PEASANTS, TRADE, AND CITIES
During the High Middle Ages, new farming methods enabled Europe’s population
to grow. The revival of trade led to a money economy and the growth of cities. Many
serfs worked the land under the manorial system, while merchants and artisans
revived old cities and founded new ones.
The New Agriculture
In the Early Middle Ages, Europe had a relatively small population. In the High
Middle Ages, however, population increased dramatically—doubling between 1000
and 1300 from 38 million to 74 million people. What caused this huge increase? For
one thing, conditions in Europe were more settled and peaceful after the invasions of
the Early Middle Ages had stopped. This increased peace and stability also led to an
expansion in food production after 1000. In part, food production increased because
the climate changed during the High Middle Ages and improved growing conditions.
In addition, peasants cultivated more land when they cut down trees and drained
swamps during the 1000s and 1100s. By 1200, Europeans had more land for farming
than they do today. Changes in technology also aided the development of farming.
The Middle Ages witnessed an explosion of labor-saving devices. For example, the
people of the Middle Ages harnessed the power of water and wind to do jobs once
done by human or animal power. Many of these new devices were made from iron,
which was mined in various areas of Europe. Iron was used to make scythes, axes,
and hoes for use on farms. It was also used in hammers and nails for building.
Iron was crucial in making the carruca, a heavy, wheeled plow with an iron
plowshare. Unlike earlier plows, this plow easily turned over heavy clay soils. Because
of the weight of the carruca, six or eight oxen were needed to pull it. However, oxen
were slow. The inventions of a new horse collar and the horseshoe made it possible
for a series of horses to pull the carruca faster and plow more land in the rocky, heavy
clay soil of northern Europe. Use of the carruca also led to the growth of farming
villages, because people had to work together. Because iron was expensive, an entire
community had to buy a carruca. Likewise, one family lagers shared their beasts. To
minimize the amount of turning of the heavy carruca, people plowed land in long strips.
Shifting from a two-field to a three-field crop rotation also increased food production.
In the Early Middle Ages, peasants divided their land into two fields of equal size. They
planted one field and allowed the other to lie fallow (unplanted) to regain its fertility.
Now, however, lands were divided into three parts. Peasants planted one field in the
fall with grains (rye and wheat) that they harvested in summer. They planted the
second field in spring with grains (oats and barley) and vegetables (peas and beans)
that they harvested in fall. They allowed the third field to lie fallow. This way, only one-
third, rather than one-half, of the land lay fallow at any time. This practice of rotating
crops kept the soil fertile, while allowing people to grow more crops.
The Manorial System
You will remember from Chapter 9 that feudalism created alliances between
nobles (lords and vassals). The landholding nobles were a military elite whose ability
to be warriors depended on their having the leisure time to pursue the arts of war.
Landed estates, located on the fiefs given to a vassal by his lord and worked by
peasants, provided the economic support that made this way of life possible. A manor
was an agricultural estate that a lord ran and peasants worked. Although free peasants
continued to exist, increasing numbers of free peasants became serfs, or peasants
legally bound to the land. Serfs had to provide labor services, pay rents, and be subject
to the lord’s control. By 800, probably 60 percent of western Europeans were serfs. A
serf’s labor services included working the lord’s land. The lord’s land made up one-
third to one-half of the cultivated land scattered throughout the manor. Peasants used
the rest of the estate’s land to grow food for themselves. Such tasks as building barns
and digging ditches were also part of the labor services peasants provided. Serfs
usually worked about three days a week for their lords.
The serfs paid rents by giving the lords a share of every product they raised.
Serfs also paid the lords for the use of the manor’s common pasturelands, streams,
ponds, and surrounding woodlands. If a serf fished in the pond or stream on a manor,
he turned over part of the catch to his lord. Peasants were also obliged to pay a tithe
(a tenth of their produce) to their local village churches. In the feudal contract, lords
and vassals were tied together through mutual obligations to each other. On individual
estates, lords had a variety of legal rights over their serfs. Serfs could not leave the
manor without the lord’s permission and could not marry anyone outside the manor
without the lord’s approval. Lords often had political authority on their lands, which
gave them the right to try peasants in their own courts. Peasants were required to pay
lords for certain services, such as having their grain ground into flour in the lords’ mills.
Even with these restrictions, however, serfs were not slaves. The land assigned to
serfs to support themselves usually could not be taken away, and their responsibilities
to the lord remained fairly fixed. It was also the lord’s duty to protect his serfs, giving
them the safety to farm the land.
The Peasant Household
The life of peasants in Europe was simple. Their cottages had wood frames
surrounded by sticks, with the spaces between sticks filled with straw and rubble and
then plastered over with clay. Roofs were simply thatched. The houses of poorer
peasants consisted of a single room. Others, however, had at least two rooms—a main
room for cooking, eating, and other activities and another room for sleeping. There
was little privacy in a medieval household. A hearth in the main room was used for
heating and cooking. Because there were few or no windows and no chimney, the
smoke created by fires in the hearth went out through cracks in the walls or, more
likely, through the thatched roof.
