The Fascinating Faces of Flanders

THROUGH ART AND SOCIETY

LISBON, CENTRO CULTURAL DE BELEM

20 JUNE 1998 - 25 OCTOBER I998

ANTWERP, HESSENHUIS

21 NOVEMBER I998 - 21 FEBRUARI I999 Twixt Meuse and Scheldt Town and Country in the Mediaeval Economy of the Southern Netherlands from the 6th to the 12th century

Henri Pirenne, writing in the early 20th century in what was ultimately to become his monu­ mental Histoire de Belgique, sketched the basic outlines of the development of our part of Europe. Belgian history cannot be conceived of and described as if the world ends at its boundaries. Belgium is a “microcosm of Western Europe (...). The Scheldt and Meuse basins have not only served as the cockpits of Europe: they were also the place where ideas were traded between the Latin and German world (...), it was their ports which for centuries were the entrepots for merchandise from both North and South”.1 Opposed to geographical and linguistic determinism, Pirenne was convinced that the “Belgian nation” (“a land of contrasts, a country lacking natural frontiers, where two languages are spoken”), was born of a political, economic, and cultural community, forged from the urban freedoms which had grown up on the banks of the Meuse and Scheldt. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Burgundian “State” was a step on the road which would inevitably lead to the establishment of 19th century Bel­ gium. Although his finalistic vision of the Belgian nation is now seen as belonging to another age, Pirenne’s thesis continues to be the most imaginative and powerful to be developed in the 20th century about medieval European history and its Belgian microcosm.2 How can we explain the extraordinary blooming of economy and urban society in the Southern Netherlands during the Middle Ages? W hat was the basis of this growth and how quickly did it proceed? Could it have started in 7th century with the birth of new flows of trade in Northwest Europe, or in the 9th century with the Carolingian renaissance, or perhaps in the nth century with the rebirth of the towns? Did this growth come from outside - a part of the reestablishment of large-scale trading in the 10th and nth centuries — or was it internal, pushed by the dynamism o f the countryside, the appearance, followed by control by the non-produc­ ing classes, o f the agricultural surpluses so essential to urban life? W h o helped to create this growth: the great merchants - entrepreneurs and capitalists; the king or the Carolingian monks who controlled the great estates; or the peasants who pioneered new lands? The answers suggested by Pirenne were inspired by the fact that he was a historian committed to a particular vision, “a child of his times, nationalist, liberal, bourgeois and optimistic (...), who saw history as a record of progress, driven by urban development, trade and capitalism”.3 However, modern research tends to put the accent on the dynamism of the relationship between town and countryside since the Early Middle Ages and the patent role in economic development played by figures from the religious and political worlds. The creation of wealth is essential for the production of art and culture. The accumulation of capital was made possi­ ble by the transfer of economic surpluses from the base to the centres of control, from the country to the town, from the peasant, the subsistence producer, to the consumer, nobleman or burgess. The countryside and its economy are the essential preconditions for the develop­ ment of Europe.

Mohammed and Charlemagne

The celebrated question of Mohammed and Charlemagne stresses continuity between the Ancient World and the Middle Ages.4 Historians of Church and State nowadays tend to speak more o f a transition when referring to the passage from late Antiquity to the successor states such as the Merovingian kingdoms of our regions. For Pirenne the turning point in the devel­ opment of the West was not the Germanic invasions of the 5th century, but came later, in the early 7th century with the arrival of Islam, which brought an end to the economy of the Mediterranean world. For Carlo Cipolla and Roberto Lopez, the West went through a long period of depression, lasting almost a thousand years, between the crisis of the Late Empire Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

and the beginnings of the trading revolution of the 12th century.5 The first signs of economic recovery were not felt before the 10th century, which must be seen as the inflection point in a long economic cycle starting in the 3rd century. We now know that the decline of Mediter­ ranean commerce started in the middle of the 4th century and reached an absolute low point in about 700.6 However, this did not lead to a general contraction o f the economy, a return to the countryside and the disappearance of town life between the 7th century and the year one thousand. W hat really happened was that the centre of economic gravity gradually moved away from the Mediterranean to the northwest of Europe.7 The routes and circuits, venues, materials, and people involved in trade changed profoundly. In the heart of the Frankish world, between the Loire and the Rhine, the independent merchant was squeezed out to make way for agents of the king and church. The abbeys of Northern Gaul slowly abandoned the arduous transport ventures which took them south of the Loire, where they could buy valuable merchandise such as olive oil, wax, fish and spices. From then on their involvement in the trad­ ing economy seems to have been primarily motivated by the desire to sell the agricultural sur­ plus of their estates to best advantage, be it at fairs (wine at the big fairs held at Saint-Denis near Paris), town and country markets, in the ancient river ports of Rouen or Maastricht and at the new emporia, such as Quentovic, on the mouth of the Canche, or Dorestad, on the con­ fluence of the Rhine and the Lek.8 The bulk of trade in northwest Europe did not consist of luxury goods, but rather o f food products (cereals, wine and salt), and other basic commodities (textiles, wood and minerals) and the output of craft workshops (millstones and grindstones from the Eifel region, pottery from Badorf, Rhenish glassware, Frankish weapons, “Frisian” and Frankish linen, etc.). This new start, sustained as it was by demographic and agricultural growth, coincided with the military expansion of the Frankish kingdom and the colonization of land to the north and east, including Frisia, Saxony, and Germany, an unprecedented campaign of evangelization and territorial organization, and the installation between the Rhine and the Loire of the struc­ tures o f the great estate system. Starting in the 7th century, the W est appears to have entered an extended cycle of development, culminating in the 13th century, in which various factors united to produce effects such as demographic growth, diffusion o f new technologies, changes in the organization of work, the rebirth of trade, the flowering o f urban life. The role o f agri­ culture in this development cannot be denied!

The Countryside in the Early Middle Ages

It is impossible to ignore the evidence - in the Middle Ages nine out of ten people were peasants. The historian has every reason to be modest. Despite the advances in our knowledge con­ tributed by archaeologists, and the new disciplines devoted to the study of ancient environ­ ments (palynology, paleopathology, paleoclimatology, etc.), we are still far from being able to provide an explanation or even a general picture of the development of the natural environ­ ment between the 3rd and the nth centuries. Nonetheless it seems that we are now able to speak of two very different periods in the general environment in Western Europe, that are characterized by a series o f natural and human factors: climate, health, nutrition and demo­ graphic change. Even so it is extremely difficult to measure their impact in regional terms. Starting with the crisis in the Late Empire, the European climate became slowly worse, turn­ ing colder and moister. In all likelihood this trend bottomed out in the 6th century, with a fall in mean temperatures o f i.5°C. W ritten sources (such as the Histoire des Francs of Gregory of Tours) and archaeological findings suggest that there may have been a disastrous conjunction of ecological factors in the 6th century, marked by a series of natural calamities including famine, floods, epidemics (two pandemics: the Justinian plague, which started in 541 and a plague of smallpox starting in 570) which hit a population already weakened by malnutrition. It is Likely that the population fell and that certain regions were depopulated. The transition from the Ancient World to the Middle Ages left traces in both the natural and human landscape the extent of which historians have long wondered at. These include the abandonment of the large farm units of the Romans, the movement of populations and their division into the romance and germanic groups. There was a generalized discontinuity in the coastal region between the A a and the Scheldt-Maas-Rhine delta, caused by a large incursion by the sea in the 3rd century. Furthermore forests grew larger and the acreage of land under cultivation fell between the 3rd and the 5th centuries, while herding developed at the expense of crop growing. There were also considerable regional differences. The continuity o f occupa­ tion of the most populous areas in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the region between the Scheldt and the Dender and the Hesbaye/Haspengouw ar.d., was very great, ás can be seen from the survival o f Roman names. The end of Antiquity was in particular marked by a move­ ment from the plateaux to the valleys, a change in the appearance of agricultural units, with the abandonment o f the Roman “colonial” villae and a style o f agriculture formerly oriented to supplying the towns and garrisons of the Rhenish limes. O ther features were the appearance o f smaller country farms, mainly run as family units, and a decline in the area o f land unde, cultivation. These lands continued to be used for agriculture, although marginal land witl heavier or poorer soils became derelict, often until the clearances o f the n th and 13th centuries. The typical Merovingian countryside was a habitat containing scattered hamlets, with numer­ ous isolated fields separated by uncultivated lands. Elsewhere, where stock breeding predom­ inated, the habitat, situated in clearings in the heart of the forest, could have been semi-per­ manent. Germanic toponyms ending in -sali, -sele, - z elles, which were used for such places mostly disappeared after the 10th century, with the clearance of the forest in which this kind of settlement was situated.9 New archaeological techniques have now made it possible to demonstrate the existence of quantitative and qualitative variations in the plant environment (advance of forests, clear­ ances). D uring the first thousand years o f the Christian era the geography o f cereal crops underwent considerable changes, although it settled down after the year one thousand. These changes were marked by the appearance in the 4th century of cultivated cereal crops which were new to Western Europe, such as rye and oats. T h e y spread slowly at first, a process which speeded up in the 7th century and really took off in the 10th century. That there was a slow but fundamental change in the geographical distribution of cereal cropping in the Middle Ages10 cannot be disputed. Prior to the 9th century the wheat variety commonly cultivated was a “dressed” wheat, that is the kernel was attached to the husk. Known as spelt it was dominant on the seigneurial estates of the region as well as on the royal lands in the Lille area until about 800; while it was used on the Corbie abbey lands prior to 826 ; and on the lands of the Abbey o f Lobbes in 868-869, between the Sambre and the Meuse, the Bavay area, and Southwest Brabant. Peasant farms often grew a wider variety of crops, with cereals (wheat, rye, barley), vegetables and fibrous plants (hops and flax), stock farming (poultry, pigs, and sheep), as well as engaging in various craft activities such as the production of items and objects in wood, cloth and fabrics, and even semi-industrial activities such as iron ore extraction near St. Hubert, pig-iron production and iron utensils. Textile production merits special considera­ tion. Flax and hemp are demanding and labour intensive crops, and were produced chiefly by peasant farmers. Textile production was in part the work of collective workshops,11 where specialized workers or women from the estate gathered to spin, weave, and make clothes as well as in the royal villae (for example around 800 in Annapes) or in monastic centres (Saint- Bertin), by the domestics of the great lay houses of the 10th century, like the “.. .gynaeceum of Count Henry established in the portus of Ename in 1014”.12 Nonetheless the bulk of textile production was the work o f the family, as can be seen from the distribution of archaeological finds relating to textile activities at Early Middle Age sites. Fabrics were woven on vertical looms built in a “weaving shed” (a single excavated room of 6 to 8 m2) located within the walls of the main residence.13 In the nth century, textile production was an entirely female activity, and included washing and shearing the sheep before carding and spinning the wool; picking and threshing the flax before rotting it and preparing it for spinning. Flax in the form of seeds or tow was the typical rent for free peasants, just as the production of linen cloth or woollen fabric was the rent for serfs.14 Cloth and fabric were an integral part of the trade between Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

