Beyond Lord and Peasants E-Book

AAVV

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 448

Beschreibung

El proceso de estratificación económica dentro de las sociedades rurales durante la Edad Media y el período Premoderno es el eje central de este volumen. Reputados expertos y jóvenes investigadores analizan las élites rurales y su relación con la aparición del capitalismo agrario desde diversas perspectivas a través de las regiones europeas: desde Wiltshire (Inglaterra), el Condado de Flandes y el Ducado de Brabante (Países Bajos) hasta el Reino de Valencia (Corona de Aragón). A través de diversos métodos históricos, se recurre a una amplia gama de fuentes variadas como crónicas de la corte, testamentos, leyes, manuales de terratenientes institucionales y registros notariales. El volumen es en definitiva, una lectura esencial tanto para los especialistas en la historia rural, así como para el público más general interesado en las sociedades preindustriales.

Leseprobe

BEYOND LORDS AND PEASANTS

RURAL ELITES AND ECONOMIC DIFFERENTIATION IN PRE-MODERN EUROPE

Edited by Frederic Aparisi & Vicent Royo

UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA

All the papers have undergone editorial review and every paper was double-blind peer reviewed.

This book has obtained a funding from the Spanish Government through the subprogram “Acciones Complementarias a Proyectos de Investigación Fundamental no orientada Tipo A, convocatoria 2011”. Reference HAR2011-14133-E, in the research project HAR2008-06039 “Elites sociales y estructuras económicas comparadas en el Mediterráneo Occidental (Corona de Aragón, Francia e Italia) en la Baja Edad Media” lead by P. Iradiel. It has also received a financial aid from the research project HAR2011-28718 “Una capital medieval y su área de influencia. El impacto económico y político de la ciudad de Valencia sobre el conjunto del reino” lead by A. Furió.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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without the prior permission in writing of Publicacions de la Universitat de València,

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(Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos, www.cedro.org).

© The authors 2014

© Publicacions de la Universitat de València 2014

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

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Cover illustration: Pieter Brueghel the Young, Census at Bethlehem (circa 1605-1610).

Digital edition by JPM Ediciones

ISBN: 978-84-370-9262-1

CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

PREFACE

Ferran Garcia-Oliver

1. FRACTURES IN THE COMMUNITY: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Frederic Aparisi Romero & Vicent Royo Pérez

2. EXPLOITATION AND DIFFERENTIATION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE RURAL MUSLIM COMMUNITIES OF THE KINGDOM OF VALENCIA, 13TH-16TH CENTURIES

Vicent Baydal Sala & Ferran Esquilache Martí

3. COMMUNAL STRUCTURES, LORDSHIP AND PEASANT AGENCY IN THIRTEENTH AND EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: SOME COMPARATIVE OBSERVATIONS

Miriam Müller

4. MANIFESTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE: CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN RURAL VALENCIA DURING THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

Vicent Royo Pérez

5. LEASE HOLDING IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLANDERS: TOWARDS CONCENTRATION AND ENGROSSMENT? THE ESTATES OF THE ST. JOHN’S HOSPITAL OF BRUGES

Lies Vervaet

6. THE NOTARIAL PROFESSION AS A MEANS OF SOCIAL PROMOTION AMONGST RURAL ELITES IN THE MIDLANDS OF THE KINGDOM OF VALENCIA DURING THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Frederic Aparisi Romero

7. ‘POOR OR RICH, DEATH MAKES US ALL EQUAL’? SOCIAL INEQUALITY (POST MORTEM) IN RURAL COMMUNITIES NORTH OF BRUGES (1500-1579)

Kristof Dombrecht

8. LEADERS OF THE PACK: A TYPOLOGY OF VILLAGE ELITES IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURY CAMPINE AREA

Eline Van Onacker

9. THE COMMON DENOMINATOR: REGULATION OF THE COMMUNITY OF USERS OF COMMON WASTE LANDS WITHIN THE CAMPINE AREA DURING THE 16TH CENTURY

Maïka De Keyzer

10. CONCLUSIONS

Christopher Dyer

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

APARISI ROMERO, FREDERIC, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

BAYDAL SALA, VICENT, Beatriu de Pinós Research Fellow, University of Oxford.

DOMBRECHT, KRISTOF, Department of History, Ghent University.

DYER, CHRISTOPHER, Leverhulme Research Fellow, Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History, University of Leicester.

ESQUILACHE MARTÍ, FERRAN, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

GARCÍA-OLIVER, FERRAN, Professor of Medieval History, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

KEYZER, MAÏKA DE, Department of History, University of Antwerp.

MÜLLER, MIRIAM, Lecturer in Medieval History, Department of History, University of Birmingham.

ONACKER, ELINE VAN, Department of History, University of Antwerp.

ROYO PÉREZ, VICENT, Department of Medieval History, University of Valencia.

VERVAET, LIES, Department of History, Ghent University.

