Vishvas's notes | Goubert peasants

THE FRENCH PEASANTRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: A Regional Example*
Goubert
Translated by G. Rudé.

1 C:

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IS TERRA INCOGNITA AS FAR AS THE land is concerned," wrote Marc Bloch in 1942, to explain a “sad deficiency” in his Caractères Originaux. For England and the Netherlands this is no longer true. But Marc Bloch was thinking only of France, and there his remark remains valid and will do so until Jean Meuvret publishes his great work on Le Problème des Subsistances au temps de Louis XIV, the first volume of which will deal with agriculture and rural society throughout the kingdom of France." My intention in the present study is more modest and more limited in scope. I propose to examine rural society in a fairly small region, the Beauvaisis.’ The Beauvaisis forms a link between the great cereal-producing plains of Picardy, semi-pastoral Normandy, and the rich and varied lands of the Ile-de-France. This region had already by the seventeenth century acquired a degree of unity, by virtue of its past history (it corresponds to the old civitas Bellovacorum), and of the predominating influence exerted on it by the town of Beauvais, its regional capital, which was then of some importance.

In this type of research the historian’s scope is strictly limited by the sources at his disposal. Among the most fruitful of these are the probate records relating to peasant properties, similar to those in England, the considerable interest of which has been repeatedly stressed by Dr. W. G. Hoskins. Equally valuable are the law-suits involving appeals against over-assessment for the taille, in the course of which experts gave a complete analysis and valuation of the real estate (either owned or leased), the livestock, debts and credits of the tax-paying peasants who were challenging the amounts for which they were being assessed. Also of prime interest are the fieldmaps, giving a dated analysis of landed property in the various parishes and lordships (seigneuries). Other sources of interest are the private papers, accounts, and leases of the seigneurs and other

5 at56 landowners - PAST AND PRESENT whether noble, bourgeois, or (as very frequently) clergy. This constitutes our basic documentary material.

— For reasonably serious study to be possible such documentation must be fairly abundant and perhaps even more important sufficiently concentrated. In the case of the Beauvaisis neither requirement is fulfilled before the 1660s or 1670s, so I am not in a position to present a thorough social analysis, based on solid foundations, until the assumption of personal power by Louis XIV. In the preceding period the surviving sources are distinctly inferior in both quantity and quality: there are no field-maps or appeals against over-assessment; the inventories drawn up after death, though numerous enough, are brief, slipshod, carelessly drafted, and often incomplete. It is by no means impossible to present a picture of certain aspects of peasant society before 1660, but it would be dishonest to lay claim to any strict accuracy of analysis; general ideas, impressions, and hypotheses must, for this period, take the place of facts.

That is why I shall confine myself largely to presenting a picture of rural society as it appears in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, based on an abundance of source-material which is both detailed and (I believe) sound. I shall then attempt a brief sketch of a social evolution ranging over the whole of the seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth; but I fully admit that in the latter part of this project there will be an element of personal speculation, the extent of which I shall indicate as precisely as I can.

I 6 A detailed survey of 38 parishes of the Election de Beauvais was carried out in 1717. This survey was initiated by the government and was not peculiar to this corner of France. The intention of the Conseil Royal du Commerce was to consider a fresh imposition of the taille, the principal direct tax of the day. The division of the landed property in these 38 parishes was as follows: 22% of the land belonged to the church, 22% to the nobility, 13% to the bourgeoisie of Beauvais, and 43% to the peasants. The peasants owned only a very small part of the vineyards, woods, and meadows (these being, incidentally, the most profitable form of cultivation). For our present purpose the important thing to notice in this government survey is the proportion of land held by the various groups: the peasants did not own half the land they tilled; their portion did not at [[57]] include the best lands; further, their holdings were more widely scattered than the lands of the privileged orders.

7 Forty years earlier a few large abbeys in the Beauvaisis had carried out a complete, careful, and accurate survey of the numerous parishes of which they held the lordship (seigneurie). These abbeys did not concern themselves exclusively with their own estates (domaines) which their tenant-farmers cultivated; they also surveyed and charted the lands of their “vassals” - the peasants who paid them seigneurial dues (and often tithes, as well, which the large abbeys had generally taken over from the parish priests.) Most of the maps made between 1670 and 1680 are accompanied by separate tables of proprietors and parcels of land. An examination of this complex of documents yields results similar to those which we have just quoted for 1717. Between 1670 and 1680 the peasants nowhere owned as much as half the land; sometimes, as in the neighbourhood of Beauvais, they owned only a quarter. In addition, at this date too, peasantland was the most scattered and the poorest in quality.

= — The field-maps prepared by the abbeys have an additional advantage: they show how the lands were divided among the peasants themselves. To take a few examples at Goincourt, of 98 peasant proprietors, 3 owned 10, 12, and 18 hectares respectively (a French hectare nearly 2 acres); 94 owned less than 2 hectares. At Espaubourg, of 148 peasant proprietors, not one held as much as 10 hectares, and 125 held less than 2 hectares. At Coudray-Saint-Germer, 106 out of 125 held less than 2 hectares; only one owned as much as 30 hectares. These examples fall in the period 1672-1680; they are all drawn from that part of the Beauvaisis which comes within the Pays du Bray, a region of great common pastures, where one might expect the peasants to be able to rear livestock at low cost. We shall see how far this possibility was, in fact, realized.

Two distinctive features, then, emerge. The peasants did not own half the land they cultivated, and among the peasants themselves holdings were extremely unevenly distributed. At least 80% of the peasantry of the Beauvaisis owned only tiny plots; only a small minority of them owned more than 10 hectares (i.c. less than 25 acres). Were we to erect a social pyramid of peasant property, it would have a very broad base and an absurdly slender apex.

