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859. The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people [vulgus] living between the Seine and the Loire formed a sworn association [coniuratio] amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had been made without due consideration [incaute], they were easily slain by our more powerful people.
So the Annals of Saint-Bertin recount the fate of the only popular resistance to the Vikings in the Carolingian period. This brief narrative leaves much unexplained, of course. What does incaute really mean? Does it mean that a sworn association was in itself seen as a seditious act? Charlemagne had banned coniurationes, after all, because their oaths were potentially in rivalry with oaths to the king (above, Chapter 16). But whether this was the principal problem or not, the fighting peasants of 859 were acting autonomously of the Carolingian political hierarchy, and were thus at best suspect, at worst actively dangerous. Not just the local aristocracy who destroyed them, but the whole political class, would have perceived this danger; and it would have seemed that much more serious because of the way Frankish society had developed in the last half century. Free peasants had traditionally been able to serve in royal armies; as late as Charlemagne’s reign we can find laws about such army service, and this military capacity, however rarely exercised, was one of the marks of freedom, along with the right to participate in public assemblies, especially law courts. By the 850s, however, despite the military danger which the Vikings represented, armies were more and more aristocratic, and military service was slowly becoming seen as an aristocratic privilege, as we saw in the last chapter. The peasants of the Seine-Loire region may have thought that they were following in the footsteps of their grandfathers, assembling for military defence at a time when they were seriously needed. Charles the Bald’s aristocrats by now saw such military readiness as inappropriate for peasants, however. This only made worse the fact that the peasants had done this autonomously, without any formal call-up. So they died. But if free peasants did not do military service any more, what did their freedom consist of? They were that much less useful to kings, and kings would be that much less worried if there were other threats to their freedom. This was a general development of the ninth and tenth centuries in the West: peasants were slowly and steadily excluded from the public sphere, and, in more general terms, ever more clearly subjected to aristocrats and churches, the great private landowners.
The way this happened, and the extent to which it happened, varied from place to place in western Europe. As many as five separate socio-economic changes can be invoked here. First, in some non-Carolingian regions, the ninth and tenth centuries were the period in which landowning itself developed, and a really wealthy aristocracy emerged for the first time. Secondly, in Carolingian Europe, aristocrats and churches gained property, by force or otherwise, from their landowning peasant neighbours, thus reducing the numbers of independent peasants. Thirdly, dependent peasants, tenants, faced increasing rents and greater control exercised over their labour. Fourthly, peasants were increasingly excluded from the public world of the army and assembly, and thus from the purview and interest of kings. Fifthly, in some parts of Europe (notably France, but also much of Italy), this exclusion was, already by 1000, coming to mean the direct subjection of peasant communities to the judicial control of local lords, in the framework of the seigneurie banale. These were largely separate developments, but they nonetheless all pointed in the same direction. Overall, the relatively autonomous early medieval peasantry, discussed in Chapter 9, lost more and more of its autonomy in the last two centuries of our period. I have called this process the ‘caging’ of the peasantry: more and more, the huge peasant majority of the population of western Europe became divided up into localized units, controlled more and more by local lords. The word is a rough translation of Robert Fossier’s term encellulement, literally the division of society into a cellular pattern, which he sees as the key element in the shift from the early to the central Middle Ages. The force of this latter image is most closely tied to that of the ‘feudal revolution’, which in a strict sense is only the fifth (and the most localized) of my five developments. But, overall, the peasantry was everywhere systematically more restricted, more caged, as a result of all five processes. We shall look at them in turn here, and then step back, and look at their broader economic contexts and consequences too.
We saw in Chapter 20 that rulers became slowly more powerful in most of non-Carolingian Europe after 800. The flip-side of this development was a general increase in aristocratic power. Aristocrats were in the eighth century or so political patrons of their free peasant neighbours, as in Scandinavia, Ireland or Brittany, or takers of tribute from otherwise autonomous dependants, as in England and, soon, Rus, rather than full-scale landowners taking rents from non-landowning tenants. In much of England, the ninth century seems to have been the cusp moment in which landownership took shape. In northern Spain, there may have been various moments for the same process between the late eighth and the tenth. In Croatia, the key moment seems to have been the ninth. In Denmark, it may have been the late tenth and eleventh; as usual, we cannot be sure, for our documents only begin in the late eleventh, but full aristocratic landownership (together with a substantial surviving peasant landowning stratum) certainly existed by then. In other parts of ‘outer Europe’, equivalent changes occurred later, out of our period, although they would in the end occur everywhere. These shifts towards aristocratic landowning on a large scale are in every case ill-documented, and their context (and their immediate effect on the peasantry) will remain obscure. But the result was in each case clear: the emergence of a powerful élite group, which had for the first time the right to coerce those sections of the peasant majority who were their immediate dependants. These rights were no greater than those of aristocrats in Merovingian Francia and Lombard Italy who were already landlords in the sixth century; it took until 900 for lords in England, and until 1000- 1050 for lords in Denmark, to gain the powers that were considered normal in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms. But peasants were losing ground all the same, and in England, as we saw earlier, where almost no landowning peasants survived by the eleventh century, they lost ground more fully than anywhere else in Europe.
