Village Pattern

One Response to Village Pattern

1. magistra says:

   August 15, 2010 at 4:43 pm

   Having now had a chance to read more of the relevant chapters of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages, the obvious questions are 1) what does Peter Sarris mean by slavery? and 2) why does he think the existence of aristocrats precludes the existence of independent peasants? As Alice Rio and others have been pointing out, you need to think fairly hard about how you define slavery as against serfdom (and it may not have mattered much practically most of the time anyhow). As for aristocrats, Chris isn’t denying their existence in the East. What he argues is that they never have as large-scale landowning as some western aristocrats. You don’t see even in the fourth century landowners who have land in numerous regions: even the Apions have land in Egypt and Constantinople, but aren’t known to have it elsewhere, unlike some western senators (and Merovingian/Carolingian aristocrats). As well as less powerful aristocrats than in the west, you also have more independent peasants. Chris mentions the Farmers’ Law, but he doesn’t just use that as evidence. He’s also using saints’ lives from sixth century Anatolia, which show peasant communities not controlled by aristocrats, and documentary evidence from sixth to eighth century Egyptian villages, which again show independent peasants and medium landowners. Villages in Palestine where you have a lot of very similar, closely-packed reasonable sized houses also suggest the same thing: it’s not your one big house in the village pattern you get in northern Europe. The extra complication in the east is also that there’s still a state that taxes. Some of the aristocratic power comes from being the mediators between that state and villages, but it also allows at least the possibility for peasants of trying to play off the state against the local aristocracy (which you can’t really do with a Carolingian count). And village structures also look a lot more solid than in the west, with formal village heads in some places, for example. So I’d say it’s perfectly possible to argue for more aristocratic continuity than has been realised without assuming that these aristocrats are simply lording it over all the peasants. Whether you want to talk about peasants probably depends more on whether you’re interested in political/cultural matters or in economic history.