The Early Middle Ages

By the end of the fifth century, the Roman Empire had disintegrated in the West. In a series of invasions, various "Barbarian" peoples (mainly Germanic tribes) swept into Western Europe. Established patterns of life were disrupted and lines of communication were broken. There were great movements of population as invaders settled and were in turn threatened by new invaders. The civilization of the Early Middle Ages that formed in the West between the sixth and eleventh centuries reflected the threefold legacy of the fifth and sixth centuries: Germanic customs and institutions, Roman culture and institutions, and Christian belief and institutions.

Early medieval institutions drew from this legacy and slowly took form. The .Christian Church, supported by a growing bureaucracy, numerous monasteries, and vast land holdings, became increasingly powerful. Medieval monarchies formed during this period but were generally weak. Local officials usually exercised political authority more effectively than monarchs. Europeans gradually established feudal relations among themselves based on personal contractual obligations for military service or exchange of land. An almost self-sufficient manorial economic and social system spread throughout many areas. In comparison to the preceding era, there was a broad cultural decline.

During the eighth and ninth centuries there was a temporary revival, especially under the rule of the Carolingian King Charlemagne, who conquered vast territories, centralized his own authority, and encouraged cultural activities. But not long after his death, fragmentation set in and Western Europe was again beset by invasions.

The sources in this chapter center on five broad topics. The first is the transition from Classical to medieval times: When did this transition occur, and what was its nature? Is this transition best viewed as occurring with the fall of Rome in the late fifth century or two centuries later with the rise of Islam? How was the transition experienced by observers of the time? The second topic is feudalism: How exactly should it be defined? What sort of relationships between people were characteristic of feudalism? What purposes did feudalism serve? How should feudalism be evaluated? The third topic is the reign of Charlemagne. What is the evidence for a revival of central authority and culture? What were the relations between Church and state during this period? The fourth topic concerns issues of gender characteristic of the Early Middle Ages: In what ways did the position of women change during this period? The fifth topic looks at the Early Middle Ages from a geographic perspective: How was the instability of the ninth and tenth centuries related to Western Europe's vulnerability to outside forces?

The aim in presenting these topics is to show the nature of the civilization that was developing during this time. Despite the disruptions, the apparent decline, and the relative disorganization of life between the fifth and eleventh centuries, long-lasting and distinctly European institutions were being formed.

Mohammed and Charlemagne: The Beginnings of Medieval Civilization

Henri Pirenne

Traditionally, the break between Roman civilization and the Middle Ages in the West has been dated to the Germanic invasions during the fifth century. According to this view, by the sixth century the West had experienced such change and decline in its political institutions, commerce, social life, and cities that Rome was at best a distant memory; the Early Middle Ages had begun. During the 1920s and 1930s this assumption was challenged by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935). He argued that there was relative continuity during the fifth, sixth, and first half of the seventh centuries. The transition to the Middle Ages occurred between 650 to 750 as a result of the rise of Islam. Pirenne's thesis had wide acceptance for many years. Although historians have since cast doubt on important parts of this thesis, all medievalists must still deal with this interpretation. In the following excerpt Pirenne summarizes his argument.

Consider: Pirenne's explanation of why the Germanic invasions did not create the break with antiquity; Pirenne's rationale for arguing that the transition was completed by 800;  Pirenne's view of the most important ways in which the civilization of the Middle Ages differed from that o the fifth and sixth centuries.

From the foregoing data, it seems, we may draw two essential conclusions:

1. The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West.

Despite the resulting turmoil and destruction, no new principles made their appearance; neither in the economic or social order, nor in the linguistic situation, nor in the existing institutions. What civilization survived was Mediterranean. It was in the regions by the sea that culture was preserved, and it was from them that the innovations of the age proceeded: monasticism, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, the ars Barbaiica, etc.

The Orient was the fertilizing factor: Constantinople, the centre of the world. In 600 the physiognomy of the world was not different in quality from that which it had revealed in 400.

2. The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity. Countries like Africa and Spain, which had always been parts of the Western community, gravitated henceforth in the orbit of Baghdad. In these countries another religion made its appearance, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been.