As the lands of the nobles, church, and bourgeoisie were leased to peasants, it is clear that the latter were working that large proportion of the land of which they were not themselves the owners. It is not as easy to chart tenancy as landownership, nor as easy to compile at 58 PAST AND PRESENT a statistical analysis of tenants as of owners. To do so it would be necessary to assemble a wide range of documents that are, of course, scattered over a multiplicity of records and archives. Even so, the result would not correspond closely to reality. A general point does, however, emerge: the scattered parcels of land owned by the privileged orders and bourgeoisie were let out to small peasants, whereas the lands concentrated in large units (especially those belonging to the church) were leased en bloc to enterprising tenants, such as the laboureurs-fermiers (substantial tenant-farmers) or receveurs de seigneurie (receivers for the lords of the manors): the latter formed the peak of the peasant social pyramid. But as these substantial people took on lease considerable estates (estates of 80, 100, 150 hectares, or more), they were only to be found in the villages. in ones and twos; in some villages they were not to be found at all. Therefore, a general examination of tenancy in the Beauvaisis leads to both a confirmation and a correction of the conclusions arrived at from the study of the ownership of land. It leads to a confirmation in the sense that the small leases (of 1, 2, or 3 hectares) go to the small proprietors, and that they remain “small men” (there are, however, a few exceptions to this rule). But it also leads to a correction, because we shall now have to place at the summit of the economic and social hierarchy of the peasants the great fermiers-receveurs of the nobility and clergy, and not the ordinary laboureurs who, as we shall see, rarely owned and exploited holdings of more than 30 hectares.

We shall, therefore, not be tempted to base the rest of our account on the antithesis laboureur (peasant) -manouvrier (wage-worker), which expresses almost the sum total of what is generally known about French peasant society. If this oversimplified antithesis remains. roughly true, it is far from expressing the whole graded complexity of social relations in the village. It has, however, the merit of stressing the interest in social terminology which prevailed in the French countryside. Like the town-dwellers the French peasants were very conscious of titles and dignities. One has only to look through the registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials (the most abundant of all French documents of the seventeenth century), or to peruse the tax-rolls to see that Jacques Bonhomme or Pierre Durand is only too glad to assume title to express his position in society. If he can do no better, he is merely " Jacques Bonhomme, manouvrier." If he tenderly cultivates three rows of bad vinestock, he styles himself “vine-grower.” If, in the course of the winter, he repairs three pairs of wheels, he becomes “wheelwright.” Should he sell a few sacks of wheat or a few fleeces in the neighbourat [[59]] ing market, he proudly calls himself “merchant.” Should he happen to own that great wooden instrument bound with a few pieces of iron, which in the Beauvaisis was the usual plough, and the two horses required to pull it, he becomes “laboureur.” But if he holds lands of the Prince de Conti, of the nuns of the Abbaye Royale de Saint-Paul, or of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux and Abbot of Saint-Lucien-les-Beauvais, Jacques Bonhomme flaunts the title of " laboureur, fermier, et receveur de Monseigneur." - - In fact, the host of nanouvriers constituted, in nearly every village, the majority the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants. In the Beauvaisis it was rare for a manouvrier to be a fully-fledged proletarian. Doubtless there existed a few wretched families, dependent more or less on begging, who eked out their lives in hovels of wood, straw, and dried mud, which could scarcely be called houses. These poor wretches appear in the tax-rolls as “propertyless,” ," “destitute,” “impotent,” taxed symbolically at a farthing. Except in times of plague and famine, however, these social outcasts remain the exception.

— The typical manouvrier owns a few acres, a cottage, and a small garden for the manouvriers of the Beauvaisis were almost all very small proprietors. The garden yielded hemp, beans, cabbages, and a few apples. Their few acres produced some sacks of maslin (a mixture of wheat and rye): in short, enough to feed a family for a few months or a few weeks a year. Could the manouvriers count on their cattle to improve their situation? Poultry and pigs, though providing tasty dishes, are ravaging, scavenging, and marauding beasts, that compete with human beings in their greed for grain. The Beauvaisis manouvriers generally kept three or four hens, but rarely a pig. The regular habit of eating salt bacon and “chicken in the pot” was, to all intents and purposes, impossible for him. Could he not at least get milk from his cow, seeing that our best writers commonly speak of the cow as the " poor man’s beast"? Our documents bring to light a few skinny cows: for lack of a meadow or even common pasture, young lads would drive them along the lanes and occasional thickets on the edge of the fields. But one manouvrier in two had no cow of his own.

The real “poor CC “3 man’s beast was the sheep, whose fleeces and lambs helped to pay his taxes. It fed as best it could on the stony plots they call riez " in Picardy; on the fallow-land four months in the year, between gleaning and the first ploughing; in winter, in the stall, grazing off its straw litter for want of real hay (for it is certain that what they called “fodder” in Picardy was straw).

at 60 PAST AND PRESENT It is understandable, then, that the manouvrier should often hire himself out to the laboureurs and large farmers. He was the all-round countryman who worked for others at trivial, seasonal, and occasional jobs: at haymaking, harvesting, gathering grapes, threshing, clipping hedges, sawing wood, or cleaning out ditches. The larger farms, especially in summer, had need of this cheap and abundant labour. The manouvrier received for his pains a bowl of soup, a jug of wine, a few ears of corn, a few pence; and often he did not actually receive any money since he was already in debt to his employer. By working for the man who had ploughed a field for him, advanced him seed, peas, or wood, the manouvrier paid back his creditor and might hope for new loans, new advances, new services, which might help him to get through the year.

To get through it without too much hardship and to supplement the meagre resources provided by his few acres and insufficient wages, the manouvrier often tried to set up as a tenant-farmer himself, or to take up some kind of subsidiary occupation, generally of a seasonal nature.

Having no horses and insufficient cattle to provide an abundance of manure, and being without capital reserves, the peasant smallholder could not be other than a small tenant-farmer. The owner of three acres, he could hardly hope to take on the cultivation of more than another three. He would find land to lease among the small plots belonging to country churches or fabriques-small religious institutions in the parishes. Again, he might lease a few scattered fields that a stranger to the village had inherited or a townsman had acquired from a mortgaged debtor. In any event, these snippets of land cost the manouvrier dear in return for a meagre, sometimes nonexistent, profit. In a bad year the rent swallowed up the yield; in a plentiful year, when the price of corn was low, the harvest represented a poor return for a heavy expenditure of toil; but at least it then helped to feed his household.

