Peasants and Polyptyques in the Ninth Century: The Peasant Hermod
Constance B. Bouchard
Eileen Power’s peasant Bodo has influenced our vision of medieval peasants for close to a century. Her image busy agricultural worker and his family serving on great ninth-century estate, drawn from variety different sources in addition the polyptyque St.-Germain-des-Prés which he briefly appears, become standard textbooks popular accounts. In spite laudable effort give an account lower-status person whom modern reader could relate, we know far less about or contemporaries than she suggests. The difficulties learning life supposedly typical are illustrated by Hermod, who appears Montier-en-Der. polyptyques, very few number all using criteria enumerate property income, provide dizzying array obligations: some owed rent but not labor, set amounts both seem have been expected labor at any times. tenants themselves had wide status, servile free. These people were surrounded others no direct evidence, there indications that many them must free-holders, owing rents dues anyone, indeed perhaps providing hired manor. Twelfth-century hesitancy copy polyptyques into cartularies suggests status obligations thoroughly changed centuries after making even high they those Carolingian era.
Medieval People