Late Middle Ages

The medieval village community, work, and faith

The medieval village was, for the great majority of the men and women of the late Middle Ages, the horizon of the world. A few hundred souls at most, clustered around a parish church and a manor house, living off the open fields, the meadow, the common pasture, and the wood, governed by the custom of the manor and the rhythm of the church calendar — that was the world of the late-medieval peasant. The demographers of the late-medieval countryside — Russell, Titow, Postan, Hatcher, Campbell, Bailey, Christopher Dyer — have spent more than a century recovering the documentary base for that world, and the work has transformed the older, more picturesque accounts. The village was not a primitive, communal collective; it was a society of customary tenants, freeholders, and wage labourers, governed by the seigneury, the census, the censier, the customary, and the court roll. It was a society of work and of faith, of arare and of orare, and the two were inseparable.

The religious life of the village was the framework of the social life. The parish church, the decima, the cures, the trentals, the obits, the guilds, the confraternities, the rogations, the processions, the almsgiving, the pilgrimages, the chapels of the local saints — all were the substance of the christianitas of the late-medieval countryside. The new religious history of the village, of which the work of R. N. Swanson, of Eamon Duffy, of Katherine French, of Peter Dykema, of John Bossy, of Virginia Davis, and of André Vauchez is the principal monument, has done more than any other current in the social history of the late Middle Ages to recover the texture of village life. The new agrarian history, of which Dyer, Hatcher, Campbell, Bailey, Stone, Langdon, Judith Bennett, and Edwin DeWindt is the principal monument, has done more than any other current to recover the texture of village work.

The Calendar of the Fields

The year of the village was governed by two calendars: the agricultural year of the aratrum and the falx, of the semenatura and the messis, of the fenum and the silva; and the ecclesiastical year of the Adventus and the Nativitas, of the Quadragesima and the Pascha, of the Pentecostes and the Assumptio, of the Omnes Sancti and the Festum Mariae. The two were not parallel; they were the same. The agricultural year began, in most regions, with the autumn sowing of the winter corn (wheat and rye) in October and November, and it was punctuated by the great liturgical feasts of the winter: Martinmas (11 November), the Nativity (25 December), Epiphany (6 January), Candlemas (2 February), and the Annunciation (25 March). The spring brought the spring sowing of the oats, the barley, and the pulses, and it was punctuated by Easter, the Rogation Days, the Ascension, and Pentecost. The summer brought the harvest, the hay-making, and the vintage; the autumn brought the winter sowing, the slaughter of the surplus livestock, and All Saints (1 November) and All Souls (2 November).

The documentary record of the calendar is rich. The English Court Rolls of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Censiers of the French villages, the Libri Monstrorum of the German and Italian bishoprics, and the Customals of the great abbeys preserve the rhythm. The Hyde Abbey Custumal of the bishop of Winchester, the Barking Abbey Custumal, the Gloucester Abbey Custumal, the Ramsey Abbey Custumal, the Tavistock Abbey Custumal, and the Battle Abbey Custumal are the principal English examples. The Polyptyque of Irminon of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (c. 820), the polyptychs of Prüm and Saint-Victor of Marseille, the Censier of the abbey of Saint-Denis of 1320, the Censier of the abbey of Saint-Bertin, the Censier of the bishop of Beauvais of 1318, and the Cartulaire of the bishop of Laon are the principal French examples. The Urbar of the German bishoprics, the Salbuch of the imperial cities, and the Liegenschaftsverzeichnisse of the Silesian and Moravian abbeys are the German equivalents.

The Customary Tenants and the Open Fields

The customary tenants of the village held their land by the custom of the manor. The custom was, in the English law of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the unwritten body of practice that governed the descent, the alienation, the inheritance, the marriage, and the wardship of the customary holding. The custom varied from manor to manor: in some manors, the holding descended by primogeniture (the eldest son took the whole); in others, by gavelkind (the holding was divided among all the sons); in others, by borough English (the holding descended to the youngest son). The Year Books of Edward I, the treatise of Henry de Bracton (c. 1230), the Fleta of the late thirteenth century, the Mirror of Justices of Andrew Horn (c. 1290), the Britton of the late thirteenth century, and the Statute of Merton of 1236 are the principal English legal sources. The French Coutumiers — the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir (1283), the Établissements de Saint Louis (c. 1270), the Grand Coutumier de Normandie — are the French. The German Weistümer — the Sendordnungen, the Dingordnungen, the Hofrechte — are the German.

