The Landlord and the Economic Revival of the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, 1000-1250

Abstract

ATTEMPTS TO PRESENT a synthetic picture of the economic and social relationships between town and country in the Middle Ages still tend to be dominated by an assumption of class conflict derived either from early liberal or Marxian analyses of the ancienregime. The medieval town is usually presented as an antifeudal institution, controlled by a new class of men-the merchants-who because of their lowly social origins and suspicious profession find themselves both despised and feared by the nobility, the dominating class of the agricultural society. Essentially a warrior class whose life is based on an agricultural economy almost completely consumptive in nature, the nobility appears unable to adapt to the expanding use of money. Threatened by the merchants rising from below, the nobility by the thirteenth century is closing its ranks. Economically, however, this attempt at exclusion is of little avail: the manors are breaking up and rights over land and men bargained away for the cash so necessary to pay old debts and purchase new luxuries. So inauspicious is the economic condition of the nobility by 13oo as usually depicted that it is quite marvelous that European revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had an ancien regime to destroy. Doubtless the most systematic presentation of the class-conflict thesis for the Middle Ages is to be found in the numerous works of Henri Pirenne. For Pirenne the countryside of the tenth and eleventh centuries had manors everywhere.' Small allodial holdings had almost completely disappeared, and the rural population was divided basically into serfs and big landlords who were either nobles or clerics. In his opinion this agricultural society was unable to furnish either leadership or capital for the commercial revival that was just beginning to get under way in these centuries.2 The serfs were too downtrodden; the nobility by their very success