estates. The free and larger manses (holdings) had also to breed oxen as draft animals. The dominant cereal on the demesne land (land farmed directly by the great landlord) was spelt, together with barley and oats, whereas poorer soils would be sown with barley and oats. Oats were the sole crop in the harsher conditions of the Ardennes, where it was associated with rye and barley. Polyptychs from the 9th century show three changes. As of the 10th century there was a general decline in spelt in favour of naked cereals such as wheat and rye. The rise of wheat, which first came to demesne lands in the 10th century and prevailed in the nth bears witness to a seigneurial choice for higher prices and yields. T h e homelier nature o f rye and oats meant that they played a leading role in the cerealization15 of Europe in the Middle Ages, by permitting the cultivation of cereal crops on land which had hitherto been ignored. Starting in the 8th century, the climate became steadily warmer, reaching a peak in the nth century, with average temperatures o f between 1.5 and 2°C higher than the mean (4° higher in sub-Arctic regions - leading the Scandinaviari navigators who first reached North America to call the new territories “Greenland” and “Vin(e)land”). On the other hand the Merovingian period seems to have been one of widespread malnutrition, as the archaeological evidence indicates a high incidence of rickets and diseases due to dietary deficiencies. Studies of human bones seem to indicate that as the 7th century gave way to the 8th there was a general decline in chronic malnutrition. Paradoxically, famine becomes more frequently reported (64 between the 8th and n th centuries, or an average o f one famine every six or seven years). Nonetheless, we must be careful how we interpret such data. Once a distinction is made between the “major famines” of a cyclical nature, the shortages arising in transitional periods, and localized famines, we see that the number of large-scale famines dwindled in the 10th century and started to rise again during the nth. Is the recurrence of generalized famine proof that growth had stopped? Should we not consider them more as “incidental occurrences, as the heavy price the peasantry had to pay to guarantee expansion”.16 The picture we see is of population growth progressing in a saw tooth curve. Whereas malnutrition has disastrous effects on the general health o f the population in the long term, famine, i f it eliminates the weak, spurs the survivors to produce more. The study of demographic data from Cairolingian polyptychs (for Cham­ pagne and the Paris basin) reveals a pioneering population, relatively young and mobile, sen­ sitive to sudden peaks in the mortality rate, but capable o f responding quickly by pushing up birth rates.17 Undoubtedly no rapid and generalized rise in the population occurred before the “demographic boom” of the nth century. On the other hand there had already been demo­ graphic growth in the richest farming areas since the end o f the 8th century. It is quite likely that the population doubled in the space of a century.18 Population densities of 20 to 30 per­ sons per km2 could well have been reached in' the Paris region or on the estates o f Saint-Bertin abbey near Saint-Omer (Sint-Omaars)19 since the middle of the 9th century. Until the year one thousand the countryside in Northwest Europe therefore displayed a sharp contrast between those regions which had been densely populated since ancient times, and large under­ populated areas which were exploited in semi-permanent fashion. This picture of a natural environment of marked contrasts applies particularly well to Flan­ ders. Picardy, its fertile neighbour, exported large quantities o f cereals to Flanders in the 13th century, and 75 % of its villages were recorded before the year one thousand. In Flanders, how­ ever, such population densities were not attained until the 3rd quarter of the 12th century.20 The progressive retreat of the sea meant that salt tolerant vegetation could develop in the coastal region, which had been virtually deserted since the 3rd century. In the 8th century com­ munities o f herders were already starting to make use of it. B y the 9 th century, the crown and various abbeys were operating large dairy farms and sheep ranches in the coastal strip. Away from the coast the earliest land reclamation operations we know of date from the 7th century. T h e vitality o f the countryside is evident from the dense population o f some areas o f the Flem ­ ish countryside. Toponymie study in the Gent area reveals early evidence of clearances taking place in the late 7th century. W e see an increase in the germanic suffixes -rohda, -rodorn in the 9th century. It seems that this reclamation of land for agriculture was launched from estab­ lished agricultural land in the most fertile areas. T h e large areas which began to be abandoned in the 3rd century were unaffected by this phenomenon. In the 8th century, we see for the first time the Frankish aristocracy and the major abbeys assembling large complexes of arable lands at the heart of the most fertile estates, owned by the crown. These were known as coutures (fir)/kouters (ni)/cultura (lat), and were undoubtedly the result of the regrouping of scattered fields and collective clearances. In the G en t area, this micro-scale open-field system contrasts with the mixed woods and pastures of the moister lower lying land taken into cultivation in the 13th century. In these areas, Verhuist tells us, there were two contrasting “styles” o f organizing the land. The leading characteristic of the one was a collective approach to exploiting the soil, typical of the Early Middle Ages, the other was typified by a sort of agricultural “individual­ ism” unique to Flemish agriculture in the 13th century.21 A n open landscape was indicative of land exploited as part of a large estate. Open-field farming, already subjected to regular three- yearly rotation in the estates of northern France in the 9th century and the performance of the onerous services associated with the feudal tenure system led to the appearance of communal disciplines. The domination of the lord over an area and its inhabitants, who became his “men” and the formulation of a collective system o f rights and obligations (ius villae) ended up by giv­ ing social and territorial cohesion to the land-holding estate. Clearances and the regrouping of land coincided with a profound transformation of the human habitat, which locally was characterized by the abandonment of the hamlets which had appeared during the preceding period and the regrouping of the population in village communities, centred on a church (in the G ent area, a “kouter” corresponded to a village). The regrouping of land thus went hand in hand with the birth of the village, the Christian­ ization of country populations and their embedment in new structures of power and land use. From Seine to Rhine these changes were accompanied by the advance of the great estate. The geographical extent of the Merovingian villa was more restricted. It covered less arable land and much less of the land was in cultivation. Tenancies held by peasants who were dependent on the lord of the estate were less numerous and moreover their connections with the demesne land was only weak. The main revenues were derived from working the land by slaves and revenues paid by tributary peasants. It was during the 7th century that the main elements of what modern historians have called “the classic great estate”22 began to make their appearance. Its leading characteristic was its bipartite aspect: the demesne land, now larger and redistributed, was worked by services imposed on the “manses” (Germanic: “hoba”), accurately defined by a contemporary text as the terra unius familiae, which meant a farm consisting o f a house and sufficient land to provide for the needs of a family of peasants, and perhaps also the draught animals they needed for working it. This therefore is the origin of a economic and social cell suited to the conjugal family, a ménage, as this word comes from the mediaeval Latin word mansionaticum. The peasants, free or otherwise, who occupied these manses had community rights to use the forest and uncultivated land, and could trans­ mit their tenancy to their children while in exchange they had to settle certain charges, whether in money or in kind as well as services determined by the custom of the estate. The most onerous services included working in the fields of the demesne and cartage, which was made available to the lord for the collection, concentration, or transportation to places of trade of the surpluses resulting from the operation of the estate, and which might consist of cereals, wine, wood, textiles and so on. The organization of the villa reflected the demands of cereal production. It implied the installation or permanent settlement on the holdings of a group of specialized farmers, labour­ ers and herdsmen skilled in handling the plough. The ruling echelons of the Frankish world, the King, the aristocracy around him, and the Church played a vital role in the creation and spread of the classic great estate in the numerous lands they held in the heart of the kingdom between the Seine and the Rhine. The rural lords, whose activities were directed towards the cultivation of cereals on fight and fertile alluvial soils, had to meet the growing nutritional needs of the State and involve themselves in both regional and interregional trade. The cre­ ation of the manse went hand in hand with the growing place of the couple in the social and religious thinking of the Frankish world. Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devtoey

The Problem of Rural Growth

Modern historians offer two models to explain the growth o f the Early Middle Ages. Adriaan Verhuist looks primarily at Northern Europe and the role of seigneurial initiative and the immense success of the large estate. Since Verhuist the estate has been seen as a dynamic and evolutionary structure that grew progressively from the 6th and 7th centuries. Whereas some historians view it as an outmoded relic of the Ancient world, or as ineffective economic insti­ tution and at the very least unrepresentative of the rural world as a whole, the “evolutionary model” of the great estate is founded on the idea that the “classic” estate system was econom­ ically efficient, based on the integration and development o f peasant farms in the context of a system o f large holdings of land. T h e expansive model o f the estate stresses three determining factors: a vigorous reawakening of demand for consumer goods following the restoration of the State, the development of the Church and the reconstitution of the aristocracy; the grow­ ing predominance in the countryside of the small dependent farm, suited to the needs of the nuclear family; and the ability of the nobility to manage the population, control their territory and secure the extraction and centralization of farm surpluses.23 Nonetheless, the classic large estate model is less applicable to many other areas o f the Christian West. Although it was imposed in Northern Italy after the Carolingian appropria­ tion of the Kingdom of the Lombards, and in Saxony after Charlemagne’s military conquest, it occurred only sporadically in Southern Gaul, where structures of the “Merovingian” type (large farms dependent on slave labour and small farms belonging to free peasants) persisted until the 10th century.24 Chris Wickham’s comparative approach culminates in the demonstration of the existence of autonomous peasant societies governed mainly by the exigencies of the subsistence economy in regions such as Britanny, Iceland, Catalonia and Central Germany in the Early Middle Agés.25 These social groups do not exclude either slavery nor the existence of a certain social stratification, however, they are fundamentally rooted in the dominance of a peasant popula­ tion which controls its own lands, is more or less autonomous, and where the hierarchies of dependence are fairly lax. T h e dominant class here consists o f village chiefs and notables. T h e state and the society of the great are distant and have relatively little bearing on the rural world. In certain cases, the military aristocracy dominates from outside, and surpluses have be to exacted from the peasants by force. The existence between the Seine and the Rhine of peas­ ant communities firmly embedded in the structures of the great estate or more autonomous micro-societies of peasants, is revealed solely by the exceptional richness of the historical record: detailed polyptychs here; exceptional series o f charters and records o f land transactions there. W hat do these sources still conceal? In the Southern Netherlands the new estate system established itself in the most fertile areas. Elsewhere, particularly in the north of inland Flan­ ders and in the Campine (a large tract o f sandy heathland to the north and east o f modern Antwerp), “the small peasant properties, more numerous here, also put up greater resis­ tance”.26 Land ownership in such areas remained more often in the hands of the minor nobil­ ity or the most prosperous ranks o f the peasantry. Even in areas held by the great landowners, for example around Gent on the land of the Saint Bavo monastery, or in the possessions o f the abbey o f Saint Bertin near Saint-Omer, other structures existed side by side the classic estate.

How far were these peasant micro-societies removed from the apparently rigid structures of the bipartite villa? Was the great estate a fixed element of the physical landscape since the 9 th century, as we might assume from the polyptychs, or was it merely a matter of boundaries and lines, set out at the dictate of the great hereditary fortunes across a totally different peasant landscape? M ight areas of peasant autonomy, areas where the people were closely supervised by the aristocracy, and yet other areas where the estate originally only came into contact with other peasant structures not have existed simultaneously from region to region? Essentially this is the hypothesis lying at the heart of the models developed by Verhuist, Bonnassie and Wickham. The social and political structures organizing the countryside vary in form and intensity. Nonetheless it is the dynamism of the peasantry which is the driving force behind growth. The Early Middle Ages thus appear to have laid the foundations in the West for a form of social organization based on the family farming unit which persisted until the indus­ trial revolution. This development affected the non-free, although their economic and social status had irrevocably evolved beyond slavery when their masters gave them tenancy rights which could be passed on to their children and allowed them to establish a true family house­ hold centred around man and wife. The clearances could have allowed freemen to create manses, whereas what happened was that independent peasants elected to contribute their lands to a great landowner in return for tenancy, in order to escape the responsibilities o f the freemen (compulsory military service and taxation) and to benefit from the privileges and pro­ tection of the new master. A ll these changes meant that the peasant and his family, with his know-how, his animals and agricultural tools, was the essential figure in rural life. Seen in this way, the demographic and economic “growth” is undoubtedly a reflection o f a certain improve­ ment in family welfare.27 The emergence of the couple as the basic unit of social life in the countryside had a considerable impact on the condition of men and women and their mutual relations. Life as a couple implies a mutual relationship which cannot be simply reduced to the traditional legal dependence o f the woman on the man or to the economic interdependence of the peasant household: there must have been an entire emotional dimension to the relation­ ship as well, which is o f course not reflected in our sources. The “improvements” seen in the countryside did not take place suddenly. They were not rev­ olutionary. Rather they were the gradual result of an intensification of agricultural practice. The spread of new techniques was accompanied by institutional and social innovations (tran­ sition from slavery to serfdom, the taking up o f the rural population into the seigneurial sys­ tem and its Christianization, and the establishment of the family-based farming unit). In the sixties, Georges Duby created a sensation by publishing figures revealing the extremely low yields of cereal farming in the Early Middle Ages.28 The measurement of the growth o f agri­ cultural yields prior to the 12th century would seem to be very hit and miss, as no direct sources are available to us, and indeed remain rare before the 14th century. T h e value of generalizing from the extremely low seed yields suggested by Georges Duby, which he deduced from a description of Annapes near Lille has been hotly disputed, and the Annapes figures have been revised upwards.29 The most severe criticism came from agricultural experts, who pointed out that “.. .agriculture with a normal yield of 1.6 to 1 would be physically impossible, as it would not produce sufficient energy for it to be sustained”. Nowadays it is estimated that cereal pro­ duction must have at least doubled between the Carolingian period and the 13th century.30 In reality, regardless o f the figures put forward, the generalization o f yields calculated on the basis of single crops on the seigneurial demesne leads to the assumption that there was only one model of agricultural production, whereas all the evidence is that the Carolingian countryside was divided between family farming, which was more meticulous, more intensive and more varied, and made frequent use of draught animals, and the extensive farming of the large demesnes, worked by gangs of peasants, and where most certainly it was the total volume of the crop which counted.

