The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  These are important contrasts, and they have several implications. The implications for differences in political practice have already been discussed, and we need not return to them here. There are also implications for peasant societies, as just indicated: the less land an aristocracy owned, the more land was in the hands of the peasantry, and therefore the more space there was for peasant autonomy; if an aristocracy was richer, the opposite was true. So the fluidity of action of some of our Italian village societies was made more feasible by the relatively contained wealth of Italian aristocracies; we might not expect Frankish village communities to be as autonomous. This point is reinforced by the fact that in Italy landowning was usually very fragmented; even an aristocratic estate could be divided into dozens, sometimes hundreds, of separate land plots. Aristocratic-owned lands, and the free or unfree tenants who worked them, were thus not all in a single block, and could well be next door to the lands, and houses, of small peasant landowners, who are quite well documented in Italy. There was space for fairly complicated local social relationships in the interstices of estates as a result, even when Italian aristocrats were locally dominant, which they usually were not.

  In some parts of Francia, we find the same degree of fragmentation; the Rhineland is one example. Here, aristocrats were very powerful, and we can indeed identify at least two levels of a Rhineland aristocracy, a lesser level with a few estates each, generally in several different villages, and a greater aristocracy with a vast wealth in land spread over a wide region (this aristocracy by the end of the eighth century included major local monasteries like Lorsch and Wissembourg). Inside that framework, peasants had to be careful, for aristocrats were everywhere, and could do them harm. Peasant landowners attached themselves to aristocratic clienteles in a routine way, to obtain protection. But, as we saw in Chapter 5, in the Merovingian period aristocrats were in general more interested in obtaining wealth and status in royal courts than they were in achieving local domination over peasantries. Peasant society could remain largely autonomous even in Francia at the level of the village, and we can see active groups of small owners running some of the best-documented villages of the Rhineland, such as Dienheim near Mainz and Gœrsdorf in Alsace, in the eighth century.

  The major exception to this seems to have been Neustria, particularly the well-documented Paris region, where estates tended to be large blocks of land. Here, peasants less often owned their own land, and village autonomy would have been quite difficult. Most of the villages we know about around Paris are indeed documented as a result of monastic estate surveys, polyptychs, which are a feature of the Carolingian period. The estates of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the Paris suburbs often contained whole villages, such as Palaiseau south of the city, which were thus entirely dependent on their landlord. We know the names of nearly every peasant, including children, who held land from Saint-Germain in the 820s, and what rent they owed, thanks to the monastic polyptych; they are among the completest records of village society we have. The peasants listed in them would have lived their lives largely by landlordly rules, and even the markers for local status would largely have depended on the different relationships each peasant family had with its landlord: the amount of land it held, the amount of rent and services it paid, and the free or unfree status of each of its members.

  These Parisian villages were regarded as typical of the whole of western Europe by historians of two generations ago. Now that other sorts of document collection have been looked at in more detail, however, they seem the opposite: they were highly unusual in the early Middle Ages in the degree to which peasants in them were dependent on landlords. In other parts of the Continent, the fragmented landowning of aristocrats meant that very few villages had a single landlord, and most such settlements had a mixture of inhabitants: unfree and free tenants; tenants who owned a little land as well; small peasant proprietors who owned all the land they cultivated, medium owners like Sigirad and Arochis of Campione, who did not cultivate their own land (and were thus not peasants) but who were not rich enough to operate politically very far outside their own village; and only in a minority of cases anyone richer - only in the villages where aristocrats themselves happened to live, in fact. These mixed villages were dominated by their richest inhabitants, who were not necessarily peasants, but village collectivities could have a considerable practical authority, and peasants could have a voice in that.

  Let us look at a couple of examples of villages which have a substantial documentation in the eighth and ninth centuries, to show how this worked in practice. Gœrsdorf in Alsace is one example, documented as it is in nineteen documents from the period 693-797. These texts survive in the charter-collection of the nearby monastery of Wissembourg, which shows in itself that the monastery gained a large amount of land there across the eighth century; nearly all the texts are gifts and sales to Wissembourg, in fact. The dukes of Alsace owned land there too, and so did the Sigibald family, significant aristocratic dealers in the eighth-century Rhineland. But between the lands of these three large owners, other people lived too. Medium owners lived in Gœrsdorf, like Adalgis-Allo, who with his wife and son sold land to Wissembourg in 695 (two tenant houses) and in 712 (four areas of arable land and woodland), and who stood witness for other donors and vendors in 693, 696 and 713. So did small-owning peasants, like Asulf, who stood witness along with Adalgis-Allo in 693 and who sold all his property to the monastery in the 696 document. What he did after that is unclear, though he could well have rented it back and become a free monastic tenant; such processes are documented elsewhere. There were certainly free tenants of the duke of Alsace in Gœrsdorf, for in the 730s they witnessed concerning the rent they had owed him on land now ceded to the monastery; probably the tenants were contesting the level of that rent, but the fact that they could do so in public shows that they had free status. Most tenants in the village were probably unfree, all the same; they are called mancipia in the charters, which means ‘unfree dependants’. Gœrsdorf was probably most sharply divided between unfree and free. The unfree were all tenants; the free were partly tenants, partly peasant cultivators, partly medium owners. It was the free who stood witness in front of the duke as ‘the men who live in Gœrsdorf’, as the text says. They also probably ran village affairs: perhaps a small-scale law court (called a mallus in Frankish law codes and dispute documents), and almost certainly any collective decisions that had to be made about the economic activities of the villa (village) of Gœrsdorf. The village seems to have been a compact settlement surrounded by its marca, fields, meadows and woods, all of which would have been exploited for grain-and wine-growing, stock-raising and wood-cutting. Gœrsdorf was near the edge of the great forest of the Vosges, but it was already by 700 in a fully settled landscape, with several other villages close by, and its own woodland would already have been restricted in size and quite fully used for its products. There were expanses of wild land in early medieval western Europe, especially in the woodland zones of central and southern Germany, but mostly people lived in territories that had been created and developed by humans for centuries, even millennia, and Gœrsdorf was certainly one of these.

