Beyond Lord and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-Modern Europe

By AAVV

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9788437092621

Book preview

cover.jpg

BEYOND LORDS AND PEASANTS

RURAL ELITES AND ECONOMIC DIFFERENTIATION IN PRE-MODERN EUROPE

Edited by Frederic Aparisi & Vicent Royo

UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA

All the papers have undergone editorial review and every paper was double-blind peer reviewed.

This book has obtained a funding from the Spanish Government through the subprogram Acciones Complementarias a Proyectos de Investigación Fundamental no orientada Tipo A, convocatoria 2011. Reference HAR2011-14133-E, in the research project HAR2008-06039 Elites sociales y estructuras económicas comparadas en el Mediterráneo Occidental (Corona de Aragón, Francia e Italia) en la Baja Edad Media lead by P. Iradiel. It has also received a financial aid from the research project HAR2011-28718 Una capital medieval y su área de influencia. El impacto económico y político de la ciudad de Valencia sobre el conjunto del reino lead by A. Furió.

logo_ministerio_grises.tif

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Publicacions de la Universitat de València,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with CEDRO

(Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos, www.cedro.org).

© The authors 2014

© Publicacions de la Universitat de València 2014

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[e-mail]

Cover illustration: Pieter Brueghel the Young, Census at Bethlehem (circa 1605-1610).

Digital edition by JPM Ediciones

ISBN: 978-84-370-9262-1

CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

PREFACE

Ferran Garcia-Oliver

1. FRACTURES IN THE COMMUNITY: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Frederic Aparisi Romero & Vicent Royo Pérez

2. EXPLOITATION AND DIFFERENTIATION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE RURAL MUSLIM COMMUNITIES OF THE KINGDOM OF VALENCIA, 13TH-16TH CENTURIES

Vicent Baydal Sala & Ferran Esquilache Martí

3. COMMUNAL STRUCTURES, LORDSHIP AND PEASANT AGENCY IN THIRTEENTH AND EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: SOME COMPARATIVE OBSERVATIONS

Miriam Müller

4. MANIFESTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE: CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN RURAL VALENCIA DURING THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

Vicent Royo Pérez

5. LEASE HOLDING IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLANDERS: TOWARDS CONCENTRATION AND ENGROSSMENT? THE ESTATES OF THE ST. JOHN’S HOSPITAL OF BRUGES

Lies Vervaet

6. THE NOTARIAL PROFESSION AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL PROMOTION AMONGST RURAL ELITES IN THE MIDLANDS OF THE KINGDOM OF VALENCIA DURING THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Frederic Aparisi Romero

7. ‘POOR OR RICH, DEATH MAKES US ALL EQUAL’? SOCIAL INEQUALITY (POST MORTEM) IN RURAL COMMUNITIES NORTH OF BRUGES (1500-1579)

Kristof Dombrecht

8. LEADERS OF THE PACK: A TYPOLOGY OF VILLAGE ELITES IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURY CAMPINE AREA

Eline Van Onacker

9. THE COMMON DENOMINATOR: REGULATION OF THE COMMUNITY OF USERS OF COMMON WASTE LANDS WITHIN THE CAMPINE AREA DURING THE 16TH CENTURY

Maïka De Keyzer

10. CONCLUSIONS

Christopher Dyer

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

APARISI ROMERO, FREDERIC, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

BAYDAL SALA, VICENT, Beatriu de Pinós Research Fellow, University of Oxford.

DOMBRECHT, KRISTOF, Department of History, Ghent University.

DYER, CHRISTOPHER, Leverhulme Research Fellow, Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History, University of Leicester.

ESQUILACHE MARTÍ, FERRAN, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

GARCÍA-OLIVER, FERRAN, Professor of Medieval History, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

KEYZER, MAÏKA DE, Department of History, University of Antwerp.

MÜLLER, MIRIAM, Lecturer in Medieval History, Department of History, University of Birmingham.