Networks, forms and flows of trade

We must now give our attention to the relationship between the country and the town, or rather to the relationship between the rural world, the producer of provisions and supplies and the other parts o f society which it nourished. These relations are expressed in unequal trading structures which were at the same time expressions o f power. T heir establishment and consol­ idation are one o f the driving forces in the transformation o f mediaeval society. T o use a for­ mulation already expressed by Henri Pirenne, the mediaeval town is the point of convergence of a regionally integrated market system, with well-balanced production and distribution sys­ tems. However, the goods in the trading network did not necessarily end up in the town as a Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

geographical, economic and social entity. Rather it was the royal palace, the baron’s castle, and the abbey which were the centres for the concentration and redistribution of wealth. The net­ works did not just constitute a physical route, but also a social, economic and political system. It is in this respect that historians draw our attention to the “role o f the great estate” and the institutional players in the economic rise of the W est between the 8th and the ioth centuries. The development of the towns takes place “against the background of the older flourishing of the estates”.31 The Meuse valley lies at the centre of the old Carolingian heartland (Herstal, Landen, Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), etc.) and it is between the Meuse and the Rhine that the hereditary lands of the majordomos of the Austrasian Palaces and their descendants lay. From the 7th to the 9th century the symbol of this prosperity was not the waterborne merchant but rather the country palace and the royal monastery and their structured network of great estates. The estate system steered this dynamism so that it favoured the crown and the grandees by the implementation of a concept of centrality which was applied to all kinds of economic transactions and social control.32 Essentially, the estate system, which in the late 19th century and early 20th century had been considered as the best illustration of the priority primitive economies gave to their own consumption, is nowadays regarded as one of the main levers used to effect a transition to a trading economy. Again we must avoid anachronisms when defining the scope of the economy, or better, of the trading economies of the Early Middle Ages. First of all attention must be given to the local level, the level of the pagus, in which a first network of primary markets, was doubtless essen­ tially oriented towards the trading of ordinary consumer goods. The increase in the number of markets during the 9th century, either by royal grant, as was generally the case east of the Rhine, or more spontaneously elsewhere, and their integration into these trading networks is also explained by the flourishing of the estate economy. The majority of the local markets did, however, not give birth to towns. Their appearance seems rather to have been more an element of the basic structure of the physical environment, which was expressed at the local level. Soci­ ety in general continued to be profoundly rural, although there was traffic, movement and trade. In the countryside the estate system shattered the traditional framework of peasant farming, based as it was on self-sufficiency and the satisfaction of the basic needs of the pro­ ducer. It forged the links o f a chain o f markets and rural market towns, leading peasants into producing for sale and allowing the number of non-agricultural producers in the village to grow. The rural market town, with its market organized to fit in with peasant needs and located at the centre of a small area, was the link and precondition for the establishment of dense and regular relations between town and country.33 Despite the dynamic image conferred nowadays on the networks of estates in the Early Middle Ages, it would be unwise to ignore a number of signs which could be a indication, as Henri Pirenne thought, of the contraction of local markets experienced by the Carolingian economy. The Frankish kingdom was never'an area in which a sole coinage was adopted, and the circulation of some coins was limited to the regional level. The interregional networks and the “circulation areas” o f the monasteries must have been essentially linear in the 9th century. Their existence does not mean that they were from then on at the apex of a hierarchical trad­ ing network. There could be differences depending on whether the linear trading relationship was linked (in the Meuse basin) or passed by (the Scheldt) a regional space. The Frankish economy produced surpluses although it was characterized within its boundaries by regional barriers and the absence o f generalized trading. The quickening of international trading circuits can be explained by the closeness of areas producing food surpluses and the creation of new markets with lively demand in the British Isles, the Rhine estuary and Northern Europe. Three main trading circuits came into being. The oldest, dating from the 6th century joined the two shores of the “Britannic Sea”, between the Loire and the Irish Sea. In the 7th century, the trading impulse reached the shores of the Channel and the North Sea, with trading between England, the Seine estuary and the Rhine delta. Two main trading circuits were established in this region: to the East was a circuit which covered the Rhine basin as far as Mainz, the Rhine-Meuse delta and East Anglia and the Thames. The other more westerly circuit linked the Paris basin, the Somme and Northern France with the coasts of the West of England. Few Franks travelled these trading routes. It was primarily Anglo-Saxon, and later Frisian, mariners who provided the links and kept the trade going. Furthermore there is clear evidence of a certain interchange between the two net­ works.34 That this was so is underlined by the fact that a new coin appeared on both sides of the sea between 660 and 67o.35 T his was the silver penny (denier). T h e chronology, the condi­ tions which occasioned its growth and the functioning of the third circuit, which was estab­ lished in the North of the Frankish world is still poorly understood. Relations between the peoples living on the shores of the North Sea most certainly continued throughout the Early Middle Ages. In the latter half of the 8th century, staging posts appeared along the rivers and coasts leading towards Frisia and Jutland. Around the year 800, the North saw the establish­ ment of new and prosperous trading centres, such as the Haithabu emporia in Schleswig and those of Birka in the Swedish heartland.36 A t about the same time silver Arabic coins were making their first appearance in Sweden, and would continue to arrive until the mid 10th cen­ tury. This third circuit brought the societies of the North Sea coasts into contact with the Baltic and the Scandinavian east. T h e idea that there was a direct trading route along which “long-distance merchants” car­ ried silver, silks and other luxury goods from Bagdad to Sweden has now been abandoned. Archaeological findings have shown that there was an immense degree of permeability at that time, with exchanges from place to place, and between neighbouring regions.37 There were trading frontiers between these separate regions, which had their own ports and central towns, and which served their respective hinterlands. Nor should we really concentrate on looking for the existence of commerce in the general complex of economic and social rela­ tions which passed along these trading routes: men and things were also subject to other forms of exchange, including migration, war, exchanges of gifts, the collection of tribute, etc.38 The variety of the forms trade took is illustrated by the new turn taken by the relations between Anglo-Saxons, Franks and Vikings after 820/830, when war gained the upper hand over commerce. Towards 850 the Baltic region became cut off from Rhenish ceramics and Dorestad coinage. The decline of the wiks was a general phenomenon. Pillaged on seven suc­ cessive occasions after 834, Dorestad failed to revive after the final sack in 863. War had been preceded by economic recession (perhaps in about 820 ?). War did not close the circuits, it sim­ ply transformed the “methods” of trade.

The Origins of the Towns

Another aspect of the continuity between Antiquity and Middle Ages has rightly been stressed by Pirenne, namely the life of the towns. In the regions we are speaking o f the signif­ icant archaeological findings of recent decades have tended to highlight the Roman origins of many medieval urban centres.39 Such findings must nevertheless be interpreted with care and without imposing a non-existent systematic order on them. The historian often finds it diffi­ cult to disentangle the evidence in the sources and the archaeological record for real continued occupation and functionality from that indicative of the reoccupation of a site or a full return to functionality. After the move of the episcopal seat to Maastricht in the 6th century and then to Liège in the 7th century, the ancient capital city of Tongeren became no more than a centre of estate management in the Early Middle Ages. A series of ancient conurbations owe their survival to the continuance o f their central political, administrative and religious functions: the Merovingian pagi such as Gent, Kortrijk, Aardenburg, Tournai (Doornik), Thérouanne, and Cambrai (Kamerijk) are named after the urban centres whose existence in Roman times is well established. Sometimes though such continuity is merely topographical: Germanic names such as Aardenburg, Antwerpen (Antwerp), and Brugge (Bruges) suggest that there may well have been a break in occupation. Activities disappeared: the Roman forges of Ganda were abandoned in Merovingian times.40 Cases where topographic and functional continuity Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

are beyond dispute are still rare: at H uy (Hoei), craft activities and techniques continued dur­ ing the Merovingian period in the workshops o f the Batta district, where smiths, goldsmiths, potters and bone carvers were all active.41 In reality one should speak of a slow discontinuity between the town of ancient times and the mediaeval town and acknowledge the great variety o f ways town life developed. In contrast to the Roman period, the town was no longer a “social model”, with a native population, civilization and organization. A t the same time it should be stressed that one of the most telling indications of the transition from Antiquity to the M id­ dle Ages in the West was the extraordinary decline in the life-style of the prince and the elite. Regardless of whether it was an ancient civitas (such as Tournai), or a vims (like Maastricht) or a trading post (like Dorestad), the town of the Early Middle Ages is revealed as combining craft and commercial activities and farming. The vicus or commercial centre serves as a point of coalescence in the “town”. Even so the latter by no means conforms to the formal topo­ graphic criteria of what might be understood to be a town (high density, conurbation). It would have been more a cluster of population nucleii where it would have been possible to find a centre of administration, newly built concentrations of housing, and recognizable districts devoted to a particular craft or to farming. This multiplicity of habitats can thus not be reduced to the traditional duality of fortress- plus-commercial settlement. In reality things were far more complex and would vary depending on the place and period. In the nth century these multi-centred concentrations of population started to merge together and soon became “a sole and single town, largely due to the establishment of an export industry at its heart”. Another important factor was the consolidation or establishment of a recognizable rural hin­ terland and a network of trading circuits linked to these urban centres. Consequently the town of the Early Middle Ages, like the abbey or rural palace at the heart of the estate system, became a nexus o f trading networks where the surpluses o f agricultural production were con­ centrated. T h e favourable situation o f a place for the purposes o f defence or for traffic explains the appearance in the late 8th century and subsequently of new centres of activity next to the most ancient centres: the vicus, castrum ot portus. T h e development is first seen in the valley of the M euse and appeared later along the course o f the Scheldt and in the Scheldt estuary. Trad­ ing in these centres was largely local. O n the other hand the ephemeral “ports of trade”, which appeared along the North Sea coasts between the 7th and 9th centuries, effectively played a “gateway” role, and saw international trading. These “wiks”, which were often founded by Royal decree, were compulsory stopping posts for travelling merchants, were the place where custom dues were collected, and where foreign coinage not current in the realm of the Franks could be changed or overstruck. Like the other “ancient” settlements which attracted a vicus ox portus in the 9th century, they served a central function and the roots of their development were nourished by a structured hinterland. The distribution of archaeological findings indi­ cates that with the exception of pottery, which tended to be concentrated in the largest pro­ duction centres, craft work was basically a domestic business. Traces of bone and horn carv­ ing, leather working, and metal-working are typical of all of these sites and is suggestive of a population o f specialist craftworkers, something which can also be found in the centres o f the Meuse valley (Maastricht, Huy and Namur).42 Textile production before the year one thou­ sand tended to be more of a country activity, with centres in estate workshops and above in all vast numbers of domestic looms in peasant farms. Rural linen and cloth were supplied to the great abbeys from their holdings in the North-West, in Flanders, Frisia, and Northern Ger­ many. In the past historians thought that upstream o f the “trading frontier” on which Dorestad lay, the territory of the South Netherlands and the Meuse valley were covered and crossed by international trading routes. Since the publication of Rousseau’s book, it has been real­ ized that the Meuse area had a head start over the Flanders in commercial and urban devel- opment.43 There is no trace of any significant commercial activity in the Scheldt valley before the end of the 8th century. The entire region was isolated from the main trading routes, which tended to run a little further to the south (Quentovic) or more to the north (Domburg on Walcheren and Dorestad). As for the coast, it had been deserted since the incursion of the sea in the 3rd century. The network of towns was largely subordinated to central functions.44

