A skeptical read would be that the economics of Norman style feudalism heavily relies on the peasants to work the land. Obviously you need the peasants to stay in their place. If all the warrior caste have the same perspective, you can't be carting off the population and selling them off overseas, without some major friction. And if you are trying to "take" some land from another warlord, it's not going to be very economical for you to sell off the peasants, cause then who is going to work the land?
The Normans were pretty harsh in their treatment of rebellious areas - the "Harrying of the North" being particularly brutal:
Yeah but that region wasn't as economically important. And it had a critical problem where it was the border region with Scotland and a preferred entry point for the Danes. Depopulating the area makes sense from a medieval military perspective because invaders won't have crops and infrastructure to pull from as they transverse the region. Other states in this time period had similar state-directed depopulated areas on the border for the same reasons.
Can someone explain what the deal was with selling slaves to Ireland? It makes it seem like Ireland was some wealthy nation buying slaves.
Ireland had viking settlement activity in the 800s and 900s. Newly formed settlements/kingdoms were consumers of slaves to further develop. But also, maybe they were named simply because Irish viking rulers had close ties with York, and therefore, there was more trade between nearby and politically close viking kingdoms.
The Normans were the great "levelers" of society. Yes, they may have raised up the slave, but they also deprived many others of their historical rights, say, of "sake and soke."
Sake was the right to hold low court on your own land.
Soke was the right to pay your taxes and infeudate yourself to the lord of your choice. There was an entire class of Anglo-Saxons known as "sokesmen." They practically disappeared overnight, historically-speaking.
Normans placed severe restrictions on your infeudation. None of this "I'll withhold my allegiance simply because my local baron is a tyrant" thing. Nope. Doesn't matter. Good, bad or evil, you owe your fealty to the local ruler.
So, while the Normans may have been a relief for the very, very bottom, they were very, very bad for the equivalent of the "middle class" of commoners.
As I read, this is pretty much what the article says. The very very bottom may have been as many as 30 % of the total population.
but did "the middle class" exist back then?
I thought "middle class" arose out of the bourgeois class later on?
It's like when I realized that slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church but simply didn't own very many things
slavery became awuful around things like deciding black people were closer to animals so it was ok to exploit them but really they were competing, or rather, trying to keep up with steam-based looms which were much faster at processing cotton so pick that cotton faster *cracks whip *
> "the middle class"
I assume small landholders, yeomen etc. and such would be the equivalent of the middle class in such a society.
> slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church
I'm not sure that's strictly true. It of course varied by time and place and the Church tried to somewhat limit the worst abuse.
Also a clear workaround was to enslave infidels. Muslims enslaved Christians (and basically depopulate many coastal areas across the Mediterranean), in turn Christians were fine with enslaving Muslims (all though they didn't necessarily have that many opportunities) and East European pagans were fair game to everyone.
As an Eastern-European, I can definitely say that after year 1000 we were not pagans, but Christian-Ortodox, but it’s true that the Genoese and the Venetians trading us around the Black Sea called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.
> called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.
I guess technically it was a "hack" though, the Genoese bought anyone the Mongols were selling and shipped them to Egypt and other Muslim states without anyone back at home asking too many questions..
Until of course the Ottomans got right of the middle men and took over the slave trade themselves.
If being raped, castrated or stoned to death was not horribly abused, I don't know what is.
> but did "the middle class" exist back then?
Not as we would recognize it today, but there were always merchants, craftsman and petty gentry that would have a measure of freedom and earning that serfs did not have the ability to achieve.
when I read Road to Wigan Pier I realized that the 20th Century British term "middle class" had an almost unrecognizable meaning compared to what Americans think of as "middle class"
So the first thing you need to figure out, to answer the question "did the middle class exist back then" is: which cultural definition of middle class are we even using to begin with?
You don't need to answer that, in fact, I explicitly handwaved it away. The question is - is there a class between the elites and the serfs, and the answer is always yes. There are always people that the elites need in order to operate a successful polity, but those people are not part of the ruling class.
What’s that definition?
I’ve always heard that it was the class in between the upper class/nobility, and the working class. That is, the class that isn’t able to just indefinitely stop working and sustain itself by things they own. But also isn’t living paycheck-to-paycheck and forced to work. Professionals in lucrative careers and successful small business owners. This makes more sense to me that the sort of typical misapplication to people around median income in the US.
Around median income is already a thing we have a name for (we can call it median income), and it tells us approximately nothing about their position in terms of labor relations or social class.
Working class people should unionize, they should band together to prevent exploitation. Middle class people don’t have to worry about exploitation, they can walk if they want to. They should form guilds and professional societies, to keep unqualified pretenders out of their fields.
"Middle class" is super-poorly defined. Marxists use it to mean petit bourgeoisie (ie people who own capital, plus professionals, so right from the start you have an anomaly, in that, say, a doctor is middle class even if they don't own anything; it's not purely capitalists). As you say Americans tend to use it to mean 'practically everybody'. The British definition has always been complex and is at this point probably complex enough that it's impossible to fully pin down; a huge part of it is _self-identification_ (there are plenty of British millionaires who consider themselves working class).
Hot take: slavery was actually always awful.
Isn't this a quite common pattern in history repeating itself? Including the reaction of the historians, to gloss over it?
The pattern that, a cohort of a society that under previous rule didn't have any right nor representation, acquire that as a side-effect during invasion of competing faction. Often under brutal circumstances, but the effect can be clearly seen if you how a society change during such over-hauling effect.
Japans invasion of South-east Asia comes to mind. Mostly for their own benefit, installing puppet-government, but it seems to be a contributing factor to decolonization of SEA of European influence. Depending on the source you read, this is probably glossed over to great deal.
I assume you can probably find similar cases in places like Spain (Reconquest), Christianization of East/North Europe, Islamic conquest of Middle East/Indus etc.