by Jack Lindsay
The expansion of money and its circulation and uses, though a key aspect of later medieval developments, did not itself disrupt feudalism or create a different sort of society. Though at some periods feudalism operated at a level close to that of a natural (non-monetary) economy, with local sufficiency dominating the situation, the development of markets, trade, and the circulation of money were not decisive in bringing about a fundamental change. That is, such things would not alone change a feudal economy into a bourgeois one — any more than they could by themselves change the slave economies of Greece and Rome into forms of capitalism; or more relevantly, than they could change the Byzantine world, where they operated strongly, into such forms. The Norman lords were always concerned with profit, and in a sense it did not matter if it came in the shape of productive lands, tolls and taxes, or money rents and commutations. There was indeed a continuous movement towards money evaluations, despite setbacks, for money by its fluidity enabled the lords to enjoy a wider range of satisfactions and luxuries. But the ancient world and medieval Byzantion proved clearly enough that such a movement did not spontaneously generate capitalist modes or relations.
Because of the growth of trade in the twelfth century, men with money invested in land, especially that of the towns where they lived. Hence the urban patriciate, viri hereditarii, divites, majores, who held this land profited further from the rise in ground rents. Now they were no longer wandering traders. They lived in stone houses, with towers or battlements rising above the thatched roofs of their tenants’ wooden dwellings. They took control of municipal administration, and some by fortunate marriages became part of the lesser nobility and modelled their way of life on that of the knights. As towns grew richer, more peasants were drawn in and their industrial character increased, with secondary localities developing around. Some towns were based on local trade, others became big exporters.[579] Instruments of credit, such as the Lettre de Foire, were used. Traffic in money expanded. The customs of fairs, especially in Champagne, gave rise to a sort of commercial law. By the mid-thirteenth century gold coinage (dropped since Merovingian days) was resumed. Much struggling went on between the merchant patriciate and the craft guilds. Municipal statutes fixed wages and regulated conditions of work as well as limiting the independence of the merchants. The church pressed in with its theory of the just price, forbidding usury, the lending of money at interest, sales on credit, and monopolies. But in fact monopolies were strong in the thirteenth century, with Flemish towns controlling the trade in fine cloth and merchant companies of Lombardy, Provence and Tuscany dominating banking. Lombard moneylenders financed Edward III in his wars against France. We even find men like Jehan Boinebroke (1280-1310) at Douai reducing workers (mainly women) to serfdom by advancing money and wool which they could not repay.[580]
By the thirteenth century a complex situation had developed on the land. Various kinds of labour were used on the demesne. Some work was done as rent by customary tenants with full holdings; some as piece-work by temporarily hired men; some by paid famuli working part or full time, who got in return, not land, but money or food; some by famuli who got part of their wages through service holdings (which were small and provided only the minimum subsistence needs of the worker and his family). Even famuli with base sergeantry holdings had to have their wages supplemented with money, liveries of corn, and the right to an acre’s crop from the demesne, or the use of the lord’s plough team on Saturdays. Service holdings in general were losing their function; most surveys show the tenants of such holdings paying rent, which was used for various kinds of paid labour. The wage labour used by the richer village peasants was beginning to approximate to capitalist wage labour, that is, it was determined primarily by economic compulsion; but on the demesne the lords were ready to use any form of pressure, including the legal status of their dependents as servile persons. We find, in the early fourteenth century, on the manor of the Yorkshire abbey of Selby, the lord using sons of his serfs (ploughmen, carters, a shepherd) as famuli curiae at half the wages paid to an extraneus.[581]
As rents fell, incomes had to be made up by intensified fiscal exploitation, warfare, and plunder, though these methods were often frustrated by policies of currency inflation. The most capable producers for the market, men not seeking luxury or display and thus not needing to keep servants and non-productive dependents, were the wealthy peasants and members of the lesser nobility who had given up trying to live in the wasteful style of the upper members of their class. These groups though as yet far from dominant carried out forms of exploitation that anticipated capitalist farming. What encouraged increases of production and improved methods was no longer feudal rent, which could still be an obstructive burden for the middle peasant, but the stimulus of the market, which grew ever more important in the fifteenth century, helping to develop production and to introduce new elements into the economy. The groups with political dominance kept on trying to maintain their power by various devices, of which the absolute monarchy was the last large-scale example; but they were carrying on a failing struggle to use their links with the state to preserve the essentials of the feudal system.[582]
The peasant revolts, whether in the form of the 1381 revolt or those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, could not by themselves break up feudal society, however symptomatic they were of its crises. (In the Hussite wars the smaller gentry felt alienated from the lay and clerical magnates, but were an irresolute force. There were indeed revolts of both knights and peasants, but they did not coincide in point of time or in viewpoint, despite the common enemy. Anyhow, Luther was there to ensure that they did not merge.)[583] These later revolts took place, we may note, in eastern Europe where state power was relatively weak, as also were urban developments. The biggest challenge came in Bohemia with its considerable economic advance; but because of the lack of any true bourgeois challenge, the rebels, even when victorious, made no attempt to take over state power. The Taborites tended to a sort of religious anarchism and primitive democracy of a peasant type, as did the Anabaptists with their voluntary church membership. However shaken or worried, the feudal ruling class could always re-gather its forces and set about re-consolidating the state. The big landowners had the most to lose and were afraid of accepting any drastic reforms, as we see in Spain of the late fifteenth century. The new absolute monarchies were led by new rulers, Isabella in Castile and Henry VII in England, but they had to build on old foundations. The utmost they could do was to attempt to rationalize the feudal order; but they could only do this because of the high degree of social and economic integration that had been going on within feudal society. For the same reason the feudal state in the advanced areas could even resume its control of the church and submit it to considerable regulation from above, imposing a discreet and restricted version of the Reformation. One interesting point is that in this milder version of the theocratic state the king resumes some of his shorn divinity, in the form of a ‘divine right’.