The Meuse Region

The hypothesis of the synchronous development of the towns of the Meuse in terms of both their nature and their scale must likewise be abandoned before the idea o f variable rates of growth and the diversity of urban types. River traffic generated by trade appears to have occurred both upstream and downstream. The centre of gravity of the Meuse Region was to the north, in the delta of the Meuse and Rhine, where the Frisians had since about 600 orga­ nized a major clearing house for trade between the Frankish world, the British Isles and Northern Europe. Maastricht appears to have been a gateway which was linked to Dorestad. In the 7th century the upstream valley did not play the role o f major corridor for international trade so often attributed to it.45 T h e four portus of the Meuse valley: Maastricht, Huy, Namur and Dinant formed an enduring armature of urban development between the 6th and the 10th centuries. Here there is evidence that the land was divided into parcels, and were subject to a tax payable solely in coin. There are also numerous traces o f oratoria. These are not primitive churches, rather they existed to serve the needs of the inhabitants of the portus.46 A t Maas­ tricht there were numerous foreign merchants living in the vicus.47 It may be assumed that a similar state o f affairs existed in the other portus of the Meuse and that these merchants attended to the links with the hinterland. However, archaeology and written sources only pro­ vide us with direct evidence of craft and trading activities before the year 800 in Maastricht and Huy. Numismatic history attests to the unity of the Meuse area, where a degree of trade was common, although it was limited to a single area and prior to the second half of the 10th century without any opening to neighbouring regions such as the Frankish Rhineland in the east and the old Neustrian lands to the west.48 Trade in the Meuse region had been even more localized, as indicated by the relations established by the vici in the Meuse valley with the hin­ terland and the birth in the Carolingian period of rural markets and fairs just large enough to serve the needs o f a local area, such as Saint-Hubert near Bastogne. A t Fosses, merchants came to the fair to sell and to buy. Based as it was on the relationship between town and coun­ try, the regional economy of the Meuse area turned on craft production, local markets, and the central religious or political functions of the palaces, abbeys, towns and the larger villages.49 -All in all the significance o f the M euse region owes far more to its place in the power struc­ tures of the Carolingian kings - palaces, great estates, monasteries, than role o f its river as “a running road”.50 After the decline which started in the period 820-830, the “wiks” of the North Sea coast (Domburg, Dorestad, Quentovic, and Yserae Portus in the Southern Netherlands) disap­ peared during the 2nd half of 9th and the 10th centuries. There are no simple explanations (military, economic or political) for their disappearance. This, however, does not mean that trade came to an end in this part o f Europe. The Viking raids did not make the old established settlements disappear. T o the contrary it could well be that they benefited from the disappear­ ance of the emporia and were able to attract the flows of international trade in the Scheldt and Meuse valleys and at Tiel and Deventer in East Holland. Did some sort of passing of the baton take place in the Scheldt valley, as Verhuist suggests might have happened in Antwerp in the latter half of the 9th century?51 T h e rarity and fragility o f the sources for the first half of the 10th century oblige us to be cautious. It would be too bold to follow Rousseau and speak of the continuity of urban life from the 5th to the 12th century.52 W e have only a very approx­ imate idea of the development of the economy in the Frankish world during the 9th and the 10th centuries. W ithout a doubt there were a series o f crises, perhaps between 820 and 830, fol­ lowed by a period of growth, perhaps between 850 and 860. In the Meuse region, the recession, which was marked by a pronounced decline in the money supply and the emission of coinage, was severe between 880 and 950. Examination o f the various forms of coins provides an insight into coinage emissions, and we see only 19 sorts o f coins struck in the mints of the Meuse (with Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

lí in Maastricht) during the first half of the ioth century. After 950, trade revived and we see 107 different sorts being struck (10 of which were struck in Maastricht).53 Studies of coin hoards in the Baltic region dating from the 10th and nth centuries tend to confirm this pic­ ture. Between 950 and 990 no discovered hoards contain pennies struck in the mints of the middle Meuse, Utrecht or Frisia. The currents of trade which linked the Germanic world to the Baltic only brought in Cologne pennies mixed with other imperial coinage. The economic frontier of the 9 th century between the Meuse and Rhine basins still existed in the second half of the 10th century. Links to the North and the Baltic from the Rhine and Meuse delta were slow to be reestablished. Around the year one thousand, coin hoards show a complete reversal in their provenance. From then on, Meuse coinage was used in Cologne and was taken to the east mixed up with Cologne coinage, which is the first evidence for contacts and monetary flows between the two regions. Later on a significant proportion of Meuse-struck coins reached the Baltic, by more direct routes, indicating that other routes for the circulation of coins had been established between the Meuse and Eastern Europe.54 By the close of the ioth century, Cologne was playing a leading role as a centre for the trade between Germany and Eastern Europe, two centuries before Cologne was to become, as Lamprecht puts it, “The great seaport of the Empire”. The evolution of the Meuse region between the 9th century and the millennium is well illus­ trated by the rise of Liège. Originally a small country estate where Bishop Lambert was mur­ dered in about 700, it became the seat of the Bishop of Tongeren (Tongres) during the second half o f the 8th century. Designated a vicus publicus in 769, the small clerical settlement which grew up around the Saint Lambert basilica gave Liège a central function, helped no doubt by the proximity of the palace at Herstal, which since 769 had been the centre of a pagellus - a royal residence and royal mint at the end o f the 8th century. It is not until to the end of the ioth century, however, that we find pennies struck bearing the name of the town. The Bishops of Liège had certainly struck coins, no doubt within the episcopal precincts, but these bore the name of the bishop. The vicus of Liège had the appearance of an urban agglomeration, with houses, stone walls and other dwellings when it was flooded in 958. Though laid waste by the Normans in 881, it was quickly rebuilt. W ine from Worms was sold there in 960. Nonetheless this town life must have consisted primarily of passive consumers, clerics and members o f the bishop’s court and other hangers-on. The relatively late appearance in the records of the col­ lection of stall dues, in 960, the lack o f any mention o f a river port or a market before the end of the nth century makes it probable that Liège continued to be preoccupied with its political and religious functions until the mid-tenth century. A generation later the town was sur­ rounded by a wall, built on the orders o f Bishop N otger (972-1008). Similarly it was in the lat­ ter half of the same ioth century that the bishops of Liège built their position as princes hold­ ing temporal sway over extensive lands. Under Bishop Notger Liège embarked on an ambitious programme of construction, leaving an indelible mediaeval imprint on the town.55 By the year one thousand merchants from Liège were trading side by side with merchants from Huy (Hoei) in London. They regularly travelled in the Rhine valley in the nth century. How­ ever little is known about the precise activitives of these nth and 12th century merchants, “Were they mainly importers of wine, unfinished wool, or linen or were they rather exporters of the products of Lièges metalworkers and leatherworkers?”56 There is no certain evidence for the systematic sale of metal products until the latter half of the 12th century. Furthermore Liège linen was little known in other regions before 1250. The town never joined either of the two great leagues of trading cities: the London-based Hansa League or the XVII cities. Like Despy, it appears that one must conclude that the Liège of the first half of the 13th century was primarily concerned with tertiary functions, whose prosperity was based on its central role as the liturgical and political capital o f the bishop.57 Around 1100, there were eight chapters in the episcopal cité with roughly 270 prebendaries and two abbeys occupied by between 70 and 80 chorister monks. Indeed one has to look to the bishop and the Church in Liège to understand the links between the production of artistic and cultural works, power centres and the accumulation of DU

wealth. Before 972, the bishops held property and rights in the most important centres of the Meuse region, as well as various large abbeys such as Saint-Hubert and Lobbes. Under N ot- ger, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto II, granted general immunity for the Saint-Lambert pos­ sessions. In 985, Otto II, granted the Comté of Huy to Notger. In 987, he added the Comté of Brugeron between the Gete (Gette) and the Dijle (Dyle) rivers, the market dues and coinage of Maastricht, the abbeys of Lobbes, Fosses, and Gembloux, and in 992 the abbey of Brogne. By the time Notger died, the foundations of a solid temporal principality had been laid, form­ ing a welcome buffer between the Holy Roman Empire and the ambitions of the French kings in Lotharingia (Lorraine) and, very soon, the expansionist plans of the Counts of Flanders. Nor did the accretion of property come to a halt in the nth century. In 1040 the Comté of Haspinga, lying between the Geer and the Meuse, was added, while the Comté of Hainaut was enfeoffed in io7i.S8 By the time the generosity of the Holy Roman Emperors comes to an end towards the close of the nth century, the “... riches o f the Church in Liège allow her to buy vir­ tually anything it wants and to nourish the heritage of Saint Lambert simply by paying for it”.59 Between 1071 and 1096, Bishops Théoduin and O tbert spent 100 gold pounds on such operations and over 2000 silver marks. Their wealth sprung from the exercise o f royal prerog­ atives and their vast estates, whose revenues all flowed into Liège. These were collected and checked by a system established during the nth century comprising a clerical arm (the cathe­ dral chapters, collegial churches and abbeys, archdeaconates, deaconates and parishes), a mil­ itary arm (fortresses commanded by constables invested by the bishop); and an estate arm (forty or so centres of operations spread evenly over the lands of Saint Lambert, which were entrusted to members of the episcopal familia). In order to maintain authority over the lands the Prince Bishops adopted a system of clientism. “To the nobles they granted fiefs, to the emerging burgesses they granted charters o f liberties”.60 Examples include Huy in 1066, Sint Truiden (Saint-Trond) in 1146, and Liège at the end of the 12th century. This powerfiil appa­ ratus made the Church the most powerful political force throughout the Meuse region. In 1107, abbé Etienne de Saint-Jacques declared, “Nothing can equal the power of the bishops whose court and opulence rivals that of the kings themselves”.61 The clergy of Liège, recount­ ing the battle of Steppes in 1213, makes William of Salisbury, half-brother of John Lackland (King John of England), say these bitter words, “Perish those who have given such power to a priest”.62

The Scheldt Region

The first indications of territorial cohesion in Flanders begin to emerge in 862 with the suc­ cess of Baldwin I (Baudouin/Boudewijn), a Carolingian count, who carried off and subse­ quently wed the daughter of Charles the Bald, Judith, already twice widowed by a King of Wessex. W ith his appearance and that of his son Baldwin II, the Counts of Flanders com­ menced a long period in which they played a key political role in the West of the Frankish Kingdom. Certain basic traits of the policies of the Counts o f Flanders emerged by the end of the 9th century and during the 10 century. These included matrimonial policies aimed at cre­ ating closer relations with the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms; taking an active part in French affairs of state; and territorial expansion, although to the south this came up against the new-found might of the Dukes of Normandy. The first “Grand Marquis”, Arnold I, son of Baldwin II, ruled lands which stretched from the Somme and the Canche to the Zwin. His successors were soon to direct their expansionist dreams towards the East. Mediaeval chroniclers were well aware of the paradoxical nature of the extraordinary success of the Flemish “princes”, who reigned over a “terre brehaigne, peu valant et plaine de palus” (a barren land, worthless and full of marshes).63 The apparent paradox hides three fundamental elements which underpinned the spectacular economic and urban growth of the County, namely long-term rural expansion since the Carolingian era; the establishment of power structures which had been based on for­ tifications and sites of refuge since the end of the 9th century; and the rise of the towns with rights, liberties and their own administrative system. Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

