Comments on: Feudal Transformations VI: Chris Wickham suggests

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:14:03 +0000

Paying in coin is good when prices are going up, because your render costs you less produce to get; but paying in kind is better when prices are going down. I think that that’s independent of erosion of feudal ties; but there may be social factors about protection and what justice one can hope for from other channels that make people eager for lordship. The idea of frontier colonisation by bold pioneers doesn’t make a lot of sense in these circumstances—it’s hard to be less protected and more vulnerable—which is why historians like Gaspar Feliu have been arguing that frontier settlement must have been under lordship all along.

As for preservation at Sant Benet, well, they did keep a lot. Elsewhere in the blog you can find me using the phrase ‘preservation by neglect’, but here I think it’s simpler; after Aió had died, they would have full property of the estate anyway, and then the old charter would be more useful than the new one because of its tenure being more ancient. On the other hand, any descendants of Aió and Guifré might be able to challenge Sant Benet for it just as Aió had unless the new one were kept too. Sant Benet were covered both ways.

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:08:35 +0000

In considering this I realize, first, that the ‘replies’ get narrower with each iteration, and secondly, that the examples I might offer come from periods of “eroding” feudalism, times when economic conditions suggested to peasants that they would rather pay feudal dues in coin than in kind. Presumably, in times when people were eager to enter feudal relationships with more powerful people, there would be a lot less bickering and arguing about the whole matter.

The case of Sant Benet de Bages is interesting. You wonder if they kept the original verdict for a reason, or simply because it seemed too valuable to lightly discard. Heaven knows I have quite a bit of stuff in the second category.

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:48:17 +0000

The point about burning charters is a fair one, though all the examples I can think of are modern. The witnesses have to be people whose word would be respected; the article by Chris Wickham in Wendy Davies's and Paul Fouracre's The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe has, if I remember rightly, a case where a witness is refused because of immoral character but that was in a very procedurally-developed system. The ultimate aim of a legal system, after all, is to maintain peace; if it fails it has to deploy a lot of continuous coercion. Early medieval society doesn't really have that apparatus of enforcement, and lasting settlements require a consensus that the outcome is acceptable to enough of the community to hold it down. Lastly, yes, indeed, you are quite right: our only clues to the workings of unwritten agreements are when later documents refer to them having been made. In that line, and also relevant to my point about consensus there, you may find this post illustrative.

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:50:03 +0000

First stipulating to my almost total ignorance, in the lay readings I’ve done I’ve noted that the lords often tried to keep the documents in a strongbox, and peasants, in riots and rebellion, tried to destroy the documents. Whether that is the general case I cannot say.

I have developed the strong suspicion that one of the more important questions about the witnesses is whether they were carrying swords. I’ll confess to some confusion as to how we would know how verbal agreements turned out if we didn’t have a written record.

Incidentally, thanks for this ‘transformation’ blogging. I’ve been interested in this period for some time but unable to think of the right questions to ask, so this is all very interesting to me.

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:32:23 +0000

Well, indeed, but in an age where few people can read it is perhaps less trustworthy than the consensus of a number of witnesses. A document can after all be faked, and many many cases in the early medieval material show documents being challenged, even ones that were technically authentic. There is a threshold of generalised literacy or, at least, familiarity with documentary processes, that has to be crossed before documents become a security in themselves, rather than just a way to spread the consensus among your potential witnesses.

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:32:41 +0000

It seems rather obvious that a written document is a security that can be traded or sold (or stolen or burned) in a way that a verbal agreement cannot.

By: The glorious 46th ed of 4SH « Testimony of the spade

The glorious 46th ed of 4SH « Testimony of the spade — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:24:41 +0000

[...] a medieval note one can find shelter in A corner of Tenth-Century Europeand read about feudal transformations. This post is a summary of a longer discussion on the topic [...]

