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

by Chris Wickham

  The situation for dependent peasants, that is to say tenants, became harsher in the same period. The century after 750 saw the steady extension, particularly in northern Francia and southern Germany, but also in northern Italy, of new estate structures, which we call ‘bipartite estates’ or ‘manors’. These were estates divided into two parts, a ‘demesne’ (dominicum and variants in Latin), all of whose produce went directly to the lord, and the tenant holdings of the peasantry. Some of the produce from the tenant holdings was paid in rent; the rest was kept by the tenant workforce, male and female (for rent was sometimes in cloth, which was almost always woven by women), for their own subsistence. This was not new; the novelty was the demesne, for this was above all farmed by the forced labour of the tenant population, who owed labour service, up to three days a week in some cases, as part of their rent. Such demesnes varied greatly in size; some of the major north Frankish monasteries had substantial ones, and high labour service; east of the Rhine they were smaller, and in much of Italy they were both small and fragmented, with labour obligations correspondingly low, maybe only two to three weeks a year. But in nearly all cases they marked an intensification of labour, for such patterns are hardly documented in the Frankish lands before the 740s. This change, too, was sufficiently visible to come to the attention of kings; in 800, when Charlemagne was in the territory of Le Mans, the peasants of both royal and ecclesiastical lands sought a ruling from him on how much labour service they should owe, as it was so variable in the area, extending in some cases to a whole week. He enacted that a tenant family on a quarter-factus (a local word for holding) with its own animals should do no more than a day’s service a week (though two if it had no animals), and less if it had less land. This sounds generous, although we do not know how much a ‘quarter-factus’ actually was (peasant families might have routinely held two or more, for example), but the need for such equalization points at the novelty of the obligation.

  Demesne farming was special, because it was entirely controlled by the lord. Such a care for estate management and for the intensification of labour points to the sale of produce. It used to be argued that manorial economies were ‘closed’, autarkic units which produced just enough for the needs of landlords and also all their own needs, thus making buying and selling unnecessary. The growing evidence for exchange after 750- 800 in particular, as we shall see later in the chapter, makes such an argument problematic; but anyway Carolingian estate documentation makes frequent reference to the transport of produce, sometimes over substantial distances, not only to monastic centres, but also to markets or ports. In general, the manorial system was tied up with the expansion of exchange. But it also represented a greater weight of exploitation for the population of manorial estates, and this showed that tenants, too, not just peasant landowners, were feeling the effects of the power of landed elites.

  We know an unusually large amount about manorial estates, particularly of monasteries, in the Carolingian period, far more than about the inner workings of European estates in any other period before the twelfth century. This is because the ninth century is the great period for estate surveys, known as polyptychs, which were often very detailed indeed. One of the first polyptychs we have, for the suburban Paris monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from the 820s or slightly earlier, lists every member of each tenant family (with a slight under-recording of daughters), the legal status of both husband and wife, the size of their mansus (tenant holding), with grain-fields, vineyards and meadows counted separately, and all the rents and services they owed, which could be very complex, including weaving, cart-service, wood-cutting, basket-making, building and iron-working. More than two dozen similar texts survive across the next century (the last major ones were for Prüm near Trier in 893 and for S. Giulia in Brescia in the years around 900). The sort of information we have for Saint-Germain was typical of such surveys; we may not always have the names of peasant children, but we sometimes have ages (Marseille cathedral, 813-14), or the rations given to demesne workers (S. Giulia), or information hinting at grain yields (Annappes, c. 800; S. Tommaso in Reggio, after 900), or the types of grain crop grown (S. Giulia; Saint-Remi in Reims, c. 850). Statistical work can be done on texts like this, to show a rise in population (Marseille; Saint-Germain), or the tendency for legally unfree men to marry free women, thus ensuring the freedom of their children (Saint-Germain among others), or the relative regularity of rents and labour service - which could be great, indicating strong central direction, or much more variegated, indicating ad-hoc negotiation or the persistence of local customs. The attraction of this sort of detail for a long time stood in the way of a realization by historians that such estates were not typical, in either their size or their degree of organization (see also above, Chapter 9). Not only were they restricted geographically, but they were also, probably, a sign above all of ecclesiastical landowning, and perhaps some royal landowning too; lay lords can be seen to have developed demesnes, but it is unlikely that they were as tightly organized as this, not least because lay estates were divided between heirs, and changed hands rather more often. All the same, the world of the polyptychs was one ninth-century reality, at least, and probably the most productive one. Monasteries did not only write estate surveys, either; we have a guide to estate management from Abbot Adalard of Corbie, Charlemagne’s cousin, from 822, and even a map of an ideal monastery, with all the workshops marked, from St. Gallen, drawn around 825-30.