ONACKER, ELINE VAN, Department of History, University of Antwerp.

ROYO PÉREZ, VICENT, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

VERVAET, LIES, Department of History, Ghent University.

PREFACE

Ferran Garcia-Oliver

University of Valencia

The work of historians has also been affected by globalization. A historian’s work has always been a struggle with oneself and with the documentary sources being used that takes place in one’s private studio. Until recently, the fruits of this labour resulted in a publication or in a participation in a more or less crowded conference and in a rapid return to the domestic studio; however, this traditional figure is gradually fading, faced with the figure of the historian connected to international co-operation and research teams, which require even greater mobility and further increased attention to bibliographic production. The historian’s research may be in the public light even before it is set down on paper. It is also obvious that the Internet and social networks have also altered the working patterns of professional historians.

This new situation is particularly visible south of the Pyrenees. The backwardness caused by the long period of Francoism, along with university structures in which endogamic interests and certain atavistic suspicions reigned supreme, led to a certain difficulty in receiving the thought and research trends in European Medieval studies. Spanish Medievalism hardly managed to secure a presence in international forums and debates. The linguistic element was also, undoubtedly, a barrier. Whereas European historians seldom read in Spanish, it was even less common for them to read Catalan or Portuguese. Syntheses of economic histories, and, in particular, agrarian histories, resulted in the scandalous absence of Iberian agricultures and rural communities, an absence shared with most other Mediterranean countries. Languages are still a barrier, but, as with the internet, the adoption of English as a lingua franca has enabled a better and faster level of communication, as well as the arrival of Hispanic historiographies on the international stage.

The presence of some prominent Hispanic medievalists in European conferences or journals is not new: Claudio Sánchez Albornoz already participated in the conferences of Spoleto in the 1950s. The novelty resides in a general status and in the consciousness of the need to avoid the isolation, which was symbolically imposed by the Pyrenees, at all costs. Undoubtedly, Catalan, Portuguese or Castilian agrarian realities are marked by a series of exclusive distinguishing traits, but they attain their full meaning and coherence in the context of the European West, which was marked by three centuries of growth, the difficulties of the fourteenth century and the slow later recovery, in which landlords not only struggled against peasant communities, but also against urban powers and emerging states.

To be honest, it would be unfair not to acknowledge the efforts carried out by local historians, specializing in the rural world, to tighten bonds and to encourage more modern debates. In this case, the universities in the Catalan Countries, with Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Valencia at the fore, have proven themselves to be particularly active. In the case of the latter university, with which I am most familiar, having belonged to it myself, an international conference on local spaces was already held in 1988, followed by another on market spaces two years later, though efforts to gear regional research towards the European level are best reflected in the 2008 conference on consumption patterns and living standards.

Recently, small scientific meet-ups have been flourishing alongside traditional conferences with a long history. The financing of research groups, which mainly resides in governmental and European institutions, has led to a multiplication of international meetings. Whereas large conferences often lack the flexibility required for fluid debates, due to the large amount of discussants and simultaneous sessions, small workshops have the virtue of encouraging debates, as well as simplifying organizational problems. Thus, a small group of specialists can meet to discuss a specific subject, allowing a comparative examination of different research experiences and providing general outlooks beyond the particular field of each one of the observations.

These historiographical workshops, in the context of globalization, in the reinforced European political framework and the speed of the internet, are contributing significantly to connect social and economic spaces that were unaware of each other, more due to the a lack of momentum and linguistic barriers rather than due to questions exclusively related to problems related to research itself. In what concerns agrarian history, the profile of a more integrated European West, participating in common problems that require the use of similar documentary sources and related research strategies, has been reinforced.

