European Society: Urban and Rural Life
Professor STEVE HINDLE
1. Describing the Social Order: A Tripartite Image of Society?
a) commonplace distinction between those who fought (the nobility); those who prayed (the
clergy); those who worked (the peasantry).
b) Extremely enduring: despite the realities of social change (e.g. nobles did less fighting,
protestants denied the clergy were a separate estate).
c) Limitations of this analysis of the social order. esp. its failure to distinguish between the
social order in the towns and the social order of the countryside
2. Towns: The Definitional Problem of ‘Urbanity’
a) Sociological (e.g. Louis Wirth, The Urban Way of Life (1938)): a town was ‘a relatively
large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’.
b) Historical: i. (e.g. Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City, 1960): pre-industrial towns
characterised by close-knit and inter-related elites; a clearly-defined class structure; a
regulated economic structure; efficient communications networks. Emerging consensus
that size is less significant than function.
3. The Pattern of Urbanisation
a) Largest towns = 50,000+ inhabitants: seven (Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Rome,
Naples, Palermo) in Northern Italy; + London, Paris, Lisbon: growth concentrated in
these 'cities'. Polarisation within the urban hierarchy
b) England only lightly urbanised: France had 27 towns larger than 10,000 people, England
only two (London, Norwich):
c) Clark & Slack (1972) on the 16th-17th c. concentration of the urban population in a smaller
group of towns:
4. Crisis or Order in Urban Europe?
a) Clark & Slack (1972): once conventional to emphasise post 1570 urban crisis: population
growth; immigration; economic weakness; social disorder; disease; provincial towns in
decline.
b) More recent scepticism on the notion of urban crisis: towns were sophisticated enough to
adapt to economic change. NB the absence of ‘lost cities’ (cf. plentiful evidence of 'lost
villages' destroyed by depopulation). Towns as vectors/agents of economic change.
5. Urban Society
a) reputation for dirt, pollution and peril: towns as sites of disorder, refuges for beggars and
vagrants
b) But NB growing evidence of late 17th c. urban renaissance; towns as centres of culture,
taste and gentility.
c) Polarisation reflected in social structure and distribution of wealth: Sjoberg (1960) on rich
merchant-dominated central areas; occupational zoning resulting from the guild system
some mixture of social classes; but cf. the poor living outside the city walls: growth of
unregulated building in the new 'suburbs'.
d) Exacerbated by migration: Clark and Slack (1972) distinguish between subsistence and
betterment migration: towns swamped by vagrants seeking alms, work and shelter.
Poverty more visible in towns than in the countryside
e) Political response: changing nature of urban government; tendency towards oligarchy
(small knots of reliable men); closing off broader tradition of participation. Some
sensitivity to communal opinion (cf. Europe). Towns as non-feudal islands in a feudal
sea.
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6. The Peasantry and Rural Life
a) 90% of the population living on the land, predominantly 85% engaged agriculture but
also perhaps 5% manufacturers (cloth produced in domestic industry amounting to less
than 5% of GNP)
b) demographic growth held in check until the 1690s in France, 1790s in Scandinavia: a
symptom of economic backwardness.
c) in western Europe the peasantry was generally free, but even there peasants were tenants
(owing rent and other feudal obligations, perhaps 2 days a week in labour services) rather
than owners. Independence and prosperity invariably undermined by taxation. In eastern
Europe serfdom persisted, and was perhaps even renewed ('second serfdom?').
d) demands on the income of the rural producer (seigneurial dues 4%; tithe 8%; royal
taxation 20%; seed corn 20%; subsistence including rent 48%). Might therefore require
25 acres for a peasant family to subsist. More than 75% of French peasants owned less
than this: only solution was to consume seed-corn (mortgaging next years crop and
borrow to make up the difference: crippling burden of debt). A substantial proportion
(70% in Castille) held no land at all.
e) Over time the burdens on the peasant were increasing, especially due to war and to
fiscality (4 fold increase in the tax burden in Castille 1570-1670): consequences included
social polarisation within the peasantry; expropriation of the very poorest; and the
purchase of rural tenancies by the urban bourgeoisie.
a) Peasant consciousness?: ‘a social entity of comparatively low classness’ (Shanin 1984).
NB Marx famous comments that even in the 19th c. the French peasantry were 'just a sack
of potatoes'; and his emphasis on the 'idiocy of rural life'. By 1670 the stupidity of the
'country bumpkin' had become proverbial.
7. A ‘Class Society’ or an ‘Estate Society’?
a) Distinction originates with the founding fathers of sociology (Weber; Tonnies) c.1900
b) ‘Class society’: status and power are determined by wealth; social opportunities are
determined by the market; classes have no formal status or legal privileges
c) ‘Estate Society’: wealth and power are determined by status; social opportunities are
determined by lifestyle, honour and reputation; estates are legally defined
d) Mousnier (1973) argues forcefully that early modern regimes in general (and France in
particular) were composed of a ‘society of orders’ i.e. of ‘estates’ rather than ‘classes’.
Ideas influenced by the 17th c. French lawyer Charles Loyseau & by 20th c. sociologists
esp. Parsons & Durkheim. Easy to criticise him for his nostalgia: emphasising consensus
pre-1789 as opposed to conflict thereafter; celebrating the fully-developed legal
priveleges of western European society (towns, guilds, representative assemblies) with
the ‘despotism’ of the east (unregulated serfdom).
e) A 'society of orders' is probably the least misleading of the models we have available?
SH: 12.x.2010