196 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155

IV*
'One does not safely bet against continuity in history', as Thomas
Bisson neatly remarks, before, in effect, doing precisely that. His
1994 article is one of the most effective and elegant defences of
the view that the complex of socio-political changes which took
place around the year 1000 was sufficiently coherent and resulted
in a sufficiently different political order to deserve the label

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revolution: the 'feudal revolution', no less.1 But, since the pendu-
lum is swinging away from the 'mutationist' position in this half-
decade, thanks largely to Dominique Barthelemy and to a new
school of sociologically minded historians in the United States, it
is comprehensible that Bisson should immediately be criticized,
by Barthelemy himself and by one of the leading members of the
American school, Stephen White. I have many intellectual points
of reference in common with this latter group of historians; but
I find myself nonetheless largely on the side of Bisson. It may
therefore be worthwhile to spend a few pages setting out a
position analogous to his, though with a slightly different take.
This Comment is not strictly a defence of Bisson, however; it is
aimed more at reformulating the terms of the debate. I will begin
with a view of what did not change around the year 1000, before
discussing what arguably did.
One common aspect of the feudal revolution debate that is
particularly unhelpful is an implicit moralism: the Carolingian
* I am grateful to all the other participants in this debate for reading and critiquing
this article.
1
T N. Bisson, 'The "Feudal Revolution"', Past and Present, no. 142 (Feb. 1994),
9. Bisson gives a full bibliography, of which I would single out the seminal overview
of 1980 by P. Bonnassie, 'From the Rhone to Galicia: Origins and Modalities of the
Feudal Order', in his From Slavery to Feudalism in Soulh-Western Europe, trans. Jean
Birrell (Cambridge, 1991) If I have to choose terminologies, I would slightly prefer
'mutation' to 'revolution', following J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, La Mutation feodale,
X'-XIT siecles (Paris, 1980), because the former seems to me weaker — though note
that Bisson (8) sees it as stronger. (The word 'feudal' loses many of its prior specificit-
ies, which were weak already, in this debate; but I will adopt Bisson's and Bonnassie's
usage here, while it is not the Marxist usage I prefer, to save arguing about yet
another word.) In my comment on Bisson I am also taking into consideration the
previous comments by Dominique Barthelemy and Stephen D. White, which appeared
in 'Debate: The "Feudal Revolution"', Past and Present, no. 152 (Aug. 1996) (here-
after Barthelemy and White, respectively) Barthelemy's other major writings on this
theme include: 'La Mutation feodale a-t-elle eu lieu?', Annales E.S.C., xlvii (1992),
La Soctele dans le comte de Vendome de Van mil au XIV siecle (Pans, 1993); 'II mito
signorile degh storici francesi', in G. Dilcher and C. Violante (eds.), Strutture e
trasformazioni della stgnona rurale net secoh X-XIII (Bologna, 1996).
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 197

and post-Carolingian state, with all its weaknesses, is depicted

as at least more palatable than a bunch of anarchic and some-
times psychopathic lords (or barons, or castellans). Here, the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Grand Narrative of the tri-
umph of the state is so powerful that it manages to speak through
nearly all the participants in this debate, as in all its predecessors.
Hence Bisson's use of words like 'unconstructive', 'capricious'
and 'unpolitical' to describe his eleventh-century lords: I cite him

