Aristocratic ‘virtue’ was also, as we have seen, religious. The family monastery channelled that religious superiority, as well as helping to keep the kin-group together. So did the extensive land-giving to churches of all kinds that marks the late eighth century in Carolingian Europe, and, after a break, the tenth and eleventh centuries too. Aristocratic control of monasteries has often been seen as in opposition to monastic ‘reform’, which removed family control and set up (or, sometimes, reinstated) rigorous and autonomous religious communities who chose their own abbots and were beholden to no one. This opposition does exist in some reforming texts, which stress lay resistance to reforming activity, and (especially in the eleventh century) often see lay control as a pollution of monastic spirituality. This is not, however, how aristocrats themselves saw it, or indeed most monks. Bishop Adalbero I of Metz, Adalbero II’s uncle, reformed the great Lotharingian house of Gorze in 933-4, with plenty of rhetoric, overstated, about the monastery’s previous irreligiosity, and later accepted a famous ascetic, John of Gorze (d. 976), as abbot; but the process can also be seen as Adalbero’s family gaining control of Gorze from a rival (the ‘Matfridings’, counts of Metz). In other cases, families themselves reformed monasteries, instituted monastic elections of abbots according to the Rule of St Benedict, but still maintained patronage of the reformed house. In cases such as these they could themselves benefit substantially from the new monastic spirituality, for monastic prayers for the family would be more efficacious; and, not least, as already in the eighth century, the generosity of others to the monastic house would frequently increase if its spiritual reputation was higher, thus boosting the wealth of a church which still maintained its original family links. At a royal level, this sort of religious/political concern is also seen in the monastic reforms of late tenth-century England, very much organized for the spiritual and political benefit of the king, queen and leading ealdormen; this was equally true, for that matter, of the ninth-century Carolingians, who were keen to impose the Rule universally in their domains, but nonetheless disposed of monastic land and appointed abbots with considerable detachment.
The classic instance of a reformed monastery at the end of our period is Cluny, in the county of Mâcon: it was founded in 909-10 by William the Pious, but put, not under his own family patronage, but under that of the pope, to keep it separate from any direct lay domination. Nor did that occur; Mâcon was on the edge of Guilhelmid power, and the family anyway died out in 927; successive abbots were of aristocratic background, for sure, but their families had no authority over them. (Nor did the pope, of course, a marginal figure in most aspects of tenth-century politics, as we have seen.) Cluny was very unusual in its formal separation from lay authority, and its abbots had to be - and were - unusually able so as to maintain it. But its growing reputation as a centre for organized spiritual activity made it the most successful recipient of lay landed generosity anywhere in contemporary Europe, with a thousand charters of gift from the tenth century alone. These did not come with domination, but with relationships, with both aristocrats and smaller neighbours (village élites and peasant cultivators alike - all gave Cluny land), who wanted to see their gifts used to their own spiritual advantage as expertly and authoritatively as possible. Cluny turned into a lordship on a par with the others in the Mâconnais, and far richer than most. It did so not by threatening aristocratic spiritual attitudes, but by drawing on them and validating them. It was its second abbot, Odo (927-42), who wrote the Life of Gerald, after all, the founding text for a lay aristocratic version of spirituality. Odo became an expert in monastic reform, called in across West Francia, and even by Alberic, prince of Rome. Cluny was the very opposite of a critique of tenth-century society: it was in many respects the most perfect product of the aristocratic values, including religious ones, discussed in this chapter.
22
The Caging of the Peasantry, 800-1000
859. The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people [vulgus] living between the Seine and the Loire formed a sworn association [coniuratio] amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had been made without due consideration [incaute], they were easily slain by our more powerful people.
So the Annals of Saint-Bertin recount the fate of the only popular resistance to the Vikings in the Carolingian period. This brief narrative leaves much unexplained, of course. What does incaute really mean? Does it mean that a sworn association was in itself seen as a seditious act? Charlemagne had banned coniurationes, after all, because their oaths were potentially in rivalry with oaths to the king (above, Chapter 16). But whether this was the principal problem or not, the fighting peasants of 859 were acting autonomously of the Carolingian political hierarchy, and were thus at best suspect, at worst actively dangerous. Not just the local aristocracy who destroyed them, but the whole political class, would have perceived this danger; and it would have seemed that much more serious because of the way Frankish society had developed in the last half century. Free peasants had traditionally been able to serve in royal armies; as late as Charlemagne’s reign we can find laws about such army service, and this military capacity, however rarely exercised, was one of the marks of freedom, along with the right to participate in public assemblies, especially law courts. By the 850s, however, despite the military danger which the Vikings represented, armies were more and more aristocratic, and military service was slowly becoming seen as an aristocratic privilege, as we saw in the last chapter. The peasants of the Seine-Loire region may have thought that they were following in the footsteps of their grandfathers, assembling for military defence at a time when they were seriously needed. Charles the Bald’s aristocrats by now saw such military readiness as inappropriate for peasants, however. This only made worse the fact that the peasants had done this autonomously, without any formal call-up. So they died. But if free peasants did not do military service any more, what did their freedom consist of? They were that much less useful to kings, and kings would be that much less worried if there were other threats to their freedom. This was a general development of the ninth and tenth centuries in the West: peasants were slowly and steadily excluded from the public sphere, and, in more general terms, ever more clearly subjected to aristocrats and churches, the great private landowners.