  The appearance of such a range of estate documents from the early years of the ninth century onwards might already make them seem to be part of the Carolingian political programme, and indeed they were: the first one of all, the Brevium Exempla of c. 800, includes surveys of five royal demesnes including Annappes, listing all the utensils, grain and animals found there, and also of a village of the monastery of Wissembourg, with comments such as ‘and you should list others of such things in the same way, and then list the livestock’. These were models, coming from royal government; and the early ninth-century manuscript of the Brevium Exempla has as its next text the Capitulare de Villis, a capitulary also dating to about 800, which is in effect another estate manual, less detailed but more complete than Adalard’s, this time constructed by a royal official. The highly moralized royal political practice of the early ninth century (cf. above, Chapter 17) extended even to estate management, that is to say. The Capitulare de Villis urges proper record-keeping (in more detail than the average polyptych managed, in fact), to ensure that royal estates should ‘serve our needs entirely, and not those of other men’, and also urges estate managers (iudices) to do justice, and to ensure that ‘our workforce [familia] works well at its affairs, and does not go wasting time at markets’. The concern for a moral way of life that permeates all Carolingian legislation thus melds with a concern for adequate profit. This concern spread from the king to the great Carolingian monasteries, and lasted as long as the Carolingians themselves did. Charlemagne’s court did not, of course, invent demesne farming, only its recording; manors were developing for quite different reasons. But the Carolingian programme provided a further impulse towards systematization and control.

  In the tenth century polyptychs ceased to be written, but manors by no means went away. In some areas, they extended geographically; demesne farming had spread to England by 900, as the Hurstborne Priors survey indicates (above, Chapter 19), showing that both land-lordship and the tight control of estates had taken root there. In Italy, the manorial system did lose ground after 900; references to labour services drop sharply across the tenth century, and there was a general trend to rents in money, rather earlier than in northern Europe, with demesnes increasingly divided into tenures. This however still showed an estate management directed towards exchange; it is just that the buying and selling of agricultural produce would be done by the tenants, not by the lords; this was an easier process in Italy than further north, for cities were larger, and thus demand for grain and wine was higher. In France, Germany and England, dem
esne agriculture and labour service remained a normal part of lord-tenant relationships into the twelfth century (in England, the fourteenth). By then, it had often become routinized, as an instrument of control rather than of the intensification of agrarian profit; but it could always be turned into the latter if there was opportunity, as in thirteenth-century England.

