by Chris Harman
The first changes were in cultivation. Those who lived off the land during the Dark Ages may have been illiterate, superstitious and ignorant of the wider world. But they knew where their livelihood came from and were prepared, slowly, to embrace new methods of cultivation that enabled them more easily to fill their bellies if they got the chance. In the sixth century a new design of plough, ‘the heavy wheeled plough’ capable of coping with heavy but fertile soil, appeared among the Slav people of eastern Europe and spread westwards over the next 300 years. 91 With it came new methods of grazing, which used cattle dung to fertilise the land. Together they allowed a peasant family to increase its crop yield by 50 per cent in ‘an agrarian pattern which produced more meat, dairy produce, hides and wool than ever before, but at the same time improved the harvest of grain’. 92 One economic historian claims, ‘It proved to be the most productive agrarian method, in relation to manpower, that the world had ever seen’. 93
There were still more new techniques in the centuries which followed, such as the adoption of the central Asian method of harnessing horses – which allowed them to replace the much slower oxen in ploughing – and the use of beans and other legumes to replenish the soil. According to the noted French historian of the medieval peasantry, Georges Duby, the cumulative effect of these innovations was to double grain yields by the twelfth century. 94
Such changes took place slowly. Sylvia Thrupp has suggested that ‘the best medieval rates of general economic growth … would come to perhaps half of one percent’. 95 Nevertheless, over 300 or 400 years this amounted to a transformation of economic life.
Such advance depended to a very large extent on the ingenuity of the peasant producers. But it also required something else – that the feudal lords allowed a portion of the surplus to go into agricultural improvement rather than looting it all. The barons were crude and rapacious men. They had acquired and held their land by force. Their wealth depended on direct compulsion rather than buying and selling, and they wasted much of it on luxuries and warfare. But they still lived on their estates; they were not a class of absentee owners like those of late republican Rome or the final years of Abbasid power. Even the most stupid could grasp that they would have no more to live on and fight with if they stole so much from the peasants that next year’s crops were not sown. As the German economic historian Kriedte has pointed out, ‘The lord had to preserve the peasant holding at all costs’, and ‘therefore … to assist peasants in emergencies which arose from harvest failures and other causes’. 96 Providing the peasants with improved ploughs meant a bigger surplus for luxury consumption and warfare, and some lords ‘put farming tools made of iron, especially the ploughs, under their protection’. 97 Individual feudal lords organised and financed the clearing of new lands throughout the feudal period. They were the driving force in the spread of the first and, for a long time, the most important form of mechanisation, the water mill.
Like other ruling classes, the feudal lords were concerned above all with exploitation. They would use unpaid peasant labour to build a mill, force the peasants to grind their corn in it – and charge them for doing so. But for a certain period of history, their concern with increasing the level of exploitation also led some of them to encourage advances in the means of production.
The feudal ruling class did not consist solely of warrior barons. Many of the great landholdings were in the hands of religious institutions – abbeys and monasteries: ‘In wealth, power and aptitude for command … abbots, bishops and archbishops … were the equals of the great military barons … Immense fortunes were amassed by monastic communities or prelates’. 98 On occasion the literacy of monks was used to gain access to writings on technology from Greece and Rome and from the Byzantine and Arabic empires: ‘If one is looking for the earliest mills, water mills or windmills, or for progress in farming techniques, one often sees the religious orders in the vanguard’. 99
The full adoption of new techniques involved a change in relations between lords (whether warrior or religious) and cultivators. The great landholders finally had to abandon the wasteful Roman practice of slave labour – a practice that lingered on as late as the tenth century. Then they began to discover advantages in ‘serfdom’, in parcelling out land to peasant households in return for a share of the produce. The serfs had an incentive for working as hard as they could and employing new techniques on their holdings. As total output rose, the lords’ incomes also rose, especially as they used their military might to force previously free peasants into serfdom. What Bois calls ‘the transformation of the year 1000’ spelt the final end of agricultural slavery – and the final establishment of feudal serfdom as a more dynamic mode of production than the old Roman system. 100
The importance of what happened in the countryside between about 1000 and 1300 is all too easily underrated by those of us for whom food is something we buy from supermarkets. A doubling of the amount of food produced by each peasant household transformed the possibilities for human life across Europe. Whoever controlled the extra food could exchange it for the goods carried by the travelling traders or produced by the artisans.
Crudely, grain could be changed into silk for the lord’s family, iron for his weapons, furnishing for his castle, wine and spices to complement his meal. It could also be turned into means that would further increase the productivity of the peasant cultivators – wooden ploughs with iron tips, knives, sickles, and, in some cases, horses with bridles, bits and iron shoes.
By supplying such things at regular markets the humble bagman could transform himself into a respectable trader, and the respectable trader into a wealthy merchant. Towns began to revive as craftsmen and traders settled in them, erecting shops and workshops around the castles and churches. Trading networks grew up which tied formerly isolated villages together around expanding towns and influenced the way of life in a wide area. 101 To obtain money to buy luxuries and arms, lords would encourage serfs to produce cash crops and substitute money rents for labour services or goods in kind. Some found an extra source of income from the dues they could charge traders for allowing markets on their land.
