Chapter 5 of 14

Lords, Serfs and Salvation: Medieval Europe

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Not one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig

At Christmas 1085, William the Conqueror held his court at Gloucester. Nineteen years earlier he had invaded England, killed its king at Hastings and, over the following decade, crushed every rebellion against him and handed the country's land to his Norman followers. Now, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, he had long and very deep discussion with his councillors about the country — how it was occupied, and by what sort of people. Then he sent his men into every shire to find out.

What they were to find out was exactly what the farm needed to know. How much land was there, and who held it? How many ploughs, how many mills, how many fishponds, how much woodland and meadow? How many people, and of what status — free men, villeins, cottagers, slaves? What had the land been worth in King Edward's time, what was it worth now, and could more be got from it? The Chronicle's English author, who was not an admirer, recorded his disgust at the thoroughness of the survey. So narrowly did the king have it investigated, he wrote, that there was not a single hide or yard of land, nor — it was shameful to tell, though the king thought it no shame to do — one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig that was left out and not put down in his record.

The result was Domesday Book, completed in 1086, the most complete survey of a European kingdom to survive from the Middle Ages. Within a century the English were calling it by that name because, as one royal official explained, its verdicts were as final as those of the Day of Judgement. In Egypt, as we saw in Chapter 2, years had been named after the counting of the cattle. In Norman England, a king counted the cattle, the ploughs and the people together, as the assets of an estate that was now, in law, his.

The figures it recorded are a portrait of the medieval farm. Historians' estimates of England's population in 1086 mostly fall between about one and a quarter and two and a quarter million. Domesday names the heads of some 270,000 households. According to the tabulation of the historical geographer H. C. Darby, roughly two-fifths of them were villeins — unfree peasants holding land from a lord in return for labour and dues; about a third were bordars and cottars, smallholders with little land who also owed service; about one in ten were slaves; and perhaps one in seven were freemen or sokemen. Above them stood the people who held land directly from the king, the tenants-in-chief. By most counts there were only a thousand or so of them, in a kingdom of perhaps two million people, and within that group a few dozen great lay magnates and churchmen held most of the land. Around a quarter of the kingdom's landed wealth was held by the Church — bishops, abbeys and cathedral priories.

One king. A few dozen magnates. A thousand tenants-in-chief. Several thousand knights and their followers. Some two million peasants. Rarely in history has the shape of the farm been written down so plainly.

How the colonus became a serf

The last chapter ended with a law of the emperor Constantine, issued in 332 CE, that allowed tenant farmers who planned to flee their estates to be put in chains like slaves. It is one of the starting points of a long process, stretching over half a millennium and more, by which the free tenant and the slave of the Roman world converged into a single figure: the medieval serf.

The process differed from region to region, and historians argue fiercely about its timing and causes. In the late Roman countryside, great landowners increasingly relied on tenants tied to the land for tax purposes. As the western empire broke up in the fifth century, and new Germanic kingdoms took its place, the old slave gangs disappeared and slaves were more often settled on plots of their own, owing labour on their master's land. At the same time, many free peasants, faced with insecurity, war and the demands of the powerful, placed themselves and their land under the protection of a lord, and accepted obligations in return.

By the ninth century, the results can be seen in remarkable detail in the surveys of great monastic estates in the Carolingian empire. The most famous, the polyptych drawn up for the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés near Paris under Abbot Irminon in the 820s, lists the abbey's estates holding by holding. It records which households held which farms, their status — free, colonus, slave — and exactly what each owed: so many days of ploughing on the abbey's own fields, so much carting, so many chickens and eggs, so many measures of wine, so much woven cloth. The difference between the free tenant and the slave was still recorded, but in practice their obligations had grown similar. They were becoming one class of dependent cultivators.