Young historians, trained in the digital era and acquainted with social networks are largely responsible for the promotion of these encounters and seminars. The inherent benefits stand for themselves. Their academic training is sent to the debating arena in which they will test the research they are carrying out and with which they might obtain their PhD. Online contacts are reinforced by bonds of generational complicity, which might lead to new common meetings and projects. I insist on pointing out the importance of the ambitious frameworks being discussed. A true synthesis of European agrarian history can only stem from the inclusion of its broad and diverse geography, and peripheries may both validate general theses or question established paradigms.

It was young historians such as these who met in Valencia on May 19 and 20, 2011. Their goal was to expose their research and points of view on rural communities and, in particular, their internal divisions, between the 13th and 16th centuries. And, finally, after the characteristic misadventures of the editing process, their interventions resulted in the book you are holding in your hands. This would not have been possible without the silent labour of Frederic Aparisi and Vicent Royo who, being convinced on the value of a project that joined the Valencian experience with English and Flemish points of view, worked constantly to organize the workshop in Valencia as well as to collect the required funds for this publication.

It is not my objective to situate the contributions in their historiographical context, a task which has been taken up by the two organizers, nor is it to ponder the results, said responsibility befalling to Christopher Dyer. I feel that I should, however, point out the value of comparing the agrarian structures of the Southern Crown of Aragon with the classical structures of the European West. In the case of Valencia, the presence of Muslim communities up to their definitive expulsion, in 1609, provides a series of obvious particularities, especially in what concerns rent collections, political exclusion and the impossibility of formulating a program of demands alongside Christian communities. However, they both experienced similar internal fractures that resulted in the emergence of a select group of peasants who went on to control the structures of local power, concentrating land and carrying out economic investments that were more related to speculation and large profit margins than with strictly agricultural activities. In fact, it emerges that these peasants, far from tending to their lands with their hands, managed a small agricultural business, and their behaviour was closer to that of rural merchants, involved in constant purchase and sale operations and money lending. However, not only peasants were at the head of the community, where notaries, merchants, textile artisans, butchers and, in occasions, clerics also held sway. The members of this rural elite became enriched and adopted a series of economic, social and political practices akin to those of the burghers and nobility in the cities, clearly setting them apart from their own neighbours.

The differences with English and Flemish peasants – and their rural elites in general – should not focus on the profile of the protagonists as much as on regional contexts, that is, on the strength of feudal power, state interference and the development of the urban economy. The common element amongst Valencian, English and Flemish peasants is, first and foremost, that social mobility, mainly focused around the elites, broke the chains of lordly power and serfdom, wherever they still existed, time and again; and, secondly, that the fundamental decisions that organized agrarian development moved towards the city and the market, in its separate facets as a credit market, land market, labour market and product market, led by grain and cloth. Opportunities were not equal, of course. Relations with the market deepened the internal hierarchies, clearly marking the divide between the rich and the poor. Wealth and poverty were visible in the clothes worn by either group, in the grain reserves kept in their granaries, in the dowries with which they married their daughters, and in the funerals organized upon death. But, in spite of all this, they remained peasants. Ultimately, the handful of probi homines would be the defenders of local franchises, spokespeople with the nobility and the leaders of anti-lordly protests. Both the rich and the poor were seen as peasants by their adversaries, a class mark with a veneer of mockery and disdain under the pen of moralists and literary-inclined burghers.

We should therefore rejoice about the publication of this volume. These young English, Flemish and Valencian researchers remind us that, from the perspective of European agrarian history, the chronological border that separates the Middle Ages from the Modern Age is often irrelevant, but also that political borders often hide shared realities and interchangeable processes. All of this, more than ever, can only be carried out in the context of international work groups.