PREFACE

Ferran Garcia-Oliver

University of Valencia

The work of historians has also been affected by globalization. A historian’s work has always been a struggle with oneself and with the documentary sources being used that takes place in one’s private studio. Until recently, the fruits of this labour resulted in a publication or in a participation in a more or less crowded conference and in a rapid return to the domestic studio; however, this traditional figure is gradually fading, faced with the figure of the historian connected to international co-operation and research teams, which require even greater mobility and further increased attention to bibliographic production. The historian’s research may be in the public light even before it is set down on paper. It is also obvious that the Internet and social networks have also altered the working patterns of professional historians.

This new situation is particularly visible south of the Pyrenees. The backwardness caused by the long period of Francoism, along with university structures in which endogamic interests and certain atavistic suspicions reigned supreme, led to a certain difficulty in receiving the thought and research trends in European Medieval studies. Spanish Medievalism hardly managed to secure a presence in international forums and debates. The linguistic element was also, undoubtedly, a barrier. Whereas European historians seldom read in Spanish, it was even less common for them to read Catalan or Portuguese. Syntheses of economic histories, and, in particular, agrarian histories, resulted in the scandalous absence of Iberian agricultures and rural communities, an absence shared with most other Mediterranean countries. Languages are still a barrier, but, as with the internet, the adoption of English as a lingua franca has enabled a better and faster level of communication, as well as the arrival of Hispanic historiographies on the international stage.

The presence of some prominent Hispanic medievalists in European conferences or journals is not new: Claudio Sánchez Albornoz already participated in the conferences of Spoleto in the 1950s. The novelty resides in a general status and in the consciousness of the need to avoid the isolation, which was symbolically imposed by the Pyrenees, at all costs. Undoubtedly, Catalan, Portuguese or Castilian agrarian realities are marked by a series of exclusive distinguishing traits, but they attain their full meaning and coherence in the context of the European West, which was marked by three centuries of growth, the difficulties of the fourteenth century and the slow later recovery, in which landlords not only struggled against peasant communities, but also against urban powers and emerging states.

To be honest, it would be unfair not to acknowledge the efforts carried out by local historians, specializing in the rural world, to tighten bonds and to encourage more modern debates. In this case, the universities in the Catalan Countries, with Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Valencia at the fore, have proven themselves to be particularly active. In the case of the latter university, with which I am most familiar, having belonged to it myself, an international conference on local spaces was already held in 1988, followed by another on market spaces two years later, though efforts to gear regional research towards the European level are best reflected in the 2008 conference on consumption patterns and living standards.

Recently, small scientific meet-ups have been flourishing alongside traditional conferences with a long history. The financing of research groups, which mainly resides in governmental and European institutions, has led to a multiplication of international meetings. Whereas large conferences often lack the flexibility required for fluid debates, due to the large amount of discussants and simultaneous sessions, small workshops have the virtue of encouraging debates, as well as simplifying organizational problems. Thus, a small group of specialists can meet to discuss a specific subject, allowing a comparative examination of different research experiences and providing general outlooks beyond the particular field of each one of the observations.

These “historiographical workshops”, in the context of globalization, in the reinforced European political framework and the speed of the internet, are contributing significantly to connect social and economic spaces that were unaware of each other, more due to the a lack of momentum and linguistic barriers rather than due to questions exclusively related to problems related to research itself. In what concerns agrarian history, the profile of a more integrated European West, participating in common problems that require the use of similar documentary sources and related research strategies, has been reinforced.

Young historians, trained in the digital era and acquainted with social networks are largely responsible for the promotion of these encounters and seminars. The inherent benefits stand for themselves. Their academic training is sent to the debating arena in which they will test the research they are carrying out and with which they might obtain their PhD. Online contacts are reinforced by bonds of generational complicity, which might lead to new common meetings and projects. I insist on pointing out the importance of the ambitious frameworks being discussed. A true synthesis of European agrarian history can only stem from the inclusion of its broad and diverse geography, and peripheries may both validate general theses or question established paradigms.

It was young historians such as these who met in Valencia on May 19 and 20, 2011. Their goal was to expose their research and points of view on rural communities and, in particular, their internal divisions, between the 13th and 16th centuries. And, finally, after the characteristic misadventures of the editing process, their interventions resulted in the book you are holding in your hands. This would not have been possible without the silent labour of Frederic Aparisi and Vicent Royo who, being convinced on the value of a project that joined the Valencian experience with English and Flemish points of view, worked constantly to organize the workshop in Valencia as well as to collect the required funds for this publication.

It is not my objective to situate the contributions in their historiographical context, a task which has been taken up by the two organizers, nor is it to ponder the results, said responsibility befalling to Christopher Dyer. I feel that I should, however, point out the value of comparing the agrarian structures of the Southern Crown of Aragon with the “classical” structures of the European West. In the case of Valencia, the presence of Muslim communities up to their definitive expulsion, in 1609, provides a series of obvious particularities, especially in what concerns rent collections, political exclusion and the impossibility of formulating a program of demands alongside Christian communities. However, they both experienced similar internal fractures that resulted in the emergence of a select group of peasants who went on to control the structures of local power, concentrating land and carrying out economic investments that were more related to speculation and large profit margins than with strictly agricultural activities. In fact, it emerges that these peasants, far from tending to their lands with their hands, managed a small agricultural business, and their behaviour was closer to that of rural merchants, involved in constant purchase and sale operations and money lending. However, not only peasants were at the head of the community, where notaries, merchants, textile artisans, butchers and, in occasions, clerics also held sway. The members of this “rural elite” became enriched and adopted a series of economic, social and political practices akin to those of the burghers and nobility in the cities, clearly setting them apart from their own neighbours.

