Ordinary Early Medieval Lives

“What’s surprising—particularly given modern stereotypes about the illiterate Dark Ages—is just how pervasive writing was,” Brown says. “These documents cover all sorts of conceivable circumstances, and they don’t just involve members of the upper classes. We see middling landowners and poor farmers as well as their unfree tenants, servants, and laborers too. They may not have been able to write themselves, but they knew bloody well what documents were, they knew who to go to when they needed one, and there’s evidence that they kept them. For example, if a lord frees one of his unfree servants, a document is produced, and that servant is going to keep it. Very few actual documents like this survive because the institutions whose records we have—mainly churches and monasteries—were not involved in the transactions that produced them. But the formularies give us an idea of what they looked like.”

Brown says the trove of document models he has analyzed cover not only economic transactions, like property sales, gifts, or exchanges, but also such things as marriages, divorces, parents leaving property to their children, childless couples leaving property to each other, a father making sure his disabled son is taken care of after he dies, elderly people adopting younger adults in exchange for being taken care of in their old age, disputes between neighbors, and much more.

So, what do these documents tell Brown about life in the early Middle Ages? Well, one thing that surprised him is that they show women wielding more independent power than you might expect.

“You often see women producing their own documents or being presented as principals in legal transactions,” he says. “They weren’t just appendages of their husbands. You see women appealing directly to the king for help and being able to travel over wide distances. It’s striking just how much agency women had. I didn’t expect it.”

The documents also show that violence was a much more regular feature of people’s lives than it is for us.

“We live today in a society where the state has a monopoly on the use of force,” he says. “If I were to come over and punch you, that would be illegal, but at a time and place when the state is much weaker than it is now, people had a fundamental right to use force on their own behalf, to take vengeance, or to defend themselves.”

Though violent acts could be expected, they were not unregulated. A person could only kill or harm another for what the community thought was just cause. Violence had to take place within a legal framework, and there was always a price to pay.

“If you killed somebody, you would have to pay for them. It’s called the blood price,” Brown says. “If I killed your brother, I may have thought I had a good reason, but you and your family are very angry with me, and you’re going to come after me unless I agree to pay you a certain amount of money to settle the debt. These amounts of money are specified in law. So, I’ll pay you the money, and you’ll write me a receipt that says you got it and that I’m free from any trouble about the matter. We only know about these receipts because they show up in the formularies.”

Brown says the era was also one in which patronage and nepotism were not just rampant but were acceptable and even necessary means for those who did not have power to gain access to those who did. If you were a peasant with a problem that needed solving, you might appeal directly to your king, whether by getting someone to send a letter for you or by walking 60 miles to make your request in person at the king’s court. More often, however, you would appeal to your lord or to your local bishop or abbot, who might have a relative who knew someone at court who could get the king’s ear.