Rural Commercialisation in Fourteenth- Century Southern Germany: The Evidence from Scheyern Abbey

Abstract

This article explores the extent and nature of rural commercialisation in Bavaria and neighbouring regions in the middle of the fourteenth century. Although it is now generally accepted that English rural society was already highly commercialised by this point, the situation in England has rarely been subject to detailed comparison with other parts of Europe, and few studies exist that examine rural commercialisation in medieval Germany. On the basis of an analysis of seven years of accounts from Scheyern abbey, the results of which are then compared both with other sources from and studies of southern Germany, and with the recent scholarship on England, this paper suggests that southern Germany was in fact in many respects comparable to England in terms of rural commercialisation, and therefore that differences in tenurial structure and the chronology of servile incidents are less relevant than have often been thought for the understanding of economic change in the later middle ages.