ABSTRACT
Structures, mental and governmental, provided the frameworks in which medievalpeople thought and lived. But the best way to see them in action is to focus on groups and associations. The Middle Ages were indeed a heyday for such collectivities, whether or not they were legally labelled as privileged, meaning, literally, ‘with a private law’. Some were in principle voluntary, such as a confraternity devoted to a saint’s cult; but most overlapped with, or were embedded in, preexisting groups of other kinds. Viewed horizontally, most people, whether their legal status was free or unfree, could be seen as families or kindreds, or those living in the same neighbourhood; viewed vertically, they were often men and women under a common lordship or ecclesiastical administration. Villages and parishes were simultaneously both types of association, horizontal and vertical. Many peasants lived and worked as discrete nuclear families, which is how they were listed by their lords’ estate-managers; but, at the same time, as farmers of contingent areas, with important decisions, such as the leaving fallow of certain land, collectively observed and seasonal working-practices, especially harvesting, collectively allocated and timed; and also as tenants of the same, or contingent, landlords, to whom they owed dues and labour-services, and to whose court they had to come to be tried and judged if they were accused of crime. Custom ruled the lives of the legally free and unfree unlike. Yet chattel slavery, relatively unimportant in the early medieval centuries, had largely been abandoned in most of western Europe by c.1000. However heavy were their customary burdens, peasants, once their dues had been handed over and services done, could work on their own account, keep their surplus produce and sell in markets, in little family firms or in consortia, and they could form associations called gilds for mutual insurance and help against such scourges as fire or storm. In towns, production was carried on by family businesses, but groups, again often known as gilds, coordinated the marketing of products and services. Of course, some were more equal than others, and just as within villages richer farmers had a larger say in decisions about fallow-lands, so in towns, rich merchants dominated gilds. Nevertheless, in town and countryside alike, groups embraced richer and poorer. Consolidated by common religious practices, such as the cults of the saints of village or town (or urban quarter), and the performance of mourning-rites at each others’ funerals paid for by members’ dues, medieval groups formed primarily for economic purposes exuded strong social and cultural cement.
