A History of Early Medieval Europe by Deanesly Margaret;

Author:Deanesly, Margaret;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429589942
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 1956-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

THE CAROLINGIAN POLITICAL SCENE

THE Carolingian age marked a new epoch in the history of Europe, and it is worth considering for a moment the setting and the actors of the new scene: the scene that was beginning when Pepin the Short died at Saint-Denis on 24 September 768, and left his kingdom divided between his sons Charles and Carloman.

If an observer in an aeroplane had passed above Europe at the time, flying from Thames mouth to Rhine mouth, and then along the Rhine-Danube frontier that had once bordered the Roman empire: or above Gaul, now the land of the Franks and called Francia in the north and Aquitania south of the Loire: he would have seen a land still, in the main, wooded. Among the woods, small strips of ploughed fields followed the river valleys and the foothills, with small villages set in small clearings. He would have seen the vineyards of Italy and Francia, and very good vineyards too along the Rhine where the Roman army contractors had first planted them; but in the main he would have seen a land uncleared of forest, with large, undrained swamps: country abounding in game, wild fowl and fresh-water fish. The thirteenth century, the century of the great forest clearings, the défrichements, was still far ahead.

The old Roman towns, laid out by the gromaticus, the army surveyor, were still inhabited, and on the same town plan: not as in Britain set aside (or used as stone quarries) by invading barbarians. There were also other towns, municipia, castra, castella, small by our reckoning, but affording a market for the produce of the countryside. In such towns, the old Roman civitates for choice, the bishop had his seat, his cathedral church, the symbol of his teaching office, and the count had his mallus, his court.

The towns, however, were not rich, as certain towns of the empire had been through the eastern trade, and as the towns of north Italy and the Danube and Rhine valleys were to be again in the twelfth century through its renewal; for there was now little eastern trade, only a trickle that came up the Russian rivers to the Baltic, and a smaller trickle of silks and spices and luxury goods that came somehow up the Rhone to Charles’s court and the great churches that would buy silken cloths and ivories and vestments: for the Arab fleet largely blocked the Mediterranean.

It was the countryside that counted: that produced the food on the great landed estates or villas and the small vici of free peasants. It was the peasant who tilled the ground that the Carolingian kings had to protect against raiders from across the frontier or oppressive landholders near by: and some of the Carolingian capitularies did seek to protect the peasant. It was the peasant who grew the food and from the land and the peasant came the royal revenue, chiefly from the lands or villas of the fisc; there was little other regular royal income. Though

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