articles of merchandise. The concentration of this industry in the towns
remained, until the end of the Middle Ages, the chief source of their
prosperity and helped to make them virtually great manufacturing
centers, of which Douai, Ghent and Ypres were distinctive types.
Although cloth-making was the dominant industry in Flanders it was,
naturally, far from being restricted to that country alone. Many of the
towns of the North and the South of France, of Italy and Rhenish
Germany, were also successfully engaged in it. Cloth, more than any
other manufactured product, was the basis of the commerce of the Middle
Ages. Metallurgy enjoyed far less importance. It was confined almost
entirely to brass-working, to which certain cities, and particularly
Dinant in Belgium, owe their fortune. But whatever might be the nature
of industry in other respects, everywhere it obeyed that law of
concentration which was operative at such an early date in Flanders.
Everywhere the city groups, thanks to commerce, drew rural industry to
them.[125]
In the era of demesnial economy, each agricultural center, big or
little, supplied in the largest measure possible its own wants. The
great proprietor maintained in his “court” artisan-serfs, just as each
peasant built his own house or made with his own hands the furniture or
the utensils he needed. The pedlers, the Jews, the infrequent merchants
who passed through the markets at great intervals supplied the rest.
They lived under conditions very similar to those which still exist in
many regions of Russia. All of that was changed when the towns began to
offer to the rural population industrial products of every sort. It
resulted in an exchange of commodities between the middle classes and
the rural population, as has been pointed out above. The artisans who
supplied the town people found in the rural classes another assured
clientèle. There came about a sharp division of labor between town and
country. The latter gave itself over to agriculture exclusively, the
former to industry and commerce, and this state of things was to endure
as long as the social order of the Middle Ages. It was, incidentally,
much more advantageous to the middle classes than to the peasants.
The towns, therefore, energetically bent their efforts to safeguard it.
They never failed to oppose every attempt to introduce industry into the
country districts. They jealously watched over the monopoly which
guaranteed their existence. It was not until the dawn of the modern era
that they were willing to give up an exclusivism no longer compatible
with economic progress.[126]
The middle classes whose double activity--commercial and
industrial--has just been outlined, were faced by innumerable
difficulties which they overcame only as time went on. No provision had
been made for their reception in the towns and burgs where they settled
down. There they were a cause of perturbation at first, and probably
they were very often greeted as undesirables. First of all they had to
come to terms with the proprietors of the soil. Sometimes it was the
bishop, sometimes a monastery, sometimes a count or a seigneur who owned
the land and there administered justice. Frequently it even happened
that the space occupied by the _portus_ or the “new burg” was amenable
to the jurisdiction of several tribunals and of several demesnes. It was
intended for agriculture, and the immigration of the newcomers changed
it all at once into ground for building. A certain time was needed
before the owners perceived the profit they could make out of it. At
first they particularly resented the inconvenience caused by the
appearance of these colonies given over to a sort of life which went
counter to custom or which shocked traditional ideas.
Conflicts immediately arose. They were inevitable, in view of the fact
that the newcomers, who were strangers, were hardly inclined to value
the interests, rights and customs which inconvenienced them. Room had
to be made for them as best as could be done, and as their numbers
increased their encroachments became more and more bold.
In 1099, at Beauvais, the chapter was obliged to bring action against
the dyers who had so obstructed the course of the river that its mills
could no longer function.[127] Elsewhere, from time to time, a bishop or
a monastery disputed with the burghers the lands they occupied. But
whether they willed or not, they had to come to terms. At Arras the
abbey of St. Vaast ended by parting with its tillages and parcelling
them out. Similar cases occurred at Ghent and Douai. Despite the penury
of existing information, it must be assumed that arrangements of this
sort were very common. Even at the present day the names of streets
recall, in many cities, the agricultural character which was theirs at
the beginning. At Ghent, for example, one of the principal arteries is
still designated under the name of “Field Street” (_Veldstraat_) and
near it is to be found “Husbandry Square” (_place du Kouter_).[128]
To the multiplicity of proprietors corresponded the multiplicity of
forms of government to which the lands were subject. Some were subject
to land-taxes and statute-labor, others to prestations destined for the
maintenance of the knights who formed the permanent garrison of the “old
burg;” still others to dues collected by the castellan or by the bishop
or by the solicitor with the title of Chief Justiciary. All, in short,
bore the stamp of an era in which economic organization, like political
organization, had been based entirely on possession of the soil. To that
were added the formalities and the taxes customarily levied at the time
of the transfer of real estate, and which singularly complicated, if
they did not actually make impossible, purchase and sale.