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only as the most recent author, for similar phrases are normal in
the literature.2 I am far from hostile to effective state power
myself, at least in my lifetime, but any position on these issues
in the Middle Ages seems utterly misplaced. Aristocrats were
brutal in all periods; it was one of the signs of aristocracy. The
famous torturers of the early twelfth century, Robert of Belleme
and Thomas of Marie, had precursors in every generation back
to Rauching in Gregory of Tours' time. None the less, these
aristocrats not only opposed the states of the Middle Ages, but
ran them as well — Rauching was a duke, and Robert of Belleme
an earl for William Rufus.3 We know this, but we feel tempted
to make distinctions, perhaps because many of us need to find at
least some group of powerful people in any part of the past with
whom we can feel some sympathy. In my view, in our period,
such a search is fruitless; they are simply not there, and there is
no point in regretting their absence.
The Carolingian state, admittedly, can seem attractive to us,
because its spokesmen regretted abuses in a way with which
we can identify. Hence the prominence in the whole debate of
arguments about whether or not there is a direct line of continuity
between Carolingian legislation against lay illegalities and elev-
enth-century clerical protest (and occasional action) against sim-
ilar excesses. This focus on rhetoric is a bad guide to reality;
Janet Nelson's exasperated sentences, quoted by White at the

2
Bisson, 'Feudal Revolution', 18, 19.
3
Respectively, Orderic Vitaks, Ecclesiastical History, vin.5 (ed. M. Chibnall, 6 vols.,
Oxford, 1973, IV, 158-60); Guibert of Nogent, De vita sua, iu.ll, 14 (ed. G. Bourgin,
Paris, 1907, 178-9, 197-9); Gregory of Tours, Decem hbri hutonarum, v.3 (ed. B.
Krusch and W. Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Histonca [hereafter MGH],
Scriptores rerum merovingicarum, LI, Hanover, 1951, 197-8). For a nice survey of
the deliberate use of violent acts for political purposes by the Normans (including,
of course, kings and princes), see R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe (London,
1993), 85-101.
198 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155
4
end of his Comment, are entirely apropos. But something else
needs to be recognized about the Carolingian period, which gives
the century 750-850, in particular, its own special irony: this was
the period of the most ambitious public power on the European
continent in the whole Middle Ages up to the late thirteenth
century, with elaborate and even sincere (although of course also
oppressive) political programmes, and a legitimizing rhetoric
based on the king's special relationship with the poor free which

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fuelled its sternest critiques of aristocratic behaviour; it was also,
however, the period where those same aristocrats, strengthened
by their irreplaceable position at the heart of government, estab-
lished a hegemony over their poor neighbours — often by force —
that by no means all of them could have claimed in the two
preceding centuries. It was 800, not 1000, that was in most parts
of Carolingian Europe the turning-point for the establishment of
local aristocratic dominance. After that, all dissension was
between landed political elites: greater vs. lesser lords; aristocrats
legitimized by public office vs. those without; and not least,
clerics vs. laity. Faced with competing dominators, peasants will
doubtless have looked for the lesser evil in every case (while not
ever being in much position to intervene one way or another,
with some exceptions);5 who that lesser evil actually was will of
course have been different from village to village, and was cer-
tainly not necessarily the most 'legitimate' power. I would also
argue that the year 1000 did not, in most parts of Europe, mark
a significant increase in the expropriation of the lands of the
independent peasantry. The Christian areas of the Iberian penin-
sula are one exception; other relatively marginal areas may offer
others; elsewhere, independent peasants were either already rare
or (as in Italy) managed to survive fairly well in the interstices
of aristocratic power.6
4
Janet L. Nelson, review of T. Head and R. Landes (eds.), The Peace of God
Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992),
in Speculum, lxix (1994), 168, as quoted in White, 222.
5
The Peace of God sometimes being one exception: see for example T. Head, 'The
Judgement of God: Andrew of Fleury's Account of the Peace League of Bourges', in
Head and Landes (eds.), Peace of God; occasional murders of unjust lords being
another: see R. Jacob, 'Le Meurtre du seigneur dans la societe feodale: la memoire,
le nte, la fonction', Annales E.S.C., xlv (1990).
6
1 have made the point about the year 800 already in C. Wickham, 'Mutations et
revolutions aux environs de l'an mil', Medievales, xxi (1991); it still needs systematic
research, however. So does the point about the year 1000, come to that, but at least
there are more monographic studies here. I cite from among many P Bonnassie, La
Catalogue du milieu du X° a la fin du XF siecle, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1975-6); R. Pastor,
(ami onp 199)
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 199

