In Montaillou the Church often opposed the interests of the clan but never really changed the system, apart from enforcing the ban on marrying first cousins, but ignoring the prohibition on marrying second cousins[314]—indicating the Church cannot be considered the principal cause of family patterns in Europe.
This freedom from extended kinship ties in the northwest also unleashed the acquisitive drives of individuals, leading to large individual differences in success in acquiring land and other forms of wealth.[315] As argued by Gregory Clark in his Farewell to Alms, this in turn led to natural selection for industriousness and intelligence in the pre-nineteenth century context where wealth was positively correlated with number of children.[316], [317]
The differences between northwest and southern Europe have been persistent in the contemporary era, although there has been some change in southern Europe. In the south, leaving home typically coincides closely with marriage and finding a job.[318] Economic distress tends to be shared by the entire family in the south, but only the directly affected individuals in the north. Older people prefer to live with their family in the south (75 percent), not the north (25 percent), and in the U.S. elderly people who live with their children tend to come from southern European family backgrounds. They tend to be more socially conservative than people with northern European backgrounds.
Because of weaker family ties, there are higher levels of homelessness in northern Europe (because people tend to be left to fend for themselves), as well as higher levels of loneliness and suicide. On the other hand, individual initiative and dynamism are much more characteristic of northwest European societies, traits that are “so important for democracy and civil society in the West.”[319]
Egalitarian Trends in Northwest Europe
Finally, because of the contemporary importance of an ideology of egalitarianism throughout the West, it is important to note an increasing egalitarianism developing after the Middle Ages in northwest Europe. “The story here that has only begun to be told is nonetheless one of the emergence of a popular egalitarian movement that was uniquely northwestern European in its origins.”[320] This is usually explained by elite diffusion, but Hartman argues that “more important for the appearance of equality as a popular political ideal was the shared domestic governance most people had experienced from the Middle Ages.”[321] Hartman emphasizes that, despite ups and downs in particular historic eras, there was a general trend in northwest Europe for men’s and women’s lives to become more similar—a trend that continues into the present.[322] Paternal authority, never as strong as in southern Europe, became even weaker.
By the end of the seventeenth century, almost half of workers in northwest Europe were wage earners in independent nuclear families without extensive kinship ties, and therefore had to rely on themselves rather than kin. This led to increasing influence for women within the family and to ideologies of egalitarianism and individual rights.[323]
As noted, the moderate individualist societies of northwest Europe were conducive to women acting independently and having a more equal relationship with their husbands. Even in the nineteenth century, a time when many historians have said women had lower status and withdrew from work, women were partners and “were required to keep households afloat”[324] “One irony is that long-range planning, risk-taking, personal responsibility, and independence have yet to be recognized as mass behaviors generated by the demands of life in distinctive sorts of households—in other words, as normative conduct required of everyone in late-marriage, weak-family settings.”[325]
Northwest European Non-manorialized Areas
Another difficulty for the theory that manorialism produced European individualism is that several highly individualistic areas of northwest Europe never developed a manorial system. It is therefore a difficult but critical question as to why this happened given that, as noted above, the manorial system has been proposed as the most important causal factor in the development of European individualism. In areas near the North Sea (Friesland), there was instead a grazing economy involving strong associations of peasants, and lords did not have as much power—proposed within the contextualist perspective as due to a marshy topography where open-field agriculture was not possible.[326]
The open-field system was not found in East Anglia, Kent, or other areas of the “ancient countryside” which were characterized by “scattered and isolated settlements.”[327] East Anglia was populated mainly by emigrants from Friesland, Kent by emigrants from Jutland. Manorialism leaves unexplained how these areas eventually became characterized by the moderately individualist family structure typical of Germanic peoples. Moreover, the wetlands common in East Anglia were drained and yielded to intensive agriculture, so that, for example, Norfolk county in East Anglia was as developed and populated in 1300 as 500 years later, so the topography was suitable for open-field agriculture.[328]
On the other hand, in central England, dominated by the Germanic Saxons, the manorial system of open-field agriculture developed early. Manorialism never developed in southern France or in Byzantine areas of (southern) Italy, but did in Longobardia (settled by the Germanic Lombards). A recent study comparing northern and southern Italy found more intensive kinship relations in southern Italy as well as less prevalence of donating blood.[329] Individualists are more willing to contribute to public goods like blood donations that will help strangers.
