The locations for castles were chosen for both strategic and economic reasons. Standing at the confluence of two rivers, on the slopes of a steep-sided valley, at the top of a mountain pass or on the edge of a forest that formed the frontier between two principalities, eleventh-century castles controlled the principal routes. Since these places were favourable from both a political and a military perspective, they had often been occupied for centuries: hence a castle frequently occupied the site of an Iron Age fort (oppidum), a Gallo-Roman villa, or a Carolingian palace (palatium). They were also invariably built in regions with fertile soil or near woods inviting clearance, except in Italy and the Iberian peninsula, where the populations had already made much progress in clearing forests by the ninth century.
With so many advantages, such sites inevitably attracted numerous peasants. In the Mediterranean lands, their dwellings began to cluster around an aristocratic fortress on a hilltop rather than being scattered across the adjacent plain. The word castrum came to signify both a castle and its fortified village, and indeed the future of noble residences became inextricably linked to the peasant dwellings grouped around them. Historians refer to this migration as incastel-lamento* or enchatellement (literally ‘encastlement’) or encellule-ment* (‘breaking up into cells’); some have even described these processes as the ‘birth of the village’.30
29 D. Barthelemy, Les Deux Ages de la seigneurie banale: Coucy aux Xle-XIIIe siecles (Paris, 1984).
30 Toubert, Structures du Latium medieval; M. Bourin-Derruau, Villages medievaux en Bas Languedoc (X-XIVe siecle), 2 vols. (Paris, 1987).
This transformation of the landscape depended to a large extent upon the initiative of lords who forced the peasants to congregate in villages so that they could control and tax them more easily. In charters, the territory that a lord dominated around his castle is called the districtum (from the Latin verb distringere, meaning ‘to constrain’ or ‘to punish’) or potestas (literally ‘power’). This system of lordship was partly inherited from the great estates of the early Middle Ages: it required the peasants, particularly in England, to perform corvees* (labour services) on the lord’s domain and to pay him a proportion of their crops as well. Other exactions, such as tallages levied directly on each peasant household, had probably originated more recently, as the castellans appropriated public courts and brought villagers under their power and authority. Lordship over land therefore went hand in hand with control of justice and economic resources (termed ‘bannal’* lordship by historians).
Nevertheless, the success of these communities was largely due to decisions made by peasants, not lords. Living in the village enabled peasants to cooperate in such activities as crop rotation, the use of common land, draining marshes, or irrigating gardens. This collective organization gave rise to village assemblies, held in the place most associated with their collective identity such as the churchyard or an elm in the centre of the village. It overlapped with forms of religious association such as the parish or confraternities*. These forms of fellowship aided the appearance of communes or sworn associations, thanks to which villagers could negotiate effectively with the castellans to have their exactions reduced. In the thirteenth century many charters of enfranchisement granted villages selfgovernment or reduced taxes, or commuted labour services for cash. Most of the time these documents were secured peacefully from the lords.
There was some violent resistance to lordship, however, such as the great uprising of the Stedinger, who assaulted the castles of Lower Saxony and the North Sea coast of the Continent between 1207 and 1234. Similar revolts broke out in the great cloth towns of Flanders and northern Italy at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were the work of the artisans, who were vulnerable to financial crises and who aspired to participate in the decisions of the town commune, which were invariably monopolized by the urban patriciate. On the eve of the great crises that lasted from the 1320s to the 1350s, these conflicts between different social groups heightened the tensions within the cities of western Europe.
This brief survey of European society in the central Middle Ages shows the importance of the transformations in this period. In the tenth and eleventh centuries regalian power shifted to castles and lordships, while in the thirteenth century these arrangements became permanently established in law across most of western Europe. In general, from the late twelfth century (although the exact chronology and forms varied from country to country), each social group acquired a precise status. Emerging royal administrations hardened these stratifications through laws, judicial inquests, and ceremonies. From then on these legal categories and badges of identity would precisely define each social ‘estate’. The social orders of the Ancien Regime were thereby established and in most of Europe they would endure until the great revolutions of the nineteenth century.
World History
