The Peasant BODO
'The Peasant BODO' is found in historian Eileen Power's popular Medieval People, an early social history text that went through ten editions from 1924 to 1963. The frontispiece of my copy (1999, The Folio Society, London) appropriately includes a quote from the Venerable Bede, the first truly English historian, who finished writing his epic five volume Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in 731 AD. In this extract, the monk notes the essential unfairness of making a record of past people and events :
"Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us ...
There be of them that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.
And some there be which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them."
ECCLESIASTICUS xliv
Eileen Power agrees: "Substantially, therefore, history concerned itself with the ruling classes. 'Let us now praise famous men', was the historian's motto. He forgot to add, 'and our fathers that begat us'. He did not care to probe the obscure lives and activities of the great mass of humanity, upon whose slow toil was built up the prosperity of the world and who were the hidden foundation of the political and constitutional edifice reared by the famous men he praised." Power's words here have become nearly as well known among modern historians as Bede's original.
'The Peasant BODO: Life on a Country Estate in the time of Charlemagne' is the title of Power's first substantive chapter in Medieval People. She relies on two main manuscript sources as well as some other contemporary references. The first major one is The Roll of the Abbot Irminion, an estate book of the Abbey of Saint-Germain des Pres near Paris, written between 811 and 826 AD. (Polyptyque de l'Abbeye de Saint-Germain des Pres, 1895 Paris). The second is Charlemagne's capitulary 'De Villis', which are the King of the Frank's instructions to his stewards on the management of his many estates, and can be reasonably dated to his reign as Emperor between 800 and 814 AD. (Explication du Capitulaire de Villis).
Power ends her chapter with the sentence, "History is largely made of Bodos." Indeed. But to truly comprehend the 'minor' historical characters who made up the "unnamed and undistinguished masses of people" in medieval society, requires an adjustment to our thinking. The priorities of life for ordinary people in Western Europe at that time were very different. As if to prepare her readers for this radical change in mentalite, Power begins the chapter with some verse from 9th century Ireland :
"Three slender things that best support the worlds:
the slender stream of milk from the cows dug into the pail;
the slender blade of green corn upon the ground;
the slender thread over the hand of a skilled woman.
Three sounds of increase:
the lowing of a cow in milk;
the din of a smithy;
the swish of a plough."
THE TRIADS OF IRELAND
This is wonderfully lyrical, even romantic language. Power too, has been criticised with 'faint praise' for "the imaginative and almost fanciful quality of [her] writing". It is true that she avoids the clamour of marching armies, famine and disease. For instance, "The Middle Ages, according to Eileen Power in this book at least, is a world where ... there are no armies, no knights, no scouts, no roughneck soldiers and no men brandishing swords ... Vae militibus!"
But by screening out the random and incidental 'noise', those catastrophic events that periodically devastated rural communities, a richly interconnected and modestly rewarding lifestyle is allowed to emerge. It was not by any means a 'pastoral idyll'. The experience of a peasant involved a lot of hard work as well as the unrelenting predations of an overlay of officials and managers, owners and their stewards. Nevertheless, the regularity of seasonal labour supplied adequate food clothing and shelter, sufficient to ensure the reproduction of families. It also supplied 'intervals' ― saints'-days and holy-days with their less Christian accompaniments of drinking and dancing, along with annual trade and produce fairs with visiting minstrels and story-tellers.
1. REGULAR SEASONAL LABOUR
(MS Cotton Tib. B. V, pt I, ffo. 3,4,5,8, The British Library)
"Four scenes from an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon calendar showing the occupations of Bodo for each month of the year.
The months illustrated are
January (ploughing with oxen)
March (digging and sowing)
June (reaping)
and December (threshing and winnowing)."
THE ROLL OF THE ABBOT IRMINION
(Polyptyque de l'Abbeye de Saint-Germain des Pres, t. II. Texte p 78)
Pages 213-214. Notes & Sources to Chapter II.
Habet Bodo colonus et uxor ejus colona, nomine Ermentrudis, homines saneti Germani, habent secum infantes III ...
Bodo a colonus and his wife Ermentrude a colona, tenants of Saint-Germain, have with them three children.
Tenet mansum ingenuilem I, habentum de terre arabili bunuaria VIII et atsingas II, de vinea aripennos II, de prato aripennos V ...
He holds one free manse, containing eight bunuaria and two antsinga (or 27½ acres) of arable land, two aripenni (or 1 acre) of vines and two aripenni (or 1 acre) of meadow.
Solvit ad hostem de argento solidus II, de vino in pascione modios II, ad tertium annum sundolas C, de sepe perticas III ...
He pays two silver shillings to the army and two hogsheads of wine for the right to pasture his pigs in the woods. Every third year he pays a hundred planks and three poles for fences.
Arat ad hibernaticum perticas III, ad tramisem perticas II ...
He ploughs at the winter sowing four perches (or 1 acre) and at the spring sowing two perches (or 1 acre).
In unaquaque ebdoma corvadas II, manuoperam I ...
Every week he owes two labour services (or 2 days) and one handwork (or 1 day).
Pullos III, ova XV, et caropera ibi injungitur ...
He pays 3 fowls and fifteen eggs, and carrying service when it is enjoined upon him.
Et habet medietatem de farinarium, inde solvit de argento solidas III ...
And he owns the half of a windmill, for which he pays two silver shillings.