Germanic versus Irish Kinship
Germanic Kinship
In Germanic areas, the Sippe (the Germanic kindred network) is “rarely encountered in the early sources,”[330] indicating a lessened emphasis on extended kinship dating from the earliest periods. “By the time Sippe appears in historical texts, it is already a structure in decline.”[331] The most explicit early references occur in laws and charters of Lombards, Bavarians, and Alamanni, but these are in the Christian era. Sippen adjudicated disputes and may have had some “residual rights” to the property of its members.[332] Herlihy suggests a Sippe included around 50 families and that they were constantly reforming and splitting. Like the Irish sept discussed below, the Sippe had a territory, but within the territory there was individual ownership.[333] This last point also undercuts the theory that the manorial system gave rise to individual property ownership as a result of incentives provided by lords under conditions of depopulation. Among both the Irish and the Germans, individual ownership of land co-existed with the kinship groups (septs and Sippen respectively), indicating that this aspect of individualism predated the manorial system.
Indeed, Herlihy claims that the Sippe was never of prime importance:
The larger kin group and households of some type had existed side by side since time immemorial. Moreover, the Sippe always played a secondary role in production and reproduction, the two functions which households have classically assumed. And these basic functions, often mentioned in the documentation, lend to households a special visibility. It was not the small household that replaced the Sippe; rather, larger social groupings, based on territory, edged it into the shadows. And the households continued to be centers of production and reproduction, even as the larger society was changing.[334]
The Germanic Sippe … was weakening and losing functions and visibility on the Continent very early in the Middle Ages, [while Ireland] long clung to its archaic institutions.[335]
This fits with the general point that the Germanic Indo-European cultures (and related Scandinavian cultures) had institutions above family-based structures, in particular, the Männerbünde (see Chapter 2).
Irish Kinship
The Irish did not develop a manorial system despite a varied topography; although there were some similarities to manorialism, it “did not generate a familia.”[336] They had what would appear to be a system intermediate between the moderate collectivism of southern Europe and the moderate individualism of Germanic areas. The Irish were divided into tribes and septs (similar to the Germanic Sippe). Lineage was important: there was strong memory for l
ineages, typically including the founder within living memory, suggesting instability and continual splitting and reforming.[337]
Septs had recognized boundaries that were defended against outsiders—a marker of collectivism. Nevertheless, within the sept, ownership of land was individual, not communal, so there were differences in wealth. Septs likely consisted of 120–256 households. Marriage was monogamous, and there was considerable emphasis on the avunculate (i.e., a close relationship between a brother and his sister’s son). Evolutionary anthropologists have explained the avunculate as a means of dealing with paternity uncertainty: a woman is virtually certain that a child is hers and a brother can be certain that he is biologically related to his sister; as a result, kinship traced through the mother is more certain than through the father. Congruent with this, Herlihy notes that sexual relationships outside marriage were accepted.[338]
Unlike Germanic cultures, the fundamentally kinship-based nature of Irish culture can be seen even quite late in the historical record. Data from 1450–1550 indicate major differences between the Gaelic areas of Ireland and the Anglo-Norman areas, with non-kinship based religious confraternities commonly occurring in the Anglo-Norman areas but absent in the Gaelic areas—likely due to the “exceptional strength” of kinship institutions in the Gaelic areas.[339] “The erenagh clan … provided a ready-made kinship network, the absence of which would have necessitated the creation of artificial bonds of fraternity and sorority.[340]
The Ethnic Argument
These points are consistent with an ethnic perspective on family structure in which the manorial system is an ethnic creation of the Germanic peoples, as opposed to a blank slate perspective in which the manorial system—conceptualized as an accident of history—created a context in which individualism flourished.
To elaborate: the implicit theory in the background of the contextualist perspective is a universalist model in which all humans have the same tendencies to embrace individualism if given the opportunity provided uniquely by the manorial system which came into being as a response to a unique set of conditions which followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire. My response is that there were already strong tendencies toward individualism in Europe among prototypical Indo-European groups, certainly including the Germanic groups, which likely gave rise to the manorial system in the first place.
It is noteworthy that in Germania (c. 100 ad) Tacitus describes relationships between masters and slaves in a manner remarkably consistent with the manorial system of the early Middle Ages:
The other slaves [i.e., those who did not voluntarily become slaves as a result of losing a dangerous game of skill] are not employed after our [Roman] manner with distinct domestic duties assigned to them, but each one has the management of a house and home of his own. The master requires from the slave a certain quantity of grain, of cattle, and of clothing, as he would from a tenant, and this is the limit of subjection.[341]
This embodies the essence of the manorial system, with slaves having substantial autonomy while nevertheless having obligations to the lord; if Tacitus is correct, this system long preceded incorporation of the Germanic tribes into the Empire. Similarly, George Caspar Homans notes that “Wessex and Mercia may have known for ages, in England and in the German homeland, a rural social order that more nearly resembled what later came to be thought of as typical of a manor than ever did the society of East Anglia, Kent, and Friesland.”[342] Homans thus agrees with Tacitus: the essentials of the manorial system may well have existed centuries before the medieval period in Germanic areas.
