A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The real cause of the crisis lay in the increasing burden on society of sustaining the lifestyle of the feudal ruling class. On the one hand, as Georges Duby notes, ‘In the most advanced countries … the grain-centred system of husbandry began to be unsettled by the requirement of the gradual rise in aristocratic and urban living standards’ and increasing demand for luxury products. 112 On the other, there was little new investment on technical improvement. As Rodney Hilton reports, ‘The social structure and the habits of the landed nobility did not permit accumulation for investment for production’. 113

  Class struggles and millenarial movements

  The sheer scale of the crisis led to convulsions right across society. Even the ruling class faced difficulties. There was a ‘crisis of seigneurial incomes’ 114 brought on first by the problems of extracting the surplus from a starving peasantry, and then by the acute shortage of agricultural labour caused by the death toll from famine and plague. The lords turned even more readily than in the past to wars against each other – as in the seemingly endless ‘Hundred Years War’ between English and French monarchs. They also tried to replenish their revenues by taking more from the classes below them, the peasants and the burghers. Economic crisis bred bitter class struggles.

  Battles between lords and peasants were not something new. Resistance to enserfment had led, for instance, to a great rising in tenth-century northern France. As a later poem tells:

  The villeins and the peasants …

  Held several parliaments.

  They spread out this command:

  He who is higher, he is the enemy …

  And several of them made an oath

  That they would never agree

  To have lord or master. 115

  Once feudalism was fully established peasants found it more difficult to challenge a lord directly. He was armed in a way they were not, they relied on him to provide certain tools and to feed them in years when the crop failed, and his power was backed by the teachings of the church. But they could still put up resistance if his demands exceeded the customary level. They gained some strength from far outnumbering the lord and his retainers on each individual estate and from the ties that came from generations of living and intermarrying in the same villages.

  In many areas the bitterness flared up as never before. In 1325 the free peasants of western Flanders took up arms, refusing to pay tithes to the church or dues to the feudal lords. They were not defeated until the King of France intervened in 1328. In 1358 a great jacquerie – rural uprising – in the Seine Valley of northern France led to attacks on nobles and the burning of chateaux. In June 1381 the English ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ briefly gave control of London to rural insurgents led by Wat Tyler (who were hanged after they made the mistake of trusting the king). The rebellion saw the whole peasantry begin to unite to demand its freedom from the feudal lords: ‘The abolition of bondage and serfdom was the first of the articles of the peasant programme’. 116 John Ball, the popular ex-priest who helped inspire the revolt, preached an unashamed attack on noble privilege: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’

  Sections of the urban population gave their support to the Flanders peasants in 1320 and to the English revolt of 1381. It was townsfolk who opened the gates of London to the peasants, and the London poor joined the insurgent throng. But the fourteenth century also saw widespread urban revolts against the old order.

  Some represented a continuation of previous struggles by the citizens of towns to establish their independence from local lords. There were repeated struggles of this kind in Flanders. In Paris in the late 1350s some of the richer burghers took advantage of the opportunity offered by the king’s imprisonment by the English to seize control of the city. Étienne Marcel, a member of a wealthy merchant family, led 3,000 artisans into the royal palace and forced the king’s heir, the Dauphin, briefly to wear the colours of revolt. In Florence in northern Italy revolt went a stage further in 1378 when the mass of ordinary artisans in the woollen trades, the ciompi , turned against the heads of its ruling merchant guilds and took effective control of the city for two months. 117

  Such direct displays of class militancy were not the only way people responded to the devastation of their lives. There was a long history of millenarial movements in medieval Europe, which combined popular bitterness against the rich with the religious expectation of the Second Coming of Christ and, often, hatred of outsiders. The official Crusades of the popes prompted unofficial Crusades of the masses – the ‘People’s’, ‘Children’s’ and ‘Shepherds’ ’ Crusades. Heretic preachers gained enormous support by proclaiming themselves the successors to Jesus. Typically, masses of people would march from town to town, looting and gathering popular support. They would direct their bitterness not against the feudal ruling class as such, but against corrupt priests and, especially, Jews. These were an easy target. They were the only non-Christian group in a society where Christianity was the all-pervasive religion; excluded from agriculture by the attitude of the church, they were forced to play a role as merchants and moneylenders on the margins of medieval society; and they lacked the power of the really wealthy classes to defend themselves. Jews would be given a choice between immediate conversion to Christianity and instant death. But the crowds would also drag priests through the streets and loot their churches.