Whether all this should be called "feudalism" is itself disputed. The word was coined by later lawyers and historians, and scholars such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Susan Reynolds have argued that it bundles together very different relationships — the military bond between a lord and his vassal knight, and the economic bond between a lord and his peasants — and imposes a false uniformity on a varied reality. The great French historian Marc Bloch, while using the term, insisted on the diversity of what it described. In this chapter I use the word loosely, as a convenient name for an order in which political power, landholding and the control of peasant labour were fused in the same hands. The mechanics matter more than the label.

The manor

The basic unit of that order, across much of western Europe from about the tenth to the fourteenth century, was the manor.

A typical manor had two kinds of land. There was the lord's own land, the demesne, whose produce went directly to him. And there were the holdings of the peasants, who farmed them for their own subsistence. The connection between the two was the heart of the system. In return for their holdings, unfree peasants owed the lord labour on the demesne — often several days a week throughout the year, known in England as "week-work", plus extra "boon-work" at ploughing and harvest. They also owed rents in money or in kind: grain, chickens at Christmas, eggs at Easter.

And they owed a long list of other payments, which make the farm's logic unusually visible. When a serf died, the lord took his best beast — the heriot — before the family could inherit the holding, and the new holder paid an entry fine to take it up. When a serf's daughter married, her father paid a fine called merchet, because the lord was losing a potential worker and her children. A woman who had sex outside marriage could be fined for it. A serf who wished to live away from the manor paid an annual fee called chevage, literally a "head-payment", to be allowed to go. In many places, the lord could also levy an arbitrary tax called tallage when he chose.

Then there were the monopolies. The lord typically owned the manor's mill, and his tenants were obliged to grind their grain there, paying a portion of it as a fee — and were forbidden to grind it at home with hand-mills. In parts of France and Germany these monopolies, called banalités, extended to the lord's oven and wine-press. The lord's court judged disputes between tenants and offences against the lord's rights, and the fines went to the lord. The lord's woods, rivers and game were his: a peasant who hunted a deer or took fish from his stream was a poacher.

Above all, the unfree peasant was bound to the land. In England, the villein was by law a nativus, a born bondman, who could not leave the manor without the lord's permission, could not sell his land or his animals freely, and could not, in most matters, sue his lord in the king's courts. If he fled, the lord could reclaim him. The fence of the medieval farm was the law of personal status itself.

What the farm took

How heavy was the load? This is a hard question, because the obligations varied enormously from manor to manor, and because the records were kept by lords, not peasants. But historians of medieval England such as Christopher Dyer have tried to reconstruct the budgets of peasant households around 1300, when the population was at its medieval peak and the pressure on land was greatest. Adding together rent, labour services, the various fines and dues, the tithe owed to the Church and the taxes owed to the king, their estimates for an unfree peasant household commonly land somewhere between a third and a half of the household's gross output — and much more of its surplus over what the family needed to eat and to sow the next year's crop. Estimates vary, and free peasants paid less, but the order of magnitude is clear.

At the same time, many peasant holdings were too small to feed a family even in good years. Around 1300 a large proportion of English peasants held fewer than ten acres. The poorest survived by working for wages for richer peasants and for the lord, by spinning and brewing, by gleaning and by grazing animals on common land. When the harvests failed, as they did catastrophically across northern Europe in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317, many of them starved.

The farm also took something less tangible: people's time and their freedom of choice. A serf could not decide where to live, whom his daughter would marry without paying, where to grind his corn, or whether to work on his own field or the lord's on a fine day in harvest. The demesne came first.

Not everything about the manor was oppression. It was also a community, with its own customs, its own village courts in which peasants judged one another, and its own ways of sharing out common land and resolving disputes. Customs could protect peasants as well as bind them, and lords who tried to increase their demands beyond custom often met stubborn resistance. The farm was never simply imposed. It was constantly negotiated, manor by manor, year by year. But the negotiation took place inside a fence that the peasants had not built and could not easily leave.

The tenth

The lord was not the only one who took a share. There was also the Church.