The Flemish Countryside

The rapid growth of the Flemish towns during the course of the nth and the 12th centuries can only be understood if the vital role of agriculture is acknowledged. In the nineteen-sixties the question of the respective interaction of demographic expansion and rural growth lead to fierce argument between neo-Malthusians, who stressed the key importance of technical innovation, and sociologists such as Boserup, who considered that demographic pressure led to both expansion and deepening in all areas.64 The acceleration of demographic growth already observable in the 8th century, and which was sustained throughout the nth, 12th and 13th centuries was not the result of a “technical revolution” in the year one thousand.65 The majority of the technical innovations of the Middle Ages, such as the heavy plough, harnesses, and watermills, were already known in ancient times.66 W hat happened in the Middle Ages was that an awareness o f these techniques was spread and that they became integrated into farming practice. Demographic pressure was an important factor “either as the direct cause or indirectly as a catalyst” in the astonishing increase in the area of land under cultivation.67 The trend to clearing new land for cultivation and putting other land to good use by empolderment or the construction of dykes, the multiplication or expansion of centres of settlement, and the colonization o f entire new areas, between the ioth and the end o f the 13th century, did by no means proceed in linear fashion, in time or in space. It has been the great land clearances which have really captured the imagination of historians. Nonetheless the greatest impact on country life and the elements which nourished the rise of the towns was made by the intensi­ fication and specialization of farming. The very real economic boom experienced during the central period of the Middle Ages was not due to the “great clearances but the phase follow­ ing them, the return to interregional trade in agricultural products”.68 In Flanders the apogee of the clearances was reached in the nth and 12th centuries, a cen­ tury before the remainder of the Southern Netherlands.69 It is evident that since the 9th cen­ tury the clearances were above all the result of the more intensive occupation of ancient lands. This element is also applicable to the great clearances after the year one thousand, which were launched from long-populated areas. The most densely populated regions in the 12th century were Gent, where clearances had started in the ioth century and Dendermonde, Aalst (Alost) and Diksmuide (Dixmude). The improvement of depopulated regions during the Early M id­ dle Ages was part of the second wave of clearances which started at the end of the n th and con­ tinued during the 12th century. After a pause in clearances between about 1175 to 1215, the improvement of the extensive heathlands in the Northern Flanders continued well into the 13th century. The first phase of the expansion of agricultural land consisted of putting the old lands into use until saturation point was reached. A third of the new concentrations of popu­ lation which appeared in the nth century were located in the Gent area. The density of the rural population in the nth century explains the rapidity of urban growth. Hardly a few decades before, leper ( Ypres), where in 1127 a fair was held that attracted merchants from far- off Italy, was hardly more than a hamlet where an estate collection office was sited. Calais was a tiny fishing village in 1165, but by 1300 had become a town with a population of 15,000, rep­ resenting a tripling in population with every generation. Saint-Omer is known to have tripled its population every century.70 Gent, Bruges, and leper reached the peak of their development in the 13th century, with populations o f 64,000, 42,000 and 35,000 respectively.71 B y the mid- 14th century, about 40 % of the Flemish population lived in towns. The expansion of the land area under cultivation is insufficient in itself to resolve the para­ dox of Flemish agriculture, where we see an awkward environment, frequently poor soils (par­ ticularly when compared to neighbouring Picardy); combined with advanced techniques (horses, intensive crop rotation, forage crops, etc.); as well as a spectacular rise in yields, which can only be explained by the dynamism of the small Flemish farm. The best modern hypoth­ esis is inspired by the idea that the rural economy in the County of Flanders had since the nth century been rooted in a macro-economic agrarian “ecosystem”, based partly on pronounced regional specialization in three different areas: i) the coastal strip, which specialized in stock- farming products; 2) the southern part of the County with its loam soils, which was the gra­ nary of the County and exported cereals along the Scheldt and Leie (Lys) to the cities of the North; and 3) the sandy soils of the Flemish heartland, where a type of extensive cash-crop farming grew up which supplied the needs of ale brewers.72 The coastal region was taken into use in progressive steps. The first shepherding operations appeared on artificial mounds in the centre of salt marshes known as schorren in the 8th cen­ tury, but it was not until the 10th century that the first villages appeared. The saline land was originally drained naturally via the channels taken by the flood water. In the following century, however, following the third Dunkirk incursion, the first small collective dykes (seawalls or embankments) begin to appear. These were then followed in about 1050 by major works such as the Oude Zeedijk east of Veurne (Fumes). The second phase, which started in about 1130, saw the construction of what might be termed offensive dykes rather than defensive dykes. These were built with the object o f reclaiming land or “polders” from the sea. T h e desalination o f the soil led to the creation o f new resources. U ntil the end o f the 12th century, land recla­ mation was primarily left to a few large abbeys, like the Abbey of the Dunes (near Veurne). In the 13th century, the nobility and patrician burgesses took a part in dyke construction enter­ prises. The activities of the coastal communities existing before the establishment of new ports by the 13 th century Counts included fishing, cattle-farming and the handling of goods in tran­ sit. T h e oldest markets in the towns such as G en t and Bruges were fish markets. Stock farm­ ing was, however, the main activity of the entire coastal region. Great herds of cattle and sheep were raised for meat, dairy products, leather and wool and sent to towns inland. The growth in the number of polders allowed the expansion of grazing land and cultivated fields. By end of the 12th century cash crops such as madder were being raised. Other products of growing importance were sea salt and peat.73

Nowadays historians think that agriculture adopted intensive methods between the 12th and 13 th centuries, before the economic crisis o f the Late M iddle A ges.74 Three yearly rotation was practised on the rich soils in the south of the County even in Carolingian times by the great estate.75 In 1120 it was being used on the land of the Abbey of Marchiennes between the Lys and the Scheldt to the north of the Lille. The “Gros Brief” of 1187 shows that it was widely used by the great estates in the County north of Lille. The long application of crop rotation would explain why in the mid-i3th century other ways of intensifying farming methods were sought on the loam soils o f Southern Flanders where cereal cropping had approached the lim­ its of its possibilities both in terms of yields and area.76 Vetch was sown on old fallow and cat­ tle allowed to graze it. A s a result the field would become enriched by natural manure and the nitrogen fixed by the vetch. This practice became widespread in the mid-i3th century in the Tournai-Lille region and in Haspengouw (Hesbaye). The practice of catch-cropping (or inter­ cropping) opened new ecological prospects making it possible to achieve a diversification of cultivated products, improved stock yields, organic and green manures, which in turn made it possible to grow other crops. For example woad, a demanding cash crop grown for dyers, made its first appearance in the 13th century.77 The practice of growing forage and industrial crops was introduced mainly by peasant farmers, and was often prohibited on the great tenanted farms. Throughout the Middle Ages the line between intensive and extensive farming prac­ tice largely coincides with the fine between the small and the large farmer. T h e light sandy soils o f inland Flanders produced mainly rye and oats and were farmed on the “dries” system (a type of outfield rotation system). Rye was the staple of the peasant diet, while the oats were used to feed the horses and make ale. The woodlands, which were still fairly extensive in the nth and 12th centuries, were used for raising pigs. That pigs were a reg­ ular feature of the diet in the Middle Ages has been confirmed by archaeological finds in Gent. Nonetheless it is likely that inland Flanders played a much more limited role in the mediaeval trading economy, than did the coastal strip or the south o f the County.78 The importance of oats in Flemish agriculture also explains the early abandonment of oxen Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

as draught animals in favour of the horse. Indeed the horse was probably already being used by Flemish farmers in the year iooo. Even though further investigation is required, it appears that oxen had been all but completely replaced by the second half of the 12th century. As it was quicker than the ox and more suitable for small intensive farms, the horse could plough much greater areas. W ith the concurrent improvement o f the cart, peasant farmers could travel fur­ ther than the nearby villages and even reach the smaller towns. The abandonment of the ox as a draught animal also made it possible to concentrate cattle-farming activities on dairy and beef production. Other elements of technical advance, such as water resource management and peat cutting, are indicative of the advanced state of Flemish farming in the nth and 12th centuries.79 Flanders therefore developed an original system for diversifying its agricultural production, which encompassed a better balance with cattle farming and regional specialization, which began to appear in the 12th century. Such trade flows would not have been possible without the establishment of a true regional economy covering the entire County and neighbouring regions. The loam plains of French Flanders, Artois and Picardy (the territorial losses of the County did not affect trading patterns) were the granary which nourished the valleys of the Leie (Lys) and Scheldt. Examination of the urban development of the cereal regions shows that simply equating cereal production w ith urban growth is fallacious. There is no large town at all in the rich lands o f Picardy. Towns do not grow up spontaneously in the country. Stock- farming goes a long way to explaining the dynamism of the Flemish countryside. Between the 8th and the 12th centuries, intensive sheep farming on the “schorren” and peat soils permitted the production of vast quantities of wool, which were carried via the estate network to Gent in the year 1000. In the 12th century, Flanders was blessed with a coast which produced a wealth o f saleable goods (unprocessed wool, meat, dairy products, fish, salt, peat, and madder), as well as densely populated regions around Gent, leper and Aalst with a possibly more fragile nutri­ tional balance, and intensifying agricultural practice on the most fertile lands combined with easy access to cereal resources. The hypothetical early specialization of the coastal strip should not result in the progress made by stock farmers elsewhere being ignored. W hen Galbert de Bruges writes about peas­ ant life between the Scheldt and Leie he confirms this, as do the toponymie distributions of place names relating to sheep farming in inland Flanders, wool production in Artois and the Tournai area in the early nth century or the importance of the drovers’ roads (Middle Dutch: herdgang) uncovered by archaeologists in the Gent area.80 The prosperity of stock farming in Flanders was striking enough for contemporaries to remark on it. Sometime between 1055 and 1065, Archbishop Gervais of Reims expressed his admiration to Count Baldwin V of the lat­ ter’s success in making, “ ... by his invention and energy (...) a land [fertile] that only a short time ago was hardly good for farming at all (...), to such an extent that it surpasses in this respect lands more suited to production; (...) so that it produces from its bosom fruit in abun­ dance and a profusion o f harvests; making it smile on those who till it and swell so with fecun­ dity that it even provides enough to fatten the beasts in the fields and meadows”.81

The Role of the Prince?

There remains one particularly thorny question. Namely should the growth of the rural econ­ omy be explained by the independence and dynamism of the Flemish peasantry and the mod­ erate demands of the lords regarding newly cleared land82 or was it rather a matter o f seigneural initiative? The idea of internally fuelled growth runs into certain theoretical and practical objections. A n intensification of farm practice on small peasant farms is not a sus­ tained and irreversible process. It could be nipped in the bud by population growth and an abundance of cheap agricultural labour. Large farms also found ways of adapting to the mar­ ket by entering into tenancy agreements. The growing practice of collecting taxes in coin encouraged the development of the intensive use of money in the countryside.83 The Flemish boom and the transfer of capital away from the countryside could have been 64

stimulated by the residential and consumption patterns of the Flemish elite. The Count of Flanders established a princely court and gathered the most powerful lords around him dur­ ing the nth century. In Brabant, the Duke did not attempt to call his great noblemen to court before the close of the Middle Ages.84 The Count’s coffers appear to have been well-filled with gold and silver, precious stones and valuable linen (!) since the reign o f Baldwin V. It is hardly surprising that both the murderers and avengers of Charles the Good searched for them in vain. The luxurious life of the Count and the nobility was a stimulus to industry and trade. The charitable acts o f the Count attracted the poor to the towns, to whom he gave food, money and clothing (!). Galbert de Bruges’s enumeration of the measures taken by the Charles the Good for the alleviation o f the famine of 1124-1126 is a good indication o f the extent to which the town dom­ inated the countryside in the early 12th century and the degree to which the Count could influ­ ence the economy. Halfway through Lent in 1125, the bread ran out. Peasant farmers from Gent and the Leie to the Scheldt had no option but to slaughter their livestock in order to feed their families. The famine caused hundreds of deaths in the countryside and peasants flocked to the towns. The Count dealt severely with those wealthy hoarders who had been speculating in grain, which in itself illustrates the not inconsiderable economic role played by the rich in the trade in agricultural produce. He suspended brewing operations and fixed wine prices in order to encourage cereal imports. H e gave orders for bread to be made from oats and regulated loaf sizes. H e ruled that one unit of agricultural land in all parts of the County should be sown with beans and peas in order to bring the next harvest forward. He instructed all his estates to maintain a hundred poor people and suspended the payment of tenancy dues.85 From this it is possible to conclude that such a thing as a commodity foodstuffs market existed in Flanders in the early 12th century, which it was possible to push in the direction of cereal purchases and bread production by forbidding the brewing of beer and cutting purchases of wine from the French wine-producing regions of Laon, Beauvais and Reims. There is nothing to indicate that the players in this market were primarily professional merchants. The speculators were the rich and probably belonged to the elite who lived in the town. As the story of the uprisings in Laon in 1112 and Bruges in 1127 tells, the nobles, senior clerics and important officials had “hôtels” or residences in town, where they stored the foodstuffs collected from the country. The political decisions of Count Charles are striking for their diversity and their nature. However, we must ask ourselves what they say about the role o f politics and the social fabric in the growth o f rural and urban Flanders. Jan D hondt regarded the complex o f “castle, collegiate church, and fair” as the fruit of the Count’s initiatives in the mid-nth century.86 Hans Van Werveke spoke of the economic policies of his successor, Philippe d’Alsace, typified by the foundation of a series of ports along the Flemish coast,87 which were the key element of a new drainage system and the exploitation of the coastal plains of Flanders.88 And as we have seen the Bishop of Reims was fulsome in his praise of Baldwin V, whom he saw as responsible for the new fertility of the Flemish lands. T h e references to a surge in violence in n th and early 12th century Flemish sources have led David Nicholas to draw a picture of a Flanders which is “rough, violent and badly governed ...” at the end of the nth century.89 Galbert of Bruges’s story, however, makes Charles the Good the heir to a tradition of peace and public order guaranteed by the Counts. One of the most serious crimes of the Erembalds was the breach of the Count’s peace and the conduct of a private war. The recurrence of the theme of violence in the chronicles is not an indication of the existence of unbridled barbarism, but a reflection by contemporaries of the feeling that they were witnessing a confrontation between the public peace and private violence. In the period between the mid-nth century and the early 12th century, the Counts of Flanders made every effort to enforce the Count’s peace (truce, peace of the town and the market, free pas­ sage for merchants) throughout the County. Historians tend to be more willing to point out the role of the Counts in the development of the towns and urban trade than in the country­ side. Nonetheless one is inclined to think that the limitation on lordly violence in the form of the public peace and early development of a network of smaller towns accessible to country- TwLxt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

dwellers must have helped to foster the return to rural growth in the nth and 12th centuries. The history of Charles the Good as recorded by Galbert of Bruges is based on a paradigm (which may have been inspired by the author’s social environment), namely the effect of the social forces unleashed by the murder in 1127 of the Count. The Count, the guarantor of the Peace, encourages foreign merchants to come to the fairs of Flanders. W e learn of the unbri­ dled rise and wealth o f Bertulf and his fellows, w e see the formation o f a new elite o f clerics, administrators and soldiers growing up which owes its prosperity to the Count. W e read of the robber knights and bandits who prey on the roads, careless of death, in order to capture and ransom the merchants. H e argues for the Count and the urban economy to take control of the peasant economy rather than for internally driven rural growth.

