Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (86 page)

The Empire and Society

Throughout, the social role of political authority was to legitimate and regulate access to and control of resources as well as the interaction between individuals and groups. As we shall see, how this was done changed considerably during the Empire’s existence. The key difference between the Empire and European countries was that the former emerged as multicentred, not just politically, but also socially, economically and culturally. This left a lasting legacy, especially in the German lands, where these developments reached their fullest extent with imperial reform and its consequences at the local and territorial level. The result was the idea that a proper social order was composed of distinct groups and communities, each with local and specific rights. The role of authorities was to protect and nurture this society and to resolve its difficulties.

The most potent form of authority in the Empire was lordship (
Herrschaft
). Like ‘feudalism’ (see
pp. 328–31
), ‘lordship’ is a highly contentious term with almost as many definitions as there are historians.
²
The debate reflects the real problems of the sources, which reveal that medieval and early modern Europeans used a variety of words for
what historians call ‘lordship’, and did so in multiple ways. The term remains useful, provided it is understood as a set of powers that could be concentrated in the hands of a single lord, but equally might become distributed between several lords, or exercised by corporate institutions or groups like city councils, religious houses and even peasant communes.
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The following offers a brief chronological survey of the main socio-economic developments throughout the Empire into the eighteenth century, while the remainder of the chapter examines the tensions between the hierarchical and associational aspects of the Empire’s socio-political order.

Carolingian and Ottonian Society

We have already seen (
pp. 179–99
) how the Empire encompassed more Romanized areas to the south and west, as well as large regions that had escaped incorporation within the ancient Roman empire. Information on the latter regions is sparse, but it seems unlikely that what became the German kingdom was inhabited by a free warrior people holding the land in common.
⁴
The majority of people during late antiquity lived in hamlets, with the few towns and larger villages restricted to the more Romanized areas like Italy. Isolated farms existed, but they belonged to the elite rather than crofters. The population relied on stock-rearing. Fields were tilled individually, because land was plentiful, while the small, dispersed population rendered common ownership unnecessary. The few large estates worked by dependent labour were mainly in Italy. Markets were underdeveloped compared to later eras, with most activities concentrating on subsistence rather than exchange. Social difference was expressed legally in terms of free or unfree populations, rather than primarily economically.

Europe’s population grew by a third in the fifty years before 700 to reach 24 million, providing a powerful factor promoting the rise of the Franks, who developed a system known as ‘villication’, establishing the manorial economy to harness the greater labour power. This coincided with the development of more coherent, centralized political structures, since these could draw on the surplus production to sustain larger numbers of warriors and clergy freed from the necessity to feed themselves. In turn, these structures provided the legal framework to command and coordinate dependent labour, since market forces alone
were too weak to achieve this.
⁵
Villication involved a shift to a three-field system. Instead of rotating fields annually between grass and grain, the Franks introduced a three-year cycle of winter planting, summer planting and laying fallow. This enabled the still-small population to exploit the land more intensively, because they could work on different fields throughout the year. The manor developed to coordinate the workforce. Manors could be crown possessions (
villae
) entrusted to stewards (
villici
or
maiores
), or could be granted as a benefice to a lay or spiritual lord, or they might be developed by lords on their own property.
⁶

Each manor was centred on the lord’s house, including barns and assets like mills, or specialist workshops on large manors like that at Staffelsee abbey employing 24 female textile workers in the early ninth century. The lord or his steward lived in the house together with servile domestics (
servi dominici
, or
Gesinde
), who were maintained at the lord’s expense from produce from the manor and were employed to maintain it and work the ‘domains’, or land reserved for the lord. A typical Carolingian manor might also have 50 tenants or ‘live-out servants’ (
servi casati
) with farmsteads known as ‘hides’ (
mansi
, or
Hufe
), each with 30 ‘rods’ or ‘yokes’ (
Morgen
) of land.
⁷
The exact size of hides varied with soil quality, but each one generally encompassed 24 to 26 hectares. The tenants used this land to support themselves and their families, whilst also working three days a week to assist the domestics farming the domains (see
Plate 27
). Common land (
Allmende
) formed the third part of the system, consisting of meadows, ponds and woods used by all the manor’s inhabitants. The manorial system thus rested on the medieval concept of lordship and usage: the lord retained jurisdiction over all land associated with the manor, but only worked the domains directly, allowing tenants and others varying access to the remainder.

This system spread through Carolingian conquest into Germany and, to a lesser extent, parts of Italy. Developments were interrupted by Viking, Slav and Magyar incursions, but resumed during the late tenth century and consolidated across the next, when they also spread eastwards amongst the Slavs and Magyars through interaction with Ottonian society. Even in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the bulk of production was consumed locally, with trade limited primarily to imports. Political needs remained broadly constant, as the Ottonians continued to require a socio-economic order able to supply sufficient
mounted warriors for them to fight their enemies and campaign in Italy.