Only slightly better documented is the expansion of aristocratic and ecclesiastical landowning inside Carolingian Europe. One aspect of this is, it is true, very clear in our material, for when peasants gave land to churches, the charters recording their donations were systematically kept. In eighth- and early ninth-century northern and central Italy, and central and southern Germany, we have a large number of texts of this type; so do we in tenth-century Burgundy, Catalonia and León. Many such documents were the work of aristocrats or near-aristocrats, men and women with enough landed wealth to be able to give generously for the good of their souls without threatening their well-being and political power; but in numerous cases it is evident that peasant cultivators were the donors - either of single fields or of their entire holdings. What were peasants intending when they gave such gifts? To get closer to heaven because of their generosity, certainly (the relationship is explicit in most such texts, which generally say that they are gifts ‘for the soul’, or for prayers by clerical professionals, and in Italy sometimes invoke a ‘hundred-fold counter-gift in heaven’). But the socio-political context for this was more varied. Sometimes such gifts were to what might be called a ‘neutral’ institution, to a newly founded local church, which simply represented a convenient nearby location for a priest capable of prayers of intercession, or to a monastery with a reputation for spirituality, whose prayers might be more efficacious for that reason (Cluny was one such in the early tenth century). Peasants might give small portions of their lands, or a childless couple might give all or most of their property, for purely spiritual reasons under these circumstances. But the institution might be locally powerful as well, either because it was associated with a major aristocratic family or a bishop, or simply because it was gaining wealth and thus power from the gifts of the faithful, as was increasingly the case for Cluny across the tenth century; under these circumstances, to be associated with it through one’s generosity might bring political benefits too, patronage in this world as well as in the next. Finally, the richest and most powerful institutions could become major players, seigneurial lords over their neighbours, and then any gifts to them by the weak would be decidedly double-edged, and might well contain a substantial element of coercion.
Not all rising churches and monasteries got this far. There is a visible tendency in many European villages for pious gifts to dry up when religious institutions became locally powerful and therefore less ‘neu tral’; we can see this in many places in Germany and Italy in the ninth century, after the first great wave of gift-giving, for example. But communities could also miscalculate, and carry on giving long enough to tilt the local balance of power too firmly towards a major local monastery. The local dominance of Fulda and Lorsch in central Germany and Farfa in central Italy by 850, Redon in eastern Brittany by 900, and by 1000 Cluny as well, had just such roots. Such monasteries henceforth operated as major political players, often at the expense of the heirs of the pious donors who were the origin of their power.
Both churches and lay aristocrats also increased their lands by more direct methods, that is to say by force. This was unlikely to be recorded in legal documents, of course, but we do occasionally have signs of it in court records. In Milan in 900 eleven peasants from nearby Cusago sought to prove their full freedom in court against the count of Milan, their landlord for some of their land; he was claiming that they were aldii, half-free, but they counter-argued that they owned their own property as well. Property-ownership was restricted to the free, so, if this was accepted, it would prove their case; conversely, however, they would lose their land as well as their freedom to the count if they failed. In this case, very unusually, the peasants won; but other parallel cases where they lost show at least that peasants were often sure of the justice of their cause. They may also have done so because they hoped for royal support. Both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious legislated against the expropriation of the poor, in fact; in 811 the former noted that the poor were telling him that bishops, abbots and counts were despoiling them of their property, and, if the powerful could not get that property, they were seeking excuses to undermine its owners, including by sending them endlessly on military expeditions (a sign of freedom, but often an expensive one) until they gave in and sold up. But, of course, however sympathetic a king/emperor might be, his local judicial representatives were the same bishops and counts, who were rarely going to let peasants raise successful pleas against themselves.
Overall, as noted in the previous chapter, the Carolingian period was one in which great lords became steadily wealthier, and peasant landowners are less and less visible in our sources. This process continued into the tenth century as well, by which time there is also no longer any sign that kings were worried about such matters. In 800, in most parts of Europe for which there are documents, we can find active societies of owner-cultivators. By 1000 these were notably fewer, particularly north of Burgundy and of the Alps. In southern France and Italy, too, such networks, even though they survived, were by now weaker. Legally or illegally, independent peasantries were on the retreat.
Peasants did sometimes resist by force. This was a losing strategy, for aristocratic armies were so much more powerful; that they tried it at all is a sign of their desperation. Such resistance tended to be commonest in mountain areas, further from centres of political power, and in areas where collective exploitation of woodland and pasture led to stronger peasant communities: we have examples from the Alps, the Appennines and the Pyrenees. The best instance is that of the peasants of the Valle Trita, in the highest part of the central Appennines, who resisted attempts by the monastery of S. Vincenzo al Volturno to claim their lands and to declare them unfree, during a whole century, 779-873, and across nine separate court hearings; it may have been another century before they finally lost. The only large-scale peasants’ revolt in this period was that of the Stellinga in Saxony in 841-2; this seems to have extended across all or most of Saxony. But that was an extreme situation, for Carolingian conquest had displaced an entire peasant society and economy, more similar to contemporary Denmark than to contemporary Francia, and Frankish-style aristocratic power had imposed itself in little more than a generation. The Saxon peasantry thus faced a new totalizing subjection, and this explains why such a large group took to arms. They lost, too, however. Royal rhetoric aside, the Carolingian century was a bad time for peasant autonomy, the time in which, in Francia and Italy, the momentum towards generalized aristocratic dominance first became inescapable.