Under such conditions the land, burdened by the accumulated vested
interests which weighed heavily upon it, could not play any part in
business operations, acquire a market value, or serve as a basis of
credit.
The multiplicity of jurisdictions complicated still more a situation
already so intricate. It was rare indeed that the land occupied by the
burghers belonged to only a single seigneur. Each of the proprietors,
among whom it was shared, had his demesnial court which alone was
competent in matters of real estate. Some of these courts administered,
in addition, either high justice or low justice. The confusion of
competencies aggravated still further the confusion of jurisdictions.
The result was that the same man was dependent at the same time on
several tribunals, according to whether it was a question of debts, of
crimes, or simply of the possession of the land. The difficulties which
resulted therefrom were the greater in that these tribunals were not all
held in the town, and it was sometimes necessary to travel a long
distance to plead before them. Furthermore, they differed among
themselves, in their composition as well as in the law they
administered. Side by side with the demesnial courts there existed
almost always an older tribunal of aldermen set up, it might be, either
in the town or in the burg. The ecclesiastical court of the diocese drew
to it not only matters relevant to canonical law, but even all those in
which a member of the clergy was interested, without taking count of the
number of questions of successions, civil status, marriage, etc.
A glance at the condition of individuals, makes the complexity seem
greater yet. As the composition of the city took form, every contrast
and every gradation in the status of individuals was to be found.
Nothing could be more bizarre, in fact, than this nascent middle class.
The merchants, as has been seen above, were _de facto_ free men. But
this was not the case with a very great number of the immigrants who,
lured by the hope of finding work, flocked to the towns. They were
almost always natives of the nearby countryside and so could not
dissemble their civil status. The seigneur of the demesne from which
they had escaped could easily seek them out and identify them; people
from their own village ran into them when they came to town. Their
parents were known, and it was therefore evident that they had been born
into serfdom, since serfdom was the general status of the rural class.
It was therefore impossible for them to claim, like the merchants, a
freedom which these latter enjoyed only because their true civil status
was unknown. Thus the majority of artisans kept, in the town, the status
of serfdom in which they had been born. There was, to be sure, an
incompatibility between their new social status and their traditional
legal status. They had ceased to be peasants but they were not able to
efface the original stain with which serfdom had marked the rural class.
If they sought to dissemble it they did not fail to be rudely recalled
to reality. It sufficed for their seigneur to claim them; they were
obliged to follow him and be returned to the demesne whence they had
fled.
The merchants themselves indirectly resented the wrongs of serfdom. If
they wished to marry, the woman they chose belonged almost always to the
serf class. Only the richest among them could aspire to the honor of
espousing the daughter of some knight whose debts he had paid. For the
others, their union with a serf would have for its consequence the
serfdom of their children. Common law ascribed to children, in fact, the
legal status of their mother by virtue of the adage _partus ventrem
sequitur_, and it is easy to imagine the absurd consequences which arose
out of this principle for families. Marriage caused serfdom to reappear
in the household. Rancors and conflicts were inevitably born of so
contradictory a situation. The ancient law, in seeking to impose itself
upon a social order for which it was not adapted, ended in manifest
absurdities and injustices which called irresistibly for reform.
On the other hand, while the middle class grew larger and with its
numbers acquired power, the nobility little by little retreated and gave
way before it. The knights who were settled in the town or in the burg
no longer had any reason for living there after the military importance
of these old fortresses had disappeared. There was a distinct tendency,
at least in the North of Europe, to retire to the country and to leave
the towns. Only in Italy and in the South of France did the nobles
continue to have their residences in the town.
This fact must be attributed to the preservation, in those countries, of
the traditions and, in a certain measure, of the municipal organization
of the Roman Empire. The cities of Italy and Provence had been too
intimately a part of the territories of which they were the
administrative centers not to have preserved, at the time of the
economic decline of the eighth and ninth centuries, closer relations
with it than anywhere else. The nobility, whose fiefs were scattered all
over the country, did not acquire that rural character which typified
the nobility of France, Germany or England. They stayed in the towns,
where they lived on the revenues from their lands. There they built, in
the late Middle Ages, those towers which today give so picturesque an
aspect to so many of the old cities of Tuscany. They did not divest
themselves of the urban stamp with which ancient society had been so
strongly marked. The contrast between the nobility and the middle class,
therefore, appears less striking in Italy than in the rest of Europe. At
the era of the commercial revival, the nobles of the cities of Lombardy
even interested themselves in the business of the merchants and put some
of their income into business enterprises. It is in this way, perhaps,
that the development of Italian cities differs most profoundly from
that of the cities of the North.