The very sharpness of the date '1000', which is becoming

standard in much of the debate (with inevitable variations:
980-1030 in Burgundy, or 1030-60 in Catalonia), is a problem
of 'mutationist' theory. In Italy, the whole process of the decen-
tralization and/or privatization of political power was a very slow
one, beginning in 900 but incomplete in 1100; here, the imagery
of revolution seems particularly inappropriate. In England, par-
tially analogous changes (perhaps across the period 1000-1160)

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took place in a context of nearly continuous royal hegemony.
Despite three or four major dynastic shifts, most of them violent,
and despite the consequent substantial replacement of the leading
aristocratic families of the country on two occasions,7 the political
system stayed intact. The focus on a particular period of crisis is
a particularly French preoccupation (shared now by some of the
strong contingent of historians of France in the United States); if
it is going to be taken up as a marker for European history as a
whole, then it must be defended for at least some areas of Europe
outside modern/medieval France (i.e., including both Provence
and Catalonia) more effectively than it has been hitherto. I would
cite here one emblematic instance: the hundred-page chapter
entitled the 'revolution feodale' in Francois Menant's excellent
recent book on eastern Lombardy between 900 and 1300, which
is about nothing other than the increased use of fiefs and vassalage
in the area, and its regulation in an imperial law of 1037. It makes
no reference to crisis and not much mention even of systematic
conflict: here, the terminology is virtually useless.8
This can be generalized further. Focus on the year 1000 and its
associated transformation gains its edge in France from its role in
French imageries of national centrality. Northern (and, increas-
ingly, southern) France serves as the fulcrum of perfected
(n 6 cont )
Resistencias y luchas campesinas en la epoca del crecimiento y consolidaaon de laformacion
feudal: Castilla y Leon, siglos X-XI1I (Madrid, 1980), for the Iberian peninsula; F.
Menant, Campagnes lombardes au moyen age (Rome, 1993), 421-4; E. Conti, La
formazione delta struttura agraria moderna nel contadofiorentino,3 vols. (Rome, 1965),
I, 162-70; M. Bourin-Derruau, Villages medievaux en Bas-Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris,
1987), ii, 225-31, for peasant survival; Barthelemy, La Societe dans le comte de
Vendome, 352-61, 441-50, for an area with few peasant allods already in 1000.
7
See esp. R. Fleming, Kings and Lords m Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991). I
shall not attempt to refer to the rest of the huge historiography on these English
developments; England anyway genuinely stands apart from changes in the strictly
post-Carolingian lands, and my propositions later in this Comment do not systematic-
ally apply there.
8
Menant, Campagnes lombardes, 563-671.
200 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155

feudalism, one of the major French contributions to European

civilization and therefore emotionally crucial to French scholarship,
as is the nation-state to the English and the city to the Italians.
The French have long been obsessed by arguments about what is
feudal and what is not, in a way that the Italians, Spanish and
Germans have been fairly indifferent to (and, if the English have
here matched the French, it is only because of the visceral impor-
tance in English national culture of the debate about 1066). The

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French often seem to see the decentralized feudal world as the
moment of opportunity in central medieval Europe: the moment
of economic expansion, of the Paris schools, and of the newer and
more permanent nation-building of Philip Augustus and his heirs
after 1200 or so. The economic possibilities of this decentralized
world are particularly explicit — indeed, enthusiastically emphas-
ized — in the work of Robert Fossier; they can be traced back to
Marc Bloch himself, even if the latter was less committed to the
symbolism of the year 1000.9 When this world actually began is
therefore of more than ordinary importance in French historical
culture. Not that the issue is a trivial one, but its ideological weight
means that absolutely everything can be put into the 'feudal revolu-
tion' by some historians: political crisis, violence, the invention of
villages, the expropriation of the peasantry, even the end of the
ancient world. Bisson does not at all engage in this emotional
overdetermination, but his intervention would certainly risk being
taken up by others for the wrong motives.

