Beyond Lord and Peasants

Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-Modern Europe

AAVV

• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9788437092621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

El proceso de estratificación económica dentro de las sociedades rurales durante la Edad Media y el período Premoderno es el eje central de este volumen. Reputados expertos y jóvenes investigadores analizan las élites rurales y su relación con la aparición del capitalismo agrario desde diversas perspectivas a través de las regiones europeas: desde Wiltshire (Inglaterra), el Condado de Flandes y el Ducado de Brabante (Países Bajos) hasta el Reino de Valencia (Corona de Aragón). A través de diversos métodos históricos, se recurre a una amplia gama de fuentes variadas como crónicas de la corte, testamentos, leyes, manuales de terratenientes institucionales y registros notariales. El volumen es en definitiva, una lectura esencial tanto para los especialistas en la historia rural, así como para el público más general interesado en las sociedades preindustriales.

1. FRACTURES IN THE COMMUNITY: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Frederic Aparisi Romero & Vicent Royo Pérez

University of Valencia

Historiography has traditionally provided us with a rigid and schematic picture of Medieval rural society, divided into two large opposed blocks, lords and peasants, which determined it up until the end of the Ancien Régime. This discourse depicted a monolithic rural community, made up by a mass of peasants bereft of any internal differences and only concerned with subsistence. The peasant population was therefore presented as passive and subordinate, emotionally and physically bound to the land, and living in a harmonious world of collective solidarity. All this took place within the context of the manor, the true object of study for many historians over the course of decades. Furthermore, as Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie proposed, peasants lacked any kind of social, political or technical initiative, and they were subjected to lordly coercion and domination. The peasantry’s only answer to this was reacting violently to abuses and arbitrariness. Following Marxist precepts of class struggle, the conflicts that took place in rural society were interpreted as a part of a century-long opposition between lords and peasants, who rebelled against lordly abuses and their increasingly precarious living conditions due to the imbalances caused by a series of plagues and shortages that took place from the 14th to the 16th century. As a consequence, peasant revolts against the nobility spread over all of Western Europe, becoming particularly important in France (Fourquin, 1972), England (Hilton, 1973), Catalonia (Vicens, 1945) and Germany (Moeller, 1982), among many others. Moreover, at the time, it was also held that these revolts were orchestrated from the cities and that the peasantry only played a secondary role in a broader struggle meant to transform the social system. Thus, a vision of immobility and stability in the rural world settled in, reinforcing the perception of fixed and rigid social categories, without any leeway for variations in time and space to help explain social mobility.

This stagnation and the vision of a shapeless peasant mass, subjected to large structures, were highly characteristic of French historiography from the classic works of Marc Bloch to the 1960s and 1970s (Le Roy Ladurie, 1974: 673-692). However, as with all generalizing assertions, there was also room for nuances. Bloch himself pointed out the consolidation of intermediate groups within peasant society, the ministres (Bloch, 1928). Years later, Phillip Dollinger, in his study on post-Carolingian Bavaria, pointed to the existence of wealthy families named villivi or Meier, ce sont des tenanciers exploitant les tenures les plus vastes, les cours. These villici, possesseurs d’une cour, forment une sorte d’aristocratie paysanne (Dollinger, 1949: 434-435).

Ever since the early 20th century English historiography, unlike its French counterpart, proved more sensitive to the stratification of Medieval peasant society. Richard Tawney pointed out the economic importance of the farmers who emerged from the 14th century crisis (Tawney, 1912: 136-176). According to Rodney Hilton, the stratification of rural communities could be perceived from the very first written accounts of them, around the 9th and 10th centuries (Hilton, 1949: 117-136; 1973: 32-35). Inequalities did nothing but deepen throughout the Medieval period, although they became most apparent from the second half of the 14th century onwards. The decrease in the population and the increase in dynamism in the land market allowed wealthier peasants to constantly expand their holdings, employing hired labour to manage them, and sending an ever greater part of their output to the market. These local elites dominated the community both on the economic and political field, and they often became its representatives. However, this did not preclude them from also becoming the lord’s trusted men, becoming a part of his small administration (Hilton, 1978: 271-284). In any case, neither the services they provided to the lord nor their level of wealth prevented them from participating in, and often leading the revolt of the English peasantry in 1381 (Hilton, 1973: 176-185). Nevertheless, according to Rodney Hilton, in spite of this internal differentiation, the community remained a strong institution, because the common interests that united its members were more important than that which divided them (Hilton, 1975: 3-19).

