From the sources 3: living in the Carolingian countryside I

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.

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)

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.

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.

Carolingian government in action: The Edict of Pitres (864)

  I am back!!! After almost two months of inactivity (54 days to be precise), the longest in the history of this blog, I am now active again. Those of you who have been actively following may have been wondering what happened to Charles Martel part four - he'll be with you very soon, I promise. But I thought I'd give you an explanation as to what has been going on in the time in between. From 3 May to 17 June I have been on a long-anticipated journey round Europe to see some of the best late antique and early medieval stuff out there, as well as things from other historical periods. A kind of Grand Tour for the twenty-first century, if you will, but orientated completely towards my personal interests rather than a canonical selection of cities and Classical sites (mostly in France and Italy) believed to be essential to the education of any young gentleman. In the course of those 46 days I travelled a minimum of 4849.1 km by train (excluding day trips to outlying places) and walked 610.9 km (13.2 km a day on average) through five Continental European countries - France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria and Italy. That number could be increased to seven if you include changing trains in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Basically covered a good whack of Charlemagne's Empire, and with all that near-constant travelling, one got some sense of what it must have been like to have been like to have been a highly itinerant ruler like Otto the Great, Conrad II or Frederick Barbarossa - above all, how exhausting it must have been. 

As you might suspect, the many great and wonderful things I saw on my travels will be the subject of many a blog post. But for the moment, in order to prepare you for the first blog post, I am going to do one on the Edict of Pitres, arguably one of the most important documents in early medieval history, as it gives us unparalleled insights into how an early medieval government was at least supposed to have worked. 

Who, what, where, when and Why?

 The Edict of Pitres was issued on 25 June. It was issued by the king of West Francia, Charles the Bald (823 - 877), at the royal villa of Pitres on the Seine, in what is now the French region of Normandy but was then called Neustria. The Edict was a legislative act issued following a royal assembly, which leading churchmen and landed aristocrats from throughout the kingdom had attended, where all kinds of consultation and discussion concerning the Edict's provisions had taken place before hand. As for the why, we need to take a step back and look at Charles the Bald's reign before that.

The Road to Pitres

Charles the Bald's reign up until this point had been quite a bumpy ride. He had won his kingdom through an extremely bloody and brutal three-year civil war, in which he and his brother, Louis the German, fought against their other brother, Lothar, and their nephew, Pepin II of Aquitaine, following the death of their father, Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840). I have covered this and the treaty of Verdun that followed in a previous post (see hyperlink above). 

No sooner had Charles secured his kingdom, he found himself faced with revolts from prominent nobles from the western regions of his kingdom, like Lambert of Nantes, who were still loyal to Lothar and his cause for a unified Frankish Empire. These threats were however eliminated fairly quickly. But in order to make sure that he political community as a whole in West Francia stayed loyal to him, Charles had to accept various constraints and limitations on his royal authority in a legislative act called the Capitulary of Coulaines - a kind of forerunner to Magna Carta. For the next five years, Aquitaine (the entire southern half of his kingdom) had tried to secede and become its own independent kingdom ruled by Charles' nephews. By 848 the nobles in Aquitaine and the Spanish March (Catalonia) had come to realise that all the advantages of having a local king were offset by said local king being a total car crash. Yet it was only in 864, a few months prior to the issuing of the edict, that Pepin II was finally pacified once and for all. Worse was to come in 858 when the West Frankish nobles, highly dissatisfied with Charles' rule, offered the crown to his brother, Louis the German. Charles was unable to raise an army to resist Louis and hid himself away in Burgundy. Only by rallying the support of the West Frankish bishops, led by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882), combined with desertions in Louis' army was Charles able to keep his throne. In 862, Charles had even faced-down a short-lived rebellion of magnates from the northern and western regions of his kingdom led by his own 16-year-old son, Louis the Stammerer.

But by the summer of 864, the situation had changed and Charles was now in a much stronger position politically, with his royal authority unchallenged. Therefore, Charles needed to make a statement that would proclaim his might as a ruler and the newfound confidence in his kingship. He also had some pressing concerns. Viking attacks down the riverine waterways of the Frankish kingdoms had been escalating. Trade with the east via Russia was becoming less profitable for the Scandinavians, as the Abbasid Caliphate was starting to politically fragment (a classic “centre can no longer hold” type situation) and its silver mines in the Middle East were drying up. Meanwhile, Britain and Mainland Europe still made rich pickings – we’re only three years off from the Great Heathen Army landing in Northumbria. Charles therefore needed to ramp up the Frankish state structures to prepare them for the worst to come. What was to happen at Pitres was going to be the defining moment of Charles the Bald’s kingship, a chance to put the last two decades behind him.

Charles the Bald appears enthroned in the Vivian Bible (846), BNF Lat 1 folio 423r

Charles the Bald's political style

Any royal assembly was a chance for a king to give charismatic displays of his royal authority. For example, we know that Carolingian Frankish kings wore their crowns at royal assemblies, as would the West Saxon kings of England from the tenth century onwards in emulation of Frankish practice. Processions, litanies and other ritual elements could be expected to happen, and its beyond reasonable doubt that these were quite theatrical occasions, even if no set of stage directions survives for a Carolingian assembly. Assemblies were also an opportunity for the king’s subjects who didn’t have the privilege of regularly attending on him at court to get close to their ruler – impress him with gifts, give him news of what was going on in their corner of the kingdom, petition him to give them favours or redress any grievances. Furthermore, they allowed members of the political community to socialise with each other – hunting and feasting would almost always be on the agenda in organising these assemblies. And most importantly, they were a forum for a king to receive formal advice from his subjects on matters of state and build consensus in support of his policies. Royal assemblies, which happened annually, were thus the key mechanism for kings to get anything done on a kingdom-wide level, and they were what held the kingdom together as a single unified entity in the absence of large, administrative bureaucracies like the Western Roman Empire had had western European monarchs from the twelfth century onwards would do.

