Millenium

by Tom Holland

  This was a delusory consolation, it might have been thought, bear­ing in mind all the harsh exactions imposed upon them. Yet it was not wholly so. The peasantry still had some muscle. Community leaders - 'boni homines' — continued to be elected. Assemblies, at which the free peasants of a neighbourhood would gather in an open field, continued to be held. Rights still existed which might be cruelly missed once they were gone. How grim an irony it was, for instance, for any peasant who did lose his livestock and his land to find himself, from that moment on, bound to both far more implacably than he had ever been while free. 'I work hard,' the typical serf was imagined as eternally sighing. 'I go out at first light, driving the oxen to the field, yoking them to the plough. No matter how bleak the winter, I dare not linger at home, out of fear of my lord; instead, having yoked my oxen, and fastened their harness, every day I must plough a full acre or more.'31 To the free neighbours of such a wretch, watching him hunched against the dawn cold, toiling to break up the frozen ground, bone-weary even amid snow or the iciest sleet, the spectacle would have served as a fear­some admonition. They too, of course, had to toil; but not so hard as did a serf. The crops harvested by a free man were not his only source of nutrition. Beyond the spreading fields redeemed with such labour from the great murk of the wilderness, dark and tangled forests still stretched across much of France, forbidding, to be sure, and perilous, the haunt of wolves, and angry boars, and bandits, and banished demons; but mighty storehouses rich in food and resources too. Any peasant prepared to venture out of the daylight into the primordial shade of the trees could set his pigs to eat there, or hunt game, or burn wood for charcoal, or collect wax and honey, or gather up mush­rooms and herbs and berries. If there was a river flowing near by, then funnel-shaped baskets could be rigged up in its waters, to serve as makeshift fishing weirs. Even out on open fields, there were always birds to be hunted. With so much to forage, there was certainly no need to depend for sustenance on corn.

  But that, in the view of great landowners, was hardly the point. Reduced harvests meant reduced surpluses; and reduced surpluses meant less for the ambitious lord to extort. Seen from this perspective, peasants who insisted on sloping off from their fields to go rabbit hunting or blackberrying or fiddling around in rivers with wicker- work were wastrels, plain and simple, letting down their betters. What other purpose did the poor have, if not to deliver the full potential of their capacity for sweat and aching muscles? Far-sighted landlords, during the final decades of the millennium, found themselves reflect­ing on this question with a mounting sense of frustration — for the very earth, like a woman no longer content to cloak her own fertility, had begun to reveal to those with the necessary ingenuity and resolve to test it a hitherto unsuspected degree of fruitfulness. Startlingly, even against a background of often terrible famines, and a widespread sense that God's creation was winding down, the scope for improving harvests appeared to be on the upsurge. Heavier makes of plough, better styles of animal harnesses and more productive methods of rotating crops — none of them novel technologies, by any means — were starting to be adopted across northern Europe on a hugely expanded scale. The finger of the Almighty too, tracing patterns across the face of the earth, appeared to be bearing witness to a swelling fecundity. Those who farmed the foothills of the Alps, for instance, could mark how the glaciers were retreating, and the tree line rising. Those who lived by coastal marshes could trace a steady shrinking of their waters. The climate was changing, with temperatures rising everywhere. To many, it was true, the resulting extremes of heat and rainfall appeared simply a further portent of doom; and yet for all that, over the long term, the warmer seasons were indisputably boost­ing crop yields. Or rather, they were boosting crop yields for a certain kind of lord: one whose tenants were willing without complaint to bend their backs, to reap and plough and sow, not just in fits and starts, but relentlessly, season in and season out. No easy task, to condition men and women to such a life. Whole communities first had to be bound to the soil, bound utterly, and broken to all the rhythms of the agricultural year, without any prospect of exemption or release. And yet, if that could be achieved, how great might be the rewards! How flourishing the profits from the gathering revolution in the fields! How irresistible the incentive to bury the freedoms of the peasantry once and for all!

