Rethinking the transition from feudalism question

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From the introduction to the newly published "Making a Living in the
Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850-1520" by Christopher Dyer:

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the progressive
Whiggish view of economic change was challenged by M. M. Postan, who
questioned many of the assumptions of his predecessors. He showed
that there was no 'rise of a money economy' because the use of money
both expanded and receded, and he emphasized the cyclical nature of
economic change. There had been growth up to about 1300, and then
contraction, and he believed that the roots of change lay in the
countryside. The key determinants of economic growth and decline were
the level of population and the productivity of the land. The great
expansion in numbers of people in the thirteenth century put
excessive pressure on land, which created the conditions for the
catastrophes of 1315-17 and 1348-50. He argued that much production
was for direct consumption in the peasant household, and therefore
the market, towns and trade were peripheral to the rural economy.

Postan's interpretation of the changes in the later middle ages was
influenced by the ideas of the classical economists, such as Malthus
and Ricardo, both of whom predicted contraction as the inevitable
consequence of growth. Postan was in no sense a Marxist, and yet his
ideas bore some resemblance to the Marxist theory that a feudal mode
of production reached its peak of development in about 1300, after
which internal contradictions led to a general crisis of the social
order. The most eloquent advocate of this view, R. H. Hilton, sees
the struggle between lords and peasants for rent as a key factor in
precipitating the late medieval crisis. R. Brenner has pursued the
Marxist view that demography was not the determinant of economic
change, and that class relations explain the circumstances which
enabled the gentry around 1500 to impose capitalist agriculture by
expelling peasants to create large farms.

The generation of historians that grew up in Postan's later years,
and since his death in 1981, have developed alternative ideas which
have eroded his great thesis without replacing it with some new grand
narrative. The Cambridge demographers have argued for essential
similarities between early modern and medieval population structure,
which implies that adjustments in marriage rates and fertility caused
population growth and decline, replacing the rather cataclysmic view
of excess populations and crises of mortality. Postan thought that
medieval cultivators could not escape from a cycle of falling yields
and fields damaged by repeated cultivation because of an inability to
improve their technology. Now we appreciate that the period was one
of constant innovation, in the use of mills, in the rotation and mix
of crops, in methods of drainage and water management, and in the use
of draught animals. Instead of the gloomy views of nineteenth-century
classical economists, who argued that excessive numbers of people
would be an unsupportable burden, economists like Boserup have shown,
using observations of the modern third world, that labour can be used
to increase production, and indeed we can see this in the most
densely populated English regions. Finally, towns and trade have been
rediscovered as an important dimension of the medieval economy. The
towns were early to develop, became large by around 1300, acted as a
stimulus to production, and promoted specialization. The influence of
the commercial world penetrated deeply into the countryside,
affecting every region and all levels of the social hierarchy.

The flourishing of archaeology in the last thirty years has made an
especially valuable contribution to the period before 1100.
Excavation and fieldwork have shown that villages formed between
about 850 and 1200, not in the fifth and sixth centuries as was once
thought. Work on towns of the tenth and eleventh centuries reveals
their large size and concentration of crafts and commerce - in other
words, they were real towns, n the later middle ages material remains
tell us about housing, trading patterns and the shrinkage of
settlements. Archaeological interpretation makes us aware of the
social meaning of material things, such as conspicuous consumption or
the emulation of social elites, and archaeology demonstrates
continuities and technical achievements. Archaeology has altered
thinking about economic history in the last few years, but economic
historians have always been influenced by other disciplines,
specially the social sciences, which include anthropology and
sociology is well as economics, and by literature and cultural
studies.

The approach to the economic and social history of the middle ages
which is represented in this book is based on the assumption that the
period mattered. The modern economy owes something to its medieval
predecessor, and we should note the emergence within the period of,
or example, shareholding or industrial mechanization. But the middle
ages should not be studied merely to seek the origins of more recent
developments. Those who lived a thousand years ago are worthy of
investigation in their own right, and we can learn from their
differentness, as well as from the similarities with our experience.
For example, medieval lords devoted a large amount of resources to
building and maintaining ponds for freshwater fish. Their ponds now
lie abandoned, and the rearing of freshwater fish has played a
negligible role in modern Britain. Yet the ponds and their management
are worth our attention because they meant a great deal to those who
built and used them. Once we have appreciated that species such as
bream and pike were regarded is a luxury food, the ponds tell us much
about dietary preferences and medieval status seeking.