Despite the importance of the event, we don’t know the actual proceedings of the assembly at Pitres. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims was an eyewitness, yet in the Annals of Saint Bertin, which he authored, he only tells us what was accomplished there. Annual tribute was received from the Bretons, who had from 845 to 851 successfully fought to free themselves from direct Frankish rule and had become a tribute-paying client state. New fortifications were to be built on the Seine to defend against Viking attacks. Finally, “with the advice of his faithful men and following the custom of his predecessors and forefathers, he [Charles] drew up capitula to the number of thirty-seven, and he gave orders for them to be observed as laws throughout his realm.” That this is an allusion to the Edict of Pitres, there can be no doubt.

Hincmar’s statement highlights one of multiple purposes of the Edict – as royal-image making/ public relations/ propaganda (whatever you wanna call it). As Janet Nelson has demonstrated, Imperial Roman legislation in the form of the Theodosian Code of 438 and the Novels of Emperor Valentinian III (r.425 – 455) is cited, sometimes verbatim, as being the inspiration behind thirty-three of the provisions of the Edict. The number of chapters of the edict (37), mentioned by Hincmar, was very deliberately chosen, as the Novels of Valentinian III were 36 in number. None of this would have been lost on the Edict’s audience. Roman law in one form or another was still the legal system in the southern half of Charles’ kingdom (Aquitaine and the Spanish March). And churchmen from the northern half of the kingdom like Hincmar had extensively studied the Theodosian Code even though where they lived the Law of the Salian Franks, which had its roots in ancient Germanic custom, held sway. Charles himself appears to have claimed to have studied Roman law as a boy in a letter he sent to Pope Hadrian II in 870. And more than thirty years ago, Freculf of Lisieux had written for the instruction of the young Charles of how Theodosius I, “a man necessary for restoring the state” had “corrected many laws, added to them and issued them in his own name. Whatever laws he saw in the city to be pernicious and redundant in terms of ancient custom, he authorised them to be removed; and he saw to it that whatever laws were necessary to help the state were added.” The Edict also cites in various places earlier legislative directives (capitularies) from Charles’ father, Emperor Louis the Pious, and his grandfather, Charlemagne. And as Charles would have been aware, his grandfather had all the law codes of the different peoples living within his Empire written down, and had tried to reconcile the differences between the two legal systems operating in the heartlands of his empire (the Law of the Salian Franks and the Law of the Ripaurian Franks) but in the end had only added a few chapters to them to bring them somewhat up-to-date. Despite the fact that Charles the Bald, unlike his two elder brothers, had never met his grandfather, he was held up as a role model for him from boyhood and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne was prescribed as a text for him to study in the schoolroom. Thus, through the Edict, Charles was very consciously casting himself in the mould of the Christian Roman emperors, especially Theodosius I (r.379 – 395) and Theodosius II (r.408 – 450), and of his immediate predecessors, who had always been held up to him as exemplary rulers.

What is the edict actually all about?

Even more interesting is what the Chapters of the Edict themselves entail. The Edict has been described by the great Anglo-Saxon historian Patrick Wormald as being the greatest single legislative act issued by a north European king before Edward I. Janet Nelson, whose biography of Charles the Bald is still the definitive work on the Carolingian monarch despite it being over thirty-years-old, describes the Edict as the most remarkable piece of public legislation between Justinian’s Novels (sixth century) and the twelfth century. And such assessments by modern academics really do bear out. The scope of the edict is huge in terms of all the different areas of government policy-making it covers, and the provisions it makes are incredibly ambitious.

The structure of the edict goes:'

The structure of the edict goes:

·         Preamble

·         Chapters 1 – 7: provisions concerning public order and the keeping of the peace.

·         Chapters 8 – 24: provisions concerning the reform of the coinage.

·         Chapters 25 – 27: provisions concerning the defence of the realm and the reform of conscription and military service.

·         Chapters 28 – 31: provisions concerning the regulation of the rural economy – taxation, rent, labour services, the land market and peasant migration.

·         Chapters 32 – 34: provisions concerning specific issues that were brought up in the royal assembly at Pitres.

·         Chapters 35 – 36: provisions concerning the communication and enforcement of the Edict in the localities.

·         Chapter 37: provision concerning the royal lodge by the Seine and final exhortation for the king’s subjects to defend the realm against the Viking threat. 

A short(ish) chapter-by-chapter paraphrase of the provisions of the edict now follows:

1.       Counts and other lay men may not appropriate church property for themselves – it’s the job of bishops and abbots to police the counts on this while the counts police other lay men; for offenders a policy of two strikes and then you’re out applies.

2.       Anyone who assaults widows, orphans, priests, monks and nuns, and any landowner who tries to evict a priest, charge rent on a holiday or on church properties granted exemption from it or refuses to pay rent on lands held from churches, will be thoroughly investigated by the counts and other royal officials and will have harsh justice served to them according to legislation issued in the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Likewise, bishops can prescribe penance or excommunication to lawbreakers.