The differences with English and Flemish peasants – and their rural elites in general – should not focus on the profile of the protagonists as much as on regional contexts, that is, on the strength of feudal power, state interference and the development of the urban economy. The common element amongst Valencian, English and Flemish peasants is, first and foremost, that social mobility, mainly focused around the elites, broke the “chains” of lordly power and serfdom, wherever they still existed, time and again; and, secondly, that the fundamental decisions that organized agrarian development moved towards the city and the market, in its separate facets as a credit market, land market, labour market and product market, led by grain and cloth. Opportunities were not equal, of course. Relations with the market deepened the internal hierarchies, clearly marking the divide between the rich and the poor. Wealth and poverty were visible in the clothes worn by either group, in the grain reserves kept in their granaries, in the dowries with which they married their daughters, and in the funerals organized upon death. But, in spite of all this, they remained peasants. Ultimately, the handful of probi homines would be the defenders of local franchises, spokespeople with the nobility and the leaders of anti-lordly protests. Both the rich and the poor were seen as peasants by their adversaries, a “class” mark with a veneer of mockery and disdain under the pen of moralists and literary-inclined burghers.

We should therefore rejoice about the publication of this volume. These young English, Flemish and Valencian researchers remind us that, from the perspective of European agrarian history, the chronological border that separates the Middle Ages from the Modern Age is often irrelevant, but also that political borders often hide shared realities and interchangeable processes. All of this, more than ever, can only be carried out in the context of international work groups.

1. FRACTURES IN THE COMMUNITY: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Frederic Aparisi Romero & Vicent Royo Pérez

University of Valencia

Historiography has traditionally provided us with a rigid and schematic picture of Medieval rural society, divided into two large opposed blocks, lords and peasants, which determined it up until the end of the Ancien Régime. This discourse depicted a monolithic rural community, made up by a mass of peasants bereft of any internal differences and only concerned with subsistence. The peasant population was therefore presented as passive and subordinate, emotionally and physically bound to the land, and living in a harmonious world of collective solidarity. All this took place within the context of the manor, the true object of study for many historians over the course of decades. Furthermore, as Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie proposed, peasants lacked any kind of social, political or technical initiative, and they were subjected to lordly coercion and domination. The peasantry’s only answer to this was reacting violently to abuses and arbitrariness. Following Marxist precepts of class struggle, the conflicts that took place in rural society were interpreted as a part of a century-long opposition between lords and peasants, who rebelled against lordly abuses and their increasingly precarious living conditions due to the imbalances caused by a series of plagues and shortages that took place from the 14th to the 16th century. As a consequence, peasant revolts against the nobility spread over all of Western Europe, becoming particularly important in France (Fourquin, 1972), England (Hilton, 1973), Catalonia (Vicens, 1945) and Germany (Moeller, 1982), among many others. Moreover, at the time, it was also held that these revolts were orchestrated from the cities and that the peasantry only played a secondary role in a broader struggle meant to transform the social system. Thus, a vision of immobility and stability in the rural world settled in, reinforcing the perception of fixed and rigid social categories, without any leeway for variations in time and space to help explain social mobility.

This stagnation and the vision of a shapeless peasant mass, subjected to large structures, were highly characteristic of French historiography from the classic works of Marc Bloch to the 1960s and 1970s (Le Roy Ladurie, 1974: 673-692). However, as with all generalizing assertions, there was also room for nuances. Bloch himself pointed out the consolidation of intermediate groups within peasant society, the ministres (Bloch, 1928). Years later, Phillip Dollinger, in his study on post-Carolingian Bavaria, pointed to the existence of wealthy families named villivi or Meier, ce sont des tenanciers exploitant les tenures les plus vastes, les cours. These villici, possesseurs d’une cour, forment une sorte d’aristocratie paysanne (Dollinger, 1949: 434-435).

Ever since the early 20th century English historiography, unlike its French counterpart, proved more sensitive to the stratification of Medieval peasant society. Richard Tawney pointed out the economic importance of the farmers who emerged from the 14th century crisis (Tawney, 1912: 136-176). According to Rodney Hilton, the stratification of rural communities could be perceived from the very first written accounts of them, around the 9th and 10th centuries (Hilton, 1949: 117-136; 1973: 32-35). Inequalities did nothing but deepen throughout the Medieval period, although they became most apparent from the second half of the 14th century onwards. The decrease in the population and the increase in dynamism in the land market allowed wealthier peasants to constantly expand their holdings, employing hired labour to manage them, and sending an ever greater part of their output to the market. These local elites dominated the community both on the economic and political field, and they often became its representatives. However, this did not preclude them from also becoming the lord’s trusted men, becoming a part of his small administration (Hilton, 1978: 271-284). In any case, neither the services they provided to the lord nor their level of wealth prevented them from participating in, and often leading the revolt of the English peasantry in 1381 (Hilton, 1973: 176-185). Nevertheless, according to Rodney Hilton, in spite of this internal differentiation, the community remained a strong institution, because the common interests that united its members were more important than that which divided them (Hilton, 1975: 3-19).