The situation for dependent peasants, that is to say tenants, became harsher in the same period. The century after 750 saw the steady extension, particularly in northern Francia and southern Germany, but also in northern Italy, of new estate structures, which we call ‘bipartite estates’ or ‘manors’. These were estates divided into two parts, a ‘demesne’ (dominicum and variants in Latin), all of whose produce went directly to the lord, and the tenant holdings of the peasantry. Some of the produce from the tenant holdings was paid in rent; the rest was kept by the tenant workforce, male and female (for rent was sometimes in cloth, which was almost always woven by women), for their own subsistence. This was not new; the novelty was the demesne, for this was above all farmed by the forced labour of the tenant population, who owed labour service, up to three days a week in some cases, as part of their rent. Such demesnes varied greatly in size; some of the major north Frankish monasteries had substantial ones, and high labour service; east of the Rhine they were smaller, and in much of Italy they were both small and fragmented, with labour obligations correspondingly low, maybe only two to three weeks a year. But in nearly all cases they marked an intensification of labour, for such patterns are hardly documented in the Frankish lands before the 740s. This change, too, was sufficiently visible to come to the attention of kings; in 800, when Charlemagne was in the territory of Le Mans, the peasants of both royal and ecclesiastical lands sought a ruling from him on how much labour service they should owe, as it was so variable in the area, extending in some cases to a whole week. He enacted that a tenant family on a quarter-factus (a local word for holding) with its own animals should do no more than a day’s service a week (though two if it had no animals), and less if it had less land. This sounds generous, although we do not know how much a ‘quarter-factus’ actually was (peasant families might have routinely held two or more, for example), but the need for such equalization points at the novelty of the obligation.
Demesne farming was special, because it was entirely controlled by the lord. Such a care for estate management and for the intensification of labour points to the sale of produce. It used to be argued that manorial economies were ‘closed’, autarkic units which produced just enough for the needs of landlords and also all their own needs, thus making buying and selling unnecessary. The growing evidence for exchange after 750- 800 in particular, as we shall see later in the chapter, makes such an argument problematic; but anyway Carolingian estate documentation makes frequent reference to the transport of produce, sometimes over substantial distances, not only to monastic centres, but also to markets or ports. In general, the manorial system was tied up with the expansion of exchange. But it also represented a greater weight of exploitation for the population of manorial estates, and this showed that tenants, too, not just peasant landowners, were feeling the effects of the power of landed elites.
We know an unusually large amount about manorial estates, particularly of monasteries, in the Carolingian period, far more than about the inner workings of European estates in any other period before the twelfth century. This is because the ninth century is the great period for estate surveys, known as polyptychs, which were often very detailed indeed. One of the first polyptychs we have, for the suburban Paris monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from the 820s or slightly earlier, lists every member of each tenant family (with a slight under-recording of daughters), the legal status of both husband and wife, the size of their mansus (tenant holding), with grain-fields, vineyards and meadows counted separately, and all the rents and services they owed, which could be very complex, including weaving, cart-service, wood-cutting, basket-making, building and iron-working. More than two dozen similar texts survive across the next century (the last major ones were for Prüm near Trier in 893 and for S. Giulia in Brescia in the years around 900). The sort of information we have for Saint-Germain was typical of such surveys; we may not always have the names of peasant children, but we sometimes have ages (Marseille cathedral, 813-14), or the rations given to demesne workers (S. Giulia), or information hinting at grain yields (Annappes, c. 800; S. Tommaso in Reggio, after 900), or the types of grain crop grown (S. Giulia; Saint-Remi in Reims, c. 850). Statistical work can be done on texts like this, to show a rise in population (Marseille; Saint-Germain), or the tendency for legally unfree men to marry free women, thus ensuring the freedom of their children (Saint-Germain among others), or the relative regularity of rents and labour service - which could be great, indicating strong central direction, or much more variegated, indicating ad-hoc negotiation or the persistence of local customs. The attraction of this sort of detail for a long time stood in the way of a realization by historians that such estates were not typical, in either their size or their degree of organization (see also above, Chapter 9). Not only were they restricted geographically, but they were also, probably, a sign above all of ecclesiastical landowning, and perhaps some royal landowning too; lay lords can be seen to have developed demesnes, but it is unlikely that they were as tightly organized as this, not least because lay estates were divided between heirs, and changed hands rather more often. All the same, the world of the polyptychs was one ninth-century reality, at least, and probably the most productive one. Monasteries did not only write estate surveys, either; we have a guide to estate management from Abbot Adalard of Corbie, Charlemagne’s cousin, from 822, and even a map of an ideal monastery, with all the workshops marked, from St. Gallen, drawn around 825-30.
The appearance of such a range of estate documents from the early years of the ninth century onwards might already make them seem to be part of the Carolingian political programme, and indeed they were: the first one of all, the Brevium Exempla of c. 800, includes surveys of five royal demesnes including Annappes, listing all the utensils, grain and animals found there, and also of a village of the monastery of Wissembourg, with comments such as ‘and you should list others of such things in the same way, and then list the livestock’. These were models, coming from royal government; and the early ninth-century manuscript of the Brevium Exempla has as its next text the Capitulare de Villis, a capitulary also dating to about 800, which is in effect another estate manual, less detailed but more complete than Adalard’s, this time constructed by a royal official. The highly moralized royal political practice of the early ninth century (cf. above, Chapter 17) extended even to estate management, that is to say. The Capitulare de Villis urges proper record-keeping (in more detail than the average polyptych managed, in fact), to ensure that royal estates should ‘serve our needs entirely, and not those of other men’, and also urges estate managers (iudices) to do justice, and to ensure that ‘our workforce [familia] works well at its affairs, and does not go wasting time at markets’. The concern for a moral way of life that permeates all Carolingian legislation thus melds with a concern for adequate profit. This concern spread from the king to the great Carolingian monasteries, and lasted as long as the Carolingians themselves did. Charlemagne’s court did not, of course, invent demesne farming, only its recording; manors were developing for quite different reasons. But the Carolingian programme provided a further impulse towards systematization and control.
