Medieval Communes

People sort of know what a commune is.  A group of hippies all living together in a big house, right?  And (in popular imagination) probably engaged in a lot more exciting activities than going to work and soaking the chick peas for supper, which surely occupied a lot more time, realistically.

The Middle Ages didn't have hippie communes but it certainly had communes, by which they meant sworn alliances of people governing themselves.  Working together as a community was an essential part of medieval society.  Monasteries, castles, and villages functioned in many ways like big families, and communes were part of this trend.

Urban communes developed at the same time as cities started growing in the twelfth century--the eleventh century in Italy.  A tiny city that had been dominated for centuries by count and bishop would, as it grew in population and became the home to many merchants and artisans, have its citizens decide they needed to be self-governing.  A commune would be set up, sometimes with the support of count and/or bishop, sometimes against their opposition.  These three major entities (count, bishop, merchant/artisan commune) would then have to work out some sort of agreement among themselves over issues like judging and tolls.

In France, the kings often supported the foundation of communes in various cities.  There are clear indications that money changed hands in the process.  It would be hard for a local authority to try to dissolve a commune when they had a royal charter.  The French kings, however, never allowed a commune in Paris.

Communes started with city councils, to make important decisions, and with judges or magistrates, to judge disputes between townspeople and punish malefactors.  Judges would be citizens of the city.  By the late twelfth century, most cities also had a mayor, a single elected individual who would be able to make decisions on crucial issues more expeditiously than could the whole city council.

Although city communes have gotten most of the scholarly attention, peasant villages had them too.  Here the beginning was the village of Lorris, not far from Paris, where the local landlord wanted to attract new settlers to his land and promised them a commune in return for settling there.  The "customs of Lorris" were approved by King Louis VI at the beginning of the   twelfth century and reconfirmed by his son and grandson in the following generations.  These customs were seen by all parties as symbols of liberty, because they gave the peasantry the authority to regulate disputes themselves and specified that the landlord could expect certain annual payments but not impose what the villagers considered arbitrary demands and taxes.  The customs of Lorris were widely copied in other villages.

This demonstrates what can be called peasant agency, the ability of peasants to make their own decisions or, at a minimum, fight back against what they considered oppression.  Medieval peasants might have lived in what we would now consider intolerable conditions (dirt-floored huts, no modern sanitation or modern medicine, back-breaking work), but they were neither silent nor passive.

In one well documented quarrel between the count of Nevers and the abbey of Vézelay, in Burgundy, both sides turned to the peasants and villagers of Vézelay for support.  The count, weeping what a monk of the abbey called obviously false tears, said that he was saddened to see the peasants so oppressed by the vile abbot, and he promised them a commune if they would forswear allegiance to the abbey and be his men instead.

(The image above is the interior of the church of Vézelay, as it would have looked at the time.)

The abbot in turn made a number of insulting remarks about the count and reminded the peasants that they had promised to be faithful to him.  Nonetheless, lured by the promise of a commune, the peasants threw their allegiance to the count, who promised to protect them from the "evil" abbot and who appointed magistrates and city council members from among their numbers.

The quarrel continued for a year, with many twists and turns, the intervention of two cardinals delegated by the pope, councils, threats, the abbot sneaking out of Vézelay claiming his life was in danger, various excommunications, and the like.  It was finally settled by compromise (as were most medieval disputes), with the peasants giving up their commune but getting the abbot to agree to drastically roll back what he had been demanding in dues.  The point is that peasants and townspeople were entirely capable of making the powerful pay attention to them and make concessions to them.  After all, they outnumbered them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval peasants and townspeople, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval bridges

Bridges seem self-evident to us.  There's a stream or river.  We want the road to cross.  We build a bridge.

But bridge-building, as any engineer will tell you, is far from simple.  It has to be strong enough to carry the load.  Unless it is very short, it has to be supported in the middle, which means putting pillars down into the river.  The pillars have to be sturdy enough to withstand the pressure of running water and probably ice and flotsam.  And then there's maintenance.  Covered bridges in the nineteenth century were built that way so that the roof would help protect the timbers.

