It is an established tradition of European historiography to concentrate on the small handful of the very powerful. There are two powerful explanations for this persistent distortion of our view of the past. First, almost the whole of our written documentation, and often a large part of the archaeological evidence, tells us about them. Medieval history has for a long time appeared as a tedious sequence of trivial conflicts between lords and clerics. The second, more significant reason is that this tenth of the population ruled over the others and determined their destiny, especially in the countryside. Their problems have come to flood the history of the period: ‘feudal society’ or ‘feudalism’ are the terms used. Let us try to sort out the essentials, beyond what has already been said when we discussed the family.
Wealth at this time undoubtedly meant land; those who owned large chunks of it ruled over others. It is practically impossible to make any assessment of the size of these great estates before about 1050–80; even those of the church evade any estimate. True, the hundreds. of thousands of hectares possessed by the great monasteries of the early middle ages had been partially dispersed, but it has been suggested that ecclesiastical lands amounted to about 25–30% of the total, and that public property and the lands of the warrior aristocracy amounted together to about as much again. The slaves and tenants just discussed lived on these estates, which were generally exploited indirectly: these were to form the basis of the seigneuries still being established. But at this time it was the ties between men which were of greatest significance, and which wove lineage solidarities on the one hand and the great mass of dependants and servants on the other into the 'familia', the word used to refer to the collectivity of those who lived around and were dependent on a lord.
The formation of a loyal but greedy clientele around the rich, who expected aid and counsel from it, goes a long way back and is an inherent characteristic of an inegalitarian society. At the time we are considering, the difficulties of subsistence and the dangers of the environment could only lead to a general spread of such accretions of 'amici', 'parentes' and 'homines' around anyone owning significant granaries. If besides this he was also invested with some public function, even if this was only theoretical, the pressures making for such an accretion would only be the greater. The presence in or near to the lord’s residence of 'nutriti' or 'prebendarii', dependants or impoverished relatives whom the lord sustained, 'familiares', 'criados', 'gasindi', 'geneats', to cite a few varied terms, charged with guarding the lord or some other task, created a familial atmosphere which has led to the description of this whole aristocratic ambience as ‘smelling of the household loaf’. This complex served as a basis for at least three elements.
The man who fed others and could protect them (the ‘giver of bread’, the Saxon 'blaford'), whose riches translated into generous presents and favours and an open table, lived 'nobiliter', that is to say without calculating, giving openly, even wastefully.He who did not was thus 'ignobilis', ignoble, as was the case with the pauper or the merchant. The immediate problem is thus the nature of ‘nobility’, which has so greatly divided historians. Some see in it a supreme group, the only one to enjoy all the elements of liberty, even in the face of public authority where this existed. Others have supposed that in the tenth century it was the blood link with the Carolingians which alone conferred nobility; some have established a link with a real or supposed devolution of public authority. But it is generally agreed that, in this period at least, nobility was an indication of pure blood which was kept in being by a systematic endogamy practised in spite of the efforts of the church to break up its rivals. That did not make every great landowner automatically a ‘noble’, but he could live like one, could aspire to become one, and nothing stops us assuming that his peasants knew something about this too.
By contrast, the establishing of firm personal ties between lord and dependants did not have to take account of this criterion of ‘nobility’. One is surrounded by those commended to one because it is better to keep them on a short rein. We know, moreover, that the Carolingians actively encouraged these practices, which were old established but seemed to them a means of moulding society more closely around them. The rites of vassalage are known from the end of the eighth century,and throughout our period they survived and spread. It should be noted, however, that theyw ere still not clearly fixed, for in 1020 Bishop Fulbert of Chartres was to explain to the duke of Aquitaine the duties – all negative, incidentally– which he could expect from homage.8 Naturally, it is the material counterpart to this engagement which is of concern to us, because the commended person, having become the man and hence in theory the equal of the more powerful lord, had to perform tasks (these were still called 'opera', ‘works’, in Saxony in 936 9) to justify the gift received. At any rate this was a frequent arrangement, though vassalage without a material counterpart is still clearly visible in Germany around 1020, and equally we find grants of land without homage in Italy around the same time. Such grants were also old-established usage, simple temporary loans of land ('laen', 'Lehn', 'prestimonio'), then permanent concessions soon to become hereditary.This is not the place to survey the development of ‘feudalism’ and the distortions which marked it from 1020 onwards, but its role in reinforcing the aristocratic group at a time when, as we have seen, the peasantry were beginning to form their own solidarities made a significant contribution to the hardening of rural society.
This was especially true if the bearing of arms was to become the virtual monopoly of a restricted group. The idea that every free man was a soldier had never vanished. Beyond the Channel, the Anglo-Saxon 'fyrd' was still not seriously shaken; but on the continent more and more use was made of heavy cavalry, which excluded the peasant and reduced him to the level of a subsidiary force, patrol, watch or substitute. Henceforth the soldier 'par excellence', the miles, would be the man on horseback, the 'chevalier' or 'Ritter'. But the Germanic languages preserved the domestic origins of such men: 'Knecht' (i.e. servant), 'knight'. The 'familia' of the rich contained enough vigorous boys to make good knights. These were the people armed to defend the lord, though at first it was not necessary to make them into vassals or choose only the noble for the purpose. The 'milites', who appear from about 920–50 in southern Europe and from about 980–1000 in the north, were soldiers in the making, fed, equipped and lodged in their lord’s residence. In Germany they were even recruited from among the ranks of the servile. Because of the need for convenient access to the services expected of them and the cost of their arms it was self-evident that they were 'casati', garrisoned, and that they had to do homage. This development, which came to mean that the prestige of the warrior, that of one who had joined an elite 'militia' after the magical ceremony of dubbing, was so great that a noble would no longer refuse it and would even strive after it, is already visible, but these elements were not to fuse until around 1100, and in some places even later; around the year 1000 they were still unquestionably distinct.
The study of rural society, which is to say of almost the whole of society, has of necessity taken us to the edge of scholarly fields which need further discussion. A general survey of human society was needed. It will have been noted, finally, that if the inequalities of wealth, rights and power were very strongly marked, the general environment within which all social levels operated had a certain homogeneity.The main reason which can be given for this is that everyone in our period was engaged in what I have called a process of regrouping ('encellulement'), a process which seems to me the most important feature of the break marked in European history by the millennium.
Notes.
8 Fulbert, ep. 51.
9 Ganshof (1955), p. 71.
By Robert Fossier in "The New Cambridge Medieval History", edited by Timothy Reuter,Cambridge University Press, UK, 2006, volume III c.900-1024, excerpts pp. 39-41. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.