it enhanced aristocratic honor, so dependent on personal generosity, patronage, and
displays of wealth. In the late twelfth century, when some townsmen could boast
fortunes that rivaled the riches of the landed nobility, noble extravagance tended to
exceed income. Most aristocrats went into debt.
The nobles’ need for money coincided with the interests of the peasantry, whose
numbers were expanding. The solution was the extension of farmland. By the middle
of the century, isolated and sporadic attempts to bring new land into cultivation had
become regular and coordinated. Great lords offered special privileges to peasants
who would do the backbreaking work of plowing marginal land. In 1154, for
example, the bishop of Meissen (in Germany) proclaimed a new village and called for
peasants from Flanders to settle there. Experts in drainage, the colonists received
rights to the swampland they reclaimed. They owed only light monetary dues to the
bishop, who nevertheless expected to reap a profit from their tolls and tithes. Similar
encouragement came from lords throughout Europe, especially in northern Italy,
England, Flanders, and Germany. In Flanders, where land was regularly inundated by
seawater, the great monasteries sponsored drainage projects, and canals linking the
cities to the agricultural hinterlands let boats ply the waters to virtually every nook
and cranny of the region.
Sometimes free peasants acted on their own to clear land and relieve the pressure
of overpopulation, as when the small freeholders in England’s Fenland region
cooperated to build banks and dikes to reclaim the land that led out to the North Sea.
Villages were founded on the drained land, and villagers shared responsibility for
repairing and maintaining the dikes even as each peasant family farmed its new
holding individually.
On old estates, the rise in population strained to its breaking point the manse
organization that had developed in Carolingian Europe, where each household was
settled on the land that supported it. Now, in the twelfth century, many peasant
families might live on what had been, in the ninth century, the manse of one family.
Labor services and dues had to be recalculated, and peasants and their lords often
turned services and dues into money rents, payable once a year. With this change,
peasant men gained more control over their plots—they could sell them, will them to
their sons, or even designate a small portion for their daughters. However, for these
privileges they had either to pay extra taxes or, like communes, join together to buy
their collective liberty for a high price, paid out over many years to their lord.
Peasants, like town citizens, gained a new sense of identity and solidarity as they
bargained with a lord keen to increase his income at their expense.