It was better, in fact, to try to take up a secondary occupation. The coopers, wheelwrights, tailors, and weavers, that one finds in such large numbers in every village, were really manouvriers seeking additional means of livelihood. Their village clients, however, were not sufficient to keep them in full employment: they would work at their trade from time to time, at the most favourable seasons of the year. But always they were peasants rather than artisans. Yet there is one exception if indeed it is an exception which is to be found in the plains of Picardy: that is the countrymen who worked wool in the south and west of Picardy, and linen in the east - - at [[61]] and north-east. On the outskirts of Beauvais a dozen villages were engaged in carding and combing the wool produced locally or imported from neighbouring districts. The carders and combers were also spinners, for they did not always leave the handling of the spinning-wheel and winder to their womenfolk. Very often, too, they prepared the serge-warp, which they sold to the manufacturers of Beauvais. Further north, towards Amiens and Abbeville, we find serge-weavers rather than carders and combers, who wove their heavy, coarse Picard cloths on crude looms cloths ranging over every conceivable type of serge, whose names are taken from such villages as Blicourt, Aumale, and Tricot. These country weavers owned neither their raw materials nor their tools; these they hired from Amiens and Beauvais merchants, who paid them by the piece, in kind more often than in cash. Most of the villages were peopled with a host of these “sergers” and carders, and looms were more in evidence than ploughs. All these textile-workers are, of course, manouvriers and smallholders, who would interrupt their weaving to tend their garden of beans and their acre of maslin: in the summer they would hire themselves out for the harvest. And so, in this almost pastureless plateau of Picardy, which yielded nothing but grain, its dense population was often saved from starvation by its occupation in the various processes of woollen manufacture. was in the case of the mulquiniers who wove linen cloth in the region. of Clermont, Péronne, and Saint-Quentin: these men, working in damp and gloomy cellars, were also peasants tiny proprietors, dwarf graziers, in fact manouvriers.

It is clear that, generally speaking, numerous imperceptible gradations lead from the mass of manouvriers to the favoured, restricted group of laboureurs. But these shades of social distinction and transitional stages are not to be found on the plateau of Picardy. In that bleak countryside, with its monotonous type of farming, peasant society appeared only in brutal contrasts. At the social peak was the big farmer, flanked by five or six laboureurs; down below was the wretched mass of manouvriers; between them, nothing.

The southern part of the Beauvaisis, however, affords a sharp contrast. Here we find rolling pastures, reminiscent of Normandy, cut by the fertile banks of the Oise and the Thérain; its hillsides covered with vines and crowned with woods, on the borders of the Ile-de-France. The charm, freshness, and diversity of the landscape seem in themselves to give rise to a rural society in which the finer gradations and distinctions abound. Here we no longer find sergeweavers tied to town manufacturers or merchants, but one or two at 62 PAST AND PRESENT weavers in every village who work up, for all, the hemp which everyone grows in his garden. There are still manouvriers, but they often possess their own cow and half a dozen sheep, sometimes even their own sow, for here it is easier to feed livestock. These manouvriers are not only a little less poor, they are also far less numerous, and rarely a majority in their village. The largest proportion of the population is composed of the most “French” of all the peasants:8 these were not the village poor, still less were they proletarians, nor were they ever prosperous members of the community: they were gardeners rather than farmers, vine-growers rather than corngrowers: skilled enough in the use of their hands to make remarkable craftsmen, artists even, though unrecognized: intelligent and adaptable enough to vary their occupation according to the season, the year, local urban demand, or the whims and fashions emanating from “the big city,” Paris, which lay ten or fifteen leagues away. These were the airiers, a kind of market-gardener who supplied the neighbouring markets with fresh vegetables: those of Bresles grew artichokes and asparagus for Paris; others tended high-grade apple-trees which they imported from Normandy. On the slopes overlooking the Oise and the Thérain, in the near vicinity of Beauvais, vine-growers forced, from a soil too heavy and starved of warm sunshine, a few hogsheads of dry, bitter, harsh wine that was either drunk immediately or sent north, especially to Amiens. They were makers of the blondes and noires, the names given to a species of linen-thread lace which “invaded " Paris in Louis XIV’s time and, in the eighteenth century, " conquered” Spain and the West Indies. Among them, too, were the makers of fans and fancy-wear in the district of Meru, skilled in working ivory for sale to Paris dealers. Less prosperous were the blatiers (corn-chandlers), peasants furnished with a donkey or mule, on which they carried, one sack at a time, corn to the mills of Pontoise or flour to the bakeries of Gonesse. Or there were those who drove Norman cattle to the plains of Poissy to be fattened up before being handed over to the butchers of Paris.

Of course, all these peasants tended their gardens and a few fields, became haymakers, reapers, and threshers, and periodically hired themselves out as wage-workers pure and simple; but they refused to call themselves manouvriers.

Very close to these social types were the so-called haricotiers (kidney-bean growers), found in the district of Bray in the Oise valley and occasionally in the Soissonnais. Not that they specialized in growing kidney-beans: indeed what we now call kidney-beans were called peas in the seventeenth century. The haricotiers with at [[63]] whom I am most familiar those of the Bray district owned a few more acres than the ordinary manouvrier: they normally farmed about 20 acres, of which they owned at least half. They kept one or two cows, five or six sheep, and sometimes a mule. They sold apples, eggs, and cheese. They made vine-props and worked in wicker, flax, or wood. Yet these humble peasants rarely hired out their labour to rich farmers: their own occupations kept them too busy. Were we to adopt a modern, colloquial, yet reasonably appropriate, term, we might call them bricoleurs (jacks-of-all-trades).

None of these different types of peasant haricotiers, craftsmen, vine-growers, corn-chandlers, gardeners had the pretension to call themselves by the exalted title of laboureur.

