Part 1 - introduction to the problem

At the heart of this problem is the fact that this very historical problem has its origin in Marxism (the idea that history was an evolution of successive stages of economic and social development began with the Scottish enlightenment in the 18th century, but Adam Smith grouped slavery and feudalism together under "the age of agriculture" that was preceded by the "hunter-gatherer" and "pastoral" ages and was succeeded by "the age of commerce"). Yet Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels showed very little actual interest in the Middle Ages, assuming more than they actually investigated and explained when it came to the things that happened between the Classical Era and the beginning of the age of exploration in the late 15th century. 20th century Marxists like Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton and Robert Brenner showed more interest in the Middle Ages, but in the much better documented later Middle Ages (c.1250 - 1550) where the object of their study was of course the beginnings of the transition from feudalism to proto/ early/ agrarian capitalism. Suffice to say that the basic Marxist idea, still present in Perry Anderson's "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (1974) is that slavery became feudalism following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as a result of the synthesis of decaying Roman slavery with the dynamic barbarism of the Germanic tribes - basically a load of spectacularly vague nonsense. Its only really been in the last quarter of the 20th century that certain Neo-Marxist historians have began to show serious interest in the transition from slavery to feudalism.

In the meantime, certain non-Marxist historians gave a good shot at the question. For example Marc Bloch (died 1944), one of the founding members of the French Annales school of historians, argued contrary to traditional assumptions, that slavery had not essentially declined with the Roman Empire and that actually the number of slaves in Western Europe had peaked in the century or so following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as a result of all the prisoners taken in the 5th century Germanic invasions and the wars between the post-Roman successor states that followed in the 6th century. Yet he noted that by the 9th century, when the Carolingian polyptychs (estate surveys) enable us to start to get a clear picture of rural social structure, slavery was well on its way out. He ruled out the idea, present in a lot of early non-Marxist scholarship on the subject, that Christianity had ended ancient slavery through a humanitarian revolution, as while it had undermined the ideology of ancient slavery by affirming that slaves were of equal moral and spiritual worth to their masters, almost all major Christian writers (bar a few notable exceptions) since St Paul had unequivocally affirmed the legitimacy of all human social hierarchies and institutions, including slavery. Instead, he argued that Christianity had only chipped away at slavery by encouraging manumission of slaves as a pious act of charity, and by discouraging/ forbidding the enslavement of fellow Christians, which meant that slaves had be sought further and further away as more of Europe became converted. Instead, he saw the causes of the decline of slavery as essentially coming from the long economic depression he saw Europe as experiencing from the 5th to 10th centuries. Chattel slaves were expensive to maintain, since you had to feed, clothe and breed them amongst other things. Thus, with negligible commerce in the early medieval economy, it was more feasible to semi-emancipate their slaves by giving them their own land holdings and granting them freedom to marry, and so have them live on your estates as legally dependent yet economically self-sufficient peasants (in other words, proto-serfs) instead. Bloch's arguments were highly influential but inconclusive, since he didn't quite explain how feudalism/ serfdom came to completely replace slavery. Broadly, since the 1970s, historians have been divided into two schools on this subject. The first can be called the mutationists, the hyper-Romanists or the feudal revolutionists, and the second I'll call gradualists or tributarists (you'll see why later).

part 2 continued

Guy Bois takes a more local view of things. He too argues that Roman slavery survived until the 10th century in his part of Burgundy, as did the Gallo-Roman landowning elite who continued to monopolise local public offices, running the local public lawcourts and acting as agents of the regional count, and fiscally exploit the free peasantry through the appropriation of ecclesiastical tithes (the closest substitute after the ancient Roman land tax fell into disuse after the 6th century in Gaul). He argues that society there was fundamentally based, like ancient Roman society, on the divide between free and unfree, and that the slaves, though they were only about 15% of the population, were vital to the landed elite (about 7% of the population) maintaining its social prestige over the free peasants, who still owned 40% of the land – in other words, the economy might not have been fundamentally slave driven, but because of slavery the free peasants had to till the land while the landed elite did not. This is interesting to note from a historiographical standpoint – though Bois is a Marxist, he seems to have picked up on the idea, emanating from the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s, that the reasons for slavery’s survival into the early period may have been not so much a question of its economic viability/ profitability but one of maintaining elite social and cultural prestige over other free men; for more on this see David Wyatt’s book “Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800 – 1200” (2009), which explores the survival and decline of slavery in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic lands (something which I will otherwise not touch on here). Bois sees Christianisation as leading to more humane treatment of slaves – they were now human beings with souls that could not be tortured, raped and killed whenever their masters saw fit – and does acknowledge that slaves since the later Roman Empire in the time of Diocletian and Constantine (late 3rd and early 4th centuries) had started to be hutted out on plots of land. But he still insists that these slaves were not proto-serfs, that they did not own and could not sell their plots of land and that their masters still had control over who they reproduced with. Meanwhile the economy had degenerated since the fall of the Western Roman Empire into near rural autarky, and cities, now much smaller, were still parasitic in the relationship to the countryside like in Roman times and were now essentially boiled down to their most basic function in antiquity as political centres i.e. Macon was basically there as the centre of the local bishop and count’s authority, along with a market and a cathedral. Bois, like Bonnassie, sees the Carolingians as trying to prop up this social order with their governmental reforms in the 9th century.

