Among the Rabble

In​ 859, a group of peasants from the lands around the Seine took up arms against the Viking raiders ravaging the French coast. It was a rather desperate attempt at resistance. ‘They fought bravely,’ the Carolingian chronicler Prudentius wrote of the battle that followed, but were ‘easily slain’. Not slain by the Vikings, however: local elites were so alarmed by the uprising that they decided to snuff it out themselves. (Prudentius is largely sympathetic to what he calls the vulgus promiscuum, but charges it with having acted ‘incautiously’.) The story gives an insight into what Shane Bobrycki calls the early medieval ‘crowd regime’, the way collective behaviour was organised and represented. Faced with the choice between the threat of Vikings and the threat of a mob, Frankish grandees chose the Vikings. Yet, as Bobrycki points out, crowds rarely feature in conventional accounts of the period. After the fall of Rome, population numbers collapsed, cities emptied out and, it’s often claimed, public gatherings largely ceased. Bobrycki sets out to challenge the final point. ‘Early medieval sources are full of crowds,’ he argues. ‘Just not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for.’

Demography is a particularly murky corner of early medieval history, but we know that between 500 and 1000 there was a trend of population decline and deurbanisation, the result of a degrading climate (the cold, arid period between the volcanic winter of 536 and 660 is sometimes called the Late Antique Little Ice Age), continuous warfare and a series of plague epidemics. New research suggests a connection between the harsher conditions and outbreaks of disease, as plague swept through communities already buckling under the pressure of food shortages and social crisis.

Some places were hit harder than others. ‘Cities [lie] in ruin,’ Pope Gregory I wrote at the end of the sixth century, ‘strongholds overthrown, fields despoiled; the land has gone back to nature.’ By the seventh century, the Colosseum could accommodate Rome’s entire population twice. The palaces on the Palatine Hill were slowly falling apart; the grand ancient churches served congregations a fraction of their former size. What had once been a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants had shrunk to around thirty thousand.

All over Europe buildings stood empty. The eighth-century writer Paul the Deacon described Metz as ‘abounding with crowds’, but also noted that its old amphitheatre had been ‘given over to wild snakes’. Bath, as depicted in the Old English poem ‘The Ruin’, had been all but abandoned: ‘Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras/hringeat berofen, hrim on lime’ (‘Roofs are collapsed, towers ruined/the ring-gate destroyed, rime on mortar’). The crumbling Roman buildings hint at a past so grand and distant that the poem’s speaker imagines them as enta geweorc, the work of giants. The landscapes in other Old English poems are equally desolate. The speaker in ‘The Wanderer’ mourns the death of his kinsmen as he roams ‘friendless’ through the wilderness; Saint Guthlac sits alone in his fenland hermitage; Heorot, the mead hall where Beowulf feasts before fighting Grendel, stands in the middle of a swamp. Readers of these poems might be surprised to learn that early medieval England had cities. York, which had been a Roman garrison town, flourished as a trading settlement (or wic in Old English). On the Thames, about a mile upstream from ancient Londinium, sat Lundenwic, a bustling hub with a population in the thousands, in what is now Aldwych (‘Old Wic’). But these were the exceptions. Between the second and seventh centuries, the number of occupied Roman settlements in lowland Britain and northern France dropped by half; in central Italy, by as much as four-fifths.

Bobrycki has worked through the records of this diminishment to find evidence of any kind of agglomeration. At times he takes this too far: it’s hard to agree that the ‘multitudes of beasts’ which roamed the pastures of early medieval Europe or the historical registers kept by monasteries count as crowds. He needn’t have cast quite so wide a net, because in the early Middle Ages people gathered, as people always have, for all sorts of reasons. Harvesting crops, or repairing dykes and ditches, required many hands. Smallish armies fought smallish wars. Monarchs and noblemen surrounded themselves with entourages; peasants congregated at churches and local assemblies; monks and nuns lived communally in religious orders. At markets and fairs, wares were traded, information was exchanged and fun was had. The great construction projects of this period – Lindisfarne, Offa’s Dyke – required large numbers of labourers. Exact numbers are hard to establish but building Offa’s Dyke is thought to have taken five thousand men. In the autumn of 793 Charlemagne enrolled a ‘multitude of men’ in a grand scheme to dig a canal between the Rhine and the Danube. (It ultimately failed on account of the swampy terrain and relentless bad weather.)

