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

by Chris Wickham

  This ‘Carolingian’ world, of villages structured by public power and large landowners but not necessarily dominated by them, became weaker in the next century. The Cluny documents, which illuminate a number of villages around the monastery in considerable detail, do show us villagers in some places, into the late tenth century, operating strategies of the sort we have just seen, with only occasional gifts to the monastery; but in others, a more hierarchical structure was beginning to appear. The family of Arleus son of Ingelelm (d. after 1002) was a similar family of medium owners to that of Karol, based in a set of villages just north of the monastery; in the last half of the tenth century they gave most of their land in one of these, Flagy, to the monastery, so as to develop a patronage relationship with Cluny, while keeping that in other villages such as Merzé. But Arleus also had more formal relationships; Josseran of Uxelles was his senior, lord. The seigneurie banale was coming in, and it would, besides restricting the legal rights of those subject to it, bring personal relations of lordship, too. Arleus’ heirs would escape this, and ended up as milites and petty lords in Merzé, on the aristocratic side of the dividing-line. His neighbours, however, many of whom he and his family also transacted with or witnessed for, did not.

  The documents for Farfa in central Italy show analogous patterns. Farfa had founded the nearby castle (that is, fortified village) of Salisano between 953 and 961 as part of the incastellamento process, and the bulk of the local inhabitants seem already to have been living there in the late tenth century. Most of the land of Salisano was already the monastery’s, since the ninth century. In the late tenth, documents show it accumulating the rest, mostly in gift, from the surviving landowning peasant population (they sometimes resisted, but lost in court); the donors then got the land back in lease, and their heirs became monastic tenants. Once again, however, some of the inhabitants swam to the surface; Azo son of Andrea, a local owner, leased the castle itself in 961, and his rivals (or maybe heirs), the Gualafossa family, ended up across the next century as petty castle lords, dependent on the monastery and active in its clientele, with military status, and also controlling a subsidiary castle which Farfa did not fully get its hands on until 1093. The seigneurie banale did not begin here until the 1010s, but we already see an increasingly firm local hierarchy, with a military edge, a generation or more earlier.

  These last two examples are from areas close to powerful monasteries, and therefore on one level it might not seem surprising that the imagery of lordship should come through strongly. But so were the Carolingian examples, for the most part, and lordship was less strong all the same. Furthermore, as already stressed, the parts of Europe where non-aristocratic landowning still existed were by now rather fewer. If the Parisian villages subject to Saint-Germain-des-Prés were atypical in their subjection in 820, they certainly were not so a hundred and fifty years later. Flagy, Merzé and Salisano show the caging process for the landowning peasantry beginning to operate; but in villages entirely owned by lords it was already more totalizing, and, as seigneurial rights came in, would become still more so.

  These were not the only socio-economic changes of the ninth and tenth centuries in western Europe. This was a period of steady economic expansion in the widest sense: in population, in agricultural production, in artisanal activity, in exchange. It can be argued that the driving force for all of this was the process of peasant subjection we have just looked at; but it led to a much greater complexity of the economy at all levels. Let us look at each in turn.

  Between the early Middle Ages and the beginning of the fourteenth century, the population of Europe grew consistently, perhaps tripling in size. Figures are hypothetical in most areas, post-Conquest England being the major exception; but both villages and towns increased in both size and number, with obvious cumulative effects, and the average size of peasant holdings dropped substantially, with quarter-mansi becoming normal holdings by the twelfth century in many places. The roots of that growth seem to have lain in the Carolingian period, for many of the villages recorded in, for example, the polyptych of Saint-Germain were already large, and lists of children, here and in other polyptychs, allow us to calculate that they were already - slowly - getting larger. Mansi in polyptychs and other documents were already increasingly often divided, at least into two, which is, here as later, a rough indicator of population growth as well. Why this growth began, and exactly when, is not yet fully clear, but slow demographic expansion, probably increasing in speed after 950 or so, underpins the last two centuries covered by this book.

