The Medieval Countryside

Isabel Alfonso is one of the finest scholars on the rural and political history of the European Middle Ages. She is widely known for her contributions to the study of the peasantry social conflict and political discourses. Her research has transcended the boundaries of medieval studies incorporating insights from disciplines beyond including legal anthropology philology and discourse analysis among others. Over her academic career Isabel Alfonso has made a continued effort to make the work of international scholars known in Spain and to communicate advancements in Spanish historiography to international audiences; and yet most of her own research has only been published in Spanish. As a means to acknowledge her long-standing commitment to bridge different historiographies and overcome national boundaries this unusual Festschrift offers a selection of her most relevant publications many of which appear in English for the very first time. Each paper is preceded by commentaries by leading scholars that discuss the enduring relevance of Isabel Alfonso’s work its richness and complexity and its potential to inspire further research along a vast array of lines.

Commentaries by Jean Birrell François Bougard Warren Brown Peter Coss Wendy Davies Chris Dyer Ros Faith François Foronda Paul Freedman Piotr Gorécki John Hudson André Evangelista Marques Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco Phillipp Schofield Stephen D. White Chris Wickham.

This volume presents recent archaeological research on the agriculture and society of al-Andalus during the Middle Ages especially from the perspective of ‘hydraulic archaeology’ - an avenue of research developed by Spanish researchers which focuses on the analysis of irrigation systems created by Islamic colonists from the eighth century onwards. More recently this research perspective has incorporated the analysis of other agricultural systems such as dryland agriculture and pasturelands. All of these agricultural regimes are complementary in peasant-led subsistence agricultural systems. From a methodological perspective this archaeological approach is highly innovative and uses a wide range of techniques (aerial photography cartographical analysis field survey archival research and archaeological excavation) in order to outline the size and boundaries of cultivation and grazing areas to define specific plots of land and the related road networks and to identify other associated facilities such as watermills.

In connection with these topics several issues are discussed: the earmarking of rural or urban farming areas for irrigation draining or dryland agriculture; the process of construction and the subsequent evolution of these farming areas; the transformations undergone by these areas after the feudal conquest; and finally the identification of pasturelands and the analysis of the evidence concerning their management.

Village communities were the heart of the medieval countryside. But how did they operate? This book seeks to find some answers to that question by focusing on late medieval Drenthe a region situated in a remote corner of the Holy Roman Empire and part of the prince-bishopric of Utrecht. Drenthe was an overwhelmingly localized rural world. It had no cities and consisted entirely of small villages. The social and economic importance of traditionally privileged sections of medieval society (clergy and nobility) was limited; free peasant landowners were the dominant social class.

Based on a careful reading of normative sources (Land charters) and thousands of short verdicts given by the so-called ‘Etstoel’ or high court of justice in Drenthe this book focuses on three types of conflict: conflicts between villages feud-like violence and litigations about property. These three types coincide with three levels of involvement: that of village communities as a whole that of kin groups and that of households.

The resulting comprehensive analysis provides a rigorous interrogation of generalized notions of the pre-industrial rural world offering a snapshot of a typical peasant society in late medieval Europe.

The Villages of the Fayyum is a unique and unparalleled thirteenth-century Arabic tax register of the province of the Fayyum in Middle Egypt. Based on this tax-register this book utilises quantitative research methods and spatial GIS analysis to provide a rich account of the rural economy of the medieval Fayyum the tribal organization of the village communities and their rights and duties in relation to the military landholders. It also draws on the rich documentary evidence of the Fayyum which stretches back to the Greco-Roman and early Islamic periods to trace the transformation of the Fayyum into a Muslim-majority and Arab province.

This volume thus offers a radically new perspective on the social and economic history of the medieval Islamic countryside. It makes a major contribution to the history of Islamic Egypt its rural economy and to our understanding of taxation and administration under the Ayyubids. Most importantly its argument for the metamorphosis of the Coptic peasantry into Muslim and tribal Arab society has profound implications for Middle Eastern history in general and challenges our modern concept of Arab identity.

This volume explores new definitions of state power in Al-Andalus throughout the Middle Ages by examining the interactions of the Andalusian state with its Islamic society looking at specific moments in Andalusian history in a variety of local geographical contexts. The essays collected here adopt largely archaeological methodologies considering in turn the various spaces reclaimed by the state and its material remains as well as the footprints of state impact on other local and territorial organizational structures. In addition these means of analysis directly highlight those spaces that remained outside of state control while also supporting consideration of how and why they managed to do so.

