By Manfred Grot en
Agriculture
Mediaeval society was an agricultural society, with at least 90 % of the population working in farming. The peasantry created the food for the nobility, clergy and townsfolk. The vivid language of the Middle Ages called them the feet carrying the body of the people, but their legal position and social standing by no means corresponded to their economic importance. The large majority of the peasants were either serfs or burdened by various kinds of high dues. The Middle Ages distinguished three basic forms of life - prayer, war and work. The first was represented by the clergy and monks, the second by the nobility and knights and the third, apart from craftsmen and merchants, mainly by the peasantry. The last-named were not allowed to cany weapons and so were excluded from chivalry with its promise of social advancement. Only he who could use weapons to defend power could also exercise power. Those who were unarmed could be no more than the object of the power of others. Thus the peasantry that was so typical of the Middle Ages was essentially defined by the creation of a body of professional warriors known as knights.
The ruling class did all it could to control the peasants' way of life so as to keep them firmly within the bounds of their social position, especially when their economic situation noticeably started improving at the height of the Middle Ages. The Chronicles of the Roman and German Emperors, written about the middle of the 12th century, calls upon the highest mediaeval authorities, Emperor Charlemagne and Pope Leo III, to legitimize the legal regulations for the peasantry:
"Now 1 want to speak about the peasants, the clothes they should wear: they should be black or grey. He (the Emperor) did not allow anything else. Gussets at the side, they befit his way of life. Shoes of cow leather, that is enough. Seven ells of hessian for shirt and trousers. If he has gussets at the front or the back he offends against class privileges. Six days behind the plough and other work suffice. On Sunday he should go to church with his staff in his hand. If he is found to have a sword he must be taken bound to the church fence. Here he must be held fast and flogged. If he is attacked, let him defend himself with a hay fork."
In this text the writer, committed as he was to courtly culture, makes no bones about his disdain for the peasantry. Middle High German literature repeatedly makes clear what courtly conduct is like by comparing it to the uncouth and loutish behaviour of peasants.
To a certain degree, the peasant depicted in literature was only a caricature of reality. Most peasants were unable to afford more than what the rulers would grant them. Mediaeval agriculture generally yielded little, mainly because of the shortage of fertilizer. The profit from wheat, for example, was in the proportion of one part of seeds sown to three parts of grain harvested. Surplus was often devoured by taxes to such a degree that it was but with difficulty that the family could feed itself from what was left. Luxury and splendour were impossible in such circumstances.
The peasants' clothes were usually made of rough cloth. They wore a shirt, short trousers (breeches) and long stockings (hose) and on top of that a tunic fastened at the waist with a belt and usually only going down to the knees so as not to get in the way while working on the fields. The nobility and wealthy citizens, on the other hand, would wear long robes down to the ground and were fashionably adorned, for example with gussets such as those mentioned above. The peasants would protect themselves from the cold and rain by means of an open coat that usually had a hood. Their feet were often only wrapped in cloths or they would wear wooden shoes. The Bundschuh, a shoe fastened at the ankle with laces, which was to become the symbol of the rebels during the Peasant Wars (1492-1514), was typical of the peasants' footwear. Simple peasants hardly owned more than one set of clothes, and right up until early modern times the colour could be a typical feature of their estate. It was only wealthy peasants who owned not just everyday clothes, but Sunday attire as well, the splendour of which was a thorn in the flesh of the higher ranks.
The main source of food for the peasants was porridge or millet gruel, which was eaten out of a wooden bowl with a spoon. Unleavened bread was often made. Otherwise rye bread was served. The fine, light-coloured bread made of wheat was regarded as being that of lords of the manor. The peasants also often ate vegetables, such as beans, lentils or peas, and butter, cheese and meat, especially pork and poultry. Strictly speaking, venison was taboo because peasants were not allowed to go hunting. Their banquets were in marked contrast to their frugal daily meals, and preachers never tired of holding forth against the excesses of such occasions.
Peasants were normally bound to a manor. Their feudal lords were the king, the nobility, bishops, convents and monasteries. In its most extreme form, the mediaeval feudal system had three components. The lord was, firstly, the owner of the land tilled by the peasants. This meant that he could charge dues for the use of arable land, meadows and woods. Secondly, he was the supreme judicial authority over the peasants, who were thus beyond the public jurisdiction of the king's representatives, the earls. Since the judicial authority also gave protection, he could charge feudal taxes. The overlord could, thirdly, also be their feudal master if they were serfs. It was particularly regarding this final point that there were the greatest differences, depending on the period, region and ruler.