Continental historiography was not indifferent to the new lines of interpretation from the isles. Indeed, within the very discourse that underlined large structures, immobility and homogeneity in rural society, a series of nuances were introduced which showed the importance of the little pieces that made up the social structure, its mobility and its heterogeneity. This change in the perception of the rural world was due to the introduction of new interpretative paradigms and, especially, to the analysis of social and economic relations in the countryside from a new perspective. From this moment, the rural community and, along with it, its inhabitants, emerged to stand on their own as objects of analysis in historiographic discourse. The sentence with which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie opened the preface of his work on Montaillou is highly illustrative of this historiographic paradigm shift: A qui veut connaître le paysan des anciens et très anciens régimes, ne font pas défaut les grandes synthèses - régionales, nationales, occidentales: je pense aux travaux de Goubert, Poitrineau, Fourquin, Duby, Bloch... ce qui manque parfois, c’est le regard directe: le témoignage sans intermédiaire, que porte le paysan sur lui-même. Moreover, he intended to carry out a study that was plus précis et plus introspectif encore sur les paysans de chair et d’os, to allow them, et même [...] tout un village en tant que tel, (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975: 9) a chance to speak out on themselves.

According to this new perspective, the rural community was the result of the conjunction of a number of peasant families that shared a same physical space, a specific legal and institutional framework provided by their lord, as well as a series of behavioural patterns which defined their basic characteristics. After decades spent studying large structures and struggles between social classes, peasant families, which were hegemonic in the organization of the social, political and economic framework of the rural world, became the centre of attention.

Taking the small domestic holding as the basic cell for production and social framing, rural communities were progressively dissected and defined in their inner workings starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Small domestic exploitations were also conceived as the basic piece for the payment of rents and taxes, as a sufficiently autonomous entity that was capable of escaping from the tentacles of the market, and which emerged reinforced from the crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Bois, 1976). The goal was to analyze the mechanisms employed by peasant families to achieve the self-sufficiency they desired, to pay for rents and taxes, guarantee the perpetuation of the family body, facing the lord and overcoming difficulties in times of crisis. The conclusion common to all the studies carried out was that these communities were far from being homogenous, but that, rather, there were deep-seated internal divisions and inequalities that could be traced back to the High Middle Ages. Thus, both in the Latium (Toubert, 1973) and in Catalonia (Bonnassie, 1975-1976) in the 9th-11th centuries, the presence of boni homines, who emerged as representatives of peasant communities and who participated in solving disputes in the court with their lords, was detected. These families were, however, more perceptible in the Late Middle Ages due to the greater availability and variety of sources. Thus, the social and economic transformations that took place in the European rural world in the Late Middle Ages, with periods of growth, crisis and reconstruction, generated significant processes of social, political and economic differentiation within rural communities.

The analysis of patterns of wealth and the records held by notaries and lords revealed the extant differentiation between different peasant families based on economic, political and social criteria that were more or less common to different territories in Europe. Material wealth, mechanisms for social reproduction, implication in local politics and relations with the lord defined the position occupied by each family in the internal hierarchy of the community. This social scale, however, was suffering constant changes, both upwards and downwards, as peasants shifted from one social station to another based on unforeseen aspects, such as the death of the head of the family, or other, carefully elaborated ones, such as strategic marriages (Furió, 1982: 141-144).

This entire process of peasant differentiation became clearer from the 1990s onwards, once the community had been studied deeply. Up to that time, various scenarios had been proposed to study the subject of the peasantry, but the best one to learn about the traits that defined the behaviour of different social groups is the local and regional frame. Whereas, in some areas, such as England, this method had a long tradition in universities, in other historiographies, such as Italian or Valencian historiography, the local level was reviled or even ridiculed. Far from the far-reaching national theses that intended to establish a single and general model, the social pre-eminence, political power, standards of living, productive investments and family strategies that defined the different sections of the peasantry were much more apparent through micro-historical observation and the application of a series of broader and more complex phenomena in a specific area (Furió, 2007: 408-412). Only thus could the idiosyncratic characteristics of social groups, whose boundaries were lax and mobile, be established. It also provided opportunities to analyze their social profiles and their behaviour in a specific time and place in-depth in order to establish similarities and differences between several regions, providing an interpretation that is both more consistent and much richer in details, as is the case with the whole of the articles this volume is composed of.