The Development of the Flemish Towns

For Henri Pirenne, the development of the towns in the Southern Netherlands was ideal material for drawing a general picture in support of his hypotheses. The towns were estab­ lished in the nth century under the impulse of the revival of international trade. There origins could be traced to a common characteristic, “The Flemish town was born of the juxtaposition of a stronghold and a merchant settlement where, to borrow the terms used in the sources there was a castrum and a portus1. For Pirenne, a castrum was not a town, it was not even urban in nature. Only the fact of its pre-existence determined the location of commercial and indus­ trial settlements.90 Archaeological discoveries show that this general picture was in reality far more complicated and much more diverse both in space and in time. For example, at both Gent and Valenciennes there was a portus before any fortifications were built. Furthermore not all Flemish strongholds were built as defences against the Norsemen, examples include several pre-urban sites such as in all likelihood Bruges in the middle of the 9th century, Saint-Omer before 891, Tournai in 898, Cambrai (Kamerijk) between 888 and 901. The main fortification works at Gent and Douai date only from the middle of the ioth century.91 Admittedly whereas part of the fortifications were built in response to a clear and present danger, the castle is essentially “the material expression of the establishment of a feudal power”.92 T h e numerous case studies that have appeared in recent decades reveal a reality which was far more complex and varied both in time and space than the simple dualism o f stronghold and settlement. Antwerp had had military function since the 8th century. A trading settlement sprung up a kilometre downstream which survived the sack of the castrum by the Vikings in 836.93 However, the seeds o f the modern town only germinated after 980, when the ancient vicus was fortified and transformed into a castrum (Het Steen) and merchants settled outside its walls. A fish market (Vismarkt) which grow up below the walls suggests that like Bruges and Gent the main activity of the new settlement was to provision the castle. In the 7th cen­ tury Gent started to coalesce around two centres, the Abbey of Saint Peter and the Abbey of Saint Bavo, both of which administered large estates. The merchant settlement of the 9th cen­ tury was located on the Scheldt about 500 metres upstream of Saint Bavo. The second portus in Gent referred to in the sources appeared in the middle of the ioth century on the banks of the Leie (Lys), at the foot of the new castle built by the Count of Flanders.94 The impressive size of the Count’s estates in the northern part of Flanders at the end of the ioth century has already been referred to. In this region the Count was by far the largest land­ holder. Farming methods, the nature and direction of the circuits used for transferring farm surpluses, consumer and trading patterns affecting estate produce would therefore have had a considerable impact on the regional trading economy. However our attention should first go to the particular pattern of incastellamento in Flan­ ders. The Flemish plain saw a spate of castle building both at the end of the 9th century and the close of the ioth century. They had a characteristic plan, being either circular (Bourbourg, Bergues-Saint-Winnoc, Veurne (Furnes), Diksmuide (Dixmude), and Gistel) or semi-circu- lar and protected on one side by a river (Saint-Omer, Arras, leper (Ypres), Armentières, Kor­ trijk (Courtrai), Tournai (Doornik), Gent, Ninove, and Aalst (Alost). Some of these had been built on an emerging pre-urban site (Bruges, Gent, and Saint-Omer).95 Walled refiiges built in flat countryside often gave rise to a small mediaeval town.96 Their development contrasts sharply with that of isolated strongholds like the large castles built by the Bishops of Liège in the Meuse region. A s o f the early n th century, this network o f defences formed the basis o f a new way o f divid­ ing the County into administrative districts. The new districts were smaller than the Carolin­ gian ^>«g-¿ they replaced. T h ey were administered by a “castellan” (or viscount) appointed by the Count, and the castrum became the main centre of the “castellany”. In addition to the tradi­ tional military and legal functions these centres were granaries, the place where the revenues of the Count and the resources of his domain were concentrated and redistributed. One key characteristic of the urbanization process in Flanders was therefore the density of its network of secondary centres. The interplay of castrum and portus, which Pirenne regarded as fundamental to the growth of the big towns, probably had the greatest effect in these smaller centres, where the initiative of the Count meant that there were mouths to feed (the milites castri, sergeants, clerks, and petty officials, domestics, leatherworkers and blacksmiths, etc.). The construction of various residences (the Flemish court continued to travel hither and thither in the County well into the 12th century) and, by establishing canonical chapters in some of them, the Count helped to increase the demand for commercial and craft activities. T h e “Gros B rief” o f 1187 gives quite a good idea o f the stimulating role the establishment o f a collection office for the Count’s estate dues could play; and which could result in a concentric estate organization issuing ultimately into épiers (granaries), lardaría, vaccariae (for dairy products) and local counting houses to handle the money; and in consumption (for mainte­ nance or payment in kind or by the establishment of fief-rents or charity rents) ; and the sale of part of the farm produce by the collectors, etc.97

Regional Economy, the Urban Phenomenon and Trade Circuits

The network of secondary centres was complemented by a primary system of local and regional fairs. T h e oldest o f these was the Saint Bavo fair, which would start on the 1st of October. Undoubtedly of spontaneous origin, it appears in the records shortly after the year 1000. Hagiographies of the nth and 12th centuries reveal the importance of the Gent market as an outlet for products such as wool and ale from the upper Scheldt valley. There is abundant reference to the plentifulness o f money and the crowds thronging to the fair. Prior to 1100, fairs are reported in various pre-urban centres such as Saint-O m er (about 1050), D ouai (1076), Aar­ denburg (about 1100), and on central monastic estates such as W ormhout (1076), Torhout (about 1084), Tronchiennes (1087) and Messines (end o f the n th century (?)). T h e fairs o f leper and Lille were subjected to the Market Peace in 1127. Texts from the 12th century illustrate the primitive nature of the Flemish fairs as interregional centres for primary farm produce.98 A s of the 8th century and to a large extent in the following centuries, the great abbeys con­ trolled traffic areas by means o f estate curtes, whose central establishments had to take turns in supplying the abbey. This was the system employed at Saint-Wandrille near Rouen in 719-739 and at Corbie in 822." These systems, which supplied the needs of the Frankish state and its superstructures, are linked as we have seen to the great “portes” (lit. gateways) of the Carolin­ gian period on the western coast trading frontier. The great innovation of a network like the one established in Flanders in the nth and 12th centuries has nothing to do with its topology, rather it lies in its evolutionary nature of the centres (estate curtes or castra), the character of the main actors (nobility, clerical or secular administrative elite), and in the nature o f the traf­ fic from the periphery to the centre (centralized consumption and sale or a partial transfer to the peripheries). W hen reduced to simple formulations, the evolutionary nature of each of these nodal points in the Flemish model is expressed as a series o f dynamic factors: the tradi­ tional central functions such as justice and administration, infrastructure (the defence appara­ tus, church, markets, etc.), the existence of a consuming population, demand for services (craftsmen, retailers), supplies o f farm products sold at market prices by the recipients, and Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

guarantees o f peace and safety. A s for traffic itself, it clearly develops in relation to supply, regional specialization and demand. Peat, salt and fish are sent to the markets in the towns, where they are sold by retailers. In 1187, the administrators o f the C ou n t’s estates allow the local collectors to choose either to consume or sell farm surpluses. From then on it tends to be money, rather than estate carts, that travels from the periphery to the centre. Finally the trad­ ing networks are not confined to a single physical organization. Traffic networks and areas instituted by the Count, church organizations great and small, and the nobility cross one another continuously. In Gent, wool arrives via estate routes of the Abbeys of Saint Peter and Saint Bavo and by merchant traders on the Scheldt. A t those places where for geographical or political reasons concentration or redistribution points coincide the evolutionary nature of the system is amplified. Pierre Toubert describes a parallel development in Northern Italy, where as o f 920, a degree o f fortification was given to numerous curtes, often accompanied by a mar­ ket. Trading networks then grew up that tended to favour the “'castelli curtensi' and the close relationship between curtis, castrum and mercatum. It is “highly revealing o f the positive adjustments to the commercial boom and the current redistribution of population patterns and local power structures”.100 The establishment and consolidation of networks of power, production and trade appear to have been one of the forces driving the transformation of mediaeval society. According to a formula already enunciated by Henri Pirenne, the mediaeval town is the point of convergence of a regionally integrated market system, with fiilly articulated production and distribution systems. A town comes into existence by its ability to control an “area di strada” and organize itself around and towards its rural hinterland (with a multiplicity o f actors, interests and power structures). In the early 11 th century the interplay of taxation and exemption helps to confirm the power of the town markets over the countryside. W ith exemptions being granted to the populations of about a hundred surrounding villages, people flocked to the market in Reims, or, at the same period, to the men of the.familia of Saint Vaast, who lived in a 60 km circle cen­ tred on Arras (Atrecht) ,101 T h e peasant farmer came to the market with his cart, to sell primary products, wood for heating, unfinished wool, and above all cereal products. More importantly, however, he also came to buy things such as wine and beer, salt, fish, lumber and finished iron. The dominance of the town over the surrounding area will ultimately come with the rise of linen-weaving in the towns to the detriment of the peasants in the surroundings who work wool and flax.102 Two major problems are left. T h e first is the question o f where the ways o f the proto-urban settlements of the Early Middle Ages, which became small towns serving largely rural needs (such as Gembloux or Saint-Hubert) and those which gave rise to towns thriving on com­ merce and production begin to part. The second concerns the links between the rather coarse estate networks that served rural needs and the main arteries of trade. In Toubert’s view, it was the same networks that were used for a superimposed flow of non­ local trade, sometimes by persons whose status was ambiguous, such as agents of the king and certain large abbeys instructed with seeking goods which could not be obtained locally further afield, and sometimes merchants working for their own account. Franz Irsigler thinks that the Frankish merchants slowly eclipsed foreigners, who could have been Frisians or Jews, and who hitherto had dominated long distance trade. By the end of a long period of slow change accompanied by ever greater professionalism, at least some of these nth century “long-dis­ tance merchants” were the heirs of these local estate merchants. Although more independent, many of them continued to be protected by the Church in order to enjoy various commercial immunities.103 This attractive hypothesis nonetheless strands on the hiatus in the documen­ tary record of the first half of the ioth century. After the decline o f the emporia located in the Northern Netherlands, the commercial role of the Frisians was eclipsed for more than a century. It was only at the end of the ioth century and more clearly at the start of the nth cen­ tury that we see Frisian merchants trying to feel their way back into their traditional markets. They pop up on the Rhine route, never totally abandoned, and further afield as far as the Western routes towards England and the Nordic countries. By the year one thousand they 68

