The Manor, Rural Life & Those
who Work
How to Wash Your Hair, 12th century
"After leaving the bath, let her adorn her hair, and
first of all let her wash it with a cleanser such as
this. Take ashes of burnt vine, the chaff of barley
nodes, and licorice wood (so that it may the more
brightly shine), and sowbread... with this cleanser
let the woman wash her head. After the washing,
let her leave it to dry by itself, and her hair will be
golden and shimmering... If the woman wishes to
have long and black hair, take a green lizard and,
having removed its head and tail, cook it in
common oil. Anoint the head with this oil. It makes
the hair long and black."
The Trotula (12th century)
What we’re doing today?
 An ordered Universe –
 Hierarchy & Power
 The Three-Fold Society
 Feudalism
 Rural Life & Agrarian Economics
 Manorialism
The Timeline – 750-1100
 http://digihum.mcgill.ca/~matthew.milner/teaching/classes/hist214_f13/ti
meline/
An Ordered Universe?
 Rhetoric about kingship part of a
large discussion about the proper
ordering of the Universe – and
society.
 Christian society is ordered and
structured - human kind was
situated amidst a larger, ordered and
hierarchical universe.
 Change and innovation was rebellion
against order - peace and authority
came from maintaining the
traditional status quo
Three-Fold Society
 Structured:
 Those who fight (bellatores)
 Those who pray (oratores)
 Those who work (laborares)
 Ideas of ‘station’ and ‘obligation’, rights &
responsibilities
 ‘invented’ by whom?
 Historical authors - Early 11th Century Bishop
Adalbero of Laon and Gerard of Cambrai:
 Way of explaining what they saw
 Does it become ‘crystallized’ or ‘real’?
 Elites use concepts of hierarchy and order to
explain and maintain political power
 Gendered? Where do women fit in?
LeGoff ‘Medieval Man’
 Much more complex picture – historiographical
 Types or functions for (men?) human beings in an ordered society
 Ten ‘types’ – based on social function or role, station, profession
The Monk, The Knight, the Peasant
The City-Dweller, The Intellectual, The Merchant, The Woman, The Artist, The Saint, The Outcast
 Just a construct? Or a useful ‘hermeneutic’ (analytical) TOOL
 Is a theory a ‘thing’ or an instrument? An intellectual knife we can use to cut up or
understand and interpret historical reality?
 LeGoff = medieval ‘cultural’ history? 1970s-80s, reaction against ‘big men’ – Annales
School history (french)
 Medieval authors use stereotypes to talk about roles in society –
William Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: The Parson, The Friar, The Wife of Bath, The Student, The
Merchant, the Lawyer, the Knight, the Physician, the Clerk, the Squire....
Laborares
Rise of ‘Medieval’ Society

Agrarian Society – LAND is source of wealth

Gendered – Patriarchy


Germanic law – women are legal minors requiring guardianship (except Visigoths!)

Male roles – hunting, building, smithing, clearing land

Female roles – planting, weeding, raising children
Oaths of fealty (allegiance)

Vassals and Lords

Knights as military vassals

Local military landowning elites - Manors

Free peasants vs serfs (agrarian economy)

Commercial networks


Initially small & local

Return of Trade & international commerce
Rise of towns in northern Europe
‘Manorialism’?
 The Manor as the base unit of medieval agrarian economics &
administration
 Landholding class of knights, vassals, etc. ‘the Lord’ of the Manor
 Bound labourers – Serfs & Peasants – can’t leave the manor
 Highly self-sufficient – supports community & warrior-class Lord (protector)
 Withstand isolation in low-trade world
 Grows out of Roman villa system where small landholders exchange rights and property
for protection from marauders / invaders, develops into manorial system
 Supports Feudal super-structure, but not part of it directly
 Manor consists of an estate with (a) village(s), mill, fortified dwelling for Lord, surrounded
by arable land
 Lord has economic as well as legal jurisdiction
What’s involved?
 Manors
 Demesne – area that supports Lord’s household
 Common Lands – for tenants
 Mills
 Church or chapel
 The Manor (from Latin, manerium)
 People
 The Lord & his household – Wife, children, Steward
 Serfs or Villeins
Works their own lots, but also those of Lord, days and times allocated by local custom
 Landholding Peasants
Much like serf, but owns land, though falls under legal jurisdiction of the Lord
Obligations of Serfs
 dues to the lord:
 capitation or head tax (literally, a tax on existence)
 the taille (a tax on the serf's property)
 the heriot (an inheritance tax)
 banalities (fees) to use the lord's mills, ovens, and presses
 Paid in KIND – not cash (usually – but this changes!)
The Manor?
Sources
 Capitularies – Franklish administrative
document
 Domesday Book (1086) – Survey of
Kingdom of England for the crown,
provides lists of land and its value, but also
indicates systems of governance
 Account books (if we’re lucky!)
 Manorial Court Records – ‘rolls’ in England
 Archaeological records
 Literature
Sources - Lands of Westminster Abbey
Medieval Agricultural Revolution
 Collective Farms

Shared labour, skills, and resources
 Crop-rotation: Move from two-field to three-field system makes fields more
productive