The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources. For the first time in history the axis of life was shifted northwards from the Mediterranean. The decadence into which the Merovingian monarchy lapsed as a result of this change gave birth to a new dynasty, the Carolingian, whose original home was in the Germanic North.

With this new dynasty the Pope allied himself, breaking with the Emperor, who, engrossed in his struggle against the Musulmans, could no longer protect him. And so the Church allied itself with the new order of things. In Rome, and in the Empire which it founded, it had no rival. And its power was all the greater inasmuch as the State, being incapable of maintaining its administration, allowed itself to be absorbed by the feudality, the inevitable sequel of the economic regression. All the consequences of this change became glaringly apparent after Charlemagne. Europe, dominated by the Church and the feudality, assumed a new physiognomy, differing slightly in different regions. The Middle Ages-to retain the traditional term-were beginning. The transitional phase was protracted. One may say that it lasted a whole century-from 650 to 750. It was during this period of anarchy that the tradition of antiquity disappeared, while the new elements came to the surface.

This development was completed in 800 by the constitution of the new Empire, which consecrated the break between the West and the East, inasmuch as it gave to the West a new Roman Empire-the manifest proof that it had broken with the old Empire, which continued to exist in Constantinople.

The Carolingian West:

The Genesis of Feudal

Relationships

David Nicholas

Scholars have long differed over the precise meaning of feudalism. In the following selection David Nicholas surveys this scholarly debate, pointing out some of the problem with the different approaches. He then argues that the term 'feudal relations," emphasizing vassalage and the fief as the key components of the feudal bond, is more useful than the term 'feudalism."

Consider: The ways scholars have disagreed over feudalism; why feudal relations might be a better term; the ways this interpretation might be supported by the primary sources in this chapter.

The Frankish age witnessed the birth of feudal relations, in the stage that the American medievalist Joseph Strayer called the feudalism of the armed retainer, as distinguished from the later feudalism of the counts and other great lords. The term 'feudalism' has occasioned considerable dispute among scholars. It is applied by Marxists and some capitadist politicians for any economic or political regime that they consider aristocratic or oppressive. Others have identified it with decentralisation of governmental function, but this ignores the fact that those areas where feudal bonds were most completely developed, France and England, became centralised states, while non-feudal Germany and Italy split into numerous principalities. Forces other than extent of feudalisation were involved in these cases, but lords of feudal vassals had a measure of control over their fiefs that princes did not have over allodial (public, non-feudal) land.

Some have defined feudalism very broadly, including the non-honourable bonds of serf to landlord as an economic feudalism. Others prefer to avoid the term entirely, since 'feudalism' is a modern word that was not used during the Middle Ages. Much of the confusion comes from the 'all or nothing' approach of some historians. Although some lords compiled lists of their fiefholders, there was never a feudal 'system'. 'Feudal relations' seems preferable, for even feudal'ism' suggests more rigidity than was ever present. Feudal relations developed gradually. We learn much about them in the late Merovingian and Carolingian periods, but the sources then say little more until the eleventh century and particularly the twelfth. When the records recommence, they show that feudal bonds had been evolving in many but not all parts of Europe in the intervening period.

For while the word 'feudalism' did not exist, Latin and the vernacular languages had words for vassal and fief, the necessary component parts of the feudal bond. Vassalage was a personal tie of man to lord that developed characteristics that set it apart from other such bonds. The vassal, the subordinate party, owed honourable obligations, notably military service, that did not compromise his social rank. In the language of contemporary texts, he was a'free man in a relationship of dependence'. Not all vassals held fiefs. Princes throughout the Middle Ages continued to maintain warriors in their households. It is inexact to speak of these people as being in a feudal bond with their lords, for they lived in proximity to their lords and did not hold fiefs. The fief was the proprietary nexus between vassal and lord and was held on conditions of tenure that were sharply different from non-feudal property. Vassals who held fiefs were expected to use the income of those properties to pay the costs of performing their own vassalic obligations. They were not maintained directly in the lords' households. Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), whose vassals included Robert Guiscard, the ruler of much of southern Italy, and who claimed the right to give Hungary and England in fief to their kings, would have been astonished at some scholars' notion that he was fighting for a figment of his imagination. Although there was no feudal system, to deny the existence of vassalage and fiefholding is to deny fact.

