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VILLAGES

VILLAGES. The village, alongside the parish and the family, was the most widespread unit of social organization throughout the early modern period. There were well over 130,000 villages in western Europe, each a largely self-sufficient rural community with a population that averaged between 100 and 500 inhabitants. Flexibly adapted to a wide range of state structures and environments, villages often enjoyed high degrees of self-government. Many also performed essential state services, including tax collection, poor relief, and the maintenance of order. Although far from democratic in modern terms, village assemblies at times displayed the most broad-based political participation of any governing institution in western Europe. Villages were anything but static communities; rates of mobility and exogamy were significantly higher than once thought. This mobility in turn reflected major changes in land exploitation patterns and in world markets, which permanently altered the economic balance of communities between 1450 and 1789. By 1550, the polarization of villages into a minority of prosperous peasants exploiting large holdings and a majority of nearly landless rural laborers had dramatically changed the social landscape. By the end of the seventeenth century, the economic division of Europe into regions closely connected to the Atlantic and world economies and regions left behind affected patterns of wealth and power within villages.

VILLAGE ORGANIZATION AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Social hierarchy in the village was well defined in most regions. As serfdom or villeinage declined by 1450, a new pyramidal social structure had emerged over a broad swath of western Europe. At the base of the peasantry were landless day laborers, joined by cottagers who rented or sharecropped less than enough land to live on in bad years. In many regions they constituted 50 to 60 percent of the village population, and increasingly depended upon weaving and cottage industry to eke out a subsistence living. One grade above were those who leased, rented, or sharecropped a self-sufficient holding. In upper Normandy, a relatively prosperous region, these modestly independent farmers represented only about 20 percent of the village households in the late seventeenth century, and they leased fewer than twenty-five acres apiece. But this middling sort (in England, husbandmen) were universally shrinking in numbers. Provinces as diverse as Languedoc and Normandy in France, as well as much of England and Scotland, the maritime provinces of the Dutch Republic, and northwestern Germany, all experienced significant losses of middling peasantry beginning in the mid-fifteenth century.

At the pinnacle of village society a new peasant elite had fully developed by 1550, composed of large leaseholders (copyholders) or freeholders (owners). Known as laboureurs in France, yeomen in England, or Vollbauern in Germany, they typically owned their own plow and team, employed other villagers as day laborers, and exploited a minimum of about 50–100 acres. Strongest in wealthier regions along the cereal plains of Europe and in England, these substantial peasant exploiters typically represented between 5 and 15 percent of village households. But they were surprisingly evident in poorer regions as well; they made up nearly 10 percent of the population in parts of Naples, for example. This peasant elite was essential to the stability of the community as a whole. They often lent seed, livestock, and cash to their poorer neighbors, though often at ruinous interest rates. Landless villagers in turn depended upon casual wage labor from wealthy peasants and landlords for their survival. In larger villages, the nucleus of cultivators and laborers was complemented by a small group of rural artisans (especially coopers and blacksmiths) and service providers (millers and innkeepers).

This core of peasants, artisans, and wage laborers was topped by a thin layer of privileged rural elites. These were men (and occasionally women) who were of the village, but not entirely in it. Noble lords or seigneurs resided in some villages, although they were increasingly absentee landlords by the seventeenth century. Their estate stewards and seigneurial court judges, along with well-to-do landlords who were not yet noble (gentry or sieurs), priests and pastors, royal judges, and rural merchants all exercised substantial control over land use and wages in the village. This group also collectively controlled civil, canon, and customary laws; criminal punishment; public works; and some poor relief—powers that affected villagers on a daily basis.

The physical maps of western European villages varied greatly, but tended to fall into two main patterns. Across the broad band of open cereal plains like the Beauce, the nucleated village with its outlying fields cut up into plow strips or furlongs was typical. In wooded areas like Shropshire, England, or mountainous regions like the Pyrenees, Alps, and Apennines, isolated farms and scattered hamlets were common. They enjoyed some of the highest levels of autonomy and self-government, remote as they were from the central state. But these scattered settlements were intimately tied together by common social institutions, particularly the parish church, the local market, and the law courts.

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, however, the twin processes of enclosure and engrossment (consolidation) of fields wrought significant changes in village land-use patterns. The English enclosure movements of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, like the notorious highland clearances in Scotland, fenced off common lands for sheep runs or agricultural improvements. Engrossment allowed larger blocks of fields to be brought under the management of one owner or lessor, which made enclosures easier. The social consequences were often dire: increasing pauperization or flight of villagers who no longer had crucial access to the common lands. Even without these new stresses, village communities were the sites of a delicate balancing act between resources and population throughout the early modern period. Late marriages, low rates of illegitimacy, and limitation of family size were the key factors that allowed villages to survive under near-subsistence conditions.