  Gœrsdorf was not directly dependent on Wissembourg (or the duke of Alsace), but it had to exist in a political framework dominated by such figures, and the monastery would have been more powerful than any rival there by the end of the eighth century, leaving less space for autonomous peasant action. Most of the villages we have documents for are like this, but sometimes we can find evidence for more independent communities. One example is the group of villages in eastern Brittany around the monastery of Redon which are documented in Redon’s cartulary. These villages, Carentoir, Ruffiac, Bains and others, certainly had tenants, both free and unfree, but it seems that here the majority of local inhabitants were landowning peasants when the Redon charters begin in the 830s (the monastery was founded in 832). Only a minority of these had more than a single peasant holding, or land in more than one villag
e; these were often priests, or else local notables with an official position, called machtierns. Every village had a machtiern (we know the names of most of the ninth-century machtierns of Ruffiac, for example), and they were always among the richest people in the village, sometimes owning well outside it; they had their own special house, often called a lis (cf. modern Welsh llys, a princely court: the Breton language is closely related to Welsh). One might call them aristocratic, but, by the standards of aristocracies elsewhere in Europe, machtierns were not at all rich and powerful; they were no more than medium owners, on the level of Sigirad and Arochis of Campione, and it is not even clear that they were very militarized. In no sense did they dominate their villages, in fact. Only a small minority of landowners in Brittany were large-scale landowners with a military lifestyle: they made up the entourage of the princes of Brittany (who called themselves kings in the late ninth century, at least briefly). As in the Rhineland, if such people lived or had a lot of land in any given village, then that village would be effectively subject to them. But most villages were not; for them, machtierns and priests were the most powerful people around.

  The east Breton villages were called plebes in the Redon documents: literally, ‘peoples’ (cf. Chapter 7 for Ireland). They were unusually organized and coherent communities by the standards of the earliest Middle Ages. They ran their own village-level law courts, presided over by machtierns or other village officials, where disputes were settled; other public village business was done at such law courts, too. When disputes were dealt with, it was the villagers who reached judgement; they also acted as oath-swearers for the disputing parties, and as sureties to ensure that losers accepted defeat. In one notable case of 858 in the plebs of Tréal, Anau had tried to kill Anauhoiarn, a priest of the monas tery of Redon, and had to give a vineyard to Redon in compensation, as an alternative to losing his right hand; here, six sureties were named, who could kill him if he tried such a thing again. In that case two of the six were machtierns, perhaps because the case was so serious, but most judgement-finders and sureties were peasants; the villages around Redon policed themselves.

  Once again, we know about these Breton villages because Redon obtained lands (and associated documents) there, steadily from its foundation, reaching a peak in the 860s. The monastery was also given political rights in the villages around it, over the head of the peasants, by Carolingian kings and Breton princes; by the 860s at the latest, it was at least as locally dominant as Wissembourg was in Gœrsdorf, and perhaps more so. Here as elsewhere, peasant societies are only clearly visible in the early Middle Ages when they are just about to be taken over by powerful outsiders, the people who were likely to have archives that would survive into later periods. But the plebes which Redon’s land expanded into had, strikingly and unusually, begun as autonomous of landlordly power, and in the 830s their flat social hierarchy still seemed relatively stable. If Redon had not been founded, we would not know anything about them, but, conversely, there is no particular reason to think that their local autonomy could not have continued for a long time.