  One consequence of a demographic rise was, of course, that there had to be enough food for an increasing population. Early medieval populations were low; the approximately two million people calculated for Domesday Book England (compared with sixty million today) could be fed fairly easily, even with the farming methods then available, and so could at least part of the increased population after that, simply by using all available agricultural space, as intensively as was possible. The pressures for intensive cultivation were even then not always irresistible; only at the very end of our period did northern Europeans begin widely to adopt a three-course rotation of crops, with only one year in three left fallow rather than one in two, which had been common earlier (and which remained common in the Mediterranean); three-year cycles were already known about in 800 (they appear in some polyptychs), but they only became generally used when population pressures increased.

  The same is true for land clearance. We saw in Chapter 9 that most land in the early medieval West should not be thought of as being trackless wild forest. Some of Germany was, and so was much of the Slav lands and Scandinavia, but to the west of the Rhine and south of the Alps, and still more in England, woodland, however extensive, was for the most part more divided up, and, if not managed for timber and coppice, was at least regarded as a resource, for peasant subsistence and aristocratic or royal hunting. Woods were often part of peasant holdings, indeed, and their use (for grazing, the gathering of woodland fruits, and of course firewood) formed part of standard peasant economic strategies. If population pressure built up, it would be these woods that would go first, cut down and replaced with grain-fields, which would produce more calories, although also a less varied diet. This small-scale land clearance, known as ‘assarting’, is more extensively documented in the ninth century than earlier; this may just be because our evidence is better, but it does fit the signs of demographic growth in the Carolingian period. All the same, the take-off of land clearance, the move to clear woodland and also marshland on a large scale, does not begin anywhere before 950 or so, and it often happened later. Population pressure was only really building up at the very end of our period, from slow Carolingian beginnings. The great clearance period, which changed the face of central-eastern Europe in particular, post-dates the end of this book.

  It is worth adding that, once peasants did commit themselves to land clearance, they could clear faster than their numbers rose, at least for a time, and this could add to their resources, at least in grain. This was particularly true on agricultural margins, in mountain areas or on the edge of the great woodland zones of Germany, where there was more to clear - landlords frequently offered lower rents in return for a commitment to clearance. Here, at least, was one area where peasants could gain, not lose, from the socio-economic changes in the last century or so of our period. An anecdotal example of this is the archaeological site of Charavines, on a small lake in the Dauphiné, on the edge of the French Alps, where a small settlement was found in an area of land clearance. The handful of houses there was found in waterlogged conditions, which means that wood survived: the houses can be dated by tree rings to the period 1003-40. Charavines did not last long, but it was notably prosperous for a few decades. The houses had extensive finds, wooden tools and bowls (and musical instruments), cloth, shoes, imported ceramics, and an unusual amount of metalwork, including weapons and coins, the imported goods perhaps paid for by the sale of pigs, which dominated animal b
ones on the site. We cannot generalize from this (though people have done so), but we should recognize that this is a much richer set of finds than one would expect on most rural sites in previous centuries; one of the buildings may have been aristocratic, but the others were not. We may be seeing here the sort of prosperity that agrarian expansion could bring at the close of our period, temporarily at least, until population rises caught up again, or until lords increased rents and seigneurial dues.

  Artisanal production and exchange was developing elsewhere, too, and had been since the Carolingian period. We saw in Chapter 9 that before 800 exchange was localized in most places. This was least true in northern Francia, where there was a measurable movement of goods along the great river valleys like the Rhine and the Seine, matching in the eighth century a set of North Sea ports. Most Italian exchange hardly extended outside single city territories, however, and, in England, very little exchange at all existed beyond the level of the village. This was even more true of Scandinavia, and the Slav and Celtic lands, except for luxury items, which travelled to their élite buyers across the North Sea and Baltic, and along the Russian rivers, as easily as they did in Francia and Italy. All these patterns became more elaborate after 800.

