The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (review)

Shortly before the turn of the current millennium, medieval scholarship, especially in the United States, assumed, to a significant degree, a polemical mode. Although this shift is hardly revolutionary—the principal inquiry is still the actual past, not current perspectives on that past—nevertheless, today that inquiry is often pursued through an interrogation of the pivotal works that have appeared since the mid-twentieth century.

No subject has attracted this cognitive mode more intensively than the question of whether "the year 1000" marked a time of transformation or of continuity. Barthélemy has been a key participant in this debate from its outset. The book under review is a modified translation of an original volume published in French twelve years ago, in which Barthélemy forcefully argued for continuity. Barthélemy's work leading up to it intersected with a major debate on the same question published in Past & Present in response to an article by Bisson in 1994 that famously named the contested period "the feudal revolution."¹

The present book considerably modifies the French original, adding a new short preface and two new historiographically oriented chapters. The subject of this book is simultaneously the real past in the contested period and the historiography of that past. The book seems to be pitched against Barthélemy's understanding, or intepretation, of the contested period as expressed by Georges Duby in La société aux XI^e et XII^e siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1953). Barthélemy dismantles Duby's major criteria of transformation, one by one, refuting the whole by subverting the parts.

Barthélemy aims his opening chapter at Duby's discernment of a documentary shift from charter to notice during the contested period, claiming that these and similar classifications are blurred and that documents with attributes falling somewhere along that continuum were produced from the Carolingian period well beyond "the year 1000." To him, the only transformation during the contested period was in the quantity and language of the documentation; what Duby (and others) saw as transition in the real world was in fact a transition in the records about that world—a "feudal revelation," not "revolution."

Two chapters then rebut Duby's inference of a transition from a rural society, sharply polarized between the free and the unfree, toward something in between—serfs—fostered by a new type of seigneurial power. Through a close analysis of the Marmoutier "book of serfs," Barthélemy observes instead a continuous diversity of status, specialization, wealth, and other criteria of social standing, affecting this particular population of servi—which he explains by reference to the initiative of the servi themselves rather than seigneurial repression. Apart from their polemical thrust, these two chapters represent the kind of close study of a rural population that is now, happily, returning to prominence.

The next three chapters focus, first, via the same sources, on patterns in the usage and meaning of the terms miles, nobilis, et al., that reveal, supposedly contra Duby, substantial continuity over the contested period. Next, shifting from words to power relations—the crux of Duby's 1953 "knighthood" problem—Barthélemy argues with what he interprets as Duby's wholesale transformation of élites—from a long-entrenched, Carolingian, nobility to a new, upwardly mobile, assertive knighthood; the supposedly new seigneurial groups turn out to be, on prosopographical grounds, an old pedigree. Nor does Barthélemy agree that those groups were more violent, brutal, repressive, and difficult to control than their predecessors had been in the Carolingian period, or that they were "independent" of both territory and institution. Their "castles" varied in size, structure, social organization, chronology of construction, and effectiveness. Royal, comital, episcopal—in short, old and "Carolingian"—power persisted throughout the period under contention. Apart from the polemics, Barthélemy's points comprise an excellent, highly textured contribution about the most important social groups during the contested period.

But, in the...