  The crisis sparked off a succession of such confused quasi-religious movements. In 1309 in Flanders and northern France:

  Armed columns appeared, consisting of miserably poor artisans and labourers with an admixture of nobles who had squandered their wealth. These people begged and pillaged their way through the country, killing Jews but also storming … castles … In the end they attacked the castle of the Duke of Brabant … who three years before had routed an army of insurgent clothworkers and, it is said, buried its leaders alive. 118

  In 1520 columns of the poor and dispossessed were again on the move, led by an unfrocked priest, a heretic monk and prophets who proclaimed that much bloodshed would herald the dawning of a new age. They stormed the prison in Paris and broke into the Chatelet Palace before going on to Toulouse and Bordeaux. As they marched, they killed Jews. 119 But they also denounced priests as ‘false shepherds who rob their herds, and began to talk about expropriating the property of the monasteries’. The pope, resident in Avignon, sent an armed force against them, hanging the participants 20 or 30 at a time. 120

  The panic during the Black Death of the late 1340s led to a further outbreak of religious hysteria – the flagellants . Encouraged by a papal statement, bands of men up to 500 strong, dressed in identical robes and singing hymns, would march to a town, where they would form a circle and set about beating their own backs rhythmically with iron spikes embedded in leather belts until they were covered with bleeding wounds. They believed that by imitating the pain Christ had endured on the cross they were purging themselves of the sins which had brought the world to its present state and ensuring their own passage to paradise. Their religious ecstasy was combined with what today would be called a ‘moral panic’ – their belief that some conspiracy must lie behind the sudden appearance of the Black Death. They massacred the Jews, who were accused of spreading the plague by poisoning wells – although, of course, Jews were as badly hit by the plague as Christians. But they also attacked priests and talked of seizing the wealth of the church, prompting the pope to denounce them in a ‘bull’, and various secular authorities to hang and behead those who did not obey it. 121

  The beginning of the fifteenth century saw a different sort of religious movement arise in Bohemia, 122 which contained some of the characteristics of the earlier urban revolts in Flanders, France and Italy, but which was also a rehearsal for the great Protestant Reformation 100 years later. The region had undergone rapid economic development. It contained the richest silver mine in Europe and the most important seat of learning in the (German) Holy Roman Empire. But much of the wealth was in the hands of the church
, which owned fully one-half of the land. This caused enormous resentment, not just among the poorer classes of town and country but even among many of the knights who spoke Czech rather than German.

  The resentment found expression in massive support for the views of Jan Hus, a preacher and professor at the university who agitated forcefully against the corruption of the church and the claim of the pope to be the sole interpreter of God’s wishes. Hus even had some backing from the Bohemian king, Wenceslas. When the emperor, at the behest of the pope, burnt Hus at the stake in 1415, virtually the entire Czech population of Bohemia rose in revolt, taking control of the church and its property into local hands.

  The king turned against the movement, and the nobles and the rich merchants became increasingly worried by the peasants’ tendency to reject exploitation by anyone, not just the church. Artisans belonging to the radical ‘Taborite’ wing of the movement controlled Prague for four months before being removed by the merchants who hoped to conciliate the pope and the emperor. There was a decade of war as the emperor and pope fought to crush the Bohemian revolt. Repeated vacillations by the Czech nobility and the Prague burghers pushed the rank and file of the Taborites to look to radical ideas, with egalitarian slogans like ‘All shall live together as brothers; none shall be subject to another’, ‘The Lord shall reign and the Kingdom shall be handed over to people of the earth’, and ‘All lords, nobles and knights shall be cut down and exterminated in the forests like outlaws’. 123 It was not until May 1434 that a noble army of 25,000 defeated the Taborite force – aided by the desertion of one of its generals. No fewer than 13,000 of the Taborites were killed.

  Flanders, northern Italy, northern France, Britain, Bohemia – the crisis of feudalism led to a series of great rebellions. Yet the power of the feudal lords remained intact. No class emerged capable of uniting the rest of society behind it in an onslaught on the system.

  For centuries the burghers of the towns had resisted the power of the lords. But the ruling councils of the towns tended to be oligarchies, dominated by great merchants who were rarely more than half opposed to the feudal lords. Living within the feudal system, they tended to accept much of its ideology. Their ambition much of the time was not to beat the feudal lords but to join them – to turn the wealth they had obtained from trade into the seemingly more permanent wealth that consisted in owning land, complete with serfs to till it. At every great turning point, they would at best vacillate and try to conciliate the lords, and at worst they would join them in attacking the masses. What happened in northern Italy was characteristic. This was probably the most economically advanced part of Europe at the beginning of the fourteenth century and the region least damaged by the crisis. A merchant family, the Medicis, came to dominate its most important city, Florence, with its vast cloth trade. But they used their power in the fifteenth century not to break feudalism apart, but to establish themselves as key players in the manoeuvres of lordly and princely families, and in doing so ensured the continual fragmentation of the area into warring statelets and eventual economic decay. 124

  The artisans of the towns could be more radical. Many were only a generation or two away from serfdom themselves, and, like the surrounding peasantry, they faced starvation when the harvest failed. There are repeated examples of them clashing with the town oligarchies, and, on occasion, throwing in their lot with rural uprisings. Yet they were not a homogeneous group. Some were relatively prosperous, running their own workshops using family labour and perhaps a couple of paid employees (‘journeymen’) and apprentices. Others were much poorer, and terrified of being forced down into the destitute masses from the countryside who scrabbled for whatever casual work was available. That is why as well as the artisan movements which allied the towns with revolts in the countryside, there were others which joined the rich merchants. It is also why there was support from sections of the urban masses for the religious frenzy of the People’s Crusades and the flagellants .