An Evaluation of Feudalism

Daniel D. McGarry

Feudalism developed gradually during the Early Middle Ages, becoming a prevailing system in many areas between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. By the Late Middle Ages, the feudal system was in decline, though elements of it would remain well into the early modern period. Since the Renaissance, scholars have often evaluated medieval feudalism negatively, emphasizing its weakness and localism. In recent decades, scholars have looked at feudalism more positively, emphasizing its adaptiveness to certain historical circumstances. In the following selection Daniel McGarry evaluates the shortcomings and the positive features of feudalism.

Consider: Whether you agree with McGarry's evaluation of what feudalism's "shortcomings" were and what its "Positive" characteristics were; whether the strengths of feudalism outweigh its weaknesses.

While feudalism had serious shortcomings, it also rendered valuable services. On the negative side, it resulted in numerous small, semi-independent local governments, incapable of providing many needed public services. Usually roads and bridges were inadequately maintained, while excessive tolls and duties were collected, and brigands and pirates flourished. Excessive emphasis was placed upon personal relationships, to the neglect of concepts of the community and public welfare. The components of the body politic were too loosely bound together by oaths and customs, with a minimum of firm enforceable obligations. The central government was too dependent upon voluntary cooperation and moral responsibility. Obligations were often so indeterminate as to admit of easy evasion. Confusion frequently prevailed, private wars were common, and commerce was severely handicapped.

On the positive side, feudalism was a realistic adaptation to existing circumstances: a flexible workable compromise between Germanic and Roman elements. In a time of great insecurity, it provided local defense and government, without entirely sacrificing unity. It was just flexible enough, on the one hand, and just conservative enough on the other, to surmount contemporary challenges yet allow for future reunification. Those states, such as France and England, where feudalism prevailed in the early Middle Ages emerged strong and united at the close of the Middle Ages, whereas those such as Germany and Italy where mixed political patterns were maintained, emerged weak and divided. Feudalism helped to give Western Europe a military proficiency which eventually enabled it to spread its colonies and civilization over the world. It encouraged the contract theory of government, according to which government is the result of a free agreement among the governed; and it contained the principle that all government is limited. Many favorable features of feudalism, first applied only to the upper classes, were progressively extended downward to benefit all the people. Feudal great councils eventually evolved into general representative assemblies, known as Parliaments, Cortes, Estates, Diets, etc. The principle of "No taxation without representation" or "No new taxes without popular consent" is traceable back to the feudal requirement of the imposition of other than customary aids upon the aristocracy. The modem "code of the gentleman," and many of our ideals of courtesy, good manners, and fair play also derive from feudalism.

Sanctity and Power: The Dual Pursuit of Medieval Women

Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne E Wemple

Too often it has been assumed that the position Of women changed little throughout the Early Middle Ages. In the following selection two medieval historians, Jo Ann McNamara of Hunter College and Suzanne Wemple of Bamard College, argue that by the ninth century the situation for many women had vastly improved.

Consider: How marriage customs changed to the benefit of women; the social effects of changes in women's inheritance rights.

By the ninth century a complex series of social advances had produced a vastly improved situation for the individual woman vis-h-vis the family interest to which she had previously been subordinated. Women were able to ensure their independence within the limits of whatever social sphere they occupied by their control of some property of their own. The Germanic custom of bride purchase practically disappeared. Instead of giving a purchase price to the bride's family, the groom endowed her directly with the bride gift, usually a piece of landed property over which she had full rights. To this, he frequently added the morning gift following the consummation of the marriage. In addition to the economic independence derived through marriage, the women of the ninth century enjoyed an increased capacity to share in the inheritance of property. Women had always been eligible to receive certain movable goods from either their own relatives or from their husbands but now law and practice allowed women to inherit immovables. A reason for this trend may be discerned from a deed from the eighth century in which a doting father left equal shares of his property to his sons and daughters. He justified his act by explaining that discrimination between the sexes was an "impious custom" that ran contrary to God's law and to the love he felt for all of his children.

