The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia (review)

Reviews 251 In the end, there is litde comprehension of Bloch's 'idee maitresse', of what he was about or what it all added up to. Alastah MacLachlan Department of History Sydney University. Freedman, Paul, The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia (Cambridge Iberian and Latin American studies), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xx, 263; 3 maps, 9 tables; R.R.P. US$49.50. In 1486, king Ferdinand II of Aragon issued the Sentencia arbitral of Guadalupe, officially ending servitude in Catalonia. This act, the only such formal abolition of serfdom in the Middle Ages, followed its only successful major peasants' war. The peasants in question were known as Remences, a term derived from the redemption payment (Lat. redimentia, Cat. remenca) that they were required to pay to disassociate themselves from their lords and lands. The act of 1486 allowed the Remences to form syndicates to raise their redemption payments. It also abolished the landlords' long-standing 'right of mistreatment' (ius maletractandi), as well as the group of seigneurial exactions known as the 'bad customs' (mals usos). Although this setdement left intact the exploitative economic system under which these peasants had laboured, it represented for them a great victory. Abolition of these marks of their servile status was precisely what they had demanded in a remarkably articulate and organized fashion. In 77te origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia, Paul Freedman sets out to explain this curious end to Catalan servitude by demonstrating with great clarity and success the historical processes by which the Remences came into existence. Freedman portrays the descent of a once virtually free peasantry into servile status as a result of parallel developments in seigneurial pressure and legal definition. These developments were not gradual and imperceptible, but occurred at various 'points of crystallization' (p. 208). Thefirstof these was the breakdown in public order and theriseof the seigneurie banale in the period 1020-60, when peasants became subject to various exactions at the hands of castle lords. The reimposition of comital authority on new terms did not succeed in eliminating these abuses. Freedman argues, however, that while this violent period was a 'point of origin' (p. 72) for a 252 Reviews later servitude, this was not established by 1100. Favorable tenures were still common, and servile status had yet to be systematized. It is in a long thirteenth century that Freedman places the most significant changes in the development of servitude. These changes were set in motion by a second period of seigneurial violence in the late-twelfth century. Personal commendation and redemption became more common and gave rise to new types of charters. References to the various mals usos appeared more frequently after ca 1180, and they were more often grouped together. Exemption from these exactions became associated with personal liberty. This had the effect of legitimizing the notion of the deprivation of therightsof a part of the population. This division of the peasantry into those subject to royal protection and those removed from royal custom was accepted in a series of royal edicts, notably a decision of the Corts in 1202 allowing seigneurial mistreatment. Roman Law played an indirect but important role here, encouraging a desire for process and orderly categoriestiiatsucceeded in reducing a variety of servitudes into a single servile status. Peasant disabilities crystallized into a definition of servile status during the course of die thirteenth century. A constitution of 1283 distinguished lands in which redemption was customary, identified redemption as the mark of serviletenure,and limited the rights of Remences to take refuge in free territory. This made the distinction between free peasants who held land under emphyteutictenure,a long-term lease, and servile Remences a matter of law. The various economic and demographic crises of the mid-fourteenth century brought about a third wave of increased seigneurial oppression. By this time, however, lords' exactions were not arbitrary abuses, but longrecognized rights. Peasants, joined by lawyers and elements of the aristocracy, increasingly voiced opposition to the system. Thefirstsigns of organized peasant resistance can be found in 1380 and by 1395 the Remences had proposed the outlines of what would become the eventual settlement of the crisis a century later...