From the late eighth century, Carolingian legislation, notably the Capitulary of Herstal issued by Charlemagne in 779, made it compulsory for every Christian to pay a tithe — a tenth of the produce of the land and of livestock — to the Church. The obligation, rooted in the Old Testament, became universal across Latin Christendom. In principle the tithe supported the parish priest, the upkeep of the church and the relief of the poor. In practice, great tithes were very often appropriated by monasteries, cathedral chapters and lay lords, who collected them from the parish and paid a small portion to a poorly paid vicar to do the actual work.

The surviving tithe barns of Europe give a sense of the scale. The great barn at Great Coxwell in Oxfordshire, built in the thirteenth century for the Cistercian monks of Beaulieu Abbey to store the produce of their estate there, is nearly fifty metres long, with a soaring timber roof. The Victorian designer William Morris admired it so much that he compared it to a cathedral. He was not wrong. It was a cathedral of the feed.

And the Church was not merely a tax collector. It was one of the greatest landlords in Europe. In England at the time of Domesday, as we have seen, around a quarter of landed wealth was in ecclesiastical hands. On the continent, the proportion in many regions was similar or higher. Bishops, abbots and abbesses held manors, villeins, mills, courts and serfs exactly as lay lords did. Monastic houses, in particular, have a reputation among historians for having been among the most conservative and demanding of landlords. Their land could not be sold or divided among heirs; their administrators kept meticulous records of what was owed; and an abbey, unlike a family, never died. As we will see, when the peasants of England rose in 1381, some of their fiercest anger was directed at the great abbeys.

The Church, in other words, was both the shepherd of the herd's souls and one of the farm's largest owners. It is a double role we have met before, in the temples of Sumer and Egypt. The medieval Church raised it to a new level, because it alone held the keys to something that no temple of Amun had offered ordinary people: eternal salvation.

Those who pray, those who fight, those who work

That brings us to the story.

Around the year 1025, Bishop Adalbero of Laon wrote a long poem addressed to the French king Robert the Pious. In it he described the proper order of society. "The house of God, which is thought to be one," he wrote, "is threefold: some pray, others fight, still others work." The clergy prayed for everyone's salvation. The nobility fought to protect everyone's bodies. And the workers — the peasants — laboured to feed everyone. Each order needed the others; each had its function; all were part of God's design.

Adalbero was not the first to use the image of three orders, and he was not the last. The historian Georges Duby, in The Three Orders, showed how this scheme came into sharp focus in northern France just when the new class of knights was consolidating its grip on the peasantry, and how it served to justify that grip. It is, in its way, a medieval version of Menenius Agrippa's fable of the belly and the limbs. It does not deny that the workers sustain everyone else. On the contrary, it says so explicitly. What it adds is that this is the order God made — and that the workers receive, in exchange for their labour, the prayers of the clergy and the protection of the knights.

Christian theology offered further support. Saint Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, had taught that no one was by nature the slave of another. Servitude, he argued, was a consequence of sin: a punishment and a remedy imposed on fallen humanity by God's just judgement. That argument cut both ways. It denied that slavery was natural, as Aristotle had claimed. But it also made it an expression of divine providence that the sinner should bear with patience. Saint Paul's instruction to servants to obey their masters "with fear and trembling", in the Letter to the Ephesians, was read in every century.

The Church also offered a further, more powerful reassurance: what happened on earth would be reversed in heaven. The poor were blessed; the meek would inherit the earth; it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. These were genuinely radical teachings, and in the hands of rebels they could become explosive, as we will see. But in the ordinary preaching of the parish they could also counsel patience. Suffering in this life would be rewarded in the next.

The rich, meanwhile, had their own route to salvation. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the doctrine of purgatory — a place of purification between death and heaven, whose duration could be shortened by the prayers of the living — became central to the religious life of western Europe, as the historian Jacques Le Goff traced in The Birth of Purgatory. The wealthy endowed monasteries, founded chantries where priests would say masses for their souls in perpetuity, and left land and money to the Church in their wills. In the later Middle Ages, the sale of indulgences — remissions of the punishment due for sin — became a large and lucrative business. One sales jingle, traditionally attributed to the indulgence-preacher Johann Tetzel in early sixteenth-century Germany, promised that as soon as the coin rang in the box, the soul sprang out of purgatory. Whether he actually said it is uncertain. That it was believed of him says a great deal.