Women's ability to inherit property had far-reaching social effects, which modern demographers are still investigating. Although a young woman still could not marry a man against her family's will, her independence after marriage was greatly enhanced if she possessed her own property. After their father's death, Charlemagne's daughters were able to withdraw from the court of their brother and lead independent lives because Charlemagne had endowed them with substantial property. As widows, too, women acquired increased status if they were allowed to control their sons' and their deceased husbands' property. The most dramatic example of this permanently affected the political future of England. The daughter of Alfred the Great, Ethelflaeda, widow of the king Of Mercia, devoted her long reign to cooperation with her brother in the pursuit of their father's policy of containing the Norse invaders. Together they established a strong, centralized kingdom centered on Wessex. After a life of campaigning against Danish, Irish, and Norwegian enemies, she succeeded in willing the kingdom away from her own daughter, the rightful heiress, and leaving it to her brother. This act destroyed the independence of Mercia with its rival claims to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and assured that the English kingdom would be dominated by Wessex and the line. of Alfred. Ironically, Ethelflaeda's indisputable contribution to the future of England deprived another woman of her right to rule.

Chapter Questions

1. In what ways was feudalism an effective answer to problems facing Europeans during the Early Middle Ages? In what ways did feudalism create new problems? Do you think the advantages of feudalism outweighed its disadvantages?

2. How would you justify calling this era a period of decline? What are some of the problems in so interpreting the Early Middle Ages? How might it be described as something other than a decline?

3. In what ways did the West differ politically, militarily, and culturally in the Early Middle Ages from the preceding Roman Empire?

The High Middle Ages:  The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries Western Europe gained new dynamism. The population increased and would continue to do so into the thirteenth century. This was accompanied by an internal expansion, involving increased clearing and farming of land, and an external expansion, with Europeans settling in new lands to the east and venturing on crusades to the Holy Land. Commerce revived, including long-range trade facilitated by newly won control over parts of the Mediterranean formerly dominated by Islam and Byzantium. Towns and cities grew, accompanied by corresponding social and political changes, as urban groups gained power and prestige. Within the Catholic Church, reforms were instituted, such as those initiated by the Cluniac monasteries. The papacy became more assertive, claiming greater powers and challenging monarchs for authority. In a variety of ways there was a broad cultural revival, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the establishment of new institutions of learning that would develop into universities by the early thirteenth century. Through these and other developments, a more stable civilization was being formed that we can recognize as European.

The sources in this chapter concentrate on three main aspects of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The first is what many historians feel was the most central issue of the time: What would the relationship between Church and state be? This issue was manifested in the Investiture Controversy, especially in the struggle between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV, but more broadly a controversy that generally marked the High Middle Ages. The second is a broad and deeply significant development, the growth of commerce and industry. The documents show urban revival, growing trade within Europe, and new long-distance commerce. The documents also cast light on the type of individuals most involvedthe growing class of merchants. The third is the social and psychological nature of life during this period, a topic that has recently been of particular interest to historians. How was serfdom experienced and viewed? How did people of different classes relate to each other? How were women viewed? In what ways was the psychic life of individuals related to the physical and social environment of the Middle Ages?

A sense of the dynamism characteristic of the High Middle Ages during these two centuries should emerge from these materials. In the next chapter the crusades, which reflect this same expansive dynamism, will be examined.

Medieval Values

Jacques Le Goff

The medieval world was permeated by certain values that colored how people tended to think about the world and to behave in society. Here generalizations are difficult, and in analyzing values scholars often have difficulty leaving their own values aside. In the following selection Jacques Le Goff, a well-known French medievalist, analyzes the fundamental values with which men of the Middle Ages thought, acted, and lived. Here he focuses on their social and political concerns, above all hierarchy, authority, rebellion, and liberty.

