Village Elites and Social Structures in the Late Medieval Campine Region by Eline Van Onacker, and: Village Community and Conflict in Late Medieval Drenthe by Peter Hoppenbrouwers (review)

These monographs concern two of the Low Countries' three notable sandy inland districts: Eline Van Onacker examines Belgium's Campine region; Peter Hoppenbrouwers considers Drenthe, in the Netherlands. These regions shared characteristic features and differed from other rural areas, so the volumes complement each other.

This research is welcome. As Hoppenbrouwers, a graduate of the 1970s, remarks, with the decline of neo-Marxist history 'peasant societies and village communities are out of favour as objects of historical research' (p. 1). Van Onacker, of a more recent generation, adopts a revisionist perspective, arguing that researchers have privileged rural regions that suit their interests and prejudices, favouring those where medieval communities transformed swiftly into modern, industrialized ones, neglecting those that behaved otherwise. Both works make regular comparison with the situation in Flanders, France, Germany, or England. Whereas Hoppenbrouwers cites copious instances from everyday life, Van Onacker's volume abounds in graphs, tables, and diagrams.

Both authors allude to the limitations of their sources. The records of rural communities can be erratically preserved, while, notwithstanding comparable natural environments, these regions' social structures varied. Consequently, the differential creation and survival of source material has permitted different things to be investigated. While Hoppenbrouwers makes good use of the judgements of the Etstoel (Drenthe's highest judicial and political body), the conflicts he examines occurred in villages whose local records have not survived. For the different aspects of her study, Van Onacker draws on information from different Campine villages, since none has the full set of records to suit her purposes—something that renders extrapolation risky, considering she notes significant variability between villages in some respects. Similar variation between regions means Drenthe and the Campine are not directly analogous: the absence of a regional council such as Drenthe's Etstoel brought about the Campine social structure that Van Onacker describes. Nevertheless, the two regions evidently have strong resemblances, including the persistence of a substantial common wasteland, which by the later Middle Ages had vanished elsewhere in the Netherlands. The works are thus productively read together.

Hoppenbrouwers's is the first English-language study of Drenthe. Two introductory chapters precede three devoted to specific categories of community conflict. Chapter 2 describes the legal system within which disputes played out; Chapter 1 is a compendious, eighty-four-page survey of everything else of an introductory nature: the study of medieval villages; Drenthe's history and historiography; the source materials consulted; the region's landscape, demography, and territorial divisions; its rural society and peasants; the landholdings of lordships, ecclesiastical or secular; and, finally, a comparison with property relations in 1630. For readers previously unacquainted with Drenthe this is a great deal to assimilate. The chapter is accordingly heavy-going, although, for the same reason, potentially an invaluable resource.

Succeeding chapters are comparably detailed but become progressively easier as the contents of earlier ones are internalized. With the last three the work comes into its own. Chapter 3 concerns disputes regarding village boundaries, the use of a village's commons, or the maintenance of bridges, ditches, and the like, either between neighbouring villages or between the village community and one of its members. Hoppenbrouwers concludes that these were sparked less by population growth than by burgeoning state formation, which demanded greater systematization, for purposes such as taxation.

Chapter 4 concerns feuding. Although murder and other felonies went to trial automatically, other offences, including accidental killing, were 'cases of vengeance': the victim's kinsfolk might demand the right of blood feud; they might apprehend culprits...