Chris Wickham on Medieval Europe
Introductory outline of the parameters of society in the middle ages
Chris Wickham wrote:
CHAPTER 1
A NEW LOOK AT THE MIDDLE AGES
This book is about change. … The middle ages had some clearly marked moments of change; it is these which give form to the period. The fall of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century, the crisis of the eastern empire when it confronted the rise of Islam in the seventh, the forcefulness of the Carolingian experiment in very large-scale moralised government in the late eighth and ninth, the expansion of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe in (especially) the tenth, the radical decentralisation of political power in the west in the eleventh, the demographic and economic expansion of the tenth to thirteenth, the reconstruction of political and religious power in the west in the twelfth and thirteenth, the eclipse of Byzantium in the same period, the Black Death and the development of state structures in the fourteenth, and the emergence of a wider popular engagement with the public sphere in the late fourteenth and fifteenth: these are in my view those major moments of change …
… People did talk about Europe in the middle ages, certainly. The entourage of the Carolingians in the ninth century, the kings who ruled what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, sometimes called their patrons lords of ‘Europe’, and so did their successors in the Ottonian Germany of the tenth century: they were posing their patrons as potential overlords of fairly vaguely characterised but wide lands, and ‘Europe’ was a good word for that. It survived throughout the middle ages in this rhetorical sense, alongside a basic geographical framing taken from antiquity, but it seldom – not never, but seldom – acted as the basis for any claimed identity. It is true that, steadily across the central middle ages, Christianity did spread to all of what are now called the European lands (Lithuania, then much larger than its present size, was the last polity whose rulers converted, in the late fourteenth century). This did not create a common European religious culture, however, for the northward expansions of Latin-based and Greek-based Christianities were two separate processes. Furthermore, the ever-changing border between Christian- and Muslim-ruled lands – with Christian rulers pushing south in thirteenth-century Spain, and Muslim rulers (the Ottomans) pushing north into the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – meant that the neatness of a ‘Christian Europe’ (which anyway always excludes Europe’s numerous Jews) never matched reality, as it still does not.
In a very general sense, the second half of our period does see Europe gaining some level of common development inside the framework of a variety of institutions and political practices, such as the network of bishoprics, or the use of writing in government, which linked Russia across to Portugal. This is not enough for us to see the continent as a single whole, all the same. It was too diverse. …
… I want to set out some basic parameters for how medieval society worked …
The Carolingian empire, as we have already seen, stretched across over half of western Europe; the power of the princes of Kiev in the eleventh century stretched nearly as far, in what is now Russia and Ukraine, a land where, north of the open steppe, forest cover was virtually complete. People did get about. Kings were often on the move for their entire reigns – King John of England (1199–1216) travelled an average of 20km a day, seldom staying anywhere more than a few nights …
… the basic procedures of political power that operated across much of our period …
The personal relationship [between kings] was what mattered … It was hedged about with ceremonial – oaths, homage (the formal recognition of personal dependence), and so on; and it was tied very closely to honour. It was also tied to assumptions about lordship: this ceremonial was part of the terms by which Henry, as a lord, held his dozen counties and duchies, with their landed resources, from the king of France, in contrast to his richest and most coherent territory, England itself, where he was fully sovereign. Here we are in the middle of the world of what is often called military feudalism: a wide élite of great aristocrats and knights did military service, and showed political loyalty, in return for gifts of office or land from kings or lesser lords, which they would lose if they were disloyal. Such men would often be called the lord’s sworn vassi, vassals, and the conditional landholdings would be called feoda, fiefs, hence the words ‘feudal’ and ‘feudo-vassalic’ in modern historical terminology …
… élite military service was not, for the most part, performed for a salary. Mercenaries were used in the twelfth century, and made up the bulk of infantry (including in Henry’s army of 1159), but cavalry and military leaders by and large consisted of men who, even if paid in part as well, had personal obligations to either the kingdom or the person of the king, or both. The Roman empire had had a fully paid army, much larger than medieval ones and permanent too, and in order to do so it also exacted heavy taxes on landholding – land being the major source of wealth by far, as we shall see. It was therefore a very coherent political structure, and the demise of its fiscal system in the west was the major reason why early medieval successor states were much weaker. The Byzantine and Ottoman empires operated in a similar way, maintaining a continuity throughout the middle ages in south-east Europe. General taxation returned in western Europe too, even if on a smaller scale and much less efficiently, in the late middle ages; when it did, it both transformed the resources of rulers and brought new problems – notably the need for rulers to get the consent of bodies of aristocrats and townsmen who were going to have to pay for the armies (or, at least, pass on the burden to their own peasantry). We shall see how this changed the political dynamics of the late medieval west. But in the twelfth century in France, and for most of the middle ages in most of Europe, no-one was taking a land tax on more than a small scale. As a result, armies had to be constructed on the basis of the public service of landowners, or else by handing out land on which military men could live; or, when mercenaries were used, by paying them out of the landed resources of kings or counts, and from levies of money from landowners in return for not serving themselves. In this world, a substantial proportion of military service, and thus army formation, depended on personal relationships, linked to the possession of land.
This politics of land was analysed in detail by the great French historian Marc Bloch in 1940, with a subtlety that has not been matched since. … He argued that a land-based society implied a ‘fragmentation of powers’: that it tended to produce decentralised political structures, simply because (to put it much more crudely than Bloch did), in a zero-sum game, the more you granted away land, the less you had, and your landed élites in the future might obey you less if you had less to give. This as we shall see was not entirely true, particularly in the early middle ages; the Carolingians in particular, who did not tax, ruled very large-scale territories indeed by any subsequent standard.
But there is no denying that tax-raising states are always much more solid than those based on the gift-exchange of land for military or political loyalty. Salaried soldiers and officials are a safer bet than those who are remunerated by land gifts; the disloyal and incompetent can simply cease to be paid. A ruler whose resources are all from landowning has to tread more carefully, particularly when dealing with aristocratic army-leaders whose landed resources are hard to take away from them, if he (more rarely she) wants to achieve political success. This marked out the majority of medieval political systems.
We may seem in this discussion to have slipped from discussing political activity to discussing military service. In our period, however, there was not so much difference. Government throughout the middle ages revolved around two main structures: the organisation of law and justice, and the organisation of war. Political loyalty was inextricable from a willingness to fight; as a result, too, the landed aristocracy almost always had a military training and identity in the middle ages, which we shall see reflected throughout this book. Rulers, when praised for their military success and their justice (including their ability to get losers to concede, which covered both), were often regarded as the source of their realm’s economic prosperity – and, conversely, climatic disasters were often seen as the fault of unjust rulers – but economic development was seldom seen as in their remit; poor relief was left to local communities and ecclesiastical charity; education was privately paid for, and so was medicine.
The restricted remit of government in western Europe, and its close link to personal relationships, has indeed led to some influential historians arguing that it is unhelpful to use the word ‘state’ when we discuss medieval polities. As will become clear this is not a view I hold; I would argue that the public authority of kings in the early middle ages, and the increasingly complex administrative systems of the thirteenth century and later, can both be usefully characterised in terms of state power. Accordingly, the word [‘state’] will be used in this book for most European political systems, except the very simple ones … But their remit was restricted …
… [The] politics of land … held full sway … Henry was about to abandon the last vestiges of a land tax in England, which its kings, uniquely in Latin Europe in the period, had collected for over a century. He may have done so to avoid creating opposition; conversely, he evidently reckoned that, in the zero-sum game of land grants, he was sufficiently resource-rich to be able to rely on the loyalty and gratitude of his principal aristocrats, both French and English – who were also the participants in his Easter and Christmas courts, and in the whole ceremonial culture which had built up around him and other rulers, which had its own etiquette and games-playing, and which helped to underpin loyalty. And he was, for the most part, right. But even he could not risk cutting at the root element of what he got in return for his generosity, that is to say the principle of sworn loyalty, by breaking his own oath to Louis VII [MGH: refers to the reasons why Henry had aborted an effort to seize Toulouse from Louis in 1159, so as not to risk being seen as an oath-breaker]. This in itself shows that the politics of land did not have to result in the cynical manoeuvrings of lords who were just waiting for the chance to break away from weakened rulers.
The obligations associated with taking land, the honour attached to fidelity, mattered too. Dishonour was indeed hard to recover from; it had to be handled with great care, and much of the political dealing of the middle ages hung on how much one could get away with before being regarded as fatally dishonourable … Furthermore, in the twelfth century the rights of lords and the obligations associated with oaths of loyalty were sharpening, as both Louis and Henry knew well and used to their advantage in other contexts. Other lords in the period might and did take chances with oaths and honour, but Henry was too skilled an operator to take the risk. All the same, the power relationships inside which these games of loyalty were played were entirely constructed around the politics of land. If we understand how that worked, we can get a long way in the understanding of the political practice of the European middle ages; only the stronger state systems of Byzantium and the Ottomans, and of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, lay outside it.
As to economic behaviour: the main point I want to make here, which underpins the rest of this book, is quickly set out. Medieval political communities based their coherence and their success on the control of land, as we have just seen. The reason is simple: all pre-industrial societies are based on agricultural wealth above all. There was nothing which one could call a factory in the middle ages, or for a long time afterwards. There were craftsmen, sometimes in large numbers, in the towns of tenth-century Egypt or thirteenth-century Flanders and northern Italy, artisans who produced cloth or metalwork on a large scale for markets across Europe, but they had access to much simpler technologies than would the industries of the future, and, above all, they were a restricted proportion of the overall population; under a fifth of the total population of Europe lived in towns – often very small ones – after 1200, and rather less before. (The exact figure is guesswork, for we do not have the data, but this works as a rough guide). There was also mining, for iron, and to produce the silver for the coinages of Europe after 950 or so, but the people engaged in that were a still smaller number. Most people, over four fifths of the population in the early middle ages, not much less later, were peasants: that is to say, they worked directly on the land as subsistence cultivators, on more or less fixed landholdings and in stable settlements (usually villages, sometimes scattered farmsteads). Agricultural products were most of what was produced by human labour in the middle ages, and for that reason the control of these, and by extension the land that produced them, was central.
But who was it that controlled land and its produce? In some cases it was the peasants themselves, in those parts of Europe where peasant landowning was substantial – which was above all in northern and eastern Europe, particularly in the first half of the medieval millennium, although there were owner-cultivators in the south, Spain, Italy and Byzantium, too. Where states taxed, as with the Byzantines and Arabs and, in the late middle ages, many western kingdoms and city-states too – or else where rulers took tribute, less systematically, from autonomous peasantries, as with the early princes and dukes of much of eastern Europe – rulers exercised a partial control over the land, simply because they took some of its produce, even if they were not actually its owners. But much of Europe was always owned by non-peasants: landowners who lived, and were prosperous, because they took rent from peasant tenant-cultivators. (Wage labour on the land was very rare before 1200.) Such landowners made up the aristocratic élites of Europe, the militarised lords whose loyalty (or not) to kings we have just discussed, and also the great churches – lands owned by churches could be as much as a third of the total land-area of kingdoms. Kings were themselves landowners, and their resources were, too, unless they taxed, overwhelmingly from the land they owned directly. The wealth of lords – whether royal, ecclesiastical, or aristocratic – thus came from what they could extract from the peasantry. They did so by force, and by the threat of force.
It is not that every bushel of grain was extracted by violence, of course. Lords did not have the manpower to achieve such a thing, given that peasants were in the huge majority. Indeed, peasants usually agreed their rents, and lords often accepted that such agreements would regularly turn into custom, and become hard to alter. But rent-taking was always backed up by potential force, from the armed men which all lords could command; the moment of rent-taking was often accompanied by armed men watching over the proceedings (the taking of taxation, which tended to have less consent from the population, even more so). And peasant resistance, which was itself sometimes violent, for example if rents and dues were arbitrarily increased, was certainly regularly met by force. We have plenty of accounts of the often repellent things lords were capable of doing to recalcitrant peasants – destruction and expropriation of goods, beating, cutting off of limbs, torture – which in the case of torture was generally recounted in tones of disgust by our sources, but about which in the case of beating and mutilation the accounts are usually more matter-of-fact. (The sources were largely written by clerics, who did not like aristocratic bad behaviour; but they tended to like assertive peasants still less.) Again: this did not happen to most people; but it could, and peasants knew it could. Violence was, that is to say, implicit throughout medieval agrarian society. Peasants did sometimes resist all the same, and sometimes even succeeded in resisting; but for the most part they were and remained subjected to lords.
Some peasants were legally free, some were not. What freedom brought, either in law or in practice (which were not the same) was by no means identical from society to society, but it was certainly supposed to allow free peasants to participate fully in the public world, for example the assemblies which were important in early medieval politics, and to have access to law courts. When such peasants were tenants, freedom often brought lower rents, too. Those who were unfree (called servi or mancipia in Latin) were even more various. ‘Servus’ meant chattel slave in the ancient world: many servi worked on the land in slave plantations, even if these were relatively rare already by the late Roman empire, and all through the middle ages there were slave household servants in many societies. In the medieval period as a whole, however, most servi were tenants. They had no legal rights, as such rights were restricted to the free by definition, and they not only paid heavier rents but also often had to perform unpaid labour services, seen as demeaning; but they had similar tenures to the free, and our word ‘slave’ does not fit them properly – I shall call them simply ‘unfree’ throughout. There were quite complex pecking orders inside villages between free and unfree tenants, particularly in the early middle ages. As time went on, these lessened in much of Europe; the common experience of economic subjection became more important than strictly legal distinctions, and the free and the unfree often intermarried (even though this was for a long time strictly illegal). As landlords put more pressure on free tenants too, both groups often ended up, after 1000 or so, in a similar practical legal subjection which is often called ‘serfdom’ (from the French word serf, itself taken from servus). Peasant resistance in the early middle ages was frequently over whether free tenants were being pushed down over the free–unfree boundary; by the eleventh or twelfth centuries, that resistance was more often over the terms of the practical subjection which was by then more common, and the free–unfree divide tended to become less crucial. But it still mattered; in both England and Catalonia after 1200, for example, there were free tenants who were not ‘serfs’, and the end of serfdom for the legally unfree in the fifteenth century was a significant change.
The dynamics of the lord–peasant relationship underlay not only all medieval economic history but all sociopolitical history too; it underpinned the sharpness of the boundaries of social stratification and it made possible the whole politics of land as just discussed. We shall see across the rest of the book how its dynamics changed in different periods and circumstances: how autonomous peasantries were on the retreat in northern Europe in the second half of the middle ages; how the nature of lordship changed in eleventh-century western Europe, bringing with it from now on many extra dues, forcefully imposed on local peasant populations; what effect the economic expansion of the central middle ages had on peasant and lordly prosperity, and on how they negotiated the relationship between the two; and how late medieval peasant resistance, to lords and states, operated, both successfully and unsuccessfully. But what is important to keep in mind … is the simple fact that wealth and political power was based on exploiting the peasant majority. The whole economic dynamic of medieval social systems, including every change which we tend to call economic ‘development’ – the increase in the number and size of markets, or the growth of owns and artisan craftsmanship for largely aristocratic buyers – hung on the unequal relationship between lords and peasants, and the surplus which the former managed to extract from the latter. Peasants do not appear on every page of this book … but almost everything which does was paid for by the surplus which they handed over, more or less unwillingly, in rent, and it is a mistake to forget it.
When we come to basic medieval cultural frameworks, it is harder to generalise, and it is also harder to select. …
… As we have seen, much of the force of political relationships in the central middle ages – and also, just as much, long before and long after – was based on honour. It is hard to overstate how important being seen as honourable was to all strata of medieval society, in every period and region of Europe; including the peasantry, even if others often thought that peasants were incapable of honour; including women, even if others often thought that the honour of women was really the honour of their male family. Accusations of disloyalty, or of cowardice, or of theft, or … of illicit sex, or … of being cuckolded, were all threats to honour. If you were a known thief, you risked death (theft, because it was secret, was in much of medieval Europe seen as worse than a homicide which was made publicly known); but, if not, you risked becoming so dishonourable as to lose legal reputation, what in the later medieval west was called fama, which in turn might mean that you could not give evidence in court, or in some cases even swear an oath. That was in itself a serious social disadvantage, as oaths surrounded not only all politics but all judicial proceedings; thus, if you lost legal reputation, you were in many ways legally defenceless.
Males defended their honour against such accusations, or against major or minor slights of other kinds, with formal oaths; but also, more directly, with violence. Violence was indeed itself respected enough for it to be a strategy in judicial proceedings: attacks on the property of others were a way of showing sufficient seriousness that you might more easily get your opponent to court; and if you did not defend your property against attack, you might be seen as having less right to it. Peasants carried knives, and used them … Aristocrats who were insulted in the central and later middle ages attacked each other’s land and castles (the duel was less common until the very end of the middle ages and after). Revenge killing was normal, and itself honourable. It would be wrong to call most medieval cultures feuding cultures; with some clear exceptions (Iceland was one, late medieval Italian urban élite society another), most violence was one-off, and dealt with by compensation and/or judicial intervention. All the same, if men came to terms with money or gifts to end the sorts of sequences of acts of violence which we call feuds, this might itself be seen as dishonourable again – one had to be very careful, when either beginning or ending cycles of violence, not to undermine one’s own honour. Even clerics, whose job was to end violence (and we have many examples of them doing just that), understood this …
… The image of the ‘medieval mind’ bedevils too many books, particularly those which seek to argue that medieval people did not think ‘rationally’ about some aspect or other of society or religion … Honour certainly had variants. It may have been generally not at all dishonourable for a male to have illegitimate children (even if it was a legal impediment in some places – not all – for the children themselves); but it was altogether exceptional to find … that it was dishonourable not to recognise anyone who appeared at the door claiming to be such an illegitimate child – lords, in particular, could accumulate many such children in Ireland, often on the basis of quite random claims. But at least one can say that the violent defence of honour was quite generalised. It was very macho, too … it was about being male and not being female. …
… drinking a lot of beer, mead or wine was … a standard element in establishing loyalty itself: if you drank together, you had obligations to each other (that was true for eating as well); if you drank in a lord’s hall, you had obligations to fight for him …
… Women sometimes had no public persona at all; in early medieval Italy and Ireland, for example, women were minors in law, with men acting for them legally all their lives, and did not inherit land easily. These constraints on women were however exceptional, and plenty of other medieval societies allowed female inheritance equally with men, or female court appearances, or even (if more rarely) female participation in public assemblies. We also find women exercising political power, either for children after their husbands’ deaths, or more rarely – usually in the later centuries of the middle ages – as heirs, in the absence of brothers. …
… I would see the main difference between the early and the late middle ages, in much of Europe at least, to be an increase in ambiguities in female roles, as society became slowly more complicated; the legal constraints which sometimes appear quite sharp in the early period seem often to have been more mediated later on, even if female inheritance was never generous (indeed, it became in some respects harder in many places), and even if the roles for women were circumscribed in all periods. As they were also, it has to be added, for men; men who genuinely were afraid of violence, for example, which may include many of us today, had little chance of long lives if they had any military responsibilities at all, and little chance of much social esteem in the average village, unless they happened to be clerics and therefore to an extent absolved from violent acts. But many clerics fought in wars with some enthusiasm …
… As to religion: it is banal to say that medieval people were religious, but they were, whether they were Jews, Muslims, pagans, or else members of what was by the late middle ages in Europe an overwhelming Christian majority … That banality is often associated with the ‘power of the church’, clerical preachers keeping the laity in line with hellfire threats of damnation … Such preaching was, in reality, much more a feature of the early modern period, in the competing Protestant and Catholic confessions; earlier, clerics were often fairly realistic about how much they could demand of their audiences, and that is when they preached at all – for preaching … was not automatic in practice by any means. But it is also the case that, even though churchmen complained in every century about how little the laity followed the teachings of the church, they could rely on the fact that their flocks fully accepted the basic outlines of Christian belief. Admittedly, what the latter understood to be those outlines was not always what clerics thought they should be. Clerics reacted to this in different ways in different periods; in the early middle ages they characteristically criticised what they claimed to be ‘pagan’ survivals, particularly forms of ritual which seemed incompatible with Christian teachings; in later centuries complaints were more likely to be about standard forms of ‘immoral’ behaviour, or else, after 1000 or so, heresy … particularly if [it] involved the rejection of the church hierarchy.
The laity were not always less austere in their practice than clerical moralists, it must be added; the whole monastic movement, and later on that of the friars, was a lay one … it did not involve, or at least was not supposed to involve, autonomous forms of belief. We will see later what happened when lay groups did begin to develop their own opinions about theology and spirituality, particularly from around 1150 onwards. But what is clear is that the Christian laity, whether or not they were well informed about the details of doctrine, and whether or not they were prepared actually to follow clerical exhortations, particularly over such deeply held attitudes as those concerning honourable violence or sex, did accept that religion was important, and all-pervasive …
… Secular and religious motives are often separated out by historians, and put into potential, sometimes actual, opposition. When aristocrats founded monasteries or gave them large donations of land, putting their family members into them … were they doing it for the religious motives which their charters of gift invoke (treasures on earth being exchanged for treasures in heaven, etc.), or were they doing it because such monasteries could remain controlled by their families and be a long-term landed resource, as families became too large and divided? When kings put their own chaplains and other administrators into bishoprics, were they doing so because they already knew how good these men would be as properly moral bishops, or were they trying to shore up royal authority in different parts of their kingdoms by putting reliable and loyal men into rich local power-bases? … When crusaders took the cross and went off to conquer Palestine in 1096, did they do so because they wanted, as armed pilgrims with deep commitment, to take back the holy sites in and around Jerusalem from Muslim infidels, or were they wrapping up a well-attested desire to take other people’s land with a new set of religious justifications? When we face these questions, we have to answer yes to both sides in nearly every case … the two motivations were inextricable, and would not have been regarded as separable …
… Of course, some political actors were more unscrupulous than others, just as some were more religious-minded than others; but neither of these would have regarded what we often see as two motivations [secular/religious] as separate either, except in the case of a few religious hardliners. The self-servingness of much medieval religious rhetoric … was not hypocritical. It might, sometimes, be more palatable (to us) if it had been; but such people … really did believe what they were saying. We have to factor that real belief into every assessment of medieval political action …
… we will also see how these initial frameworks can, must, be nuanced at every stage by real differences: early medieval practices were very different from late medieval ones, Frankish practices were very different from Byzantine ones, and so on … But the parts made up the whole too.
The Source:
Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe, Yale University Press 2016
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.