Life in the towns was very different from life in the countryside. The traders and artisans were free individuals not directly under the power of any lord. There was a German saying, ‘Town air makes you free.’ The urban classes were increasingly loath to accept the prerogatives of the lordly class. Traders and artisans who needed extra labour would welcome serfs who had fled bondage on nearby estates. And as the towns grew in size and wealth they acquired the means to defend their independence and freedom, building walls and arming urban militias.
The civilisation of the thirteenth century
In time, every aspect of society changed. The classic account of European feudalism by the French historian Marc Bloch goes so far as to speak of a ‘second feudal age’, in which relations between the feudal lords themselves underwent a transformation. Kings became more influential. They were able to formalise their power at the top of hierarchies of feudal lords. By granting various towns internal self-government they could use them as a counterweight to the barons. And they tried to set up national networks of courts where their officials rather than the barons administered ‘justice’ – although the barons usually managed to remain all-powerful in matters affecting their own estates.
Intellectual life was also transformed. The traders needed to keep accounts and written records of contracts in a way which the feudal lords of the earlier period had not. They also wanted formal, written laws rather than the ad hoc judgments handed down in the villages by the lords. Some took the effort to learn to read and write, and did so in the local idioms they spoke. Literacy was no longer confined to the monasteries and Latin ceased to be the only written language. Learning moved from the monasteries to new universities established in cities like Paris, Oxford and Prague, and scholars could now earn a livelihood away from the direct control of church authorities by teaching for money. They showed a new
interest in the serious study of non-religious works of the Greek and Roman world, travelling to Sicily, Moorish Spain or even Syria to gain access to them through Arabic translations. 102 They began to dispute with each other over the merits of Plato and Aristotle, and of the Islamic Aristotelian, Averroës.
Medieval thought is often associated with ‘scholasticism’ – disputation for its own sake, based upon hair-splitting references to texts. But the first phase of the new thought was far from scholastic in this sense. It involved using the long-forgotten texts to try to generate new ideas. Thus Abelard, who dominated the intellectual life of the University of Paris in the early twelfth century, insisted, ‘The man of understanding is he who has the ability to grasp and ponder the hidden causes of things. By hidden causes we mean those from which things originate, and these are to be investigated more by reason than by sensory experience’. 103 He was attacked by the mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux for holding ‘himself able by human reason alone to comprehend God altogether’. 104
Reliance on reason did not mean that the new scholarship had to be remote from practical activity. It was the scholar Roger Bacon who wrote down the formula for gunpowder for the first time in the west, and explored ways of using mirrors and lenses for magnification. It was another scholar, Peter of Maricourt, who investigated magnetic properties and devised machines based on them. 105
With the scholarly translations came information on the techniques discovered more than 1,000 years previously in Greece, Rome or Alexandria, and on the techniques which the Islamic societies of the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia had acquired from China. These added to the improvements which local millwrights, blacksmiths and builders were already making to tools and equipment and resulted in ‘a passion for mechanisation of industry such as no culture had known’. 106
Water mills began to provide the motion for bellows for blacksmiths’ hammers, and for ‘fulling’ (beating cloth to finish it). The crank and the compound crank turned up-down motion into rotary motion (and vice versa), and the flywheel kept rotation at an even speed. The spinning wheel and the compass arrived from the Far East in the twelfth century, and the rudder replaced the steering oar in the thirteenth, enormously increasing the reliability of sea transport. The discovery of the eyeglass meant declining eyesight no longer ended the careers of clerks and scholars. The horse stirrup, advances in armour-making, the crossbow, the stonethrower, and then gunpowder and the cannon (first used in 1320), transformed warfare. And the humble wheelbarrow, almost unnoticed, altered the character of much back-breaking work on the land.
Such technical advance underlay the full flourishing of medieval society and culture in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. By this time ‘communes’, self-governing city states, dominated the political landscape of northern Italy and Flanders. 107 Writers such as Boccaccio, Chaucer and, above all, Dante made a name for themselves by producing a secular literature written in their local idiom – and, in the process, gave it the prestige to begin its transition into a ‘national’ language. And towering above the medieval towns were those monuments to its culture, the great cathedrals. These were works of construction and art inconceivable without the agricultural, technical and ideological changes of the previous centuries.
