around a castle. Payments for such new customs were often more onerous than any
previously paid rents and dues, and the universal application of such exactions tended to
erase earlier distinctions among peasants. Although documentation is sparse for the
earlier period, by ca. 1100 most peasants were either free or unfree, some richer or
poorer, but all increasingly dependent on the new castle lords.
This tendency to flatten distinctions among the peasantry does not mean that peasant
status necessarily declined during this period. First of all, because agricultural production
was increasing, peasants could afford higher rents. Moreover, competition for
experienced agricultural laborers often increased as new villages were founded in the
forested pockets of rural France, as new agricultural frontiers opened up in Spain and the
German east, as the new monastic orders sought lay brothers, and as the cities beckoned
as havens of freedom and craft labor. Lords who were instigators of new village
foundations made concessions of liberties in order to attract settlers to their new villages,
and lords who held older estates were forced to make similar concessions—to grant or
sell liberties, to allow peasants to buy themselves out of servitude, or to allow peasants to
create new fields and additions to their holdings in the waste adjoining the older
cultivated area.
By the 12th and 13th centuries, lordship was no longer a purely rural affair. Lords
themselves had also felt the attraction of towns and new frontiers and deserted the
countryside. Demesnes, often not all that profitable, were converted into peasant
holdings, labor services were commuted into payments in money or kind, and serfdom
became increasingly a legal category having little effect on the economic circumstances
of peasants. In the 13th century, lords in some regions, apparently faced by increasing
costs and creeping inflation, tried to squeeze the last drop of profit out of the legal
disabilities of serfdom by selling liberties and enfranchisements to their rich peasants or
peasant villages or attempting to extort payment for legal disabilities long forgotten.
Generally, however, it was the disappearance of labor services that ended the great
division within the peasantry between free and unfree. Although not everyone owed the
same rent, all were henceforth virtually equal inasmuch as none had to spend time
working on the lord’s land. The rural classes of the years after 1300 were increasingly
impoverished, by famine, warfare, plague, and excessive division of property among a
population growing beyond the means of European lands to support it. Yet because there
were fewer to share remaining wealth, the condition of those peasants who survived the
Black Death of 1348 and subsequent pandemics must have improved temporarily.
By the end of the Middle Ages, most distinctions in the rural world were economic.
Rich peasants took land at farm from powerful lords for large sums and proceeded to hire
laborers to work it, but there were also impoverished rural families whose names were
entered on the abbey rolls of those entitled to a daily dole. In between were the masses of
peasants whose economic condition varied considerably from one generation to the next,
depending not so much on external economic circumstances as on bad luck, too-great
fecundity (necessitating an overdivision of inheritance), or the good chance of having
only one surviving heir to marry and bring property to the patrimony. After the 14th
century, lords abandoned the countryside to live in cities as rentiers and seigneurs, as
they would until the French Revolution.
Constance H.Berman
The Encyclopedia 1565