The best example of this social mobility is provided by the members of the so-called “rural elite”. This concept, which was coined recently, has proliferated through a series of studies, seminars and conferences focused on local elites (Menant-Jessenne, 2007). Indeed, the presence of a substrate of distinguished characters whose wealth surpassed that of their neighbours, with differentiated social practices, a distinguished cultural level and a certain political influence on the collective, has been detected. Thus, a small group of wealthy farmers, merchants, carders and notaries, who went to the fore of their communities and intended to highlight their pre-eminence, emerged. In order to achieve their aims, they employed a number of clearly differentiated economic, social and political strategies that brought them closer to the burghers and petty knights in towns than to their neighbours, who were simple peasants. The members of the rural elite composed a social group with blurry boundaries and have become the best example of social mobility. Rather than being stable members of a specific social order, the elites were involved in a process of constant change. Thus, social groups are neither immobile nor homogenous. Faced with the rigidity with which social categories have been described, it is necessary to integrate certain elasticity to the study of rural society in order to understand the differentiated behaviours of different sectors of the peasantry (Béaur, 1999: 17-20). Their lives were all marked by social and economic mobility in their field of action, the rural space, even though their situation was subjected to a strong variability, as they depended on a number of factors, such as family cycles, success of failure in business and relations with the lord. In sum, it is a series of paths that have been cleared by historiography over the past few years, and the studies that make up this volume treat them in-depth.

Nevertheless, studies on social mobility and economic differentiation in the rural world have not yet achieved sufficient weight in the field of historiography. In fact, these subjects have only been treated exclusively in a single conference, held in Rome in 2008, whose subject was Economies et sociétés médiévales. La conjoncture de 1300 en Méditerranée occidentale. The minutes of the conference were published by the Ecole Française de Rome in 2010 under the title La mobilità sociale nel Medioevo. As Sandro Carocci lamented in his introduction, up until now, the two phenomena have only been treated in an ancillary capacity in studies on nobility, urban oligarchies and, to a much lesser extent, rural elites. That is, the analysis of the behaviour of the most powerful classes, especially in the urban field, has led to the study on the mobility of certain individuals to be incorporated as an additional sample of the whole of the characteristics of the group being studied, without paying exclusive attention to the phenomenon.

Both concepts of economic differentiation and social mobility, especially the latter, have mostly been used by sociologists and anthropologists, rather than historians. Only modernists have used them systematically. The impossibility of carrying out studies with a broad qualitative base, owing to the dearth of documentary source material, has led studies on social mobility to take a back seat among medievalists. Up until now, the stratification in the Medieval rural world has been studied based on economic and political precepts that situated individuals and their families on specific points on the social scale. However, it is necessary to integrate other qualitative variables to interpret this generalized phenomenon in any historical period. Indeed, social standing is determined by a broad array of factors, such as recognition from others, cultural learning and networks of contacts. These aspects are not exclusive from each other, and they must all be taken into account along with an entire series of behaviours and outward signals that point to the position acquired within a social group: housing or funerary practices, among others (Pareto, 1964).

Beyond these mechanisms, different “channels of mobility” have been singled out (Sorokin, 1970). These ways correspond to the institutions that ease the transition from one social position to another: the family, school, the army, the administration, professions, the church and others represent these channels of promotion. Of course, no single path is necessary to thrive in society, but rather, social ascent is often born from a variety of channels. It is therefore necessary to adopt a multi-dimensional vision of the social space, as individuals moved in multiple spheres of action. Thus, for instance, one same subject is a husband, a peasant, a Christian and the member of a community. These diverse identities provide him with different means for promotion and to pursue his interests. On the other hand, social mobility can be analyzed inversely, that is, not only studying mechanisms for ascent, but also mechanisms of social decadence, even though this was initially far less attractive for historians (Carocci, 2010: 12).

It is therefore necessary to study the incidence of the different factors that organize social and economic relations in the rural world in order to gain a more in-depth knowledge of the European rural societies and the transformations it went through during the Medieval and Modern centuries. This is, ultimately, the goal of the series of studies that follow, as they offer a broad view of the abovementioned aspects and they approach the processes of ascent and descent of different strata of the peasantry on the social scale from different perspectives.

***

The edition of this volume is the result of the work carried out over the past years, and it was born from the Seminari de Joves Investigadors we have been organizing in the Department of Medieval History of the University of Valencia. In the first edition of this seminar we attempted to consolidate the scientific exchanges with our colleagues from our historiographic and linguistic field, the Crown of Aragon. Thus, doctoral students from Girona, Barcelona and Alicante attended. The goal was not only exchanging experiences in research, but also concerns and perspectives that were still unclear. This has been all but confirmed by later events. The positive reception of the initiative among the students of the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Valencia, as well as the financial aid from the Department of Medieval History, in which we were research fellows, at the time, led us to organize a new edition. In 2010, the field of reference was increased to the whole of Spain, which led young doctoral students from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Universidad de Sevilla presented the state of their research. At that time, we considered the possibility of inviting European colleagues who were in the initial phases of their historiographic training for a third edition of the seminar. The opportunity arose in the context of the Rural History Conference of 2010, held in Brighton (England), where the research team we belong to, Grup Harca, had organized a session on the management and use of natural resources in the Middle Ages. Here we met our Flemish colleagues, who had just begun their doctoral theses. The union of synergies took place immediately. As a consequence of our contact during the abovementioned scientific meeting, we invited our Belgian colleagues to participate in the Seminari de Joves Investigadors we had been holding for three years in the Department of Medieval History of the University of Valencia.