In the tenth century polyptychs ceased to be written, but manors by no means went away. In some areas, they extended geographically; demesne farming had spread to England by 900, as the Hurstborne Priors survey indicates (above, Chapter 19), showing that both land-lordship and the tight control of estates had taken root there. In Italy, the manorial system did lose ground after 900; references to labour services drop sharply across the tenth century, and there was a general trend to rents in money, rather earlier than in northern Europe, with demesnes increasingly divided into tenures. This however still showed an estate management directed towards exchange; it is just that the buying and selling of agricultural produce would be done by the tenants, not by the lords; this was an easier process in Italy than further north, for cities were larger, and thus demand for grain and wine was higher. In France, Germany and England, demesne agriculture and labour service remained a normal part of lord-tenant relationships into the twelfth century (in England, the fourteenth). By then, it had often become routinized, as an instrument of control rather than of the intensification of agrarian profit; but it could always be turned into the latter if there was opportunity, as in thirteenth-century England.
Tenants on great estates were, as before 800, socially very diverse. On every estate there were both free and unfree dependants, and sometimes the half-free as well, with an intermediate set of rights. In regions of Europe with a written vernacular tradition, such as England and Germany, we find even more social strata, each with a separate vernacular name, owing slightly different arrays of services. All or most strata owed labour service, but heavy labour service on demesnes broadly went with unfreedom; legal status was thus tied up with economic subjection. All the same, the tendency was for legal status to become less important. On the village-sized estates of Saint-Germain, where everyone was a tenant, intermarriage between free and unfree was common, as we have just seen, and it became possible to imagine that unfreedom would die out. On one level, unfreedom was no longer necessary to lords, as most peasants were already tenants; the next developments we will discuss, the exclusion of the free from the public world and the development of the seigneurie banale, also lessened the privileges of freedom, making it easier for lords to allow the unfree to gain it. Very slowly, the traditional concept of unfreedom lost its purchase in western Europe. This happened first in Italy, where unfree tenants were already rare in the eleventh century (though domestic servants remained unfree for much longer); it happened next in France, though somewhat later in Germany and England, and later still in Scandinavia. Tenurial subjection remained, and the central medieval concept of ‘serfdom’, of being tied to the land and subject to the justice of the lord, was not very different in practice from the legal unfreedom of the early Middle Ages - indeed, it used the same word as the classical Roman word for ‘slave’, servus. By now, however, the degree of tenurial, economic, subjection to a lord was much more important than the traditional free-unfree division.
The other two trends which reduced the autonomy of the peasantry of Europe in the period 800-1000 have already been discussed (in Chapters 18 and 21) and need less detail here. Peasants were increasingly excluded from the army in Carolingian Europe, as we have seen. This was not complete; it did not happen in England, nor in Saxony, where all hands were needed for the Slav wars in the tenth century. Elsewhere, however, aristocratic status itself was by 1000, and indeed earlier, associated with being a miles, and aristocratic clienteles became the only fighting forces. Public assemblies, too, lost their importance in parts of tenth-century Europe, particularly in West Francia; they continued into the late eleventh century in Italy, but abruptly ended there too. It was above all in England that earlier traditions of public assemblies with judicial powers, extending to all free men, continued without a break. This was a major reason why the free-unfree divide remained strong in England, too; indeed, a rather larger proportion of the population was legally unfree there by 1200 or so than in any of the post-Carolingian lands. Elsewhere, though, the world of the public was increasingly barred to the peasantry, who were as a result more and more subject to lords.
This then developed into the seigneurie banale in parts of West Francia/France and Italy, in areas where the state lost almost all force and private lordships took over almost everything. Seigneurial lords claimed legal rights even over their free landowning neighbours, if they lived in the lord’s seigneurial territory, especially if they were peasants, as in the case of the lordship of Uxelles in the Mâconnais discussed in the last chapter. It should be evident that the seigneurie banale was only an extreme development of the general tendency for the free peasantry, of all social and economic conditions, to be excluded from the public world, a process already beginning in the Carolingian period. The sort of control that lords could have even without formal seigneurial rights is well shown by the incastellamento process of central Italy, the lands around Rome in particular. In this process, in the tenth and eleventh centuries lords moved their free dependants, often by force, from their previous settlements to hill-top villages, sometimes on new sites, reorganizing their tenures and their rents as they did so. This was harder in northern Italy, where the land of lords was more fragmented; incastellamento there just meant the foundation of castles as signs of political power and status, alongside or above pre-existing villages and hamlets, as in northern Europe. In the centre of the peninsula, however, lords often had larger blocks of land, and were more powerful as a result. Peasants inside the new castles were already that much further from the world of the public, although the seigneurie banale did not fully develop in these regions until well into the eleventh century. But with the new seigneuries of the decades around and after 1000, the trap snapped shut on the peasantry, who were from then on legally subjected to lords, with varying degrees of severity, for all their affairs. This would continue until seigneurial powers were picked at from both sides, in the twelfth century and onwards, by peasants who established agreed sets of rights with their lords, called franchises (‘freedoms’) in Romance-speaking countries; and by rulers, kings or counts in France, cities in Italy, who were keen to expand the remit of public justice again. But by then it was a very different political world.
