A key issue missing from much of the medieval peasantry discourse is that the category "medieval peasant" contains an extraordinarily diverse range of lifestyles and circumstances. A short thread. #medievaltwitter 1/
A free pastoral farmer in 11th-century Iceland would have lived in a dramatically different way from a bondsman ("serf") producing arable crops on a seigneur's estate in Ile-de-France in the early 14th century, with attendant corvées, tithes, jurisdictional restrictions, etc. 2/
Not to mention the many farming communities of the early middle ages, pre-Frankish conquests, about whom we know almost nothing, but who were probably not yet subjugated to any seigneurial regime. They most likely had much more freedom than their descendants. 3/
Even within the same century and general region, at a moment in time when we know quite a bit about peasant lives, there are huge variations. Take what is now Germany, in the long 15th century. 4/
In the south-west, fragmented lordship and strong village communes enabled assertive peasant communities to bargain for decent rents and customs, and where they could negotiate they were liable to band together in rebellion (most dramatically in the 1525 Peasants' War). 5/
In the north-east, village communities became atomized under the total socio-economic and jurisdictional domination of landlords, a regime called Gutsherrschaft. Communal organization was weak, and prevented large-scale peasant co-operation of the kind experienced elsewhere. 6/
And this diversity was within medieval Europe alone. (As with many other "medieval" things, there is an implicit Eurocentrism in the "medieval peasant" conversation.) We want an essentialized, archetypal pre-modern farmer, uncorrupted by industrial civilization, 7/
to hold up as a mirror to our own time, but in seeking this comforting figure, we miss the fascinating variety of lifestyles created by human culture and society across time and space in the actual, gloriously complex, medieval period. /Fin
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