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:04:13 +0000

I like this, and will credit you if I wind up arguing it, but I think it’s a secondary cause. The reason there are more lords is not because the structures are disintegrating and anyone can get in on the act, though this is a factor in some places like the Midi I suppose. It’s also and perhaps mostly coming from the general increase in resource base: there is now enough surplus to make being a local lord on a small territory viable whereas in 900 maybe there wasn’t. If you have twenty lords, it’s because there’s enough to support them and their armed retinues; before maybe there was only enough to support ten, and therefore the `public’ power was still a better deal than trying to go it on one’s own resources. At the basic end of things I still think what’s going on is that economic growth increases the range of options available to everyone, and that this inevitably privileges those who can pay for military force with the new revenue. All the same, what you say is a consequence of this process that I think is extremely plausible and that I don’t think I’ve seen suggested before…

By: magistra

magistra — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:05:34 +0000

This has got me thinking more about when it actually makes sense for a lord to write down details of what the peasants owe him. If you start from the principle that a lord’s rough economic aim was to take as much of the surplus of the peasants as possible while leaving them still able to survive (the lord wants neither to kill them nor for them to get richer and hence less biddable), then writing things down is actually a bad idea, because it makes it harder for the lord to grab any additional surplus on the basis of ‘custom’ if the peasants do start to do better. Writing things down in detail only makes sense for the lord if he’s worried that he’s going to lose the dues he already takes on a customary basis: written dues provide a ceiling for what can be claimed, but also a floor below which what is claimed cannot fall.

In which case, maybe what changes is that there is more competition from other lords in the same area. There are certainly more secular lords in France in the period (and in Tuscany and Catalonia as well?), while everywhere with the monastic reforms there are new and newly aggressive monastic ‘lords’. So are the detailed records of dues mainly about lords protecting themselves from other lords by specifying exactly what their ’share’ of the local peasantry is? If you have twenty ‘lords’ in a eleventh century pagus rather than two or three in the Carolingian one you may need this kind of specificity rather than relying on less detailed verbal agreements.

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:49:45 +0000

I remember, late, that there is also a recent review article by Simon MacLean in Early Medieval Europe; full cite is:

S. MacLean, “Apocalypse and revolution: Europe around the year 1000″ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 15 no. 1 (Oxford 2007), pp. 86-106.

That’s probably as up-to-date as you can currently get in English!

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:41:23 +0000

Luckily I have Jstor access. PDFs all neatly arranged in a folder to be read. Thanks, much appreciated!

By: Jonathan Jarrett

Jonathan Jarrett — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:21:56 +0000

There are two small clusters of articles on the Transformation, couched as a debate, one in English and one in French. The French one is Poly & Bournazel versus Barthélemy, and so mostly illuminating about small bits of France and how Duby’s students can fight with each other. Barthélemy also contributes to the English one, which was all responses to an article by Thomas Bisson, but as three other people do too and not all work on France, it’s more useful. References:

Bisson, T. N., “The `Feudal Revolution’” in Past and Present No. 142 (Oxford 1994), pp. 6-42

Barthélemy, D., “Debate: the feudal revolution. I”, transl. J. Birrell, in Past and Present No. 152 (Oxford 1996), pp. 196-205

White, S D., “The ‘feudal revolution’: comment. II” in Past and Present No. 152 (Oxford 1996), pp. 205-223

Reuter, T., “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution’. III” in Past and Present no. 155 (Oxford 1997), pp. 177-195

Wickham, C., “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution’. IV” in Past and Present no. 155 (Oxford 1997), pp. 197-208

Bisson, T. N., “Debate: the `Feudal Revolution’. Reply” in Past and Present No. 155 (Oxford 1997), pp. 208-234

Some, but I don’t think all, of these are online at FindArticles for what help that may be.

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:59:35 +0000

I suppose I could accompany that with wondering whether there is any book, either by a single author or a collection of articles on the theme, that really focuses on the Feudal Transformation debate and would be suitable as an introduction. Since Jean-Paul Poly & Eric Bournazel’s work, despite the promising title, doesn’t seem like the right thing to pick up first.

It’s come up in my courses, but not as something picked apart to excess. Too much of my personal reading on the topic has been the Anglo-Saxon–>Norman transition.

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:26:46 +0000

You’ve posted it before, of course, but I always love the Feudal Transformation diagram. Still need to clear the hurdle between where I get the joke and a number of the references to where I can give a nice evidence-based disquisition or even ramble concerning my thoughts on the matter (which interests me a lot). Someday…