—
In other provinces in Poitou for example there existed laboureurs à bras, that is laboureurs who did not possess a plough or a horse. In the Beauvaisis such a thing would have been impossible. In fact no social term had so clear and concise a meaning: a laboureur was, almost by definition, a man who owned a plough and a pair of horses. (Oxen were quite unknown, both as draught-animals and for stock-raising.) The social importance of people who possessed so precious and rare a capital may be appreciated: a simple plough-horse, fully grown and in good health, was worth at least 60 livres. This corresponded to the price of three fatted cows, or twenty sheep, or twenty hectolitres (fifty-five bushels) of corn in a good year. The laboureur, therefore, took a pride in ploughing, three or four times a year, his own land with his own horses. He could take on lease other lands and plough them when he wished: he could use his horses for carting manure, crops, straw, hay, wood, or wine. He would hire out his horses to the manouvriers and haricotiers, who were incapable of engaging in the humblest form of farming without the essential aid of the laboureur’s horses. Thus the laboureurs became the creditors of the mass of small peasants and, when occasion demanded, their employers at low wages.
some How much better the laboureur lived than the mass of the peasants! He ate off pewter, sometimes laid out on a table-cloth. His cupboards were stocked with pairs of sheets, towels, shirts of fine embroidered cloth. He had reserves of corn, peas, beans, and even a whole pig in his earthen salting-tub. His Sunday-clothes were of stout serge. To attend mass or the village ball his wife and daughters would deck themselves out in linen bodices, brightcoloured skirts and petticoats, and a small golden cross at their necks. All of which was in glaring contrast with the manner of living of the bare-footed manouvrier, clad in coarse hempen cloth, at 64 PAST AND PRESENT often without bedor table-linen, without even a table or provisions, eating a thick soup from an earthen bowl with wooden spoon.

But the laboureur is a fairly rare social specimen. At Loueuse, out of 86 householders, only 3 were laboureurs: in Saint-Omer en Chaussée, 10 out of 93: at Crillon, 6 out of 70: at Glatigny, 3 out of 90: at Litz, 6 out of 43: at La Houssaye, only I out of 46 payers of the taille.

Yet even within this strictly limited social class, so clearly cut off from the mass of the peasantry, there were many grades both in the size of landholding and in social position. There were genuine laboureurs who farmed no more than 35-40 acres and kept only three cows. Others were the owners, apart from their horses and cattle, of a mere two or three pieces of land; they farmed chiefly as tenants. Such a man might keep a fair number of pigs, perhaps 20 or more because he had bought from the lord of the manor the droit de glandée, the right to graze his pigs in the lord’s wood when the acorns fell. At Loueuse, in 1694, François Andrieu had the distinction of not renting any land: he farmed his own land, nearly 100 acres, with five horses and two ploughmen. This large peasantproprietor, however, owned no more than 3 cows, 2 pigs, and 23 sheep an indication of the small amount of livestock owned by even the largest farmers in this province at this period. In a better grazing district, Charles Bournizien of Villers-Vermont, in 1683, kept 13 cows and 85 sheep: he had a few enclosed pastures of his own, was the tenant of a noble lady, and had the use, in the Bray district, of the common pastures of his village, which, though not yielding grass of the highest quality, were extremely spacious. Bournizien and Andrieu are the most substantial laboureurs that I have come across in the Beauvaisis between 1670 and 1700. They both possessed the enviable privilege of never having to fear hunger and of always having a surplus of produce for sale grain, calves, or fleeces: yet even they are not at the top of the peasant social hierarchy.

That position, without any doubt, is occupied by the big tenants and receivers of the seigneuries. Claude Dumesnil, tenant and receiver of the Abbaye Royale de Saint-Paul at Goincourt, worked 100 hectares of land, 12 hectares of meadow, a large vineyard, and two woods, with the aid of 12 horses, 2 carters, 2 ploughmen, and an abundant supply of seasonal workers. Tenant of the abbey lands, he also farmed the seigneurial rights, the tithes (which the Abbey had appropriated from the local priest), and the monopoly of the wine-press. For all this he paid the “Ladies of Saint-Paul " [[65]] at 1,200 livres tournois and 40 hectolitres of best wheat a year. He had leased out his own property (a house and a few fields) for 100 livres. At Goincourt he owned 25 cows, 6 sows, and 225 sheep. These are the highest figures I have come across. The seigneurial dovecot on his farm housed 160 pigeons: 180 fowl fed in his backyard: among them were a couple of dozen turkeys, and as many ducks - birds that are seldom found at all, even among the wealthiest laboureurs. His reserves of grain, beans, peas, liquor, and timber, were considerable: there were more than 8,000 sheaves, over 100 barrels of wine and cider, and 200 fleeces in his barn. Half the villagers of Goincourt were in his debt, and 41 families in the adjoining parishes owed him a total of 1,700 livres. Dumesnil lent out horses, wagons, corn, hay, timber, and even money. It was this rôle of creditor that made him a figure of economic, social, and political importance. In short, he was a power in the land. Dumesnil even owned a small library, composed of pious works and stories of travel: many a merchant in the neighbouring town possessed no more than a prayer-book.

Such persons were to be found in every parish where the seigneur owned a large, compact domain. They usually appear to be the tenants of bishops, canons, and large abbeys. The tenant of the Ursulines of Beauvais at Moyenneville lent money to the convent, where his two daughters were inmates. The tenant of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Germer at Coudray-Saint-Germer had ruined the petty noblemen of the neighbourhood by lending them money at heavy rates of interest on mortgages. By the end of the seventeenth century the large fermiers-receveurs constituted a closed caste. They intermarried, succeeded one another from father to son, or from father to son-in-law, entered into agreements to reserve for themselves the best leases, and left no tenancies available for those outside their circle. During the Revolution they frequently bought up the lands which their old master, now expropriated, had for many years been renting to their families. Even to-day it is not uncommon to find established on former ecclesiastical lands, sold at the time of the Revolution, the descendants of the powerful receivers of the ancien régime. It is these receivers, placed high above the common peasant, that form the apex of the peasant hierarchy of the Beauvaisis.” II - A precise answer must now be attempted to the question how many of all these peasants were able to enjoy economic independence at 66 PAST AND PRESENT to feed their families from that portion of the harvest left at their disposal? First, let us consider the most vital product of all, wheat. It represents the staple food of the people of the north and centre of France, whether in the shape of bread, soup, or gruel. M. Labrousse has shown that a daily ration of 2 to 24 pounds of bread was essential to the maintenance of each adult, and that the value of this amount of bread represented at least half the poor man’s budget. 10 These calculations apply to the more prosperous part of the eighteenth century, from 1733 to the Revolution. There are good reasons for supposing that these figures are not high enough for the seventeenth century; nevertheless, let us accept them as a basis. The most common type of peasant household consisted of six persons father, mother, three children, and a grandparent. Even if it included two very young children (fed from an early age on gruel and bread), it is unlikely that a family of this size consumed less than ten pounds of bread per day. To produce this amount of bread for a whole year required 18 quintals of wheat. From extensive documentary evidence it appears that the yield of the best lands in the Beauvaisis, even with the most favourable harvests, rarely exceeded 9 quintals per hectare, or six times the outlay of seed.1 In years when harvests were bad, the yield barely reached 4 quintals per hectare.