Cycle of Labor
The seasons of the year largely determined peasant activities. Each season
brought a new round of tasks. Harvest time in August and September was especially
hectic. A good harvest of grains for making bread was crucial to survival in the winter
months. A new cycle of labor began in October, when peasants worked the ground for
the planting of winter crops. In November came the slaughter of excess livestock,
because there was usually not enough food to keep the animals alive all winter. The
meat would be salted to preserve it for winter use. In February and March, the land
was plowed for the planting of spring crops—oats, barley, peas, and beans. Early
summer was a fairly relaxed time, although there was still weeding and sheepshearing
to be done. In every season, of course, the serfs worked not only their own land but
also the lords’ lands. They also tended the small gardens next to their dwellings, where
they grew the vegetables that made up part of their diet. Peasants did not face a life
of constant labor, thanks to the feast days, or holidays, of the Catholic Church. These
feast days celebrated the great events of the Christian faith, or the lives of Christian
saints or holy persons. The three great feasts of the Catholic Church were Christmas
(celebrating the birth of Christ), Easter (celebrating the resurrection of Christ), and
Pentecost (celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s disciples). Other
feasts dedicated to saints or the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, were also
celebrated. More than 50 days were essentially holidays. Religious feast days, Sunday
mass, baptisms, marriages, and funerals all brought peasants into contact with the
village church, a crucial part of manorial life. The village priest taught the peasants the
basic ideas of Christianity so that they would gain the Christians’ final goal—salvation.
However, village priests were often peasants themselves; most could not read.
No one knows how much church teaching the peasants actually understood. Very
likely, they saw God as an all-powerful force who needed to be appeased by prayer to
bring good harvests. The position of peasant women in manorial society was both
important and difficult. They were expected to work in the fields and at the same time
bear children. How well they managed the household determined whether their family
starved or survived.
Food and Drink
Though simple, the daily diet of peasants was adequate when food was
available. The basic staple of the peasant diet, and of the medieval diet in general,
was bread. Women made the dough for the bread. The loaves were usually baked in
community ovens, which the lord owned. Highly nutritious, peasant bread contained
not only wheat and rye but also barley, millet, and oats. These ingredients gave the
bread a dark appearance and a very heavy, hard texture. Numerous other foods added
to the peasant’s diet: vegetables from the household gardens; cheese from cow’s or
goat’s milk; nuts and berries from woodlands; and fruits, such as apples, pears, and
cherries. Chickens provided eggs and sometimes meat. Peasants usually ate meat
only on the great feast days, such as Christmas and Easter.
Grains were important not only for bread but also for making ale. In the Middle
Ages, it was not easy to obtain pure sources of water to drink. Consequently, while
wine became the choice of drink for members of the upper classes, ale was the most
common drink of the poor. If records are accurate, enormous quantities of ale were
consumed. A monastery in the twelfth century records a daily allotment to the monks
of three gallons of ale a day. Peasants in the field probably consumed even more.
The Revival of Trade
Medieval Europe was an agricultural society with small villages. In the 1000s and
1100s, however, the economic foundation of European civilization changed. Changes
included a revival of trade and an associated growth of towns and cities. The revival
of trade in Europe after the chaotic Early Middle Ages was gradual. Cities in Italy took
the lead. Venice developed a mercantile fleet (a fleet of trading ships) and by the end
of the 900s had become a major trading center in the Mediterranean. The towns of
Flanders, an area along the coast of present-day Belgium and northern France, were
ideally located for northern European traders. Merchants from England, Scandinavia,
France, and Germany met there to trade their goods for the high-quality woolen cloth
of Flanders. By the 1100s, a regular exchange of goods had developed between
Flanders and Italy.
To encourage this trade, the counts of Champagne, in northern France, initiated
a series of trade fairs. Six fairs were held every year in the chief towns. At these fairs,
northern merchants brought the furs, woolen cloth, tin, hemp, and honey of northern
Europe and exchanged them for the cloth and swords of northern Italy and the silks,
sugar, and spices of the East. As trade increased, demand for gold and silver coins
arose at fairs and trading markets of all kinds. Slowly, a money economy—an
economic system based on money, rather than barter—began to emerge. New trading
companies and banking firms were set up to manage the exchange and sale of goods.
All of these new practices were part of the rise of commercial capitalism, an economic
system in which people invested in trade and goods to make profits.
The Growth of Cities
The revival of trade led to a revival of cities. Towns had greatly declined in the
Early Middle Ages, especially in Europe north of the Alps. Old Roman cities had
continued to exist, but they had dwindled in both size and population.