  Francia between the Loire and the Rhine was the most economically complex part of the West, after as before 800. We find increasing urban activity in the archaeology, with Mainz joining Dorestad, Cologne and Paris as major artisanal and mercantile centres, and by the tenth century urban populations appear as political actors, with the inhabitants of Metz and Cambrai rising up against their bishops in 924 and 958 respectively, among others. In the tenth century we also find more evidence than earlier for active Jewish commercial populations in the Rhineland cities. A set of smaller new urban centres developed as well, as with the burgus that grew up around Saint-Denis just outside Paris, and the first activity in the network of Flemish towns such as Bruges, Ghent and Saint-Omer, which seem to have begun to expand in the late ninth century. When Dorestad failed in the same period, new Rhine-mouth centres emerged to replace it, notably Tiel, where excavations show substantial tenth-century development. Written evidence for markets across the whole of northern Francia increases as well, and in the tenth century they extended far across East Francia too, as numerous grants of market rights by the Ottonians show. Iron production is increasingly visible in the archaeology. And ceramic production, always the clearest indicator of the scale of economic systems, continued to develop, with the Badorf and Pingsdorf kilns near Cologne joined by major and widely distributed products from, for example, Andenne in the Meuse valley and Beauvais north of Paris. Badorf/Pingsdorf products are also found in the trading centres of Scandinavia such as Ribe and Hedeby (where, however, they may have been seen as luxuries). We can even plot land trade routes by now, linking the great river basins, studded with vici and burgi acting as markets; these routes can be tracked by coin distributions, the wine of Burgundy and the Paris region probably exchanged for wool from the Rhine delta, the future Flanders. The sales from the great monastic estates, which we have seen documented in the polyptychs, fed into this network. Even in Francia, most exchange was always relatively local; some 80 per cent of coins are found inside a 100-kilometre radius of their mints. But there was enough of an interregional traffic in bulk goods to give us an impression of considerable activity. This continued without a break from now on, with the cloth production of the Flemish towns taking off after 1000, and the great Champagne fairs developing in the next century; these marked a new stage in the complexity of exchange, but they had firm ninth- and tenth-century roots.

  These signs of activity were matched elsewhere, but on a smaller scale. In England, large-scale production and internal exchange began in the tenth century, and was matched by some urban development, particularly in York. In southern Germany, Regensburg on the Danube was clearly an active urban and mercantile centre by the tenth century, expanding beyond its Roman walls, with merchants rich enough to buy land. A document from about 905 listing tolls owed at Raffelstetten on the Danube near Linz shows that Moravians, Bohemians and maybe even the Rus were using the river to trade with the Bavarians. Here, however, the goods listed were dominated by salt, which had been sold from the Salzburg region since the Iron Age and before; slaves and horses took second place. There is no reference to artisanal products, a major sign of bulk trade. The Danube did not yet match the Rhine, Meuse or Seine as a trade route.

  This has some parallels in Italy, too. As Italy was the closest part of the Latin West to the important exchange networks of the Muslim southern and eastern Mediterranean, there were increasingly active long-distance sea-routes around the peninsula, with Venice developing rapidly as an entrepôt after the late eighth century, particularly for the slave trade to the Arabs fuelled by the Carolingian-Sclavenian wars; in 829 its duke Justinian in his will refers to his ‘working solidi’ invested in ships due to return, the first reference in medieval history to mercantile capital. Venice by the tenth century was an autonomous maritime power, making trade treaties not only with kings in Italy but even, in 992, with the emperor Basil II, Venice’s nominal sovereign. In the tenth century Venice was also matched in southern Italy, the richest part of the peninsula, by the trading activity of Amalfi, Salerno, Gaeta, and (the largest of them) Naples. They, even more than Venice, looked to the Arab world. All the same, this international exchange did not fully reflect the more somnolent activity of Italy’s internal economy. The inland Italian cities were very large by western standards; they all had active markets, and they were expanding in the tenth century in particular, as rising figures for house prices show for Milan. Some of them were points of reference for wider exchange, notably Pavia and Cremona. But the others were exchange-centres above all for their immediate territories. The north Italian cities as yet had little connection with Venice (less than southern Italian cities had with Amalfi and Naples); the complex and vibrant production and exchange of the Po plain and northern Tuscany in the twelfth century is hardly visible before 1000, or 950 at the earliest. The most we can say is that the Italian urban network was poised on the edge of that economic take-off, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years later than in Francia.