11 - Yet we cannot conclude from the above that 2 hectares of land in good years and 4 in bad were sufficient to feed a household of peasants. For one thing, the whole of the Beauvaisis belonged to the great region of triennial rotation: usually a field would be under wheat for only one year in three. We shall therefore need to treble the areas just quoted, which will give us a minimum of 6 hectares and a maximum of 13. Secondly, we must remember that the peasant-proprietor could not possibly retain his whole crop. What deductions had first to be made from it? — In the first place, he had to deduct his future seed one sixth of his crop, and a larger proportion in bad years. He had to pay the taille to the king. An average peasant let us say a fair-sized haricotier or small laboureur - would have to pay at least 20 livres tournois a year, the equivalent of 4 quintals of wheat in a year when prices were low, or the output of half a hectare of land. He was subject to other royal taxes as well, such as the gabelle (salt-tax), which, though their incidence is hard to compute, amounted to at least as much as the taille. So the king took from our small laboureur the equivalent of the full yield of a hectare of wheat, corresponding to three hectares of land. The ecclesiastical tithe-owner had been at [[67]] the first to appear on the scene and had already carried off from six to nine in every hundred sheaves. The seigneur, of course, had his share as well: what he exacted varied widely from place to place. In the northern Beauvaisis, the droits de champart (tributes in kind) took a heavy toll: nine sheaves in every hundred on top of the tithe. A further charge was the grain paid as wages to the reapers and threshers, whose services were generally required. If we total up these various initial charges seed, sundry expenses, royal taxes, ecclesiastical and seigneurial dues - they amount to at least half of the wheat-crop. (Similar charges also applied to spring-sown cereals, such as oats, and even to wine.) In fact, the peasant proprietor who aimed to feed his family on the produce of his land would need to grow twice the amount he required for this purpose. To run over the figures again: the peasant who aspired to a state of economic independence had to farm a minimum of 12 hectares (nearly 30 acres) in years of plenty, and 27 hectares (65 acres) in years of shortage. Thus, not a single manouvrier, not a single haricotier or average laboureur, could be economically independent. The large laboureurs, the owners of at least 27 hectares siderably less than one tenth of the peasantry alone were assured of being able to feed their families comfortably under all circumstances. Those owning less than 12 hectares of land could not provide from the produce of their own fields the means to feed their families: they would have to buy additional wheat - that is, sell their labour in exchange.

—

con- Leaving aside the large tenant-farmers, whose lot need arouse no pity, the position of the majority of the tenant-farmers was even more precarious. Indeed, in their case, the rent has to be added to all the other charges already mentioned. In the northern part of the Beauvaisis the rent usually amounted to 1 quintals of wheat per hectare. So the annual charge of the landlord amounted to a proportion varying from one sixth to one third of the crop, according to the nature of the harvest.

In short, the small peasant who was least severely affected by the complex system of initial charges on the yearly produce was the proprietor who farmed his own land: the most severely affected was the small tenant-farmer who owned but few acres. By heavy toil, the manouvriers, haricotiers, and small laboureurs were able, in favourable years, to extract from a good deal of rented land, a fair proportion of the food required for their family’s upkeep, which their own fields were unable to provide. In years of bad harvest small farms were more of a burden than a support. In no case could a holding of less at 68 PAST AND PRESENT than 12 hectares assure its occupant of the slightest trace of economic independence. As our documents amply illustrate, the great majority of peasants three quarters or more remained well below that level. Were they, then, condemned to suffer hunger, or even starve to death? ― The answer is most definitely in the affirmative. Three facts emerge beyond dispute. In the first place, the majority of the peasants of the Beauvaisis suffered from almost continuous undernourishment. Secondly, they devoted considerable courage and imagination to attempts to procure that extra food which their own lands could not produce. Thirdly, they did not always succeed in doing so: during lean years, which were not exceptional, they had to resign themselves to dying in their thousands for lack of food.

The first fact, the most difficult to prove beyond all doubt, emerges from the study of a large number of inventories drawn up after death. The almost total absence of meat from the manouvrier’s diet was due, as we have seen, to his lack of livestock. He hardly ever had bacon since he had not the means to feed pigs. His vegetables were those of low food value: apart from cabbages, green vegetables were little known, and certainly rarely grown, except just outside the towns. There was a general absence of fruit, except in autumn: soft fruit was scarce since it takes a long time to ripen. The wild berries picked in the hedges were mostly used in drinks; and ciderapples and pears were crushed to make weak cider, heavily diluted. with water. A little fruit of better quality was sold in the town-markets: the income derived from it helped to pay the tax. On the plateau of Picardy only the wealthier laboureurs and the larger tenant-farmers had milk and cheese: in the pastoral district of Bray, milk was made into butter and cheese and sold to Parisians at Gournay. As for whey, we know that the great bleaching establishments of Beauvais had a considerable demand for it between March and September.1 What we know for certain is that the basis of the diet was formed by bread, soup, gruel, large peas (called bigaille), and beans a diet both heavy and lacking in nutrition, insufficient during winter and increasingly so as spring approached, despite the seasonal addition of the first green vegetables, gathered in fields, meadows, and ditches. Nor did his pale cider or bitter, green wine (that quickly spoiled) have any nutritional, or even medicinal, value.

In our analysis of peasant society we have repeatedly stressed the incessant search for other forms of income, for piece-work and such like, that is characteristic of all the manouvriers, of almost all the at [[69]] haricotiers, and of most of the smaller laboureurs. This search, which was absolutely essential in order to feed their families, to pay the taille, and to survive at all, took the form of hunting for vacant leases, for wool to spin, for lace to manufacture, for wood to chop, carve, or sell, for any small job on the larger estates. If need be, should ordinary work fail, they would resort to all sorts of alternatives picking leaves, herbs, acorns, berries, which every forest-owner forbade, royal, noble, or episcopal. The result was a considerable crop of offences against the forest-laws, not to mention breaches of the laws relating to fishing and hunting. (It is a striking fact that nearly every peasant went armed.) It was but a small step from this to a profusion of minor thefts, or even to open begging. This was a particularly distinctive feature of those dreadful years when, as the saying went, the times were out of joint,” and harvests shrank to a half, or even to a third, of their normal yield.