The possibilities for working together were highly interesting due to the number of points in common between our groups, in spite of the distance between us. On the one hand, belonging to two historiographic fields, the Valencian one and, especially, the Belgian one, were going through an important renewal of agrarian historiography in a European context. On the other hand, our observatories, the Kingdom of Valencia and Flanders, gained value according to the new historiographic tendencies that have come to point out the regional, and even county level as the most appropriate for historiographic research. Likewise, the members of Grup Harca and our Belgian colleagues shared an interest in rural society and the processes of internal differentiation in peasant communities throughout the Late Medieval and pre-Modern centuries, to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, the third edition of the Seminari de Joves Investigadors had an international dimension, as well as a common subject to provide coherence to the submissions. This encounter, held in Valencia, had its continuation in the conference organized by our Belgian colleagues in the University of Antwerp, in which English researchers also participated.

This volume gathers some of the materials that were presented as papers in both conferences. This does not, however, mean that it will be filed away. It is true that uncertainty hangs over the futures of young people all over Europe, especially in these times. In spite of this, the new tendencies and criteria for scientific assessment require the configuration of international groups that, through comparative analysis, analyze historical processes from different European fields. In fact, come to think of it, this collaboration between Belgians and Valencians is nothing new. The invitation from Phillip III of Burgundy, count of Flanders, to Alfonso V of Aragon to become a part of the order of the Golden Fleece in the 15th century is a good example of the political interests and economic bonds that united both regions. Let us, therefore, pursue this most fruitful relationship.

In this volume we have attempted to study economic stratification and social mobility through variety indicators and observatories. We have organized the contributions chronologically. The paper by Ferran Esquilache and Vicent Baydal analyzes differentiation within Islamic communities in the Kingdom of Valencia. Miriam Müller studies the evolution of communal structures in the decades preceding the Black Death faced with external elements, such as the lord or the landscape, but also internal divisive forces. The paper by Vicent Royo also follows the same line by analyzing the internal conflicts within peasant communities in the northern Kingdom of Valencia as a reflection of processes of differentiation and social mobility present within the communities as early as the 14th century. Lies Vervaet, on the other hand, studies these processes by analyzing loans of lands carried out by the Saint John’s hospital in Bruges throughout the Late Middle Ages. Frederic Aparisi studies the notarial profession as a means for social promotion for rural elites and their process of insertion in the urban oligarchy of a large, 15th-century Medieval city, Valencia. Whereas Aparisi uses notarial records as a source material, Kristof Dombrecht uses the account records of funeral expenses as evidence of the stratification in 16th-century peasant society. The study on the rural elites continues with the studies of Eline Van Onacker on the Campine area in the 15th and 16th centuries. Maïka De Keyzer, on the other hand, retakes the subject of conflict through a study on the use of common holdings in that area. Finally, professor Christopher Dyer closes this volume with a general valuation on the subjects exposed.

***

Publishing this volume has been no easy task, and it is the result of the combined efforts of a lot of people. First and foremost, we would like to thank Paulino Iradiel for the scientific and bureaucratic support he provided us with so that this book could come into being. It goes without saying that we also extend our thanks to the Ministry of Economy and Competitivity of the Spanish government, which financed the publishing. We would also like to specifically thank the authors for their efforts and patience throughout the publishing process, and, likewise, to thank the selfless collaboration of our friends and colleagues, Vicent Baydal and Ferran Esquilache. Furthermore, we would like to thank professors Ferran Garcia-Oliver and Christopher Dyer for their advice and absolute availability when participating with this project, especially due to how busy they are. Finally, we could not finish this section without giving our thanks to Elisa Palacios, whose experience and know-how have been crucial to allow this project to materialize into the book you are holding in your hands.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC FRAME

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— (1999) ‘Se situer socialement dans la société urbaine. Le cas des Dijonnais à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in J. Pontet (ed.), À la recherche de la considération sociale, Bordeaux, pp. 143-158.

— (2007) ‘Désigner les notables. Le vocabulaire de la notabilité à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIVe-XVes.)’, in L. Jean-Marie (ed.), La notabilité urbaine X-XVIII siècle, Caen.

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— (2010) ‘Methods and problems in the study of Social mobility in England, 1200-1350’, in S. Carocci (ed.), La mobilità sociale nel Medioevo, Rome, pp. 97-116.

— (2012) A Country Merchant, 1495-1520. Trading and farming at the end of the Middle Ages, Oxford.

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— (2007) ‘Las elites rurales en la Europa medieval y moderna. Una aproximación de conjunto’, in A. Rodríguez (ed.), El lugar del campesino. En torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, Valencia, pp. 391-421.

