Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PUNF (Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, 888-1121)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-09-01 al 2025-08-31
The Practices of Unfreedom in Northern France, 888-1121 (PUNF) project’s primary aim was to re-frame historical understandings of unfree persons in France during the central Middle Ages by applying methods and frameworks from the growing field of the history of slavery and dependence. Traditionally, legally unfree people in medieval societies have been considered as either ‘slaves’ or ‘serfs’, with the moment of transition from Roman-style slavery to medieval serfdom the object of much scholarly debate. However, in the past decade scholarship has increasingly recognised that unfree status was far more fluid and variable than previously understood. In drawing on the global comparative history of slavery, these new methodologies and approaches can provide more nuanced insights into the lives of unfree people in the Middle Ages and the power relationships which underlay unfreedom as an institution.
In order to bridge the divide between the twentieth-century historiography of medieval French society and the emerging methodologies from global slavery studies, the PUNF project sought to conduct a detailed analysis of practices of unfreedom as recorded in the documentary evidence from four ecclesiastical provinces, covering what is now northern France and western Belgium, between the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the twelfth century AD. By forming a picture of unfreedom from first principles, based on evidence of practice, a more nuanced understanding of the role of unfree people in medieval society can be achieved which can transcend the moribund ‘slave-serf’ binary. This new understanding of unfreedom was to be explored through three key themes:
1) The Imposition of Unfreedom: That is to say, the ways in which lords imposed their demands upon the unfree, the extent to which they prioritised social or economic domination, and the implications of these for strategies of élite power.
2) The Agency of the Unfree: That is to say, the reaction of unfree people to the demands of lords, the possibility for negotiation, evasion or resistance to unfreedom, and the scope of action available to unfree people to escape or ameliorate their status.
3) The Historical Record of Unfreedom: That is the places, times and methods by which practices of unfreedom written down, described and preserved, and the extent to which these processes of source creation reveal patterns and lacunae in the historical evidence for unfreedom in the central Middle Ages.
By synthesising the findings of these three core themes, the aim of the PUNF project was to define a new framework by which to understand the role of servitude within French society in the post-Carolingian period.
In order to bridge the divide between the twentieth-century historiography of medieval French society and the emerging methodologies from global slavery studies, the PUNF project sought to conduct a detailed analysis of practices of unfreedom as recorded in the documentary evidence from four ecclesiastical provinces, covering what is now northern France and western Belgium, between the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the twelfth century AD. By forming a picture of unfreedom from first principles, based on evidence of practice, a more nuanced understanding of the role of unfree people in medieval society can be achieved which can transcend the moribund ‘slave-serf’ binary. This new understanding of unfreedom was to be explored through three key themes:
1) The Imposition of Unfreedom: That is to say, the ways in which lords imposed their demands upon the unfree, the extent to which they prioritised social or economic domination, and the implications of these for strategies of élite power.
2) The Agency of the Unfree: That is to say, the reaction of unfree people to the demands of lords, the possibility for negotiation, evasion or resistance to unfreedom, and the scope of action available to unfree people to escape or ameliorate their status.
3) The Historical Record of Unfreedom: That is the places, times and methods by which practices of unfreedom written down, described and preserved, and the extent to which these processes of source creation reveal patterns and lacunae in the historical evidence for unfreedom in the central Middle Ages.
By synthesising the findings of these three core themes, the aim of the PUNF project was to define a new framework by which to understand the role of servitude within French society in the post-Carolingian period.
The primary activity of the PUNF project was a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of documentary records which preserve mentions of unfree people from the period AD 888 to 1121. These documents, mostly charters which were preserved in the archives or cartularies of major churches and monasteries, were drawn from the area covered by the medieval ecclesiastical provinces (i.e. archdioceses) of Tours, Rouen, Sens and Reims, corresponding roughly to modern northern France and western Belgium.
The process of analysis was composed of four phases, each of which constituted a major part of the project’s activities. The first phase involved the identification of records relating to unfreedom from among the thousands of medieval French charters surviving from the period. This work was done primarily on the basis of printed editions of medieval cartularies (compilations of charters), as well as databases and archival catalogues for documents which have not yet been edited. The second phase of work involved the coding and analysis of individual documents in a relational database. The design and structure of this database reflects the scientific objectives of the project, and involved a significant degree of calibration to ensure necessary data was captured without the need for overly-burdensome data entry. This was followed by a continuous process of coding and entry as documents were identified and analysed.
The third phase of activity involved the physical and material analysis of documents which survive in their original manuscript format (whether single-sheet charters or cartularies). Undertaken in libraries and archives across France and Belgium, the study of the handwriting, writing supports, addendums and copies and archival notation allowed for a fuller understanding of the conditions under which unfree practices were recorded. The final phase of the project activity was a synthetical analysis, which brought together the data gathered in the other phases of the project to draw wider conclusions on the processes and impacts of unfree status in medieval French society.
The process of analysis was composed of four phases, each of which constituted a major part of the project’s activities. The first phase involved the identification of records relating to unfreedom from among the thousands of medieval French charters surviving from the period. This work was done primarily on the basis of printed editions of medieval cartularies (compilations of charters), as well as databases and archival catalogues for documents which have not yet been edited. The second phase of work involved the coding and analysis of individual documents in a relational database. The design and structure of this database reflects the scientific objectives of the project, and involved a significant degree of calibration to ensure necessary data was captured without the need for overly-burdensome data entry. This was followed by a continuous process of coding and entry as documents were identified and analysed.
The third phase of activity involved the physical and material analysis of documents which survive in their original manuscript format (whether single-sheet charters or cartularies). Undertaken in libraries and archives across France and Belgium, the study of the handwriting, writing supports, addendums and copies and archival notation allowed for a fuller understanding of the conditions under which unfree practices were recorded. The final phase of the project activity was a synthetical analysis, which brought together the data gathered in the other phases of the project to draw wider conclusions on the processes and impacts of unfree status in medieval French society.
The results of the project represent a major progression beyond the state of the art in our understanding of the place of unfreedom in medieval society, and the collected data provides numerous avenues for continued exploitation and further research. At the most fundamental level, the project has identified far more documentary records of the practice of unfreedom than has previously been recognised in the literature, which has drawn its understanding largely from normative sources. Alongside well-known concentrations of documentary material in archives such as Marmoutier, Sint-Pieters Ghent and Saint-Florent-lès-Saumur, the project has concluded that small numbers of documents relating to unfree people are present in virtually every surviving ecclesiastical archive from the period (often less than a dozen per institution), which allows for a far more representative understanding of the practices of unfreedom. The project database has illuminated the range of strategies imposed by lords to impose and maintain unfree status, with submission rituals a common practice among ecclesiastical lords, sales and purchases of unfree people present in the evidence but at low rates, and the use of explicit violence to enforce status exceptionally rare. The project also concluded that unfree people themselves had a wide range of possible responses to unfreedom, largely determined by their existing relationships and networks within the lordship: well-connected dependants could gain significant wealth and status, at times enough to negotiate better conditions and even manumission (but only from lay lords), while lower-status dependants had a much more restricted scope of response, primarily escape or evasion of obligations. Finally, the project has conclusively demonstrated the complex archival and documentary history of medieval unfreedom, in which manuscript analysis shows that records of unfreedom did not merely preserve social status in writing, but was a tool of power which allowed for the reproduction of unfreedom across generations.