  Tenants on great estates were, as before 800, socially very diverse. On every estate there were both free and unfree dependants, and sometimes the half-free as well, with an intermediate set of rights. In regions of Europe with a written vernacular tradition, such as England and Germany, we find even more social strata, each with a separate vernacular name, owing slightly different arrays of services. All or most strata owed labour service, but heavy labour service on demesnes broadly went with unfreedom; legal status was thus tied up with economic subjection. All the same, the tendency was for legal status to become less important. On the village-sized estates of Saint-Germain, where everyone was a tenant, intermarriage between free and unfree was common, as we have just seen, and it became possible to imagine that unfreedom would die out. On one level, unfreedom was no longer necessary to lords, as most peasants were already tenants; the next developments we will discuss, the exclusion of the free from the public world and the development of the seigneurie banale, also lessened the privileges of freedom, making it easier for lords to allow the unfree to gain it. Very slowly, the traditional concept of unfreedom lost its purchase in western Europe. This happened first in Italy, where unfree tenants were already rare in the eleventh century (though domestic servants remained unfree for much longer); it happened next in France, though somewhat later in Germany and England, and later still in Scandinavia. Tenurial subjection remained, and the central medieval concept of ‘serfdom’, of being tied to the land and subject to the justice of the lord, was not very different in practice from the legal unfreedom of the early Middle Ages - indeed, it used the same word as the classical Roman word for ‘slave’, servus. By now, however, the degree of tenurial, economic, subjection to a lord was much more important than the traditional free-unfree division.

  The other two trends which reduced the autonomy of the peasantry of Europe in the period 800-1000 have already been discussed (in Chapters 18 and 21) and need less detail here. Peasants were increasingly excluded from the army in Carolingian Europe, as we have seen. This was not complete; it did not happen in England, nor in Saxony, where all hands were needed for the Slav wars in the tenth century. Elsewhere, however, aristocratic status itself was by 1000, and indeed earlier, associated with being a miles, and aristocratic clienteles became the only fighting forces. Public assemblies, too, lost their importance in parts of tenth-century Europe, particularly in West Francia; they continued into the late eleventh century in Italy, but abruptly ended there too. It was above all in England that earlier traditions of public assemblies with judicial powers, extending to all free men, continued without a break. This was a major reason why the free-unfree divide remained strong in England, too; indeed, a rather larger proportion of the population was legally unfree there by 1200 or so than in any of the post-Carolingian lands. Elsewhere, though, the world of the public was increasingly barred to the peasantry, who were as a result more and more subject to lords.

  This then developed into the seigneurie banale in parts of West Francia/France and Italy, in areas where the state lost almost all force and private lordships took over almost everything. Seigneurial lords claimed legal rights even over their free landowning neighbours, if they lived in the lord’s seigneurial territory, especially if they were peasants, as in the case of the lordship of Uxelles in the Mâconnais discussed in the last chapter. It should be evident that the seigneurie banale was only an extreme development of the general tendency for the free peasantry, of all social and economic conditions, to be excluded from the public world, a process already beginning in the Carolingian period. The sort of control that lords could have even without formal seigneurial rights is well shown by the incastellamento process of central Italy, the lands around Rome in particular. In this process, in the tenth and eleventh centuries lords moved their free dependants, often by force, from their previous settlements to hill-top villages, sometimes on new sites, reorganizing their tenures and their rents as they did so. This was harder in northern Italy, where the land of lords was more fragmented; incastellamento there just meant the foundation of castles as signs of political power and status, alongside or above pre-existing villages and hamlets, as in northern Europe. In the centre of the peninsula, however, lords often had larger blocks of land, and were more powerful as a result. Peasants inside the new castles were already that much further from the world of the public, although the seigneurie banale did not fully develop in these regions until well into the eleventh century. But with the new seigneuries of the decades around and after 1000, the trap snapped shut on the peasantry, who were from then on legally subjected to lords, with varying degrees of severity, for all their affairs. This would continue until seigneurial powers were picked at from both sides, in the twelfth century and onwards, by peasants who established agreed sets of rights with their lords, called franchises (‘freedoms’) in Romance-speaking countries; and by rulers, kings or counts in France, cities in Italy, who were keen to expand the remit of public justice again. But by then it was a very different political world.

