Global History: A Short Overview by Noel Cowen

Author:Noel Cowen [Cowen, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

11

Economic Breakthrough

New Bases of Subsistence

The end of Roman rule in the west had left a political vacuum and a cultural ruin, and as late as the ninth century the physical outlook was of a vast wilderness, with here and there clusters of occupation. From this low level began the struggles from which a new civilization arose. There came over the centuries a quickening of change, as higher productivity and surplus population began to fuel the assertive tendencies of a newly confident society. Feudalism was the political and economic base, emerging in the tenth century and reaching its zenith in the thirteenth century. The bedrock of the system was the entrenchment of the power of local aristocrats and landowners over the peasantry, who occupied and tilled the land but were not its owners. The estates were held as a fief from a superior noble who could demand military service in time of war and who in turn was the vassal of liege lords upwards towards the monarch.

During the four centuries of its existence the feudal system allowed for striking increases in agricultural productivity, which yielded the essential surplus to create permanent civilized centres. Land clearance intensified, and within two hundred years the forests which once covered most of central Europe had largely disappeared. In a major modification of the natural environment, ploughing advanced at the expense of woodland and marsh, with a widening belt of farmland around the settlements. Some later techniques undoubtedly owed something to eastern sources as well as to Rome, but the craftspeople of western Europe often had little alternative but to find their own solutions to problems as they arose.

In the drive for territorial acquisition which seized society during the early Middle Ages, the manorial estates became the main matrix around which relationships could be organized. New equipment, such as plough teams and mills to grind the corn, was expensive and it was economic to install it only where there were enough people and an effective organization. Joint undertakings by the better-off peasant families were sometimes attempted, but the surpluses were generally raised through seigneurial revenues in the form of rent in money, labour or in kind. The early economic objective was the growing of grain, but a gradual rise in the living standards of the nobility introduced meat and wine, stimulating the growth of small market towns inhabited by dealers in these and other products.

From being at first centres of exchange, the towns also became centres of production, of cloth and clothing, footwear, leather and metal goods, and they attracted the crafts associated with building, such as brick-making, masonry and carpentry. There was an increase in the numbers following these occupations and they used craft guilds to protect their interests. The merchants and more important manufacturers founded companies to reduce competition and restrict entry. They had different interests from the lay and ecclesiastical lords and before long they were insisting on urban autonomy and claiming the right to make their own fiscal and juridical arrangements.

When the

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