  Venice and Amalfi were already anticipated in the eighth century by the ports of the North Sea, Dorestad, Quentovic, London, Ipswich, Southampton, York, Ribe, extending up the Baltic to Birka, with Hedeby founded around 800. It was down the trade routes with Scandinavia that the Vikings came, and Viking raids on Dorestad and other Frankish coastal towns, and also many inland centres in West Francia, did considerable damage in the late ninth century. But, as we saw in Chapter 20, Viking activity had close links to merchant activity; often enough, indeed, raiders took goods simply to sell elsewhere. In the tenth century, North Sea exchange picked up quickly (if indeed it had ever lessened, taken as a whole), and the presence of Scandinavian communities all across the north, Dublin, York and Rouen to the west, and Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod and Kiev to the east, greatly extended the scope of that exchange.

  We must not overstate North Sea economic activity. This exchange was similar to that of the new northern Mediterranean ports, above all in luxuries, or near luxuries such as slaves. All the same, the existence of the North Sea (and Irish Sea, and Baltic, and Russian river) long-distance exchange network was important for the future. When, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the internal economies of the major north European regions became sufficiently complex to begin to specialize in their production, the North Sea network was ready for bulk exchange, sending English wool to be made into Flemish cloth, and sending French and Rhenish wine, Norwegian and German timber, north Norwegian dried fish, to anywhere that needed them. But already by 1000 this sort of bulk exchange was a feature of the Islamic Mediterranean; closer and more organic links between the Muslim regions, al-Andalus, Tunisia, Sicily, Egypt, the Levant, had already begun in the tenth century (see above, Chapter 15). The Mediterranean indeed had more potential for growth in interreg
ional bulk exchange in 1000 than the North Sea had, and in the next century it would expand further, as Italy entered it more fully, and other regions too. In the North Sea region, by contrast, this trading world was a feature of the central Middle Ages, not earlier, and was hardly visible in 1000, except perhaps in Flanders. But the North Sea would match the Mediterranean in the end; and its roots lie in the luxury exchange network of the early Middle Ages. The sea-lanes and roads of the twelfth century were not so very different from those of the eighth, ninth and tenth.

  In these pages, I am stressing the increasing exchange activity of the period 800-1000, but we must not exaggerate its significance. In particular, we must not overemphasize the importance of long-distance routes. Venetians and Swedes and Rhinelanders can all be found in Constantinople in the tenth century, but this does not mark any systemic links between Italy, Sweden/Rus and Germany on the one hand and Byzantium on the other. It marks only the luxury network, bringing wealth to a handful of lucky merchants, one major city (Venice), and few others. One might look at the long-distance trading of tenth-century Scandinavians, from Dublin to Rus, and suppose that this meant that economic activity was as great in Scandinavia as in Francia, or as in Egypt, whose merchants were only beginning to move outside the Nile valley in the same period. This would be false, however. The Egyptian economy was far more complex than any other; in Europe, the Frankish economy was vastly more complex than that of Scandinavia, whose major entrepôts had almost no link with their hinterlands at all. As in the Mediterranean, it is the internal economies of Europe that mattered most; most goods were transported, bought and sold inside, not outside, economic regions (this is still true today, never mind a thousand years ago), and economic complexity, ‘development’, depended above all on that. If we concentrate on the internal economic activity of the major west European regions before 1000, only northern Francia and the Rhineland are really looking dynamic, even though a more complex internal exchange was steadily extending more widely, as Otto I’s market grants in East Francia, East Anglian wheel-thrown pottery, or the long-term fight between the citizens of Cremona and their bishop over river tolls on the Po all show (the latter went on for at least two hundred years, c. 850-1050). Internal exchange would need to become properly rooted in other regions than the Loire-Rhine area, however, for it to be possible to have a bulk trade between these regions, not just a luxury trade. This was only on the edge of taking place in western Europe in 1000.