  Finally, there were the peasants. Peasant risings could shake society, but the peasants themselves – illiterate, scattered across the countryside, each concerned with their own village and their own land – could not conceive of any realistic programme for reconstituting society. Such a programme would have had to combine a revolutionary attack on the power of the lords with schemes for using technical development in the towns to enhance agricultural output in the countryside. Economic development had not yet gone far enough to fashion a class, in the city or the countryside, capable of presenting such a programme in however confused a manner.

  There already existed the embryos which would one day grow to create such a class. In some towns there were merchants and craftsmen interested in technical innovation and productive investment. In some regions of the countryside there were better-off peasants with notions of becoming more prosperous by throwing off the burden of lordly exploitation and tilling the land more productively. But a promising embryo was not the same as a class capable of bringing to an end a crisis which was causing devastation to society at large.

  The birth of market feudalism

  The crisis of European feudalism was, however, different in one very important respect from the crisis that had hit ancient Rome, Sung China or the Arab empires of the Middle East. Recovery occurred much more quickly.

  There was economic recovery and a renewal of population growth by the middle of the fifteenth century. 125 There was also a rise in living standards among the survivors of the famine and plagues, since although the smaller population could only till a smaller area of land, it tended to be the most fertile land. Food output fell by much less than the number of people to be fed. What is more, the importance of some towns actually increased. Part of the rural population, especially the lords, had become too dependent on the goods produced in the towns for society to revert to a system of production on virtually self-contained estates. As their demand for goods grew, so did their desire for cash, which they could only get by selling a growing proportion of rural output. Market networks continued to penetrate the countryside, linking each village and household to the traders of the towns.

  The growth of market networks slowly but surely changed feudal society. A few of the merchants became rich from the international trade in luxuries which brought products from India, south east Asia and China to Europe. 126 Their wealth could be sufficient for them to act as bankers to kings and emperors, financing wars and reaping political as well as economic rewards. Even those who could not aspire to such heights could dominate the political life of their own towns, making them vital allies for kings trying to expand their power.

  The kings, in turn, began to see their futures not simply in fighting each other or marrying into each other’s families for land, but also in terms of gaining some of the profits from trade. Portuguese monarchs encouraged merchants to use ships built with the most modern techniques to find a way round Africa to the riches of Asia, and the ‘Catholic monarchs’ of Spain financed Columbus’s voyage west across the Atlantic.

  The mass of lesser traders were still little more than shopkeepers. But with luck they could expand their influence and wealth by finding niches in feudal society and slowly widening them. The butcher might be a humble fellow, but he was in a position to provide cash inducements to local peasants to specialise in certain sorts of livestock – that is, to begin to exercise a degree of control over the farming economy. By the fifteenth century ‘every town had its butchers, all of them prosperous, the new men of the pastoral economy and its masters’. 127

  The urban traders often influenced life in the countryside in another way, by encouraging less prosperous peasants to take up industrial crafts in the countryside, away from the controls of the urban guilds. There was the growth of a ‘putting-out’ system. The merchant would provide the raw materials to rural workers, who would transform them into finished products in their own homes, with little choice but to accept the price the merchant gave them.

  How important such a cha
nge could be is shown by the case of the textile industry. In the mid-fourteenth century 96 per cent of England’s most important export, wool, was turned into cloth abroad, mainly in the towns of Flanders. A century later 50 per cent was exported already woven. The merchants had increased their profits by weakening the hold of the Flemish artisans. But they had also done something more. They had taken hold of some of the rural labour which had previously been subject to the feudal lord. The long-term effect was to replace one form of exploitation by another. The direct robbery of the products of peasant labour was replaced by a system in which individual workers voluntarily accepted less than the full value of their products in return for being supplied with raw materials or tools.

  This was not fully capitalist production as we know it. Production in large workplaces directly under the control of an entrepreneur was confined to a very few industries, mainly mining. The putting-out system relied on people who could still regard themselves as their own bosses. But it was a step towards fully developed capitalism. The merchant had moved from simply buying and selling goods to worrying about their production, and the direct producers could no longer obtain a livelihood unless a portion of their output went to the merchant as profit.

  What is more, both the merchant and the producer were increasingly subject to the dictates of markets over which they had no control. Dispersed rural producers lacked the power of the town guilds to limit output and control prices. They had no choice but to keep abreast of new cost-cutting techniques introduced by other producers. The feudal organisation of production was giving way to a quite different organisation, in which competition led to investment, and investment intensified competition. For the moment, this only occurred in a few gaps within the old system. But it was like an acid, eating into and changing the world around it.