In their eyes, the mutationniste historians have failed to recognize the implications of the new ways of producing charters that the Gregorian reform movement (see Chapter 4) propagated in monastic scriptoria*. For in the eleventh century scribes began to write long ‘notices’, phrased in the past tense and listing a plethora of details about aristocratic oppression, rather than more traditional acts that had been couched in the present tense and that had had little to say about military affairs; this new genre of document allowed them to condemn violence far more than before and to exaggerate the social disorder that had in fact been rocking west European society for decades.3 Accordingly, there must have been social continuity, not transformation. The anti-mutationist school argues that the old Carolingian nobility could never have bolstered its power with knights drawn from the allod-holders, who had full property rights over their lands; nor could the peasants have been enserfed at this point, since they were already subject to a form of servitude before the year 1000. As for the theory of the ‘three orders’, this had already been clearly formulated by the ninth century.
This historical debate has certainly not yet been resolved. Two lessons can be drawn from it, however. First, we see the realities of medieval society through the distorting prism of the discourses of contemporary authors; and, secondly, these transformations were characterized by great regional diversity, varying from principality to principality and extending from the late ninth century to C. U70.
World History
