Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400-1000 (review)

Squatriti considers the public control of water from norms of Roman law and administration to mainly private control in early medieval Italy from a variety of perspectives. The provision of water to cities, the raison d’être of Roman aqueducts, fell mainly into the hands of bishops and abbots, who both repaired Roman aqueducts and built new ones, but who saw to the church’s own needs first before attending to those of the general public. In any case, domestic water supply was mainly achieved with wells, cisterns, or local springs, rather than long-distance conduits. The purity of water was judged by limpidity and odor and, as a beverage, it was associated with the poor; the more it was doctored (with ice, for example) the more highly valued it became. The site of bathing shifted from public communal baths to private intimate ones, as the cleansing function of this activity was separated from a recreational one, under the influence of ascetic Christian values.

Squatriti’s discussions of irrigation and fishing are particularly useful for the light they shed on the decline of Roman law and its doctrine of the public nature of water courses; the latter became progressively private or patrimonialized. By the tenth century, water channels were private, and usufruct was tightly controlled by lay and ecclesiastic lords, whether for irrigation or for fishing rights. Only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries did the Italian communes begin to revive both norms of Roman water law and a centralized style of water management, particularly for flood prevention. The fact that the Goths could not control water in the way that the Romans did is a corroboration of Wittfogel’s theory linking water management with centralized administration, although Squatriti is hesitant to so assert.¹

As for the water mill, which by the tenth century had become ubiquitous, Squatriti is one of a number of recent scholars (including the present reviewer) who doubt the received view, associated with Bloch, that although the Romans knew how water mills worked, they did not build them because of the general availability of slave labor.² According to this new view, water mills originated in the first century a.d., were “perfectly familiar” in fourth-century Rome, and reached the explosive or logistic phase of the innovation diffusion curve precisely in the eighth century when documentary mentions proliferate. Other findings are also corroborated from evidence of other early medieval European societies: the role of free peasantry in building mills (frequently under collective ownership); the “clericalization” of milling after 800; and the co-existence of nonfeudal, commercial mills with seigniorial or banal ones throughout the feudal period. Because most feudal dues were paid in grain or flour, millers acquired their infamous reputation for thievery by 1100.

Squatriti’s claim for the interrelatedness of the variegated uses of water is ecologically based, and his ecological sensibility produces some finely textured historical analysis, as in his account of how lowered population density and the re-establishment of riverine marshlands contributed to the reduced incidence of flooding in areas where Romans had worked hard to prevent it (75). It must be noted, however, that different uses of water were also linked phenomenologically and symbolically in medieval Europe. In particular, the heavy religious symbolism of water, pervasive both in the sacraments and in Christian perceptions of “natural religion,” served to knot these themes together ideologically as well as ecologically.