These trends had separate roots, but they interacted with each other, and this interaction meant that the effects of each were greater; the exclusion of peasants from the public world was all the more serious because such peasants were also losing their lands, or, as tenants, were becoming more subjected to the demands of landlords, and vice versa. It is in this context that we can talk of a caging process, as peasant societies were steadily separated from each other, each more subject to a local lord, even without the imposition of the seigneurie banale, although still more fully if that form of lordship developed. That local lords in some cases were rising, militarized, families from the same community, former village-level medium owners or even former rich peasants (above, Chapter 21), did not make things any better; such families had a local knowledge that made domination easier, and also often had capillary hierarchical links with their neighbours or former neighbours, in the form of patron and client as well as landlord and tenant. Villages, and local communities in general, became more shot through with vertical social bonds. As we saw in Chapter 9, villages themselves became more carefully structured: they were often larger, often more nucleated. After 800 or so, they increasingly often had a church (the priest was another focus of patronage relations), and by 1000 they might sometimes already have a castle. If we look at the archaeological record for villages, we also frequently see from the ninth century the slow development of signs of distinction and power, such as estate centres, maybe walled, as at Montarrenti in Tuscany (above, Chapter 10); these were sometimes the lineal ancestors of the fortifications of the tenth and the eleventh centuries. But what castles, towers and the like meant was a much more formalized hierarchy. These hierarchies and new structurings added to the caging process for the peasantry, for they took away the flexibility that can be seen in our evidence from the earliest Middle Ages. Peasants ‘knew their place’ more from now on; they had less negotiating power.
These are very wide generalizations, and there were all sorts of regional nuances. By and large, regions (or villages) where a peasant landowning stratum survived could maintain a certain independence of action, at the local level at least, for many centuries to come; we can see examples in twelfth- or thirteenth-century northern Italy, for example, even in areas where private seigneuries were strong. But, overall, village society became more hierarchical, with a different pacing in each locality.
Let us look at some concrete examples of this. We saw in Chapter 9 that the villages around Redon in eastern Brittany were very autonomous in the early ninth century, with an active public sphere, and a peasantry capable of independent actions of all kinds, from land transactions to local policing. Chance collections of documents surviving from the Carolingian period give us a number of parallels to this pattern. The Rhineland villages around Mainz were sites of a large amount of aristocratic (including monastic and royal) landowning, for the area was one of the main ‘royal landscapes’ of the Carolingian world, but there were plenty of peasant owners as well, organized into groups of public witnesses, who largely kept out of aristocratic networks. The smaller villages around Milan or Lucca in Italy in the ninth century show more patronage links, between peasants and larger owners (both lay and ecclesiastical), but also a considerable flexibility of action for village-level dealers: they might all or mostly have patrons in the city, but there was a good deal of choice, for all powerful people had a city base. In the mountains, further from cities, peasants could develop a variety of different strategies. One example of this is the area around Rankweil in the upper Rhine valley, in the Alps above Lake Constance, whose inhabitants can be seen in a document collection of the 820s cautiously developing a land-based patronage relationship with the scultaizus Folcwin, a local official. Folcwin was probably brought in from outside as part of the extension of Carolingian public authority into the Alps, but he seems to be being absorbed into a local society rather than changing it from without. Another example comes from the Adriatic side of the central Italian Appennines, the land around the monastery of Casauria, founded (not far from the Valle Trita) by Emperor Louis II in 873. The documents from one village, Vico Teatino, surviving from the period 840-80, show among others a prosperous medium owner called Karol son of Liutprand (d. c. 870), who, with his family, engaged in a dense set of property transactions aimed at developing local social networks, and, above all, at setting his children up with attractive marriage-portions. Karol dealt with officials and greater landowners too, and doubtless had patronage relations with them - he was indeed climbing socially by marrying his children to them - but he moved with a great fluidity inside his own society. These were the years just before Casauria abruptly arrived, with royal patronage, on the political scene of this microregion; Casauria changed local politics profoundly, just as Redon did for the villages around it (hence, as usual, the survival of Karol’s documents, in the monastic archive), but up until then the flexible social world persisted.
This ‘Carolingian’ world, of villages structured by public power and large landowners but not necessarily dominated by them, became weaker in the next century. The Cluny documents, which illuminate a number of villages around the monastery in considerable detail, do show us villagers in some places, into the late tenth century, operating strategies of the sort we have just seen, with only occasional gifts to the monastery; but in others, a more hierarchical structure was beginning to appear. The family of Arleus son of Ingelelm (d. after 1002) was a similar family of medium owners to that of Karol, based in a set of villages just north of the monastery; in the last half of the tenth century they gave most of their land in one of these, Flagy, to the monastery, so as to develop a patronage relationship with Cluny, while keeping that in other villages such as Merzé. But Arleus also had more formal relationships; Josseran of Uxelles was his senior, lord. The seigneurie banale was coming in, and it would, besides restricting the legal rights of those subject to it, bring personal relations of lordship, too. Arleus’ heirs would escape this, and ended up as milites and petty lords in Merzé, on the aristocratic side of the dividing-line. His neighbours, however, many of whom he and his family also transacted with or witnessed for, did not.