3.       All free men in the kingdom are obliged by sacred oath to maintain the public peace, and it’s the job of bishops, counts and other royal officials in the localities to police them and bring offenders to the king’s attention.

4.       The vassals of the king and queen shall be treated with all due respect by the counts, just as they would expect not to be mistreated by the king and his entourage.

5.       Counts must ensure that royal estates and monastic lands under royal protection that lie within their administrative districts are treated as inviolate. They also must respect the king’s choices of estate managers and guarantee their safety.

6.       Free men living in lands ravaged by the Vikings, who have thus turned to banditry to make up for their loss of homes, farmland, slaves and moveable wealth, shall be summoned to the public law courts by a local count. If they refuse then whatever remains of their property in their home county shall be seized by the state and they shall be outlawed.

7.       Men who operate as bandits outside their administrative district from which they hail shall be reported by the count responsible for the county in which they are operating to the count responsible for their home county. They shall then work together to track down and arrest the criminals in question.

8.       Unadulterated denarii (silver coins) of the correct weight from any mint are legal tender in every part of the kingdom until St Martin’s Day (11 November). All towns and villages across the kingdom, even if they are ecclesiastical properties that are legally immune from the normal jurisdiction of the king’s officials, will have local residents appointed as judges. Together they will work with the counts, other royal officers and major landowners in the area to ensure that good denarii are not rejected in financial transactions, and that denarii that are of incorrect weight/ are not of pure silver are prohibited.

9.       These ordinary free men chosen as local judges for the coinage, must swear an oath that they will perform the duties that the role entails to the best of their knowledge and abilities, and in good faith. Any man they know to have refused an adulterated denarius of correct weight, they must bring to the attention of the count and other officers of the state in the localities. If they fail to do this and are convicted, they will be punished as a perjurer under secular law and will also be prescribed an appropriate penance under ecclesiastical law.

10.   After St Martin’s Day (11 November 864), only the new, reformed silver coinage will be accepted. Anyone who tries trading with an old denarius will have the coins will have it confiscated from him by the count and his subordinate officials.

11.   Coins of the new, reformed type will look like this: on one side they will have the king’s name written in a circle and the monogram of the Carolingian dynasty in the middle; on the other side, they will have the name of the place where the coin was minted written in the circle and in the middle the symbol of the cross.

12.   Coins may only be minted at ten sites in the kingdom, all under the tight supervision of the king’s officials – Quentovic, Compiegne, Rouen, Paris, Rheims, Sens, Orleans, Chalon-sur-Saone, Melle and Narbonne.

13.   In each of these ten royally-approved sites for mints, the locals shall choose an honest and reliable moneyer. Moneyers shall swear an oath to do their duty to the best of their knowledge and ability and in good faith. If a moneyer is believed to have minted adulterated or underweight denarii, or to have engaged in fraudulent practices in the weighing or purifying of the silver, he will be subjected to trial by ordeal. If thereby found guilty, he will have one of his hands amputated and will be prescribed the penance appropriate for blasphemers and robbers of the poor by the local bishop. Those living in Aquitaine will be sentenced according to Roman law.

14.   On 1 July, every count from each of the ten districts allowed to have mints will come to the town of Senlis with his viscount, two substantial landowners/ slave masters from the region and the resident moneyer. There, they will be given five pounds of pure silver from the royal treasury so that they can begin minting coins. And on the Saturday before the beginning of Lent the next year, they shall bring five pounds of denarii to the king’s officers at Senlis.

15.   All men in the kingdom will be able to have their old denarii exchanged for the new coinage after 1 July, having been informed that after 11 November only the new coinage will be legal tender. Any man who rejects an unadulterated denarius of the new coinage of the new coinage after 1 July will have to pay a fine of sixty solidi (720 denarii or three pounds of silver), and any slave/ serf who rejects it will be given sixty lashes with a birch. The local bishop and the officers of the state will ensure that the punishment is not excessive. Any landlord or slave master who doesn’t let his slaves or serfs be punished for the aforementioned offence will be obliged to pay a fine of sixty solidi.

16.   After 1 July, if any man discovers a denarius of the new coinage that has been adulterated, he must perform a citizen’s arrest on the man who offered it to him during trading and interrogate him as to who he got it from, and this shall then pass from hand to hand until the original moneyer has been traced. As before, any moneyer who mints underweight or adulterated coinage will in Aquitaine be punished according to Roman law, and in the northern half of the kingdom and Burgundy will be punished by having his hand amputated. Anyone caught accepting an underweight or unadulterated denarius will pay a fine of sixty solidi if he is a free man, or given sixty lashes with a birch if he is a slave or a serf.

17.   Counts and other officers of the state will ensure that no one in their administrative districts tries forging coins or setting up their own private mints. Anyone caught doing this will have his hand amputated.

18.   If a forger flees to a royal estate, he will be searched for and arrested by the officers of the state. If he hides in lands belonging to churches or magnates that are protected by a legal immunity, the landowner is obliged to hand him over to the officers of the state for punishment as they would do for robbers and murderers. Any landowner who harbours a forger shall be fined 15 solidi if he refuses to hand him over at the first request, 30 solidi at the second, and full compensation for all the damages (600 solidi) combined with the count and his men coming over and forcing him to hand over the fugitive at the third. Any landowner who resists the count coming to arrest the forger will be fined 600 solidi.

