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1 results

  • 2 - Rural economy and country life

  • from PART I - GENERAL THEMES
  • Edited by Timothy Reuter, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    13 March 2000, pp 25-63

  • Summary

    Blinded by classical towns or fascinated by the mosaics which decorated a few exceptionally rich houses, ancient historians have refused to admit, in spite of archaeological evidence, that to the left and to the right of the Rhine, the Germanic and the Graeco-Roman rural economy were in much the same state. The basic unit of daily life was the family. The historian who examines the family of the first half of the tenth century will find three levels. This chapter suggests that the evolution of family structure was accompanied by the presence or the persistence of human groupings such as the hundred or even simply parishes. It shows why people needed to make a survey of cultivated lands before examining the environment. From the tenth to the eighteenth century it was the seigneurie in which the men of Europe lived, in forms showing wide chronological and geographical variation.