In these last it is only in a quite exceptional case that we find here
and there, as if gone astray in the midst of middle class society, a
family of knights. In the twelfth century the exodus of the nobility to
the country was completed almost everywhere. This is a development,
however, which is still very little understood, and it is to be hoped
that further researches will throw greater light upon it. Meanwhile it
may be assumed that the economic crisis, to which the nobility were prey
following the diminution of their revenues in the thirteenth century,
was not without its influence in their disappearance from the towns.
They must have found it advantageous to sell to the burghers the lands
they owned, the altering of which into ground for building had
enormously augmented their value.
The status of the clergy was not sensibly modified by the influx of the
middle class to the towns and burgs. Out of it arose a few
inconveniences for them, but also a few advantages. The bishops had to
battle to maintain intact, in the presence of the newcomers, their
rights of justice and their rights of demesne; the monasteries and the
chapters saw themselves forced to permit houses to be built on their
fields or on their tillages. The patriarchal and demesnial form of
government to which the Church had been accustomed suddenly found itself
at grips with unexpected claims and needs, out of which was to result,
at the start, a period of uneasiness and insecurity.
On the other hand, however, compensations were not lacking. The rental
or tribute levied on the lots of land given over to the burghers formed
an increasingly fruitful source of revenue. The increase in population
brought with it a corresponding increase in the perquisites supplied by
baptisms, marriages and deaths; the yield from offerings went on
increasing without let-up; merchants and artisans formed pious
confraternities affiliated to a church or to a monastery in return for
annual dues. The creation of new parishes, proportionately as the number
of inhabitants mounted, multiplied the numbers and the resources of the
secular clergy. After the beginning of the eleventh century abbeys, on
the contrary, were founded in towns only in very exceptional cases. They
were not able to accustom themselves to that life, too blustering and
busy, and in addition it was no longer possible to find the room
necessary for a great religious house with the accessory services it
required. The Cistercian Order, which spread so widely through Europe
in the course of the twelfth century, organized only in the country.
It was only in the following century that the monks were to come back to
the towns again. The mendicant friars, Franciscans and Dominicans, who
were to come and settle there, were not merely a normal development
arising from the new orientation which religious fervor took. The
principle of poverty which they professed made them break with the
demesnial organization, heretofore the support of monastic life. By them
monasticism was found to be wonderfully well adapted to a city
atmosphere. They asked no more of the burghers than their alms. In place
of isolating themselves in the center of vast, silent enclosures, they
built their convents along the streets. They took part in all the
agitations, all the miseries as well, and understood all the aspirations
of the artisans, whose spiritual directors they well deserved to
become.
_Chapter VII_
Municipal Institutions
Cities, in their formative period, found themselves in a singularly
complicated situation. They were faced with problems of all sorts. In
them there existed side by side two populations which did not mix, and
which presented all the contrasts of two distinct worlds. The old
demesnial organization with all the traditions, all the opinions, all
the ideas which may not have been born of it but which received from it
their particular stamp, came to grips with wants and aspirations which
had taken it by surprise, which went counter to its interests, to which
it was not adapted and which, from the very first, it opposed. If it
gave ground, that was in spite of itself and because the new conditions
which had to be faced were due to causes too profound and irresistible
for their effect not to be felt.
The consequences of facts which are so little affected by human wishes
as the increase of population and the expansion of trade could not be
avoided. Probably those in positions of authority in the social order
were not able to appreciate the import of the changes that were taking
place about them. The old order of things sought, at first, to maintain
its position. Only later, and usually too late, did it try to adapt
itself. As always happens, the change did not come about all at once.
And it would be improper to attribute, as has frequently been done, to
“feudal tyranny” or to “sacerdotal arrogance” an opposition which is to
be explained by more natural incentives. There happened in the Middle
Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the
beneficiaries of the established order were bent upon defending it, not
so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their interests, as because it
seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society.