19.   To facilitate the reform and regulation of the coinage as outlined above, every count shall be obliged to make a survey of all the markets in his county. They must be able to report back to the king’s court which markets in their county were created in the time of Charlemagne, which were created in the time of Louis the Pious with his authorisation, which were created in the time of Louis the Pious without his authorisation and which came into being during the reign of the present monarch. They must also find out which markets have moved location since they were created, and by whose authority this has taken place. Every count shall bring the surveys to the next annual assembly, and the king and his advisers shall determine which markets are useful and can remain and which ones are superfluous and shall be abolished. And no markets may be held on Sundays.

20.   Counts and other officers of the state must ensure that fixed weights and measures are used in all transactions, so that landlords may not claim more than they are rightfully entitled to by custom from their tenants in rent, and traders may not sell their customers short. Anyone found guilty of this will have the goods they measured dishonestly confiscated and be fined sixty solidi if they are a free man, and given sixty lashes with a birch if they are a serf or a slave, and they will receive appropriate penalties from the bishops as well. But if any counts or other officers of state unjustly confiscate goods from free men, serfs or slaves on the false pretence that they had used dishonest measurements, they shall be punished for miscarriage of justice in the same way as any official who abuses their powers. Anyone responsible for ensuring that correct weights and measures are used who fails in this duty will be punished as a perjurer.

21.   The fine for the rejection of good denarii has been remitted for the last three years. Now, it will be retroactively reinstated and those who took advantage of that must now make good, to ensure that no one will ever again refuse good denarii. Any landlord who tries to rack up rents/ any merchant who tries to rack up prices in order to fork up the money for the fine will be made to pay compensation to the poor people they have exploited this way and will be punished by the officers of the state, so no one will be tempted to exploit the poor in this way again.

22.   Unfree peasants who have been flogged for refusing good denarii should not be forced to pay fines, and if they have been fined in the past, they’ll be given due compensation. Any free man who owns allodial lands or benefices (lands granted by the crown for life) in multiple counties, but cannot fork out enough to pay the fine then the officers of the state may exercise discretion as to what is a fair punishment that will not just unjustly burden him – the aim is encouraging law-abiding behaviour for the common good, not the state’s representatives enriching themselves. Likewise, the officers of the state can be lenient in giving out fines to people who have broken the law unintentionally/ out of ignorance.

23.   Gold and silver alloys are banned. And after St Remigius’ Day (1 October) no one may sell gold and silver except for purification – jewellery is included in this ban. Anyone caught selling alloys or gold and silver jewellery will be immediately arrested and brought before the king’s representatives if they don’t own property or slaves in the county. And if they do, they will be summoned to the law courts. If found guilty, they will be punished accordingly. However, if any officers of the state arrest people carrying away their alloys or gold and silver jewellery to the smith for purification, the officers will be investigated and punished. Any smith caught making gold and silver alloys or jewellery after 1 October will be punished according to Roman law if he lives in Aquitaine, or if he lives in other parts of the kingdom, he will have his hand amputated.

24.   The price of a pound of refined gold is fixed at twelve pounds of pure silver in the new denarii. A pound of gold that has been refined but not enough to make gilt shall be fixed at ten pounds of silver. Any counts and officers of the state must, on pain of being stripped of their offices, ensure that these prices stay fixed. Any man who tries to fraudulently get round this decree will be forced to pay a fine of sixty solidi if is a free man, or will be given sixty lashes if he is an unfree man.

25.   From 1 July, any man caught trying to sell weapons and armour to the Vikings will be executed for treason against the state and betrayal of the Christian faith, without any hope of royal pardon or redemption.

26.   Any free man who owns a horse, or has the means to support one, is obliged to serve in the royal armies. Counts and other officers of the state are thus forbidden from confiscating a free man’s horses without clear justification, since it will prevent him from performing the military service he owes to the state. Any count or other type of royal official caught doing will receive the punishment befitting all government officials who engage in arbitrary and oppressive behaviour in the localities.

27.   The counts must make surveys of how many free men in each county can serve as soldiers in the royal army on their account, how many could serve if a neighbour helped provide them with supplies and equipment, how many could serve if two neighbours were ready to help them out and how many could serve if four neighbours were ready to help them out. The counts should then report back to the royal court how large a squadron of soldiers their county can send to royal army. The remainder, consisting of free men to poor to serve in the royal army even if they clubbed together, should be obliged to build new fortifications, bridges and swamp crossings and perform guard duty in public fortresses and on the border if they live in frontier regions, as it is their duty to defend the patria. Anyone who deserts from the royal army, or fails to show up for muster, shall be fined.

28.   Any free landholder who owes the king poll tax or rent is forbidden to commend themselves to the church or any other lord, lest the state loses what it is rightfully owed. The counts will enforce this. And if the church or any other lord does take such people on, they will be fined. Any free man is allowed to sell or gift his property to whoever he pleases, so long as the state still receives what it is owed by way of rent or tax.

29.   Peasants who live on royal or ecclesiastical estates, who already willingly perform cartage and manual labour on them as is laid out in the polyptychs (estate surveys and records of rents and services owed compiled in the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious), must now be willing to cart marl without any argument, even though this is admittedly a recent innovation rather than an ancient custom.

30.   Peasants are now forbidden from selling their hereditary lands on the land market, as it is leading to landlords losing rents and estates becoming fragmented. Counts, other officers of state and priests will be tasked with enforcing this. Any subsequent sale of peasant land that takes place will be revoked, and rents shall be levied on each hereditary holding after the lands belonging to it have been restored in proportion to the quantity and quality of its fields and vineyards.

