The Customs of Lorris

 As I have discussed earlier, medieval peasants were neither passive nor helpless creatures.  After all, they outnumbered the rest of the population by a considerable amount, and if they didn't grow the food, the lord would have to be out there himself behind the plow, or else the food didn't get grown.  Peasants were thus a valuable commodity, and at least some lords figured out that making them happy was usually preferable to beating and threatening.  Medieval peasants lived in conditions those of us in the twenty-first century West would find intolerable, but that didn't mean they could do nothing to help themselves.  There was plenty they could do short of revolting.

One of the most notable examples of peasant initiative in improving their position was the Customs of Lorris.  This was a blueprint for how a village might be organized, with the obligations of the peasants spelled out.  It started, as the name implies, in the village of Lorris, early in the twelfth century.  (Lorris is east of Olrleans in central France, in the Loire valley.  This is the bell tower on its medieval church.)

The local lord had granted a series of privileges to his peasants in what was called a "charter of liberty" or a "franchise," and he asked King Louis VI to confirm it, which he did.  The lord's purpose was to make the villagers happy, to attract new villagers to a territory that was being economically developed, and to get a steady revenue stream without having to hassle and badger the villagers of Lorris.  These Customs were then reaffirmed in the following generations by subsequent kings, and they were widely copied all over northern France.

From the peasants' point of view, the principal advantage was regular, predictable obligations, instead of arbitrary or capricious demands.  Each peasant family received a house in the village and sufficient land in the surrounding territory to raise their crops, and the family paid 6 pennies a year for this.  They had no labor dues, no unexpected demands for goods or services.  They could not be expected to join a military expedition unless it took them no more than a day away from home.  No tolls would be charged on peasants heading out of the village to take their crops to market.  The only extra tidbit the king threw in was that the village would have to provide food for the king and queen for up to two weeks a year if they stayed in Lorris.

But most of the Customs granted the peasants autonomy.  Every family in the village paid the same rent, which was unusual in the twelfth century, when there was a patchwork of different obligations, probably a further indication that Lorris was a newly planned and laid out settlement.  Families were free to sell their houses and land if they wished and leave; clearly the lord of Lorris did not anticipate that many would want to.  Fines for various infractions were clearly specified, and it was stressed that no one would be imprisoned unless accused of a crime.

Overall, the Customs gave the villagers of Lorris, and the other villages where they were adopted, identity as citizens of a particular place, rather than just dependents of one lord or another.  Every indication is that they paid good money to their lord in return for the grant of these Customs.  Although the Customs in the form we now have them do not spell out the negotiations that led them to taking the form they now have, but there must have been considerable discussion for the lord to know what the peasants would agree to and what obligations they were willing to undertake.  The autonomy, the ability to determine ahead of time how much they were expected to produce, was from their point of view worth it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

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.

Serfs

What's a serf?  What's a peasant?  Given that pretty much everybody of western European ancestry is descended from peasants, this is something that it seems we'd like to know.

A "peasant" just means a country person, a farmer, someone engaged in agriculture.  The most common medieval term was rusticus (which you don't need to know Latin to interpret).  They worked extremely hard (as of course modern farmers do as well), but not all of them were serfs.

A serf (servus) was someone who was legally unfree, although exactly what this status entailed varied widely.  The term servus had been the term in Roman law for slaves, but medieval serfs were not slaves.  Slavery had died out in western Europe by the eighth century.  Serfs could not be bought and sold because they were not property, and killing a serf was murder just as was killing a free person.  They were not even usually referred to with the term servus.  More common were such terms as mancipius, collibertus, famulus, hospes, or colonus.  Because different regions might use different terms, it is nearly impossible to say what was the distinction between these different terms.

Mancipius suggests someone seized in the hand, collibertus someone with only partial liberty,  famulus someone who served the family, hospes someone who came from elsewhere, colonus someone who was supposed to open up new lands, but all we can say for sure is that medieval scribes knew what they meant and we're left trying to figure it out from context.

As legally unfree, a serf (of whatever variety) was not supposed to be able to enter the church--though some did--and was not supposed to be able to give testimony in court--though again, some did.  They were supposed to defer to their lord-of-the-body (as the person whose serf they were was called) in marriage and inheritance, because servile status was hereditary.

In some places, a serf was supposed to come before his lord once a year with a rope around his neck and some pennies on his head.  Serfs usually had to pay a fine if they married someone who was not a serf of the same lord.  And sometimes serfs had to pay an inheritance tax (called mainmort) if they weren't living at home when their parents died and wanted to take up their parents' house and land.

Serfs owed the same mix of rents as free peasants who had landlords--a combination of money, produce, and "work days" in which they worked in the lord's fields.  On the average, serfs had heavier labor dues (more work days) than free peasants, but they were not subject to arbitrary payments.  That is, the lords could not just demand whatever they wanted and get away with it.

A lot of serfs had both a lord-of-the-body and a separate landlord from whom they rented some additional land.  In addition, serfs, like everyone else in a region, were subject to the regional count and the diocesan bishop.  This helped, because they could play one off against another, complaining with heart-rending cries to count or bishop if someone tried to demand something of them not approved by tradition.  Peasants (including serfs) had nothing like the freedoms we now take for granted, but they still had agency, the ability to take charge of their own lives.

Serfdom essentially disappeared in France in the early twelfth century.  Understandably, serfs found the ritual with the rope and the pennies very humiliating, and many bought their way out--their lords were willing to take a large lump sum in return for never again receiving the pennies, whose value became less and less all the time.  Some forgot (or "forgot") that they were serfs, since in many respects they were indistinguishable from other peasants.  Other just ran away to lose themselves in the rapidly growing cities.

In England and Germany, however, serfdom lingered much longer than in France.  Christian Spain started having serfdom for the first time in the thirteenth century.  Russia acquired serfs for the first time at the end of the Middle Ages.

Interestingly, mainmort, the inheritance tax for those heirs not living at home with their parents, lasted for at least a century after serfdom had disappeared in France.  Eventually most peasants bought their way out of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.