CC At such times that considerable majority of peasants whose farms were too small fell short of everything: of wheat, first of all, and then of all those subsidiary foods just mentioned, which formed part of their basic subsistence. In fact the larger laboureurs and farmers reduced the number of their hands and cut their wages. The weavers, too, lacked work: in times of high prices the woollen cloth bought by the poor of the Beauvaisis found no sale, and merchants, fearful of adding to the stocks already in their hands, compelled the town and country craftsmen to stop their looms. 18 Everything fell off at the same time crops, work in the fields, and work in industry.

Some of the peasants, normally tied to the soil, would then take to the road in search of bread. They would beg at the doors of the rich farmers and the curés; but even if the latter were charitably disposed they could not help everybody. They would go knocking at the gates of the wealthy abbeys, some of which would organize a free distribution of bread; but then thousands of poor wretches would appear, bring with them the inevitable accompaniment of contagious disease. Most of the impoverished peasants would try to enter the towns, where there was always some provision of relief organized by a variety of charitable bodies. But the towns would turn away these “foreigners,” by force if need be: they were already bearing the heavy burden of their own poor.

Very swiftly the weaker elements of the rural (and urban) population would begin to die off-old folk, infants, adolescents. In September or October, two months after the harvest, the names entered in the parochial burial registers would begin to mount up. be no fall in the mortality rate during the winter, and it would reach There would at 70 PAST AND PRESENT — its peak in the spring, when dwindling stocks of food would be exhausted, and epidemics, thriving on weakened physiques, would spread among the poorer classes and, eventually, strike the rich, who, till then, had suffered nothing. At the same time there would be fewer marriages and even births would fall far below their accustomed figure: the very fertility of the population would be severely affected. In ten or twelve months between 1661 and 1662, between 1693 and 1694, and again between 1709 and 1710 ten to fifteen per cent of the inhabitants of a village would disappear, carried off by famine or epidemic. Some townships of the Beauvaisis lost as much as a quarter of their population in this manner. The manouvriers were always the hardest hit, both relatively and absolutely. After such a blood-letting there followed a few years of comparatively prosperous existence: there was more work for fewer hands, there was more land to let, and the people of the countryside could breathe a little more freely, until the next disastrous harvest, which inevitably brought in its train, at least until 1740, the same or similar misfortunes.

There can be little doubt that these phenomena and they are amply proven - express a kind of periodical disequilibrium between an irregular food-supply and a prolific population, subject to fitful and uncontrolled increase. It seems likely that they left a deeper mark on a cereal-producing region like Picardy than on a fertile and varied region such as Normandy and the Ile-de-France: and this difference suggests that small-scale farming, so roundly condemned by the Physiocrats in the eighteenth century, had certain solid advantages. Above all, we must not forget that, in those years of endurance, the memory of which remained deeply imprinted on the popular mind, the villages suffered as much or perhaps more than the towns, and that the social structure of the peasantry was then brutally laid bare: those who died in their thousands were the manouvriers, the small peasants who owned a few acres and a cow and could not find work to supplement their incomes.

Although every adult had had some experience of such years, these years of heavy mortality were fairly rare not more than one in ten. During the years of respite the Beauvaisis peasants managed, in one way or another, to make a living; yet it was under a growing burden of debt.

— It would require a whole volume on its own to study the question of peasant indebtedness in any detail an important question, though little explored. Here we can only indicate its diversity, inevitability, and intensity. Every small peasant was indebted to one or more laboureurs, who lent him horses and working-stock, at THE FRENCH PEASANTRY OF THE 17TH CENTURY

71 carted his produce, sold or advanced him a lamb, timber, beans, wheat. Every small peasant owed his landlord arrears of rent and for advances of seed or money. His debts to the seigneur were not so great; but he always owed substantial amounts to the tax-collector, since he found difficulty in having the necessary ready-cash available. Then, less onerous, but a burden nevertheless, there were his debts to the blacksmith, wheelwright, tailor, weaver, village shepherd, the religious confraternity, the schoolmaster, not to mention the innkeeper of the nearest township. Finally, there were the usual rural moneylenders lawyers, innkeepers, large farmers, magistrates whose activities extended over a large part of the countryside. They often acted as “covers " for the wealthy bourgeois of Beauvais. This type of lender was the most dangerous: he held contracts for loans drawn up by lawyers, and they always involved a mortgage on the debtor’s property. When the debtor defaulted his land passed to the creditor. The courts automatically returned a verdict in favour of such transfers, all the more readily since the creditors were often themselves the judges. The study of peasant indebtedness is, in fact, one of the main clues that make it possible to trace the evolution of the condition of the peasantry throughout the seventeenth century.

is more abundant and — III Available sources do not make it possible to trace the development of the peasantry of the Beauvaisis, Picardy, or the northern Ile-deFrance between 1600 and 1635. An historian of excessive ingenuity and there are such could, of course, use isolated examples to invent a social pattern corresponding to his own pet theories or the fashion of the moment. For 1635 to 1660 the documentary material makes it possible to put forward certain tentative hypotheses, some of which appear to have fairly solid foundations, even if they do not accord with traditional ideas on the subject. For the period after 1660 it will be possible, in a few years time, when extensive archival research has been completed, to present a study that is solidly based on reliable source-material. No conclusion of general validity can, of course, be advanced with any confidence until comparative studies have been carried out in a number of strictly limited and defined regions of seventeenth-century France. What follows is, therefore, no more than a number of hypotheses, of uncertain validity for the earlier periods and, in any case, not claiming to be applicable to any region other than the Beauvaisis.