The expanding state system was able to lengthen its life and gain temporary stability by drawing in the smaller gentry, offering them jobs in the official spheres or the standing army. The appropriating classes were thus linked by multiple bonds of interest to the administration. The result of all this was (a) a far stronger structure where wealth was essentially dependent on land rent (as in eighteenth-century Poland) or was extracted by taxes (as in Islam) or (b) a governmental system which, on reaching the limits of its contradictions, provided a firm basis for the next level of development, that of the bourgoisie. The expression of the final stage of feudal integration, the stage before the bourgeois revolution, was the emergence of the national state. Strictly we cannot speak of such a state at earlier periods. We have tribal groupings or federations, feudal combinations and concentrations, city-states, empires, and so on, but only at the end of feudalism does the national state proper appear.
A complicated struggle had gone on during the transition from labour services to money rents, with th
e breakdown of serfdom in the fourteenth century, and the first effective intrusion of genuine capitalist relationships in sixteenth-century England. In that century the vast majority of peasants paid money rents; the well-off freehold farmers no longer paid feudal dues and had reached the status of independent free producers, who employed poorer neighbours in both agriculture and industry, though still on a small scale. The genesis of capitalism is to be sought here, in the petty producers, not in the haute bourgeoise who had accommodated themselves to feudal relations in banking or mercantile pursuits. ‘To buy land is one of the objects for which merchants are accustomed to labour,’ said Guicciardini in the fifteenth century. The yeoman farmers bought the labour-power of their poorer neighbours, the cottars, and not only kept on expanding the scale of their productive operations but also started off the country cloth industry, while entrepreneurs of the same kind appeared in the town crafts. Merchant capital on the other hand was often allied with feudal reaction or absolutism; the chartered merchants and monopolists belonged to the royalist party in the seventeenth century. Modern capitalism (observed Pirenne) did not come from medieval ‘capitalists’, that is, men of capital, but rather from their destruction. The basic contradiction in this phase lay between the rising small and middle bourgeoisie and the ‘merchant or usurer capitalists’ with their roots in feudal economy.[584]
*
Much more might be said on these points, but we have briefly considered the ways in which European feudalism differed from previous serf economies or the contemporary ones of the east, and how it alone led to a bourgeois society and industrialism. The antecedents of that later development lay in the distinctive nature of European feudalism with its rich and complex texture, social and economic, its entangled pattern of conflicts and contradictions inside a strong evolving structure. The pattern was too varied and vital, too full of conflicts, for any simple system of feudal exactions to settle down over society as in the east; the feudal structure was too firm to allow the variety to fall away into localism, into patches of particular or separated out interests seriously impeding the general social evolution.
In that evolution England had an important part to play — a part which can be understood only if we realize what happened in the Norman conquest, and how the juxtaposition and ultimate fusion of the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman contributions worked out. Conversely, the Conquest itself and its more immediate effects can only be understood if they are seen in the wider context of the whole trend of feudalism, and of the forms and forces in it which finally issued in a new kind of society.