  Document collections in the early Middle Ages generally tell us about the alienation of land, and little else; as noted at the start of this book, these were the kinds of documents which were most normally preserved. They dealt, that is to say, with land which was given or sold (usually to churches and monasteries), or pledged in return for loans, or else leased in return for rent. Reading texts of this kind is sometimes frustrating: surely they give us a very external view of village-level society, documenting as they do the most formal actions villagers could undertake, and, often, the dullest? Court cases, when they survive, generally do so because land was involved too (Anau’s vineyard, for example), but at least they can contain detail of more ‘human’ interaction - hatred, violence, bad faith. They are all the more illuminating because of that. But land transactions are not to be underestimated: they were of crucial importance, for they had to do with the resources available to each peasant family for their very survival. One chooses whom to cede land to; one will alienate or lease to friends or patrons or clients, not to enemies (unless one is forced to by an extreme situation, such as debt, penury or climatic disaster). As a result, if we have a large number of documents for any given village, we can build up pictures of social relationships which are only attested through land deals, but which had wider resonances too. So, for example, it is interesting that the 860s, when Redon got the highest number of gifts from its neighbours, is also a period when we have more court cases between the monastery and its neighbours. In the 830s Redon was a local, still relatively small house, to which one might give land for one’s soul without there being any political implications. In the 860s, however, it was the largest local landowner around, and, if one gave it land, one was seeking a patron. Such gifts by then usually involve the cession of the same land back to the donor in precaria, for rent; if one feared Redon’s power, however, rather than seeking its patronage, one might well oppose it instead, by taking its land, stealing its produce, contesting its property boundaries, or claiming that one’s kin had no right to sell to the monastery, hence the court cases. The document collections of the early Middle Ages are still fairly thinly spread, and we seldom have a critical mass sufficient for a dense description of local realities, but when we do, as around Redon, we can get closer to peasant society.

  Palaiseau, Gœrsdorf and Ruffiac can stand for three early medieval peasant realities: the village all owned and dominated by a single lord; the village with powerful external owners but also fragmented property-holding and a significant presence of peasant landowners; and the village where small owners predominated and ran their own lives much more autonomously. How common were each? As already stated, Palaiseau was probably the least typical of the three, at least up to 800; there were village-sized estates in every part of western Europe, but they were only common in a small number of areas, such as the Paris basin. (Royal estates, too, tended to be of the Palaiseau type.) Gœrsdorf was probably a very widespread type indeed; there were, after all, major aristocrats all over Europe, and they had to own land somewhere - indeed, the more scattered their land, the more places they owned it. The Gœrsdorf model can perhaps be seen as typical of most of southern and eastern Francia, Italy (as in Campione), and - though here the evidence is less good - the non-mountainous sections of Spain. Ruffiac can stand for parts of Europe where aristocrats were weaker: Brittany, obviously, but Britain too; other parts of Europe north of the Frankish world; and also more marginal parts of southern Europe, such as the Pyrenees and the Appennines. But there were probably examples of autonomous villages scattered quite widely across Europe, at least in the sixth and seventh centuries. By the ninth and tenth centuries there would be far fewer, as we shall see in Chapter 22. In England, in particular, village-level societies with a relatively high degree of autonomy in 700 or so, at most paying recognitive dues to a king or, increasingly, a church, would have become by 900 or so much more subjected, paying higher rents to a single landlord. England moved, as a whole, from a collection of local societies on a Ruffiac model directly to a collection of societies on a Palaiseau model - a considerable social change, even though a poorly documented one. We shall look at how that process can be characterized in Chapter 19.

  Villages were various in many other ways, too: far more ways than can be described in detail here. They varied in their size and spatial coherence, from big nucleated settlements (Palaiseau had 117 holdings, perhaps representing nearly 700 inhabitants), through small hamlets, to sets of isolated farms, and mixtures of all these forms. They varied in the strength of their internal organization; some had structured patterns of decision-making (although this was rare before 1100 in the West, it was not unknown - the Redon villages seem to be examples); some had collectively run pastoral economies (by contrast, collective decisions about agriculture were rare before three-field systems expanded across northern Europe in the central Middle Ages, and before the Arabs expanded irrigation
agriculture in Spain and Sicily in the ninth to eleventh centuries). Before 800, overall, villages tended to be smaller and less structured than they would be later, and some historians indeed prefer not to call them ‘villages’ in this period at all. But the idea of all the people living in a given geographical territory, landowners or tenants, being seen as inhabitants of the same place, the villa of Palaiseau or Gœrsdorf or the plebs of Ruffiac (vicus, locus and many other Latin words were also used), is in itself an important element that can be said to be the basis of ‘village-ness’, and I am happy to use the word here. Some villages were fairly weak or small, some coherent or large, and village coherence would slowly increase between around 600 and around 1000, but in all centuries villages and their territories were important as the basic stage on which the peasant majority, 90 per cent of the population of Europe and maybe more, lived their lives throughout our period.

  Villages were not egalitarian communities in any period, even if they did not have lords, and large landowners were marginal or absent. Peasants were divided between owners and tenants, and between richer and poorer owners, in a complex pecking-order. The free-unfree dividing-line was also of crucial importance in most villages, separating people who had legal rights, in public law courts and local decision-making (and also duties such as army-service), from people who had none. This line was violently policed by kings, and marrying across it was illegal everywhere, although we have seen, with Anstruda of Piacenza, that people frequently did so in practice. The practical importance of the free-unfree line was probably very variable regionally, too. It mattered more when all tenants were legally unfree, for example, than when unfree tenure was just one version of dependence beside others (as at Palaiseau, where free and unfree tenants lived side by side, and indeed intermarried on a regular basis). But everywhere it marked an important status difference inside the village, and thus a break in local solidarity: village collectivities would not often be powerful and coherent until unfreedom became less common, which was, once again, a feature of the tenth and eleventh centuries more than the sixth to eighth.