So far, all my posts on the Carolingian era have been all about kings, aristocrats, intellectuals, clerics and warriors. Obviously, these were all people of no small consequence in early medieval society, but in pure demographic terms, these people were a very small proportion of the population of early medieval Western Europe. And how did these people manage to eat if they didn’t work the land themselves? Therefore, let’s bring the more than ninety percent of the population who weren’t performing liturgies, writing manuscripts or decked out with sword-belts and riding warhorses into the spotlight.
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| In other words, we're gonna be talking about these sorts of people today. The labours of the months are depicted here in a manuscript produced at the monastery of Salzburg (then in Bavaria) dated to 818, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Vienna; Codex 387, fol. 90. |
Now it’s in the eighth and ninth centuries, in the age of
the Carolingians, that we start to get a growing volume in documentation for
rural life in Western Europe – negligible by the standards of modern history
(anything post-1300 really), but quite substantial for the early middle ages.
We also get a range of different types of documentation about rural life too.
The most exciting of these are the polyptychs. These are estate surveys which
analyse the constituents’ part of each villa (in the ancient Roman sense), and
register what each manse (the unit of landownership and tax assessment) owes
the landlord in rent and the state in public duties after recording the
tenants. These were produced as property deeds used in lawsuits to defend the
rights of landlords. The Carolingian king-emperors encouraged the production of
them from the first quarter of the ninth century onwards. Pretty much all the
landlords for whom we have surviving polyptychs are monasteries and cathedrals,
since their continuity as institutions means that documents in their archives
have the best chance of survival. The first polyptych we’ll look at is that of
Saint Germain des Pres, a very wealthy and prestigious Parisian abbey founded in
the sixth century. It was drawn up between 806 and 829, when Irminon was abbot.
We’ll focus on the extract that concerns Villeneuve, a villa located in the
wine-growing region of the Seine basin:
There is a master’s manse at Villeneuve with a dwelling
and sufficient other buildings. 172 bonniers of arable land which can be sown
to produce 800 muids. There are 91 arpents of vineyard where 1,000 muids can be
harvested. 166 arpents of meadow from which 166 waggons of hay can be gathered.
There are three flour mills the rent of which brings in 450 muids of grain.
Another one is not rented out. There is a wood four leagues round where 500
swine can be fattened.
There is a well-constructed church with all its
furniture, a dwelling house and sufficient other buildings. Three manses are
dependent on it. Divided between the priest and his men, there are 27 bonniers
of arable land and one ansange. 17 arpents of vineyards, 25 of meadow. This
provides a horse, as a “gift.” In the service of the master, nine perches and
an ansange are ploughed, two perches for the spring grain, and four perches of
meadow are enclosed.
Actard, villein (colonus), and his wife, also a villein
(colona), named Eligilde, ‘men’ of St Germain, have with them six children
called Aget, Teudo, Simeon, Adalside, Dieudonnee, Electard. They hold a free
manse containing five bonniers of arable land and two ansanges, four arpents of
vineyard, four and half arpents of meadow. They provide four silver sous for
military service and the other year two sous for the livery of meat, and the
third year, for the livery of fodder, a ewe with a lamb. Two muids of wine for
the right of pannage, four deniers for the right of wood; for cartage a measure
of wood, and 50 shingles. They plough four perches for the winter grain, and
two perches for the spring. Manual and animal services, as much as is required
of them. Three hens, 15 eggs. They enclose four perches of meadow …
… Adalgarius, slave of St Germain, and his wife, villein
(colona), named Hairbolde, “men” of St Germain. This man holds a servile manse.
Hadvoud, slave, and his wife, slave, named Guinigilde, “men” of St Germain,
have with them five children: Frothard, Girouard, Airole, Advis, Eligilde.
These last two hold a free manse containing one and a half bonniers of arable
land, three quarters of an arpent of vineyard, five and a half arpents of
meadow. They look after four arpents in the vineyard. They deliver for pannage
three muids of wine, a setier of mustard, 50 withies, three hens, 15 eggs.
Manual service where they are ordered. And the female slave weaves serge with
the master’s wool, and feeds the poultry whenever she is ordered to do so.
Ermenold, villein (colonus) of St Germain, and his wife,
slave: Foucard, slave, and his wife, slave, named Ragentisme, ‘men’, of St
Germain. These last two hold a servile manse containing two bonniers, one and a
half ansanges of arable land, an arpent of vineyard, two and a half arpents of
meadow. They owe the same as the preceding one. The female slave and her mother
weave serge and feed the poultry whenever they are commanded to do so.
(“Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West” by
Georges Duby, translated by Cynthia Postan, Edward Arnold, 1968, pp 368 – 369)
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| The abbey of Saint Germain des Pres, Paris. Of course none of the present building would be recognisable to people from Carolingian times - all of it is rebuilds from the eleventh century and later. It now gives its name to a fashionable quarter of the sixth arrondissement on Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, where there are a lot of famous cafes (Les Deux Magots, le Procope and the Brasserie Lipp) and where, in the 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus came up with existentialism. |
Now I am I am not versed in archaic units of measurement and
I’ve never been great with numbers (getting an A in Maths GCSE was one of the
most satisfying achievements of my life), so while the data given in the first
paragraph is fascinating, I am in absolutely no position to use it to calculate
the agricultural productivity of Villeneuve. The legendary Georges Duby used polyptychs,
including this one, to calculate cereal production in Carolingian Europe and
the figures he came up with were depressingly low – two berries of grain reaped
for every seed planted, compared to a crop to seed ratio of 6:1 in the
thirteenth century and 30:1 for farmers in Europe and North America today. Duby
was of course writing in the 1970s and was much more at home in the High Middle
Ages (950 – 1350) . Since then, the evidentiary basis for his pessimistic view
of Carolingian agriculture has been challenged (see Jonathan Jarrett, ‘Outgrowing
the Dark Ages’, Agricultural History Review 67, 2019, pp 1 – 28). And
the fact we have these figures to make productivity calculations at all, shows
that these people weren’t stupid, primitive or economically illiterate.