Cities Old and New
With the revival of trade, merchants began to settle in the old Roman cities. They
were followed by craftspeople or artisans—people who had developed skills and saw
a chance to make goods that the merchants could sell. In the course of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, the old Roman cities came alive with new populations and
growth. Many new cities or towns were also founded, especially in northern Europe.
Usually, a group of merchants built a settlement near a castle because it was located
along a trade route and because the lords of the castle would offer protection. If the
settlement prospered and expanded, new walls were built to protect it. The merchants
and artisans of these cities later came to be called burghers or bourgeoisie, from the
German word burg, meaning “a walled enclosure.” Medieval cities were small in
comparison with either ancient or modern cities. A large Medieval trading city would
number about 5000 inhabitants. By the late 1200s, London—England’s largest city—
had more than 40,000 people. Italian cities tended to be even larger than this. For
instance, Venice, Florence, and Milan each had more than 80,000 inhabitants. Even
the largest European city, however, seemed small when compared to the Byzantine
capital of Constantinople or the Arab cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. Most
towns were closely tied to the land around them because they depended on the food
grown in the surrounding manors. In addition, the towns were often part of the territory
belonging to a lord, and therefore were subject to his authority.
The lords wanted to treat townspeople as they did their vassals and serfs.
However, townspeople saw things differently. Townspeople needed freedom to trade.
They needed their own unique laws and were willing to pay for them. Lords and kings,
in turn, saw that they could also make money and sold to the townspeople the liberties
they wanted. By 1100, townspeople had numerous rights from local lords. These
included the right to buy and sell property, freedom from military service to the lord, a
written law that guaranteed townspeople their freedom, and the right for an escaped
serf to become a free person after living a year and a day in the town. The people in
almost every new town and city gained these basic liberties. Some new towns also
received the right to govern themselves by choosing their own officials and having
their own courts of law. Over time, medieval cities developed their own governments
for running the affairs of the community. Only males who had been born in the city or
who had lived there for some times were citizens. In many cities, these citizens elected
the city council members, who served as judges and city officials and who passed
laws. Elections were rigged so that only patricians— members of the wealthiest and
most powerful families—were elected.
City Life
Medieval towns were surrounded by stone walls. Walls were expensive to build,
so the space within was tightly filled. Thus, medieval cities had narrow, winding streets.
Houses were crowded against one another, with the second and third stories built out
over the streets. The danger of fire was great. Dwellings were mostly made of wood
before the 1300s and candles were used for light and heat. Medieval cities burned
rapidly once a fire started. The physical environment of medieval cities was not
pleasant. Often dirty, cities smelled from animal and human waste. Air pollution was
also a fact of life. Smoke from wood fires, present everywhere, or from the burning of
cheap grades of coal filled the air. Water pollution was also a problem. Butchers
dumped blood and all other waste products from their butchered animals into the
rivers. Tanners, who converted animal hides to leather, unloaded tannic acids and
other waste products of their operations. Cities did not use the rivers for drinking water
but relied instead on wells. While medieval towns had private and public baths—Paris
had 32—they were closed during the great plague of the fourteenth century (discussed
later in this chapter). Considerably more men than women lived in medieval cities.
Women were expected to supervise the household, prepare meals, raise the children,
and manage the family’s finances. Often, they helped their husbands in their trades.
Some women developed their own trades to earn extra money. Sometimes, when a
master craftsman died, his widow carried on his trade. It was thus possible for women
in medieval towns to lead quite independent lives. In fact, many women became
brewers, weavers, and hatmakers.
Industry and Guilds
With the revival of trade, cities and towns became important centers for
manufacturing a wide range of goods, such as cloth, metalwork, shoes, and leather
goods. Many craft activities were carried on in houses located in the narrow streets of
medieval cities. From the 1000s on, craftspeople began to organize themselves into
guilds, or business associations. Guilds played a leading role in the economic life of
cities. By the 1200s, there were guilds for almost every craft (tanners, bakers) and
separate guilds for specialized groups of merchants, such as dealers in silk, spices,
or wool. Craft guilds directed almost every aspect of the production process. They set
the standards for the quality of the articles produced, specified the methods of
production to be used, and even fixed the price at which the finished goods could be
sold. Guilds also determined the number of people who could enter a specific trade
and the procedure they must follow to do so.
A person who wanted to learn a trade first became an apprentice, usually at
around the age of 10, to a master craftsperson. Apprentices were not paid, but they
did receive room and board from their masters. After five to seven years of service
during which they learned their craft, apprentices became journeymen and worked for
wages for other masters. Journeymen aspired to become masters as well. To do so,
they were expected to produce a masterpiece, a finished piece in their craft. This piece
allowed the master craftspeople of the guild to judge whether a journeyman was
qualified to become a master and join the guild.
