Peasants keep appearing in this blog, for the excellent reason that they were by far the bulk of the medieval population, maybe 90%. Today I want to discuss one particular peasant, named Bodo, who has become (and he'd be shocked to learn it), the "Standard Medieval Peasant." I am discussing him because he provides a good starting point for pointing how how unfounded are many of the sweeping assumptions modern folks have about medieval people.
Bodo was a real person. He lived in the early decades of the ninth century on a manor belonging to the Parisian monastery of St.-Germain-des-Prés. He is known because the monastery did an inventory of all its manors, including this one (located outside of Paris), listing the tenants by name and detailing how much each owed in rent. Bodo was required to work a certain number of days a week on the fields belonging to the big manor house.
The monastery's records about Bodo are extremely skimpy, not much more than this, though noting he had a wife, Ermentrudis, and three (unnamed) children. In 1924 the historian Eileen Power wrote a book, Medieval People, designed to give ordinary people more of a role in accounts of the Middle Ages--at the time most historians were focused on institutions, great men, and the rise of the nation state.
This was laudable of course, but she made some great leaps in fleshing out Bodo's story. She described Bodo's manor as looking like what Charlemagne had, two generations earlier, said he wanted a royal manor to look. (One must wonder if a monastery had the same idealized vision as a king, much less whether any of Charlemagne's manors ever looked the way he envisioned.) She added in detail from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, plus even some manorial rolls from the end of the Middle Ages. She also gave Bodo and his wife three named children as well as an ox.
The real problem with this "artist's conception" of Bodo is that he has become the standard version of every medieval peasant. Because Power did not describe any peasants from later centuries, Bodo has come to stand for every medieval peasant, giving a timeless quality to descriptions of peasant life. Every popular account of "life in the Middle Ages" includes something like the image below, with a castle or manor house, a grouping of peasant houses and a church, and the fields stretching off in all directions. Although not in this particular image, it's also common to show a barefooted peasant with an ox. (It's Bodo!)
(Actually I think I see Bodo over near the left, leading his ox, who is bringing a cartload of, I assume, food to the castle/manor house.)
The problem is that Bodo and his manor are typical only of great ninth-century manors with their tenants. Especially as the economy improved and new lands were cleared for agriculture in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, due to peasant initiative, this "typical" arrangement became less and less typical.
Most peasant villages had neither a castle or a manor house. Many of the peasants might be tenants of a monastery or a secular lord, but he (or she or they in the case of a monastery) lived some distance away. And a lot of peasants were what is called allodists, that is they owned their property outright rather than being tenants.
Even the tenants owed much less in labor dues by the twelfth century than they had in the ninth century. Peasants had been able to negotiate their way out of them, usually for a monetary payment. The landlord found it easier to hire workers than to try to force unwilling peasants to work. These payments were fixed in perpetuity, which meant that the amount the peasants had to pay declined in value, while wages for hired labor went up. "Works for us!" said the peasants. Bodo would have been jealous.
© C. Dale Brittain 2021
For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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