As noted above, Tacitus also states that the late-marriage pattern was apparent among the German tribes in his time. This was quite unlike the practice in the Roman Empire where girls were typically married shortly after menarche.[343]
The ethnic perspective is also consistent with the fact that in southern Europe, family structure was based on kinship relations despite being part of the Frankish Empire and having a system where lords were due rents and other obligations. In other words, if the essence of manorialism is a system of rents and obligations to a lord, such a system did not lessen the importance of kinship relations in southern France and Italy. As Hartman notes, “despite the influence of Church, lord, and monarch, the village leadership on a day-to-day-basis came from the heads of the forty or so ostals” (i.e., land parcels dominated by particular kinship groups).[344] In Montaillou the lord did impose a variety of taxes and rents on the ostals,[345] as in the manorial system, but the land remained in the control of the kinship group—whereas in the Frankish heartland it was owned by individual nuclear families. In other words, in the south the system of rents accommodated to the moderately collectivist family environment, while in the north the system of rents accommodated to the moderately individualist environment. Elite domination did not change family structure but accommodated to it.
I conclude that, consistent with Tacitus’s remarks, the Germanic peoples had a greater tendency toward creating the manorial system than other groups and that the system was in place long before the Frankish conquests of the early medieval period. Germans also had a greater tendency toward individualism than the Irish (and southern and eastern Europeans) long before the establishment of the manorial system in the early medieval period.
Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages in conditions of depopulation and the consequent need for labor, lords may well have been incentivized to grant families more individual autonomy. Unlike the situation of labor shortage in India mentioned above, under these conditions the natural tendencies of northwest Europeans came to the fore and the power of the wider kinship group declined further. The system had already established patterns of individual inheritance that generated differences in family wealth, and they therefore eschewed whatever remained of the ties of the wider kinship group with relative ease. They naturally adopted personal responsibility rather than collectivist familism because it was already ingrained in their culture; the Sippe faded into a historical memory.
The importance of incentives provided to laborers in facilitating individualism (but not causing it) can be seen in Holland where lords offered attractive terms to settlers willing to farm newly cultivable land:
The consequences of this process were significant for large parts of Holland from the tenth century onwards. Both the Bishop of Utrecht and the Count of Holland (but sometimes also local lords) lured colonists to the scarcely inhabited marshes by offering personal freedom from serfdom and full peasant property rights to the land. The rural people who reclaimed the Holland peat lands between the tenth and fifteenth centuries barely knew of the manor or seignorial dues, although admittedly recent archaeological evidence has pointed to the existence of some limited manorial [estates] from as early as the ninth century. In fact, many of the colonists in the Holland peat-lands originated from heavily manorialised societies and looked to escape the constrictions of serfdom further inland. Each colonist received a standardised strip of land of their own but also enjoyed favourable jurisdictions over the waste (recht van opstrek) which allowed all colonists to reclaim as much of the marshes as they wanted by extending their linear plots until they met up with a natural boundary or were stopped by another property … .
The same process can be traced for the Frisian and German coastal marshes too. Through this reclamation context, there also developed a peasant society characterised by highly egalitarian distribution of property. Landownership was small-scale and in the hands of peasant farmers themselves, with agriculture in the initial phases highly unspecialised. Aristocratic landownership was minimal; only 5–10 percent of the total area in the late Middle Ages. This free peasant property structure remained in place from the moment that reclamation took off up to the 1500s.
The reclamation of the marshes of medieval Holland created legally free and relatively egalitarian societies, which in turn impacted on the modes of exploitation undertaken there. Land was worked by the people that colonised it and owned it almost outright—the
peasants. What emerged from the earliest moments of colonisation all the way through to the 1500s was a proliferation of small to medium-sized farms, which were exploited by the peasant household directly. …
Medieval Holland was characterised by egalitarian distribution of property, high levels of freedom and autonomy for its inhabitants, secure rights to property and a modern system of property transfer, a wide range of specialised and commercialised (non-agricultural) economic activities, and a flexible and unrestricted market for commodities and capital. [346]
It is noteworthy that Friesland is included in this summary, because Frisians emigrated to East Anglia in the fifth century—500 years before the Dutch land reclamation project. However, in East Anglia they also resisted manorialism. In support of this fifth-century emigration scenario, Homans notes linguistic evidence as well as contemporary written sources (e.g., Bede), and archeology.[347] In these areas, unlike manorialized areas, there were independent holdings (i.e., without labor obligations to a lord) located near small villages (“hamlets”).[348] Over time, the holdings became unequal, so that by the end of the thirteenth century “irregularity is the rule rather than the exception.”[349] Such conditions were not conducive to manorialism.
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