Accounting for History in Marx's Capital by Bryer Robert;

Author:Bryer, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Figure 6.1 Using a Polyptych. Source: Created by the author based on Sato (2000, Figure 2, 154).

These documents, Sato suggests, are evidence of “the administration of peasant tribute accounting” (2000, 160), but the question is whether an ‘attenuated’ form in Marx’s sense had solidified into rent. To Wickham, although the payments, mostly in grain, some of wood, are “probably best seen as tax” because “in Tours there are hints that the fiscus still expected at least some taxation,” and evidence of earlier immunity from tax, he concludes they were effectively rents because the monks “most likely” kept them (2005, 109). The key question, however, is not who kept the payments, but their basis, that is, how the monks accounted for them. It is possible that St Martin’s monks collected their ‘rents’ and other income and calculated the ‘profit’ they had made after their collection expenses. Later evidence suggests that a polyptych usually went with ‘charge and discharge’ accounting (Oldroyd and Dobie 2009, 99–100), with the calculation of ‘primeval profit’ as receipts minus expenses. This provides a framework to understand the evidence from Tours, the other polyptychs that survive, and the evidence of late eighth-century estate management in the Capitulare de Villis and Brevium exempla, the “only surviving administrative documents from the time of Charlemagne that discuss estate management and revenue collection in extensive detail” (Campbell 2010, 243). The Capitulare de Villis “contains no date and makes no reference to any historical event: its date, authorship and purpose have consequently been matters for considerable debate” (Loyn and Percival 1875, 64). They have “all but preoccupied scholars of the early Middle Ages for over a century,” but despite “prodigious efforts at interpretation . . . no consensus has yet emerged about the documents’ exact origins” (Campbell 2010, 243), particularly their purpose.

Most agree, however, it “was not to establish a new system, but rather to improve an existing one” (Loyn and Percival 1975, 65). A Capitulare was a document containing orders or instructions, in this case about the management of royal estates, and the Brevium exempla, found with the Capitulare de villis, contained model ‘inventories’ of royal estates. Whereas polyptychs kept detailed information on the “rents, deliveries and services to which the different categories of inhabitants of the estate, whose names are often given, were obliged,” inventories were “a summing up of the number of mansi, of inhabitants, cattle, stock, etc.” (Verhulst 2002, 127), a stock taking that often recorded grain or wine yields. Some thirty polyptychs survive from Carolingian Europe, most dating from the ninth century, which scholars have also studied intensively (Verhulst 2002). They were usually ecclesiastical estates’ registers, which generally recorded “each estate of an abbey, giving the details of its location, names and households, as well as the legal status of each dependent peasant attached to it and the amount of rent in money, kind or labour owed by the peasants” (Sato 2000, 145; Verhulst 2002, 38).

Historians often conclude, “the world of the polyptych began with Charlemagne’s noted interest in maximizing the income from estates” (Sato 2000, 160).

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