so co-ordinated, but there were efforts elsewhere to re-establish lords’ rights, especially at the end of the century.
Lords had to make realistic judgements about their problems, but could still work in their own interests. The reconstruction of the post-war French countryside involved recreating estates, by attracting settlers with promises of large holdings at low rents. In the Paris region lords invested hundreds of pounds in building mills and ovens in order to profit again from the seignorial monopolies. In Tuscany lands continued to be consolidated into blocks, poderi, which were then leased out and yielded high rents from mezzaddria contracts.
Despite the widespread abandonment of direct production for the market, home farms still produced for lords’ households (in northern Italy, for example), and some nobles ventured into profitable enterprises, like the large sheep flocks in Castile or, in Sicily, mills and aqueducts (at a cost of 8,000 florins on one estate) to set up sugar plantations. English gentry in the late fifteenth century invested in hedges and fences when they enclosed village fields, but usually left the management of flocks and herds to graziers or butchers, who paid a great deal of money for the leases of these specialised farms.
The intervention of towns in their hinterlands represented a further pressure on the rural producers. Quite distinct from the purchase of land by individual townsmen, towns claimed rights over the surrounding country, whether by the city ruling its contado, as in northern Italy, or by claiming jurisdiction over individual outburghers, as in northern Europe. The city of Freiburg bought up woods, pastures and even whole villages for the sake of adding revenues to the public purse, and controlling the supply of resources such as fuel. Towns everywhere were anxious to secure the cheapest possible food supplies for their inhabitants, and used various devices, such as declaring that the central urban market alone could handle the surplus production of the neighbourhood. By such interference in the market, and by individual townsmen obtaining rent charges from peasants to whom they had advanced loans, in areas of a relatively weak nobility, such as Holland, the towns assumed some of the extractive roles normally associated with lords.
Finally, the state intervened in rural society, again as an exploiter of the peasantry, notably in France where royal taxes rivalled and surpassed the burden of lords’ rents. Rulers anxious to maintain revenues, or to avoid disorder, or both, might intervene to protect the peasants. The Catalan example has already been noted, and in Germany we find princes like the dukes of Bavaria or the dukes of Brunswick preventing some of the excesses of lords who attempted to impose personal serfdom. But the state always played an ambiguous role — as the Catalan example shows, the monarchy could oppose the interests of the nobility only with the greatest difficulty. Intervention often meant siding with the lords, by punishing rebellious tenants, legislating to limit wage increases, or attempting to curb the consumption of luxuries by peasants. Only on rare occasions can the state be seen promoting economic growth in the countryside, whether by quelling disorder, or by removing tolls and other obstacles to internal trade, or more directly, like the dukes of Milan, initiating drainage and irrigation schemes, building canals and encouraging new crops such as mulberry trees.