Peasant Elites and Village Communities in the South of France, 1200 1350

Abstract

The medieval village, said Rodney Hilton, introducing a paper on ‘Village Communities in Medieval England’ at the 1982 Flaran Colloque, was not an organic or a harmonious community in which everyone played their part. Drawing on his own work on the west midlands, amplified by more recent studies, he described a society in conflict. The fiercest disputes were between communities and their lords, but the community was also divided within itself; it was a stratified society in which the elite both led the resistance to the lord and itself behaved violently, especially towards the lesser villagers. Do we find this type of combative and overbearing elite when we look at the sources for the south of France, and in particular Languedoc? It is hard to tell, but let us look at how elites were constructed, both economically and politically, in the villages of Languedoc (See Fig. 1). We will then be able to return briefly to the English parallel.