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— (forthcoming) ‘Elits camperoles a l’ombra de la ciutat de València: els Castrellenes’.

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— (1973) Bond men made free. Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381.

— (1975) The English peasantry in the later middle ages, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

— (1978) ‘Reasons for inequality among medieval peasants’, Journal of Peasant Studies, V, pp. 271-284.

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— (2009) Lucca nel Duecento. Uno studio sul cambiamento sociale, Pisa.

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Figure 1.1. Map of the regions studied in this book

Figure 1.2. Map of England in the Middle Ages

Figure 1.3. Map of the Low Countries in the Middle Ages

Figure 1.4. Map of the Crown of Aragon

2. EXPLOITATION AND DIFFERENTIATION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE RURAL MUSLIM COMMUNITIES OF THE KINGDOM OF VALENCIA, 13TH-16TH CENTURIES

Vicent Baydal Sala & Ferran Esquilache Martí

University of Oxford & University of Valencia

The only mention of Muslim communities to be found in the proceedings of the conferences in Flaran on pre-Modern European rural elites is a modest footnote. Jean-Pierre Jessenne and François Menant mention them as an example of elites subjected to processes of sharp breakage caused by wars, referring to the Christian conquests of Sicily and the Southern territories of the Crown of Aragon from the late 11th century to the mid-13th century (Menant and Jessene, 2007: 29). No other mention, in spite of the fact that the Muslims would remain in Aragonese lands for several centuries more, up until their expulsion in 1609.[1] Nevertheless, we know very little from the perspective of rural elites and social differentiation, especially in the kingdom of Valencia, the region of the Iberian Peninsula where they were the most demographically significant and where they remained longest after the Christian conquest. This is, precisely, one of the goals of this article: to attempt to redirect research through the analysis of what we know to this day and by formulating the first working hypotheses on the question. Is it possible to know the level of economic differentiation and social stratification within rural Muslim communities in the kingdom of Valencia? Were there any truly differentiated and outstanding “elites” within them? And, if so, which were their main characteristics, and how did they compare to Christian rural elites?

However, it is important to keep in mind that any analysis of Valencian Muslims would be invalid without taking into account its situation of submission to Christian society. The conquest in the 13th century had an all-pervading effect on its existence and on the reproduction of its social order. For this reason, before treating the question of social differentiation, the first part of this paper shall observe this exploitation from a historical perspective: its origins, its evolution, its nature and its implications. After all, Valencian pre-Modern society was markedly different from other contemporary European societies due to the presence, over centuries, of a significant number of local Muslims subjected to a differential exploitation.

1. THE SEGREGATION AND DIFFERENTIAL EXPLOITATION OF THE ALJAMES

From the 11th to the 14th century, the periphery of the European continent was subjected to conquest by the feudal and Latin-Christian society that had crystallized in the central core of Europe around the year 1000. The Anglo-Normans moved against the Celtic peoples of Wales, Scotland and Ireland; the Germans against the Balts, Slavs and Magyars in Northern and Eastern Europe; the crusaders and peoples of the Italian peninsula against the Muslims, Byzantines and Hellenes in the Eastern Mediterranean; and the Normans and Spanish peoples against the Muslims in Southern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula (Bartlett, 1993). Thus, in this context, the Christian conquest of Al-Andalus began, stemming from a society that belonged to the inherently expansionistic feudal order formed between the 9th and the 11th centuries.

The conquest took place in the same way as it did in the rest of the European periphery: through a tendency to biological substitution of the indigenous populations or, alternately, by segregating and dominating them (Torró, 2008a). Wherever it was materially possible, the Latin-Christians expelled or annihilated the natives and replaced them with colonists (e.g. Sicilia, most of al-Andalus, Brandenburg and Prussia); however, in those places where it was not possible, either due to geographic distance, native resistance or a lack of constant immigration, they were segregated and subjected to heavier burden of serfdom than on the new colonizing population (e.g. the Great Britain, Ireland, Livonia, Pomerania, Peloponnese, the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean or the Crusader states).[2] This was the case in the kingdom of Valencia, where the Muslims were maintained in a considerable proportion up until 1609, in a situation of segregation and exploitation, as we shall explain later on.[3]

1.1. Conquest, colonization, deportation and segregation

Al-Andalus was an Oriental, segmented and tributary type of society, which gave birth to a strong autonomy in peasant groups organized in rural communities called aljames (jama’a in Arabic), which were related to the Islamic state through Koranic taxation (Guichard, 1977). Thus, this society was considerably different from the Western, conjugal and feudal society that developed in the Christian territories in the Northern Iberian Peninsula around the year 1000. Thus, the Christian conquest of Al-Andalus entailed an absolute social rupture. In fact, the causes of the Muslim defeat stemmed precisely from that great difference: feudal society was permanently organized for war, whereas Andalusian society lacked that degree of social militarization. On the other hand, the maintenance of rural Muslim communities in the kingdom of Valencia was directly related to the evolution of the process of military subjugation that took place in the 13th century.