The customary tenant worked the open fields in common with his neighbours. The open fields were the campus, the Gewann, the champagne, divided into a small number of large blocks, and the blocks were cultivated in a common rotation. The tenant held a share of the open field, made up of a number of strips scattered through the blocks, and the scattering was, in the older and more durable villages, the work of centuries. The strips were not, in law, the property of the tenant: the tenant held them at the will of the lord, on the condition of the customary services. The court rolls of the manorial court — the curia, the plaids, the audiences — are the documentary record of the disputes and the decisions. The work of Edwin DeWindt, of Helen Cam, of Doris Stenton, of H. M. Chew, of Christopher Dyer, and of David Postles has, in two generations, made the court rolls a major documentary source.

The open field was governed by the custom of the field: the Flurzwang of the German literature, the assolement of the French, the commonty and the stint of the English. The custom dictated the order of the crops, the time of the sowing, the time of the harvest, the time of the fallow, the rights of the afterpasture, the rights of the common, the rights of the way, and the rights of the lord. The byelaws of the open field, the ordinances of the census of the village, and the judgements of the curia were the institutional mechanism. The customary tenant was, in law, free to do many things: to marry, to inherit, to alienate by the custom of the manor, to sue in the royal court. He was not, in law, free to do a few other things: to leave the manor without licence, to sell his holding without the lord’s consent, to marry his daughter outside the manor without paying a merchet, to bequeath his holding against the custom of the manor.

The Seigneury and the Village

The seigneury was the political and the judicial system of the village. The lord of the manor, in person or through his steward (seneschal, drossart, Vogt, bailiff), held the curia, the court baron, the court leet, the court of the honour, the high court of the seigneury. The court had jurisdiction over the customary tenures, the petty offences of the village, the regulation of the common, the supervision of the weights and measures, the supervision of the bakehouse and the moulin banal, the supervision of the foresterie and the garenne, the supervision of the vigne and the vergier.

The seigneury was, in this period, in slow retreat. The Carta of the village, the charter of the franchise, the charter of the bourgeoisie, the charter of the commune, the franchises of the bonne ville — all were the instruments of the contractual extension of the village. The English Staple of 1313, the Carta Mercatoria of 1303, the Statute of Merchants of 1285, the Statute of Winchester of 1285, the Statute of Westminster of 1285, the Coutume de Paris, the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of 1283, the Coutumes of the bonnes villes of Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, the Coutumes of the bonnes villes of the Champagne and the Île-de-France — all were the constitutional moments of the late-medieval village. The historiography of the seigneury, of which the work of Marc Bloch, of Georges Duby, of Robert Fossier, of Marc Pacaut, of Pierre Toubert, of Gabriel Fournier, of Jean-Pierre Molénat, of the late Adriaan Verhulst, and of the late Walter Müller is the principal monument, has, in two generations, transformed the older, more formalist, more juridical account.

The Parish and the Church

The parish was the unit of the ecclesiastical administration. The parochia, the Kirchspiel, the paroisse, the pieve of the Italian peninsula, the encomienda of the Iberian peninsula, the parafia of the Slavic lands — the parish was the unit of the cura animarum, of the preaching, of the administratio sacramentorum, of the decima, of the obventiones, of the iurisdictio. The parish priest, the curé, the Pfarrer, the pievano, the parrocho, the pop or the ksiądz of the Slavic lands, the pappas or the hiereus of the Byzantine lands, was the principal figure of the village. He was, in the English village, the rector or the vicar; in the French village, the curé; in the German village, the Pfarrer; in the Italian village, the pievano or the rettore.

The parish church was the architectural and artistic centre of the village. The great Sussex wool churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Devon churches of the Perpendicular of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the East Anglian churches of the wool trade of the fifteenth century, the Normandy churches of the Romanesque and the Gothic, the Île-de-France churches of the Gothic, the Picard churches of the flamboyant, the German churches of the Backsteingotik, the Italian churches of the Romanesque and the Gothic — all were the architectural centre. The work of Eamon Duffy, of The Stripping of the Altars (1992), of Virginia Davis, of C. H. Lawrence, of R. B. Dobson, of the late Colin Morris, and of the late R. N. Swanson has, in the past thirty years, transformed the older, more clerical, more Protestant, and more secularised account of the religious life of the late-medieval village.