The documents for Farfa in central Italy show analogous patterns. Farfa had founded the nearby castle (that is, fortified village) of Salisano between 953 and 961 as part of the incastellamento process, and the bulk of the local inhabitants seem already to have been living there in the late tenth century. Most of the land of Salisano was already the monastery’s, since the ninth century. In the late tenth, documents show it accumulating the rest, mostly in gift, from the surviving landowning peasant population (they sometimes resisted, but lost in court); the donors then got the land back in lease, and their heirs became monastic tenants. Once again, however, some of the inhabitants swam to the surface; Azo son of Andrea, a local owner, leased the castle itself in 961, and his rivals (or maybe heirs), the Gualafossa family, ended up across the next century as petty castle lords, dependent on the monastery and active in its clientele, with military status, and also controlling a subsidiary castle which Farfa did not fully get its hands on until 1093. The seigneurie banale did not begin here until the 1010s, but we already see an increasingly firm local hierarchy, with a military edge, a generation or more earlier.
These last two examples are from areas close to powerful monasteries, and therefore on one level it might not seem surprising that the imagery of lordship should come through strongly. But so were the Carolingian examples, for the most part, and lordship was less strong all the same. Furthermore, as already stressed, the parts of Europe where non-aristocratic landowning still existed were by now rather fewer. If the Parisian villages subject to Saint-Germain-des-Prés were atypical in their subjection in 820, they certainly were not so a hundred and fifty years later. Flagy, Merzé and Salisano show the caging process for the landowning peasantry beginning to operate; but in villages entirely owned by lords it was already more totalizing, and, as seigneurial rights came in, would become still more so.
These were not the only socio-economic changes of the ninth and tenth centuries in western Europe. This was a period of steady economic expansion in the widest sense: in population, in agricultural production, in artisanal activity, in exchange. It can be argued that the driving force for all of this was the process of peasant subjection we have just looked at; but it led to a much greater complexity of the economy at all levels. Let us look at each in turn.
Between the early Middle Ages and the beginning of the fourteenth century, the population of Europe grew consistently, perhaps tripling in size. Figures are hypothetical in most areas, post-Conquest England being the major exception; but both villages and towns increased in both size and number, with obvious cumulative effects, and the average size of peasant holdings dropped substantially, with quarter-mansi becoming normal holdings by the twelfth century in many places. The roots of that growth seem to have lain in the Carolingian period, for many of the villages recorded in, for example, the polyptych of Saint-Germain were already large, and lists of children, here and in other polyptychs, allow us to calculate that they were already - slowly - getting larger.Mansi in polyptychs and other documents were already increasingly often divided, at least into two, which is, here as later, a rough indicator of population growth as well. Why this growth began, and exactly when, is not yet fully clear, but slow demographic expansion, probably increasing in speed after 950 or so, underpins the last two centuries covered by this book.
One consequence of a demographic rise was, of course, that there had to be enough food for an increasing population. Early medieval populations were low; the approximately two million people calculated for Domesday Book England (compared with sixty million today) could be fed fairly easily, even with the farming methods then available, and so could at least part of the increased population after that, simply by using all available agricultural space, as intensively as was possible. The pressures for intensive cultivation were even then not always irresistible; only at the very end of our period did northern Europeans begin widely to adopt a three-course rotation of crops, with only one year in three left fallow rather than one in two, which had been common earlier (and which remained common in the Mediterranean); three-year cycles were already known about in 800 (they appear in some polyptychs), but they only became generally used when population pressures increased.
The same is true for land clearance. We saw in Chapter 9 that most land in the early medieval West should not be thought of as being trackless wild forest. Some of Germany was, and so was much of the Slav lands and Scandinavia, but to the west of the Rhine and south of the Alps, and still more in England, woodland, however extensive, was for the most part more divided up, and, if not managed for timber and coppice, was at least regarded as a resource, for peasant subsistence and aristocratic or royal hunting. Woods were often part of peasant holdings, indeed, and their use (for grazing, the gathering of woodland fruits, and of course firewood) formed part of standard peasant economic strategies. If population pressure built up, it would be these woods that would go first, cut down and replaced with grain-fields, which would produce more calories, although also a less varied diet. This small-scale land clearance, known as ‘assarting’, is more extensively documented in the ninth century than earlier; this may just be because our evidence is better, but it does fit the signs of demographic growth in the Carolingian period. All the same, the take-off of land clearance, the move to clear woodland and also marshland on a large scale, does not begin anywhere before 950 or so, and it often happened later. Population pressure was only really building up at the very end of our period, from slow Carolingian beginnings. The great clearance period, which changed the face of central-eastern Europe in particular, post-dates the end of this book.
It is worth adding that, once peasants did commit themselves to land clearance, they could clear faster than their numbers rose, at least for a time, and this could add to their resources, at least in grain. This was particularly true on agricultural margins, in mountain areas or on the edge of the great woodland zones of Germany, where there was more to clear - landlords frequently offered lower rents in return for a commitment to clearance. Here, at least, was one area where peasants could gain, not lose, from the socio-economic changes in the last century or so of our period. An anecdotal example of this is the archaeological site of Charavines, on a small lake in the Dauphiné, on the edge of the French Alps, where a small settlement was found in an area of land clearance. The handful of houses there was found in waterlogged conditions, which means that wood survived: the houses can be dated by tree rings to the period 1003-40. Charavines did not last long, but it was notably prosperous for a few decades. The houses had extensive finds, wooden tools and bowls (and musical instruments), cloth, shoes, imported ceramics, and an unusual amount of metalwork, including weapons and coins, the imported goods perhaps paid for by the sale of pigs, which dominated animal bones on the site. We cannot generalize from this (though people have done so), but we should recognize that this is a much richer set of finds than one would expect on most rural sites in previous centuries; one of the buildings may have been aristocratic, but the others were not. We may be seeing here the sort of prosperity that agrarian expansion could bring at the close of our period, temporarily at least, until population rises caught up again, or until lords increased rents and seigneurial dues.