  These trends had separate roots, but they interacted with each other, and this interaction meant that the effects of each were greater; the exclusion of peasants from the public world was all the more serious because such peasants were also losing their lands, or, as tenants, were becoming more subjected to the demands of landlords, and vice versa. It is in this context that we can talk of a caging process, as peasant societies were steadily separated from each other, each more subject to a local lord, even without the imposition of the seigneurie banale, although still more fully if that form of lordship developed. That local lords in some cases were rising, militarized, families from the same community, former village-level medium owners or even former rich peasants (above, Chapter 21), did not make things any better; such families had a local knowledge that made domination easier, and also often had capillary hierarchical links with their neighbours or former neighbours, in the form of patron and client as well as landlord and tenant. Villages, and local communities in general, became more shot through with vertical social bonds. As we saw in Chapter 9, villages themselves became more carefully structured: they were often larger, often more nucleated. After 800 or so, they increasingly often had a church (the priest was another focus of patronage relations), and by 1000 they might sometimes already have a castle. If we look at the archaeological record for villages, we also frequently see from the ninth century the slow development of signs of distinction and power, such as estate centres, maybe walled, as at Montarrenti in Tuscany (above, Chapter 10); these were sometimes the lineal ancestors of the fortifications of the tenth and the eleventh centuries. But what castles, towers and the like meant was a much more formalized hierarchy. These hierarchies and new structurings added to the caging process for the peasantry, for they took away the flexibility that can be seen in our evidence from the earliest Middle Ages. Peasants ‘knew their place’ more from now on; they had less negotiating power.

  These are very wide generalizations, and there were all sorts of regional nuances. By and large, regions (or villages) where a peasant landowning stratum survived could maintain a certain independence of action, at the local level at least, for many centuries to come; we can see examples in twelfth- or thirteenth-century northern Italy, for example, even in areas where private seigneuries were strong. But, overall, village society became more hierarchical, with a different pacing in each locality.

  Let us look at some concrete examples of this. We saw in Chapter 9 that the villages around Redon in eastern Brittany were very autonomous in the early ninth century, with an active public sphere, and a peasantry capable of independent actions of all kinds, from land trans
actions to local policing. Chance collections of documents surviving from the Carolingian period give us a number of parallels to this pattern. The Rhineland villages around Mainz were sites of a large amount of aristocratic (including monastic and royal) landowning, for the area was one of the main ‘royal landscapes’ of the Carolingian world, but there were plenty of peasant owners as well, organized into groups of public witnesses, who largely kept out of aristocratic networks. The smaller villages around Milan or Lucca in Italy in the ninth century show more patronage links, between peasants and larger owners (both lay and ecclesiastical), but also a considerable flexibility of action for village-level dealers: they might all or mostly have patrons in the city, but there was a good deal of choice, for all powerful people had a city base. In the mountains, further from cities, peasants could develop a variety of different strategies. One example of this is the area around Rankweil in the upper Rhine valley, in the Alps above Lake Constance, whose inhabitants can be seen in a document collection of the 820s cautiously developing a land-based patronage relationship with the scultaizus Folcwin, a local official. Folcwin was probably brought in from outside as part of the extension of Carolingian public authority into the Alps, but he seems to be being absorbed into a local society rather than changing it from without. Another example comes from the Adriatic side of the central Italian Appennines, the land around the monastery of Casauria, founded (not far from the Valle Trita) by Emperor Louis II in 873. The documents from one village, Vico Teatino, surviving from the period 840-80, show among others a prosperous medium owner called Karol son of Liutprand (d. c. 870), who, with his family, engaged in a dense set of property transactions aimed at developing local social networks, and, above all, at setting his children up with attractive marriage-portions. Karol dealt with officials and greater landowners too, and doubtless had patronage relations with them - he was indeed climbing socially by marrying his children to them - but he moved with a great fluidity inside his own society. These were the years just before Casauria abruptly arrived, with royal patronage, on the political scene of this microregion; Casauria changed local politics profoundly, just as Redon did for the villages around it (hence, as usual, the survival of Karol’s documents, in the monastic archive), but up until then the flexible social world persisted.