One thing to be borne in mind is that the term "freedom" has had different meanings at different times. When we talk of freedom today, for example, we are taking such obligations as compulsory schooling, military service and tax liability into account. The Middle Ages had different standards. The extent to which one's life was determined by a feudal master was a decisive criterion.
Serfs with no land of their own were worst off. They were required to serve in the landlord's household, putting their entire working power at his disposal. There was no such thing as freedom for them. As a rule, they were not allowed to marry. They were, however, guaranteed a living and provision for old age. Serfs living in huts in the vicinity of the manor house enjoyed a little more freedom. Serfs cultivating a farmstead of their own had to render certain services for their feudal lords. They also had to pay a poll tax, with special taxes being due in cases of marriage and death.
Work of a peasant (13th century)
'Ihe medallions depict two Lisks done in rur. il areas - sowing the grain and harvesting the crops.
Most big manorial estates had been organized as villications since the days of the Carolingian dynasty. A villication consisted of a manor estate with its own economic system and a number of dependent holdings. Either the noble landowner himself lived on the manor estate with his family, or an official usually called a Schultheiss or Meier. The latter was particularly common in the case of very large manor estates made up of several villications. Important monasteries had thousands of peasants living in holdings. The owners of such holdings or Hufen, the average size of which is given as 10 hectares, not only had to cultivate their own land but also work for the manor.
We can see what it was like in practice from an article in the land register of Prum monastery in the Eifel. The article is about Rommers-heim farm near the monastery, to which seven Hufen manorial land belonged and 30 Hufen of land to be cultivated for the landlord. The peasants had to pay the following dues to the monastery - one pig worth 20 pfennigs, one pound of flax, three chickens, 18 eggs, half a load of wine in May and ditto in October, five cartloads of manure, five bundles of tree bark, 12 cartloads of wood, help with baking and brewing, the transport of 50 boards or 100 shigdles for the church roof, a week as a swineherd in the woods, cultivating three acres of the landlord's land three days a week, i. e. ploughing, sowing, harvesting, taking in the harvest, threshing, fencing in the corn fields and meadows, collecting five bushels of corn from Holler (40 km away), guarding the barn, looking after one of the landlord's garden beds. The peasant's wife had to sew trousers. If the abbot visited the estate, the peasants had to join forces to supply four oxen and provide a cart for transport purposes. These demands were originally recorded in 893; the fact that a monk called Caesarius copied them out and annotated them in 1222 shows how tenaciously the feudal landlords clung to their rights over the centuries. Prum monastery was in this respect, however, extremely conservative. By 1200 most lords of the manor had long given up managing their property themselves and had leased it out to peasants in return for payment in kind or money.
For a number of reasons, the situation of the peasants had considerably improved during the 12th century. A huge growth in the population increased the demand for bread-cereals. The towns were thriving, and here in particular agricultural produce brought good prices. Ploughland was extended to provide food for the growing population by large-scale assarting. Areas that had hardly been developed, such as the Slavonic countries to the east of the German Empire, were systematically colonized. If they were to get peasants to do the hard work all this entailed, the landlords were obliged to offer the settlers particularly favourable legal conditions. This had an effect on all the regions that had long been settled. Here, too, dues and services were reduced to stop the peasants from emigrating to the colonies or towns. One of many examples is provided by a document from Archbishop Philipp of Cologne dating from the year 1171 on changes in the estates of the cathedral capital in Worringen. In order to stem the rural exodus, the taxes for persons over the age of 11 were reduced to 2 pfennigs a year. Six pfennigs were to be paid to the mayor on marriage. If a peasant died, the mayor got either his best horse or, if he didn't own any horses, another animal or an article of clothing. The best linen dress of a dead woman also went to the mayor. A comparison with the Prum peasants in Rommersheim clearly shows how much freedom the people in Worringen, in the vicinity of the
Windmill
Grain started being ground with the help of windmills in the I lth and 12th centuries-a technical innovation Europe owed to the highly developed civilization of Arabia. The picture shows a "post
Metropolis of Cologne, had in managing their own affairs. As replacement of loss of income, the mayor was to be paid 6 marks, the cathedral provost 3 marks each year. In order to get this system going and to make sure the payments could be made, 12 peasants first had to collect a total of 70 marks, each according to his wealth - a handsome sum of money which in those days was enough to buy a castle. The foremost peasants in the village were anything but poor.