Artisanal production and exchange was developing elsewhere, too, and had been since the Carolingian period. We saw in Chapter 9 that before 800 exchange was localized in most places. This was least true in northern Francia, where there was a measurable movement of goods along the great river valleys like the Rhine and the Seine, matching in the eighth century a set of North Sea ports. Most Italian exchange hardly extended outside single city territories, however, and, in England, very little exchange at all existed beyond the level of the village. This was even more true of Scandinavia, and the Slav and Celtic lands, except for luxury items, which travelled to their élite buyers across the North Sea and Baltic, and along the Russian rivers, as easily as they did in Francia and Italy. All these patterns became more elaborate after 800.
Francia between the Loire and the Rhine was the most economically complex part of the West, after as before 800. We find increasing urban activity in the archaeology, with Mainz joining Dorestad, Cologne and Paris as major artisanal and mercantile centres, and by the tenth century urban populations appear as political actors, with the inhabitants of Metz and Cambrai rising up against their bishops in 924 and 958 respectively, among others. In the tenth century we also find more evidence than earlier for active Jewish commercial populations in the Rhineland cities. A set of smaller new urban centres developed as well, as with the burgus that grew up around Saint-Denis just outside Paris, and the first activity in the network of Flemish towns such as Bruges, Ghent and Saint-Omer, which seem to have begun to expand in the late ninth century. When Dorestad failed in the same period, new Rhine-mouth centres emerged to replace it, notably Tiel, where excavations show substantial tenth-century development. Written evidence for markets across the whole of northern Francia increases as well, and in the tenth century they extended far across East Francia too, as numerous grants of market rights by the Ottonians show. Iron production is increasingly visible in the archaeology. And ceramic production, always the clearest indicator of the scale of economic systems, continued to develop, with the Badorf and Pingsdorf kilns near Cologne joined by major and widely distributed products from, for example, Andenne in the Meuse valley and Beauvais north of Paris. Badorf/Pingsdorf products are also found in the trading centres of Scandinavia such as Ribe and Hedeby (where, however, they may have been seen as luxuries). We can even plot land trade routes by now, linking the great river basins, studded with viciand burgi acting as markets; these routes can be tracked by coin distributions, the wine of Burgundy and the Paris region probably exchanged for wool from the Rhine delta, the future Flanders. The sales from the great monastic estates, which we have seen documented in the polyptychs, fed into this network. Even in Francia, most exchange was always relatively local; some 80 per cent of coins are found inside a 100-kilometre radius of their mints. But there was enough of an interregional traffic in bulk goods to give us an impression of considerable activity. This continued without a break from now on, with the cloth production of the Flemish towns taking off after 1000, and the great Champagne fairs developing in the next century; these marked a new stage in the complexity of exchange, but they had firm ninth- and tenth-century roots.
These signs of activity were matched elsewhere, but on a smaller scale. In England, large-scale production and internal exchange began in the tenth century, and was matched by some urban development, particularly in York. In southern Germany, Regensburg on the Danube was clearly an active urban and mercantile centre by the tenth century, expanding beyond its Roman walls, with merchants rich enough to buy land. A document from about 905 listing tolls owed at Raffelstetten on the Danube near Linz shows that Moravians, Bohemians and maybe even the Rus were using the river to trade with the Bavarians. Here, however, the goods listed were dominated by salt, which had been sold from the Salzburg region since the Iron Age and before; slaves and horses took second place. There is no reference to artisanal products, a major sign of bulk trade. The Danube did not yet match the Rhine, Meuse or Seine as a trade route.
This has some parallels in Italy, too. As Italy was the closest part of the Latin West to the important exchange networks of the Muslim southern and eastern Mediterranean, there were increasingly active long-distance sea-routes around the peninsula, with Venice developing rapidly as an entrepôt after the late eighth century, particularly for the slave trade to the Arabs fuelled by the Carolingian-Sclavenian wars; in 829 its duke Justinian in his will refers to his ‘working solidi’ invested in ships due to return, the first reference in medieval history to mercantile capital. Venice by the tenth century was an autonomous maritime power, making trade treaties not only with kings in Italy but even, in 992, with the emperor Basil II, Venice’s nominal sovereign. In the tenth century Venice was also matched in southern Italy, the richest part of the peninsula, by the trading activity of Amalfi, Salerno, Gaeta, and (the largest of them) Naples. They, even more than Venice, looked to the Arab world. All the same, this international exchange did not fully reflect the more somnolent activity of Italy’s internal economy. The inland Italian cities were very large by western standards; they all had active markets, and they were expanding in the tenth century in particular, as rising figures for house prices show for Milan. Some of them were points of reference for wider exchange, notably Pavia and Cremona. But the others were exchange-centres above all for their immediate territories. The north Italian cities as yet had little connection with Venice (less than southern Italian cities had with Amalfi and Naples); the complex and vibrant production and exchange of the Po plain and northern Tuscany in the twelfth century is hardly visible before 1000, or 950 at the earliest. The most we can say is that the Italian urban network was poised on the edge of that economic take-off, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years later than in Francia.