These are all good reasons to be distinctly uneasy about the

imagery of feudal revolution/mutation. But this does not mean
that one can argue for socio-political continuity across the period,
say, 800-1150, in most of western Europe. The political struc-
tures of the reign of Charlemagne, which unified the entire land
area of the original European Economic Community and beyond,
9
R. Fossier, Enfance de I'Europe: X°-XIF sticks, aspects economiques et sociaux, 2
vols. (Pans, 1982), e.g., 615-18 ff.; M. Bloch, Feudal Society (London, 1961), for
example, 65-71. The potential for emotion in this debate is well illustrated by Poly
and Bournazel's impassioned — as well as interesting — reply to Barthelemy, 'La
Mutation feodale'- J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, 'Que faut-il preferer au "muta-
tionisme"? Ou le probleme du changement social', Revue htstorique de droit francats
et etranger, lxxii (1994).
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 201

cannot be usefully regarded as analogous to those of the near-

independent castle-based lords of three or four villages apiece in
the France or Italy of 1100. In Italy, the country I know best,
major shifts had taken place by 1100 in the basic rules of political
practice: public office had become the patrimony of specific famil-
ies; private relationships (such as vassalage) had become formal-
ized as the major building-blocks of political action; a sharp
division between an aristocratic stratum, defined militarily, and

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the rest of free society had appeared for the first time since the
Roman empire; and local political relationships had crystallized
into the structures of signorial power (rights of private justice,
and the rest). These developments — all of which have exact
French analogues — may have taken a century at least, hence
their decidedly un-'revolutionary' aspect; but they created a new
world, in which the Italian city communes of the twelfth century
would have to navigate as best they might without any recourse
to 'Carolingian' practices.10 Something here had, if you like,
mutated. Although England and parts (at least) of Germany and
Castile had not changed nearly as much as this, many of the more
specific changes listed above can be found there as well: the
existence of a major structural shift in political practice should
not be denied for a large proportion of the continent.
When the continuity vs. change argument has been debated in
recent years, in a wide variety of historical periods, proponents
of change have often found themselves on the defensive. Even
hitherto unquestioned fault-lines, like the fall of the western
Roman empire or the Industrial Revolution, have been not only
spanned by newly identified continuities in social and political
practices (which is fair enough), but wholly eroded away in the
work of some historians. This seems to me wrong. It can lead
people to write as if historical change did not take place at all,
which is absurd. But if change did take place, it needs to be
categorized — named — if it is to be understood. Historical
periodization has to take place. People can and should contest
the validity of this dividing line or that, but to deny the usefulness
10
1 have characterized these developments briefly elsewhere, with bibliography, in
C. Wickham, 'La mutation feudal en Italia', in A. Malpica and T. Quesada (eds.),
Los ortgines del feudahsmo en el mundo mediterrdneo (Granada, 1994); C. Wickham,
'Property-Ownership and Signorial Power in Twelfth-Century Tuscany', in W.
Davies and P. Fouracre (eds.), Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 1995) The classic survey remains G. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power
in Medieval Italy, trans. R. Brown Jensen (Cambridge, 1989), 151-66, 191-208.
202 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155

of dividing lines at all is decidedly risky. So, it may well be that

the political structures of 950 and 1050 in specified regions of
Europe are not that far apart, but if those of 800 or 850 and 1100
or 1150 are structurally distinct, then it seems worthwhile at least
to go and look to see if there is a moment between these dates
when (to use Weberian terminology) a given society is more
usefully to be described in terms of one ideal type ('Carolingian',
say) rather than another (let us say, 'feudal')- Even similar societ-

