A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (21 page)

The crisis sparked off a succession of such confused quasi-religious movements. In 1309 in Flanders and northern France:

In 1520 columns of the poor and dispossessed were again on the move, led by an unfrocked priest, a heretic monk and prophets who proclaimed that much bloodshed would herald the dawning of a new age. They stormed the prison in Paris and broke into the Chatelet Palace before going on to Toulouse and Bordeaux. As they marched, they killed Jews.
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But they also denounced priests as ‘false shepherds who rob their herds, and began to talk about expropriating the property of the monasteries’. The pope, resident in Avignon, sent an armed force against them, hanging the participants 20 or 30 at a time.
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The panic during the Black Death of the late 1340s led to a further outbreak of religious hysteria—the
flagellants
. Encouraged by a papal statement, bands of men up to 500 strong, dressed in identical robes and singing hymns, would march to a town, where they would form a circle and set about beating their own backs rhythmically with iron spikes embedded in leather belts until they were covered with bleeding wounds. They believed that by imitating the pain Christ had endured on the cross they were purging themselves of the sins which had brought the world to its present state and ensuring their own passage to paradise. Their religious ecstasy was combined with what today would be called a ‘moral panic’—their belief that some conspiracy must lie behind the sudden appearance of the Black Death. They massacred the Jews, who were accused of spreading the plague by poisoning wells—although, of course, Jews were as badly hit by the plague as Christians. But they also attacked priests and talked of seizing the wealth of the church, prompting the pope to denounce them in a ‘bull’, and various secular authorities to hang and behead those who did not obey it.
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The beginning of the 15th century saw a different sort of religious movement arise in Bohemia,
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which contained some of the characteristics of the earlier urban revolts in Flanders, France and Italy, but which was also a rehearsal for the great Protestant Reformation 100 years later. The region had undergone rapid economic development. It contained the richest silver mine in Europe and the most important seat of learning in the (German) Holy Roman Empire. But much of the wealth was in the hands of the church, which owned fully one half of the land. This caused enormous resentment, not just among the poorer classes of town and country but even among many of the knights who spoke Czech rather than German.

The resentment found expression in massive support for the views of Jan Hus, a preacher and professor at the university who agitated forcefully against the corruption of the church and the claim of the pope to be the sole interpreter of God’s wishes. Hus even had some backing from the Bohemian king, Wenceslas. When the emperor, at the behest of the pope, burnt Hus at the stake in 1415, virtually the entire Czech population of Bohemia rose in revolt, taking control of the church and its property into local hands.

The king turned against the movement, and the nobles and the rich merchants became increasingly worried by the peasants’ tendency to reject exploitation by anyone, not just the church. Artisans belonging to the radical ‘Taborite’ wing of the movement controlled Prague for four months before being removed by the merchants who hoped to conciliate the pope and the emperor. There was a decade of war as the emperor and pope fought to crush the Bohemian revolt. Repeated vacillations by the Czech nobility and the Prague burghers pushed the rank and file of the Taborites to look to radical ideas, with egalitarian slogans like, ‘All shall live together as brothers; none shall be subject to another’, ‘The Lord shall reign and the Kingdom shall be handed over to people of the earth’, and, ‘All lords, nobles and knights shall be cut down and exterminated in the forests like outlaws’.
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It was not until May 1434 that a noble army of 25,000 defeated the Taborite force—aided by the desertion of one of its generals. No fewer than 13,000 of the Taborites were killed.

Flanders, northern Italy, northern France, Britain, Bohemia—the crisis of feudalism led to a series of great rebellions. Yet the power of the feudal lords remained intact. No class emerged capable of uniting the rest of society behind it in an onslaught on the system.

For centuries the burghers of the towns had resisted the power of the lords. But the ruling councils of the towns tended to be oligarchies, dominated by great merchants who were rarely more than half-opposed to the feudal lords. Living within the feudal system, they tended to accept much of its ideology. Their ambition much of the time was not to beat the feudal lords but to join them—to turn the wealth they had obtained from trade into the seemingly more permanent wealth that consisted in owning land, complete with serfs to till it. At every great turning point, they would at best vacillate and try to conciliate the lords, and at worst they would join them in attacking the masses. What happened in northern Italy was characteristic. This was probably the most economically advanced part of Europe at the beginning of the 14th century and the region least damaged by the crisis. A merchant family, the Medicis, came to dominate its most important city, Florence, with its vast cloth trade. But they used their power in the 15th century not to break feudalism apart, but to establish themselves as key players in the manoeuvres of lordly and princely families, and in doing so ensured the continual fragmentation of the area into warring statelets and eventual economic decay.
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The artisans of the towns could be more radical. Many were only a generation or two away from serfdom themselves, and, like the surrounding peasantry, they faced starvation when the harvest failed. There are repeated examples of them clashing with the town oligarchies, and, on occasion, throwing in their lot with rural uprisings. Yet they were not a homogeneous group. Some were relatively prosperous, running their own workshops using family labour and perhaps a couple of paid employees (‘journeymen’) and apprentices. Others were much poorer, and terrified of being forced down into the destitute masses from the countryside who scrabbled for whatever casual work was available. That is why as well as the artisan movements which allied the towns with revolts in the countryside, there were others which joined the rich merchants. It is also why there was support from sections of the urban masses for the religious frenzy of the ‘People’s Crusades’ and the
flagellants
.

Finally, there were the peasants. Peasant risings could shake society, but the peasants themselves—illiterate, scattered across the countryside, each concerned with their own village and their own land—could not conceive of any realistic programme for reconstituting society. Such a programme would have had to combine a revolutionary attack on the power of the lords with schemes for using technical development in the towns to enhance agricultural output in the countryside. Economic development had not yet gone far enough to fashion a class, in the city or the countryside, capable of presenting such a programme in however confused a manner.

