married free women, their children then had the free status of their mother. In such
fashion, the lowest level of servile status seems to have disappeared in many regions by
ca. 1000.
It was the early-medieval world, almost entirely a rural society, that was most
characterized by the tripartite division into those who fight, those who pray, and those
who work the land. Through the Merovingian and Carolingian eras, moreover, there was
little differentiation in economic status between men and women or between a lord and
his dependents: all were poor and living not far from starvation. Although there were a
few independent peasants who worked their own land for subsistence, or soldier-peasants
who might be called up for Carolingian military service, the rural population was made
up almost entirely of peasants tied to the villa or manor and their lords, whether simple
knights living off the revenues of a single estate, or more important secular lords and
ladies owning many estates and moving from one to the next throughout the year, or
important ecclesiastics, particularly monks and abbots. In addition, the growing religious
fervor and social change after the Carolingian era gave rise to increasing numbers of
religious hermits and other marginal peoples—charcoal producers, poachers, thieves,
beggars, outcasts—living in the forests on the edge of the cultivated lands.
Relations between a rural lord and his peers were by military ties of feudalism or
mutual defensive pacts often recorded in convenientia contracts. Relations between lords
and peasants were basically those of lord and man, with the peasants expected to work
and produce for their lords in return for military protection; historians call this rural
economic organization “manorialism.” Manorialism had its roots in the old Roman estate
system of landlords with dependent tenant cultivators, in the emperor Diocletian’s
legislation that tied free peasants to the land, in the settlement of Roman. and barbarian
troops in territories devastated by invasion or peasant revolt, and in the commendation of
free peasants to aristocrats who promised to protect them from late-imperial tax
collection. In the 8th- and 9th-century polyptichs of the Carolingian church, these varying
origins of the peasant population are still visible. Those documents differentiate among
liberi (free peasants), coloni (free men who had been tied to the land by tax legislation),
laeti (probably barbarian settlers), and servi (serfs). Serfs were descendants of slaves
allowed by their Roman masters to settle on tenancies and marry. Their servile origins
were reflected in the requirement that they perform several days of agricultural labor each
week on the lands of their lord and in certain limitations on their freedom, in particular on
the freedom to leave their holding, the right to marry outside of the lord’s estate, and the
right to bequeath property without interference. Often, such manors were also immune
from royal control, and serfs on them were required to use their lord’s rather than public
courts.
Distinctions among peasants of the Carolingian era were blurred in the centuries that
followed. As the power of the kings, emperors, and their officials waned, free and unfree
alike became increasingly subject to the economic exploitation based on force imposed
by lords of castles, particularly after the year 1000. In the name of their bannum, such
lords introduced “new and evil customs” that effectively captured a growing share of the
expanding agricultural production of this period. Such customs as requiring peasants to
use their newly installed water mills or the village ovens for a fee, to contribute to upkeep
of castle walls, and to allow the lord to sell his wine before their own were imposed not
just on serfs belonging to a particular landlord but on all the inhabitants of the district
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