Continental historiography was not indifferent to the new lines of interpretation from the isles. Indeed, within the very discourse that underlined large structures, immobility and homogeneity in rural society, a series of nuances were introduced which showed the importance of the little pieces that made up the social structure, its mobility and its heterogeneity. This change in the perception of the rural world was due to the introduction of new interpretative paradigms and, especially, to the analysis of social and economic relations in the countryside from a new perspective. From this moment, the rural community and, along with it, its inhabitants, emerged to stand on their own as objects of analysis in historiographic discourse. The sentence with which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie opened the preface of his work on Montaillou is highly illustrative of this historiographic paradigm shift: A qui veut connaître le paysan des anciens et très anciens régimes, ne font pas défaut les grandes synthèses - régionales, nationales, occidentales: je pense aux travaux de Goubert, Poitrineau, Fourquin, Duby, Bloch... ce qui manque parfois, c’est le regard directe: le témoignage sans intermédiaire, que porte le paysan sur lui-même. Moreover, he intended to carry out a study that was plus précis et plus introspectif encore sur les paysans de chair et d’os, to allow them, et même [...] tout un village en tant que tel, (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975: 9) a chance to speak out on themselves.

According to this new perspective, the rural community was the result of the conjunction of a number of peasant families that shared a same physical space, a specific legal and institutional framework provided by their lord, as well as a series of behavioural patterns which defined their basic characteristics. After decades spent studying large structures and struggles between social classes, peasant families, which were hegemonic in the organization of the social, political and economic framework of the rural world, became the centre of attention.

Taking the small domestic holding as the basic cell for production and social framing, rural communities were progressively dissected and defined in their inner workings starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Small domestic exploitations were also conceived as the basic piece for the payment of rents and taxes, as a sufficiently autonomous entity that was capable of escaping from the tentacles of the market, and which emerged reinforced from the crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Bois, 1976). The goal was to analyze the mechanisms employed by peasant families to achieve the self-sufficiency they desired, to pay for rents and taxes, guarantee the perpetuation of the family body, facing the lord and overcoming difficulties in times of crisis. The conclusion common to all the studies carried out was that these communities were far from being homogenous, but that, rather, there were deep-seated internal divisions and inequalities that could be traced back to the High Middle Ages. Thus, both in the Latium (Toubert, 1973) and in Catalonia (Bonnassie, 1975-1976) in the 9th-11th centuries, the presence of boni homines, who emerged as representatives of peasant communities and who participated in solving disputes in the court with their lords, was detected. These families were, however, more perceptible in the Late Middle Ages due to the greater availability and variety of sources. Thus, the social and economic transformations that took place in the European rural world in the Late Middle Ages, with periods of growth, crisis and reconstruction, generated significant processes of social, political and economic differentiation within rural communities.

The analysis of patterns of wealth and the records held by notaries and lords revealed the extant differentiation between different peasant families based on economic, political and social criteria that were more or less common to different territories in Europe. Material wealth, mechanisms for social reproduction, implication in local politics and relations with the lord defined the position occupied by each family in the internal hierarchy of the community. This social scale, however, was suffering constant changes, both upwards and downwards, as peasants shifted from one social station to another based on unforeseen aspects, such as the death of the head of the family, or other, carefully elaborated ones, such as strategic marriages (Furió, 1982: 141-144).

This entire process of peasant differentiation became clearer from the 1990s onwards, once the community had been stu...