There is definitely a hierarchy in this village. Besides the
landlord (the abbey of Saint Germain) and the priest (rural parish churches
were starting to emerge in what is now France in the Carolingian age), who
occupies his own little satellite estate as a quasi-tenant of the abbey, there
are clearly two types of social status here.
Firstly, there are the coloni, a class of peasant
tenant farmers who are still free men under the law, but are nonetheless dependent
clients of their landlords and so are referred to as their “men”, just as the
warrior retinue of an aristocrat might be. A clear indication of their legal
freedom is that military service is expected of them, as by ancient custom was
expected of all free Frankish men including peasants, though in practice, they
commute that public duty for a payment to the state – basically a flat-rate
tax. These people clearly have to do unpaid labour on the demesne (the land
owned directly by the landlord and farmed for his benefit), specifically
ploughing it twice a year and performing “manual and animal services as
required.” Carting hay and manure is also theoretically expected of them, but in
practice they’ve commuted it for payments of chopped wood. Everything else they
have to provide for the landlord takes the form of various kinds of rent. Some
of the rent they pay in the form of produce from their own plots of arable
land, vineyards and animals i.e., “for the livery of fodder, a ewe with a lamb.
Two muids of wine for the right of pannage …” But clearly not all them, as for the
livery of meat and the right to use the woodlands for fuel and fattening pigs they
pay in cash – sous and deniers are the denominations of the silver coinage
created by Pippin the Short’s currency reform of 755. That they had access to
cash indicates that there was some commerce going on in the ninth century Frankish
countryside, and that peasants must have been visiting markets and fairs to sell
their surplus produce. It also shows that Carolingian agriculture certainly
wasn’t so primitive that the peasants were living at hand-to-mouth subsistence
level. Other, more prosperous kinds of free peasant do not feature here because
they owned their own land outright as allods, and so owed nothing to landlords.
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| A peasant at work with his mouldboard (or heavy) plough pulled by oxen in the Stuttgart Psalter (c.825), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart |
The other group present here are the slaves. They’ve clearly
evolved a lot from the Classical Roman agricultural slaves familiar to Cato,
Cicero, Varro and Columella. Rather than living in barracks and working on the
master’s plantations under the close supervision of him and his agents, just as
slaves in the Colonial Caribbean, Imperial Brazil and the Antebellum US South
would also do, they appear to be hutted out in their own houses and farming the
own plots of land. They also seem to be providing rents in produce from their
plots of land for the right to use the woodland, showing that they actually
have a fair amount of economic autonomy – that is to say they can at least provide
for their own food, fuel and clothing, rather than being completely dependent
on their master like in those other slave societies I’ve mentioned. However,
they are still subject to exploitation at the master’s whim. Here there is a
gender division of labour. The boys’ jobs include working in the master’s vineyards
and “manual services.” The girls’ jobs include textile work on the looms in the
master’s workshops and feeding the poultry. It is also clear that these slaves are
allowed to marry and have custody over their children, which are absolutely not
a given in slave societies. Not only that, but a slave, Adalgarius, is married
to a free woman called Hairbolde, and Ermenold, a colonus, is also
married to a slave, which would suggest that these enslaved people aren’t being
viewed as subhuman by the free. All of this does bring up the old vexed
question of when does slavery become serfdom and does it even matter? I won’t
discuss my thoughts on that here – that’s for a Controversies post at a later
date.
What’s most distinctive about the polyptychs as documents on
the early medieval countryside is that they give the names of people other than
heads of household and mention the number of children. Now it seems like the
nuclear family was the norm in the Frankish heartlands – certainly in this
polyptych no household has more than two generations in it. I must state here I
don’t have access to the original text of the polyptych, and that Georges Duby,
who edited and translated it, took out a large section in the middle. Thus only
five households appear in the extract I’ve given, though there will have been many
more. In these five households, three out of five married couples don’t have
any children and those which do have five and six respectively. In this polyptych,
the ages of the children are not specified. This makes the polyptychs like gold
dust for those interested in early medieval demography. From them we can make a
stab at the population of any given locality and average family size. The only
problem is that, unlike the parish registers we have in England post-1540 and nineteenth
and twentieth censuses, these documents do not seem to have been systematically
updated and so only offer us snapshots in time. Perhaps in the two households with children, most of them subsequently died of childhood illnesses. And perhaps the apparently childfree families had kids a couple of years down the line. And whether they can be used to
generalise for areas not covered by them (most of the Frankish Empire), is also
doubtful - even amongst themselves, the polyptychs show a great degree of regional and local variation. Still, they are incredibly rich and fascinating and we will see more of
them next time.
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