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ies in some or many respects may be significantly different in
this. Specific continuities between one and the other — in, for
instance, the level and strategic role of violence, as White
argues — do not of themselves negate the possibility of difference.
One simply has to go and look, keeping in mind the need to
categorize as one does so.
But what are the real changes which might characterize such
a divide? I would list two. First, the changing relationship
between local aristocratic power and wider-based political forces,
such as those controlled by kings and the more powerful counts,
dukes and bishops. Secondly, the development of increasingly
explicit and, indeed, formal personal relationships and social
boundaries at the local level, which come more and more to
characterize social practice. The first of these is precisely the
theme discussed very effectively by Bisson; the second has been
particularly well characterized by Fossier. Let us look at them
briefly in turn, focusing on the Carolingian areas of Europe.
A local lord in the Carolingian period had a great deal of de
facto power, based on his own armed men and political clienteles,
and he could use it, regardless of the constraints of kings and
their local representatives, the counts that is to say, despite what
we could call (because they did) the structures of public power.11
Indeed, such a lord might be the count himself, in which case
only an extreme situation, such as disloyalty to the king, could
undermine his local hegemony. Such men are the classic villains
of the usually ineffective Carolingian legislation against the
powerful, or of a mass of clerical moralizing, but it is important
to recognize that they had their own personal moral codes,

11
White, 228, stresses that Bisson ('Feudal Revolution', 12) critiques a 'statist'
public-private distinction. This is certainly true, but Bisson none the less embraces
the use of the word 'public', as do I; it does not seem to me that one needs to be
statist tofindthe terminology useful to distinguish between Carolingian and seigneurial
power — as, I hope, I show later.
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 203
however self-seeking and brutal — Count Gerald of Aurillac (d.
909), presented by his biographer as a saint because of his extra-
ordinary self-abnegation in, for instance, only fighting defensive
wars against his neighbours (as Bisson notes), or in fighting
without using ambushes, was expressing a lay as well as a clerical
ideal in his actions, however unusual they were.12
On the other hand, people also knew that there were competing
sets of norms inside which aristocrats were supposed to operate.

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Every county had its public tribunal or placitum, run by the count
(Gerald was also a saint for running his properly — not all counts
did so — but we have quite a lot of documents for cases heard
at placita; they did exist). At such tribunals, the procedures were
as much Carolingian as local. Peasants sometimes went to placita
to appeal against lords; in practice they lost, but it is clear that
the concept of extra-local justice was important for them, or they
would never have bothered to go.13 This imperfect legal institu-
tion represented the possibility of justice not dependent on the
local lord's will, and people respected it — it was in its name
that they lamented the abuses of the powerful. Lords, for then-
part, may not have recognized the moral legitimacy or even
relevance of all royal law, but they knew that what went on at
the placitum had force, and respected it, not least because they
wanted to control it themselves when they could. Lords remained
interested in the Carolingian state, because office-holding within
it brought them power that they could not obtain on the basis of
their private landholding alone; and no matter how much they
subverted it once in office, which they did, they recognized that
the state system had its own rules, the rules of the placitum.

12
Odo of Cluny, De Vita S. Geraldi, i.8 (Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina,
221 vols., Pans, 1844-64 [hereafter PL], cxxxih, col. 647); cf. Bisson, 'Feudal
Revolution', 15; for Carohngian aristocrats in general, see the recent survey by S.
Airlie, 'The Aristocracy', in R. McKittenck (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval
History, u, c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge, 1995); see also S. Airlie, 'The Anxiety of Sanctity:
St Gerald of Aurillac and his Maker', Jl Eccles. Hist., xlni (1992), which stresses
Gerald's strangeness. But a full analysis of the local power of Carohngian aristocrats
remains to be written.
13
Odo of Cluny, De Vita S. Geraldi, i.ll (PL, cxxxiii, cols. 649-50); cf. the counts
who cut placita short to go hunting, attacked by Charlemagne in Capttulana, i (ed.
A. Boretius, MGH, Hanover, 1883), nos. 23, c. 17; 49, c. 1 (63, 135). Janet Nelson
analyses the working of West Frankish placita in 'Dispute Settlement in Carolingian
West Francia', in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds.), The Settlement of Disputes in
Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986). She establishes the importance of local
procedures and, by implication, local normative practices in them, but she also gives
the examples of peasants as plaintiffs (48-52).
204 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155
There was, in effect, a dialectic, between central (public) and
local (private) power, which characterizes the eighth and ninth
centuries throughout Carolingian Europe, and in some areas the
tenth and part of the eleventh centuries as well. Lords ran the
public political system, redirecting it to their own needs, but
the public system determined what legitimate practices were
supposed to be, and lords knew it; the norms determining their
own local practice were, however, much more de facto, and some

