Medieval People
1924
In 1924, medievalist Eileen Power performed an act of historical revolution: she turned away from kings and conquests to find the real medieval world in the lives of ordinary people. Drawing on account books, letters, wills, and parish records, she reconstructs the existence of six individuals who would otherwise have vanished into historical silence a Frankish peasant in Charlemagne's time, a Venetian trader's wife, Chaucer's prioress as she actually lived, a Parisian housewife bargaining in the market, a 15th-century English merchant, and an Essex clothier. Power transforms dry documents into intimate portraits, revealing what people ate, how they worked, what they feared, and what they dreamed. The result reads less like a history textbook than like a time machine, each chapter a window onto a world that history books routinely ignored. Nearly a century later, Medieval People remains astonishing not just for its scholarship but for its humanity: Power understood that the peasant's labor and the merchant's ledgers matter as much as any royal decree.
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“Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women,' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil'; over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain. In every country in Europe, right through the Middle Ages to the time of the Reformation, and after it, country folk continued to sing and dance in the churchyard. Two hundred years after Charlemagne's death there grew up the legend of the dancers of Kölbigk, who danced on Christmas Eve in the churchyard, in spite of the warning of the priest, and all got rooted to the spot for a year, till the Archbishop of Cologne released them. Some men say that they were not rooted standing to the spot, but that they had to go on dancing for the whole year; and that before they were released they had danced themselves waist-deep into the ground. People used to repeat the little Latin verse which they were singing:...Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-ridingAnd his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him-- Why are we standing still? Why can't we go away?””
— Eileen Power
“Nuns, after all, were but women, and they had the amiable vanities of their sex.””
— Eileen Power
“But still more responsible for their unawareness was the educational system in which they were reared. Ausonius and Sidonius and their friends were highly educated men and Gaul was famous for its schools and universities. The education which these gave consisted in the study of grammar and rhetoric, which was necessary alike for the civil service and for polite society; and it would be difficult to imagine an education more entirely out of touch with contemporary life, or less suited to inculcate the qualities which might have enabled men to deal with it. The fatal study of rhetoric, its links with reality long since severed, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form rather than on matter. The things they learned in their schools had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was the same, whereas everything was different.””
— Eileen Power
“The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.””
— Eileen Power
“But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!””
— Eileen Power
“Ausonius and Symmachus and their set ignore the barbarians as completely as the novels of Jane Austen ignore the Napoleonic wars.””
— Eileen Power
“One religion in particular grew mighty, by clasping its sacred book and addressing itself with words of hope to the victims of social injustice, but although it was able to bring comfort to individuals it could do nothing, indeed it did not try, to give new strength or inspiration to the embattled civilization. True to its own ethos it was impartial as between Barbarian and Roman, or between the Romans who prospered and ruled and those outside the pale.””
— Eileen Power
“Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son. Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them? This is indeed a question almost as absorbing as the question why their civilization fell, for au fond it is perhaps the same question.””
— Eileen Power
“This peaceful infiltration of barbarians which altered the whole character of the society which it invaded would have been impossible, of course, if that society had not been stricken by disease.””
— Eileen Power
About Medieval People
Chapter Summaries
- Preface
- Power explains her methodology of using social history to bring ordinary medieval people to life, arguing that personal stories make history more vivid than abstract treatises. She outlines how each chapter illustrates different aspects of medieval life through individual examples.
- 1
- Traces the decline of Roman civilization through three Gallo-Roman writers: Ausonius (4th century), Sidonius Apollinaris (5th century), and Gregory of Tours (6th century). Shows how the educated elite gradually lost touch with reality as barbarian invasions transformed their world.
- 2
- Reconstructs the daily life of a peasant family on the estates of St. Germain des Prés using Charlemagne's estate records. Shows the agricultural routines, religious beliefs, and social relationships of ordinary people in the Carolingian Empire.
Key Themes
- Social History vs. Political History
- Power argues that understanding ordinary people's lives is as important as studying kings and wars. She demonstrates how social history can be more vivid and meaningful than traditional political narratives.
- The Decline of Civilizations
- The book explores how great civilizations fall not through dramatic events but through gradual internal decay, as shown in the Roman Empire's slow collapse despite its material prosperity.
- Economic Foundations of Society
- From Bodo's agricultural labor to Paycocke's cloth trade, the book shows how economic activities shape social structures and individual lives across different historical periods.
Characters
- Eileen Power(protagonist)
- The author and historian who brings medieval people to life through detailed social history. She was a Reader in History at the University of London and Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge.
- Ausonius(major)
- A 4th-century Gallo-Roman scholar and gentleman who lived during the decline of Rome. He was a professor of rhetoric in Bordeaux and later became consul, representing the cultured Roman elite who seemed oblivious to barbarian threats.
- Sidonius Apollinaris(major)
- A 5th-century Gallo-Roman aristocrat and Bishop of Clermont who witnessed the final collapse of Roman civilization in Gaul. He maintained aristocratic lifestyle even as barbarian kingdoms replaced Roman rule.
- Bodo(major)
- A Frankish peasant living on the estates of St. Germain des Prés during Charlemagne's reign. He represents the common people whose lives are reconstructed from estate records, showing daily medieval rural life.
- Ermentrude(major)
- Bodo's wife, a peasant woman who managed household duties, raised children, and contributed to agricultural work. She represents medieval peasant women's roles and responsibilities.
- Marco Polo(major)
- The famous Venetian traveler whose journeys to China opened medieval Europe's eyes to the wealth and sophistication of the East. He represents the merchant adventurer spirit of medieval Venice.