have contacts in the North Sea area with other coastal peoples, including Scandinavians, Anglo-Danes and Anglo-Saxons, Old Saxons from Bremen and Hamburg, Rhenish folk from Cologne and Duisburg, Flemings and people from the Meuse. Did those competitors “rush to fill the gap left vacant by Frisian merchants and the decline of Dorestad” in the first years of the ioth century?104 A ll along the Meuse, there is hardly a sign of a revival of interregional trade before the second half of the ioth century. It is unlikely that the portus o f the towns on the banks of the Scheldt played a significant role in international trade before the close of the ioth century. 105Nonetheless the presence of 9th, ioth and nth century ceramics imported from Northern France and the Rhine in Gent, Bruges, Antwerp and elsewhere seems to indicate a certain continuity of interregional contacts, which were in all probability commercial in nature.106 The sudden halt to growth caused by the Norse incursions was not irreparable. For the time being though it must be acknowledged that we do not know all the participants in trading relations in the ioth century. The idea of agents acting for the estates being slowly transformed into “long-distance merchants”107 or the hypothesis o f the Frisian gap being filled by local merchants108 must be carefiilly explored by future research. A ll we can say about nth and 12th century merchants is that we know little about them.109 W e know nothing of the sta­ tus (where they free or protected?) of the merchants who start to be mentioned in textual records shortly after the year 1000. For example, we know of a certain Robert, the son of Alward of Saint-Omer, who sells linen in Barcelona, and we know about all those from Flan­ ders, Ponthieu, Normandy and France, and from Huy, Liège and Nivelles, who pay stall dues to the Port of London on the Thames. Some of the merchants of Arras (mentioned in a text whose date is still uncertain (1030-1040) were part o f úit familia of Saint-Vaast in the early nth century. In the I2th-i3th centuries the wine traders o f Gen t were still paying dues to the abbeys of Saint Peter and Saint Bavo.110 We must also ask if the dusty travellers - adventurers who spent most of the year tramping the roads were particularly numerous.111 Towards the end of the n th century we know that at Valenciennes guild brothers travelled in armed caravans for a three day march from the town. Shortly after the year one thousand, a merchant from Tournai came to the Saint Bavo fair to sell his load of wool. Until about 1050, perhaps 1100, it would have been this kind of interregional trade which was carried on by the itinerant merchants. London and England were two days away in a small sailing ship, other familiar destinations would have been Laon, Artois and Picardy, the Meuse, and the Rhine as far as Cologne. Not so much adventurers, more colleagues united in a guild in order to share the immediate dan­ gers o f the robber knight and excessive tolls. The Flemish merchant of the nth century is difficult to discern from the sources. The Meuse Region gives us a clearer picture of the merchants, and it seems that here the growth of the towns was not so fast as in Flanders. Liège, the largest town on the Meuse in the 13th cen­ tury still appears to be a town engaged primarily in tertiary activities. The large Flemish towns of the period were completely different. They were larger, pursued economic activities and dominated the surrounding countryside. To understand this asynchronicity between Flanders and the Meuse basin we must examine a final problem: namely the conditions under which the transfer of an industry and the concentration of labour which had hitherto been largely rural had taken place. The latter could indeed have been stimulated by demographic growth and the breakdown of estate structures in the countryside.112 In the Middle Ages cloth was the only industrial product exported on a large scale. Hans Van Werveke argues that systematic manufacturing for export started in the Flemish town in the nth century. This moment coincided with the use of English wool for the manufacture of luxury goods. Hitherto cloth had been produced solely for the domestic market and primarily to meet the needs of the family. “Frisian” linen were made in the home, but sold outside the area where they were made,113 which according to the Pirenne school meant that they did not enter the commercial economy. Cloth and fabrics were part o f the products supplied by peas­ ants in the context of the estate trading circuits in North-West Europe. Archaeology and a reexamination of the textual evidence has made it possible to restore the parentage of the famous pallia fresonica to Frisia. Frisia in the Early Middle Ages was not just a country with a Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

large sheep-farming industry, it also had a manufacturing industry, and was a country where everywhere wool was spun and woven in numerous small workshops scattered over the coun­ tryside and in the towns.114 In about 830 we learn that the Abbey of Fulda received close to 855 pieces o f cloth from its Frisian territories. In the ioth century, the Abbey of Werden received close to a thousand from the same area. In the 9th and ioth centuries, the monks o f Saint Bavo in Gent had lands in Frisia “for the convenience of the monks and particularly for their clothes”.115 The homines fron d installed on the Zeeland estates of the abbey around the year 800 had to deliver a coat every year.116 Whereas the monks of Gent turned again to Frisia at the end of the ioth century, a text writ­ ten in Trier (Trêves) in about 1075, entitled Conflictus ovis et lini, reveals that Flemish cloth, prized for its colours and quality, had become an export product.117 Accompanied by their fel­ lows from the Meuse, Flemings travelled the Rhine valley to Koblenz between 1000 and 1070.118 The few texts dating from the 8th and ioth centuries show that sheep farming existed on the coast. Specialized sheep-farming operations grew up on the “schorren” and the peat soils in the nth and 12th centuries. After the marine incursions on the IJzer (Yser) river flood plain in the 1014 and 1042, numerous sheep farms were set up. leper, which had hitherto only been an estate centre, became a town in the last decades of the nth century. In 1127, its fair was visited by merchants from all the neighbouring kingdoms and particularly from Northern Italy, and Count Charles purchased a silver vessel from them. Verhuist thinks that these “Lombards” could have come to leper to buy cloth.119 Gent received local wool, which was brought in to sell at the Saint Bavo fair by a merchant from Tournai since the start of the nth century. It appears that the Abbeys of Saint Peter and Saint Bavo in Gent brought the wool from their “schorren” north of Bruges and Aardenburg to these pre-urban centres or to Gent. In the current state of documentary studies, it would seem that the growth of sheep farming in the ioth century favoured the spread o f textile craft skills in the countryside and pre-urban centres. Clothes making in fact appears to be the only activity which allowed Carolingian craftswomen to gain a certain degree of independence, and consequently a potential for mobil­ ity, and to make a living from their skills. There were, for example, the camsilariae, who were women who made panels of cloth for shirts, and who lived on smallholdings near Tournai. They sold their products for 8 pennies apiece.120 Did an increase in the availability of wool encourage the sale of unfinished wool (shortly after the year 1000 in Gent) and the arrival of craft weavers in the town? It could well be that this first flowering of the Flemish cloth indus­ try, a century before the first direct evidence of the arrival of English wool (perhaps in about 1113) was firmly and primarily based on local wool supplies. Was the “hunger” for wool the result o f the shrinkage of sheep flocks, itself a consequence of the construction of dykes around the “schorren” and the gradual empoldering of the entire coastal region?121 Verhuist s field studies tend, however, to suggest a different chronology. T h e growth in the area o f agricultural land is a phenomenon of the end of the nth and o f the 12th centuries.122 In 1120, when imports of wool from England to Gent is beyond dispute, the burgesses o f Gent were also having wool produced in the Vier-Ambachten (Quatre-Métiers) area, about 30 km north of the town.123 In the early 12th century therefore textile production in Flanders was large enough to absorb all the local wool and to extend the market for raw wool to England. The Conflictus ovis et lini also indicates another change, namely that wool, unlike linen, which continued to be women’s work, was from then on being worked by men.124 In 1137, the monks of Sint-Truiden con­ demned the behaviour of that “impudent and arrogant race o f workers who are weavers o f wool and linen”, without mentioning women at all. T h e author even praises the superiority o f the “rusticus textor et pauper” over the “'urbanus exactor”125. T h e entry o f men into an area, which since ancient times had been entirely the business of women, is indicative of the tremendous changes taking place. A final aspect which should be considered is the introduction of the hor­ izontal loom. It was first reported by Rashi, who saw it at Troyes in m id-nth century. T h e next innovation was a pedal loom which appeared in the 12th century.126 Such improvements made it possible to weave longer and more even pieces. The old vertical loom was indeed nothing more than a frame for holding the weft. The spread of new looms must have led to the rise of 70

two new crafts: the construction of looms, and their operation by skilled workers. The shift of the textile industry away from the country and the domestic sphere towards the town and the professional sphere cannot be explained exclusively by the need for weavers and fullers to live in the towns where the merchants had their homes.127Th e facts as we know them are indicative of a more complex hypothesis: and where we see restrictions in demand: urban consumers (including more luxurious products); and in supply: appearance of new products, accompanied by changes in technology; rapid changes in the context and gender division of the work (from work in the home to work in a workshop, from opera muliebria to the superbia of the weavers) at the point where possibilities converge: urban centres; population growth in the countryside; abundant supplies of raw materials; and lively trading circuits. These were the conditions which were in effect in Flanders in the nth century and which led to the appear­ ance of an urban textile industry. The history of Gent, illuminated by recent archaeological findings, indeed makes one suspect an even earlier chronology. A new wooden residence and a castle chapel was built in the first half of the ioth century on the “Oudburg” site, after the Counts o f Flanders had made themselves the masters o f the G en t area. T h e leatherworkers’ district was very nearby. B y no later than 966, the old Carolingian portus on the Scheldt had expanded to the Leie, opposite the casde of the Counts. It was here that the oldest market of the portus, the Fish Market (Vismarkt) was situated, the primary purpose of this market being to supply the inhabitants of the portus, the craftworkers and the garrison on the “Oudburg” with food. T h e reason why the portus expanded towards the Leie was the presence o f this mil­ itary centre. The Scheldt played a key role in interregional trade. This was the route by which the wool destined for the Fair of Saint Bavo arrived from Tournai in the early n th century. T h e fair was held on the days following the feast day of the Patron Saint on the 1st of October. The sale of unfinished indicates that textile activities were already present in Gent. The portus, where a representative of the Count (comes G andavi portus) had been instad area, subject to its own judicial organization. The largest Flemish town in the Middle Ages had thus acquired the diverse characteristics required by the traditional definition of a town by the year 1000.128

The long slow rise of the economies of Northwest Europe

Pirenne’s central idea was that the mediaeval town was born. In the nth century, urban life revived under the effects of the revival of international trade “on virgin soil, without any antecedents from an earlier age”. Breaking with the division into the traditional periods of Western history has made possible to revise such theses. Pirenne himself suggested the enor­ mously generative idea of a relatively continuous transition from Antiquity to the Merovin­ gian period. Verhulst’s studies of the origin of the towns in Northwest Europe confirm the relevance of this notion. For Pirenne, the Carolingians, which he describes as that “anti­ commercial civilization” ruled over a rural West, dependent on a subsistence economy, the Norsemen moreover having totally destroyed trade. Since then the economy o f Carolingian times has been totally reviewed, with the intensity and nature of trade being examined, the start of demographic regeneration, and the importance of rural growth. The breakpoint represented by the millenium has in fact never been really questioned by historians. The majority of modern studies stop in the early ioth century. It is not a matter of seeking new continuities, for example, between the 9th and the 12th cen­ turies. The unity of the process of historical development does not lie in the aspect which has remained immutable during the entire process, but in the continuity by which one particular change flows almost seamlessly into another in a constant succession of transformation. As Norbert Elias writes, for example, what links the Northern Netherlands of the 15th century with the 20 th century (...) is not so much an essential core which has remained unchanged but the continuity of transformations whereby 20th century society proceeds from 15th century society (...) identity not being so much as a substance but more of a continuity of transforma­ tions leading from one stage to the next”.129 Changing the frame of reference in order to deal with the historical evolution of the Southern Netherlands between the 6th and 12th centuries Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

helps to highlight other series of changes. The nth century in Flanders is one of urban har­ vest. The first fruits of the ioth century are the result of the slow and fundamental transfor­ mation o f the countryside. Nowadays we are fortunate in having a synoptic picture that enables us to review the “Piren- nean” theories o f the birth of the towns in their entirety.130 In the Southern Netherlands the continuity of existence of the urban centres of Antiquity into the Middle Ages is far greater than was thought. This is not necessarily manifested in topographical continuity. The main­ tenance of central functions (whether religious, administrative, military or other) plays an important role in the phenomena associated with the permanence of non-agricultural settle­ ments. The topography of these urban habitats cannot be reduced to the traditional dualism of fortification and trading settlement. The reality prior to the year one thousand is far more complex than that, and these pre-urban settlements appear to have been closer to multi-cen­ tred accretions of people and activities than anything else. Pirenne regarded the fortification simply as a passive attractor o f commercial activity. Nonetheless it now seems that the strong­ hold must have played an active economic role both as a centre of concentration and con­ sumption.131 The other break with “Pirennean” models is the reassessment o f the role o f consumption in the trading economy. Pirenne thought that not only was the Flemish castrum not a town it had none of the features of a town either. Its population did not produce anything for itself and from the economic point of view it was nothing more than a consumer. Even so, as we have seen, the definition of the mediaeval town must be adjusted to account for both the emergence and divergence o f the urban phenomenon in the Southern Netherlands. The town was a centre o f consumption as well as a centre of commercial activity (or more broadly speak­ ing a place where trading exchanges took place) and of production. As Pierre Toubert expresses it, this was a matter o f circuits, activities and superimposed networks. Apart from the merchants, room must be allowed for the other components of the urban population, such as the clerical and secular elites, officials, sergeants and servants, craftsmen and so on. The role played by the C ou nt’s épiers and lardaría, or those of an abbey, nobleman, or high official deserve just as much attention as the market hall or merchant’s stores. This view of things, based on a very broad sociological definition of trade, ought to make us just as interested in the private fortune of Chancellor Bertulf as in the more typical “Pirennian” figure of Guil­ laume Cade.132 Essentially this is a matter of applying the same epistemological broadening which allows the carts of the Carolingian monasteries to enter the trading economy to the nth and 12th centuries. Nor should the role of the seigneuries in the nth century trading econ­ omy be forgotten. In 1095, the Count of Hesdin’s carts travelled laden with grain and wine through the Canche valley to the sea (where Quentovic arose) and returned with a cargo of salt and fish.133 Viewing the history of the regional economies of the Southern Netherlands between the 7th and the 12th centuries as a single entity helps bring out how important the long-term trends are. The 7th century saw a shift in the European centre of gravity 60m the Mediterranean to Northwest Europe. Modern historians are well aware of the extent of interregional trading between the Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian worlds between the 7th and 9th cen­ turies. T h e economic crisis o f the early 9th century, the “Norse incursions” and the documen­ tary scarcity of the ioth century go a long way to supporting the view that this system of inter­ regional trading was interrupted for an extended period of time. The Carolingian pagi o f the Count of Flanders grew up on the edges of the trading areas. For people of the time, the success o f this “terre brehaigne" (barren land) was an event. Our understanding of the phenomenon nonetheless improves if we consider the development of North Western Europe as a space-time continuum, and stop thinking of the hiatus of the 9th century as a divide between two periods. If we ignore its specific form, we see that trading - be it commerce, migration, pillage and war, gifts and tributes - was not interrupted by the N orse incursions nor the crisis o f the Carolingian empire. 72

