Medieval commune
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Image:San Gimignano.jpg Communes in Europe in the Middle Ages were sworn allegiances of mutual defense (both physical and freedoms) among community members of a town or city. They took many forms, and no two were alike in organization or make-up. The Late Latin connotations (con+munitii) are those of possessions, stores and preparations that the community held in common.
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Description
During the 10th century in several parts of Western Europe, as populations increased and a money-based economy emerged, peasants who wished to leave the oppressive life of serfdom gravitated towards newly emerging walled towns and the comparative freedoms and opportunities of commerce.
Such townspeople needed physical protection from lawless nobles and bandits, part of the motivation for gathering behind communal walls. The walled city represented protection, but once a townsman left the city walls, he (for women scarcely travelled) was at the mercy of often violent and lawless nobles in the countryside. Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection and justice, each city had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the city walls, and outside. Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for turning the cities into self-governing corporations. Although in most cases the development of communes was connected with that of the cities, there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that were formed to protect the common interests of villagers.
What did it mean for a commune member to defend another? Obviously if a commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call for help, as it would be unlikely anyone would be around in time. Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker, the threat of revenge being a form of defense. However, if the attacker was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle (as was often the case), the town commune could not muster the forces to attack him directly; instead they might attack the nobles family, burn his crops, kill his serfs, or destroy his orchards in retribution.
In addition to physical protection was the struggle to establish liberties, freedom to conduct and regulate their own affairs and security from arbitrary taxation and harassment from the bishop, abbot or count in whose jurisdiction these obscure and ignoble social outsiders lay—a long process of struggle to obtain charters that guaranteed such basics as the right to hold a market. Such charters were often purchased at exhorbitant rates, or granted, not by the local power, which was naturally jealous of prerogatives, but by the king or the emperor, who came thereby to hope to enlist the towns as allies in the struggle to centralize power that was arising in tandem with the rise of the communes. "The burghers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were ruthlessly harassed, blackmailed, subjected to oppressive taxes and humiliated. This drove the bourgeois back upon their own resources, and it accounts for the intensely corporate and excessively organized character of medieval cities" (Cantor 1993 p 231)
Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at their heart, communes were sworn allegiances of mutual defense. When a commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an oath in a public ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of trouble, and to maintain the peace within the city proper.
The commune movement started in the 10th century, with a few earlier ones like Forlì (possibly 889), and gained strength in the 11th century in northern Italy which had the most urbanized population of Europe at the time. In central and northern Italy, and in Provence and Septimania, the Roman cities had almost all survived—even if grass grew in their streets—largely as administrative centers for a diocese or for the local representative of a distant kingly or imperial power. In the Low Countries, new towns were founded upon long-distance trade, where the staple was the woolen cloth-making industry. It then spread in the early 12th century to France, Germany and Spain and elsewhere. England never saw much of the urban commune movement (although it had some rural ones) because it was by comparison a well-run kingdom and did not need local protection forces. The sites for these ab ovo towns, more often than not, were the fortified burghs of counts, bishops or territorial abbots. Other towns were simply market villages, local centers of exchange.
Social order
According to an English cleric of the late 10th century, society was composed of the three orders: those who fight, those who pray and those who work (the nobles, the clergy and the peasants). In theory this was a balance between spiritual and secular peers with the third order providing for the other two. The urban communes were a break in this order. The Church and King both had mixed reactions to communes. On the one hand, they agreed safety and protection from lawless nobles was in everyone's best interest. The commune's intention was to keep the peace through the threat of revenge, and the Church was sympathetic to the end result of peace. However, the Church had their own ways to enforce peace, such as the Peace and Truce of God movement, for example. On the other hand, communes disrupted the order of medieval society; the methods the commune used, eye for an eye, violence begets violence, were generally not acceptable to Church or King. Furthermore, there was a sense that communes threatened the medieval social order. Only the noble lords were allowed by custom to fight, and ostensibly the merchant townspeople were workers, not warriors. As such, the nobility and the clergy sometimes accepted communes, but other times did not. One of the most famous cases of a commune being suppressed and the resulting defiant urban revolt occurred in the French town of Laon in 1112.
References and further reading
- Cantor, Norman F. 1993. The Civilization of the Middle Ages ((New York: HarperCollins)
- Jones, Philip. 1997. The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
- Lansing, Carol, 1992. The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune. (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
- Sella, Pietro, "The Statutes of the Commune of Bugelle (Biella)" 1904. 14th century statutes of a Piedmontese commune (Latin and English translations), express the nature of the commune in vivid detail, productions of medieval society and the medieval personality.
- Tabacco, Giovanni, 1989. The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, 400-1400,translator, Rosalind Brown Jensen (New York: Cambridge University Press)
- Waley, Donald, 1969 etc. The Italian City-Republics (3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1988.)
- Guelph University, "The Urban Past: IV. The Medieval City" A bibliography.