  And this not least because there was now one more nail at hand, delivered with a fatal timing to the strong and ruthless everywhere, to the final doom of the independent poor — and already, by the Millennium, being hammered with great violence into their coffin. France's first great social upheaval was heralded, not by the storming of a single brooding fortress, as a later one would be, but by the very opposite, the raising across the whole country of a great multitude of battlements. Brilliantly although a warlord such as Fulk Nerra might learn to deploy castles to serve his strategic interests, their most seismic impact was to be experienced not in the realm of military affairs at all, but across the countryside, in the forests, the farms and the fields. Even the most prosperous of free peasants would soon learn to dread the sight of makeshift walls and towers being erected on a nearby hill. No more ominous silhouette could possibly have been imagined than that of a castle on its rock. Tiny it might be, and inaccessible, and crudely built—and yet the shadow cast by such a stronghold would invariably extend for miles. Never before had an entire generation of landlords come so suddenly into the possession of so lethal a coercive tool. Entire communities could now be dominated, cabined in and patrolled.

  It was no coincidence, then, that those same decades which wit­nessed the sudden spread of castles over France should also have been distinguished by the systematic degradation of the peasantry's right to roam. Woods and rivers, those primordial sources of sustenance, began to be ringed around with tolls, or else placed off-limits altogether. Inexorably, the easier it became for a lord to enforce restrictions, and to privatise what had once been common land, the faster it occurred. The poor man out with his bow and arrow in the woods, tracking some game for his cooking pot, just as his forefathers had always done, suddenly found himself branded a poacher, a criminal. No more hunting, shooting or fishing for the peasantry. Those who wanted food would now have to work for it in the fields the whole year round.

  All change, it went without saying, was wicked; but change so violent and disruptive seemed especially so. Nevertheless, as even the most despairing peasant had to acknowledge, the cruelty of new laws could hardly serve to invalidate them — not if the lord responsible was a mighty prince, a duke or a count possessed of the 'ban'. To campaign against such an awesome figure was immediately to be guilty of rebel­lion. In 997, for instance, at Evreaux, in northern France, where the peasantry had responded with naked fury to having the forests and streams closed off to them, the local count answered the supplications of their elected emissaries by having their hands and feet cut off. A per­fectly pitched atrocity: for the agitators, witnessing the mutilated state of the boni homines, duly bowed their heads and melted away back to their ploughs. Naturally, terror of the count's armoured horsemen was what had most immediately served to chill their spirits - but there had been something more as well. No less than princes, peasants lived in dread of anarchy. They might find the iron demands of an unjust law fear­some, yet there was one thing that they tended to fear even more: a world in which no laws existed. For then the weak would find them­selves the prey of the strong indeed. The horror of this had been most eerily articulated back in 940, by a peasant girl named Flothilde: for she had reported to a listening monk a terrible dream, one which had returned to her every night, in which armed men pursued her, seeking to capture her and throw her down a well. Countless other peasants too, mute witnesses to the times, must have been haunted by similar nightmares. They knew the darkness which might lurk within the human soul. Better order, then, most appear to have reck­oned, any order, even the harshest, than the lack of it. And so it was, in counties ruled by iron-willed princes, where the new laws,
though brutal, could nevertheless be regarded as legitimate, and despite all the suffering and the misery and the restlessness which accompanied their introduction, that the poor did not revolt. The prerogatives of lordship, linking top to bottom, were maintained. Society did not crumble.