In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti drew a distinction between what he called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ crowds. Open crowds are what we tend to think of when we speak of crowds: spontaneous occasions where people come together with a shared if hazy purpose, temporarily suspending the normal order of things. Closed crowds, by contrast, are planned gatherings with a fixed motive. They solidify rather than disturb existing social hierarchies. One of the reasons the early Middle Ages tend not to feature in histories of the crowd, Bobrycki suggests, is that gatherings in this period were overwhelmingly closed. Mobs such as the one that formed on the Seine were rare – they were logistically challenging and provoked brutal reprisals. The forming of assemblies followed what Bobrycki calls ‘predictable grooves’: harvests in late summer, hunts in autumn, religious festivals in winter and spring, military campaigns and secular assemblies in early summer.

Nonetheless, gatherings could still be occasions for popular resistance. Peasants who assembled at the wrong place or time, in unexpected numbers, or who refused to assemble, undermined the status quo. In the 750s, for instance, the Lombard king Desiderius bestowed the Trita valley – a remote backwater beneath the peaks of the central Apennines – on the monks of his local monastery. The monks thought that the gift included the valley’s peasants, and began demanding rent and labour. The peasants refused. An extended dispute followed, in which the monks accused the peasants of invading their land. But generations of peasants held out; their form of collective action was to flee to the mountains every time the monks appeared. A settlement had still not been reached when, 120 years and nine court cases later, the monastery was sacked by a Muslim army.

In Normandy, around the turn of the millennium, disgruntled rustici took a more direct approach. Unhappy with lordly privileges over woodland and waterways, they stopped work, ‘stirred up numerous mini-assemblies and decided to live according to their own wishes’. The peasants elected representatives and sent them to the provincial assembly to present their decree of collective autonomy. The outcome makes clearer the reason the peasants of Trita chose their oblique method of resistance: the duke sent the delegates back with their hands and feet cut off. ‘Having seen this,’ a local chronicler wryly noted, ‘the rustics, putting aside their gatherings, went back to their ploughs.’

Churches hosted the sort of organised gatherings more commonly associated with the period. Just how frequently the average peasant went to church is impossible to say, though Bobrycki suggests that ‘most laypeople might not [have taken] communion more than three times a year.’ Certainly, early medieval legislators made an effort to increase attendance. Even for those who didn’t regularly attend Mass, churches were central to communal life. They were markers of local identity, venues for various kinds of public meeting and places where the poor received disbursements. Bobrycki does a good job of evoking how imposing churches would have seemed: ‘Hundreds of lit candles … The scent of incense or cut flowers … Grand frescoes and mosaics, rare textiles between partitions, the blocked-off altar with relics below, beneath an apse showing the awful multitudes of the Final Judgment.’ But even the grandest early medieval churches weren’t cavernous spaces. They were broken up in ways that reinforced social hierarchies: curtains and columns separated members of the congregation by class; frescoes depicted heavenly crowds in serried ranks. Men and women received communion separately, while the poor stood by the church entrance or in the antechamber begging for alms. In the ninth century, Pope Paschal I redesigned Santa Maria Maggiore so that he wouldn’t be disturbed by the sound of women entering the building.

For all these attempts at structure, religious crowds could still be unpredictable. In the fifth century, Augustine complained that an unexpectedly large and ‘rather restless’ horde had come to listen to him preach. Amid the commotion he had to read out a passage from the Gospels twice, ‘for my voice is such that it will only carry in a great silence.’ In the 840s, two men dressed as monks arrived at the church of St Bénigne in Dijon with bones they claimed were relics. (Of which saint they couldn’t say.) Before the local authorities figured out what to do with them, a crowd of hundreds of peasants – ‘especially women’ – had formed at the church, flailing wildly ‘as if they were being beaten’ and refusing to leave. Bobrycki notes that, despite admonishment from bishops and priests, peasants continued to ‘build bonfires, march in unauthorised processions, assemble before magicians, pseudo-saints, and pseudo-prophets and shout to the moon in eclipse’.