The manorial system eroded sharp distinctions between free and unfree, creating a more complex social structure. The peasantry emerged as a hybrid group with rights associated with hides, but still dependent on a lord. Given the small population, lords were keen to retain workers and granted hereditary tenure to their peasants, but they also imposed restrictions on the sale or partition of hides to maintain them as viable subunits of the manor. Domains remained important, for example producing four times the income derived from tenures at Cluny abbey in the mid-twelfth century.
⁸
Live-in domestics remained slaves into the eleventh century, their numbers sustained partly by slave-raiding until the late tenth century, together with requisitioning children from tenants whose own family growth remained constrained by the number of hides available. The earlier free peasantry survived better in Saxony (especially Westphalia) into the Ottonian era, but declined elsewhere in Germany with the spread of dependency, and by 1100 perhaps only 10 per cent of the population remained legally free.
⁹
The military obligations established by the Carolingians might take free men away from their farms for months. Accepting dependency offered a way to escape this. The church was especially keen to attract labour for its large construction projects, as well as to work its lands, and frequently extended protection in return for service and a share in produce.

A functional division gradually emerged to structure society into Estates, or corporate social groups. The clergy and nobility were exempt from manual labour, performing spiritual and military tasks instead. The commons, or third Estate, comprised the bulk of the population providing society’s material needs. Society stratified along lines of protection and service, with a clearly lordly elite sustained by peasant production. Lordship continued to develop as the legal framework to regulate this relationship through structures like manors, law courts, dioceses and parishes.

Salian and Staufer Society

The mid-eleventh century marks a significant watershed, ending the expansion and consolidation of Frankish-Ottonian socio-economic
forms, and the emergence of more diversified patterns. One reason was the success of the manorial economy in raising productivity. Hunger crises persisted into the eleventh century, but not on the scale of those in the ninth century, or again during the twelfth. Bread had become the staple food, as evidenced by the rapid spread of water mills during the eleventh century after their slow development since the Carolingian era. The more intensive field use allowed for the cultivation of more diverse crops, including vegetables that improved diet. Already the invention of the deep-bladed plough had allowed the Franks to work the heavier northern European soil. New forms of harnessing draught animals, together with the invention of the horseshoe, improved ploughing in the eleventh century, while iron axes and scythes now replaced wooden implements.
¹⁰

Change not only came ‘from below’, but was also stimulated by lordly pressures, such as the building of stone castles and cathedrals like that at Paderborn under Bishop Meinward. The bishop had peasants beaten for laziness, and once had one woman dragged on her bottom across her garden until it was clear of weeds.
¹¹
Most lords, including counts, found the rising costs of military service could not be met from existing means, and not only pushed their peasants to be more productive but also sought privileges like market and mint rights to help develop their lands and to gain access to cash as well as produce and labour.

Europe’s population rose from 38.5 million in 1000 to 73.5 million in 1340, experiencing the fastest growth in France, England and Germany. The population of the German kingdom tripled between 1000 and 1237, rising even faster in some areas like eastern Saxony, which saw tenfold growth.
¹²
The German population grew from 8 million in the twelfth century to peak at 14 million around 1300, while the number of Italians rose from around 5 million in 950 to between 7 and 8 million by 1300, at which point Hungary and the Slav areas to the east had perhaps 9.5 to 13 million inhabitants. For the most part, population growth encouraged a virtuous circle, providing more labour to boost production further. Forests were cleared in the Vosges, south-west Germany, the Palatinate, Franconia, Thuringia, Bohemia and other upland areas during the eleventh century. Improved drainage and dyke construction reclaimed land along the Elbe and North Sea coasts around the early twelfth century, thanks largely to the influx of migrants to these regions.
¹³

Despite this, population growth increased pressure on land and so fuelled urban growth, initially in Italy where the former Roman settlements had revived already in the tenth century, and it encouraged the foundation of new towns north of the Alps after 1100 (see
pp. 504–8
). Towns stimulated more specialized production and market networks, including expanding long-distance trade. More stable relations between the Empire and Denmark and other Baltic powers encouraged such trade and contributed to a north–south division in Germany. The north was integrated within Baltic and North Sea networks through new towns founded on the coasts and along major rivers, while the south remained linked through more established towns to Mediterranean trade. Expanding markets meanwhile yoked north Italian towns closer to their immediate hinterlands, contributing substantially to their growing political supremacy over rural lords. In turn, towns acted as catalysts for their surrounding area, which developed market gardening and viticulture to serve the urban population, many of whom were not primarily engaged in food production. Growing commercialization increased the demand for secular, vernacular literacy, as well as sharper divisions of labour and a shift from subsistence to profit.
¹⁴

Producing for the market required new divisions of labour and more sophisticated land management than could be provided through the manorial economy. Migration to towns and further east across the Elbe caused temporary labour shortages. This added pressure on lords to offer their peasants better terms so as to encourage them to remain on their land. The process began first in Italy where the manorial economy was never as widespread as north of the Alps, and where greater urbanization and better roads had facilitated commercialization already in the tenth century. The trend spread north during the eleventh century, accelerating after 1100 and peaking around 1300.
¹⁵
Lords moved from taking income in the form of peasants’ labour to extracting it as shares of their produce through varieties of sharecropping. Italian lords soon revised this to extracting cash rents, because their tenants had greater access to urban markets to sell their produce. This became widespread during the twelfth century, transforming hides into leaseholds. Meanwhile, most of the lordly domains were broken up to create additional tenancies. Short-term leases developed in Italy from the twelfth century, often only lasting until the next harvest. Major operators like
Cistercian monasteries, which had worked their land directly with dependent labour, also converted to leaseholds by the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, many peasants sublet parts of their plots to cottagers.
¹⁶