The economy of salvation thus mirrored the economy of the manor. The poor paid tithes and were promised a reward after death. The rich paid for masses and were promised a shorter stay in purgatory. And the land given for those masses became part of the Church's estates, worked by serfs who paid tithes.

The shepherds of the manor

Who ran this system day to day? The answer, as always, is a layer of managers between the owners and the herd.

At the top were the lords' stewards and the royal officials — sheriffs, justices, escheators — many of them trained in law, some of them clergy. The clergy themselves were the most literate class in Europe for most of the Middle Ages, and provided the administrators, clerks, accountants and lawyers of kings and great lords as well as of the Church. On each manor there was a bailiff, appointed by the lord, and below him, very often, a reeve: a peasant chosen from among the villeins, sometimes by the villagers themselves, to organise the labour services, supervise the harvest and account for the manor's produce. Chaucer's Reeve in The Canterbury Tales is a lean, sharp-tempered man feared by everyone below him, who knows every trick of the herdsmen and has quietly grown richer than his lord.

The reeve is a perfect example of the shepherd's ambiguous position. He was one of the herd, chosen from among his neighbours. He was also the lord's agent, responsible for extracting the work and the produce that the lord demanded. He might protect his neighbours or exploit them; he might defend the village's customs or quietly enrich himself. The farm has always depended on people like him.

And there were the knights, the fighting order. In the early Middle Ages, the mounted warrior was the military backbone of every kingdom, and his land — his fief — was granted in return for military service. The knight's horse, armour and training were paid for by the labour of the peasants on his manors. The knights were the farm's guard dogs. And from time to time, as in the Norman conquest of England, the guard dogs were the very instrument by which a new owner seized the farm.

Owners against owners

Not all conflict in the medieval farm was between lords and peasants. As in the Bronze Age, some of the most important struggles were between the owners themselves — between kings and great lords, and between kings and the Church.

In June 1215, the barons of England forced King John to agree to Magna Carta at Runnymede. It has been celebrated ever since as a founding charter of liberty, and some of its clauses — that no free man should be imprisoned or dispossessed except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land — have become fundamental principles. But Magna Carta was, above all, a settlement between the king and his wealthiest subjects. Its protections were for "free men", and in 1215 most English peasants were not free. One clause is especially revealing. It provides that when a villein is fined, the fine must not take away his wainage — his plough and the tools of his husbandry. The reason was not tenderness towards the villein. It was that the villein's ability to work was an asset of his lord, and the barons did not want the king's fines to ruin their property.

Here again we see the pattern from Mesopotamia. Conflicts at the top of the farm sometimes produced protections for the herd. But they were protections of the herd as property.

The great dying

Then, in the middle of the fourteenth century, came one of Walter Scheidel's Four Horsemen.

The Black Death reached Europe in 1347, arriving in Sicily on ships from the Black Sea, and swept across the continent over the next four years. It killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe's population, and in some places more; the Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow has argued for a figure as high as sixty per cent, though many historians think this too high. Repeated outbreaks over the following decades kept the population down for more than a century.

For the survivors, the result was a revolution in the balance of the farm. Land was suddenly abundant, and labour suddenly scarce. Peasants who had been desperate for a few acres before the plague could now find vacant holdings. Labourers who had been glad of any work could now demand higher wages. Serfs who were unhappy with their lords could slip away to another manor, where a lord short of tenants might ask no questions.