Venice and Amalfi were already anticipated in the eighth century by the ports of the North Sea, Dorestad, Quentovic, London, Ipswich, Southampton, York, Ribe, extending up the Baltic to Birka, with Hedeby founded around 800. It was down the trade routes with Scandinavia that the Vikings came, and Viking raids on Dorestad and other Frankish coastal towns, and also many inland centres in West Francia, did considerable damage in the late ninth century. But, as we saw in Chapter 20, Viking activity had close links to merchant activity; often enough, indeed, raiders took goods simply to sell elsewhere. In the tenth century, North Sea exchange picked up quickly (if indeed it had ever lessened, taken as a whole), and the presence of Scandinavian communities all across the north, Dublin, York and Rouen to the west, and Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod and Kiev to the east, greatly extended the scope of that exchange.
We must not overstate North Sea economic activity. This exchange was similar to that of the new northern Mediterranean ports, above all in luxuries, or near luxuries such as slaves. All the same, the existence of the North Sea (and Irish Sea, and Baltic, and Russian river) long-distance exchange network was important for the future. When, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the internal economies of the major north European regions became sufficiently complex to begin to specialize in their production, the North Sea network was ready for bulk exchange, sending English wool to be made into Flemish cloth, and sending French and Rhenish wine, Norwegian and German timber, north Norwegian dried fish, to anywhere that needed them. But already by 1000 this sort of bulk exchange was a feature of the Islamic Mediterranean; closer and more organic links between the Muslim regions, al-Andalus, Tunisia, Sicily, Egypt, the Levant, had already begun in the tenth century (see above, Chapter 15). The Mediterranean indeed had more potential for growth in interregional bulk exchange in 1000 than the North Sea had, and in the next century it would expand further, as Italy entered it more fully, and other regions too. In the North Sea region, by contrast, this trading world was a feature of the central Middle Ages, not earlier, and was hardly visible in 1000, except perhaps in Flanders. But the North Sea would match the Mediterranean in the end; and its roots lie in the luxury exchange network of the early Middle Ages. The sea-lanes and roads of the twelfth century were not so very different from those of the eighth, ninth and tenth.
In these pages, I am stressing the increasing exchange activity of the period 800-1000, but we must not exaggerate its significance. In particular, we must not overemphasize the importance of long-distance routes. Venetians and Swedes and Rhinelanders can all be found in Constantinople in the tenth century, but this does not mark any systemic links between Italy, Sweden/Rus and Germany on the one hand and Byzantium on the other. It marks only the luxury network, bringing wealth to a handful of lucky merchants, one major city (Venice), and few others. One might look at the long-distance trading of tenth-century Scandinavians, from Dublin to Rus, and suppose that this meant that economic activity was as great in Scandinavia as in Francia, or as in Egypt, whose merchants were only beginning to move outside the Nile valley in the same period. This would be false, however. The Egyptian economy was far more complex than any other; in Europe, the Frankish economy was vastly more complex than that of Scandinavia, whose major entrepôts had almost no link with their hinterlands at all. As in the Mediterranean, it is the internal economies of Europe that mattered most; most goods were transported, bought and sold inside, not outside, economic regions (this is still true today, never mind a thousand years ago), and economic complexity, ‘development’, depended above all on that. If we concentrate on the internal economic activity of the major west European regions before 1000, only northern Francia and the Rhineland are really looking dynamic, even though a more complex internal exchange was steadily extending more widely, as Otto I’s market grants in East Francia, East Anglian wheel-thrown pottery, or the long-term fight between the citizens of Cremona and their bishop over river tolls on the Po all show (the latter went on for at least two hundred years, c. 850-1050). Internal exchange would need to become properly rooted in other regions than the Loire-Rhine area, however, for it to be possible to have a bulk trade between these regions, not just a luxury trade. This was only on the edge of taking place in western Europe in 1000.
There was thus some exchange vitality in western Europe at the end of our period, but not exchange take-off. This also fits the steady but not yet rapid rise in population and in land clearance; the eleventh century and the twelfth show so much more activity that one risks seeing none before 1000, which would be as misleading an interpretation as an upbeat one focused on international routes. What explains the exchange activity that one can see in the ninth and tenth centuries, however? I argued in Chapter 9 that the motor of exchange before 800 was, broadly, aristocratic wealth and buying-power; the richer élites were, the more they were able to sustain large-scale networks of production and distribution. After 800, and even more after 950 or so, one could add to that the increased economic complexity that a rising population would bring on its own; furthermore, even peasants could benefit from the economic expansion brought by clearing land, at least sometimes, and lords, who had rents from more people and places, certainly did. But the main motor was still aristocratic. And in this context the caging of the peasantry was a vital element. All the trends towards the greater subjection of the peasantry described in the first half of this chapter had as an important result the concentration of peasant surplus in the hands of lords, through rents and seigneurial dues. The proportion of global production that ended up in the hands of lords steadily (sometimes, as in England, rapidly) increased. Aristocratic buying-power thus increased too. It was this that fed the expansion of exchange in the ninth and tenth centuries, and would do so for some centuries to come, for it was not until much later in the Middle Ages that capillary exchange anywhere became sufficiently relied on by peasants for it to become self-sustaining. The loss of autonomy of the peasantry and the increase in the complexity of exchange were thus two sides of the same coin. Historians tend to like exchange complexity, and they use value-laden words like prosperity, development, and (as I have done) dynamism to describe it. But complexity has costs, and the cost in this period was a decisive move to restrict the autonomy (and sometimes, indeed, the prosperity) of between 80 and 90 per cent of the population.