Bridges were very important in the Middle Ages both for commerce and for communication.  One can kick a horse into a river and hope he swims faster than the river carries him away, but this doesn't work with a cart full of goods on the way to market.

Timber bridges were certainly found in the Middle Ages, but if possible they were built of stone, the roadway wide enough for a cart, with low walls on either side.

All market towns built bridges on the approach roads to facilitate merchants bringing goods to town.  These were usually operated as toll bridges, where those with the carts would willingly pay rather than hunt up and down stream for miles for a shallow ford.

Within a town there was almost always a bridge, because almost all towns were built on a stream or river.  The bridge made communication and commerce between both sides of the river much easier than they would have been otherwise.  Often a bridge would lie right below a castle or fortress, so that anyone crossing the bridge would know they should not even think of getting out of line.

Under the bridge, if the river was swift-flowing, mills were often build between the pillars.  On the bridge itself, if it was fairly long, little shops might become established.

A surprising number of Europe's medieval bridges still survive after eight centuries or so, a tribute to the planning and workmanship of medieval engineers who did not have computers, slide rules, or even Arabic numerals.  These bridges are mostly now pedestrian-only, but some still take cars.  (The one above, located in Mende in south-central France, is pedestrian-only now.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on medieval bridges and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Guilds

We tend to think of labor and management as two separate groups, groups that indeed are comparable from one locality to another.  That is why modern labor unions are national or even international.  But medieval guilds were different.

As cities grew in the twelfth century, a major component was the guilds, associations of artisans that all made the same sort of thing.  A guild included everyone from the masters down to the boys starting their apprenticeships, so labor and management were not considered separate categories.  There was no sense of solidarity between guilds making the same product in different cities; any member of the shoemakers' guild in one city would have told you that the shoemakers' guild in the next city over was well known for its shoddy products and high prices.

Although each guild set its own requirements, there were many similarities.  To become a member of a guild, one usually started young, around six or eight, the same age as a boy might be when sent off to the church or to begin his knighthood training.  One began as an apprentice, doing simple, low-level tasks in a shop, like sweeping up or carrying messages.  It helped to be from a guild family; some guilds were wary of letting in "outsiders."  Parents placing a boy in a shop as an apprentice had to pay a sizable fee, because the boy would have to be fed, housed, and clothed for years before he became an economic asset.

An apprentice advanced from simple tasks to slowly learning the trade.  At this point he would become a journeyman, someone who knew what he was doing and would be paid to do it.  (The word, by the way, doesn't mean someone taking a trip but rather someone paid by the day, journée in Old French.)  A journeyman typically moved out of the shop where he'd lived since boyhood, even if he still worked there.

Journeymen were hired by the masters, those who actually ran the shops.  All journeymen must have dreamed of becoming masters, but only a few could.  They would need enough capital to buy a shop--again, being from the right family helped a lot--and especially needed to produce a "masterpiece," something to prove to the other guild masters that they had become so good at their craft that they were qualified to join them.

The shops combined retail and work space on the street level.  Large, arched doors stood open except in the worst weather, letting in both light and customers.  The upper floors were where the master's family and the apprentices lived, somewhat above the noise and smells of the street.

Different shops in a guild would coordinate with each other and usually all be situated on the same street; they might even claim the local parish church as their church.  The messier guilds, like the leather tanners (who produced a lot of waste hair and flesh as well as unpleasant chemicals) would be on the downstream side of town.  Guilds regulated both quality and prices, so as not to undercut each other.  People shopping for a particular product would choose one shop over another for its features or personal service.

Guilds included everything from shoemakers to jewelry makers to masons to prostitutes.  The professors of a university belonged to the professors' union (universitas is indeed medieval Latin for what we'd call a guild).  Although most guilds were run by men, a few, like the ribbon-maker's guild, were all female.  Women might also become masters if they were the daughter or widow of a master and could prove they knew the craft.

For more on medieval city life, see the following post.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015