Consider: What exactly these medieval values were and how they fit together, what 'justice "might mean to medieval men; how one's social station might relate to these values.   [M]en of the Middle Ages thought, acted, and lived with several fundamental values. . .  . "

Hierarchy: The duty of medieval man was to remain where God had placed him. Rising in society was a sign of pride; demotion was a shameful sin. The organization of society that God had ordained was to be respected, and it was based on the principle of hierarchy. Earthly society, modeled on celestial society, was to reproduce the hierarchy of the angels and the archangels. . .  .

Authority and Authorities: On the social and political levels, medieval man had to obey his superiors, who were prelates if he was a cleric, the king, the lord, the city fathers, or community leaders if he was a layman. On the intellectual and mental level he had to show loyalty to the authorities, the first of which was the Bible, followed by authorities imposed by historical Christianity: the Fathers of the church in late antiquity, the university magistri in the age of the universities in and after the thirteenth century. The abstract and superior value of auctoritas, of authority, inherited from classical antiquity, was imposed upon him, embodied in a great number of different "authorities." The greatest intellectual and social virtue required of medieval man was obedience, justified by religion.

The Rebel: Nevertheless (increasingly after the year 1000, and again after the thirteenth century), a growing number of medieval men refused to accept unchallenged the domination of hierarchical superiors and authorities. For a long time, the principal form of contestation and rebellion was religious: it was heresy. Within the framework of feudalism, it then took the form of the revolt of the vassal against the lord when the latter abused his power or neglected his duties. In the university context contestation was intellectual. Social revolt finally arrived to both city and countryside in the forms of strikes, riots, and workers' and peasants I revolts. The great century for revolt was the fourteenth, from England and Flanders to Tuscany and Rome. When necessary, medieval man had learned how to become a rebel.

Liberty and Liberties: Liberty was one of medieval man's time-honored values. It motivated his principal revolts. The church, paradoxically, gave the signal, as it was under the banner of Libertas Ecclesiae-the freedom of the church-that the church, the pope at its head, demanded its independence from a lay world that had subjugated it through feudalization. From the mid-eleventh century, liberty was the password of the great movement for reform begun under Gregory the Great.

Later, aware of their strength and eager to sweep away obstacles to the great surge that had beg-Lin with the year 1000, peasants and new city-dwellers demanded and obtained freedom, or, more often, freedoms. The enfranchisement of the serfs corresponded to the concession of charters or liberties to the burghers of the towns and cities. These were above all freedoms (in the plural)-liberties that were actually privileges.

The Mold for Medieval Women: Social Status

Margaret Wade Labarge

Gender alone greatly affected the life of medieval women, but there were several other factors that interacted with gender to influence the sort of life a medieval woman might lead. Perhaps the most important other factor was social status. In the following selection from A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life, Margaret Wade Labarge analyzes the importance Of social status for medieval women.

Consider: The differences between upper- and lower-class women; how status interacts with gender differences; how the primary sources in this chapter might support Labarge s analysis.

... [S]ocial status was even more important for a medieval woman than her physical inheritance, for it defined how she would be regarded by others, whom she could marry or what form of religious life she might undertake. Status was determined by birth, for medieval thinkers firmly believed that royal and noble blood was indeed different from the substance which pulsed in the veins of the bourgeois and the peasants, and that it should not be intermingled with that of a lower rank. It was this solid conviction which accounted for the fury of widows and wards whose lords sold their marriages and thus their fiefs to men below their own station and explains their willingness to pay large sums to avoid such disparagement. Women shared the status of their family and their husband all the way up and down the social scale, though a married woman was always a step below her husband for he was her lord and master. Nevertheless, such subordination was restricted only to her husband; all other men, if of lower rank, must display respect for her higher status, for actual behaviour was based primarily on the subservience exacted by rank . . .  .

