The Carolingian World by Marios Costambeys Matthew Innes & Simon Maclean

Author:Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes & Simon Maclean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

THE PROBLEM OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

All of these issues also play a role in debates about whether the Carolingian period witnessed economic growth or stagnation.86 Thanks to the impression of systematic organisation gained from the Polyptychs, some historians have seen the manor as a model of economic efficiency and so a motor of economic development. For their opponents, however, big was not necessarily beautiful: manorial structures were conservative, shackling rural producers to the demands of landlords and limiting their ability to participate in networks of exchange. But, as is the case with most set-pieces, the contours of this debate may tell us less about historical realities than the ideological and intellectual predilections of modern academics, here working in the last third of the twentieth century when ideological controversy raged over the relative merits of direct economic management by state elites and small-scale private enterprise.

There certainly are clear indications within the polyptychs that the systems of production pursued on the estates of the great churches succeeded not only in meeting the imperatives of generosity imposed on abbatial and episcopal tables by the Carolingian political system, but also in generating significant surpluses that were actively marketed. Careful study of the services demanded from the dependent peasantry on the estates of St Germain and Prüm, for example, has shown a complex system whereby certain privileged groups were required to oversee the transport of local surpluses by boat or cart, some to central points within the abbeys’ holdings where it could be redistributed to feed the monks and their guests, but some to major markets for sale.87 A series of royal privileges allowing the foundation of markets at central points within ecclesiastical estates, climaxing in the middle decades of the ninth century in west Francia and the tenth century in the east, illustrate how the infrastructure created by these systems of redistribution could stimulate exchange.88 Perhaps more significantly still, the granting of formal privileges to license specialised ‘markets’ perhaps indicates a step change. We know that before the ninth century there were some seasonal fairs at major centres such as St Denis, which were the visible peaks of ‘market-type’ activity in a countryside where most exchange remained embedded within wider patterns of social interaction, buying and selling going on at regular public meetings which had a wide range of functions ranging from legal hearings to feasts and hunts. Such a state of affairs is typical of a world in which the economy was not yet understood as a separate sphere of activity with its own rules and processes; and against such a backdrop the creation of recognised and recognisable markets more distinct from the generality of social intercourse constitutes an important shift.89

Royal demands also played an important role in this process.90 Those free peasants who oversaw the transport of surpluses typically had relatively light obligations in respect of corvée labour on the lord’s reserve, but were responsible for meeting many of the public obligations owed by their lord to the king, carrying goods or messages at the king’s command or taking customary gifts of produce to royal palaces.

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