The essays use the territorial dimension of the kinship–state dichotomy as a starting point for considering its means of operation and evolution over time. Beginning with the traditional assumption that territorial configuration patterns are heavily determined by the relative weight of the different authorities operating in a given territory the essays identify the different agents operating in Al-Andalus (mainly the state and gentry-based peasant communities) through insightful archaeological and historical considerations of medieval Andalusian society’s material remains. With special attention also paid to the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada — the Andalusian territory lasting longest under Muslim rule — this collection makes an important contribution to larger historiographical debates surrounding the medieval Islamic world.

This volume explores the relationships and interactions between medieval urban populations and their rural counterparts across north western Europe from the seventh to sixteenth centuries. This theme has become increasingly fragmented in recent decades resulting in scholars being largely unaware of developments outside their own areas. The present volume brings together historians and archaeologists in order to highlight the varied ways in which town–country interactions can be considered from perspectives that include economy politics natural environment material culture and settlement hierarchy. As a whole the papers offer innovative interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic that create a new platform from which to understand more fully the complex bilateral relationships in which both urban and rural spheres were able to influence and challenge each other. Contributions are wide-ranging from the activities of elite aristocratic groups in and around individual towns to large-scale surveys covering wide areas. With coverage from the North Sea to the western Baltic the book will be relevant to a range of disciplines including archaeology history and geography and is aimed towards both advanced students and established scholars.

This book re-examines the ancient landscape divisions of medieval northern Scotland and discusses these in a European context. It demonstrates for the first time that the secular and ecclesiastical units of lordship across more than half of medieval and later Scotland were built out of an earlier Pictish (pre-ad 900) unit of land assessment the dabhach (plural dabhaichean). It is also demonstrated that these dabhaichean remained in use as viable units of land assessment for many hundreds of years. Some were still being listed in estate rentals in the 1930s giving them a working lifespan of over 1000 years.

Essentially dabhaichean were the building blocks from which the medieval kingdom of the Scots was largely founded. They formed the basis of larger units of secular and ecclesiastical lordship parishes tax assessments and common services. The latter included bridge service road service fighting service and hunting service. They provided order for society. Importantly this book also argues that each of these units contained all of the natural resources required to sustain communities from year to year such as access to fishings woodland peat meadows arable land and grazings. In terms of environmental history the division of the landscape into dabhaichean resulted in the increasingly efficient exploitation (and management) of these resources across time.

Kings aristocrats peasants and the Church are among the shared features of most early medieval societies. However these also varied dramatically in time and space. Can petty regional kings for instance be compared to those in charge of a whole empire? Scale is a crucial factor in modelling explaining and conceptualizing the past. Furthermore many issues that historians and archaeologists treat independently can be theorized together as processes of scale decrease or increase: the appearance of complex societies the rise and collapse of empires changing world-systems and globalization. While a subject of much discussion in fields such as ecology geography and sociology scale is rarely theorized by archaeologists and historians. This book highlights the potential of the concepts of scale and scale change for comparing and explaining medieval socio-spatial processes. It integrates regional and temporal variations in the fragmentation of the Roman world and the emergence of medieval polities which are often handled separately by late antique and early medieval specialists. The result of a three-year research project the nine case studies in this volume offer fresh insights into early medieval rural society while combining their individual subjects to generate a wider explanatory framework.

This up-to-date discussion takes as its starting point the challenge to the traditional notion of feudalism in the twenty-five years since the publication of Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel’s work on the ‘mutation féodale’ and Susan Reynolds’s attack on the very idea of a feudal society in the Middle Ages. While these challenges have presented a new picture of Western Europe in the so-called feudal age one more focused than the traditional model of feudalism was no new scholarly consensus has yet emerged.

The volume has two objectives. Firstly it discusses the present state of research bringing together leading representatives of the various interpretations of feudalism. It examines the character of medieval society including questions of landholding government and the relationship between king and aristocracy. Secondly it provides a new geographic perspective on the subject by considering countries little discussed from a feudal perspective. In addition to discussing countries that have been prominent in previous studies of feudalism such as England and France the book also includes contributions on Germany Spain Scandinavia Hungary and Romania thus supplying a truly European perspective and a comparative view of social structure in different regions of Europe.

The arrival of the Black Death in England which killed around a half of the national population marks the beginning of one of the most fascinating controversial and important periods of English social and economic history. This collection of essays on English society and economy in the later Middle Ages provides a worthy tribute to the pioneering work of John Hatcher in this field. With contributions from many of the most eminent historians of the English economy in the later Middle Ages the volume includes discussions of population agriculture the manor village society trade and industry. The book’s chapters offer original reassessments of key topics such as the impact of the Black Death on population and its effects on agricultural productivity and estate management. A number of its studies open up new areas of research including the demography of coastal communities and the role of fairs in the late medieval economy whilst others explore the problems of evidence for mortality rates or for change within the village community. Bringing together broad surveys of change and local case studies based on detailed archival research the chapters offer an assessment of previous work in the field and suggest a number of new directions for scholarship in this area.