  Yet princedoms as steel-girt as Flanders or Anjou were aberrations. In southern France especially, it was not long before the assaults upon the pauperes were attaining such a pitch of relentlessness and illegiti­macy that it did indeed appear to many, witnessing the collapse of entire regions into savagery, as though everything were falling apart. Here, when a castellan laid claim to the powers of the 'ban', it was most likely to be a fraud. Rarely would he have had permission to build his castle from some higher authority. The opportunities were simply too spectacular, and the competition too ferocious, for any man of ambition to hang around waiting for that. Indeed, the would- be castellan had little choice but to move as urgently as he could, rushing with a desperate sense of greed to secure a suitable rock or hill for himself, before anyone else could beat him to the site. 'For then he could do what he liked without fear, in full confidence that his castle would protect him — whereas others, if they tried to oppose him, could now be overcome easily, since they would have nowhere to hide.'32 A wildcat lord such as this, smelling the fresh timber of his bat­tlements, feeling solid rock beneath his feet, knowing himself the master of all he surveyed, could afford to thumb his nose at the world. He owed no duty to a count, nor to anyone, except himself.

  And certainly not to the pauperes. Indeed, bleeding the locals white was not merely an option for the ambitious castellan, but an absolute necessity. Banditry and intimidation had to sanction what legitimacy could not. Castles — and men to garrison them — had to be paid for. Warriors, if they were to supply their lord with effective muscle, did not come cheap: their arms, their armour and their horses all had to be purchased, to say nothing of their loyalty. To contemporaries, the gangs of mail-clad thugs increasingly being employed by castel­lans appeared a caste as novel as they were alarming; and chroniclers, thumbing through dusty tomes, struggled at first to find suitable terms to describe them. In English, they would end up being known as 'cnichts': a word customarily applied to household servants, and strongly suggestive of servility and baseness. Who these 'knights' truly were appears to have varied from region to region; and yet it is evident that many must indeed have been of less than noble origin. Where else, after all, was an upstart lord to find recruits, if not from among the ranks of the local peasantry? And where better could an ambitious peasant, especially one with a taste for violence and a lack of scruples, look for gainful employment, than to a castellan? Food, accommoda­tion and the chance to kick people around: all came as perks of the job. It was an attractive package—and especially amid the carnivorous nature of the times. Out on patrol with his lord, marking from his saddle how a one-time equal might flinch at the sight of him, or cringe, perhaps, in the dirt, or beg in his misery for the return of a missing daughter, or a bag of grain, or a cow, a knight would have no doubt what he was glimpsing: a fate that might easily have been his own.

  And perhaps it was precisely for this reason, a terror of the abyss that still awaited them if all their menaces failed, and all their scavenging left them empty-handed, that the knights and their mas­ters were so merciless. Month by month, season by season, year by year, their exactions grew ever worse. How gruesomely apt it was that their favoured mode of torture should have been a garrotting-chain, the 'maura', notorious for inflicting upon its victim 'not one but a thousand deaths'35: a literal tightening of the screws. Robberies too, and rapes, and kidnappings: all were deployed with a brutal gusto by hit squads determined to trample underfoot every last vestige of independence in the countryside, and to reduce even the most pros­perous of peasants to servitude.

  So far reaching in its implications was this programme, and so con­vulsive in its effects, that any lord with half an aptitude for driving it through could track its progress simply by gazing out from his castle, and marking its imprint upon the fields and settlements spread out below. Landscapes fundamentally unchanged for a millennium were in the process of being utterly transformed. Rather than being left to live as they had done since Roman times, on scattered farms, or clus­tered around villas, or migrating year by year from hut to hut and field to field, peasants increasingly found themselves being herded together into what was in effect a human sheep pen: a 'village'. Here, in this novel style of community, was the ultimate refinement of what had for so long been a lordly dream: to round up the peasantry for good. As raw and sinister as a newly founded prison, a village might bear witness to the servitude imposed not just upon the odd luckless individual, but upon an entire community. Battered down and blood­ied, those peasants adjusting to the novel experience of having to live cheek by jowl with their neighbours would labour henceforward as serfs: for the subtle and various shades of freedom that might once have served to define them had been smeared and blotted out. They were all of them unfree now: living trophies, the spoils of violence and crime.

