The I. H. R. saw a lot of lively discussion last night as Charles West attempted to convince us all that what was really happening in the much-debated feudal transformation was an increasing rigidity of definition in the terms that governed social relations. As we wound up agreeing on it in discussion afterwards, in the sources we’re familiar with, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, although élite relations are still endlessly negotiable, the categories of negotiation are more fixed. There may be endless arguments about what homagium actually means, or whether holding a feodum from someone means you owe him hospitalitas or not, or can dispose of the land’s produce freely. The difference is that now the argument is over the meaning of an agreed term, whereas in the ninth century there was no shared vocabulary for this sort of thing; the churchmen might have one, but their tenants, subjects and oppressors didn’t, or don’t try and use it. Instead you get conflicting norms like those described by Stephen White, or indeed Jeffrey Bowman, where one side is using written proof of transaction and the other is using witnesses to long tenure and they’re not arguing about the same thing at all. Although this discourse does have rules of conduct, even if as some have observed they are not rigid and can be ignored, there are people who know they are there and play outside them in a way that there doesn’t seem to be room for in the later period. Charles doesn’t know why this is any more than I do, but he puts it very clearly.

I count Charles as a collaborator, and we’ve had many fruitful discussions about this before, but yesterday evening was helpful in clarifying where our views diverge, and although I asked what he happily told me he thought was the meanest question that he got, the one that I didn’t get the chance to ask is the one that, for example, Chris Wickham would be asking: how much does this matter, to the population at large to whom these élite negotiations only affect the destination of their surplus? Charles had some pretty good examples of peasants being involved in the processes he described, and the social level he was exposing was one where the peasants were an everyday factor, but even higher up, it’s sometimes too easily forgotten that even in the Middle Ages, political decisions can have social and economic consequences. To pull two examples from the career of my pet ruler, Borrell II (forgive me an Answers.com link, but as yet there is little better on the web about this man): firstly, in 985 Barcelona was sacked by the Muslim Chief Minister of Córdoba, al-Mansur, and this was a sufficiently severe devastation that charters we have trying to reallocate the property of those who died or were taken prisoner refer to it as “die quod Barcinona interiit”, ‘the day Barcelona died’. One in particular says, in so many words, that the devastation wouldn’t have been as serious if Borrell II hadn’t got everyone in the area to take refuge in the city with all their belongings (including their title deeds…) and then taken his army to the wrong place, so that when the city fell everything was lost with it. Whether he could actually have resisted the full might of al-Mansur’s army is unlikely, although generally his war record was pretty dire, but the scale of the loss, this charter argues, was aggravated by his mistaken trust in the city’s walls.

Secondly, and more relevantly both to last night’s seminar and my upcoming one in the Department, around 981 Catalonia starts to see a major change in the kind of money it uses. Up till then almost all charters reckon prices in solidi, which is an old value standard based on a Roman coin but which is actually equivalent to twelve of the deniers that they actually use (see my previous post about the Departmental seminar for a picture). After 981, all kinds of units creep in, weights of gold especially but also something called a pesa which seems to be weighed bullion. Now the coinage is notionally in control of the counts, though possibly mostly provided by their bishops; if there’s change here, even if it’s importing foreign coin (mancuses also start being used, which is Spanish Muslim currency), then something has happened at the top level that alters, by commission or omission, the symbols of rulership that the everyday person carries round in his purse, sees every week perhaps, and relies on to get what he wants when the merchants come round to the village, or he goes to the city to find them. This kind of thing affects people’s lives at the grassroots.

It is merely that I wonder whether the changes that Charles is talking about, although they are significant, really make this kind of difference. Does a peasant care that his lords are now discussing homage and servitium as if these things had an agreed meaning (which everyone was most anxious to impress upon Charles that they didn’t) when a century or two before they might have talked only in terms of the particular case because the words simply weren’t common enough to argue over? Possibly not, except in as much as he would probably like to to keep the old lack of vocabulary so that he can cite long-hold custom as to how much he actually turns over from his harvests. But he cares about the new prosperity, the change of money (is it as good? Possibly better, but who will accept it? and so on) or the Muslim attacks. Even if we manage to describe what’s happening in élite relations, firstly we still have to account for it, and then we have to fit it into this far huger set of disconnected changes that are happening at the same time and try and suggest how the chain of cause and effect I’ve been describing was in play where they met. These are the sort of questions we need to be asking about any kind of social change, even now.