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of them remained largely uncodified, in the framework of what
Bourdieu calls a habitus.1*
In 1100, this political pattern no longer existed in the
ex-Carolingian areas of Europe, except perhaps in the lands most
closely associated with the emperor in Germany (although placita
were never strong there), and in the occasional unusually coherent
county or duchy (Tuscany was one until the wars of the 1080s-90s
and the death of Matilda in 1115). Instead, we find local private
lordships, or seigneuries banales, or Bannherrschaften, or signorie.
All the major landowners of post-Carolingian Europe had then-
own tribunals by now, and their own customs (usus, consuetudo),
which established local legalities. Lords ignored even these; then-
arbitrariness was itself sanctioned by local expectations (the
habitus again). Their dependants could, by recognizing their
authority, appeal to their better natures, using normative lan-
guage, sometimes successfully; but this normative language no
longer derived from a wider political system. Thus, although it
is clear that lordly domination in the countryside was a fact, in
850 and in 1100 alike, the political framework in which this was
expressed was substantially different: de facto power had become
de jure. Seigneurial justice was not unrivalled; Peace of God
assemblies in France,15 and city justice in twelfth-century Italy,
often competed with it quite consciously. But both of these were
similar crystallizations of previously informal action, on the same
level as the seigneurie banale, only this time representing collective
co-operation rather than local domination. Any other reaction to
lordly power — clerical protest, for example — was purely moral-
istic; it did not represent an alternative legal system. Even kings
were in practice at best, by this time, influential third parties and
potential arbiters, despite their theoretical position as founts of
14
For example, P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (London,
1990), 52-65.
15
See the new survey, Head and Landes (eds.), Peace of God.
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 205

law. People could and did play with alternative sources of law;
clerics could use ritual to persuade or shame lords into accepting
their own rules;16 the weak could use one lord against another.
But there were no outside authorities. The dialectic of public and
private, which characterized the world of the Carolingians them-
selves, had gone until kings (or princes, or cities) began to recon-
stitute their own political systems around 1200.
For me, the sign of the shift from the first of these patterns to

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the second in most regions of Europe is indeed the disappearance
of the placitum. It has been argued that this marks the end of
abstract, norm-based justice and its replacement by compromises
arbitrated between lords. Such a sharp opposition is by now
fatally undermined by historians who can easily show both com-
promise in the Carolingian period and outright victory in the
often more informal dispute-settlement of the eleventh century.17
But the placitum, however weak it became, does mark the exist-
ence of the Carolingian dialectic of normative behaviour; its
ending, too, marks an important change in the framework that
structured and legitimized social action.
This brings us to the second aspect of change, perhaps more
neglected. If local norms and procedures were the dominant
framework for social action in 1100, they needed to be much
more formal and explicit than they were in 850. But so did other
aspects of local identity and practice. I mentioned some of them
earlier, when listing political changes in Italy, but they are part
of a wider framework. In 1100, the social boundary between
aristocrats and non-aristocrats was much more tightly character-
ized than it had ever been in 850, when the strata of free society
stretched without a break from dependent tenants to the king's
court, with only rough-and-ready (and disputed) criteria as to
who was nobihs and who was not.18 Inside aristocratic society, it
was becoming increasingly necessary in most of Europe for famil-
ies to define themselves in exclusive terms, as lineages whose
members (in theory) stuck together, rather than as looser and
16
As in P. Geary, 'Humiliation of Saints', now in his Living with the Dead in the
Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994); see further, G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor (Ithaca,
1992), 202-13.
17
For the eleventh century, a good example is P. Toubert, Les Structures du Latium
medieval (Rome, 1973), 1303-13, 1334-5; for the eighth and ninth centuries, see
several articles in Davies and Fouracre (eds.)5 Settlement of Disputes.
18
See H. W. Goetz,' "Nobilis": Der Adel un Selbstverstandnis der Karolingerzeit',
Vterteljahrschnft fUr Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, lx (1983).
206 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155