The way this happened, and the extent to which it happened, varied from place to place in western Europe. As many as five separate socio-economic changes can be invoked here. First, in some non-Carolingian regions, the ninth and tenth centuries were the period in which landowning itself developed, and a really wealthy aristocracy emerged for the first time. Secondly, in Carolingian Europe, aristocrats and churches gained property, by force or otherwise, from their landowning peasant neighbours, thus reducing the numbers of independent peasants. Thirdly, dependent peasants, tenants, faced increasing rents and greater control exercised over their labour. Fourthly, peasants were increasingly excluded from the public world of the army and assembly, and thus from the purview and interest of kings. Fifthly, in some parts of Europe (notably France, but also much of Italy), this exclusion was, already by 1000, coming to mean the direct subjection of peasant communities to the judicial control of local lords, in the framework of the seigneurie banale. These were largely separate developments, but they nonetheless all pointed in the same direction. Overall, the relatively autonomous early medieval peasantry, discussed in Chapter 9, lost more and more of its autonomy in the last two centuries of our period. I have called this process the ‘caging’ of the peasantry: more and more, the huge peasant majority of the population of western Europe became divided up into localized units, controlled more and more by local lords. The word is a rough translation of Robert Fossier’s term encellulement, literally the division of society into a cellular pattern, which he sees as the key element in the shift from the early to the central Middle Ages. The force of this latter image is most closely tied to that of the ‘feudal revolution’,
which in a strict sense is only the fifth (and the most localized) of my five developments. But, overall, the peasantry was everywhere systematically more restricted, more caged, as a result of all five processes. We shall look at them in turn here, and then step back, and look at their broader economic contexts and consequences too.
We saw in Chapter 20 that rulers became slowly more powerful in most of non-Carolingian Europe after 800. The flip-side of this development was a general increase in aristocratic power. Aristocrats were in the eighth century or so political patrons of their free peasant neighbours, as in Scandinavia, Ireland or Brittany, or takers of tribute from otherwise autonomous dependants, as in England and, soon, Rus, rather than full-scale landowners taking rents from non-landowning tenants. In much of England, the ninth century seems to have been the cusp moment in which landownership took shape. In northern Spain, there may have been various moments for the same process between the late eighth and the tenth. In Croatia, the key moment seems to have been the ninth. In Denmark, it may have been the late tenth and eleventh; as usual, we cannot be sure, for our documents only begin in the late eleventh, but full aristocratic landownership (together with a substantial surviving peasant landowning stratum) certainly existed by then. In other parts of ‘outer Europe’, equivalent changes occurred later, out of our period, although they would in the end occur everywhere. These shifts towards aristocratic landowning on a large scale are in every case ill-documented, and their context (and their immediate effect on the peasantry) will remain obscure. But the result was in each case clear: the emergence of a powerful élite group, which had for the first time the right to coerce those sections of the peasant majority who were their immediate dependants. These rights were no greater than those of aristocrats in Merovingian Francia and Lombard Italy who were already landlords in the sixth century; it took until 900 for lords in England, and until 1000- 1050 for lords in Denmark, to gain the powers that were considered normal in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms. But peasants were losing ground all the same, and in England, as we saw earlier, where almost no landowning peasants survived by the eleventh century, they lost ground more fully than anywhere else in Europe.