Despite their small size, there was a high degree of social and economic mobility bubbling below the surface of western European villages. Some was downward mobility, driven by growing rural stresses from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Economic polarization that pushed more peasants into the landless category, population growth that overburdened villages, and the enclosure and engrossment of land caught many in the economic downdraft. Villages across Europe expressed increasing concerns about (and often a hardening of attitudes toward) vagabonds, "sturdy beggars," and the settled poor. Expanding cities like London and Paris were one of the safety valves for the rural needy. The resultant rates of mobility are sometimes striking: One English village in Northamptonshire experienced a 52 percent turnover in households in just the twenty years before 1638.

Upward mobility was still in the grasp of other village groups, however. Prosperous peasants became the feeder school for the gentry. Those who had acquired roughly a hundred acres or more could begin the delicate process of insinuating themselves into the landlord class of the village by ceasing to work with their hands, educating sons in the law, marrying into gentry families, and having themselves duly noted down in the parish records as sieurs or "gentlemen." Indeed, the wealthy peasantry and the gentry often formed a kind of social convection zone in the village, where gentry who failed to maintain their position sank back into the peasantry, and careful peasants moved up to replace them. In the parish of Myddle in seventeenth-century England, only half the gentry were able to maintain their status over two or three generations; the rest were replaced by yeomen and merchants. The most difficult step upward was from the day laborer or cottager class into the ranks of the wealthy peasantry. One expert has estimated that it required an English day laborer's wages for a hundred years to acquire a self-sufficient farm holding. Moreover, the numerous advantages held by village elites made it difficult to become a self-sufficient landowner. Through strategic marriages, command of property law, control of the village assembly and common lands, and usurious loans secured by farms, land was magnetically attracted toward those who already had land.

COMMUNAL BONDS

The organization of western Europe into villages, as opposed to tribal or kinship organization, was based on neighborhood solidarities among distinct families. This sense of neighborhood emerged in the language as voisinage in France and Nachbarschaft in Germany, and it was cemented by a number of institutions and traditions. At the center was the parish church, which united even scattered farms and hamlets into the village community. (In many regions parish and village boundaries were largely coterminous, but they were not always so.) Sunday services were only one of the occasions for creating parish bonds. Religious confraternities, celebrations of holy days, marriages, and baptisms all helped to cement communal bonds across family lines. The parish church, in tandem with the village assembly, organized poor relief for the community. Even the arrangement of the church served to remind villagers of their assigned place in the social hierarchy: church benches, for those important enough to sit during services, were strictly arranged according to rank.

Beyond the doors of the parish church, taverns, alehouses, and weekly markets served as vital centers of sociability. On winter evenings, villagers often congregated together to save light, repair tools, and tell stories. Seigneurial and royal assizes regularly brought villagers together to resolve (or occasionally inflame) their disputes in court. Many of these institutions and traditions cut through social hierarchies and regularly brought poorer and wealthier members of the village into contact with each other. But villages were also arenas of conflict, which was expressed in endemic lawsuits, physical violence, charivaris, and witchcraft accusations. The inherent tensions created by wide gulfs in economic, honorific, and power status were always latent. Even a relatively small community of forty or fifty families might encompass a family of supernova aristocrats and landless paupers.

The village in turn was more deeply embedded in larger economic and social circuits than was once believed. Annual fairs brought into the village country dwellers from a wide circumference, as well as merchants from urban areas; in France these often included theater troupes and peddlers of cheap popular books (the famous Bibliothèque Bleue). Royal courts on the Continent, and circuit assizes in England, drew university-trained lawyers and judges into the countryside. English justices of the peace, drawn almost exclusively from the rural gentry class, had become fixtures in the House of Commons by the seventeenth century and were expected to help control elections to Parliament in the county. Aristocrats and nobles took rural servants, particularly women and girls, into the cities with them; many of them returned to the village as young women with dowries. In transhumance areas and coastal regions, it was the young men who typically left home for months at a time, to follow herds of sheep or to fish as far away as Newfoundland. Above all, the production of both bulk goods and luxury goods for the Atlantic trade tied villages into global cycles of boom and bust. Production of cotton, linen, and flax, the weaving and dying of fabric and lace, cheese making, wine making, and glassmaking became central to village economies from the Veneto in Italy to western France to Flanders and the Dutch Republic. As both the state and impersonal economic forces made a wider impact on village life, they became the source of new discontents.

