The overwhelming majority of the European population—about 90 per cent—were peasants. Even if the urban revival encouraged many of them to migrate to the towns, especially in the Mediterranean regions, it remains true that most people lived on and worked the land. Their laborious daily tasks in the fields had barely altered in thousands of years, although iron tools and mills that aided their work were becoming more widespread. Between 950 and 1320 favourable climatic conditions increased agricultural production and improved the peasants’ quality of life, so that they became better fed, housed, and clothed than ever before (see Chapter 2).
This general growth in prosperity had varying consequences for the rural population. At the top of the village hierarchy were those peasants who owned their own plough and enough animals to draw it, which means at least eight oxen or four horses. Village upstarts of this sort might lend money to other peasants and even to impoverished petty landowners, from whom they might one day be able to buy ‘free’ fiefs, or with whom they might form marriage alliances, thereby breaking into the ranks of the nobility. The second and probably the largest category of peasants comprised those who barely possessed enough to support their family or pay their dues to their lord: perhaps a house with a vegetable patch, a field, and some livestock grazing on the common fields. Finally, at the bottom of the social scale were the labourers, farmhands, and shepherds who had no land at all, but relied upon daily wages and resorted to seasonal migration to sell their labour. From the thirteenth century onwards abundant English manorial records reveal that this underclass represented up to half the peasant population.
Craftwork played an important part in villages (see Chapter 2), involving at least a fifth of the peasantry. Althought there was certainly an elite of full-time artisans with their own workshops, such as blacksmiths and glassmakers, most craftwork was done by peasants who supplemented their income from farming with small-scale work such as pottery or tile making. They might employ some labourers to help them with the hardest tasks such as extracting clay, chopping firewood, or making charcoal. These wage-labourers dwelt at the fringes of society, frequenting the forest, which consequently became the focus of repeated friction and conflict, for it provided the peasants with lands to clear, grazing, and an indispensable source of energy for artisans’ ovens. Like some agricultural produce, artisans’ wares were sold in town markets: such commercialization furnished the more affluent peasants with extra income, serving to increase the social differences within village communities.
In the West the legal status of peasants was still more problematic because of significant regional differences. Around the year 1000 the class of allod-holders, who had freedom of movement and controlled their own lands, paying no taxes except to ‘public’ authorities, was in steep decline. The members of this upper level of the peasantry, which was particularly abundant in the Mediterranean regions, were numerous enough for some of them to become mounted warriors and to force their way into the nobility; the less fortunate amongst them succumbed to seigneurial domination.
At the other extreme, servitude underwent a major transformation in the thirteenth century, becoming institutionalized. Like nobility, which became an ‘estate’ or ‘order’ with specific privileges, serfdom was influenced by the revival of Roman Law in the universities, which affected legal thought and legislation. Jurists compared the status of serfs to that of the ancient Roman coloni, while charters referred to them with terms such as colonus, servus, or adscripticius. Just as nobility was largely defined by the fief, servitude became increasingly bound up with the plot of land to which a particular peasant was attached, and which he could not leave without his master’s express grant of manumission*. Lords exercised tight legal controls over both the person and the possessions of serfs. Various humiliating taxes denoted this dependence: a poll tax or chevage, paid in a ceremony of submission; formariage, which demonstrated that a serf s offspring were also dependants of his master; and main-morte, which reflected the serf’s inability to pass on his inheritance. Nevertheless, it is important not to confuse legal status with landed income: in return for being dependent on their lord, some serfs enjoyed a level of agricultural success that many freeborn labourers would have envied.20
Like the German ministeriales, serfs could even rise spectacularly up the social scale. Hugh of Fleury (d. 1122) tells the improbable but suggestive story of Stabilis (‘Steadfast’), a serf of the abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, who fled his village out of poverty: he sought his fortune in a remote village of the county of Troyes (in Champagne) called Auxon, where he toiled until he grew rich; he then devoted himself to the profession of arms, learning to ride, hawk, and hunt, employing pages, and eventually marrying an aristocratic lady; when the monks of Saint-Benoit demanded the customary rent that was the badge of his servile status in the court of the count of Troyes, the nobles of Champagne pleaded his cause. Stabilis was a truly self-made man, largely thanks to his military skills. In The Murder of Charles the Good (c. ii28), Galbert, a notary of Bruges, related a similar story concerning Bertulf, a man of very Obscure origin who became the chancellor of the count of Flanders and provost of the collegiate church of Saint-Donatien de Bruges: he propelled his relatives into the highest positions in the count’s court, entrusting them with castles, granting them prebends at Saint-Donatien, and marrying his nieces to nobles. The members of his Erembald clan began to bear the title of nobilis but still bore the stigma of servitude: it was in order to prevent a court case that would prove its servile ancestry that the family assassinated the count in 1127.'7 The condition of the peasantry was still far from fixed and could be evaded, as numerous examples show. This is true both for individuals and for groups: from the 1250s onwards there are numerous continental examples of whole communities of serfs purchasing their freedom.
World History