The owners responded immediately. In 1349, while the plague was still raging, the English crown issued the Ordinance of Labourers, followed in 1351 by the Statute of Labourers. They required every able-bodied person without land of their own to work for anyone who required it, at the wages customary before the plague; forbade employers to pay more or workers to accept more; and prohibited workers from leaving their employment before the end of their term. Similar laws were passed in France, Castile and elsewhere. In 1363 the English parliament went further, passing a sumptuary law that specified what kinds of clothing people of each rank could wear, so that servants and labourers would not dress above their station. The farm reached for the fence and the story at the same time.

The laws were enforced, sometimes vigorously, and thousands of labourers were fined under them. But they could not overcome the arithmetic of scarcity. Over the following century, real wages in England rose substantially — by many estimates, the daily wage of a labourer could buy roughly twice as much by the middle of the fifteenth century as before the plague — and peasants were able to bargain down their rents and services. The nineteenth-century economic historian James Thorold Rogers called the fifteenth century the golden age of the English labourer. The phrase is too rosy, but the direction it describes is real.

The Black Death is the clearest example in this book of how the farm can be weakened by forces that no one intended. It did not abolish lordship or the Church. But it shifted the balance of power between the herd and its owners further than any revolt had done, by making the herd scarce.

1381

It also made the herd angry. When peasants and labourers who had begun to taste a better life found their lords trying to hold them to the old dues and the Statute of Labourers holding down their wages, the result in England was the largest popular rising in its medieval history.

The trigger was a tax. To pay for its unsuccessful war with France, the English government had introduced a new kind of tax, levied on every adult per head: a poll tax. The third poll tax, granted in 1380, was set at a shilling a head — three times the rate of the first one in 1377 — and fell with particular weight on the poor, since a labourer paid the same as a prosperous farmer, and a large household more than a small one. Many evaded it. When royal commissioners arrived in Essex in the spring of 1381 to investigate the evasion, the villagers of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford-le-Hope drove them out. Within days, much of Essex and Kent was in revolt.

The rebels of Kent chose as their leader a man named Wat Tyler, about whom almost nothing is known before these weeks. They freed from the archbishop's prison at Maidstone a radical priest, John Ball, who had been preaching for years against lordship and the wealth of the Church. On 12 June, at Blackheath outside London, Ball preached to the assembled rebels on a text that has become the most famous slogan of the medieval breakout: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" According to the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, Ball argued that all men had been created equal by nature, that servitude had been introduced by the unjust oppression of wicked men against God's will, and that the time had come for the people to cast off the yoke.

The rebels entered London on 13 June. They burned the Savoy, the magnificent palace of John of Gaunt, the king's uncle and the most hated magnate in England. According to the chroniclers, they made a point of destroying its treasures rather than stealing them, throwing gold and silver plate into the Thames and smashing jewels, and killed one of their own number who was caught taking something for himself. They wanted it understood, the chroniclers say, that they were zealots for truth and justice, not thieves. They attacked the Temple, where the lawyers kept their records, and burned documents. On 14 June the young King Richard II, then fourteen years old, met the Essex rebels at Mile End and promised them what they asked: charters freeing them from serfdom and allowing them to rent their land at fourpence an acre. On the same day, other rebels broke into the Tower of London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, who was also the king's chancellor, and the treasurer, Robert Hales.

On 15 June, the king met the Kentish rebels at Smithfield. According to the Anonimalle Chronicle, the most detailed account, Tyler set out a programme of breathtaking scope. There should be no law except the law of Winchester (an old statute about local peacekeeping), no outlawry, no lordship except the king's, and the goods of the Church should be divided among the parishioners after providing for the clergy. There should be only one bishop in England. And there should be no more serfs: all men should be free and of one condition. In the course of the meeting, an altercation broke out and the Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck Tyler down; one of the king's squires finished him off. As the rebels drew their bows, Richard rode forward alone and, according to the chroniclers, declared that he would be their captain and leader. The rebels, uncertain, allowed themselves to be led away and dispersed.