31.   Each count must make a survey of rural migrants living in his county. Rural migrants who have lived in their new county of residence since the time of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious are permitted to stay. Those who have fled to live in a new county because of recent Viking raids must be sent back by the counts, the bishops and their agents, but they must not blackmail them into doing so. People who have migrated to other regions for seasonal wage labour in the vineyards can continue to do so, so long as they return to the home regions to sow, plough and harvest their landlord’s crops within the allotted times. Any marriages migrants make outside their home region will be dissolved. Runaway slaves will be returned to their masters, and any child of a runaway slave will inherit his mother’s status.

32.   Two counts who share a border must not convene their county courts on the same day, because free landholders who have lands and interests in both counties cannot attend both meetings. They must stay in constant communication – if one count holds the county court on a Monday, the other should hold it on a Thursday, and to make it fair they must alternate each year between who gets to hold their court first.

33.   Anyone who witnesses an oath shall swear his oath 42 days thereafter, unless Lent falls in between, in which case he must wait until eight days after Easter Sunday. Anyone who fails to heed this decree will be fined sixty solidi.

34.   The counts have asked for advice on how to deal with peasants who have sold themselves into slavery/ serfdom because they are doubly burdened by the poll tax and rent to their landlords in times of famine. After further consultation with the bishops and other members of the Christian faithful, and having looked through the Salic law, capitularies, the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers, the king has decreed that throughout the kingdom men should still be allowed to sell themselves into slavery/ serfdom when they are desperate. However, their masters are obliged to care for them and cannot sell them to anyone else. Nor can they claim ownership of any children that the man in question has had with a free woman.

35.   Royal agents will be sent into every county to make sure that all the provisions of the Edict, and all previous capitularies, are being implemented by the counts. And if any counts are found to be negligent or unwilling to implement the royal will in the localities, they will lose their offices and be replaced by more reliable candidates.

3 All archbishops, and the counts of the cities where their metropolitan sees are based, shall receive copies of the Edict of Pitres and previous capitularies from the royal chancery. They will then have them transcribed, so that all the bishops, counts, abbots and royal vassals in their provinces may have a copy of the Edict of Pitres which they can then have read out publicly in all the county courts across the kingdom. And lists will be drawn up by the archbishops and counts of all who have received a copy, which will then be given to the chancellor, so that no one can claim ignorance in disregarding the Edict’s provisions.

3 Following an incident last year, no one may reside in the royal lodge by the Seine without permission and the guards will ensure that the culprit does not escape without due punishment. All the king’s subjects must be prepared to defend the realm and the Holy Church against the Vikings whenever the need arises for them to do so.

A silver denarius of Charles the Bald minted at Quentovic following the reform of the coinage enacted by the Edict of Pitres

What the mounted militias mentioned in the Edict of Pitres would have looked like: cavalry depicted in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, Cod Sang 22 p140

Some analysis of mine

The first thing that is so remarkable about the Edict is the sheer range of different areas of government its provisions entail. Basically, you have all the basic functions of a state covered in the provisions here – justice, law enforcement and the maintenance of public order, national defence and military organisation and the collection of government revenues; they’re all there! But not only that, as the Edict attempts to regulate various aspects of economic and social life, as well as thoroughgoing reform of the state-backed currency. The Edict itself very frequently uses the Latin term res publica (normally translated as state, sometimes as commonwealth). It justifies many of its provisions in terms of the benefit of the state (res publica), as distinct from that of either the king as a person or the political community, and regularly appeals to the public good as well, though who that public was varied a lot. The Carolingians clearly saw themselves as something more than just holy warlords with an imperial Roman gloss, and they saw the kingdoms they presided over as something more than just their private property or a network of personal followers (the semi-mythical personenverbandstaat of German historiography). It is also clear from the edict that the Carolingians had a bureaucracy (however skeletal) with defined public duties and mechanisms for holding them to account over failure to perform those duties and abusing their public authority. A monopoly on violence was undoubtedly out of the reach of the Carolingian state – as is explicit from the provisions of the Edict, the Carolingians had no standing army or professional police forces, and had to rely on the close co-operation of local landowners for the maintenance of law and order. And the Edict does also show the importance of the church and appeals to authority to the successful operation of the Carolingian government. But if those last two criteria disqualify Carolingian West Francia, or indeed all other early medieval kingdoms, from being states then very few polities in the whole of human history have been states. Away with the naysayers! In my not even vaguely Weberian view, the West Frankish polity under the Carolingians was a state by any reasonable definition. How powerful and efficient it was is up for debate, but a state it was nonetheless.

Some of the policies outlined in the Edict, like the first seven provisions dealing with law and order (which in some places echo the Edict of Paris issued in 614 by the Merovingian king Chlothar II), are very basic and one really does wonder about their effectiveness. At the same time, they reflect the best methods then available. And while it would be wrong to say that later medieval governments didn’t make improvements on that front, no quantum leaps were made until long after the conventional endpoint of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the system of law enforcement in Georgian England (but not in eighteenth century France, where professional police forces had been introduced) barely differed in its fundamentals from that described in the Edict of Pitres – a small number of unpaid officials working together with local landowners and the wider community.

