Old and New Social Figures

In France in 1016, Adalberon₅ the bishop of Laon₅ wrote with con­viction and satisfaction that Christian society was made up of “those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor” (protores, bellatores, Iaboratoresy^x In this synthetic picture society was divided into three orders: the agrarian aristocracies, traditionally linked to bearing arms, the arts of war, and the exercise and responsibilities of religion; the clergy, in cities, towns, and rural areas and on the various levels of the official hierarchy (parishes, dioceses, and so forth), plus canons and monks; and finally the laborers, those who worked with their hands to cultivate the soil.

The idea of labor was secondary, and it was restricted to manual activities, principally those of the peasant (free, serf, or slave). Other ideals and values had priority over it, such as physical strength, war­fare, or the religious life. It was widely believed that not only wealth and well-being but honor and one’s good name were to be conquered and defended by the sword, either by individual force or with the aid of armed bands, and that material interests were to be safeguarded by physical ability and by solidarity within the family, the kinship group, and the socioeconomic group, or by political intrigue. It was agreed that one could also appeal to the imperatives of reason or morality or to the obligations that religion imposed on the faithful; but law, jus­tice that becomes law and provides norms for civil life, skilled use of legal techniques, and even binding, constraining sentences were all

i. Adalberon, Carmen adRotbertum regem, ed. G.-A. Hiickel, ∖nLes poemes satiriques d³Adalberon, Bibliotheque de la Faculte des Lettres de FUniversite de Paris, 13, 2 vols. (Paris: 1901), 155—56. things that remained outside the ideal framework and the vision of a three-part society, even if Iurisperiti_y judges, and notaries did exist.

Craft and commerce were also excluded from this ideal framework. Of course there had for some time been negotiatores who had built up fortunes, but they were regarded with suspicion or aversion. Trade was seen as a practice striving for undue and illicit gain; thus it was considered dangerous and harmful to both social well-being and the salvation of the soul.

In short, to look at society from Adalberon⁵S point of view, one could see milites, clergy, and peasants attached to the land, but arti­sans and merchants, jurists and physicians were simply invisible.

The very lucidity of Adalberon⁵S picture of society shows it to be the last reflection of a world about to enter a profound crisis of trans­formation. Only a few decades later, in the second half of the same eleventh century, signs of radical renewal were strikingly evident, as we have seen concerning the ecclesiastical world. Those signs became so intense and so widespread that they shaped a new civilization. Nat­urally, the new society continued to show vital behavior patterns, atti­tudes, traditions, ideals, and values that belonged to the epoch that was ending, but these now occurred within totally new historical pro­cesses, concrete situations, and theoretical configurations. The struc­ture of “feudal civilization⁵⁵ was crumbling: the fief remained, but not the “civilization” that had made it the pivot and the nucleus of the feudal vision of life; many of the material and ideal elements of feudal­ism still remained, but they were gradually absorbed by the new and original communal and monarchical institutions; bent to other func­tions, they revealed different capacities.

This turmoil and this “rebirth” permeated all aspects of both every­day life and cultural life and all sectors of human endeavors. Adalbe- ron⁵s neat tripartite division was able to survive only in peripheral, isolated, and out-of-the-way areas where the society that had justified it had survived.

The new ^ccvulgar tongues” emerged and spread. When the Italian, Spanish, French, German (and other) languages were born, after a long gestation during the tenth and eleventh centuries, it was an his­torical event without peer in the two millennia of Christianity. The canons of all manual and professional operations were overthrown in all fields: agricultural methods, craft techniques, trade and commer­cial operations, and the techniques of the artist and the scholar. Great stone cities were built, and with them and within them great fortunes were founded and augmented by skillful business dealings and by professional specialization, helped by notable and rapid earnings from an increased demand for city real estate and by higher profits from an enlarged urban market.

In the cities new sorts of persons were active and rose to promi­nence. Some were specialized jurists trained in schools that became famous and gave rise to the modern university. Some were medical doctors (called “physicians”) who borrowed many of their positions and logical procedures for the analysis of reality from newly rediscov­ered Aristotelian texts, and who tested and refined their professional­ism with direct observations. Some were scholars who acquired a growing social and political importance that reached its peak in the age ofhumanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some were artists—painters and sculptors in particular. Some were money bro­kers—exchangers of coins—and highly prestigious and powerful fi­nancial operators who laid the foundations for modern banking, and whose widespread, even international, business dealings gave a mea­sure of economic and cultural unity to a nascent Europe.

A new idea of labor was in the air everywhere: labor was now viewed as including not only manual toil but the activities of the intel­lectual and the professional, the entrepreneur and the merchant.^[49] At the same time, the age-old suspicion and sharp condemnation of trade and commerce declined. The benefits of commerce began to be appreciated, particularly in an age in which one region could be suf­fering a food shortage while others abounded in seasonal produce. People began to understand that commerce was essential for the exis­tence and development of a market, and that if the market was to in­clude specialized goods it could survive only if it was firmly linked to a flourishing international, or at least intercity, commerce.

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