Elsewhere the rising spread to Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and beyond, and its targets reveal its grievances. At St Albans, the townspeople had long been in conflict with the great abbey, which controlled the town and insisted that its tenants grind their grain at the abbey's mill. Decades earlier, the abbey had confiscated the townspeople's hand-mills and laid the millstones as paving in a floor of the abbey. In 1381 the townsmen broke into the abbey, tore up those millstones and broke them into pieces, which they shared out among themselves, Walsingham says, like the consecrated bread at mass. At Bury St Edmunds, rebels executed the prior of the abbey. Everywhere, rebels sought out and burned manorial records — the court rolls and rentals that recorded who was a serf and what each household owed. As in Egypt after the fall of the Old Kingdom, the breakout went for the ledger.

The repression was swift. The king revoked the charters of freedom he had granted at Mile End. When a delegation of Essex rebels came to him at Waltham to ask him to honour his promises, he replied, in Walsingham's account: "Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher." Royal justices toured the rebellious counties, and many rebels were hanged. John Ball was captured, tried at St Albans and hanged, drawn and quartered on 15 July 1381, with the king present.

And yet the rising was not simply a failure. No further poll tax was attempted for generations. And over the following century, serfdom in England withered — not by any single act, but through the steady pressure of labour scarcity, flight, refusal and bargaining. By around 1500 it had become rare, although a few cases lingered into the reign of Elizabeth I. The rebels of 1381 lost their battle. The conditions that had made them rebel won much of their war for them, slowly and without a charter.

The Twelve Articles

The largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution came nearly a century and a half later, in Germany.

By the early sixteenth century, peasants in many parts of southern and central Germany faced lords — princes, nobles, abbeys and towns — who were trying to increase their dues, restrict access to the common woods, waters and pastures, and extend serfdom. At the same time, the Reformation was shaking the authority of the Church. Martin Luther's challenge to the sale of indulgences in 1517 had grown into a challenge to the whole structure of ecclesiastical power, and his insistence on the authority of Scripture alone gave ordinary people a powerful new language for their grievances.

From the summer of 1524, revolts spread across south-west Germany, Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, Alsace and the Austrian lands. In March 1525, in the Swabian town of Memmingen, a furrier named Sebastian Lotzer and the preacher Christoph Schappeler drafted a statement of the peasants' demands: the Twelve Articles. It was printed and reprinted across Germany within weeks, and became the manifesto of the whole movement.

The Twelve Articles are a remarkable document, and a moderate one. They asked that each community be allowed to choose its own pastor. They asked that the "great tithe" on grain be used to support the pastor and the poor, and that the "small tithe" on livestock be abolished. In the third article they complained that it had been the custom to treat them as their lords' property, which was pitiable, since Christ had redeemed every one of them with the shedding of his precious blood — and that it was therefore consistent with Scripture that they be free. They demanded the right to hunt and fish, the return of common woods and meadows that the lords had appropriated, the reduction of labour services and rents to fair levels, judgement according to old written law rather than arbitrary new penalties, and the abolition of the death-duty that robbed widows and orphans. Every demand was presented as a claim grounded in the Word of God. If any article could be shown to be contrary to Scripture, the peasants promised, they would withdraw it.

Luther's response is one of the most revealing moments in the history of the farm's story. At first, in his Admonition to Peace, he rebuked the lords for their oppression and the peasants for their rebellion in nearly equal measure. Then, as the revolt spread and turned violent, he wrote a pamphlet known in English as Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. In it he urged the princes to put down the rebels without mercy, calling on everyone who could to smite, slay and stab them, secretly or openly, as one would kill a mad dog. The reformer who had broken the authority of the Pope over Christian consciences would not extend the same liberty to Christian peasants over their lords' land.

The princes needed little encouragement. The peasant armies, though large, were poorly armed and poorly led against professional troops. At Frankenhausen in Thuringia on 15 May 1525, the forces of the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer, who had prophesied a coming kingdom of God on earth, were destroyed; thousands were killed, and Müntzer was captured, tortured and beheaded. By the end of the year the revolt had been crushed everywhere except in a few Alpine regions. The number of dead is unknown; estimates commonly run to around a hundred thousand.

