Cannibals and Kings (27 page)

Despite its reputation for being a “dark age,” the early medieval period was a time of population growth and of expansion and intensification of agricultural production. Around
A.D.
500 there were probably only about nine persons per square mile in transalpine Europe, but by
A.D
. 1086 England had reached a density of thirty persons per square mile. It was only after
A.D.
500 that iron axes and saws became cheap enough to be used by the average farmer. Settlements expanded into the remaining forest lands and the edges of moors
and swamps. Lumbering, house building, and fence construction were intensified. The invention of the horseshoe increased the utility of the horse as a traction animal. And the development of blacksmithing led to the introduction of a new kind of plow—a heavy iron-tipped instrument mounted on wheels and capable of cutting deep furrows in the wet clays and loams characteristic of rainy, forested regions. Because the furrows were cut deep, cross-plowing was unnecesary and the most economical field under cultivation became the one whose shape required the least number of turnarounds per unit area, that is, a field longer than it was broad. This new shape facilitated an improved method of crop rotation, which reduced the need for letting fields lie fallow. The whole system was admirably suited to the relations of production characteristic of the manor. Each peasant family had access to the manor’s blacksmith facilities, heavy plow, teams of draft animals, and contiguous fields which a farmer could not have afforded on an independent basis. Why, then, did this system not endure beyond the fourteenth century?

Explanations for the collapse of feudalism usually begin by noting that trade and manufacture increased in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and that the search for profits transformed all the customary feudal obligations into demand-and-supply market relationships. But as Immanuel Wallerstein points out, “Feudalism as a system should not be thought of as something antithetical to trade.” Feudal lords had always encouraged the growth of towns and the development of town-based artisans and merchants who could facilitate the conversion of the manor’s agricultural products into a multitude of goods and services that the manor could not provide. They were never ideologically opposed to buying and selling and making profits. What has to be
explained, therefore, is why it took over 500 years for the towns and markets to begin to subvert the feudal order.

The answer, I think, is that towns and markets grew slowly as long as the serfs and free peasants could maintain a relatively high standard of living from their traditional agricultural activities. The development of commercial life to the point where it threatened the feudal status quo had to wait for the build-up of population density. As density rose, efficiency declined, and so did agricultural profitability from the point of view both of the peasants and of the feudal lords. This encouraged the feudal lords to seek supplementary sources of income, the most important of which was the raising of sheep for wool, which in turn restricted the amount of land available for food crops, reduced the size of peasant holdings, pauperized much of the rural population, and stimulated migrations to the towns and wool production centers.

My account of this process owes a great deal to the work of Richard G. Wilkinson. In his book
Poverty and Progress
Wilkinson indicates that the fertility of arable land and the yield from seed were in decline in England during the thirteenth century:

Attempts were made to increase yields per acre through liming, marling, plowing in straw ash, sowing more intensively, and experimenting with new seeds. But to no avail. Although overall production went up, population went up even further. The price of wheat almost trebled
between the late twelfth and early fourteenth centuries at the same time that English exports of wool rose by 40 percent. A rise in grain prices meant that families who lacked sufficient lands to feed themselves were pushed down close to or below the pauperization threshold.

As I pointed out in the discussion of population growth among the Yanomamo, the period immediately before and shortly after the overloading and depletion of a preindustrial ecosystem should be characterized by peak rates of female infanticide. Although this proposition could not be tested in the Yanomamo case, the data are available for late medieval England. According to Josiah Rüssel, the junior age sex ratio rose to a peak of 130:100 between 1250 and 1358, and remained drastically imbalanced for another century. Of course, since infanticide in the Judeo-Christian tradition was considered murder, every effort was made by parents to make it seem as if the deaths of unwanted babies was purely accidental. Barbara Kellum’s study of infanticide in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England suggests that the coroner would be called in if a child was scalded to death by a pot of water that tipped off a stove, or was drowned in a pan of milk, or fell down a well. But suffocation, the most frequent cause of “accidental” infant death, was handled by the parish priest. Death by suffocation was routinely attributed to “overlaying,” and the mother was rarely punished with anything more severe than public remonstrance and penitence—restriction to a diet of bread and water.

The theory behind “overlaying” was that a mother had the right to nurse her child in her own bed, keeping it at her side during the night, but that she was obligated to exercise care in not falling asleep and rolling over on it. When a baby died under these circumstances, homicidal
intent was impossible to prove. Obviously, however, mothers who were strongly motivated to rear their babies would seldom roll over on them. Selective infanticide, not accident, is the only explanation for the huge imbalance in the late medieval juvenile sex ratios.

Despite the high rate of female infanticide, the population of England continued to increase until 1348, when the most devastating plague in the history of Europe—the Black Death—carried off between one-quarter and one-half of the population. From what is known about the relationship between malnutrition and resistance to disease, I think it is reasonable to suppose that a significant percentage of the mortality rate in the Black Death pandemic was related to the deterioration of nutritional standards. Certainly, the shift in population from countryside to towns and the increase in the overall density of settlements were causally related to the outbreak.