Bois sees the beginnings of the end of this system as coming with the beginnings of agricultural growth and rural commercialisation in the late 10th century, which enriched the free peasant population, led to the development of a land market and did all sorts of other things to weaken the power of the aristocracy over the free peasantry. Meanwhile the rise of the powerful independent monastery (unlike other monasteries it was jurisdictionally subject to only the Pope) of Cluny in the region that Bois is studying (the Maconnais), led to the masters donating their slaves to the monastery as pious acts as the turn of the millennium approach, and once Cluny got them, they emancipated the slaves and made them tenants instead. Cluny accumulating all its holdings led to the count’s territory being cut through, and so access to the count’s patronage through office holding and stuff meant that one of the most important things propping up the masters (the state) was withering away). Bois argues that as the year 1000 approached the masters were facing impoverishment and downward mobility, and so they started attacking the lands of the peasants and Cluny, but by the late 1020s Cluny was able to pacify them with the help of King Robert II the Pious, who allowed them to ban the construction of fortifications not under their control, and so a new tripartite social order, engineered by Cluny, based around clerics, knights and serfs emerged. Please note that this my reading of it – Bois’ arguments about the end of slavery and the feudal revolution are quite opaque, but far from unreadable by the standards of something written by a fairly hardcore Neo-Marxist.

Part 2 - mutationists/ hyper-Romanists and the "Transformation of the year 1000"

The mutationist position has been advocated most influentially by French Neo-Marxists, namely the historians Pierre Bonnassie and Guy Bois. They argue that Roman style chattel slavery survived long past the fall of Rome, carrying on in the post-Roman kingdoms with renewed vigour. We’ll examine their views in turn – Bonnassie’s are expressed in his “From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe” (1991) and Bois’ in “The Transformation of the Year 1000: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1992), but do note that both were originally published in French in 1977 and 1989 respectively.

Bonnassie, like Bloch, even suggests that in the 6th and early 7th centuries there were more slaves in Western Europe than ever before or since, especially since slavery had become so well-established in Northern Gaul, Germany and Britain, areas where it had previously been marginal, by the likes of the Salian Franks, Bavarians and Anglo-Saxons. Supply was never a problem – Bonnassie argues that the Merovingian kings of the Franks frequently engaged in razzias (raids) similar to those of the early Islamic Caliphates against each other, and that slave raiding was similarly a mainstay of warfare between Celts and Anglo-Saxons in Britain and between Franks and Saxons in Germany. Bonnassie then suggests that slavery went into a crisis in Southern Gaul, Spain and Italy, the old heartlands of Roman slavery in Western Europe, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, as the slaves became fully Christianised – they were all baptised and participating in Christian worship with the free – which meant that treating them like animals was no longer morally justifiable. This, according to Bonnassie, led to many slaves rebelling (slave revolts were always rare, but slaves assassinating their masters was a significant problem) or running away, which led to a heightening of repressive measures reflected in the Lombard and Visigothic laws for Italy and Spain respectively in that period. However, Bonnassie doesn’t see a similar crisis happening in Gaul north of the Loire, in Germany or in Anglo-Saxon England in this period.

Bonnassie then argues that slavery appeared stable enough in the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, as reflected in the legislation of the era, which consistently affirms that the fundamental divide in society is between free and slave, the polyptychs (estate surveys of royal and ecclesiastical estates) that reinforced the rights of masters, the theological and moral defences of slavery by prominent churchmen like Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus and the mass enslavement of prisoners taken in Charlemagne’s Saxon wars of 772 – 803. At the same time Bonnassie sees the slave system weakening even further as the 9th century progressed. Some Carolingian churchmen like Bishop Agobard of Lyons and Abbot Smargardus of St Mihiel began calling for the abolition of slavery, heavily suggestive of how it was no longer ideologically sustainable. Meanwhile, the social divide between free and slave began to erode, with mixed marriages becoming common. Bonnassie ultimately sees the end of slavery as coming in the 10th and early 11th centuries, which came down to three factors. The first being the rise of a new popular Christianity as the turn of the second millennium approached, which spiritually unified the rural non-noble population. The second being economic change – the more widespread diffusion of agricultural technologies that had developed in the preceding centuries like watermills, the heavy plough and the horse-collar – which meant that less human effort and manpower was required, and the clearance and colonisation of new lands for cultivation which required landowners to enfranchise settlers in order to attract them. The third was the decline of the public state structures of kings and counts that sustained slavery through laws and public justice, and their replacement with local warlord rule by castellans and knights. Bonnassie identifies a law created by Emperor Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire at a church council in 998, which required slaves to fight a champion designated by their master in order to prove their freedom, as the last symbolic legislative rear-guard action to defend a dying system, and quantifies how references to slaves, while abundant in charters pre-950, become virtually non-existent by c.1030.

