ABSTRACT
Admittedly, the word 'community' is rarely found in any document prior to the thirteenth century. These older records have much to say of seigneuries as collective units, but hardly ever refer to the inhabitants as a body. Can this be taken to imply that there was a period when the seigneurie completely stifled the collective life of the group? Some have thought so. But negative evidence is of value in historical matters only on one condition: that the silence of the texts is caused by the absence of facts rather than witnesses. In this case it is the witnesses who are lacking. Nearly all our sources are seigneurial;
The territorial limits of a rural community were those containing the land subject to the various rules of communal husbandry (which dealt with temporary cultivation, grazing on the commons, dates of harvests etc.) and to the performance of collective services for the benefit of the group as a whole; its boundaries were especially clear-cut in unenclosed regions where nucleated settlement was the rule. The seigneurie consisted, amongst other things, of the land subject to the payment of rents and services to a single lord, and over which he exercised his rights to aid and his power to coerce. Were the two coterminous? Sometimes, as in the new settlements, they must have been. But this was not always or even most frequently the case. Naturally our information is fullest for more recent periods, when very many of the older seigneuries had already been broken up by alienations and, still more frequently, by subinfeudation. But even in Frankish times a villa often contained manses dispersed over different villages. The same is true of all the countries of Europe where the seigneurial regime was in operation. If it is true that we should regard the Frankish and French lords as the latter-day heirs of the ancient village chieftains, we should add that it was apparently possible for a number of separate authorities to flourish side by side in the same place. This simple topographical observation is in itself sufficient refutation of the idea that the rural community could ever have been completely absorbed by the seigneurie. Conscious of its unity, the rural group could react just as vigorously as any urban community to the break-up of a seigneurie. For example, the lands and village of Hermonville in Champagne came to be divided among eight or nine sub-fiefs, each with its own court; but from 1320 at latest the inhabitants appointed their own communal officers to enforce agrarian discipline, irrespective of seigneurie.20