The crisis of the fourteenth century
The period of economic growth and technical advance was not to last. For it occurred in a society dominated by a class of feudal lords whose way of life still centred on luxury consumption, preparation for war and notions of military honour, and over time this became a drain on, rather than a spur to, advance. Typically, medieval legend celebrated as ‘good kings’ those like Richard the Lionheart or ‘Saint’ Louis IX of France who spent vast sums on leading rampaging bands of brigands across Europe and Asia Minor to try and displace the Muslims from Palestine in the ‘Crusades’. Just as wasteful, and ruinous to the lands they passed through, were the wars waged by Norman kings as they attempted to subdue Scotland, Wales and much of France and Ireland as well as England, or the wars waged in thirteenth-century Italy between German ‘Holy Roman’ emperors and French kings allied with the pope. 108 At most, 1 or 2 per cent of revenues went into new investment. 109
The lords grew ever more remote from the practicalities of producing the wealth they consumed. The descendants of the warriors in rough fortresses resided in elaborate castles, cloaked themselves in silk and engaged in expensive courtly and knightly rituals which asserted their superiority over other social groups. They regarded themselves as a caste apart from everybody else, with hereditary legal rights sanctioned by sacred religious ceremonies. Within this caste an elaborate gradation of ranks separated the great aristocrats from the ordinary knights who were legally dependent on them. But all its layers were increasingly disdainful of anyone involved in actually creating wealth – whether wealthy merchants, humble artisans or impoverished peasants.
The popes, abbots and bishops were part of this ruling class and shared its attitudes, but had distinct interests of their own. In the late eleventh century a series of ‘reforming’ popes had aspired to centralise the network of abbeys and bishoprics so as to impose a near-theocratic structure on the whole of Europe. One product of this was that the church attempted to establish peace between rival lords and make itself the dominant influence in society. Another was the utter waste and devastation of the Crusades. The popes used the call to ‘free’ Jerusalem from the ‘infidel’ Muslims (who had never stopped Christian pilgrimages), and the prospect of loot, to persuade kings, lords and knights to join massive armies under papal jurisdiction. It did not worry them that the exploits of these armies included the wanton sacking of cities, the slaughter of women and children, rape, pillage, pogroms of Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians, and the conquest and pillage of Constantinople in 1204. 110 The wars between the popes (allied with the French king) and the emperors which devastated Italy in the thirteenth century were another product of papal ambition.
The popes, bishops and abbots also devoted themselves to upholding the wider values they shared with the lords. The cathedrals, the greatest artistic creations of the period, were also the greatest symbol of the power of the ruling class, emphasising the God-ordained character of society, with heavenly hierarchies of angels, saints and humans corresponding to earthly hierarchies of kings, lords, abbots, bishops, knights and commoners.
The hold of the church over the minds of the masses depended on the superstitions and magical beliefs in holy relics and miracles which flourished in a society where life was often short and almost always insecure. This led the church leaders to fear the new ideas spreading in the cities. The faith in reason of people like Abelard and Bacon could undermine the hold of superstition, while the wandering monks who preached a gospel of poverty and humility could encourage the ‘heretical’ belief that the ‘holy poor’ were entitled to wage war on the ‘corrupt rich’. The church increasingly clamped down on new ideas. It gave official recognition to moderate Franciscans but persecuted the ‘extremist’ fratelli . Then in 1277 it tried to ban 219 ‘execrable errors’ (some of which were held by the great apologist for late medieval Christianity, Thomas Aquinas) from the teaching of scholars. Roger Bacon seems to have been held under house arrest, and the followers of Averroës were forced to leave Paris for Padua. Finally, in the course of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition came into existence and, with it, the burning of people for heresy. In the new atmosphere scholars began to keep clear of ‘dangerous discussions’. After Thomas Aquinas recast Christian theology on the basis of Aristotle’s ideas – in the process justifying the hierarchy of aristocrats, knights, merchants, artisans and peasants – medieval thought entered its truly scholastic, sterile phase in which there was no questioning of the basics of church dogma or of the notions of the physical world that went with it.
By the year 1300 there was a vast contradiction at the heart of European society. Material and cultural life had reached a peak which bore comparison wi
th that of the high point of Roman civilisation. It looked as if society was going forward, escaping, albeit slowly, from poverty, insecurity and superstition. Yet the top of society was increasingly freezing up, as the lords made the barriers separating them from other classes ever more rigid, as the church clamped down on dissent and rational thought, and as ever greater amounts of the surplus were used for luxuries, warfare and ritual.
The contradiction came to a head as famines spread across much of Europe and plague came in their wake, its virulence increased by widespread malnutrition. Half the population was wiped out, vast numbers of villages were abandoned, and millions of hectares of cultivated land went to waste in the great crisis of the fourteenth century. As Guy Bois tells, ‘For more than a century … the greater part of the continent … suffered a massive decline in population and a regression in productive capacity. In scope and duration the phenomenon had no known historical precedent. It took place in an atmosphere of catastrophe: ceaseless epidemics, endemic war and its train of destruction, spiritual disarray, social and political disturbances’. 111
As with the crises which plunged previous civilisations into ‘Dark Ages’, there have been attempts to explain what happened in terms of natural causes. Some historians blame a supposed cooling of Europe’s climate. But this does not explain why people could not adjust over the decades, turning to new and more hardy crops – for instance, planting barley where they had once grown wheat, and wheat where they had once grown vines. Others claim population growth used up all the land open to cultivation. But it seems unlikely that all waste land had, in fact, been used and, in any case, it does not explain why crop yields stopped rising as they had in previous centuries.