242. The Medieval Villa

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Lord and man

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch

Chapter IV
Economic and Social Organization

2. The Great Domains

p98 ...The products of the soil, which had flowed into the urban markets, gradually lost their purchasers. Once the division of social labor came to an end... the agricultural population began to produce only for its own needs;... it was henceforth both the producer and the consumer of the products of the soil. There was now only one kind of wealth -- landed property -- and only one kind of worker -- the tiller of the soil -- and the only economic relations which existed between man and man were conditioned by their quality of landowner or tenant.

...The transformation must have begun some time in the 5th century; by the end of the 8th century it was complete. Its final stage was the great domain of the Carolingian epoch, an exact description of which may be found in the polyptych of Abbot Irminon and the Capitulare de villis.
...

p99 The domain, as an economic phenomenon, was entirely original; there was nothing of the kind at any period of Graeco-Roman antiquity. It was doubtless related, by direct filiation, to the great estate of the late Roman Empire; it preserved, in its essential features, the organization of the Roman villa, whose name is retained, and the institution of the colonatus appears to have been the preponderating influence in the condition of its tenants. But its actual operation, both in principle and in effect, was something quite new. One may define it by saying that the idea of profit was completely unknown to it... Its aim was to ensure that the domain should be self-sufficing, living on its own resources... From this ["closed economy" or "economy without outlets"] many very important consequences followed, which dominated the entire economic life of the Middle Ages down to the 12th century... The farmer was... satisfied with a minimum of care and effort, and agronomic science was allowed to fall into oblivion, until the possibility of selling the crops should once more encourage the owners of the soil to adopt improved and therefore more lucrative methods. But then the land would begin to be regarded as a value, and not as a mere means of subsistence. 

...At stated periods, in conformity with a permanent assessment, the various tenures would have to deliver to... [the landowner] grain, eggs, cheese, smoked meats and ells of cloth.
...

p100 We must consider, too, that the prestation [Footnote: Payment in kind] of each tenure was invariable, and that for so long as he furnished it the tenant enjoyed a hereditary right to the land which he occupied... What mattered to the landowner was the annual regularity of his income in kind, and the best way of guaranteeing this was to give it the character of a permanent tax. Between the lord of the domain and his peasants there was no relation comparable to that which subordinates the workers to a capitalist. The domain was not in any sense an exploitation, whether of the soil or of human beings. It was a social institution, not an economic enterprise. The obligations of its inhabitants were not based on personal contracts, but depended on right and custom. Each domain had its own law, established by traditional usage. The Seigneur was at once more and less than a landed proprietor in the Roman or modern meaning of the term; less, because his property right was limited by the hereditary rights of his tenants to their tenures; more, because his power over these tenants was far in excess of that of a mere landowner.

p101 In fact, he was their lord and they were his men. Many of them, the descendants of enfranchised slaves or body-serfs, constituted part of his patrimony. Others, the heirs of colonists of the Roman epoch, were adscripti glebae. Others, again, bound to the seigneur by "recommendation," lived under his protection. Over all of them, in various degrees, he exercised a patriarchal authority, and all were subject to his private jurisdiction... at this period of sparse population men were far more important than land; there was more than enough land... There were consequently many provisions for preventing a man from leaving the domain. Over his serfs the seigneur possessed the right of pursuit; they could not, without his consent, marry wives outside the domainal community. Adscription to the soil, originally confined to the descendents of slaves and colonists, was gradually extended to freemen living under the seigneur's jurisdiction. This gradual extension of servitude to the whole agricultural population was the most notable phenomenon of the 9th century and the two following centuries. As a general rule, the peasant of this epoch was not free... in contemporary documents the words denoting the peasant (villanus, rusticus) became synonymous with serf (servus). 