In the aftermath of the plague, Europe entered a period of intense political and economic unrest. The feudal kingdoms were shaken from top to bottom by massive peasant uprisings, messianic movements, an outbreak of cults that practiced self-flagellation, massacres of Jews, schisms within the Catholic Church, crusades to suppress heretics, the founding of the Inquisition, and a ceaseless round of wars, one of which is known appropriately enough as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). What all this adds up to, I suggest, is that the intensification of the manorial mode of production had reached its ecological limits and that the crisis preceding the emergence of the new mode of production which we call capitalism was at bottom similar to the crises preceding the neolithic “revolution” and the rise of pristine states. Let me make this point clearer. I am not claiming that ecology and reproductive
pressures alone are capable of accounting for the crisis of feudalism in the fourteenth century. Other factors such as the exploitation of peasants by feudal lords and the rise of new classes of merchants and bankers also exerted an influence. The pressure from the feudal nobility and from the rising mercantile interests played a role in producing the crisis just as surely as the corrupt ambitions of China’s managerial bureaucracy played a role in destroying numerous dynasties. Moreover, I find it conceivable that had there been less pressure from the feudal ruling class to get the peasants to intensify production, population might have stopped growing temporarily at a point low enough to avert a crisis and to keep the standard of living above the pauperization threshold. Perhaps the Church’s opposition to infanticide also played a role in accelerating the growth of population and in precipitating the crisis.

But the ecological factors cannot be ignored. The consequences of enclosing lands for wool production would have been insignificant had the capacity of the unenclosed lands to produce additional food crops not already been pushed beyond the limit of marginal returns. And I see no reason to doubt that eventually, because of some climatic perturbation, reproductive pressures would have been sufficient to set the stage for a shift to a new mode of production. After all, the cycle of intensifications, depletions, and new modes of production started in classless, pre-state band and village societies. I think we must conclude, therefore, that the manorial system was inherently unstable for both political-economic and ecological reasons and must not attempt in our present state of knowledge to assign greater causal significance to one or the other.

One question that remains is why the decline in population
after the Black Death did not become part of a cycle of demographic and economic ups and downs similar to the rise and fall of living standards that lay behind the dynastic changes in hydraulic society. Why, in other words, was feudalism replaced by an entirely new system instead of being restored when the crisis had passed? Here, too, I believe Wittfogel’s theory provides the key by drawing attention to the contrasting ecologies of the feudal and hydraulic worlds—although again I want to stress the existence of an interplay between ecological and political-economic factors.

In hydraulic societies pauperization and dynastic collapse were typically associated with the decay and disrepair of the waterworks. The first order of business was to restore the hydraulic infrastructure. This was up to the new dynasty, which acted not out of altruism but out of attention to the maximization of its own political and economic welfare. In committing itself to the restoration of the hydraulic infrastructure, the new dynasty was automatically committing the entire society to the restoration of the political economy of agro-managerial despotism. In the crisis of European feudalism, on the other hand, the problem lay in the landlessness of the victims of enclosures and the raising of animals on lands that were needed to raise food crops. The first order of business of the manorial lords turned merchants and manufacturers could not be to drive out the sheep, restore the peasants to the land, and stop manufacturing woolens. The maximization of their own immediate political and economic welfare lay not in going backward but in going forward into larger and more uninhibited attempts to make money and accumulate capital by raising more sheep and manufacturing more woolens. In short, the manorial system was not restored; rather,
it was replaced by a system based on scientific technology, machine production, capitalism, and parliamentary democracy.

Under capitalism the distribution of most goods and services is carried out by “companies” which control or have access to accumulated supplies of money or “capital.” The object of such companies is to accumulate more capital and to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible by maximizing the rate of making profits. A company can increase its rate of profit if it gains a technological advantage over its competitors and lowers its unit costs. Technological innovation, therefore, soon becomes the key to the accumulation of capital and business success. Science, in turn, provides the key to technological innovation. Hence capitalism, science, and scientific technologies form a distinctive mutually reinforcing complex that originated in Europe as the resolution of the crisis of feudalism.

Many features of this complex were also present in the hydraulic societies. The Chinese, for example, had private property in land, price-making markets for agricultural and manufactured goods, rich merchants, and a network of banks and merchant associations. Peasant families bought and sold in local markets with the intent of maximizing profits. Moreover, the Chinese emperors encouraged scientific and technological innovations. In fact, we now know that until the fourteenth century China’s rate of scientific and technological advance was as great as that of Europe. Modern historical research has demonstrated that the Chinese were responsible for developing a crucial element of the watch—namely, the escapement, the part that prevents the spring from unwinding faster when it is tightly wound. Ironically, it was the Chinese who invented gunpowder, which the Europeans used in their conquest of the Orient. Because
of investment in government-controlled dams, canals, and irrigation systems, Chinese water mills were superior to those in Europe. Joseph Needham, the great historian of Chinese science and technology, regards the Chinese water-powered metallurgical blowing machine as the direct ancestor of the steam engine. Needham also credits the Chinese with the invention of the first computer, the canal lock gate, the iron chain suspension bridge, the first true mechanical crank, the stern-post rudder, and the man-lifting kite. And as long ago as
A.D.
1313 the Chinese were experimenting with water-driven spinning machines that were the direct prototypes of the European spinning jennies.

Despite these great experiments, one may reasonably doubt that China would ever have developed an industrial mode of production without the threat and stimulus of the European example. In China technological advantage over one’s competitors never became the key factor in raising profits and accumulating capital. The key variable in Chinese commercial life was the support of the agro-managerial bureaucracy—Marx’s “bureau of internal plunder.” Without proper imperial connections, profits could be dissipated by corrupt officials. Licenses to trade could be arbitrarily suspended, and businesses that proved too lucrative were in constant danger of being swallowed up by the government. In other words, in China the growth of private trade and manufacture followed the growth of the agro-managerial state and remained an important but dependent aspect of the centralized political economy. “At best,” writes Wittfogel, the masters of hydraulic society “treated what capitalist enterprise there was like a useful garden. At worst, they clipped and stripped the bushes of capital-based business to a stalk.” In post-medieval Europe, by contrast, private industry and commerce
accompanied or even preceded the emergence of the European parliamentary monarchies. The power of Europe’s kings and merchants emerged from a common substratum of feudal restrictions and limitations, and both kings and merchants competed for control over the post-feudal political economy.