Men and Women in Early Medieval Serfdom: The Ninth-Century North Frankish Evidence

Devroey, Jean-Pierre

doi:10.1093/past/166.1.3

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The polyptych of Saint-Remi is the most specific in describing the properties and the duties owed by the household heads settled on each property, though household components are missing (Devroey, 1981). Given their rich information, these three sources have been studied extensively in recent decades (Ring, 1979;Devroey, 1981;Herlihy, 1985;Devroey, 1993;Feller, 1994). In contrast, the polyptych of the Abbey of Saint Victor describes properties and kinship types less precisely and thus has been neglected by scholars (Renard, 2012).…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Démographie, paysannerie et famille dans la Provence du haut Moyen Âge, 813-814

Barbiera,

Castiglioni,

Dalla-Zuanna

et al. 2022

Population

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Établi en 813-814, l’inventaire des paysans qui travaillaient pour l’abbaye Saint-Victor de Marseille donne des informations sur la dynamique démographique en Provence (France méridionale) durant le haut Moyen Âge. La structure de la population par âge est reconstruite et permet de constater qu’elle est similaire à ce que reflètent d’autres registres médiévaux européens. Avec des résultats très proches des données sur les cimetières provençaux du premier millénaire et des tables de mortalité classiques estimées dans le cadre de précédentes études, qui montraient une mortalité importante dans le Sud de l’Europe, on en déduit non seulement cet inventaire des tendances de mortalité, mais aussi des modèles de nuptialité et de natalité. Ces résultats paraissent indiquer que la Provence du haut Moyen Âge se caractérisait par une pression démographique plus forte que celle observée en France ou en Europe occidentale après la grande peste. Enfin, sont analysés les modes d’habitat et d’exploitation propres à la paysannerie locale, en plaine comme en montagne, pour clarifier les relations entre habitat, environnement et production.

show abstract

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Démographie, paysannerie et famille dans la Provence du haut Moyen Âge, 813-814

Barbiera,

Castiglioni,

Dalla-Zuanna

et al. 2022

Population

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Women formed the majority of migrants in the large estates (see above). A non-free woman was doubly disadvantaged, as a slave in the same way as her male counterpart, and as a woman, in the countryside and in the dependent peasantries marked by the primacy of agricultural labour over the opera muliebria (Devroey, 2000).…”

Section: Relations Of Gender and Patriarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

Family, income and labour around the North Sea, 500–1000

Devroey¹,

Nissen²,

Vanhaute³

et al. 2011

Making a Living: Family, Income and Labour

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

From antiquity onwards, north-western Europe was divided into two large bodies, both from an economic and social point of view. The first was constituted, to the south of the Rhine, by the former provinces of the Empire conquered by the Romans at the end of the first century BC and in the first century AD. In the third century Barbarian tribes on the borders of the Roman Empire (the limes) exerted growing pressure on this territory which was expressed in various forms: military raids, then systematic occupation of the territories after the withdrawal of Roman troops (Great Britain, Toxandria), or accommodation, by the infiltration of families or the settling of groups sanctioned by treaties between the Germanic tribes and Romans. Ancient Gaul was totally occupied from the sixth century on by the Franks, who progressively dominated the whole of the Great Northern European plain, towards the east as far as Saxony and to the north as far as the border of Denmark. The second body had as its single common point the fact of never having been conquered by the Romans and consisted of Germanic, Scandinavian and Celtic populations (Wickham, 2010). Within these two zones, peasant families were faced with very different agricultural systems and landownership structures before the Germanic conquest. In Great Britain, the withdrawal of Roman troops was followed in a few decades by the abandoning of earlier forms of ownership and settlement systems. On the continent, the processes were more complex in the sense that the changes which affected the settlement of the countryside could stretch over several centuries and that the new forms of ownership and land occupation resulting from these changes were spread by conquest, from the seventh century, from Frankish Gaul towards the north and the east (Frisia, Saxony), and to the west (the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) by the influence exerted by Carolingian ideological models (Wickham, 2009). In this chapter, we examine three regions during the early middle ages: 1) north-western Europe under Frankish hegemony (northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and north-west Germany), 2) England, and 3) Scandinavia. These lands were in constant contact through ideological and religious influences, mainly from the Frankish regions, migration, trade flows and wars. The place occupied by the family unit in rural production at the beginning of the period studied is still poorly understood today in terms of the whole of the regions of northern Europe. The study of family morphology and the structures of rural production show that the narrow family group, composed of a couple and their children, became the principal unit of production, reproduction and organisation in the rural society of the West. It took on its fundamental features during the early middle ages at the moment when conjugality became the ideological model spread by Christianity and 1 Our thanks to Chris Wickham and Alexis Wilkin who reads the first drafts.

show abstract

“…Most of the unfree in the early Middle Ages were tenants ( servi casati or hutted serfs) and had to maintain an independent household, even if they could be moved out any time. They could marry, but only to other ‘unfree’ men or women, own property and pass it to their children, and they could be set free, although often they remained bound as tenants on the estate where they worked (Devroey 2000: 28).…”

Section: Seniority and The Sacralisation Of The Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Those who remained slaves were increasingly maintained as part of the familia and contributed to its economy. They were certainly no more and probably much less numerous than the free tenants of an estate, and as the distinction between slave and serf dissolved they gradually merged into the mass of tenant householders (Devroey 2000: 23). The period was distinctive, however, in the extent to which the Church took on and in turn transformed the role of ‘slave owner’.…”

Section: Seniority and The Sacralisation Of The Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

Old age in the Dark Ages: the status of old age during the early Middle Ages

Gilleard

2009

Ageing and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reviews the position of old age in the societies of post-Roman Europe, from the fifth to the 10th centuries. Drawing on both primary and secondary literary and material sources of the period, I suggest that living beyond the age of 60 years was an uncommon experience throughout the early Middle Ages. Not only was achieving old age a minority experience, it seems to have been particularly concentrated among the senior clergy. This, together with the growing importance of the Christian Church as the institution that stabilised post-Roman society, the decline of urban living and its attendant culture of leisure and literacy, and the transformation of kinship into a symbolic 'family under God ' contributed to a more favourable status for old age, or at least one that was particularly favourable for older men. This was based not so much upon the accumulation with age of wealth and privilege, but upon the moral worth of old age as a stage of life. The early Middle Ages, the so-called ' Dark Ages ', was in this respect a relatively distinctive period in the history of old age. With all around instability and the future uncertain and often threatening, survival into old age was a rare but frequently revered attainment.

show abstract

Men and Women in Early Medieval Serfdom: The Ninth-Century North Frankish Evidence

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Démographie, paysannerie et famille dans la Provence du haut Moyen Âge, 813-814

Démographie, paysannerie et famille dans la Provence du haut Moyen Âge, 813-814

Family, income and labour around the North Sea, 500–1000

Old age in the Dark Ages: the status of old age during the early Middle Ages

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About