Only slightly better documented is the expansion of aristocratic and ecclesiastical landowning inside Carolingian Europe. One aspect of this is, it is true, very clear in our material, for when peasants gave land to churches, the charters recording their donations were systematically kept. In eighth- and early ninth-century northern and central Italy, and central and southern Germany, we have a large number of texts of this type; so do we in tenth-century Burgundy, Catalonia and León. Many such documents were the work of aristocrats or near-aristocrats, men and women with enough landed wealth to be able to give generously for the good of their souls without threatening their well-being and political power; but in numerous cases it is evident that peasant cultivators were the donors - either of single fields or of their entire holdings. What were peasants intending when they gave such gifts? To get closer to heaven because of their generosity, certainly (the relationship is explicit in most such texts, which generally say that they are gifts ‘for the soul’, or for prayers by clerical professionals, and in Italy sometimes invoke a ‘hundred-fold counter-gift in heaven’). But the socio-political context for this was more varied. Sometimes such gifts were to what might be called a ‘neutral’ institution, to a newly founded local church, which simply represented a convenient nearby location for a priest capable of prayers of intercession, or to a monastery with a reputation for spirituality, whose prayers might be more efficacious for that reason (Cluny was one such in the early tenth century). Peasants might give small portions of their lands, or a childless couple might give all or most of their property, for purely spiritual reasons under these circumstances. But the institution might be locally powerful as well, either because it was associated with a major aristocratic family or a bishop, or simply because it was gaining wealth and thus power from the gifts of the faithful, as was increasingly the case for Cluny across the tenth century; under these circumstances, to be associated with it through one’s generosity might bring political benefits too, patronage in this world as well as in the next. Finally, the richest and most powerful institutions could become major players, seigneurial lords over their neighbours, and then any gifts to them by the weak would be decidedly double-edged, and might well contain a substantial element of coercion.
Not all rising churches and monasteries got this far. There is a visible tendency in many European villages for pious gifts to dry up when religious institutions became locally powerful and therefore less ‘neu tral’; we can see this in many places in Germany and Italy in the ninth century, after the first great wave of gift-giving, for example. But communities could also miscalculate, and carry on giving long enough to tilt the local balance of power too firmly towards a major local monastery. The local dominance of Fulda and Lorsch in central Germany and Farfa in central Italy by 850, Redon in eastern Brittany by 900, and by 1000 Cluny as well, had just such roots. Such monasteries henceforth operated as major political players, often at the expense of the heirs of the pious donors who were the origin of their power.
Both churches and lay aristocrats also increased their lands by more direct methods, that is to say by force. This was unlikely to be recorded in legal documents, of course, but we do occasionally have signs of it in court records. In Milan in 900 eleven peasants from nearby Cusago sought to prove their full freedom in court against the count of Milan, their landlord for some of their land; he was claiming that they were aldii, half-free, but they counter-argued that they owned their own property as well. Property-ownership was restricted to the free, so, if this was accepted, it would prove their case; conversely, however, they would lose their land as well as their freedom to the count if they failed. In this case, very unusually, the peasants won; but other parallel cases where they lost show at least that peasants were often sure of the justice of their cause. They may also have done so because they hoped for royal support. Both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious legislated against the expropriation of the poor, in fact; in 811 the former noted that the poor were telling him that bishops, abbots and counts were despoiling them of their property, and, if the powerful could not get that property, they were seeking excuses to undermine its owners, including by sending them endlessly on military expeditions (a sign of freedom, but often an expensive one) until they gave in and sold up. But, of course, however sympathetic a king/emperor might be, his local judicial representatives were the same bishops and counts, who were rarely going to let peasants raise successful pleas against themselves.
Overall, as noted in the previous chapter, the Carolingian period was one in which great lords became steadily wealthier, and peasant landowners are less and less visible in our sources. This process continued into the tenth century as well, by which time there is also no longer any sign that kings were worried about such matters. In 800, in most parts of Europe for which there are documents, we can find active societies of owner-cultivators. By 1000 these were notably fewer, particularly north of Burgundy and of the Alps. In southern France and Italy, too, such networks, even though they survived, were by now weaker. Legally or illegally, independent peasantries were on the retreat.
Peasants did sometimes resist by force. This was a losing strategy, for aristocratic armies were so much more powerful; that they tried it at all is a sign of their desperation. Such resistance tended to be commonest in mountain areas, further from centres of political power, and in areas where collective exploitation of woodland and pasture led to stronger peasant communities: we have examples from the Alps, the Appennines and the Pyrenees. The best instance is that of the peasants of the Valle Trita, in the highest part of the central Appennines, who resisted attempts by the monastery of S. Vincenzo al Volturno to claim their lands and to declare them unfree, during a whole century, 779-873, and across nine separate court hearings; it may have been another century before they finally lost. The only large-scale p
easants’ revolt in this period was that of the Stellinga in Saxony in 841-2; this seems to have extended across all or most of Saxony. But that was an extreme situation, for Carolingian conquest had displaced an entire peasant society and economy, more similar to contemporary Denmark than to contemporary Francia, and Frankish-style aristocratic power had imposed itself in little more than a generation. The Saxon peasantry thus faced a new totalizing subjection, and this explains why such a large group took to arms. They lost, too, however. Royal rhetoric aside, the Carolingian century was a bad time for peasant autonomy, the time in which, in Francia and Italy, the momentum towards generalized aristocratic dominance first became inescapable.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 68