Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 148

The last few years have seen a flurry of publications focusing on the ‘local’, inequality, and peasants (more recently referred to as the subaltern). Contributions from scholars such as Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, Nicolas Schroeder, and Thomas Kohl have helped us to approach otherwise hard-to-see groups in new and revealing ways. One significant part of this effort has been edited volumes collecting the fruit of many scholars’ labours, e.g., Castillo et al.’s Social inequality in early medieval Europe: Local societies and beyond, or Bernhard Zeller et al.’s Neighbours and strangers: Local societies in early medieval Europe. This volume complements these works, seeking to bridge the gap between the local and the supralocal. Something that has enabled such a wide view is that this volume represents the culmination of knowledge from three funded collaborations across a decade and follows two previous volumes (Andrew Reynolds, Wendy Davies, and Guy Halsall’s People and space in the Middle Ages and Julio Escalona and Andrew Reynolds’s Scale and scale change in the early Middle Ages). Accordingly, their collective focus has shifted from the local worlds with which they began to tracing out the pathways of power from their foundations to the summit. As the editors make quite clear, while this volume seeks to unpick relationships between the top and base of the superstructure of society, it attempts to do so carefully, well aware of the risks of teleological arguments surrounding the issue of state formation (p. 3). They acknowledge that we should not assume that states were inevitable or all-encompassing developments. Indeed, this project has gone quite some way to illustrate the unevenness of ‘state’ power across early medieval polities (I use the word state here as a convenient shorthand to denote the governing structures of medieval polities).

The essays of the fourteen scholars who have contributed to this volume cover, via a rather generous reading of the ‘early medieval’ time-frame, the fifth to the thirteenth centuries and focus on regions ranging from Iceland to Italy. Rather than attempting to group them together chronologically or regionally, the editors have opted to divide the material into three sections: the first focuses upon society at the local level; the second examines the supralocal; and the third surveying connections between the two.

In the first part, examining the evidence from the local, are contributions by Grenville Astill, Margarita Fernández Mier, Alexandra Chavarría Arnau, and Iñaki Martín Viso. These essays argue, in one form or another, for the standardizing effect of the state. Where the state’s touch is at its lightest we find greater divergence in local farming or organizational practices. It may go without saying that in order to find evidence of local, rural neighbourhoods, the scholars in this volume have made extensive use of archaeological evidence. Astill uses evidence of land reallotment, open-field systems, and settlement nucleation, to reconsider James Campbell’s maximalist interpretation of the early English state from an archaeological point of view. Mier contrasts the evidence from two villages, Vigaña and Villanueva, one near a ‘power centre’ and the other deep in the mountains, to highlight the differences in the communities’ experiences of supralocal power. Arnau and Viso use burial evidence from northern Italy and western Iberia respectively to draw out local agency and the ways in which these methods of interment were erased or adopted by the state.

The second section, focusing on the supralocal, comprises essays by Frode Iversen, Alfonso Vigil-Escalera Guirado, Orri Vésteinsson, Letty Ten Harkel, Stuart Brookes and Andrew Reynolds. Iversen begins the section with an examination of the Thing (public assemblies) in Iceland and its role as an ideological centre for state formation in the region. Unlike the supralocal communities in Iversen’s analysis which had the potential to influence state decisions, Guirado’s examination of similar small, supralocal groups in Central Spain shows that, in the face of a complex, post-Roman state, it could be much harder for regional collectives to shape state-level processes. The work of both Vésteinsson and Ten Harkel, examining Icelandic identity under Norwegian rule and Carolingian control of Frisia respectively, illustrates how light the touch of the state could be in early medieval Europe. Brookes and Reynolds’s co-authored chapter brings the focus back to England and the issue of the intrusive early English state. Supporting the idea that the complex territorial and political divisions of early medieval England, such as the shire, served to reinforce top-down power, they argue that the manifestation of these systems differed on the ground.

The third and final part, examining interactions between the local and supralocal, are papers by Wendy Davies, Álvaro Carvajal Castro, Julio Escalona, and Alexander James Langlands. Central to interactions between the local and supralocal is the transference of land, a process which is best seen in charter material. Accordingly, all four chapters make extensive use of such evidence. While it is important to avoid teleological arguments for state formation, Davies flips this issue somewhat on its head. She argues that the longevity of charter practices indicates that the apparatus of the state can be surprisingly resilient even when we might expect it to have disappeared i.e., during the failure of the state itself. Reminding us that paying close attention to terminology matters, Castro suggests that the ubiquitous term ‘villa’, used in charters from tenth-century León and which once referred to a nebulous unit of aristocratic landholding, only came to denote a physical villa with the intensification of lordship. Escalona and Langlands both utilize the concept of Dense Local Knowledge to posit that local actors possessed a valuable asset – detailed knowledge of boundaries and the landscape – which was not accessible to lords without consultation. This proved to be a pinch point which offered ground for negotiation.

Given that this volume covers so much space and time, it is a testament to the slow form of scholarship used throughout the project that it has remained a cohesive, rather than a discursive, volume. As a result, it offers a vital window into the world of medieval European agrarian societies, both local and supralocal. One comes away from this volume, or at least this reviewer did, with a deeper appreciation for the granularity of polity formation in early medieval Europe.