"The lands of the Abbey of Saint-Germain were divide into a number estates, the fiscs, each of a convenient size to be administered by a steward, the villicus or major. On each of these fiscs the land was divided into seigniorial and tributary lands;
The first administered by the monks through a steward or some other officer ['Attached to this manse dominial was a considerable amount of land ― ploughland, meadows, vineyards, orchards, and almost all the woods or forests on the estate. Some of the labour required to cultivate all these lands was provide by servile workers, household serfs, but far the greater part of it had to be done by services paid by the other landholders on the estate'].
And the second possessed by various tenants, who received and held them from the abbey. These tributary lands were divided into numbers of little farms, or manses, each occupied by one ore more families ['The abbey possessed a little estate, or fisc, called Villaris near Paris ... in the estate book dealing with Villarus, we find there was a man called Bodo living there. He had a wife called Ermentrude and three children called Wido and Gerbet and Hildegard; and he owned a little farm, or manse, of arable and meadow land, with a few vines']
"Beside the seigniorial manse, there were a number of little dependent manses. These belonged to men and women who were in various stages of freedom, except for the fact that they all had to do work on the chief manse ... The most important people were those called coloni, who were personally free (i.e. counted as free men by the law), but bound to the soil, so that they could never leave their farms and were sold with the estate, if it were sold ... In return for these holdings the owner ... of every manse had to do work on the land of the chief manse for about three days in the week ... The steward's chief business was to see that they did their work properly, and from every one he had the right to demand two kinds of labour.
The first was fieldwork: Every year each man was bound to do a fixed amount of ploughing on the domain land (week work) and also to give an unfixed amount of ploughing (boon work), which the steward could demand every week when it was needed ...
The second kind of labour which every owner of a farm had to do on the monk's land was called hand work ... he had to help repair buildings, or cut down trees, or gather fruit, or make ale, or carry loads ― anything which wanted doing or which the steward told him to do .... on all the other days of the week tenants were free to cultivate their own little farms.
"But their obligation did not end there, for not only had they to pay services, they also had to pay certain rents to the big house ... every man had to pay an army due, which Charlemagne extracted from the abbey, and which the abbey extracted from its tenants ... 'He pays to the host two shillings of silver' comes first on every freeman's list of obligations. The farmers also had to pay in return for any special privileges granted to them by the monks; they had to carry a load of wood to the big house in return for being allowed to gather firewood in the forests, which were jealously preserved for the use of the abbey; they had to pay some hogsheads of wine for the right to pasture their pigs in the same precious woods. In addition to these special rents he had to other rents in produce; every year he owed the big house three chickens and fifteen eggs ..."
(Extracts from pages 23-26, chapter 2, main text of Medieval People)
2. OCCASIONAL HOLY DAYS AND MARKET DAYS
Facing page 33. Caption to this illumination dated late 14th century
(from the Grandes Chroniques de France, fo. 122v. Bibliotheque Municiple, Castres/Photographie Girandon, Paris)
"Bodo's daily work would normally be leavened only by such great events as the annual fair held at St Denys near Paris, where all kinds of exotic goods newly bought from the East could be seen ... [Above is] a late fourteenth-century depiction from the Grandes Chroniques de France of the Lent fair of St Denys."
CAROLINGIAN IMPERIAL DECREE ― 827 AD
(Documents relatifs a l'Histoire de l'Industrie et du Commerce en France, t.I, pp. 51-2)
Pages 35-36, Chapter 2, main text
"We ordain according to the law of God and to the command of [Charlemagne] our father of blessed memory in his edicts, that no servile works shall be done on Sundays, neither shall men perform their rustic labours, tending vines, ploughing fields, reaping corn and mowing hay, setting up hedges or fencing woods, cutting trees, or working in quarries or building houses; nor shall they work in the garden, nor come to the law courts, nor follow the chase. But three carrying-services it is lawful to do on Sunday, to wit carrying for the army, carrying food, or carrying (if need be) the body of a lord to its grave. Item, women shall not do their textile works, nor cut out clothes, nor stitch them together with the needle, nor card wool, nor beat hemp, nor wash clothes in public, nor shear sheep; so that there may be rest on the Lord's day. But let them come together from all sides to Mass in the Church and praise God for all the good things He did for us on that day!"
"Unfortunately, however, Bodo and Ermentrude and their friends were not content to go quietly to church on saints' days and quietly home again. They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery ... They were very merry and not at all refined, and the place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan songs of their forefathers, left over from old Mayday festivities that they could not forget, or ribald love-songs which the Church disliked. Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil'; over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain."
(Page 36. Extract from main text)
"Another treat Bodo had which happened once a year; for regularly on the ninth of October there began the great fair of St Denys, which went on for a whole month, outside the gates of Paris. Then for a week before the fair little booths and sheds sprang up, with open fronts in which the merchants could display their wares ... and on the opening day all regular trade in Paris stopped for a month, and every Parisian shopkeeper was in a booth somewhere in the fair, exchanging the corn and wine and honey of the district for rarer goods from foreign parts ... Bodo would certainly take a holiday and go to the fair. In fact the steward [of Villius fisc] would probably have great difficulty in keeping his men at work during the month; Charlemagne had to give a special order to his stewards that they should ―
'be careful that our men do properly the work which it is lawful to extract from them, and that they do not waste their time in running about to markets and fairs'.
Bodo and Ermentrude and the three children, all attired in their best, did not consider it a waste of time to go to the fair twice or three times. They pretended that they wanted to buy salt to salt down their winter meat, or some vermillion dye to colour a frock for the baby. What they really wanted was to wander along the little rows of booths and look at all the strange things assembled there ... Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo's few pence out of his pocket."
(Pages 43-44. Extracts from main text)
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