Hiatus? Flemish merchants are known to have been regular visitors to the Port of London shortly after the year iooo. In 1127 the news of the death of Count Charles arrived in London the very next morning. English wool was being landed in Gent in 1120. The world of Godric of Finchal, who lived at the end of the nth century and is the archetypal merchant adventurer “inspired by the spirit o f capitalism” as Henri Pirenne puts it, was bounded by the shores o f the North Sea: England, Scotland, Denmark, and Flanders.134 Continuity?‘Count Baldwin I kidnaps and marries Judith, widow of two Wessex kings, while their son takes a leaf out of the parental book by carrying off Elftrude, daughter o f Alfred the Great, King o f Wessex. Other Anglo-Flemish marriages illustrate the permanence of contacts in the ioth century. There was also a commerce in thought and ideas. Dunstan and Ethel- wood, two Englishmen, were in contact with Gent, where Gérard de Brogne had just revived the abbey of Mont-Blandin. In about 1030 the Danes and the Normans in 1066 set about establishing states which straddled the trading circuits of the 8th and the ioth centuries. Ships from Rouen loaded with wine discharged in London around the year 1000, just like the carts belonging to the Count of Hesdin which travelled to the mouth of the Canche in 1095. The continuum view is also useful for thinking about the historic conditions of the sustained growth of the economy of Northwestern Europe. It is this which is the proper scale for mea­ suring phenonema of varying intensity and duration such as the Frisian crossroads (7th to 9th centuries), the growth of Carolingian agriculture, the vitality of the money economy in Eng­ land (7th to 12th centuries), the diversification of the Flemish economy (ioth to 13 th centuries), the industrialization and concentration of textile production in the towns (nth to 12th cen­ turies), and the establishment of more far-flung trading networks and new continental ports, linking the North West to the South (fairs in Flanders and Champagne, Gent and Bruges) and to the East (Cologne) (ioth/nth to the 13th centuries). The long growth of agriculture started in the 8th century. The process speeded up in nth century with the progressive diversification of the rural economy, nourished towards the south by cereal-growing country and stimulated in the north by the exploitation of the coastal strip and the production of local wool. The small family farm makes its appearance as a driving force in the intensification of farming methods with the general introduction of the horse as a draught animal, the adoption of an increasing diversity of farming techniques, an improve­ ment in the balance between stock-farming and cultivation, and the introduction of new forage and cash crops. In return, the Flemish countryside is covered with a remarkably dense network o f defended villages and fairs. T h is mesh o f trade and power slowly starts to become centred on the towns in about the year 1000. W e still find it difficult to gauge the power of attraction the towns had on the rural population of the times. The growth of the urban popu­ lation which started in the nth century was rapid and sustained. The appearance of a wage- earning class and masculinization of the textile workforce during the nth century was undoubtedly a crucial element in this process. It helped to shape the two faces of mediaeval society: the countryside and the “true” town, self-aware and capable of attracting elite and poor alike. In the final analysis the mediaeval town must be considered as a social fact, a “human habi­ tat”, which in turn begs the question about the emergence of urban society. When seen like this, numerous roads lead to the town. The town is “large” if it becomes the political and administrative seat, the economic, religious and cultural centre of a large area.135 Single­ stranded explanations relying solely on commerce, the merchant or industry must be rejected, although the importance of such factors must be acknowledged. Long-distance commerce creates a powerful new link between the various regions o f Europe. T h e Lombard merchants who arrived in leper in 1127, were the heralds of a new and lasting dimension of economic, artistic and cultural exchanges between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. As of the nth century, the town becomes distinct from the countryside by the nature, culture and dynamism o f its elites. These meliores are not the mediaeval carpetbaggers suggested by Pirenne, rather they are a mixture o f established and, more especially, new elites (the younger scions o f noble families, vassal knights, ecclesiatical and lay administrators, etc.). From then on, the surplus of Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

rural production was concentrated (directly in warehouses, or indirectly as money tithes) and consumed in the town. Such consumption could take the form of public and private buildings, luxury goods or works o f art, customers, wage earners, and charitable works. W ithin the town walls princes occupied their palaces, clerics prayed, architects designed new buildings, sculp­ tors and goldsmiths pursued their arts. Commerce is a consequence of urban life not a cause. The new eûtes were a driving force in the birth of what Verhuist calls the “town as such, with its own laws, administration and justice (and) free burgesses.136 They withdrew the town from the governance o f the nobles and ruled themselves, without denying the authority prince and acquiring the total independence of the “urban republics” of Italy. Every inhabitant of the town benefited from this “freedom" which was an essential part of the urban landscape. Nonetheless it was the meliores who governed the town and thus secured their grip on the finance and trade passing through it until the great revolts of the early 14th century. In Wallo- nia the process of the concentration of industry came later (metal working and linen) and came to a halt at the close of the Middle Ages. Indeed until the 18th century industry in Wallonia was to remain a largely rural affair. The industrialization of the textile industry in the towns explains the earliness and extent of urban concentration in Flanders. The unusual size o f the Flemish towns greatly stimulated the demand for foodstuffs and industrial raw materials in the countryside. In turn it explains the intensification and progress of Flemish agriculture in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The hypotheses advanced in the foregoing argue in favour of the continuity of economic expansion from the Carolingian era into the nth, 12th and 13th centuries. This lengthy start should not be thought o f as a progressive and continuous process, lacking crests and troughs. Proper studies of the economic cycles concerned remain to be made. The economic view in itself does not provide a complete picture of town and country. The birth of the “urban habi­ tat” as a physical space and a way of life requires an integrated approach, which pays attention to the social and cultural facts and the production and consumption of material goods.137

Jean-Pierre Devroey, Université libre de Bruxelles

Translated from French by Van Lokeren, edited by Prof. dr. A. Verhuist Notes

1. Pirenne 1900. 2 . Verhuist 1986. 3. Verhuist 1986. 4 . Pirenne 193 7. 5. Cipolla 1956; Lopez 1974. 6. Claude 1985 Handel. 7. Claude 1985 Aspekte; Verhuist 1993. 8. Devroey 1984. 9. Verhuist 1990 Slavery; Verhuist 1990 Rurale. 10. Devroey 1990. 11. Herhily 1990. 12. Vita Sancti Macharii. 13. Devroey 1998. 14. Devroey 1998. 15. Abel 1978. 16. Bonnassie 1990. 17. Devroey 1981. 18. Toubert 1986. 19. Schwarz 1985; Nicholas 1991. 20. Nicholas 1991. 21. Verhuist 1966; Verhuist 1995 Economic; Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 22. Verhuist 1966; Verhuist 1992; Devroey 1993 Domaine. 23. Verhuist 1966; Verhuist 1995 Economic; Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 24. Bonnassie 1990. 25. W ickham 1992; W ickham 1995. 26. Verhuist 1990 Slavery; Verhuist 1990 Rurale. 27. Toubert 1986. 28. D uby 1966. 29. Fumagelli 1966; Montanari 1985; Delatouche 1970. 30. Rösener 1992; Verhuist 1990 Rurale; Verhuist 1990 Slavery. 31. Violante 1953. 32. Toubert 1988. 33. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 34. Lebecq 1983. 35. Grierson 1986. 36. Ambrosiani 1988. 37. Jansson 1985. 38. Grierson 1959; Grierson 1961. 39. Verhuist 1987; Spa 1990. 40. Verhuist 1989 Towns. 41. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 42. Spa 1990. 43. Rousseau 1930. 44. Verhuist 1989. 45. Rousseau 1930; contra Despy 1968. 46. Despy 1995. 47. Despy 1968. 48. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 49. Despy 1968. 50. Rousseau 1930. 51. Verhult 1989 Towns. 52. Rousseau 1930. 53. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 54. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 55. Kupper 1990. 56. Despy 1975. 57. Despy 1975. 58. Kupper 1981. 59. Kupper 1981. 60. Kupper 1981. 61. Vita s. Modoaldi. Twixt Meuse and Scheldt / Jean-Pierre Devroey

62. Triumphus S. Lamberti in Steppes. 63. Istore et Chronikes de Flandre. 64. Boserup 1965. 65. W hite 1940; D uby 1966. 66. Mediaeval Farming 1997. 67. Verhuist 1990 Slavery; Verhuist 1990 Rurale. 68. W ickam 1992. 69. Verhuist 1990 Rurale. 70. Derville 1991; DerviËe 1995. 71. Verhuist 1982; Verhuist 1990 Rurale. 72. Thoen 1997. 73. Thoen 1994; Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 74. Verhuist 1985; Thoen 1993. 75. Derville 1989; Morimoto 1994. 76. Derville 1978; Derville 1989; Irsliger 1982. 77. Verhuist 1985; Thoen ^92. 78. Thoen 1994. 79. Thoen 1994; Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 80. Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 81. Ganshof 1943. 82. Thoen T994. 83. Thoen 1994. 84. VanUytven 1976; Thoen 1994. 85. Galbertus Notarius. 86. Dhondt 1948. 87. Van Werveke 1952. 88. Verhuist 1967 Comtale; Verhuist 1967 Politique. 89. Nicholas 1991. 90. Pirenne 1905. 91. Verhuist 1994. 92. Verhuist 1994. 93. Verhuist 1978. 94. Verhuist 1989 Ghent. 95. D e Meulemeester 1990. 96. De Meulemeester 1990. 97. Gros Brief 1962. 98. Yamada 1991. 99. Devroey 1993 Monasterii. 100. Toubert 1988. 101. Devroey 1993 Echange. 102. Derville 1991. 103. Irsigler 1989; Verhuist 1993. 104. Lebecq 1983. 105. Devroey-Zoller 1991. 106. Verhuist T994. 107. Irsigler 1989. 108. Lebecq 1983. 109. Derville 1992. 110. Irsliger 1989. 111. Ganshof 1943. 112. Van Werveke 1949; Verhuist 1993. 113. Van Werveke 1951; Van Werveke 1954. 114. Lebecq 1983. 115. Miracula sancti Bertini. 116. Verhuist 1971. 117. Verlinden 1972. 118. Tissen 1989; Kölzer 1992. 119. Verhuist 1995 Economic; Verhuist r995 Landschap. 120. Hâgerman 1991. 121. Jansen 1982. 122. Verhuist 1995 Economic; Verhuist 1995 Landschap. 123. Blockmans 1938; Verhuist 1972. 124. Herlihy 1990. 76

125. Gesta Abbatum Trudonensium. 126. Jansen 1982. 127. Van Werveke 1951; Van Werveke 1954. 128. Verhuist 1989 Ghent. 129. Elias 1996. 130. Verhuist 1987; Verhuist 1989 Towns. 131. Verhuist 1987. 132. Derville 1992. 133. Fossier 1996. 134. Derville 1992. 135. Genicot 1973. 136. Verhuist 1993. 137. Verhuist 1997.