A thousand years after the Lord was born on earth of a Virgin Men are become prey to the gravest errors. . .
Fraud, theft and aU infamy reign supreme in the world,
Saints are not honoured nor the sacred worshipped.15
With these words Rodulf Glaber, writing in the late 1030s, bemoaned the state of the kingdom of France around the year 1000. Although this monk’s complaints related to very specific conditions at the French king’s court, his opinions have exerted a deep influence over historical writing, for he wrote with a pervasive sense that the coming
14 Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 85.
15 Rodulfus Glaber, Opera, ed. and trans. J. France (Oxford, 1989), 166,168.
Of the second millennium signalled an unparalleled crisis of authority. Historical scholarship, particularly in France, has tended to agree with him that the late tenth and early eleventh centuries witnessed great social crisis, sometimes called the ‘transformation of the year 1000’ (mutation de Van mil).
It was not the year itself that mattered very much. Although some people regarded the date 1000 as ominous, for most Christians who knew the Bible and its conventional interpretations the year 1033 was far more likely than 1000 to herald the end of the world, for, according to accepted calculations, it marked the thousandth anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. Rodulf Glaber wrote expressly to interpret the history of the ‘Roman world’ (by which he meant the former Carolingian lands) in the context of these two millennial dates; for instance, he linked 1033 with the councils known to historians as the Peace of God (see Chapter 4), during which ‘bishops, abbots and other devout men’ sought to restrain the violence of the warrior class. Yet the calendar-based anxieties of one Burgundian monk do not prove that there was a crisis of authority across Europe. Historians now recognize, for instance, that the Peace ‘movements’ were far from coherent and responded to local issues. Yet other factors have convinced many historians that the opening decades of the eleventh century saw radical social change. Monastic writers had long bewailed the violence of warrior-landowners, but across much of western Europe their complaints seem to increase dramatically after 1000. Around the same time, heresy became an issue of great concern and provoked a forceful response from the Church authorities. Did millennial anxieties, aristocratic violence, and rising religious dissent together constitute a grave social crisis?
A particularly influential interpretation was Georges Duby’s study (1953) of the county of Macon, an area located, like Glaber’s monasteries, in Burgundy. Duby concluded that, although the Carolingian Empire had been divided in the ninth century, the public order that it had established persisted until around 1000. Only then, he maintained, did the emerging castellans overturn the old Carolingian order: these castle-lords forced all the local freemen to acknowledge their authority by surrendering their allods* and receiving them back conditionally from the lord as fiefs*. The castellans exerted their oppression through the recruitment of bands of warriors from whom the knights emerged. Duby’s theories were carried much further by
Guy Bois in 1989: examining a single village in the same region, he concluded that the ancient socio-economic system of slavery had persisted until the rise of the castellans rudely overturned it at the turn of the millennium.
Since 1990 there has been an extensive reaction against these ‘mutationist’ theories. Greater sensitivity towards the sources has suggested that the ‘transformation of the year 1000’ was essentially a mutation documentaire. a change in the way that documents were produced. After 1000 the style of producing charters in the former Carolingian lands became more informal, allowing monastic scribes greater freedom to narrate how nobles atoned for their ‘violence’ by piously endowing the scribes’ monasteries. Many denunciations of aristocratic violence may therefore be largely rhetorical. The leading exponent of this interpretation, Dominique Barthelemy, has argued that the new types of charter unmasked social changes that had already taken place a century or more earlier: there was no social ‘revolution’ around 1000, merely a ‘revelation’ of slower, long-term trends. Barthelemy also argues that there is little evidence of a free peasant class before 1000 and that knights were not a new phenomenon: no one doubts that early medieval magnates had also surrounded themselves with retinues of ambitious warriors. It has also become clear that models of abrupt social change based upon regional studies cannot be applied to the whole of Europe, or even all of France. The ‘transformation’ model requires the collapse of princely rule and ‘public’ order; yet in England this happened only temporarily during dynastic strife (for example, 1138-53), while in Germany royal power was undermined not by deep-seated structural changes but by a series of civil wars from the 1070s onwards—in other words, what could be called ‘high’ politics.
And yet, if the sources are really so subjective, it is equally difficult to argue that they prove social continuity. Even in England, recent comparative work suggests that the continuing strength of the monarchy masked massive aristocratic violence and profound religious anxieties. There can be no doubt that there were far more castles in Europe in 1150 than in 1000, and that individual aristocratic families, organized into lineages (see pp. 48-54), regarded these as the cornerstones of their inheritance; in most regions, they also asserted ‘bannal’* authority over the neighbourhood, in a more concerted and coherent manner than 200 years earlier. If some regions clearly do not Fit the Duby model, it does not mean that all Europe avoided social upheaval, nor that these changes did not sometimes seem bewildering and frightening to contemporaries, especially if they accompanied disorder or dissent. Martin Aurell argues below (pp. 41-2) that free peasants with the right to bear weapons were abundant in the Mediterranean regions around 1000: their numbers were destined to fall precipitously over the course of the next 200 years. The vast increase in both the number and the type of written sources produced during this period may testify to social, economic, political, and religious revolution. All in all, the debates surrounding the ‘transformation of the year 1000’ remain controversial, but their importance should not be underestimated, for they concern one of the key problems for the historian of central medieval society: how it differed from early medieval structures, and why.
World History