The final point in the document is particularly interesting because it allows the peasants a certain degree of co-operative autonomy. The withdrawal of the landlords made it possible for the peasants to join together to form a village community, allowing them to regulate their affairs on their own responsibility, according to village law. Such cooperative regulations affected matters like the mutual use of meadows, water and woods (common land), of draught animals (oxen, horses) and better ploughs. It especially stipulated an obligation to conform to certain rules governing the use of land. These were necessary for the three-field system of agriculture that was in common use. For this, ail the arable land belonging to a village was divided into three big fields. These were sown either with summer crops or winter crops or left to lie fallow according to a prearranged order, with the use of each field
A medieval village
The village of Rysum in Lower Saxony gives us an excellent impression of what medieval villages looked like. Their layout was mainly circular, with a precisely stipulated system of roads running through them and meeting in the centre. The church was the nucleus of the village.
"The Milkmaid"(mid - 13th century)
There were relatively few cows in the Middle Ages, for they needed a great deal of fodder and it was difficult to meet their needs in winter. As a rule, their milk was made into cheese and more tarelv butter. A 13th-century writer said of a milkmaid's work, "A milkmaid must be loyal, have a good reputation and make sure of cleanliness."
Changing annually. Since so little fertilizer was used, the idea was as far as possible to prevent the soil becoming exhausted. In areas where dairy farming or wine growing predominated, the community had other specific problems to solve.
The appearance of the villages varied from region to region. There were old villages that had grown naturally and now had an uneven layout (nucleated villages). Then there were those that had been established according to a set plan - these were the ribbon-built and the radial villages, the forest villages and the villages in the marshes on the North Sea coast. In some areas, the houses built were larger in size so that the living quarters, barn and the shed for the animals were all under one roof. In others, the various buildings were separate from one another and grouped round the farmyard or even scattered round the land. The construction of pit houses - huts erected in pits in the ground - was very simple.
Comfort in these houses was almost non-existent. An episode in the book of legends by Saint Anno of Siegburg takes us into one such dwelling. There is an open fire burning in the middle of the one and only room and above it there is an earthenware pot with water in it hanging from a hook. A mother leaves her baby, a child not quite a year old, sitting in a hollow dug in the mud floor while she goes out of the house for a short while. At this very moment one of the handles of the pot breaks, and the hot water and the embers from the fire spill all over the child. In this particular instance, St. Anno helps out with a miracle. But such living conditions must have been disastrous for children.
The experience of the uncertainty of life must have had a tremendous influence on the mentality of the peasantry. Peasants were excluded from written culture and so nothing they wrote themselves is extant. The only way we can find out about what they thought, about their religious beliefs is only indirectly - and then it was distorted - in records by the clergy, who scarcely understood or sympathized with the culture of the peasantry. Although every larger village had a parish church, the pastoral care of the inhabitants was frequently dreadful. Matters of religious belief were often only inadequately explained to the peasants. Other social ranks had bishops, abbots, priests, kings, noble gentlemen and ladies presented to them as examples of good behaviour,
But in the Middle Ages there was no such thing as a "peasant's saint." On the contrary, peasants were more likely to be suspected of heresy. After all, what else could you think of a peasant's woman who, as the monk called Caesarius of Heisterbach tells us, stole a holy wafer to put into a beehive because her bees weren't doing well - or of another who crumbled up a holy wafer and scattered it over the vegetables to make her plants grow better? Such practices could only be regarded as blasphemous and persecuted as such. And so it is not surprising that in 1233 Pope Gregory IX declared the struggle against the rebellious peasants in Stedinger a crusade.
Rural culture appears in a brighter light in the songs of Neidhart of Reuenthal, who sings about the village festivals that, for a short time, put the greyness of daily life into the background: "Clear away the stools and the chairs! Move the tables to one side! Today we want to tire ourselves out dancing."