The consciousness of their privileged position protected the women of the upper classes, but worked to the disadvantage of those lower down the scale. Courtesy was a noble virtue; it was not considered necessary towards poor townswomen or, even more noticeably, towards peasant women, because their low rank excluded them from consideration. Most men felt that violence, even rape, practised on such base creatures quite literally did not count and should be overlooked. Such an attitude was encouraged by the fact that high tempers and violence were general in the Middle Ages in both sexes. In addition, the law recognized the right of men of all classes to beat their wives, so long as they did not kill them or do excessive damage. It appears to have been a frequently exercised right, for many of the cautionary tales warn women of the wisdom of being humble and not arousing their husband's wrath, lest a beating and permanent disfigurement or worse should follow. The women themselves seem to have been quick with words and occasionally with blows.

The Merchant

Aron ja. Gurevich

The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the growth of towns and cities, which marked a new dynamism in Western civilization. One reason for this growth was the revival of commerce. Here the medieval merchant played a central role, but the merchant was important to medieval society in several ways. In the following selection Aron ja. Gurevich analyzes the roles played by the medieval merchant and the type of person the great merchant was.

Consider: The ways the merchant supported medieval society; the social and psychological differences between the merchant and others; whether this interpretation is supported by the document on St. Godric.

The position of men of affairs in medieval society was extremely contradictory. By lending money to the nobles and the monarchs (whose insolvency or refusal to pay often caused the failure of great banks), and by acquiring landed property, concluding marriages with knightly families, and pursuing noble titles and crests, the mercantile patriciate became deeply entrenched in feudal society, to the point of being an inevitable and fundamental element of it. Crafts, commerce, the city, and finance were all organic parts of fully developed feudalism. At the same time, however, money was sapping the traditional bases of aristocratic domination-land and warfare-and pauperizing the artisan class and the peasants, since the great enterprises launched by merchants employed wage-workers. When in the late Middle Ages money became a powerful social force, large-scale international commerce and the spirit of gain that moved the merchants became the heralds of a new economic and social order: capitalism.

In spite of all his efforts to "root himself' in the structure of feudalism and adapt himself to it, the great merchant was a totally different psychological and social type from the feudal lord. He was a knight of profit who risked his life not on the battlefield but in his office or his shop, on board a merchant ship, or in his bank. To the warlike virtues and the impulsive emotivity of the nobles he opposed careful calculation and cause-andeffect thinking; to irrationality, he opposed rationality. In the milieu of men of affairs a new type of religious sentiment came to be elaborated in a paradoxical combination of faith in God and fear of castigation in the otherworld, on the one hand, and, on the other, a mercantile approach to "good works" that expected indemnification and compensation, which were to be expressed as material prosperity.

The Making of the

Middle Ages: Serfdom

R. W Southern

For large masses of people serfdom was the overriding condition of life during the Middle Ages. At times observers have tended to romanticize the Middle Ages and the bucolic life of the peasantry. But in the following selection R. W Southern of Oxford University, author of the highly acclaimed The Making of the Middle Ages, reflects most historians' views in arguing that serfdom was a condition characterized by servitude; the serfs lack of liberty was recognized by contemporaries as harmful and degrading. This selection illustrates the advantages of looking at the Middle Ages from the inside, from the point of view of the people of that time.

Consider: The evidence Southern provides to support his argument; how this interpretationfits with the selection from The Art of Courtly Love that discusses love and the peasants; conditions that might have mitigated the negative aspects Of serfdom.

To nearly all men serfdom was, without qualification, a degrading thing, and they found trenchant phrases to describe the indignity of the condition. The serf's family was always referred to by lawyers as his brood, his sequela, and the poets delighted to exercise their ingenuity in describing the physical deformity of the ideal serf. Hard words break no bones, but they are hard to bear for all that, and they became harder as time went on.

