IRMINON, POLYPTICH OF
. The “polyptich,” a multileaved document used from late Roman times through the 14th
century, inventoried an estate or seigneurie with tenants, as well as their obligations in
kind or in money and services. Irminon, abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had his survey,
the most informative of all those that survive from the early Middle Ages, redacted
between ca. 807 and ca. 825, naming approximately 8,000 people residing on the 1,378
farms of the abbey, squeezed into “population islands” surrounded by forests and
wastelands. This first comprehensive catalogue treats peasant households (familia) in the
medieval rather than the classical sense. Cited as units of measurement in the 7th century,
familia, equivalent to the “hide” in England and the mansus in Italy, became generally
used in the 8th for a peasant farm. The virtual end of slavery caused the family farm,
normally inalienable and inheritable, to become the basic agricultural unit.
Although difficult to read and full of lacunae, Irminon’s survey indicates that there
were 135 males for every 100 females in the twenty-seven brevia, surveys of individual
estates held by the abbey, that counted 4,188 males, 3,556 females, with 939
indeterminable as to sex. That ratio was common, except after wars, to most non-
European as well as European societies before the 18th century because of high death
rates in childbirth and because infanticide of females exceeded that of males. The survey
of the landholdings of the Italian monastery of Farfa made between 789 and 822, where
males outnumber females by 122 to 100, like other surveys even of late-medieval Europe,
almost always provide similar ratios.
In Irminon’s polyptich, the average family consisted of 5.75 people, each of whom
worked approximately 120 acres. No grandfathers and only twenty-six grandmothers
were recorded. Extended lateral families predominated. The 2,006 men and 2,200 boys
against 1,975 women and 1,569 girls gives a ratio clearly beneath replacement needs, so
that the population must have been shrinking. Marriages were apparently relatively late
for females as well as for males, husbands being about nine years older than their wives
and many men not marrying at all.
William A.Percy, Jr.
[See also: POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHY]
Guérard, Benjamin, ed. Polyptyque de l’abbé Irminon; ou, Dénombrement des manses, des serfs et
des revenus de l’abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés sous le règne de Charlemagne. 2 vols.
Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1844.
ISAAC OF STELLA
(after 1100–1169/78). Born in England, Isaac became abbot of the small French
Cistercian house of Stella, near Poitiers. Nothing is known of his life before he became
abbot, but the nature of his thought and his use of technical theological language strongly
suggest that he was a student in the schools of Paris and Chartres. He possibly came to
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