  Not that the castellans were always blatant in their illegalities. Upstart lords, by virtue of the various prerogatives that they had usurped from the aristocracy, did often attempt to cloak their depredations behind a semblance of legitimacy - but few of their vic­tims were fooled by that. Peasants, looking back to more prosperous times, knew perfectly well that their fathers and grandfathers had not been obliged to put up braggardly knights in their hovels; nor to walk up to the gates of a nearby castle, there to hand over all the riches of their harvest; nor to toil as unpaid porters, sweating and stumbling as they served in the train of some upstart castellan. That all these out­rages could claim some vague precedent in the obligations of the 'ban' did not make them any less shameless or grotesque. Justice, which had once been administered to them by their own elected leaders in open fields, beneath the sight of heaven, had been stolen from them. And so the peasantry spoke of the new customs that the Millennium was serving to bring them as 'evil’; and even as they cursed, they cried out for release from their wretchedness.

  But who was there to heed their prayers? Christ and His saints in heaven, of course; and sure enough, on occasion, a saint might indeed blaze out a reply. Terrifying prodigies capable of bringing a wicked lord to his senses, and dousing 'the torches of his avarice', were naturally much prized by the poor: for increasingly, interventions by the super­natural appeared the only sure way 'to stop their meagre possessions from being despoiled'.34 Saints who did not protect their devotees were much resented: one woman, for instance, outraged that St Benedict had failed to protect her from an evil lord, physically assaulted the altar in his shrine, beating it with her fists, and roundly abusing her heavenly patron. It was a truth as evident as it was regrettable, how­ever, that even miracles performed by a living saint such as Romuald were hardly to be relied upon: for while the celebrated hermit was more than content, on occasion, to punish robber lords by having them choke to death on the meat of stolen cows, or be struck down by invisible arrows, he could hardly punish every thieving castellan, as ultimately it was his very isolation from the turbulent currents of human sinfulness that marked him out as holy. Yet even amid the swamps, Romuald and hermits like him might serve as an inspiration to the oppressed and groaning peasantry because they bore witness to the power of a lord greater and infinitely more powerful than even the most brutal castellan. The poor did not despair of the protection of Christ; nor did they doubt that He heard their groans, and pitied them. Perhaps they knew as well what had been foretold in the Holy Scriptures, that He was to come again at the end of days, to judge the living and the dead, and that the oppressed would be bade welcome, and sat at His right side, to take their place in the New Jerusalem, while the wicked were delivered over to eternal fire.

  But when? When? Always the question: when? Whether there were those among the peasantry who were aware of the Millennium we do not know—for the silence of the
poor is almost total. Yet such was the scale of the horrors that had overwhelmed them, and such their yearning for redemption from all their miseries, that it seems implau­sible that they could have been wholly ignorant of so portentous and fearsome a date. That they were living through the one-thousandth anniversary of their Saviour's life, even as the shadows that had engulfed them were thickening into an ever more hellish darkness, would surely have struck many as a coincidence too far. Certainly, there were those among the learned who had no doubts. 'For it is revealed as an evident fact by the Holy Gospel that as the last days go by, so love will be chilled, and iniquity will blossom amongst men. And they will face dangerous times for their souls... Here, then, is the cause of the evils which, on an unprecedented scale, have afflicted every portion of the world, on and around the thousandth anniver­sary of the birth of our Saviour and Lord.'35

  Such was the judgement of one observer of his times, a monk named Rudolf Glaber; and it could hardly be dismissed as an eccentric one. The monastery in Burgundy to which he belonged was no back­water, no nest of cranks or heretics. Indeed, in all Christendom, there were few assemblages of stone and mortar that could boast a greater charge of holiness than the monastery of Cluny. The voice of prophecy to which Rudolf laid claim was nothing less than his pre­rogative as one of its brothers. 'Truly, our life lasts one thousand years.' So had warned Odo, the second of puny's abbots, decades before the anarchy that would mark the passage of the Millennium. 'And now here we are, arrived at the last day of the very span of time itself.'36 These were words that no Christian could readily ignore: for they had issued from the place that seemed to its admirers, more than any other, the nearest there was to heaven on earth.