more overlapping interest groups, the Personenkreise of Karl

Schmid and his school.ig The local power of such aristocrats was
increasingly territorially defined in the framework of the sei-
gneurie; lords could have legal rights outside such territories, but
they were circumscribed, and the relevant boundaries were
known — and, indeed, fought over.20 Local territories for other
forms of social action were becoming explicit too: village territor-
ies were increasingly clear and important, particularly in the

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twelfth century; so were parish boundaries. Seigneurie, village
and parish often had the same bounds, and are often regarded as
having a common cause (normally, the seigneurie is seen as the
prime mover); but in each case one can see a separate process of
development. Villages needed, and gained, more formal gov-
erning structures (the comune rurale in Italy, the communaute
rurale with its own franchise in France, the concejo in Castile).
Similarly, religious ritual became increasingly systematically
rooted in villages and needed its own local structures. In each
case, informal local community action — or informal local reli-
gious ritual — of a sort that can occasionally be sighted in ninth-
century sources, was replaced by much more clearly defined and
bounded patterns in the world of 1100 or shortly thereafter.21 In
Italy, the same thing happened in cities, with the slow emergence
of autonomous city communes from the networks of urban solid-
arity of previous centuries.
All of these developments were separate in our period, but
they had a common structure. In each case, previously informal
patterns of practice, domination, solidarity or identity became
much more formal, rule-bound and explicit. Europe's divisions
became abruptly clearer as a result of this process of encellulement,
as Fossier has defined it.22 This common structure, Unking such
diverse patterns of social change, marks a sea-change in political
and social practice; and it seems to result from the fact that local
19
For example, K. Schmid, 'Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht,
Haus und Dynastie beim mittelalterhchen Adel', Zeuscknft fur die Geschichte des
Oberrkeins, cv (1957), an article that still stands, as the origin of a generation of
research and debate (whether family structures and inheritance patterns really changed
is quite another matter).
20
A classic here is C. Violante, 'La signoria territoriale come q u a d r o delle strutture
organizzative del contado nella Lombardia del secolo X I I ' , in W. Paravicini and K. F .
Werner (eds.), Hislotre comparee de I'admintstration (IV-XVI1P slides) (Beihefte d e r
Francia, ix, Munich, 1980).
21
See C. Wickham, Comumtd e clientele ( R o m e , 1995), esp 5 7 - 9 2 , 199-254.
22
Fossier, Enfance de I'Europe, 288 ff.
 THE 'FEUDAL REVOLUTION' 207

lords (or communities) had to create the rules of their own social
worlds, once that public power had faded. In the Carolingian
world, local practices were crucial, but they could still be
informal, because the frame of formal and public action was
delineated by the state. In 1100, this was no longer possible: the
local world was dominant, and its definition could not be delayed.
In post-Carolingian Europe, all subsequent social and political
developments would be determined by the realities of this locally