at 72 — PAST AND PRESENT The general economic atmosphere prevalent in the Beauvaisis and Picardy during the years 1600 to 1635 may be defined as follows: in spite of occasional temporary falls the general trend of prices during these years was a rise of about 25%. This may seem surprising as some historians have claimed that prices began to fall from 1620, or even from 1600. In the region covered by our study (including Picardy), however, the movement of prices followed the trend just noted.1 A study of successive and comparable lists of farm-leases shows that rents in no way lagged behind the upward movement of agricultural prices; in fact, rather the contrary. From what statistics there are available of textile production at Beauvaisand Amiens, too it appears that the highest urban output of the whole century took place between 1624 and 1634: but we know nothing about rural output for this period, and never seem likely to. If the long-term trend of baptisms, marriages, and burials can be taken as a reliable indication of the movement of population, it may be established with reasonable certainty that the population noticeably increased between 1600 and 1635, despite a number of disasters of varying magnitude, such as a plague between 1620 and 1630 and a great food crisis in 1630-1. The sum total of these symptoms economic, social, and demographic reveals a phase of economic expansion, an “A phase,” to adopt the terminology in vogue since Simiand’s day. But this expansive phase is slight: its significance is not easy to estimate: perhaps it was peculiar to the north of France. During such a period it may be suggested that the conditions of the peasantry were not at their worst.

—
But this evidence is only indirect. My own direct knowledge of the peasantry very scanty for this period-boils down to a few impressions. The small, “average average” laboureurs seem relatively numerous; their post-mortem inventories suggest a fair standard of prosperity; some have even amassed a little ready cash. On the other hand there are few really rich laboureurs. The great abbeys had trouble in finding tenants for their larger estates those of over 60 hectares: they were compelled to divide them into three or four plots and lease each one to a fair-sized laboureur; and each of the tenants found it difficult to pay his yearly rent. I know next to nothing about the manouvriers, and I have found no trace of peasant revolts, although they are frequent in the neighbouring provinces, such as Normandy. 15 If we leave aside a number of terrible disasters, the peasantry probably did not suffer at this time from exceptional poverty; and it seems likely that the contrasts between the various social groups were less marked than they became later.

at [[73]] The subsequent period is notorious for the military disasters of 1636, twenty-five years of war, bringing every sort of fiscal imposition in their train, a weak regency, and five years of civil war.

Few years of French history are in such need of being studied afresh: the results are likely to be surprising.

Between 1635 and 1660 the peasants of the Beauvaisis and southern Picardy suffered a few months of panic in 1636, followed in 1647 to 1653 by a crisis economic, social, demographic, physiological, — and moral of an intensity and duration hitherto almost unknown. The panic of 1636 resulted from the Spanish invasion. A few villages were burned down, some of the crops plundered. The peasants fied before the troopers, carrying with them their livestock, foodsupplies, savings, and families. We find the Picards encamped in the Bray district in August and September: many took refuge with their belongings behind the solid walls of Beauvais and there awaited their liberation. They had set out after the harvest and returned to their farms in time for the autumn ploughing. In Alsace and Lorraine, as we know, the results for the countryside of the events of 1636 were extremely serious;16 but in our region they were comparatively slight. From 1636 to 1647 prices remained fairly high, rents continued to rise, and the population figures resumed their upward course (a cause for lamentation rather than rejoicing). There followed a series of disasters, of which the complex phenomena called the Fronde is only an aspect. 17 In the Beauvaisis-as, no doubt, in other provinces - the key is probably to be found in an unusually prolonged series of bad harvests. For five consecutive years, from 1647 to 1651, agriculture was the victim of bad weather; the most disasterous harvests being those of 1649 and 1651. The usual food-crisis was therefore carried over (generally with increased intensity) from one year to the next: the result was a steep rise and heavy extension of poverty and mortality, and a sharp fall in births. As usual the crisis in industry followed close on the heels of the agricultural crisis. The population of the Beauvaisis (and, maybe, of the whole of France) experienced in these years a succession of misfortunes the like of which did not recur in the following years. It seems probable that it was at this point that the general structure of peasant society that we have analysed took firm shape. Crushed by debt the small peasants had to give up a large part of their land to their creditors.

This was the moment chosen by the bourgeoisie of Beauvais, by a series of easy transactions, to appropriate hundreds of hectares of land. At the same time this bourgeoisie was completing the ruin of at 74 PAST AND PRESENT a part of the old rural nobility. For paltry sums, on terms that were little short of scandalous, they bought up manors, noble domains, whole seigneuries. And these new lords, former bourgeois who quickly acquired titles of nobility, pressed far more heavily on the mass of the subject peasantry than the old. Simultaneously, in these crucial years of 1647 to 1653, the more substantial laboureurs, those who had surplus crops to sell, sold them at considerable profit, since the prices of cereals had risen two, three, or even four times. Thus enriched they bought up lands from their debtors among the small peasants; and, most important of all, they were able to take out leases on the great ecclesiastical domains, of which there was an abundance in the Beauvaisis, and set up as fermiers-receveurs of the seigneuries. Meanwhile taxation, which had increased as the result of foreign and civil war and the incompetent management of the treasury, and whose main weight fell on the peasantry, seemed more oppressive than ever to the manouvriers and small laboureurs during this period of hardship. In short, the terrible years of 1647 to 1653, which decimated the Beauvaisis, left a profound mark on peasant society and decisively widened social differences. It was then that the chasm appeared separating the so-called " rural bourgeoisie from the growing mass of manouvriers and smallholders.