By contrast, when it comes to the coinage reform, the intricacy and sophistication of the mechanisms put in place for implementing it is phenomenal for an early medieval government. Indeed, reform of the coinage was where the edict was most successful in its impact, setting standards that would remain in place even after the decline of royal power in West Francia in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, up until the thirteenth century. Likewise the reform of the military provides a fairly robust plan for conscripting the yeomanry and other types of modest freeholders into the royal armies – the only alternative to having to rely on the private retinues of landed aristocrats, given that the Carolingian state did not have the resources to maintain a regular army, and one which gives the state direct access to military manpower. The provisions for reforming the military, along with others like the provisions on markets and rural migration, show the extensive use of written surveys and inquiries by the Carolingian state – the Domesday Book of 1086 had a long heritage, and I would argue that the Edict of Pitres and the legacy of Carolingian government more generally is part of it. In addition, provisions attempting to curb peasant migration and rural land markets demonstrate that an economically and socially interventionist state was not a novelty in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth century or the nineteenth century. Furthermore, all the considerations given towards the communication of the Edict down to the localities and the mechanisms for enforcing it/ holding the officers of the state to account show that this wasn’t just the Carolingian court having big ideas that had no real potential to actually change things on the ground. This goes in the face of the more pessimistic interpretations of the Carolingian reforms, based around the work of Francois Louis Ganshof, Louis Halphen, Heinrich Fichtenau and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, that dominated the scholarly landscape from the 1940s to the 1980s. Finally, the fact that all of this was introduced in the wake of the Viking threat, invites comparison between Charles the Bald’s administrative reforms and those that Alfred the Great and his successors introduced in Wessex/ England in the struggle against the Scandinavians. After all, lets not forget that Judith, the second wife of Aethelwulf of Wessex and stepmother to Alfred the Great, was the daughter of Charles the Bald. So comparisons between Francia and Anglo-Saxon England are more than appropriate considering their contacts with each other.

The standards set by the Edict of Pitres really did endure for centuries. Here is a silver denarius of Count Fulk V of Anjou, the grandfather of Henry II, minted sometime between 1109 and 1129, when he left his county to become King of Jerusalem. The only difference between this coin and the coins of Charles the Bald post-864 is that the monogram in the middle of the obverse side is no longer recognisably that of the Carolingians (who had gone extinct by that point), and it definitely can't have been minted at one of the ten approved and centrally controlled royal mints mentioned in the Edict.

The most famous bit (among medievalists anyway) at the very end

In the appendix, one of the three provisions there reads (all credit must be given to Simon Coupland, whose translation of the Edict I have used and which you can read in full here  https://www.academia.edu/6680741/The_Edict_of_P%C3%AEtres_translation):

“And it is our wish and express command that if anyone has built castles (castella), fortifications or palisades at this time without our permission, such fortifications shall be demolished by the beginning of August, since those who live nearby have been suffering many difficulties and robberies as a result. And if anyone is unwilling to demolish them, then the counts in whose districts they have been built shall destroy them. And if anyone tries to stop them, they shall be sure to let us know at once. And if they neglect to implement this our command, they shall know that, as it is written in these chapters and in the capitularies of our predecessors, we shall look for counts who are willing and able to obey our orders, and appoint them in our districts.”

This is probably the most famous provision of the Edict, despite only being in the Appendix. It is one of the very earliest written sources to mention castles in France or anywhere else in Western Europe – ninth century Carolingian Frankish sources rarely ever speak of them, unlike tenth century ones where they’re much more common and twelfth century ones where they’re completely ubiquitous. It also appears, on the surface at least, that the Carolingians banned the construction of private fortifications and saw them as a nuisance to public order. The Edict of Pitres is thus undoubtedly part of the early history of the European castle. But what part of it? That is something to be explored in another post, so please stay tuned for more.

 

Images of Carolingian castles are extremely hard to come by (but not completely non-existent, as we'll see in a subsequent post), which may say something about the Edict's general effectiveness. This is pushing into what we'd normally consider to be post-Carolingian, but here's one of the earliest artistic depictions of castle-based warfare from the Leiden Maccabees, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Codex Per F 17 folio 24v.

Freedom and slavery in Anglo-Saxon England

 This is based on a facebook post I wrote for some medieval groups I'm on, where its often complained that there's very little discussion of peasants in contrast to the near constant posts about what kings, queens, dukes, earls and barons were up to/ were not up to. Early medieval slavery is something that's fascinated me since my first year as an undergraduate, not least given how it links to the legacy of the Roman world and its transformation (a recurring theme on this blog) and to the Feudal Revolution debate that I'm so fixated on, for which I will one day get round to doing a post on here for your benefit and mine.

Anglo-Saxon Slavery

Could these be Anglo-Saxon slaves at work in this early eleventh century manuscript?

There certainly was a lot of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England. It’s been estimated that, in the period 800 - 1066 , at least ten percent of the population of Anglo-Saxon England were slaves, though that figure may have been as high as 30%. If the latter estimate is correct, then that would mean that, proportionally speaking, there were almost as many slaves in Anglo-Saxon England as there were in Roman Italy from c.100 BC to 400 AD, according to Keith Hopkins’ estimates.

How did these slaves become slaves? Some would have been born into that condition – following ancient precedent, slavery was a hereditary condition and any child born to an enslaved parent/s was automatically a slave. Others were formerly free peasants who had been pushed below subsistence level by bad harvests or debt, and therefore needed to bargain away their freedom in order to receive the food and clothing needed for them and their families to survive from a slave master or mistress. For example, one wealthy Anglo-Saxon woman in her will gave freedom to:

“Ecceard the smith and Alfstan and his wife and all their children born and unborn, and Arcil and Cole and Ecgferth and Ealdhun’s daughter and all those people who had bowed their heads to her in return for food when times were bad.”

