ABSTRACT
In recent decades, reconstructions of early medieval settlement patterns based on estate records such as private charters have inclined historians to marginalize villages. Robert Fossier, for example, argued that village organization was absent before the eleventh century. Essentially, he reasoned that well-defined villages took shape only through a process of “cell-formation” (encellulement), featuring organized terroirs or lands, rural parishes, fixed fortifications and juridical features. Because the archaeological evidence for early medieval nucleated settlements could not be ignored, Fossier thought that the rural population concentrated in precarious “proto-villages”, which were a sort of “incomplete” village.2 In the 1970s and 1980s other rural historians pieced together pictures of early medieval Italian and “Mediterranean” contexts, which interpreted the documentary sources as evidence of a dispersed population caused by indomitable peasant individualism. They understood peasants to be deeply bonded to their landscapes and the vestigial settlement structures of the Roman period. Hence, the settlement pattern necessarily consisted of dispersed properties.3 Finally, and significantly, historians of northwestern Europe and of the Mediterranean accepted the concentration of such dispersed peasant sites. In this view, aristocrats created estate or manor centers (curtensi is the Italian term) by founding churches or settling uninhabited sites, supposedly from the
1 This chapter results from our work within the Area di Archeologia Medievale at Siena University: surveys and excavations primarily in southern Tuscany. I am indebted to many collaborators and students, in particular to Marco Valenti and Roberto Farinelli. My habit of thinking in parallel with Richard Hodges, in a dialogue that has developed over twenty years, has inspired gratitude toward my friend that equals the intellectual stimulation that he provides.