18 The whole The subsequent period is far better known to us. period 1660-1730 is characterized by a general fall in prices and incomes. This fall, sometimes gradual, sometimes abrupt, with occasional brief moments of stabilization, is the symptom of a prolonged economic depression. It is certain that the production and prices of textiles in Picardy and the Beauvaisis both fell disastrously at this time and there was a feverish search for new markets: such symptoms in industry are in no sense the mark of a period of prosperity. In terms of population, the losses incurred in 1647 to 1653, followed by another heavy drain in 1661 to 1662, were to have serious consequences for a number of age-groups over the next twenty years or more. After the decade 1680-90, when normal fertility was about to lead to another upward movement, the heavy mortalities of 1691-4 and 1709-10 intervened; then the number of burials increased threeor four-fold above normal and the birth-rate was gradually depressed, leading to a profound disturbance of the age-composition of the population for nearly fifty years to come. Except in the first years of Colbert’s ministry the tax-burden on the countryside continually increased, particularly after 1690. During the same period the French coinage became progressively debased. It is true that the peasantry, into whoseat [[75]] economy money scarcely entered, suffered only indirectly from successive devaluations; but the drastic reorganization of the seigneuries held by the bourgeoisie and clergy, accompanied by a general overhaul of the registers of landed property and more accurate land-surveys, led, in practice, to an increase in seigneurial dues, which fell mainly on the countryside. The condition of the peasantry under Louis XIV is, in fact, the product of an exceptional convergence of unfavourable factors. Those writers who were aware of economic developments and had a direct knowledge of the country as a whole - men like Hévin and Boisguilbert, and reformers, Vauban above all pointed to, and even exaggerated, the fall in agricultural incomes, the decline of ground-rents, the stagnation of industry, and the general impoverishment of the peasantry. By and large this was the picture presented by the Beauvaisis, which never quite recovered from the long crisis of the mid-century. One is tempted to talk of an atrophy or general stagnation of the countryside. Suddenly, around 1694 and 1710, catastrophic increases in prices and poverty, which drove up still further the endemic burden of peasant debt, led to yet another transfer of thousands of acres of plough-land to the bourgeoisie, who, at the same time, completed the ruin of the last remnants of the old nobility of the Beauvaisis. This time, too, the great abbeys took part in the kill. It is true that the reign of Louis XIV ended, for the majority of the peasantry of the Beauvaisis, in the unhappy manner described in the orthodox textbooks. But, in the midst of the general distress, the powerful caste of the big fermiers-receveurs attained its highest point of wealth, social power, and arrogance. More sharply than before peasant society became split into distinctive groups with conflicting interests and outlooks. Though the general picture is one of decline, the privileged few rose to new heights.

Paris.

Pierre Goubert.

1 NOTES Letter by Marc Bloch published in Annales, 1947, p. 365. M. Bloch’s masterpiece, Les Caractères Originaux de l’Histoire Rurale Française (Paris and Oslo, 1931), was republished in 1952 and 1956 (Paris, éditions Armand Colin, 2 vols.). This work should serve as the basic textbook for any study of French rural history.

Pending the publication of this important work reference should be made to J. Meuvret’s numerous articles. The most important are in Mélanges d’Histoire Sociale, vol. V (Paris, 1944); a paper read to the Société de Statistique de Paris in May 1944; Population, No. 4, 1946; Revista da Economia, p. 63 at 76 PAST AND PRESENT (Lisbon, 1951); Annales, No. 2, 1953, and No. 1, 1955: (these articles are mainly concerned with the history of prices). Among articles concerned with the general economic history and agrarian economy of the seventeenth century are: Etudes d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, vol. I, 1947, p. 15, and vol. V, 1953, p. 5; Eventail de l’Histoire Vivante, vol. II, p. 353; and, above all, J. Meuvret’s Report to the Tenth International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Rome, 1955 (Relazioni, vol. IV, pp. 139-68); and an important article shortly to appear in the Mélanges being produced in tribute to Armando Sapori, and another in Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine.

All place-names cited in this article are in the western part of the present department of the Oise, most of them in the arrondissement of Beauvais.

The best study of the taille is by E. Esmonin, La Taille en Normandie au Temps de Colbert (Paris, 1913). The documents used here are in Series C of the Departmental Archives.

For land-surveys and field-maps see, above all, Marc Bloch’s articles in the first numbers of Annales (Paris, 1929). Paul Guichonnet has just drawn attention to the exceptional character and interest of the Savoy land-survey, Revue de Géographie Alpine, No. I (Grenoble, 1955).

These documents are in the Archives Nationales and are related to the projects (inspired by Vauban) for devising a taille proportionnelle. This matter will be treated by J. Meuvret.

‘These documents are in series G. and H. of the Departmental Archives of the Oise. The most complete set is that relating to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Germer.

“France,” in the strict meaning of the word, is the small fertile plain extending to the north of Paris from Saint-Denis en France.” The term province of the Ile-de-France” is an early extension of this meaning. The northern limit of the Ile-de-France is the Forest of Chantilly.

The reader is reminded that all place-names here mentioned are in the western part of the present Department of the Oise.

10 Cf. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du Mouvement des Prix et des Revenus en France au XVIIIe Siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1933); La Crise de l’Economie Française à la Fin de l’Ancien Régime at au Début de la Révolution (Paris, 1944).

11 I attempted to deal with this problem of yield in the north of France in my Communication to the Tenth International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Rome, 1955 (not yet published).

“I hope that the importance of the part played by the cloth-bleaching establishments of Beauvais and elsewhere will be made clear in a work shortly to appear, Familles Marchandes sous l’Ancien Régime: les Danse et les Motte de Beauvais.

1 M. Labrousse’s Equisse du Mouvement des Prix clearly showed the connexion between agricultural and textile crises. I have observed the same in the Beauvaisis in the seventeenth century.

11 Space will not allow me to add here detailed evidence in support of my remarks about prices, incomes, textile production, demography, and social development. This will be found in a work as yet uncompleted whose title is likely to be: Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730; contribution à l’Histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe Siècle.

1 These peasant revolts have been stressed by V.-L. Tapić, La France de Louis XIII et de Richelieu (Paris, 1952), following B. F. Porshnev, Narodnie Vosstaniya vo Frantsii pered Frondoi (Moscow, 1948).

1 G. Livet’s numerous articles and great work, L’Intendance d’Alsace sous Louis XIV, 1648-1715 (to appear in 1956) must serve as the basis for all future studies of eastern France in the seventeenth century.

“’ Ernst H. Kossmann’s La Fronde (Leiden, 1954) deserves to be better known; despite some questionable conclusions it is probably the best work available on the subject. Further work on the Fronde is urgently needed [[77]] (but based on archival material: Kossmann’s essay is based on printed sources only). Several research workers are engaged on the subject, in Paris and elsewhere.

“The expression is Georges Lefebvre’s in Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution Française (Paris-Lille, 1924). It is a term used by an historian in relation to a social situation; but it is an anachronism: Frenchmen of the ancien régime never gave the name bourgeois to persons engaged in agriculture.