HIST 107 Introduction to Medieval History Lecture 22 Social Changes in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Main Question What sorts of changes are evident in medieval European society between c 1200 and c 1350 and why are they significant Preliminary Remarks See useful map of European trade routes c 1300 in Rosenwein Short History p 268 general map of Europe c 1280 on p 276 This lecture tackles a very big subject medieval society in a period of great change by breaking it down into three subsets The first subset will look at how the amount of written evidence balloons from c 1200 Much of this increase is due to the fact that authorities both secular and ecclesiastical are taking more of an interest in the activities of ordinary men and women The growth of a class of literate bureaucrats who are able to produce more written documents also stimulates this process The example we will consider is the register i e copies of official documents of Jacques Fournier who was bishop of Pamiers in the far south of France in the early fourteenth century He went on to become pope as Benedict XII 1334 42 Jacques was very interested in rooting out the remnants of the Cathar heresy still to be found in small pockets in southern France See Rosenwein Reading pp 435 42 for an extract from the register that illustrates the extent to which sources are now drilling down into the lives of even fairly low status people The second portion of the lecture will involve going back before c 1200 in fact to the 1120s We will consider an extraordinary break down of political life in Flanders modern Belgium when the count of Flanders Charles the Good was assassinated in 1127 Part of the re ordering of political life that followed this event involved the emergence of the Flemish towns as semi independent political players This is one early and striking demonstration of the emergence of towns in Europe in the twelfth thirteenth and fourteenth centuries The final portion will consider the area of Europe in which the development of towns was most pronounced northern and north central Italy Lombardy and Tuscany We will track how and why towns grew in this area and what new and distinctive political arrangements emerged as a result These towns become famous late in our period as the epicentre of the Renaissance but the foundations of urban growth are laid earlier in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries 1 Key Questions A What significance attaches to the evidence provided by sources such as the register of Jacques Fournier B What can we learn from the disruption caused to Flanders by the murder of Charles the Good C Why does northern Italy emerge as the most heavily urbanized part of medieval Europe and what distinctive political and social patterns emerge there A What significance attaches to the evidence provided by sources such as the register of Jacques Fournier As stated above main value evidence of the much greater reach of sources e g secular government expanding their court systems raising more taxes therefore need to know who what to tax Domesday Book back in 1086 was a precocious precursor of this Church post Lateran IV mandated to take a closer interest in pastoral duties finding and combatting heresy the immediate stimulus for Fournier extract in Rosenwein concerns a suspected heretic Guillaume Austatz many witnesses called to give evidence Guillaume himself in the process get real glimpse of small tight communities Most famous exploitation of this material by a modern historian famous book by French historian Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie His book Montaillou 1975 becomes a publishing sensation translated into English and well worth reading Montaillou small and remote village still is in extreme south of France in Pyrenees near border with Spain Leroy Ladurie discovered that it was a sort of pocket of residual Cathar belief by early fourteenth century most Cathars already suppressed Therefore Fournier s register included a large amount of material about this one very small village community most inhabitants interviewed at length and their testimonies survive this enabled Leroy Ladurie to write a detailed microhistory e g how peasants worked their family lives gender relations belief systems understanding of their world sex lives which got the media interest when the book came out Q Was Montaillou exceptional because of its Cathar associations 2 Maybe but the bigger point is that much of what Leroy Ladurie identified there applies to medieval societies in general they Especially emphasis on communities People giving evidence to Fournier s inquisitors come back again and again to the ways in which their identity is defined by the groups belong to e g family gender occupation religious adherence Montaillou is therefore for our immediate purposes above all an illustration of the importance of community in medieval life something we have already seen in e g the emphasis on the Rule of St Benedict as a blueprint for living the religious life communally Where this emphasis upon community is particularly evident is in the history of the emerging towns Flanders provides good evidence of the urbanization process So the next question is B What can we learn from the disruption caused to Flanders by the murder of Charles the Good in terms of the growth of urban identity Charles the Good count of Flanders modern northern Belgium but then mostly in French kingdom Murdered in 1127 by a family that had risen in service to the counts the Erembalds Not necessary to go into detail of why the murder took place sufficient to know that the murder precipitates a huge political and social crisis Charles leaves no direct heirs therefore numerous neighbouring princes contend for the vacant countship they buy support from local players this accelerates emergence of towns as political voices in their own right Why Flanders second major area after northern Italy of urbanization in Europe trade with Italy of products from north e g English wool to feed textile industry Charles murdered in one of the major town Bruges Bruges and its main rival Ghent emerge as political actors Background here availability of one of the most remarkable sources from the entire Middle Ages This is Galbert of Bruges s The Murder of Charles the Good Galbert an eyewitness a notary a professional writer of documents his account of the murder and aftermath is amazingly detailed journalistic 3 one of side effects of the crisis that most struck Galbert