From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of enslavement.

Pierre Bonnassie (Author), Jean Birrell (Translated by)

9780521112550, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 June 2009

368 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.47 kg

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of a public order that also sheltered free peasants, giving way in the tenth and eleventh centuries to a new regime of harsh lordships that mark the beginnings of feudalism. He shows that feudalism in south-western Europe was no less significant than in northern European lands.

List of maps
Foreword by T. N. Bisson
Abbreviations
1. The survival and extinction of the slave system in the early medieval West (fourth to eleventh centuries)
2. Society and mentalities in Visigothic Spain
3. From the Rhone to Galicia: origins and modalities of the feudal order
4. Descriptions of fortresses in the Book of Miracles of Sainte-Foy of Conques
5. The formation of Catalan feudalism and its early expansion (to c. 1150)
6. Feudal conventions in eleventh-century Catalonia
7. The noble and the ignoble: a new nobility and a new servitude in Catalonia at the end of the eleventh century
8. Rural communities in Catalonia and Valencia (from the ninth to the mid-fourteenth centuries)
9. From one servitude to another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdom at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987–1031)
10. Marc Bloch, historian of servitude: reflections on the concept of 'servile class'
Index.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD]