Wickham, Society in the Early Middle Ages
Public power that for the first time owed nothing to the Roman past..
The Source:
Chris Wickham, ‘Society’, in The Early Middle Ages Europe, 400-1000, edited by Rosamond McKitterick in the series The Short Oxford History of Europe, Oxford University Press, 2001
[MH: the introduction has been omitted here.]
Roman aristocracies
Our starting-point must be the late Roman world, which was still prosperous and stable in 400. Late Roman aristocrats were roughly divisible into four overlapping categories. Firstly, there are the senatorial families, who could be hugely rich …
Secondly, there is the government elite of the empire. Many of these were from senatorial families, and many more became so. They were largely focused on the capitals … though there were still plenty in older centres too…
Thirdly, there were the families of the city councillors (curiales) of the many hundreds of cities of the empire, the urban aristocracy who had put up the second-century temples and other public buildings which still so often survive, and who were, from the fourth century onwards, enthusiastically endowing churches, the buildings of the new state religion, Christianity. This local aristocratic stratum felt itself under threat by 400, as its traditional tax-collecting role was undermined by functionaries of the more centralized late Roman state, but its collective wealth was not much diminished. Overall, curiales formed the main group of landowners under the Roman empire, and their lands, which tended (unlike those of senators) to be restricted to the territories of single cities, were more likely to survive the radical decentralization that accompanied the break-up of the empire in the west.
Fourthly, there was the army, a partially separate hierarchy, whose leaders were nonetheless major players in the political scene. Many of these were of senatorial origin, but there was always space at the top of the military hierarchy for able men of lesser families, particularly from frontier areas and indeed, increasingly, from Germanic communities beyond the frontier. Such new men were … regularly the target of the social and cultural snobbery of the civilian elites … but they were not the less Roman for that, and not a few of them became emperors.
Several points need to be made about these different aristocratic groups, taken as a whole.
First is the fact that the majority of the members of this class, including the richest and highest-status of them, were civilian, not military, figures: the Roman imperial aristocracy was one of the very few in the history of the pre-industrial world not to be dominated by military prowess. Its cultural markers were not valour, horsemanship, hunting, but, rather, education and comfort. Roman civilian aristocrats … [were] the source of the literary and the archaeological remains that have awed subsequent generations … In this they were not atypical of subsequent aristocracies …
Secondly, there was a close association between aristocratic status and imperial office-holding. Even members of the richest senatorial families were fully legitimated only by holding a series of offices, either in the old ceremonial capital, Rome or in the administration. Not that all family members needed to be officials, or indeed could be, for there were not enough offices to go around. Even when they rejected them, as for example if they opted for ascetic Christianity, they nonetheless kept ‘their own rank’…
But it would not have been possible for a family to remain of full senatorial status if, for example, it had rejected all office and retired to its lands; and for the curial stratum such a choice was actually illegal. One alternative was certainly to join the church: bishops were usually from either senatorial or curialis families. As time went on, the ecclesiastical hierarchy became a parallel one, ever more attractive to curial families in that it was tax-exempt. But the episcopate was closely tied into imperial values as long as the empire lasted; bishops and curiales cooperated in governing the cities of the fifth century.
A third point is, precisely, this urban focus for the aristocracy. Only the military hierarchy was partially immune from having to operate on an urban stage in its public activity. Roman cities were full of public arenas for political action: the forum, the ceremonial buildings around it, the baths for less formal meetings, and by now the cathedral. This was often on the forum, thus further reinforcing the importance of the town centre, although equally often carefully situated in a corner of the town walls, as an alternative ceremonial focus.
‘Civilized’ behaviour—knowing Virgil, etc.—meant, precisely, city-dwelling behaviour. Not that one never went into the countryside. In the late empire, in particular, every major western family had at least one lavishly furnished rural estate, or ‘villa’as we call them, in which aristocrats routinely spent the summer months. Large numbers of these have been found by archaeologists. But this sort of life was not considered as an alternative to the city; it was called otium, ‘rest’(with its opposite the effectively urban-based negotium, ‘business’) … in the autumn one was due back in town … if one was not to be despised as a peasant. … [An] open interest in wealth-creation was considered déclassé. …
… Such an equation between city and culture/civilization was inherited by the city-based episcopate, who by the late fifth century were among its staunchest defenders. Sidonius … became bishop of Clermont in 469 … [Sidonius] is a good example of this urban lifestyle and imagery … Sidonius chose to write as part of an endless tradition of poetry-loving, toga-clad, bath-frequenting civilian aristocrats. …
… When the Visigoths took over southern Gaul in the 470s, the aristocracies began to have to choose new roles. Some of their members put on the robes of the church, as bishops or aspirant bishops, as did Sidonius … some put on armour, as generals in the armies of the new Romano-Germanic kingdoms; some, like Sidonius’ own son, did both.
There was, however, decreasing space for a specifically civilian lay aristocracy, except for a few people in the immediate administration of kings. Sidonius, for all his confident traditionalism, was in the last generation of its splendour. By the sixth century, many things had changed.
Early medieval western elites
Let us continue with the aristocracy of the western Roman provinces into the post-Roman world, the period 500-750, to see how different they were from the Roman tradition. We can find the same sort of patterns in Frankish Gaul, Visigothic Spain, or, a little later, Lombard Italy from 568/569 onwards, and I shall take my examples from all three regions.
In each case, a major marker of the secular aristocracy was by now military activity, which indeed by the seventh century was often a requirement for bishops as well. … In fact, this period is perhaps the least explicit in western history for exactly what made up aristocratic status, the status of being nobilis, as aristocrats were sometimes called. Wealth (in land) was one element, certainly; military office-holding another; descent a third; closeness to the king a fourth; an array of typical aristocratic behaviour patterns a fifth. … Although in practice they have to be described together, they were considerably less inseparable than they would be in later periods.
It may be most helpful to begin with descent. Who was of clearly high status in the west in, say, the seventh century? One clear answer is former Roman aristocratic families, the group called ‘senatorial’ families by Gregory of Tours in the 570s-580s, although the senate as an institution was by now confined to Rome itself, and in terminal decline even there. We can trace their descent well into the seventh century in Gaul … Spain and Italy. … These families maintained their status in part because of their continued landed wealth, but in great part because of their ancestry: they could command respect.
… They were also better defined as a descent group than were the new Germanic aristocracies who came in with the [Frankish] conquest. In Italy, Lombard named male-line blood-aristocratic families (genera) are not documented after the 640s, and the concept may have rapidly fallen into disuse as they ran out of male heirs; only in Bavaria do such families, there called genealogiae, last into the eighth century. In Francia, by contrast, the earliest law code, the Pactus legis Salicae of C.500-510, only refers to free Franks, and makes no reference to aristocratic status of any kind.
In the Frankish lands, indeed, it has as a result often been argued that the early medieval aristocracy was a new service aristocracy, owing their wealth and position exclusively to Clovis [king of the Franks 481–511] and his sons. This is unlikely, for they are pretty firmly rooted, probably by 500-520 if we consider the dates of the rich founding graves of Merovingian-period cemeteries, and by 550 at the very latest. Yet the argument at least shows how hard it would be to claim that there was any explicitly characterized aristocracy of blood in Francia, at least until the major sixth-century families themselves put down roots. But these had slightly different family structures, as we shall see in a moment.
Landowning was, on the other hand, a constant. In eighth-century Italy, wealth and nobilitas were in effect synonyms … In Francia, the equivalence was less explicit, but was doubtless regarded as equally normal. Whether Germanic aristocrats seized land directly, or were assigned it by kings as part of a formal land-settlement, or gained it through office-holding or later royal largesse, they certainly possessed it, in every successor state. Some of these possessions were huge, too, by any criteria except those of the richest fifth-century senators. … By now [seventh century], ethnic descent was less important than Königsnähe [closeness to the king]; but both were transmuted into landed wealth, and thus the possibility of independent local power.
If one compares Francia with the Visigothic and Lombard kingdoms, one conclusion seems clear: Frankish aristocrats were the richest. … In the eighth-century documentation for Lombard Italy, landowners rarely held more than half a dozen estates each, even when they were royal associates: even middling Frankish aristocrats may have outclassed them. The situation is less clear in Spain, but our fragmentary evidence hints at a similar small scale for all but the greatest noble families. This would allow for an accumulation of wealth and a range of exchange activity in Francia that could not be matched elsewhere after 650 or so … It also made life more difficult for Merovingian kings, who had to face the most serious faction-fighting of any Germanic kingdom. Riding that tiger was hard, and it is not surprising that the Merovingian kingship was the one to suffer the most serious political crisis, in the mid- to late seventh century. Royal resources remained sufficiently great in Francia, however, for the Carolingians to bounce back from 718 onwards, and to establish themselves as the most powerful dynasty in the west. Indeed, once they had asserted their authority over the factions, and once they had confiscated the lands of losing opponents, they could benefit from the wealth and local power of their aristocracies as well.
These Frankish, Italian, and Spanish aristocracies were above all military. They aimed for positions in royal government that were above all defined in military terms, as dukes and counts, that is to say provincial and local army-leaders and judges. They attached themselves to each other, and to kings, in clienteles tied together by oaths of loyalty that had a strong military element. Their image of proper behaviour allowed for a great deal of violence: not only bravery in war but also revenge-killing was considered entirely honourable, even by kings and churchmen.
Gregory of Tours [c.540–94, Frankish bishop and historian] chronicled some more unpleasant sadism in his aristocratic neighbours, which he did criticize; he remarked rather sourly that aristocrats in general were only interested in honour, plunder, money, and court cases. But these latter characteristics were more often tolerated than criticized by our commentators … They were normal. So was aristocratic display. Elites wore a great deal of wealth on their person, for effect: gold and gems on fine leather and silk clothing was common among aristocrats of both sexes, for example. … This clothing rhetoric was respected even by peasants … participating in royal banquets—being a conviva regis—was a particularly important aspect of Königsnähe.
Clothing and eating were not solely attributes of military identity, but it may be because of military traditions that they did not seem to have been matched by good housing. With the decline of cities as political foci at the end of the [Roman?] empire, urban living was no longer essential for aristocracies, and where towns were not strongly rooted, as in northern and central Gaul or inland Spain, elites came largely to live in the countryside. Only in Italy did cities clearly keep their former role as living quarters for the aristocracy. But nothing has ever yet been found by archaeologists for early medieval Francia or Italy to match the great rural villas of late Rome, which had gone by 600 everywhere—by 450 in northern Gaul. In Spain, too … Nor do literary sources tell us much about aristocratic residences, even casually, though they tell us often enough about the wonders of church architecture. Lay aristocrats seem to have spent their wealth on personal adornment, food, and—above all—buying loyalty from armed followers with money and land, rather than on the permanent buildings favoured by Roman civilian aristocrats or by early medieval churchmen.
The picture just presented has very little parallel to that of the civilian aristocracy of he Roman empire, except in the importance of landed wealth. Yet many of the ancestors of the military aristocrats of the seventh century will certainly have been Roman. Indeed, in places like Aquitaine [around Bordeaux], where few Germans settled for long, most or all of them were Roman in origin. But even Aquitainian aristocrats are not visibly different from those elsewhere …
Why was this picture so different? Above all it was because the form of the state had changed. The material basis for aristocratic activity, in any pre-industrial society, is land; but its institutional forms and cultural identity are always related to the wider structures of political power. The Roman empire was a very strong political system, funded by tax-raising; not only titles, status, and privilege but also money were available as a result of state service. Being a part of this system, and playing by its rules, was profitable, and, above all, stable: possession of a given title meant what it said, as the basis for secure position, and for the patronage powers that derived from it. Only in the final decades of the empire did less formal elements of local power, such as private armies, become more than occasionally necessary for aristocrats.
None of this was true in the post-Roman world … the tax system was in sharp decline in the sixth century, and landowning became the basis of both royal and aristocratic wealth and power; all elements of political position were only worth anything if they were backed up by the control of land. Politics became more decentralized as a result, for local power became more and more important; it also became more direct, because if one could not impress one’s immediate armed entourage, one had no chance of impressing anyone else. Again, kings and aristocrats were here in the same boat, and tended to behave in the same ways.
The other thing that changed was, of course, that the states of the post-Roman world, and the legitimacy they sought, had come to be seen as Germanic. Such legitimations were not necessarily old; recent research shows that collective identities among Germanic peoples were very fluid indeed before their armies took over Roman provinces. The ‘ethnogenesis’ [invented artificially constructed identities] of hitherto mixed groups, united only by their leaders, into theoretically homogeneous communities of Franks or Lombards was actually a result of that conquest … Such a crystallization process was effective, however. As long as a kingdom lasted, its king and its court would be Frankish, Visigothic, Lombard, Burgundian, Alaman, Bavarian. Such kings were also, at least nominally, the rulers of a people in arms, who included the peasantry.
They ruled by assembly, as a result: through the great public meetings, both at the central and the local level, often called placita [judicial assemblies], at which disputes were settled and laws were made … This sort of political practice had strong Roman elements, but the imagery attached to it was ethnic. To participate in secular politics, one came increasingly, at least by the seventh century, to have to be seen to be a Frank, Visigoth, or whatever was locally appropriate. Naming practices changed to match.
… By the seventh century Roman names in Francia were decidedly fewer; by the eighth, in a second process of ethnogenesis, all the inhabitants of the lands north of the Loire were called, and seem to have considered themselves to be, Franks. The same thing happened in Italy and Spain. With these changes, a wider aristocratic identity changed as well: all secular aristocrats became local lords with a military training, whatever else they also were.
Aristocratic families were widely-based: family attachment was through female as well as male lines, as late Roman family structures had been before them. A good deal of attention was paid to marriages, as the key means of extending clan identity sideways, and this in turn means that the location of women was of some importance to families. This did not in itself bring much female autonomy, but it is probably in this context that another social role developed for aristocratic women, at least in Francia, namely, the control of nunneries. These could become semi-autonomous religious foci for quite wide family groups … Membership of the Frankish royal families, both the Merovingians and the Carolingians, was by contrast restricted to the male line, but the wives and mothers of kings were often from the aristocracy. Here, too, such women could gain a considerable political role, for themselves and through them for their families, particularly in time of royal minorities, when mothers were generally queens-regent.
When, in the tenth century, male-line family structures became a feature of the aristocracy as well, this sort of genealogical centrality produced a notable group of powerful mothers, in every part of Latin Europe. We should not mistake this set of influential women for a proof of female independence and autonomy: queenly power was often contested, and all the evidence we have for female autonomy shows it to have been both fragile and circumscribed. The public space was seen as male above all; female self-assertion in it was regularly criticized. … Women, however influential, were supposed to operate in private, inside the household. …
The local power-bases of aristocracies were, as we have seen, crucial. They were also highly diverse. No two areas of Europe were alike in their social structures, and this meant that local power had to be differently constructed in each. Local power [could be] straightforward and uncontested. By contrast, around a major royal power-centre such as Paris in the same period, we find a variety of large-scale landowners jostling for power in the same space: major aristocratic families, rich suburban monasteries … and the king himself. Here, power was more competitive, and more mediated: both through the foundation of private monasteries, and through aristocrats simply seeking to make their presence felt in the royal palaces that clustered north of the city.
Perhaps more common than either of these two patterns, however, was a still more fragmented one. Around Lucca, the best-documented city in eighth-century Italy, documents show us a variety of aristocrats, urban-dwelling in this case, with very scattered landowning, intercut not only by other aristocratic land but also by the lands of the peasantry. No local lord could establish uncontested power in this sort of environment. Rather, he would use his lands to build up clienteles and thus support and influence.
His aim would be to come to the attention of the king and become his personal follower, with the possibility of gaining more wealth as a result, or else becoming duke or indeed bishop of the city. This constant competitive game at the local level, with half a dozen major players, could absorb aristocrats for generations. It was also of course much less dangerous to royal power than were local power-points like the Liège area, at least unless the aristocratic factions of different localities joined together in wider groupings.
I have taken most of the above examples from the pre-Carolingian period, but it needs to be said as a conclusion to this section that the Carolingians changed few of these patterns. What the four generations of unitary Carolingian power between 718 and 840 did was to focus aristocratic attention firmly on the mayor of the palace/king/emperor and his court as the only serious venue for large-scale political action. This was all the more attractive because Frankish expansion into Aquitaine, Catalonia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Italy provided unmatched patronage opportunities for the Carolingian family, with a host of new counties, duchies, and royal lands to be given out.
Once it became clear how profitable this could be, by the mid-eighth century, factional violence dropped back considerably, and did not return until the 830s, when the empire had ceased to expand … the rules and the ideology of politics had changed considerably … but aristocratic society and values remained much the same.
Two changes are worth signalling: first, in the framework of a powerful and aggressive [Carolingian] state, large landowners increased their wealth considerably, often at the expense of their poorer neighbours; second, as a result of this, aristocrats had many more personal dependants, and the rituals of dependence became rather more developed, notably those associated with sworn loyalty, oaths of vassalage as they were sometimes called in ninth-century Francia and Italy. …
England and Norway
What linked aristocratic social development in the western and eastern provinces of the former Roman empire was … the militarization of practice and ideology; what differentiated the two was the survival of taxation in the east (and its reintroduction in Arab Spain), and the resultant maintenance of a powerful centre of gravity in the political capitals, Constantinople and Cordoba, and, outside Europe, Damascus and Baghdad. The politics of land thus had relatively little role in Byzantine or Arab society. Aristocrats got as much land as they could in each, as in the west; but this process was much less dangerous to rulers.
The societies to the north of the Frankish world shared some of these similarities, while maintaining numerous differences from the Romano-Germanic societies of the west until the ninth century and often later. It is necessary to stress at the outset that these societies were even more heterogeneous than those discussed up to now, for they had largely independent origins. The Celtic societies of Ireland and Scotland diverged in many significant ways from the ‘Romano-Celtic’ societies of Wales or Brittany; Anglo-Saxon England developed in clearly different ways from Saxony, Denmark, or northern Scandinavia, whence its rulers had come; the Slav lands were different again, with Poland and Bohemia developing as states in the tenth century, and some of their western neighbours, for example the Liutizi, consciously rejecting statehood. They did have common features, notably clearly defined warrior elites devoted to small- scale fighting and the gift-exchange of treasure, and substantial free peasantries, but any attempt to generalize across all of them risks banality. I shall here, therefore, discuss only two of these societies, England and Norway.
Anglo-Saxon England shows the clearest development, thanks to a convergence of narrative sources, documents, and archaeology. Its conversion to Christianity in the seventh century furthermore opened it up to influence from Francia … It has claims to being the most successful Carolingian-style polity in Europe by the tenth century. It had to come a long way, however. Three centuries earlier, it would be hard to argue that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had much political coherence at all, and a century earlier than that even social classes are barely visible. The Anglo-Saxons took over Roman agricultural territories, but if there is one Roman province with a complete social and political break between the empire and the Germanic polities it is the Anglo-Saxon, that is English, sections of Britain. The sixth-century Anglo-Saxon communities seem to have operated on a tiny scale, with dozens of autonomous units scattered across the island.
Cemetery archaeology and, increasingly, settlement archaeology allow one to argue with a fair degree of conviction that, although there were certainly relatively rich people in the English lands at the start of the sixth century, only at the end of that century do they stand out as a separate economic group, whose status and wealth must have derived from exploiting others. It is in the same period that the county-sized kingdoms, Kent or Sussex or East Anglia, seem to have crystallized; and in the seventh century slightly larger polities, Wessex or Mercia or Northumbria begin to appear as the product of conquest. Even these were still very small indeed and, for that matter, poor by continental standards.
Seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England was thus pretty small-scale. But it did have an aristocracy. In the first laws we have, from Æthelberht of Kent around 605, they were legally recognized in a way that Frankish aristocrats still were not; and in eighth-century accounts of the same period—notably that of Bede, written in the 720s—that aristocracy is highly warlike, kept in royal households only by grants of land, gifts of treasure and by generous feasting, and capable of moving from one king to a more successful one with great ease.
It is interesting that this well-defined and self-conscious aristocracy— identifiable even by its style of speaking—was at the same time so restricted in material terms that archaeologists can still only with difficulty distinguish it from the more prosperous end of the peasantry.
It may be that the status of an aristocrat was fenced off by essentially ritual, rather than economic, distinctions from the free peasants or ceorls who were his neighbours. It may just be, however, that the seventh century was a period of very rapid social change, and that Bede’s account tells us more about eighth-century aristocratic identity than that of the seventh.
Either way, it is at least clear that what one might refer to as an aristocratic calling became steadily more explicitly defined. In the seventh century, even landownership is barely documented; kings, notables, churches, on the one side, and peasants, on the other, had competing rights to take surplus from tracts of land, without the latter being for the most part in any clear sense tenants of the former.
By the end of the eighth century, this was changing, and land tenure on a Roman, or Frankish, model became increasingly normal. The free peasantry still had a political role in English communities, however, as participants in court assemblies, and as liable to military service and construction work for kings. It was this public service that Offa could draw from when he built his dyke against the Welsh in the late eighth century, and that Alfred could draw from when he built fortified towns and fought off the Vikings in the late ninth. By then, aristocrats could certainly be dominant—and domineering—in England, but they had not cancelled the public role of the free.
The image of the aristocratic retinue feasting with the king is one we have seen in Francia; in England, too, it carried with it obligations of mutual support and loyalty. This was not because both societies were Germanic; it can be found in Wales and Ireland as well. The image of the warrior bound to fight for his lord by feasting obligations was general in the early middle ages … Feasting … was part of being a warrior, and a noble.
Where the societies of northern Europe differed was in the rigidity of their social structures. England was here at a mid-point; Ireland was much more rigid, and the Scandinavian societies, as it seems, rather less. In Scandinavia, it seems that even hierarchies took a long time to establish themselves, except probably in Denmark. Our sources tend to be fairly late, but for Norway we have a handful of tenth-century poems, and twelfth-century laws that have analogies with the twelfth-century laws in its colony Iceland, which separated itself off politically in the late ninth and tenth century.
We can at least make hypotheses, therefore, about this latter period. In Norway, it would be hard to say there was a defined aristocracy at all. Here and in Iceland, communities of free peasants, rich or poor, looked to independent and highly ritualized public assemblies or things as their major political focus. From the late ninth century onwards, regional rulers and kings sought to establish hegemony over these things [assemblies], but it was a slow and intermittent process, barely complete in the twelfth century.
It is not that such communities were havens of equality; there were certainly richer men of higher status … in Iceland or … in Norway, who had the right to lead or represent their lesser neighbours, whether in the thing [assemblies] or at war. But this status brought little permanent power over these neighbours, and not even all that much relative wealth. Norway was a violent place; all men were quick to anger, and keen to feud. Distrust was only sensible… The Norwegians evidently knew that their social world was hard to negotiate. But the absence of fixed power relations meant that it was at least possible, indeed even normal, to negotiate one’s social and political position, as was impractical in England after 600 at the latest: not only was one dealing with neighbours who, whether richer or poorer, were in a comparable economic bracket, but even status distinctions were relatively fluid, except for the sharp difference between slavery and freedom.
Norwegians fought wars and recognized military leadership—they were of course active Vikings in the ninth century—and indeed recognized feasting and gift-exchange obligations with jarls and kings, just as did every society we have looked at. At the local level, too, there were structural distinctions between the powerful and the weak. But social skills could overcome them. Norwegians (and still more Icelanders, who had no kingship) were in these respects about as far away from the civilian Roman world we started with as one could possibly get.
The peasantry
By 800 … it is clear that entire villages in what has become the Paris conurbation, such as Palaiseau and Villeneuve, were wholly owned by the monastery [of Saint-Germain-des-Prés]. Peasant society was thus tenant society. The social divisions were those between different types of tenant, free (ingenuus) and unfree (servus), living on monastic holdings called mansi. The free-unfree divide was the basic division, but it was partially undermined by the detailed terms of the leases, which are recorded in the polyptych, with the possibility of unfree tenants holding ‘free’ mansi and reduced services, or free tenants holding ‘unfree’ mansi, and so on. Furthermore, intermarriage was possible, which probably brought social advancement to unfree husbands of free wives, and certainly brought freedom for their children. One must assume, then, that there was quite a complex pecking-order in each village, inside a frame of generalized subjection to detailed monastic control, which extended to instructions about cutting roof-tiles out of logs, feeding chickens, and weaving cloth. …
… [Such] estates used to be considered typical of western Europe in this period; this is not now widely believed. As said earlier, most landowning was far more fragmented than these great village-sized estates, which indeed only seem common at all in parts of north-west Francia, and subsequently also in parts of England, particularly Mercia and Wessex. In the Rhineland, central and southern France, northern Spain, and Italy we find scattered estates, and, as a result, villages with a very large variety of landowners. In any given village, indeed, one could find lands belonging to a larger or smaller set of absentee owners, farmed by tenants (free or servile), and also village-based owners, who could themselves vary in wealth and status from small aristocrats to subsistence cultivators, and who could have property focused in one village or else scattered across several. …
… The city held a lot of power and authority in its hinterland; its duke or count dominated local justice, for example. Local political foci were probably, increasingly, village churches, of which there were many … some private, some episcopal; their priests were themselves landowners and rural dealers … As a result … priestly families in the ninth century were often the central families in villages.
For clearer patterns of village decision making, we have to look to regions where there were even fewer substantial local owners, and maybe more nucleated settlement. One such is eastern Brittany … in the ninth-century … a society with few outside owners and with a relatively restricted stratus of wealthy locals, called machtierns. These men had some local authority, for example as presidents of courts and assemblies, but very little power to coerce—certainly nothing like as much as a count.
Village territories (here called plebes) more or less ran themselves: free villagers (or the richer among them) guaranteed land transactions, acted as sureties in disputes, and indeed judged court cases in village courts. The existence of the latter (they are called placitum or mallus, standard Frankish words for judicial assemblies) shows that a Breton plebs had … organizational coherence … a plebs was something one could seek to dominate, and indeed fight over. It is equally notable that these Breton peasantries did not accumulate land to the same extent that one can find in, for example, Italy; their competitiveness seems to have been political rather than economic. This, like the power of their local assemblies, has closer analogies in the thing [assembly] societies of Norway than in most of the rest of Carolingian Europe.
This is as far as we can go here in setting out differences; these anyway have to be set against what peasants had in common.
First, they were, as already noted, subsistence cultivators, with a sprinkling of full-time or part-time artisans: their first concern had to be their crops. Bad weather marked even surer ruin than wicked lords. Weather magic was common …
… Secondly, in nearly every part of Europe, they lived in geographically defined communities, whether nucleated or dispersed, which meant something to them emotionally or politically, or, increasingly, in religious terms, as rural churches or monasteries and their attached ritual steadily became more widespread across the eighth to tenth centuries.
Thirdly, they had to deal with lords, royal, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical, who either owned their land and took their surplus, or else perhaps owned land nearby and sought to extend their own properties at the peasants’ expense, often in violent ways.
Peasants could be the clients or followers of lords too: they could seek to exploit lordly power, not just resist it or evade it. Lords ‘protected’ their weaker neighbours, after all. The word ‘protection’ is used in our sources, and … its meaning … would have been well understood by any early medieval lord or peasant too. But the relationship between lordly oppression and rapaciousness and peasant resistance was essentially one of conflict: and this was so across the whole of early medieval Europe, as in all the peasant societies of history. ..
… Peasants were not all equal, as we have already seen, but the way they were unequal needs to be brought out more. The basic distinction in every early medieval village society was between free and unfree. Free men … had public rights, to own, to sell, to participate in courts and decision making; the unfree did not.
The manumission, that is, the freeing, of the unfree was a common pious act, particularly in the wills of land-owners, but it was not always easy … In many European societies freedmen remained permanently under the legal patronage of their former owners; manumission was not a way of evening out social status. Solidarity between the free and the unfree was hard to achieve as a result, and not infrequently we can find court records in which a servus claims that he is really free, but his free neighbours witness against him and he loses. But the distinction was, all the same, not an absolute one … free and unfree tenants did the same sort of services for and paid the same sort of rents to their landlords … although unfree tenants were more subject, it was a relative difference only. It is for this reason that I have avoided translating servus as ‘slave’.
Essentially, in village society there was a more articulated hierarchy than simply that between free and unfree, stretching from substantial local landowners with their own tenants, through peasant proprietors, free tenants, and down to unfree tenants.
The division between owners and tenants was in practice almost as important as that between free and unfree, although it was more easily bridgeable; many peasants owned some land plots and rented others as well. In this grey area, status may have been as flexible and negotiated as in Norway. Where villages differed was, as we have seen, in the balance between these social strata: whether there were many owner-cultivators, or any owners at all, or any unfree tenants.
The free-unfree division undermined village solidarity; but so also did the behaviour of local elites. In the early middle ages, village politics was seldom so absorbing that the richest local owners would dedicate themselves to it alone; they generally looked outwards, and upwards: to the most accessible aristocrats, and to the public arena.
Free peasants had military responsibilities in all early medieval polities … a peasant who could afford a sword and a horse and had an aptitude for military service could undoubtedly find a chance to perform it, either for a private lord/patron or for the king/count, or for both. The slow extension of links of military dependence to the lower levels of the clienteles of aristocrats in the Carolingian period included many members of village elites. In the tenth century, not just in the ex-Carolingian lands but in England and Castile as well, these lesser milites came to see themselves as a small-scale local aristocracy, and the division between them and their unmilitary neighbours became steadily sharper. One of the features of the decades around 1000 in much of the west was … that this latter division closed access to the aristocracy and the king for the majority of the peasantry.
This slow trend was also the underpinning for some of the more dramatic examples of social mobility of the period, the low-born plucked from the dust and made counts, like Leudast of Tours in the 570s, or bishops, like Ebbo of Reims in the 820s, or even …emperors, like Basil I (867-886). Such ‘upstarts’ were regularly sneered at …
… Such rapid social mobility was always likely to be risky. It was also, of course, pretty rare. But it was possible because the peasantry were still part of the public sphere, at least in theory. I have stressed that villages were not always as yet coherent collectivities: either because they were too internally divided or because … village identity was still relatively inchoate. But they did exist as concepts, and sometimes they had a certain organizational force … early Frankish villages—or groups of villages—had local courts, run by local judicial experts … Such courts … must have existed elsewhere to resolve local-level disputes. …
Frankish villages were also clearly enough constituted for free males to have a right of veto on new settlers. Although this veto is sufficiently hedged around in the text to make it clear that one man could not exercise it on his own, the law at least shows that a migrant could not settle against the will of a sector of a village. Furthermore … in most … places … villages were ascribed collective responsibilities in law codes, for catching thieves or fugitive servi for example, which presuppose at least a minimum common identity. In … almost any period between the sixth and the ninth century … free villagers [were] regulating the common lands of the village territory, and also underwriting the taxes of fellow-villagers.
It has to be admitted that, taken as a whole, these activities are not that surprising, and probably could be found in every society divided into village territories that has ever existed. But they at least bring to our attention the dimensions of local cooperation, and some differences in its intensity. Broadly, villages were stronger where there was more collective economic activity—pasturing, woodland use—and weaker where there were strong outside landowners to dominate local political practice. …
… Peasants also had to live alongside aristocrats, who were either landlords, lords, patrons, dangerous neighbours, or all of these simultaneously. Aristocrats were indeed intrinsically dangerous, as has already been stressed. … It is possible nonetheless that, in the west, the period in the last two millennia in which aristocrats were least dominant was the period c.500-800 … Roman aristocracies in the west survived the Germanic conquests, but not necessarily unscathed; Germanic aristocracies took some time to develop. In the east, the seventh-century crisis similarly undermined aristocratic hegemony. It is not that the rich did not survive, but they could not necessarily dominate their peasant neighbours, unless the latter were their immediate dependants.
Only in the eighth century in Francia and Italy, the ninth in England, the tenth in Castile and Byzantium, later still in Scandinavia, did fully-fledged aristocratic hegemonies begin to develop again. The evidence for this development is mostly very poor, it should be admitted.
In Francia and in particular Italy one sign is a set of ninth-century court cases in which peasants protest to public powers about aristocratic domineering. In Castile, these tensions appear closer to 1000. In England, a sign that aristocrats may have become structurally dominant is the archaeological evidence for market exchange, which is confined to East Anglia in the eighth century but takes off elsewhere from the late ninth.
What we lack is much evidence for full-scale peasant revolts, in other words systematic resistance to these shifts. … The encroachment of the powerful, when it became serious, was anyway not successfully resisted, in this epoch.
By 1000 aristocratic power was dominant again everywhere, almost as much as it had been under the Roman empire.
Peasant societies … lived by some of the same rules: males in both were quick to take offence, and to react violently; males and females in both associated binding obligations with the exchange of gifts; status was associated above all with wealth, legal independence, and military prowess. There was, furthermore, a continuum between the poorest free peasant and the richest aristocrat, a continuum composed of tiny gradations of social status, which could only with difficulty be climbed, but which placed the whole of free society under the same sort of legal obligations. This would continue for some time … in polities of strong public power or weak aristocracies. It would change in the tenth century in the Latin west, however, that is, in the post-Carolingian world and its English and Spanish neighbours and imitators.
The year 1000
Aristocratic clienteles were a feature of the whole of the early middle ages, as indeed before and after. They were based on exchanges of gifts and favours, both upwards and downwards: lords gave protection, land, treasure, or feasts, and expected political and military loyalty in return. This was normal and praiseworthy. A Frankish king in the seventh century, for example, provided that if an aristocrat were sent away by the king to fulfil a royal function, that [according to an ancient formula] ‘all his court-cases, and those of his friends, sworn dependants, or those in his legitimate sphere of influence’ would be suspended until he returned.
The aristocrat’s role was to support his followers, and they needed him to be there. In the Carolingian period, the rituals surrounding this dependence became slightly more articulated, as the oath of fidelity became more elaborate, and as it became commoner for lords to give lands to dependants with more explicit reference to the fact that they could take the land back if the dependant was disloyal (‘conditional tenures’ were sometimes called beneficia or feuda, [i.e.] fiefs, though the terminology remained vague for a long time). But Merovingian lords had been able to take back such lands before, in practice, and this operation, a military one, was not rendered any easier later just because the terminology of gift-giving had changed.
More significant as a change was that under the Carolingians it became ever clearer that royal and comital armies were made up of these clienteles alone (including those of kings and counts themselves). Military service and military identity thus became regarded as aspects of aristocratic service, not simply the public obligations of free men; and, as noted earlier, they came more and more to be seen as a privilege, marking out milites as different from the non-military members of society. This pattern began already in the mid-ninth century; by the late tenth, families of milites could often be seen as lesser aristocrats, seeking their own local powers over the peasantry.
By the early eleventh century, the structural difference between military aristocrats and peasants had become crystallized in the theory of the three orders: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work; this theory had ninth-century, if not earlier, roots, but its full elaboration only began after 1000. It had a long future in front of it: in France, the separation between these three ‘estates’ would only end in 1789.
Nonetheless, in all periods, the local dominance of aristocrats was a fact of life, and was one of the main reasons why elites wanted royal support and patronage. The Carolingian period, indeed, was in much of the west, as already noted, the period when aristocratic local hegemony became in practice complete. This power in theory conflicted with the local judicial power of the count, but not so much in practice: even excluding the frequent situation where the local lord was the count himself, [judicial assemblies] were assemblies of aristocrats, and a peasant who wanted to contest the local domination of his own lord was not likely to win there.
The life of Count Gerald of Aurillac in southern France (d. 909), who was so virtuous an aristocrat that he was regarded as a saint, gives us a clear idea of what such unusual virtue was in the late ninth and early tenth century: it included sexual abstinence to be sure, but also the refusal to let his men live by plunder when they were short of food in local wars, the insistence indeed that they paid the proper price for things as they went along, and the insistence that all such wars should only be defensive. Gerald’s placita [judicial assemblies] were also remarkable, not only because he let criminals off lightly but also that he had them at all, and judged according to law.
Gerald was further saintly in that in the civil wars of the 890s he continued to be a vassal of the king, who was nowhere to be seen, rather than transferring his loyalty to other dukes or counts. Needless to say, other aristocrats did relatively few of these things. Most significant, though, is that, in a time when royal and, on a local level, comital power still existed, at least in theory, even as saintly a man as Gerald was in practice beholden to no one, and, both in the placitum and outside it, did exactly what he thought fit.
On one level, then, between 850 and 1100 aristocrats dominated without a break. They stayed with kings if they could and defied them if they had to, hoping to get away with it (which sometimes they did); at the local level they used their personal military clienteles to throw their weight around with little fear of reprisal, except from rival aristocrats. This was equally true of the ninth century, when kings were powerful, the tenth century, when local dukes and counts were more important points of reference, and the eleventh, when all lords had established their own judicial tribunals and in many parts of Europe the placitum either fell into disuse or simply became the personal tribunal of the count as a hereditary local lord.
In French historiography in particular, either the collapse of royal power in the tenth century or the collapse of that of counts in the late tenth and early eleventh has for long been seen as a watershed in historical development; but viewed from the standpoint of the aristocratic dominance of local society, it could be argued that nothing really changed. Such an argument has been quite strongly put in recent years.
The arguments for continuity are striking, but they are, all the same, not wholly conclusive. The elements I have just characterized, military clienteles and local power, had roots far back in the past, but in the tenth century, the later tenth century in particular, they began to mesh in different ways, and elements of discontinuity began to appear as well. One is the placitum [judicial assembly]. However much such assemblies were in practice dominated by aristocratic interests in the Carolingian period, they did represent a public legal system, with a kingdom-wide authority, where royal legislation was at least sometimes recognized and put into practice. It represented legality; the private measures of lords, though unchecked in practice, were illegal if they were in conflict with the placitum.
In those parts of eleventh-century Europe where the placitum vanished, these private measures instead crystallized into fully-fledged tribunals, with their own territorial remits, in what the French call the seigneurie banale. This was a real change: what had been illegal now constituted legality. There was no more give and take between two kinds of local power, either; the seigneurie was all there was.
Similarly, when aristocrats stopped looking to kings or dukes/counts for status and patronage, and based their position solely on their own local powers, even if these local powers were essentially unchanged, the political system had shifted. Here, too, a give and take between centre and locality had gone, and local power was all there was left.
These shifts simplified political structures very notably, and they were widespread in western Europe. Between roughly 1000 and 1050 they occurred in most of what is now France, except in the most coherent counties such as Normandy and Flanders; in the parts of the German kingdom that now make up the Low Countries; in northern Italy (where even the developing city states behaved a lot like collective lordships); in Catalonia. Even in England, where kings were strong, this was the period where the military aristocracy, by now clearly distinguished from the peasantry, began to build the fortified residences that would soon become castles. These are signs that England might have matched the Continent even without the Norman Conquest.
If all power became locally based in much of Europe in the eleventh century, that power could no longer be informal and de facto. Even the most chaotic seigneurie banale began to generate its own rules—on the basis of older local customs, but by now much more explicitly characterized. Local legalities thus began to be more clearly defined. So did the parameters of local power, seigneurial territories; so did its power-centres, which were increasingly focused on castles. So did social divisions, as military activity ever more clearly defined the boundaries of the aristocracy, and legitimated the establishment of seigneurial powers by each military family. All territories became more clearly characterized, not only seigneurie, but village and parish as well. These local building-blocks were by the twelfth century sufficiently clearly characterized for them to be the basis on which reviving central government would be built. This would be a renewed public power that, for the first time, owed nothing to the Roman past.
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I am now at the stage of researching Type 7 society (Europe in the Middle Ages) and the transition from Type 7 to Type 8. I plan to explain Type 8 to you in early 2025. This is the purpose of Social Science Files, filing research and publishing some preparatory essays.