Appendix – Note on Norsemen and the Heavy Plough
A key implement in bringing about the agricultural advances on which the medieval west reposed was a new kind of plough, a wheeled plough with mouldboard. Plinius shows that wheeled ploughs, doubtless Celtic in origin, were known in the Po valley in his time; but the new implement had many important new features. It could move easily from field to field, and was made of three main elements (coulter fixed to beam, which struck vertically into the earth; flat share, perpendicular to coulter, which cut through roots; mouldboard turning soil to left or right and driving a furrow that allowed drainage and could free mineral substances in the undersoil). This plough begot the long field (contrasted with the square field which comes from cross-ploughing with a lighter plough). It could work rich alluvial soils, and needed greater traction-power: yokes of four pairs of oxen, not a pair. So peasants had to pool their oxen and the long strip led to cooperative methods and the openfield system.
Where did the new plough originate? Already in the last century B.C. the Belgic tribesmen had a plough turning the furrow-slice to the right, so that the farmer ploughed in ‘lands’ or ridges. The origins perhaps go further back to the struggles of farmers on the north German plain, when the change from a dry sub-boreal phase to a wet cold sub-Atlantic one came about, with a lessening of available open ground and an increase of heather: see Curwen, 66f; Hilton (10); Payne, 97; Haudricourt (2).
Attempts have been made to trace the advent of the plough proper by taking aratrum and carruca as scratch-plough and heavy plough — which they are not. Nor can we take O.E. sulh as scratch-plough with small team; for Kentish sulung, derived from sulh, meant a unit for ploughing subdivided into four yokes, each of two oxen. The origin of our plough is unsure. Latin plovum appears among Lombards in N. Italy in 643; in England ploh is not found before 1100, certainly derived from O. Norse plogr. Slavs had twenty-six terms, with key-word plug, which is not Slavonic, Germanic, Celtic or Roman; the Slavs got their word-complex by the end of 6th c. (before their dispersal): LW (3), 49ff.
It has been suggested that the openfield system did not exist in early AS times and was brought in from Scandinavia; cap. 42 of Ine’s laws of late 7th c. is taken as a revision of text in Alfredian rescension. But no, the laws not only mention strips and common pasture, but also refer to mixed ownership of parcels in arable and meadow, and to the joint responsibility of villagers for fencing crops to keep animals out till harvest: a matter often dealt with in later manorial records. Also the term yardland proves the earlier existence of openfields. In the 7th c. ‘the yard of land undoubtedly had its primitive meaning of a tenement formed by detaching one rood — a strip of arable one rod or geard in width — from every acre in a hide. The use of the term is itself proof of the existence of openfields in 7th c. Wessex’ (S (5), 309; Hilton (10), 97f).
In Scandinavia the unit was the bol, divided into 8 attingar; 2 attingar made up a mark: typical estate of a middle peasant. They were equivalent to a pair of oxen. No texts indeed cite the bol before 1085, but it is claimed that traces of it appear in Norman communities towards 900. England shows no sign of the Norse system; but it is argued that the oxgang corresponds to it, with no relation to the hide, the AS basis. The Normans on arrival found a system they could recognize as akin to their own; they used the Latinized term carruca for the basic unit, which was divided into 8 parts or bovates, the latter in turn grouped to form 4 virgates in each carrucate. This system depended on the eight ox plough, unlike the hide: LW (3), 52ff; contrast Bouard (6) on Norman openfields in 13th c.
But in fact the virgate or yardland was a subdivision of the hide; and the hide was used in Danelaw till the start of the 11th c., and there is no evidence of ploughland as a unit in Scandinavia till the 13th c. The change in England from hide to ploughland may well be part of general reorganization under Aethelred in his last years, when the Midland shires were created: Sawyer (2), 172, also on the duodecimal system as a sign of Norse influence; Mercia: C. S. Taylor. We must then drop the thesis that the Danes brought the heavy plough and openfields into England; but they may well at an earlier date have played their part in evolving that plough. We saw how in Alfred’s day the horse was being used in the far north; the Norsemen may have adopted or developed advanced methods found in the Danelaw. (Sawyer (4) demolishes LW on stirrups.)
For a ridge-and-furrow field system in Wales (Hen Domen, Montgomeryshire) see Med. Arch. xv, 1971. It lies round and under a castle of the Conquest period. Normally the field — outfield system was followed (with one common field permanently cultivated, and supplemented by outfields, temporary cultivations of waste. This system operated in neighbouring Shropshire till early 13th c. But through lowland regions of central Wales some form of openfield agriculture was widespread in the Middle Ages. The hamlet linked with Hen Domen probably belong to thegns Sewar, Oslac, and Azor in 1066).
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For some abbreviations, see Notes & Abbreviations before the Foreword. Also: Med. (Medieval); Eng. (England or English); RKOR (Register d. Kaiserurkunden d. ästräm. Reiches 1924-32, F. Dolger.)
*
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A
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*
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