Urban Economy
The Middle Ages had taken over the towns as a legacy from the ancient world. It was a legacy they at first didn't really know what to do with. The life of the ancient Germans had scarcely been affected by the towns. For this reason, the heirs of Rome allowed the administrative and economic functions of the towns almost entirely to fall into decay. It was mainly the Church that kept remains of late-antique urbanity going until into the Middle Ages. The bishop resided in town, and his priests looked after religious welfare of the hinterlands and did missionary work there. During the Middle Ages the bishop's church was joined by other collegiate and monastic churches. The clergy and monks of these churches made up a considerable proportion of the urban population. Therefore it was the Church more than anything else that left its mark on early mediaeval towns. These towns presented themselves to the world as a place that was obviously meant to be holy. Examples of such towns with antique traditions in Germany are Trier, Cologne and Mainz. They served as a model for cathedral towns that came into being in the Middle Ages, like Magdeburg, Bremen or Hildesheim.
Life in a medieval town (detail from a 14th-century miniature)
In the High Middle Ages, only about 10 % of the population of Germany lived in towns. Since urban areas were important trading and economic centres, a favourable position as far as traffic and transport were concerned was a precondition for the wealth of a town. This is why many towns were built on rivers or major trading routes. Ships were without doubt the most important form of transport for heavy loads. The picture shows men unloading coal ships.
The cathedrals, church foundations and monasteries had to be provided both with articles of daily use and luxury goods. Church-goers from nearby and pilgrims from afar had to be given board and food. And so trade and crafts came to life again in the towns. The bishops surrounded themselves with a retinue of dependent people known as ministerielles, who performed important and difficult services and so enjoyed great esteem. Ministeriales and merchants were, economically, the biggest and thus most influential groups of people in 11th century towns. Theoretically, these two social groups hardly ever came into contact with one another. Merchants who traded over long distances, and who were generally personally free, earned their wealth on long and dangerous journeys. The ministeriales, on the other hand, were unfree; they were responsible for administrative tasks and went to war for the bishops.
Scene from the "Jungfrauenspiegel"(late 12th century)
At the peak of the Middle Ages, al least 90 % of the population were involved in agriculture. Work in the fields was extremely difficult, (or the peasantry had no special aids to help them. Tools were simple (the picture shows scythes, a rake and a spade), and it was taken for granted that the entire family would muck in. In the picture married women have a head-covering, while the unmarried ones are bare-headed.
The bishops normally exercised full sovereign power over their towns. They were lords of court, and they charged property tax, poll tax and tolls. Walls and towers were within their power. The inhabitants of the towns were bound to the city lords in various ways.
The closest ties were those of bondsmen and bondswomen, and they belonged to the bishop's family. Free town inhabitants, such as merchants and craftsmen, were subject to the city lord's protection and this also involved obligations such as going to court sessions, paying taxes and defending the town from hostile attacks. The demands which were made by the city lord were often felt to be a burden. At the same time, however, there were city laws preventing such claims from turning into arbitrary demands.
City laws had gradually developed from general laws in reply to the needs of many people living together in a confined space. Two examples from the oldest charter of the town of Soest make clear the character of city law:
"§31 If someone pledges his house or any other building, and if this is destroyed by fire or any other cause-the new building, if the owner of the building should rebuild it, should act as a pledge, otherwise he must relinquish the ruins and the land to the creditors and the creditor can make no further demands. If, however, the owner lays claim to the ruins, the creditor can ask him to pay the entire debt.
§58 If a citzen has taken off his clothes to bathe and at this very moment is summoned to court by a court messenger, he need not follow the summons until he has finished bathing and drying himself."
Townspeople who were used to such legislation strongly objected to the city lords blatantly violating their rights. Uprisings were the result. The first time people revolted was in 1073 in Worms and 1074 in Cologne.
In 1074 Archbishop Anno of Cologne was visited by the Bishop of Munster. When his guest decided he wanted to go home, the archbishop simply confiscated a ship belonging to a merchant from Cologne, threw its freight into the Rhine and chased off the ship's crew. The merchant's son hurried onto the scene with his friends. The young men put the archbishop's servants and the city bailiff to flight. The uprising spread. Anno was besieged in his palace. He fled first to the cathedral and then along a secret passage and out of the city. The archbishop's palace was looted, people were killed, the rebels got ready for a siege. But the archbishop returned with a strong contingent of soldiers and was severe in his punishment.
Hieronymous Bosch: "The Vagrant" (also known as "The Prodigal Son")
This picture of a pilgrim passing an inn gives us an idea of the way simple people lived; the poverty and uncouthness are particularly striking. The man urinating against the wall of the house is following the custom of the day. The staff carried by the ragged wanderer indicates that it was necessary to be armed as protection against robbers and wild animals.
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World History