It must not be supposed that those who were subject to this servitude felt it as a burden...How could liberty be valued by men whose very existence was guaranteed only by the place they occupied on the land, and under the jurisdiction of their seigneur, and whose security was therefore all the greater in proportion as they were more intimately incorporated in the domain?

p102 Whether lay or ecclesiastical, the great domain of the first few centuries of the Middle Ages (before the 13th century) had nothing in common with the great exploitation. By the end of the Roman Empire the latifundia with their slaves had already disappeared, and it seems that the landed proprietors were progressively abandoning agriculture on the grand scale and dividing their estates into tenures... The domain was divided into two very unequal parts: the seigneural land (terra indominicata) and the mansionary land (mansionaria). The first, by far the less extensive, was exploited directly and wholly to the profit of the seigneur. The work on this land was performed by domestic serfs who did not possess tenures, much like our agricultural laborers, or by tenants who were subject to corvees. The mansionary land was reserved for such tenants. It was divided into units... large enough to support a family. These were the manses (mansus), and their possession was hereditary, subject... to prestations in kind in labor. The whole constituted a rural villa. The common center was the siegneural court (hof, curtis), in which lived the seigneur's intendant or bailiff, the mayor... entrusted with the supervision of and jurisdiction over the villeins (villani). The court, surrounded by a moat and a palisade, served as the master's residence when he resided on his estate, and included the barns and granaries where the crops and other revenues were stored. It was here too that the domainal tribunal assembled... presided over by the mayor or the seigneur. Here and there, even in the 9th century, and more and more frequently as time went on, a chapel, built by the seigneur, and served by a priest whom he chose and appointed, provided for the needs of religion. Many rural parishes owe their origin to these domainal chapels; and these, too, explain the right of presentation [patronage] which many seigneurs retained until the end of the ancien regime, and of which traces still linger in certain countries.

p103 ...if a stream crossed the domain, the seigneur [often] built a mill upon it, for his own use and that of the inhabitants. A portion of flour was deducted from each sack by the miller, to provide for his maintenance; and this was the origin of the customary dues which survived until the French Revolution.

...the organization just described... exercised such a profound influence on society that in all Western European languages it has left its traces on the geographic and onomatological vocabulary. One has only to consider the number of French place-names ending in ville or court, or in the Germanic languages in hof, and the frequency of such family names as Lemaire, Mayer, De Mayer, Le Mayeur, etc.

Ordinarily a large domain consisted of several villae. That of Saint-Germain des Pres, in Charlemagne's day, comprised a whole series, scattered about from Brittany to the banks of the Moselle. The monasteries of the northern regions almost always endeavored to acquire, in the wine country on the banks of the Rhine, the Moselle or the Seine, a villa which would furnish them with the wine that could no longer be obtained through the channel of trade.

...Despite their profoundly different character, both [the great domains of the early years of the Middle Ages and the trade guilds of the urban industrial economy] were alike in one respect. Both economies were based on petty exploitation, with the result that they preserved intact, through the centuries, in the one case the bourgeois artisan, in the other the small farmer... the great domains of the Middle Ages safeguarded the class of peasants. For them servitude was a benefit... Since it was not organized with a view to profit, the domainal constitution imposed only small prestations in return for considerable advantages. As the peasants were part of the seigneur's property, he was interested in their preservation: he defended them in the event of war and fed them from his stores in time of famine. War and famine were the two plagues that afflicted them in turn; war being a consequence of the increasing weakness of the State, and famine the inevitable result of commercial stagnation. A bad harvest was an irremediable disaster at a time when a country could not make good the deficit from the surplus of a neighboring country. The period extending from the 9th to the 12th century is par excellence, in the economic history of Europe, the age of alimentary crises. They recurred every few years with the regularity of a natural phenomenon.

p104 ...There were, of course, landless folk, "poor men," as the contemporary texts describe them; men of a wandering habit, begging their way from monastery to monastery, hiring themselves to the villeins at harvest-time. But these disinherited children of a social order which was based on the possession of the soil were neither a responsibility nor a danger, which is proof of their small number.

p105 It is impossible to estimate... the density of the population... All that we can say is that in the Carolingian epoch the population was very small; undoubtedly smaller than at any previous epoch, owing to the extinction of the urban population. And it seems to have remained almost stationary until the beginning of the 11th century, for the normal excess of births did no more than fill the gaps constantly made by famine, war, and the disturbances and catastrophes of every kind that descended upon the West from the middle of the 9th century.

I concede that the domain does not work the way the latifundia worked. I hadn't realized that they had gone extinct by the end of the Roman period, though it does make sense since they require huge numbers of slaves to operate... and a commercial economy.

I do see Pirenne's point of view, regarding the relationship between the people and the seigneur, but since there is no chance, in such a dark age, of a written record of what the common people thought of their status, speculating about this is a little irresponsible. Perhaps some or even most common men were happy to be nestled into a domain, but I doubt this feeling was universal. That there was a "right of pursuit" suggests not everyone was quite as happy as he would have us believe.