As for how serfdom came about, Bonnassie argues that for about two to three generations (c.1000 – 1060) there was virtually no servitude in South West Europe (France south of the Loire and Christian Spain), as all the slaves had been freed but serfdom had not come about yet either – peasants paid rents in cash or kind to lords but were otherwise totally free and independent, and beginning to prosper as a result of accelerating agricultural and commercial growth. Scarily enough for the rising class of castellans and knights they were also developing a political agency of their own through the Peace and Truce of God movement (active in Central and Southern France 989 – 1054), in which they alongside the Church and some lay aristocrats protested the brutality of the endemic private warfare among the warrior elite at that time – the most radical expression of this came at Berry in 1038, in which a peasant militia under the leadership of Archbishop Aimon of Bourges managed to successfully destroy many local castles but were eventually defeated by an army of knights (Bonnassie, like other Marxists, gets very excited at this since its one of those rare instances of peasant rebellion we get before the 14th century). Eventually the castellans decided that they’d had enough of this, and so in the second half of the 11th century they established the ban (powers to judge and command, usurped from kings and counts) over the free peasantry and former slaves. This made them into a single serf class that were not slaves – they were tenants under the law, not chattel, and were economically autonomous – but their lords wielded exclusive jurisdiction over them through their private courts and customary laws, and they could levy all sorts of different rents and tolls on them (referred to as malae consuetudines – “evil customs”) and make them do forced labour (corvee).

part 3 - critiques of the mutationists and alternatives

Now we turn to the anti-mutationist critiques. Now it must be noted that the mutatonists take a very legalistic approach, taking the Classical Latin terms used to refer to unfree cultivators (servi, mancipia, ancillae etc) at their word, and tending to assume rather than prove that they were slaves almost exactly like those in the time of Cicero. They tend to focus less on what these relationships between slaves and masters actually involved. Certainly from my reading of the Carolingian polyptychs – lots of them feature in Georges Duby’s “Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West” (1968), a brilliant collection of translated sources – which show “slaves” in 9th century Francia and Northern Italy owning their own land, paying rent, marrying free men and women, selling their land etc. Its true that the polyptychs only apply to royal and ecclesiastical estates, but that’s because of institutional continuity – barely any similarly detailed sources for lay aristocratic estates survive from that period. So one can doubt whether the so-called “slaves” of the early middle ages really were slaves or whether they were proto-serfs after all. Meanwhile, various historians such as Chris Wickham in “The other transition: from the ancient world to feudalism” (1984) and “Framing the Early Middle Ages” (2005) and John Haldon in “The State and the Tributary Mode of Production” (1993), have argued that there’s a sort of liminal or intermediate state between the ancient and feudal modes called the tributary mode, in which through quasi-fiscal means the ruling elite exploit an otherwise largely free and independent peasant population in a given territory. Charles West also subscribes to that model for the Carolingian period in his “Reframing the Feudal Revolution: political and social transformation between Marne and Moselle 800 – 1100” – see its chapter 2 “Networks of inequality.” West argues that the aristocracy weren’t so much landlords as they were tribute-takers in the provinces, exacting food and money rents from free and unfree landholding peasants on estates geographically dispersed across the vast Carolingian Empire while they held public offices from and carried out various services the Carolingian state. He then sees the clarification of these relations, based on a closer legal tenurial bond between lord and peasant and the greater clarification of the reciprocal rights and obligations between them in the 10th century as marking an important step in the direction of true feudalism, and then generalisation of those tenurial relationships within carefully delineated lands in the 11th century through the seigneurial ban and the development of private justice as marking the full flowering of the new order.

Overall, I personally am quite undecided on this matter. As should be somewhat apparent by now, the evidence is fragmentary and there are many different possible ways of reading it. But still I think this is a very good and important question to be asking, especially since it makes us pay attention to what was going on with the 90% of early medieval society who weren’t writing manuscripts or riding warhorses.