The Confraternity and the Village

The confraternity was the principal lay institution of the late-medieval village. Known by different names in different parts of Europe — confraria in Italy and Iberia, confrérie in France, Bruderschaft in German lands, brotherhood or guild in England — it was a voluntary association of laypeople bound together by devotion to a patron saint and by mutual charitable obligations. The confraternity had its patron saint, its altar in the parish church, its candle on the patron day, its procession on the festa of the patron, its alms for the poor, its trentals for the dying, and its obits for the dead. The confraternity was the principal social institution of the late-medieval village, alongside the manor and the parish. The work of James Brodman, of Katherine French, of Christopher Black, of Frances Andrews, of Nicholas Terpstra, of Lorenzo Polizzotto, of Michèle Bompaire, of Marc Venard, and of Yves-Marie Bercé has done more than any other current in the social history of the late Middle Ages to recover the confraternity.

The confraternity is the institutional context of the late-medieval charity. The hospital of the village, the Hôtel-Dieu of the bonne ville, the Domus Dei of the marché, the aumône of the chapitre, the aumône of the commune, the aumône of the cures — all were the institutional context of the late-medieval charity. The pauvres honteux, the pauvres of the confraria, the pauvres of the cures, the pauvres of the chapitre — all were the recipients. The work of Michel Mollat, of André Vauchez, of Bronislaw Geremek, of Lester Little, of Daniel Le Blévec, of Florence Callu, of Jean-Pierre Molénat, of Jean-Pierre Bénoit, of Robert Fossier, of Jean-Pierre Poussou, of Philippe Braunstein, of Jean-Michel Poisson, and of the late Jean-Pierre Benezet has, in two generations, made the pauvres of the confraria a major object of historical study.

The Worldview of the Village

The worldview of the late-medieval village was Christian, but it was a particular Christian — the christianitas of the saint of the chapel, of the festa of the patron, of the procession of the Rogations, of the miracle of the reliquary, of the exorcism of the démoniaque, of the sort of the sors, of the charme of the maleficium, of the diable of the sorcier, of the loup-garou of the lycanthrope, of the fée of the fata. The work of Carlo Ginzburg, of Jean-Claude Schmitt, of Robert Muchembled, of Pieter Spierenburg, of Richard Kieckhefer, of Brian Levack, of Edward Peters, of Lyndal Roper, of Robin Briggs, of Keith Thomas, of Alan Macfarlane, of Bernard Capp, of Peter Burke, of Mary Fulbrook, of Robert Scribner, of Gustav Henningsen, of William Monter, of Henry Kamen, of D. P. Walker, of Jean-Pierre Verdon, and of Marcello Muzzati has, in two generations, recovered the christianitas of the village.

The popular religion of the village was, in this sense, the religion of the festa, of the focaccia of the patron, of the processio of the Rogationes, of the miraculum of the reliquary, of the officium of the defunctorum. The popular religion of the village was, in other words, the religion of the seasonal cycle: the sowing, the reaping, the vintage, the slaughter, the marriage, the birth, the death. It was the religion of the agricultural year — of the semenatura and the messis, of the fenum and the silva, of the vindemia and the vendange. The popular religion of the village was, in short, the christianitas of the late-medieval countryside.

Reading the Village

The historiography of the late-medieval village has been transformed in the past forty years. The older, more literary, more antiquarian, more collectivist, more idealist, and more Marxist account has been replaced by a more local, more documentary, more demographic, more quantitative, more legal, and more economic account. The work of Marc Bloch, of Georges Duby, of Robert Fossier, of Marc Pacaut, of Emile Perroy, of Jean-Pierre Molénat, of Gabriel Fournier, of Pierre Toubert, of Jean-Marie Pesez, of Adriaan Verhulst, of Walter Müller, of Christopher Dyer, of Mark Bailey, of John Hatcher, of Bruce Campbell, of David Stone, of John Langdon, of Judith Bennett, of Edwin DeWindt, of Eamon Duffy, of R. N. Swanson, of John Bossy, of Virginia Davis, of Katherine French, of André Vauchez, of Michel Mollat, of Lester Little, of Daniel Le Blévec, and of Carlo Ginzburg has, in the long arc, transformed the historiography of the late-medieval village.

References and Further Reading

  • Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931).
  • Georges Duby, L’Économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (1962), 2 vols.
  • Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (1992).
  • Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (2002) and Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989).
  • Edwin B. DeWindt, ed., The Book of William Chandler, Reeve of the Manor of Braughing, 1472–1480 (1984).
  • R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989).
  • André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (1981; English edn. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 1997).