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demarcated world; these realities would not be completely effaced
by anything until the most resolute early modern absolutisms.
I would therefore defend, with Bisson, the importance of the
political changes of the period between 850 and 1100 as denning
a new political paradigm for much of Europe. But, as indicated
earlier, 250 years is a long time for a revolution — however the
word is denned, there have been several of them in the quarter-
millennium nearest to us. It is, in principle, possible to identify
individual dates in all the different regions of Europe for the
change from one ideal type to the other; I would use as my
discriminator the end of the placitum tradition, as already noted.
But was it ever sudden enough to be 'revolutionary'? Here, I
think that participants in the debate tend to argue across each
other. Bonnassie and Bisson say yes, but they are at least in part
generalizing from their deep knowledge of Catalonia, perhaps the
best (and certainly the best-studied) example of a revolutionary
crisis in this period.23 Barthelemy says no, but he is generalizing
from his knowledge of the lie de France and the middle Loire
valley, where the process was a great deal slower. Surely the
answer is that it varies? To Barthelemy's Vendomois one can add
the regnum Italiae of north Italy, where the process was very slow
(except perhaps in Tuscany, thanks to the late survival of the
power of its march); Burgundy, by contrast, still lies closer to
Catalonia, as it has done since the classic thesis of Georges Duby.
This is not an evasion; it is significant that it varies.24 Like the
Industrial Revolution, or the varying moments of middle-class
political assertion in Europe that began with the French
23
Bonnassie, Catalogne, t h e crisis period is extended t o 1200 in T . N . Bisson, ' T h e
Crisis of t h e Cataloman Franchises, 1150-1200', in J. Portella (ed.), La formacto t
expansto del feudahsme catald, 2 vols. (Girona, 1985-6); P . F r e e d m a n , The Origins of
Peasant Servitude m Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991), 6 9 - 1 1 8 .
24
F o r B u r g u n d y , G. D u b y , La Soaete aux XT et XW siecles dans la region mdcon-
naise, 2nd edn (Pans, 1971), 137-90; for the Catalonia-Italy contrast, C. Wickham,
Land and Power (London, 1994), 208-11.
208 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 155

Revolution, this major shift could be fast or slow, (relatively)

peaceful or sharply violent, and the variations themselves shed
light on the structural differences between one region and
another. The presence or relative absence of violence at the
moment of structural shift (of course, given the political players,
violence was never wholly absent) thus can itself be used as a
discriminator to compare how societies worked in the years (dec-
ades, centuries) around 1000. This seems to be a useful way for

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debate to unfold in the future. For it will unfold: the only thing
that is certain is that it will still be under discussion in three years
time, in the year 2000, before all the participants collapse with
exhaustion.

University of Birmingham Chris Wickham

REPLY
It is not easy to be precise about the incidence and chronology
of power and social change from the ninth to the twelfth centuries.
On that we all seem to agree. If there is 'debate' about 'feudal
revolution', it is because some historians have troubled others by
daring to read an event into the problematic evidence of an
undoubtedly continuous history. In fact, of my present critics
only Dominique Barthelemy seems much interested in that event,
such as it was, which is not to deny that the others have their
opinions about it. Stephen White addresses himself chiefly to the
conceptual issue of violence, which he understands differently
from me; Timothy Reuter raises methodological questions about
the contrast I imply between old and new 'orders' of power and
about what I shall call for short the 'geo-historiographical'
implications of my evidence; while Chris Wickham develops an
alternative description of institutional change within (broadly)
the dynamic and chronology I have proposed.l
1
Dominique Barthelemy, 'Debate: The "Feudal Revolution": Comment 1', Past
and Present, no. 152 (Aug. 1996) (hereafter Barthelemy); Stephen D. White, 'Debate.
The "Feudal Revolution": Comment 2', Past and Present, no. 152 (Aug. 1996)
(hereafter White). Among the more pertinent works published since my article was
written are Cinzio Violante and Johannes Fried (eds.), // secolo XI: una svolta? (Annah
dell'Istituto storico italo-gennanico, Quaderno xxxv, Bologna, 1993); Lester K. Little,
Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, 1993).