Crop yields increase; moves from Rhine / Loire outwards
 Plough & Tilling

Heavy plough allows farming of clay soil, more fertile

Small technological change as huge economic and demographic impact
 Invention of the horseshoe
Arthur, King of the Britons
‘Feudalism’?
 The basic outline
 Fief / Feudum – parcel of land from overlord to vassal in exchange for military service
Sub-infeudization – vassals grant Fiefs to others, creating a pyramid of vassalage
Alienation – give land to others – usually the church, removing it from feudal oversight - potentially
 Involves Oath of Fealty (loyalty and obedience) from the 8th-9th century
 Vassal places hands between the lord's, is sealed with a kiss
Can you be a vassal of more than one lord of you have two fiefs? – Liege Homage
 Governed by mutual rights & obligations (not one way!)
 Creates a network of mutual relationships on loyalty and service
Feudalism - Germ. Lehnswesen or Feudalismus; Fr. féothilité)
What do we know?
 Appears first in western
Europe, and moves eastward
 Indicates weak central
government
 Fiefs varied considerably in
size from one or more small
manors to agricultural
holdings of twenty-five to
forty-eight acres, or even
territories
 Only hereditary in England
after 1154
 Allodium – holding land
WITHOUT feudal duties – full
‘ownership’
Rights & Obligations (Dues)
 Lord:
 Lands reverted (technically) to lord at death of a vassal;
 rights of guardianship (wards) over minor children upon death of a vassal;
 (some locations) rights over marriage of vassals;
 ‘aids’ in England & France – Fees paid upon the lord's oldest son was knighted, when the
lord's oldest daughter was married, and when the lord himself was taken prisoner
 Purveyance – hospitality in a vassal’s household
 Vassal:
 Attend Lord at Court;
 Military Service for portion of the year, longer if at war;
 Rights to Lord’s Justice;
 pays relief upon death of father to secure inheritance
Moot & Bailey design
Changes & Challenges

Vassals’ rights increase

Loyalty & Fealty become critical


Identity bound up in vassalage to liege lord – not the ‘French’ so much as the vassals of a lord.
Combat as a method of honour & measure of wealth

Society is hierarchically ordered with a military class of highly-trained and expensively-equipped warriors

What do you do when you’re bored or offended? FIGHT
Problem of Regulating conflict – too much?
Do Christian Knights fight? And kill? – Peace of God, church tries to establish parameters
Rise of Chivalry & Tournaments as method of demonstrating prowess without economic & political consequences – Honour & Comportment

The rise of Hereditary Aristocracy

Eventually investiture can’t be withheld (custom!) from an heir willing to do homage

What to do with many sons? Forms of inheritance – Salic Law; women & inheritance
France vs England

Service or cash?


The return of coinage alters how dues can be paid, and whether service (vassal or serf) can be bought off rather than given in
person, or in kind
Whose Justice? Abuse of Courts by Lords, or conflicts between different customs
Medieval Law & Society
 Manor Courts – Later development
 Lord or his representative has legal jurisdiction within his estate
 Over see transfers or grants of land; trespassers punished;
 Fines for
making bad ale, fighting, lack of chastity, letting animals roam in the planted fields, marrying without
leave, and for breaching "the custom of the manor"
 Legal system complex – customary?
Roman Law – universal, created for an empire
Germanic Law – common, and local, much organic; guided by tradition and custom
 Rents, Rights, & Obligations
 A felony was a break of a feudal contract, which disrupted communal peace
 Forfeiture – loss of a fief if a vassal fails in his obligations
 In England – rents paid on Quarter Days – e.g. Sept 29 – Michaelmas (st Michael’s day)
 King’s Court
‘Feudalism’? ‘Manorialism’?
 Do they ‘exist’?
 Very difficult to say – historiographical constructs – they are ISMs
 Early 17th Century - Sir Henry Spelman - "feudalism"
 Marc Bloch – Feudal Society (La société féodale 1939), trans. 1960s
Feudalism permeates all of medieval society
 E.A.R. Brown – Tyranny of a Construct (1974) critiques Bloch
feudalism is counterproductive as it encourages "concentration on oversimplified models" and there
is "insufficient attention to recalcitrant data”
 S. Reynolds in Fiefs and Vassals (1994) – historians have read feudalism into early periods
when it doesn’t exist
 The background – Karl Marx
 Three phases in social development with different modes of economic production:
Tribal, Feudal, Capital
 Christopher Hill “By feudalism I mean a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of
economy and in which political power is monopolised by a class of landowners”
‘Feudalism’? ‘Manorialism’?
 Diversity critical – terms of feudal relationships and forms and governance
of manors
 Great difference between Bavaria and England according to poem ‘Meier Helmbrecht’
C. 1250 a peasant boy who se father was a wealthy peasant, leased a farm, as his father had done
before him, The boy, encouraged by his mother and sister, was determined to seek his fortune as
a knight. The costume he secured consisted of fine linen clothes, not homespun, ornamented
with fur of lambs and goats.
 Is it useful?
 Yes – is a useful way of looking at relationships, provided we qualify and explain the
particulars
Take Away

Medieval society develops new modes of governance and
economics in light of the Carolingian collapse & 8th-10th century
migrations

Rise of independent – self-sufficient agricultural units ‘manors’
which regulate life

Development of system of protection supported by these units

Medieval scholars describe this as a Three Fold society and see it
as a form of social order

Historians called this feudalism & manorialism

Pyramidal structure, emphasis on rights & obligations –
contractual

Develops into notions of ‘station’ – Aristocracy

Is challenged by constant warfare & conflict, the corruption of
dues & service by cash
Terms
Feudalism
Manorialism
Fief
Heriot
Crop Rotation
The Heavy Plough
Fealty
Liege Lord
Laborares