Early​ medieval speakers of Latin inherited a trove of words to describe different types of crowd: populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex. Caterva and grex were both used to describe troops of men, but caterva originated as a military term referring to a band of barbarian soldiers, while grex, which had pejorative undertones, had been a word for a flock or herd of animals. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville expounded on the distinction between a ‘multitude’ (multitudo) and a ‘crowd’ or ‘rabble’ (turba). The former was defined by numbers, the latter by space: ‘For a few people can make up a turba in narrow confines.’ These nuances were being abandoned, however. Some writers were using turba not just for disorderly rabbles, but for hosts of angels and gatherings of monks; military terms such as legio and cohors lost their specificity and became synonyms for ‘many’. Even plebs came to be used simply as an alternative to populus.

As gatherings became more organised affairs, new words were needed. Germanic languages had inherited the word ‘thing’ (ding in German and þing in Old Norse), which originally referred to a local assembly – the kind where disputes were settled and collective decisions reached – but evolved to include the time or place of these assemblies, the discussions held and the agreements made. A thinghûs (‘thing house’) came to be anything from a legal court to a theatre; a thingâri (‘thing doer’) could just as easily be a preacher or a litigant. The noun thingatio even entered Latin through Lombard law, where it denoted public legitimisation.

Along with their terminology, the Romans had passed down to early medieval Europe the belief that crowds were an important source of validation. Hordes of admirers attested to the holiness of relics. Adoring masses confirmed a ruler’s legitimacy. Though elections in the early Middle Ages were hardly democratic, unanimous approbation by crowds was an important part of the ritual. ‘In a world with no voting booths or opinion polls,’ Bobrycki writes, ‘claims about collective will implied collective performances.’ It was routine for those running for office to accuse their rivals of crowd manipulation. Photios, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, was dogged by accusations that he had doctored the names of subscribers to his conciliar acta to inflate his support. Gregory, bishop of Tours, claimed that one of his rivals for the position had assembled a ‘throng of paupers’ to raise a clamour.

Crowds were a scarce resource and assembling them required careful planning. When a group of ninth-century clerics in eastern Francia required ‘miraculous’ crowds to prove that their newly procured relics were authentic, they made sure to parade through the region before storing the relics at the busy mill town of Obermühlheim, which they renamed Seligenstadt, or Blessed City. What mattered was the illusion of spontaneity. For every genuine relic-bearing cleric, however, there was a peddler of fake goods. What were authorities to do in cases where crowds seemed to legitimise miscreants? Gregory, from his see in Tours, reproached an ‘expert in wickedness’ who dressed in skins and went around calling himself Christ, committing highway robberies and handing out the spoils to his throngs of followers. In the eighth century, St Boniface wrote about a man called Aldebert who claimed to be an apostle, sold his fingernails as relics and won over ‘a multitude of simple people’. What made these events so unsettling was their similarity to approved gatherings. Had Christ himself not said, in the Gospel of Matthew, that ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’? In a world where crowds were seen as bestowing holy legitimacy, spectators gathering around heretical preachers or false relics posed a problem to authorities. Early medieval writers wrote polemics dismissing these ‘bad crowds’ as being motivated by fear or emphasising the involvement of women.

By the end of the first millennium, demographic pressures had eased. The climate became milder (the ‘medieval warm period’ began in the tenth century), and after the eighth century plague outbreaks largely ceased. Thanks in part to improvements in agricultural methods, populations recovered and large cities began once more to flourish. Venice, Ghent and London expanded greatly and came to possess a distinctly urban character. Spontaneous gatherings were no longer rare and the crowd ‘took on a new shape’: this is when we begin to see peasants’ revolts, tourneys, large public sermons and factional urban brawls. It was also around this time, Bobrycki points out, that ‘the initial signs appeared of a violent new mass persecution of the Jews of Western Europe.’

Some elements of the early medieval ‘crowd regime’ survived. Out of the ceremonial assemblies grew the later medieval parliaments, which evolved into the parliaments we know today. Early medieval artistic motifs showing rows of angels or amassed onlookers witnessing miracles remained commonplace in paintings and literature. Bobrycki ends his book with the First Crusade of 1096-99, in which more than a hundred thousand Europeans travelled ‘like locusts’ to the Holy Land under the leadership of Peter the Hermit. A product of the newly fashionable public sermons, it was, Bobrycki writes, ‘one of the most astounding mass movements in world history’.