There is always a tendency to belittle the achievements of the past
and to assume in a patronizing way that medieval people were
primitive and ignorant. For example, the yield of corn in the
fifteenth century was low by modern standards, and indeed had fallen
since the thirteenth century. Does this mean that the people who grew
the crops were stupid and lazy? In fact, if we look at the price of
grain and the consumption of bread, we find that food was cheap and
plentiful. Corn production was adequate for society's needs, and as
it was unnecessary for cultivators to strain themselves to increase
their output, we should not criticize them for their imagined
failings. Recent experience of technological failures, such as the
BSE epidemic and the threat of climate change, has perhaps made us
rather less confident of our superiority, and a little more
appreciative of common sense and skilful management in the middle
ages. Scottish economic history has suffered in particular from
assumptions about that country's backwardness before modern
'improvement'. Scottish agriculture was not very productive, but the
country was thinly populated and not especially prone to famine. In
the thirteenth century the abundant Scottish currency and urban
growth suggest that the country participated in the general European
expansion.

As we adopt a more sympathetic approach to medieval economic
management, we appreciate that people had to make a series of
difficult decisions about which crops to grow or which type of cloth
to weave. As the economy became more complex, the decisions included
the raising of credit, marketing strategies and investment plans.
Historians once tended to determinism, which means they believed that
circumstances forced society along particular channels, and that
events unfolded with a certain inevitability. Now we recognize an
element of choice. For example, we do not know why some rural
communities in the early middle ages lived in scattered hamlets with
fields irregularly disposed around them, while others moved into
large villages with well-organized open fields. They were influenced
by the soils which they worked and the social pressures around them,
but we must doubt if the decision was predestined.

It is sometimes believed that the crucial decisions were taken by
powerful elites of rulers, aristocrats and merchants. We often find,
however, that when kings or great lords initiated some change, the
results were unplanned and unforeseen. At the beginning of our period
King Alfred ordered the building of a system of forts to keep the
Danes out of his kingdom of Wessex. Many of those forts would become
towns, but it is not certain that the king intended that result. More
often change emerged from the combination of thousands of
uncoordinated actions, involving people at all levels. Formal
descriptions of medieval society imply the subordination of the
masses. Yet even serfs had some use of property, and had some choice
in the management of their holding of land, though they were of
course restrained in many ways. One of the dynamic forces in medieval
society, and the motive force behind many economic changes, was not
dictatorial decisions, but the opposite - the competition and
frictions between different groups, not just between lords and
peasants or merchants and artisans, but also between laymen and
clergy, higher aristocrats and gentry, and subjects and the state,
and between individuals within those various groups. A society that
appears to be governed by rigid laws and customs, in reality allowed
people to take initiatives.

Change was based on combinations of interconnected movements, such as
the simultaneous emergence of lordship, villages, towns and the state
in the period between 850 and 1050. Selecting which came first, or
which dominated over the others is often a fruitless exercise. Those
who advocate a single explanatory mechanism, such as changes in
population, or innovations in technology, or climate change, are
usually oversimplifying. We know the difficulties in tracing the
origins of the industrial revolution, or the slump of the 1920s, and
the argument that single causes can be applied to an earlier period
again suggests a patronizing attitude which underestimates the varied
and interlocking nature of the medieval economy.

Finally, because we are dealing with a culture and economy very
different from our own, various terms and concepts are used which
cause problems for modern readers. These are terms in use in the
middle ages, and also those coined by modern historians, which as
much as possible will be defined when they are first mentioned. Some
modern words are so fundamental, and yet have been subject to so much
controversy, that they need brief discussion here.

It has become commonplace to describe medieval society and economy as
'feudal'. Some historians regard this as a misleading modern
invention to describe an ideal type of society which never existed.
The word will be employed here as useful shorthand for a social
organization in which lords had powers over others, through private
jurisdiction and other non-economic means, which enabled them to
extract rents, services and other dues. Feudalism in a more
specialized sense refers to the ties between lords and their
aristocratic vassals, based on the granting of land (fiefs) in
exchange for military and administrative services. Here the word
'aristocracy' will be used to describe the whole landed elite, from
the gentry to earls and dukes, but also including the higher clergy.
'Nobility' is used on the continent but is not easily applied in
Britain, and the aristocracy can be recognized as a coherent group
from its landed incomes and style of life. 'Peasant' refers to
small-scale cultivators, who possess land, and are subordinated to
lords and the state. There has been a move to deny the existence of
an English peasantry, on the grounds that they were not as closely
bound to family groups as in other cultures, but peasantries differ,
and the economic position of those dependent on small holdings of
land (usually below 60 acres) is a defining characteristic. This
excludes farmers (who had large holdings) and those entirely
dependent on wages. 'Serfs' were peasants who were legally unfree,
that is they were judged in their lord's court and could not usually
appeal for justice to the king's court. The term 'serf derives from
legal status, and tells us little about wealth. 'Towns' and 'urban'
refer to places with a dense and permanent concentration of people
who pursued a variety of non-agricultural occupations. The population
need not have been very large - a town could have had 300 inhabitants
- and many towns were unwalled, and had not been granted a borough
charter or other privileges.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/11/2002

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