The conquest was led by James I of Aragon, who had already occupied the island of Majorca in 1229, annihilating or enslaving the entire Muslim population. The case of the Valencian territory, which was larger and more densely populated, was quite different. The Christian campaigns began in 1233, and, in 1245, they reached the borders of what would then constitute the new kingdom of Valencia, integrated in the Crown of Aragon. The advance took place by thoroughly expelling and expropriating the Muslim inhabitants in the North of the country and from its main cities, including Valencia, but in other places they remained in their lands thanks to the treaties of surrender they signed with the Christians, who maintained the Islamic system of taxation, transferred to the feudal lords. The situation, however, would not remain stable for long. In late 1247, an Andalusian leader sparked a movement of resistance and took several castles, causing a new mobilization of the conquerors. James I declared the previous treaties null and void, and, in 1248, he decreed the expulsion of all Muslims from the kingdom. According to the king’s auto-biographical chronicle, up to 100.000 people were exiled, though many aljames rose up in arms and managed to remain in contract with the king.

Faced with the risk of losing control of his territory, James I stimulated colonization, which had been very weak up until that moment. Between 1248 and 1249, all the most important towns were emptied of Muslims and occupied by Christian colonists, who went on to dominate the most fertile regions on the coast and the most strategic places. During the following generation, repeated attacks took place against several resisting aljames which decided to flee or, more often, were dispossessed and relocated to other regions in the kingdom. Thus, internal deportations were added to the expulsions and flights, along with a considerable harshening of the manorial impositions to which they were already subjected. The situation worsened to the point that, in 1276, the native Muslims organized another revolt against Christian power that led to open war and another decree of expulsion. Finally, the rebellion was put down in 1277, putting an end to any possibility of Muslim resistance. This was assisted by the continuing arrival of Christian colonists who, once the domination of the kingdom was asserted, showed an interest in maintaining large pockets of Muslim population to exploit more extensively, being a vanquished and segregated people.

After the defeat in 1277, the situation of the aljames tended to stabilize. On the one hand, some of them managed to remain in the places they inhabited prior to the conquest, maintaining the use of the land and the ability to organize their work independently. They could be described as “autonomous aljames”, mostly located in the mountains and in the rural interior of the kingdom, where the worst-quality lands were located. On the other hand, in the outskirts or surroundings of Christian cities, “peri-urban aljames” were created with deported Muslims who, generally lacking lands of their own, worked for Christians as day labourers or sharecroppers (Torró, 1999). The largest of the latter kind – called moreries – were the ones in Valencia and Xàtiva, with more urban characteristics, whereas the remainder, much smaller, were located in rural or semi-urban locations (e.g. Segorbe, Morvedre, Alzira, Gandia, Cocentaina or Elx; see the Figure 2.1). All in all, lords who owned autonomous aljames could exact greater impositions from them than from new Christian peasants, whereas urban landowners could also exploit the Muslim manpower residing in the moreries.

Figure 2.1. Map of the kingdom of Valencia in the 14th-16th centuries with a broad distribution of Muslim and Christian population

This was a planned system of segregation, meant to exploit ethnic and religious differences. Autonomous aljames were relegated to the mountains and fluvial valleys – whose lands were generally of inferior quality – and conformed pockets of indigenous population, isolated from each other by the main Christian towns, located in the coastal planes and the main communication hubs. Moreries, on the other hand, were isolated neighbourhoods located next to Christian towns, sometimes even outside the walls. On the other hand, the segregation was not only physical, but also biological, as legislation expressly forbade mixed marriages, and even punished sexual relations between Christians and Muslims. This was a means of maintaining both communities separated, preventing the Muslim community from becoming assimilated, thus leading to the disappearance of the ethnic difference that justified their exploitation (Torró, 2008a: 103).[4] This system was broadly maintained throughout the following centuries until the definitive expulsion in 1609, and it decisively marked the conditions of the Muslims in the kingdom of Valencia.

1.2. Muslims within the manorial system: feudal rents and provision of labour

In general, rents paid by Muslims were considerably higher than the ones paid by their Christian neighbours, even though this should be assessed on a local per case-basis and there were a number of chronological and geographic differences. According to Robert Burns, who worked with documents from the 13th century, the taxation applied to Muslims by the conquerors was light compared to that in the previous Andalusian period (Burns, 1975: 27-28). However, it is a known fact that this situation did not last long, and that taxes were rapidly substituted by high rents, which increased even further over the following centuries.

Pierre Guichard clarified this evolution, first by identifying the Andalusian system of taxation prior to the Christian conquest (1990-91: 245-273). It was based on the legal Koranic tax, zakāt or alms-giving, an agrarian tithe (‘ushr) paid to the State in coin or in kind. Furthermore, there was a specific tax for irrigated lands, the magram, which taxed the productivity of the land and was calculated periodically based on the quality of the soil, the available water and the crops grown on each plot. To this was added the farḍa, a tax in coin applied to the aljama as a whole and distributed based on each family’s property, whose Koranic justification was unclear and which was collected at irregularly. The most noteworthy fact is that these taxes were paid to the State by the aljama