Economic Activity in a Peasant Society

Gregory wrote about some sophisticated forms of economic activity that existed in early medieval Europe, such as long-distance trade, which depended on surpluses. But he also wrote about famines. Most people in his day lived on the edge of survival. From the fifth to the mid-eighth century, the mean temperature in Europe dropped. This climatic change spelled shortages in crops and the likelihood of famine and disease.

An underlying reason for these calamities was the weakness of the agricultural economy. Even the meager population of the Merovingian world was too large for the land’s productive capacities. The heavy, wet soils of northern Europe were difficult to turn and aerate. Technological limitations meant a limited food supply, and agricultural work was not equitably or efficiently allocated and managed. A leisure class of landowning warriors and churchmen lived off the work of peasant men, who tilled the fields, and peasant women, who wove cloth, gardened, brewed, and baked.

Occasionally surpluses developed, either from good harvests in peacetime or plunder in warfare, and these changed hands, although rarely in an impersonal, commercial manner. Most economic transactions of the seventh and eighth centuries were part of a gift economy, a system of give-and-take: the rich took plunder, demanded tribute, hoarded harvests, and minted coins—all to be redistributed to friends, followers, and dependents. Powerful men and women amassed gold, silver, ornaments, and jewelry in their treasuries and grain in their storehouses to mark their power, add to their prestige, and demonstrate their generosity. Those benefiting from the gifts of the rich included monasteries and churches. The gift economy was the dynamic behind most of the exchanges of goods and money in the Merovingian period.

However, some economic activity in this period was purely commercial and impersonal. Long-distance traders transported slaves and raw materials such as furs and honey from areas of northern Europe such as the British Isles and Sweden. These they sold to traders in Byzantium and the Islamic world, returning home with luxuries and manufactured goods such as silks and papyrus. Byzantine, Islamic, and western European descendants of the Roman Empire kept in tenuous contact with one another by making voyages for trade, diplomatic ventures, and pilgrimages. Seventh- and eighth-century sources speak of Byzantines, Syrians, and Jews as the chief intermediaries of such long-distance trade. Many of these merchants lived in the still-thriving port cities of the Mediterranean. Gregory of Tours associated Jews with commerce, complaining that they sold things “at a higher price than they were worth.”

Although the population of the Merovingian world was overwhelmingly Christian, Jews were integrated into every aspect of secular life. They used Hebrew in worship, but otherwise they spoke the same languages as Christians and used Latin in their legal documents. Jews dressed as everyone else did, and they engaged in the same occupations. Many Jews planted and tended vineyards, partly because of the importance of wine in synagogue services and partly because they could easily sell the surplus. Some Jews were rich landowners, with slaves and dependent peasants working for them; others were independent peasants of modest means. Some Jews lived in towns with a small Jewish quarter that included both homes and synagogues, but most Jews, like their Christian neighbors, lived on the land.