ABSTRACT
The turbulence of the Migration Period and the great epidemics of plague in the sixth century left behind a western world that was emptier and more desolate than it had been in the later years of the Roman Empire. Soil research shows that in many parts of Europe the forests increased during the fifth and sixth centuries, as did various forms of pastoralism. A large number of archaeological findings point to a sharp fall in settlement density. Estimates of overall population decline in post-Roman Gaul, Italy and Spain were in the order of 50 per cent, and some remote and forested areas, such as the Ardennes, may even have lost all their population for a while. It is important to realise how much this affected the so-called land-labour ratio. Because there was plenty of land, to become a large landowner was less of a problem than to bring land to productive value, for which scarce labour was indispensable. Therefore, the real challenge for the mighty
few was to control the labour of the majority poor rather than to grab land. By and large they succeeded in attaining that goal. First of all, in the long run – that is to say, seen over the half millennium covered by the early medieval period – peasants lost a significant amount of their hold on land in favour of aristocratic large landowners (including kings and ecclesiastical institutions). Specialists on the period do not hesitate to speak of a complete transformation of the dominant mode of production: from a peasant mode to a ‘feudal’ or aristocratic mode. Its essence was a substantial increase in the transfer of agrarian surpluses from peasants to aristocratic lords under non-economic (non-commercial), ‘political’ pressure. However, and this will be the second major point to be made in this chapter, this transformation was not a bad thing in many respects. It did create the seed-bed for substantial demographic and economic growth. For many
years the entire period from 500 to 1000 was depicted as a time of demographic stagnation, but that view has been revised. Nowadays, one tends to think in terms of a slow but sure recovery that started in the West around the beginning of the seventh century. A cautious estimate suggests that the population of western Europe doubled between 600 and 1000 from about 12 million to 24 million. During the same period, a remarkable recovery of commercial exchange is visible, even if this took the form of long-distance trade within trade networks of low complexity, primarily aimed at providing a small elite with expensive prestige objects.