It should be borne in mind, moreover, that this social order the middle
classes accepted. Their demands and what might be called their
“political programme” did not aim in any way at its overthrow; they took
for granted the privileges and the authority of the princes, the clergy,
and the nobility. They merely wished to obtain, because it was necessary
to their existence, not an overthrow of the existing order but simple
concessions. And these concessions were limited to their own needs. They
were completely uninterested in those of the rural population from which
they had sprung. In short, they only asked of society to make for them
a place compatible with the sort of life they were leading. They were
not revolutionary, and if they happened to turn to violence it was not
through hate against the government but quite simply to force
concessions.
A brief review of the principal points in their programme will be enough
to show that they did not go beyond an indispensable minimum. What they
wanted, first of all, was personal liberty, which would assure to the
merchant or the artisan the possibility of going and coming, of living
where he wished and of putting his own person as well as that of his
children under the protection of the seigniorial power. Next came the
creation of a special tribunal by means of which the burgher would at
one stroke escape the multiplicity of jurisdictions to which he was
amenable and the inconveniences which the formalistic procedure of
ancient law imposed upon his social and economic activity. Then came the
instituting in the city of a “peace”--that is to say, of a penal
code--which would guarantee security. And then came the abolition of
those prestations most incompatible with the carrying on of trade and
industry, and with the possession and acquisition of land. What they
wanted, in fine, was a more or less extensive degree of political
autonomy and local self-government.
All of this was very far from forming a coherent whole and being
justified on theoretical principles. Nothing was further from the mind
of the original middle classes than any conception of the rights of man
and citizen. Personal liberty itself was not claimed as a natural right.
It was sought only for the advantages it conferred. This is so true that
at Arras, for example, the merchants tried to have themselves classed as
serfs of the Monastery of St. Vast in order to enjoy the exemption from
the market-tolls which had been accorded to the latter.[129]
It was not until the beginning of the eleventh century that the first
direct action was taken by the middle classes against the order of
things they suffered from. Their efforts thereafter never halted.
Despite vicissitudes and reverses, the movement of reform advanced
unhesitatingly towards its goal, broke by main force, if necessary, the
opposition that stood in the way and ended, in the course of the twelfth
century, by giving the towns those essentially municipal institutions
which were to be the basis of their constitutions.
Everywhere it was the merchants who took the initiative and directed
events. Nothing was more natural than that. They were the most active,
the richest, the most influential element in the city population and
they endured with so much the more impatience a situation which clashed
with their interests and belittled their confidence in themselves.[130]
The rôle they then played, despite the enormous difference in time and
conditions, may fittingly be compared with that which the capitalistic
middle class assumed after the end of the eighteenth century in the
political revolution which put an end to the old order of things. In the
one case as in the other, the social group which was the most directly
interested in the change assumed the leadership of the opposition, and
was followed by the masses. Democracy in the Middle Ages, as in modern
times, got its start under the guidance of a select few who foisted
their programme upon the confused aspirations of the people.
The episcopal cities were the first to be the scene of combat. It would
be a decided mistake to attribute this fact to the personality of the
bishops. A great number of them distinguished themselves, on the
contrary, by their manifest solicitude for the public weal. Excellent
administrators, whose memory has remained with the people throughout
the centuries, were by no means rare among them. At Liège, for example,
Notger (972-1018) attacked the castles of the robber barons who infested
the neighborhood, and turned from its course a branch of the Meuse to
make the city more healthy and to strengthen its fortifications.[131]
Similar examples could easily be cited in the case of Cambrai, Utrecht,
Cologne, Worms, Mainz and a number of cities of Germany where the
emperors strove, up to the time of the investiture struggle, to name
prelates notable equally for their intelligence and their energy.
But the more the bishops were conscious of their duties, the more also
they had to defend their government against the demands of their
subjects and endeavor to keep them under an authoritative, patriarchal
regimen. The confusion of spiritual power and temporal power in their
hands, moreover, caused every concession to seem to them to be a peril
to the Church. It must also not be forgotten that their functions
obliged them to reside permanently in their cities and that they feared,
with good reason, the difficulties which would be caused them by the
autonomy of the burghers in whose midst they lived. Finally, it has
already been seen that the Church had little sympathy with trade. This
unsympathetic attitude must naturally have made the Church deaf to the
wishes of the merchants and of the people who were grouped behind them,
have prevented an understanding of their wants, and given a false
impression of their real power. Out of this came misunderstandings,
clashes, and soon an open hostility which, after the beginning of the
eleventh century, was to end in the inevitable.[132]