Others still were foreigners either captured in war or purchased at slave markets. Slave-raiding was a very standard part of warfare in the early medieval British Isles. This was a very ancient practice indeed, that can be seen in ancient Near Eastern texts and in the Bronze Age Mycenaean/ Archaic Greek societies described in Homer’s Iliad. At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons, it was very common in Viking age Scandinavia, along the eastern frontiers between the Frankish empire and the Slavic tribes and in the Islamic world, with the famous Moorish razzias. For example, when the people of Northumbria in 1065 rose up in revolt against the heavy-handed and unpopular administration of Earl Tostig, who had been imposed on them by Edward the Confessor, they, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, invaded the Mercian shires and

“They took many captives and carried them off north with them.”

Thirteen years earlier, Harold Godwinson, after he had gone into exile in Ireland after being deprived of his earldom in 1051, invaded the coast of Somerset with a force of Irish and Hiberno-Norse mercenaries and, according to the ASC

“Seized whatever he pleased, in cattle, captives and property.”

And in 1036, when Edward the Confessor and his brother Alfred tried unsuccessfully to invade England from Normandy to reclaim their throne from the Danish king Harald Harefoot, while Edward escaped, Alfred and his companions were not so lucky and, according to the ASC:

“Some of them were sold for money.”

Alfred himself, and some of his companions, were even less fortunate – they were horrifically mutilated and died shortly afterwards. It was not yet considered honourable to be merciful to captives in war, even if they were highborn – this was a pre-chivalric age. The typical choice for any defeated warrior in the early medieval period was simple – death or slavery.

Turning to slave markets, those were also widespread in Anglo-Saxon England. There were two primary slave-trading zones – the North Sea and the Irish Sea. William of Malmsbury (1080 – 1143), looking back on the mid-eleventh century from the 1120s, describes how Gytha Thorkelsdottir, the Danish noblewoman who was the wife of Earl Godwin of Wessex, would

“Buy parties of slaves in England and ship them back to Denmark, young girls especially, whose beauty and youth would enhance their price.”

Turning to the slave trade for West Britain and Ireland, in his “The Life of St Wulfstan”, William of Malmsbury also describes the slave market at Bristol, where merchants

“Would purchase people from all over England and sell them off to Ireland in the hope of profit; and put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed and making them pregnant. You would have groaned to see the files of the wretches of people roped together, young people of both sexes, whose youth and beauty would have aroused the pity of barbarians, being put up for sale every day.”

This passage brings into focus two things. One being the brutality of the slave system in Anglo-Saxon England. The second being the range of different roles for slaves. Historians of slavery often usefully speak of the concept of “social death” – that upon becoming enslaved, a slave ceases to be recognised as a human being and a member of society with rights, and becomes something else i.e., the ancient Greek philosopher Plato famously described the slave as being a “tool with a voice.” Certainly, a degree of violent and inhumane treatment was built into the Anglo-Saxon slave system, like with all other slave systems. The punishments for transgressive behaviour could be very harsh, including being branded like cattle, blinded, castrated, stoned to death by other slaves (if male) or burned alive (if female). As alluded to earlier in that passage from William of Malmesbury, like in all patriarchal societies which also have systems of slavery, female slaves in Anglo-Saxon England were extremely vulnerable to sexual assault from slave merchants, masters and their agents, lacking as they did the protection mechanisms available to free women – the law and family honour. William of Malmsbury also suggests that there was a certain incentive to rape female slaves – getting them pregnant would mean churning out more slaves. However, in contrast to Classical Greece and Rome, free men showing their sexual dominance over their inferiors (women and slaves) was a much less integral part of Anglo-Saxon masculinity, and over time the force of Christian moral reform began to be felt, however slowly.

Yet there are some signs that “slavery as social death” was starting to weaken by the ninth century. By this point, almost all slaves would have been Christians and many, if not most, of them would have been the same ethnicity as their masters, unlike in the immediate post-Roman period (c.450 – c.680) when the majority of Anglo-Saxon slaves would have been conquered Romano-Britons/ proto-Welsh – these factors would have made it more difficult to make slaves seem other and not “people like us.” And so we do start to see slaves gaining some legal rights and recognition of their humanity. For example, the laws of King Alfred the Great (r.871 – 899) state:

“These days are to be given to all free men, but not to slaves and unfree labourers: twelve days at Christmas; and the day on which Christ overcame the devil (15 February); and the anniversary of St Gregory (12 March); and the seven days before Easter and the seven after; and one day at the feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June); and in harvest-time the whole week before the feast of St Mary (15 August); and one day at the feast of All Saints (1 November). And the four Wednesdays in the four Ember weeks are to be given to all slaves, to sell to whomsoever they please anything of what anyone has given them in God’s name, or of what they can earn in any of their spare time.”

A folio of the Laws of King Alfred

While it is clear that slaves are not afforded the right to enjoy the same Christian holidays as the free, at the same time their agency as human beings is recognised in that the are allowed to engage in buying and selling objects at their own volition during Lent. And it is also hinted at that slaves could do certain additional tasks for rewards and wages, and were also the recipients of gifts given as pious acts of charity by the free, the latter recognising that slaves were human beings with souls and that treating them kindly would please God.