There already existed the embryos which would one day grow to create such a class. In some towns there were merchants and craftsmen interested in technical innovation and productive investment. In some regions of the countryside there were better off peasants with notions of becoming more prosperous by throwing off the burden of lordly exploitation and tilling the land more productively. But a promising embryo was not the same as a class capable of bringing to an end a crisis which was causing devastation to society at large.

The birth of market feudalism

The crisis of European feudalism was, however, different in one very important respect from the crisis that had hit ancient Rome, Sung China or the Arab empires of the Middle East. Recovery occurred much more quickly.

There was economic recovery and a renewal of population growth by the middle of the 15th century.
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There was also a rise in living standards among the survivors of the famine and plagues, since although the smaller population could only till a smaller area of land, it tended to be the most fertile land. Food output fell by much less than the number of people to be fed. What is more, the importance of some towns actually increased. Part of the rural population, especially the lords, had become too dependent on the goods produced in the towns for society to revert to a system of production on virtually self contained estates. As their demand for goods grew, so did their desire for cash, which they could only get by selling a growing proportion of rural output. Market networks continued to penetrate the countryside, linking each village and household to the traders of the towns.

The growth of market networks slowly but surely changed feudal society. A few of the merchants became rich from the international trade in luxuries which brought products from India, south east Asia and China to Europe.
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Their wealth could be sufficient for them to act as bankers to kings and emperors, financing wars and reaping political as well as economic rewards. Even those who could not aspire to such heights could dominate the political life of their own towns, making them vital allies for kings trying to expand their power.

The kings, in turn, began to see their futures not simply in fighting each other or marrying into each other’s families for land, but also in terms of gaining some of the profits from trade. Portuguese monarchs encouraged merchants to use ships built with the most modern techniques to find a way round Africa to the riches of Asia, and the ‘Catholic monarchs’ of Spain financed Columbus’s voyage west across the Atlantic.

The mass of lesser traders were still little more than shopkeepers. But with luck they could expand their influence and wealth by finding niches in feudal society and slowly widening them. The butcher might be a humble fellow, but he was in a position to provide cash inducements to local peasants to specialise in certain sorts of livestock—that is, to begin to exercise a degree of control over the farming economy. By the 15th century ‘every town had its butchers, all of them prosperous, the new men of the pastoral economy and its masters’.
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The urban traders often influenced life in the countryside in another way, by encouraging less prosperous peasants to take up industrial crafts in the countryside, away from the controls of the urban guilds. There was the growth of a ‘putting-out’ system. The merchant would provide the raw materials to rural workers, who would transform them into finished products in their own homes, with little choice but to accept the price the merchant gave them.

How important such a change could be is shown by the case of the textile industry. In the mid-14th century 96 percent of England’s most important export, wool, was turned into cloth abroad, mainly in the towns of Flanders. A century later 50 percent was exported already woven. The merchants had increased their profits by weakening the hold of the Flemish artisans. But they had also done something more. They had taken hold of some of the rural labour which had previously been subject to the feudal lord. The long term effect was to replace one form of exploitation by another. The direct robbery of the products of peasant labour was replaced by a system in which individual workers voluntarily accepted less than the full value of their products in return for being supplied with raw materials or tools.

This was not fully capitalist production as we know it. Production in large workplaces directly under the control of an entrepreneur was confined to a very few industries, mainly mining. The putting-out system relied on people who could still regard themselves as their own bosses. But it was a step towards fully developed capitalism. The merchant had moved from simply buying and selling goods to worrying about their production, and the direct producers could no longer obtain a livelihood unless a portion of their output went to the merchant as profit.

What is more, both the merchant and the producer were increasingly subject to the dictates of markets over which they had no control. Dispersed rural producers lacked the power of the town guilds to limit output and control prices. They had no choice but to keep abreast of new cost-cutting techniques introduced by other producers. The feudal organisation of production was giving way to a quite different organisation, in which competition led to investment and investment intensified competition. For the moment, this only occurred in a few gaps within the old system. But it was like an acid, eating into and changing the world around it.

The changes also influenced the ways some of the lords behaved. They were desperate to increase their own supplies of cash, and there were two ways of doing so. One was to use their old feudal powers and deploy organised violence to strengthen serfdom, making the peasants provide additional forced labour on large estates. The serfs would provide their own subsistence at no cost to the lord, enabling him to sell the surplus at a handsome price to merchants.

The other approach was for the lords to lease chunks of their property for fixed rents and for long periods of time to the most efficient and go-ahead section of the peasantry, who would then get other peasants with little or no land to work for them. In effect, this involved the lord accepting the full implications of the developing market system and opting to get his income as rent from lands farmed in a capitalist manner.

Those regions most tightly covered with networks of towns made some sort of move towards capitalist agriculture, while elsewhere the shift was to enhanced serfdom. Over a 300 year period England, the Netherlands, parts of France and western Germany, and Bohemia moved in one direction, while eastern Europe and southern Italy moved in the other. But neither transformation took place instantaneously and without complications. Different lords moved at different speeds, and the whole process became intertwined with other changes. Some kings sought to extend their powers with the aid of the urban rich and encountered resistance from the great lords. Kings fought dynastic conflicts with each other. New ways of looking at the world encouraged by urbanisation clashed with old ways associated with the feudal order and embodied in the teachings of the church. Peasants rose up against lords—class struggles between rich and poor erupted in the cities.