Men well knew, however theologians might seem to turn common notions inside out, the difference between the yoke of servitude and the honour of liberty-or, to use the expressive phrase of Giraldus Cambrensis, the hilaritas libeTfatis: "There is nothing," he wrote, 11 which so stirs the hearts of men and incites them to honourable action like the lightheartedness of liberty; and nothing which so deters and depresses them like the oppression of servitude." If we consider only the practical effects of serfdom and notice how little the lines of economic prosperity follow those of personal status; if we reflect on the many impediments to free action, to which even the mightiest were subjected in such delicate matters as marriage and the bequeathing of property, it may seem surprising that the pride of liberty was so strong, and the contempt for serfdom so general: yet such was the case. However much the hierarchical principle of society forced men into relationships at all levels of society in which rights and restraints were inextricably mixed up, the primitive line which divided liberty from servitude was never forgotten.

Feudal Society: The Psychic World of Medieval People

Marc Bloch

A full picture of the Middle Ages requires a concrete, empathetic sense of how people experienced everyday life at that time. But perhaps the hardest task for the historian is to understand and convey feelings and attitudes of people in the distant past. Few historians have attempted to do this in any "scientific" or rigorous way, although in recent years there has been a growing interest in this kind of scholarship. A pioneering effort in this direction was made by the French medievalist Marc Bloch. In the following selection Bloch relates the physical and social environment of the Middle Ages to the psychic world of the inhabitants of that time.

Consider: The evidence that supports Bloch's claim that emotional instability was characteristic of the feudal era; how this approach compares with the approaches of Southern and Pirenne.

The men of the two feudal ages were close to nature-much closer than we are; and nature as they knew it was much less tamed and softened than we see it today. The rural landscape, of which the waste formed so large a part, bore fewer traces of human influence. The wild animals that now only haunt our nursery tales-bears and, above all, wolves-prowled in every wilderness, and even amongst the cultivated fields. So much was this the case that the sport of hunting was indispensable for ordinary security, and almost equally so as a method of supplementing the food supply. People continued to pick wild fruit and to gather honey as in the first ages of mankind. In the construction of implements and tools, wood played a predominant part. The nights, owing to the wretched lighting, were darker; the cold, even in the living quarters of the castles, was more

intense. In short, behind all social life there was a background of the primitive, of submission to uncontrollable forces, of unrelieved physical contrasts. There is no means of measuring the influence which such an environment was capable of exerting on the minds of men, but it could hardly have failed to contribute to their uncouthness . . .  .

Infant mortality was undoubtedly very high in feudal Europe and tended to make people somewhat callous toward bereavements that were almost a normal occurrence. As to the life of adults, even apart from the hazards of war it was usually short. . .  .

Among so many premature deaths, a large number were due to the great epidemics which descended frequently upon a humanity ill-equipped to combat them; among the poor another cause was famine. Added to the constant acts of violence these disasters gave life a quality of perpetual insecurity. This was probably one of the principal reasons for the emotional instability so characteristic of the feudal era, especially during its first age. A low standard of hygiene doubtless also contributed to this nervous sensibility. . .   .

. . . Finally, we must not leave out of account the effects of an astonishing sensibility to what were believed to be supernatural manifestations. It made people's minds constantly and almost morbidly attentive to all manner of signs, dreams, or hallucinations. This characteristic was especially marked in monastic circles where the influence of mortifications of the flesh and the repression of natural instincts were joined to that of a mental attitude vocationally centered on the problems of the unseen. No psychoanalyst has ever examined dreams more earnestly than the monks of the tenth or the eleventh century. Yet the laity also shared the emotionalism of a civilization in which moral or social convention did not yet require well-bred people to repress their tears and their raptures. The despairs, the rages, the impulsive acts, the sudden revulsions of feeling present great difficulties to historians, who are instinctively disposed to reconstruct the past in terms of the rational. But the irrational is an important element in all history and only a sort of false shame could allow its effects on the course of political events in feudal Europe to be passed over in silence.

Chapter Questions

1. For a long time it was believed that the Middle Ages, the years 500 to 1500, constituted an era of little change, offering little in comparison to the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it and the Renaissance that succeeded it. In what ways do the sources in this chapter not support this interpretation?

2. In what ways were developments during the eleventh and twelfth centuries problematic or advantageous to the Church? To the monarchies?

3. What options were available to people in different classes or stations of life--peasants, merchants, Church officials, and kings-to make changes in their lives?