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 studied deeply. Up to that time, various scenarios had been proposed to study the subject of the peasantry, but the best one to learn about the traits that defined the behaviour of different social groups is the local and regional frame. Whereas, in some areas, such as England, this method had a long tradition in universities, in other historiographies, such as Italian or Valencian historiography, the local level was reviled or even ridiculed. Far from the far-reaching national theses that intended to establish a single and general model, the social pre-eminence, political power, standards of living, productive investments and family strategies that defined the different sections of the peasantry were much more apparent through micro-historical observation and the application of a series of broader and more complex phenomena in a specific area (Furió, 2007: 408-412). Only thus could the idiosyncratic characteristics of social groups, whose boundaries were lax and mobile, be established. It also provided opportunities to analyze their social profiles and their behaviour in a specific time and place in-depth in order to establish similarities and differences between several regions, providing an interpretation that is both more consistent and much richer in details, as is the case with the whole of the articles this volume is composed of.

The best example of this social mobility is provided by the members of the so-called rural elite. This concept, which was coined recently, has proliferated through a series of studies, seminars and conferences focused on local elites (Menant-Jessenne, 2007). Indeed, the presence of a substrate of distinguished characters whose wealth surpassed that of their neighbours, with differentiated social practices, a distinguished cultural level and a certain political influence on the collective, has been detected. Thus, a small group of wealthy farmers, merchants, carders and notaries, who went to the fore of their communities and intended to highlight their pre-eminence, emerged. In order to achieve their aims, they employed a number of clearly differentiated economic, social and political strategies that brought them closer to the burghers and petty knights in towns than to their neighbours, who were simple peasants. The members of the rural elite composed a social group with blurry boundaries and have become the best example of social mobility. Rather than being stable members of a specific social order, the elites were involved in a process of constant change. Thus, social groups are neither immobile nor homogenous. Faced with the rigidity with which social categories have been described, it is necessary to integrate certain elasticity to the study of rural society in order to understand the differentiated behaviours of different sectors of the peasantry (Béaur, 1999: 17-20). Their lives were all marked by social and economic mobility in their field of action, the rural space, even though their situation was subjected to a strong variability, as they depended on a number of factors, such as family cycles, success of failure in business and relations with the lord. In sum, it is a series of paths that have been cleared by historiography over the past few years, and the studies that make up this volume treat them in-depth.

Nevertheless, studies on social mobility and economic differentiation in the rural world have not yet achieved sufficient weight in the field of historiography. In fact, these subjects have only been treated exclusively in a single conference, held in Rome in 2008, whose subject was Economies et sociétés médiévales. La conjoncture de 1300 en Méditerranée occidentale. The minutes of the conference were published by the Ecole Française de Rome in 2010 under the title La mobilità sociale nel Medioevo. As Sandro Carocci lamented in his introduction, up until now, the two phenomena have only been treated in an ancillary capacity in studies on nobility, urban oligarchies and, to a much lesser extent, rural elites. That is, the analysis of the behaviour of the most powerful classes, especially in the urban field, has led to the study on the mobility of certain individuals to be incorporated as an additional sample of the whole of the characteristics of the group being studied, without paying exclusive attention to the phenomenon.

Both concepts of economic differentiation and social mobility, especially the latter, have mostly been used by sociologists and anthropologists, rather than historians. Only modernists have used them systematically. The impossibility of carrying out studies with a broad qualitative base, owing to the dearth of documentary source material, has led studies on social mobility to take a back seat among medievalists. Up until now, the stratification in the Medieval rural world has been studied based on economic and political precepts that situated individuals and their families on specific points on the social scale. However, it is necessary to integrate other qualitative variables to interpret this generalized phenomenon in any historical period. Indeed, social standing is determined by a broad array of factors, such as recognition from others, cultural learning and networks of contacts. These aspects are not exclusive from each other, and they must all be taken into account along with an entire series of behaviours and outward signals that point to the position acquired within a social group: housing or funerary practices, among others (Pareto, 1964).

Beyond these mechanisms, different channels of mobility have been singled out (Sorokin, 1970). These ways correspond to the institutions that ease the transition from one social position to another: the family, school, the army, the administration, professions, the church and others represent these channels of promotion. Of course, no single path is necessary to thrive in society, but rather, social ascent is often born from a variety of channels. It is therefore necessary to