Their solidarity helped to make villages the natural locus of rural riots and protests against these wider powers. Enclosure riots in England and Scotland, periodic tax and bread riots, and poaching and smuggling everywhere expressed the villagers' firm sense of their customary rights against landlords, tax officials, and grain suppliers. One need only think of the German Peasants' War of 1524–1525, the revolt of the Nu-Pieds in Normandy in 1639–1640, or the rebellion of the Bonnets Rouges in Brittany in 1675 to see that grievances over seigneurial exactions and innovative tax schemes were always simmering in rural communities. Moreover, these disturbances were almost never led by the landless poor, but rather by those who had something to lose in the village: the natural peasant leadership.

VILLAGE GOVERNMENT AND FUNCTIONS

Villages were composite entities made up of overlapping institutions, above all the family, the parish, the seigniory (or lordship), and the village assembly. This last institution is what gave the village community its formal coherence; it developed special characteristics in the West. In France, village communes or assemblies (communautés, assemblées) had received formal charters by the thirteenth century in some areas; in others, they remained informal but recognized institutions. They were composed of heads of households, since the household, not the individual, was the fundamental social unit. But within the assembly, the hierarchical village social structure was instantly apparent. The households of laboureurs or yeomen normally dominated land-use issues, tax matters, and village offices. Assemblies were predominantly male, although evidence indicates that widows with substantial holdings were sometimes admitted.

Although the constellation of powers in any given village was unique, their local functions were quite similar. The Gemeinde in northwestern Germany, like the assembly in England and the commune in France, met periodically after Mass to elect syndics or council members and other minor officials. They managed most communal aspects of life, from grammar schools to ale quality, by appointing schoolmasters, aleconners, shepherds, and harvest guards. Through the fabrique (vestry), they jointly shouldered responsibility for the upkeep of the parish church. Above all, the assembly controlled crucial aspects of land use and labor. They set the dates of the grain or wine harvest, fixed wages for day laborers, and controlled the sale, lease, or rental of the common lands. Waters, woods, wastelands, and meadows were collectively managed, which provided a crucial margin of survival for many villagers.

The village assemblies also performed critical functions for the early modern state, which had only a thin presence at the local level. By far their most contentious task in regions like France and the Italian city-states was apportioning and collecting royal taxes in the village. In France, the community was then burdened with collective responsibility for making up any shortfall in uncollected taxes. Villages often exercised important legal and policing powers at the local level. Some German assemblies were allowed to set their own weights, measures, and prices. French assemblies increasingly used lawsuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to contest their rights with other villages, their lords, or even with royal officials. Drunken or disorderly behavior, domestic fights, scolding, and marketplace fraud were typically handled through local seigneurial courts, in petty sessions, or by village arbiters.

While communes or assemblies provided a significant measure of self-government under normal conditions, they were nevertheless sharply circumscribed in their ability to protect the village from environmental or political disasters. Cycles of famine and disease, escalating tax demands from the central state, and marauding armies spawned by the civil, religious, and international warfare of the age regularly decimated individual villages. Nevertheless, villages collectively remained a resilient and adaptable social unit throughout the early modern period, and one on which the wealth of most of Europe depended.

See also Agriculture; Landholding; Mobility, Geographic; Mobility, Social; Peasantry; Peasants' War, German; Popular Protest and Rebellions; Wages.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Gough, Richard. The History of Myddle, edited by David Hey. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 1981. Printed version of manuscript (1703).

Secondary Sources

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

Forster, Robert, and Orest Ranum, eds. Rural Society in France: Selections from the Annales; économies, sociétiés, civilisations. Translated by Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore, 1977.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore, 1980.

Goubert, Pierre, and Daniel Roche. Les Français et l'Ancien Regime. Paris, 1984.

Huppert, George. After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe. Bloomington, Ind., 1986.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The French Peasantry, 1450– 1660. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Berkeley, 1987.

Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. London, 1982.

Sabean, David Warren. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.

Underdown, David. Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660. Oxford and New York, 1985.

Vardi, Liana. The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680–1800. Durham, N.C., 1993.

Wegert, Karl H. Popular Culture, Crime, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Würtemberg. Stuttgart, 1994.

ZOË A. SCHNEIDER