Slaves could be employed in all kinds of things. Given that this series is about peasants and agriculture, it is of course important to remember, as noted from the outset, that many slaves were employed as agricultural workers, but some were employed as domestic servants, artisans or even priests. And as hinted at from the allusions to the prettiness of the slave girls sold by Gytha, many female slaves may even have served primarily as entertainers and concubines to their masters, much like the harem women of the Islamic world.

Let’s finish our discussion Anglo-Saxon slavery with a quote from Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955 – 1010), a prodigiously learned man who produced translations of Latin works into Old English and wrote an Old English grammar textbook and glossary. Aelfric describes the life of the field slave as follows:

“I go out at daybreak, goading the oxen to the field, and I join them to the plough; there is not a winter so harsh that I dare not lurk at home for fear of my master.”

As you can see, there’s no sugar-coating of the slave’s condition in that description, however brief, and a measure of human sympathy.

The free peasantry in Anglo-Saxon England

The majority of the population in Anglo-Saxon England was, however, comprised of peasant families who owned landed property and were legally free – these people were known in Old English as ceorls. Being legally free didn’t just mean not being a slave. Free peasants had the right to have both disputes concerning their property and redress for crimes done towards them and their dependents brought before the public law courts of shire and hundred, supervised by the king’s officials (ealdormen, shire reeves, reeves, bishops and abbots). At these courts, juries that would include free peasants (ceorls) as well as thegns (the gentry of Anglo-Saxon England) would participate, giving the facts of the case and eventually reaching a verdict. Free peasants also had the right to bear arms, and concomitant to that were liable to be called up for military service in the fyrd – the royal armies of levied free men (thegns and ceorls) raised in the shires by the king’s officials (ealdormen and shire reeves). They could also, on occasion, have their grievances heard and addressed in the Witan – the royal assemblies kings held several times a year to take counsel, settle disputes and make government policies, which were attended mostly by bishops, abbots, lay magnates (earls and king’s thegns) and some ordinary thegns representing the shires. Thus they were fully participating members of the public sphere which, like in ancient Greece and Rome, was the central defining feature of their free status.

However, the ceorls were not as homogenous a class as they appear. Some ceorls were clearly doing better than others, for as Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d.1023) wrote in the laws of King Cnut, if a ceorl possessed five hides (a unit of tax assessment) of land, a proprietary church, a kitchen, a bell house and a burgh gate and an office in the King’s Hall, he could become a thegn. This indicates that some free peasants were, by the early eleventh century, getting so rich from the rapid economic growth that had been taking place since the Reconquest of the Danelaw and the onset of the medieval warm period in c.900, that they were building up what were in effect manorial estates and thus attaining thegnly (gentry) status through the backdoor.

The kitchen, proprietary church, bell house and burgh gate described by archbishop Wulfstan depicted in a modern illustration of an Anglo-Saxon thegnly residences - clearly some free peasants were getting incredibly wealthy if they could build such country residences and get considered for thegnly status under the law

At the other end there was a lot of downward mobility. In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, a combination of oppressively high taxation through the geld (the only systematic land tax levied in Western Europe at that time), the costs of military service and the obligations to repair roads, bridges and fortresses that were imposed on the free peasantry meant that many ended up as slaves or entering into some form of dependency to lords. Meanwhile, the economic growth of the tenth and eleventh centuries was leading to the emergence of a much more developed manorial system in Wessex and Mercia, based on more extensive direct exploitation of the land by lords. By the mid-eleventh century, a complex rural pecking order seems to have been in place. A document called the “Rights and Ranks of People”, written in Old English sometime in the reign of Edward the Confessor and copied in Latin in the twelfth century. Between the thegn and the slave, this document specifies three types of free peasant instead of the traditional ceorl – (in descending order of status) the geneat, the cottar and the boor.

The obligations of the geneat (the original meaning of that word was courtier/ companion, but by the 11th century it just simply meant a free proprietor of some standing) were completely subject to regional variation, butc could include the following:

1. Pay rent in kind, in the form of a swine a year.
2. Perform carting services.
3. Perform reaping and mowing services for his lord.
4. “Keep up places from which deer may be shot”
5. Build and fence the lord’s house

For the cottar (a small-holding peasant owning five acres of land) the duties were as follows:

1. Perform labour services on the demesne every Monday, or for three days a week at harvest time.
2. He has to pay Peter’s pence (a tax of one penny paid by any freeholder with land above a certain value to the Holy See, abolished by Henry VIII in 1534) on Ascension Day and the tithe on Martinmas like the former two.
3. He can also be expected to do coastguard and work on the king’s deer-fence

Finally, the Boor's obligations were as follows:

1. On some estates he has to work on the lord’s demesne (land directly farmed by the lord for his benefit) for two days a week.
2. At Michaelmas he pays 10 pence in cash rent, and rents in kind at Martinmas (23 sesters of barley and 2 hens) and at Easter (a young sheep)
3. He must plough three acres as “boon work” (additional labour services performed at specific times of the year) and perform various other supplementary labour services where appropriate too.
4. Each boor must maintain one hunting dog and provide 6 loaves to the swineherd.
5. In return he gets two oxen, one cow, six sheep and seven acres of land as well as tools for his work and utensils for his house, though all this reverts to the lord after his death

I'm going to follow up with this post very soon with one on the Continental situation in the same period, for which there are many parallels, which will involve a close look at the ninth century Carolingian polyptychs - how exciting! There will also be a post about how slavery came to an end in both continental Western Europe and England - spoiler alert: the feudal revolution does feature and the Normans (contrary to how a lot of people like to see them, most of the time anyway) aren't the bad guys in this.