Imagining the End: Visions of

c

. 



 and 

c

. 



, when justice became the private

prerogative of  the proprietors of  castles. In consequence humble but free

peasants lost the essential guarantee of  their liberty, and became helpless to

resist enserfment by the knights who alone remained strong enough to answer

only to the count. In 



 Duby’s richly detailed thesis, making masterly use

of  the exceptional archives of  the bishopric of  Mâcon and the abbey of

Cluny, provided a comprehensive and closely argued context for the causes

and consequences of  that momentous change, and therefore for what is now

the orthodoxy that it was the decades around 



, rather than those around



, that constituted the critical turning point in early European history.

4

This proposition began to be assimilated into general historical consciousness,

however, only in the 



s and 



s when Duby began to write works of

synthesis that were quickly and widely translated,

5

 and when the work of  his

students and other younger scholars influenced by him began to be published

in considerable quantity.

6

 From the present point of  view, Pierre Bonnassie’s

account of  the extremely violent imposition of  the 

seigneurie

 in Catalonia,

slightly later than in Duby’s Maconnais, has been particularly influential.

7

From that point onwards the victory was swift and seemingly definitive. In

the 



s a growing flood of  publications, covering an increasingly com-

prehensive array of  fields and activities, confirmed that the eleventh century

had assumed the mythic status once accorded to the twelfth, as the time when

the structures of  European society and the lineaments of  European culture

assumed their essential shape.

8

Both topographically and conceptually the implications of  Duby’s work

went well beyond the southern Maconnais in which it was rooted, especially

with the publication in 



 of  Pierre Toubert’s magnificent study of  the

Latium (to the north and east of  Rome), which while making important

conceptual additions and modifications to Duby’s model also showed that the

sequence and chronology of  events which he had proposed were broadly

applicable in a region of  very different history and ecology, and especially

that the subjugation of  a previously free peasantry took place suddenly and

violently, though here in the second half  of  the tenth century rather than the

early decades of  the eleventh.

9

 These conclusions radically challenged the

traditional chronological framework of  medieval and therefore of  European

history, in which it had long been axiomatic that the reconstruction of

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131

Medieval Europe

European society in the high middle ages began with the pontificates of  Leo

IX, Alexander II and Gregory VII (



s to 



s) and the conflicts within

the Church and between Church and laity to which they gave rise, and in

secular affairs with the revival of  monarchical vigour and authority, assisted

by that of  commerce and urban life which (at least in Northern Europe) were

barely beginning to make themselves felt in the same decades. We should

note at this point, since this chapter will be rather narrowly focused on

religious and political activity in western France, how comfortably these

conclusions sit with the wider tendency of  the past quarter of  a century or

so to describe the later tenth and early eleventh centuries in almost every part

of  Western Europe as a time of  increasingly dynamic and varied economic

activity, not only in the Mediterranean but throughout the regions bordering

the North Sea, which had been animated since the seventh century at least

by a greater volume and variety of  exchange than we dreamed of  in the days

when we depended entirely on the literary evidence.

10 

These economies were

being stimulated in the tenth and early eleventh centuries not only by the

connections established along the Russian rivers with the advanced economies

of  the Byzantine and Arab worlds, but by the flow of  silver from the newly

discovered mines in the Harz mountains and, more lucrative still, of  tribute

from the military successes of  emperors and nobles on the eastern frontier of

Saxon and Salian Germany.

11

 Although the territories in which the changes

that led to ‘the making of  the middle ages’ or even ‘the birth of  Europe’ had

most usually been sought and debated – northern and western France and

northern Italy – were very far from being stagnant in the tenth century, as

the old story had it, it would be nearer the truth to describe them as among

the more backward parts of  Europe than as the most dynamic.

Duby’s revision seemed, and still does, to fit very neatly with the other and

greater revolution in historical periodization achieved in the same decades by

Peter Brown and his legion of  students and followers. Brown has taught us

to abandon the notion of  an ‘antiquity’ giving way rather suddenly to the

‘middle ages’ with the decline of  the western empire in the fifth century, in

favour of  a ‘late antiquity’ which experienced a long and comprehensive, but

also slow and gradual transformation running all the way from the third

century to the eighth, or even beyond.

12

 His perspective seemed to be illus-

trated and reinforced by the more narrowly focused studies of  the French

‘neoromanists’,

13

 reviving and reinvigorating the conception of  a society – a

southern society, it should be said

14

 – still essentially Roman in its structures,

institutions and even religious attitudes and observances right up to the tenth

century, when it collapsed cataclysmically before the onslaught of  seigneurial

violence which constituted the ‘feudal revolution’.

It is only to be expected that such a radical reinterpretation of  the course

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132

Medieval and Early Modern Periods

of  temporal change should seek its spiritual counterpart. Indeed, if  we were

in search of  a test by falsifiability for this new periodization, and of  the

question whether the transformation of  the society and institutions of  Western

Europe which, everyone agrees, occurred between the ninth and the thirteenth

centuries was revolutionary or evolutionary in nature, a good one might be

precisely whether the religious changes which took place at the same time are

amenable to the same chronology and explanation. In this context we need to

remember the work of  two masters who have not written directly on the

issues with which we are concerned here, but who bestride our little world

like colossi. Jacques le Goff ’s profound reading of  texts ostensibly dedicated

to piety or fantasy, exactly placed in their social and economic context and

informed by the questions and insights of  anthropology, have placed our

grasp of  mental structures and horizons on an entirely new plane. His insights

help us appreciate the rhythms of  very long-term change as well as the ways

in which ritual can be used in the shorter term to capture and if  necessary

enforce changes in the modes of  domination and exploitation.

15

 The same

sensitivity to the ways in which religious change and religious conflict can

illuminate what are otherwise the most mysterious problems of  social relations

– the acquisition and exercise of  power in small communities, how the

connections and tensions between the lofty and the humble, the strong and

the weak, the literate and the peasant, the city and the countryside, operate

and are animated – has lain at the heart of  Peter Brown’s work since the late



s.

16

 That is what has made his ‘world of  late antiquity’ so much more

than a mere revival of  the continuity thesis of  the nineteenth-century ‘Roman-

ists’, or even of  Pirenne’s magnificent perception of  the context provided for

the post-classical societies of  its western extremity by the rhythms of  first

millennium Eurasia.

17

Georges Duby himself  always showed considerable sensitivity to the in-

terpretation of  religion in the context of  social change, and many of  his

writings, especially in the 



s, are enlivened by comments on popular heresy

far shrewder and more illuminating than what was being produced at that

time by specialists in the field.

18

 His most developed statement of  his thesis

of  a ‘feudal revolution’ centred on the decades around the millennium,