The historian Peter Blickle, in The Revolution of 1525, argued that the uprising was not merely a peasant jacquerie but a "revolution of the common man", with a coherent programme for reorganising society on the basis of godly law and communal self-government. He also showed that the defeat was not total. In several territories, the lords concluded agreements with their peasants that limited labour services and dues, and in some, peasants gained representation in territorial assemblies. The farm adapted, conceding some of what it had refused to the rebels.

The second serfdom

The most important lesson of the late Middle Ages, though, is that the same pressures could produce opposite outcomes in different places.

In England and much of western Europe, the century after the Black Death saw serfdom decline. But east of the river Elbe — in Prussia, Brandenburg, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and later Russia — the opposite happened. From the late fifteenth century onwards, lords in these regions bound their peasants more tightly to the land, increased their labour services, sometimes to three, four or more days a week, and built great estates producing grain for export to the growing cities of western Europe, shipped through ports such as Danzig. Historians call this the "second serfdom". In Russia, the binding of the peasants to the land was completed by the law code of 1649 and serfdom was not abolished until 1861.

Why did the same labour scarcity free peasants in the west and enslave them in the east? This question was the subject of one of the great historical debates of the twentieth century, launched by the historian Robert Brenner in 1976. Brenner rejected explanations based purely on population or markets. What made the difference, he argued, was the balance of power between classes: the strength of peasant communities, their capacity to resist and organise, and the ability of lords to combine with each other and with the state to enforce their claims. Where peasants were strong, scarcity worked in their favour. Where lords were strong, scarcity made them tighten the fence.

It is a conclusion with implications far beyond the Middle Ages, and Chapter 14 will return to it. A shock to the farm — a plague, a war, a new technology — does not by itself determine who benefits. The outcome depends on who is organised enough to take advantage of it.

What the medieval farm teaches

The fence of medieval Europe was, above all, personal status: the law that made the serf a born bondman who could not leave the manor, sell his land or sue his lord. Around it stood the lord's courts, the lord's monopolies of mill and oven, the forest laws and the Statute of Labourers.

The feed was the labour of serfs on the demesne, rents in money and kind, fines at death, marriage and inheritance, fees for the mill, the tithe to the Church and the taxes of the king — in total, by most estimates, a third or more of what the peasant household produced.

The shepherds were the stewards, bailiffs and reeves, the clerics who kept the records and staffed the courts, and the knights who defended the farm and, when needed, conquered it.

The story was the three orders — those who pray, those who fight, those who work — each in its place by God's will; servitude as the consequence of sin; patience on earth rewarded in heaven; and, for those who could pay, a shortened purgatory.

The breakouts were many: flight to other manors and to the towns, the steady refusal of services, the risings of 1381 and 1525 and dozens of smaller revolts. The greatest leveller, though, was the plague, which made the herd scarce. And the most important lesson is that the herd's gains depended not only on scarcity but on organisation: where peasants could combine, they won; where lords could combine, they lost.

Bridge: the registers of 1381

In the same year that the English peasants rose and burned the manorial rolls, at the other end of Eurasia, a very different ruler was building a very different kind of ledger. The Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming dynasty in China, was himself the son of poor peasants and had once begged for his food as a wandering monk. In 1381 his government completed a nationwide registration of households, recording every family's members, residence, land and the labour services it owed, and organised the households into groups of 110 families responsible for collecting taxes and providing labour. The registers were stored in a vast archive on islands in a lake near the capital, Nanjing. They were called the Yellow Registers.

Western Europe's lords and peasants have dominated the way the history of the farm is usually told. But for most of history, the largest and most sophisticated farms were not in Europe. In the next chapter we travel east — to the mandarin bureaucracy of imperial China, the caste order of South Asia and the land-tax regimes of the Islamic world — to see how very different stories could produce strikingly similar farms.