On the death of Theuderic IV in 737, the Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel (c. 688–741), took the decision not to nominate a new king of France. The vacancy lasted six years: Pippin the Short and Carloman, the sons of Charles, eventually reinstated a Merovingian on the throne. For a long time, this interregnum has been analysed in terms of the rising power of the Pippinides – and probably quite rightly so. Yet it has also been seen as proof of the marked weakness of the monarchy. This is more doubtful: in reality, instead of interpreting this episode in the light of the Carolingian rise, one may replace it in the context of the political practices which had been in use since the beginnings of the Frankish settlement in Gaul.

The idea of an ancestral ‘Germanic kingship’ resting on a warlike sacredness and endowed with limited political attributes is probably best placed alongside the myths of historiography. In fact the Merovingian world had inherited most of its governing traditions from Rome. In the late imperial period, the auctoritas represented the plenitude of sovereign power, such as the issue of rights, the monopoly of gold coinage, the control of diplomacy and the control of religious cults. This authority was the preserve of the princeps, while judicial and military powers could be delegated to agents. If one is to give any credence to the rare royal edicts that have been preserved, this conception of kingly power did not undergo any significant transformation between the fifth and the early eighth centuries. The auctoritas was normally reserved to the sovereign only. One did not think of palatine and territorial offices in terms other than temporary and revocable delegations of power.

Thus in the early days of the Merovingian dynasty, the very notion of central authority had indeed raised problems of definition. Thanks to a foedus with the Empire in the fifth century, the Frankish kings had been given control of the provinces of northern Gaul. But at best this was delegated power. The real master of the world was still in Constantinople, a fact that the Merovingians were willing to accept. In their correspondence, they presented themselves as the ‘sons’ of the emperor. On the solidi minted by the Franks, the Byzantine emperor appeared as the sole issuing authority, and this situation lasted until the late sixth century.

Much scholarship on medieval authorship focuses specifically on textual evidence – that is, what the text itself says about an author. Scribes and planners are thus often neglected as agents of composition and reception, and seen rather as ‘mechanical means’ through which details of authorship are transmitted, to borrow Matthew Fisher's terminology. This chapter therefore attempts a distinctive analysis, one that aims to show that the medieval publishers (including scribes) of French Grail literature adopted strategic and deliberate tactics in the disclosure of authorship in their editions. These strategies, I argue, reveal important developments in the social and cultural positioning of authorship during the period under consideration in this book. My primary concern, therefore, is to understand whether the author gradually gained a consistent position within the manuscript publication of French Grail texts, in effect establishing a standard for the print industry which followed, or whether such trends in fact remained specific to certain texts, workshops and traditions, or even to particular authors themselves. A secondary benefit of viewing the consumers of these texts through the eyes of the publishers who tailor products on their behalf, or even at their behest, is the generation of important insights into medieval audiences’ perceptions of Grail authors, as well as indications of whether knowledge of authorial identity actually mattered to these audiences. Medieval publishers, after all, were literate, and must therefore also be counted among the primary audiences for the texts they published.

Modern readers, of course, are accustomed to the notion of authors occupying a place of prominence in printed editions of texts, typically being named on the front cover, title page and spine. Medieval texts transmitted in manuscripts, however, do not usually accord the names of authors the same method of presentation. A notable amount of medieval literature is, for example, anonymous. And even when authors are named by having been, for instance, interwoven into the main body of text, name-checked in a scribal preface or colophon, or referred to by a pseudonym, they actually often claim to be handing down something from another auctor, rather than creating it themselves. The purpose of this often appears to be to lend to the text, as Marie-Dominique Chenu points out, a notion of greater authority and authenticity.

Across medieval Europe, the distinction between authority (auctoritas or dignitas) and power (potestas) was at the heart of the theoretical reflection on powers, most especially in the form of the division between ecclesiastical authority and temporal power, inherited from Pope Gelasius. An alternative analysis distinguished implicitly between the power and authority held by the prince, and various forms of delegated power: in practice, lords or their representatives exerted power over localities and/or populations, but their legitimacy rested on the authority of a distant prince. In the case of kings, the personal nature of kingship raised specific questions about the continuity of authority and the risks created by the king's absence, incapacity or death. The growing separation between the person of the king and the dignity of the Crown may have helped resolve this issue. In England, the Boulogne Agreement of 31 January 1308 is usually considered as the first textual evidence of the clear separation between the Crown and the person of the king. However, earlier texts had already enhanced the perennial nature of the royal dignitas.

In fact, there were many instances when authority of various ranks and forms was absent: through legal minority, vacancy or physical or mental incapacity; under duress (by captivity or exile); or through conscious choice due to a plurality of business commitments or priorities beyond the physical jurisdiction of the individual(s) in power. These absences were experienced in various ways, and prompted a variety of responses. We might, of course, identify common legal principles and customs which evolved over time to respond to such crises or interregna, and to guide the appointment and management of proxy authority in ruling dynasties and governments, national and trans-national institutions (such as characterized both the secular and regular churches), and thus communities small and large (from individual households, families and businesses through wider associations such as guilds and on to towns and city states). However, given the huge variety of experiences across the many kingdoms, lordships and institutions of medieval Europe which have been highlighted by recent collaborative surveys of similar themes – such as hereditary succession or the development of office-holding and representative assembly – the editors of this present volume chose, quite deliberately, to set no very fixed parameters in inviting contributions which reflected as wide a geographical, socio-political and methodological spectrum as possible.

‘When I was eleven years old I was already a servant (vaché), it was the same for everyone’, Dalmazzo Giraudo (born 1893), a peasant from Piedmont reported in 1970. My parents ‘sent me out to serve. I stayed for two years’, Ferruccio Preti wrote in 1950 in one of the autobiographies of militants preserved in the archive of the Communist Party in Bologna, where the experience as farm servants (garzoni) was one of the most common themes. Almost all boys from agricultural labourers’ (braccianti) families became servants as soon as they had attended primary school, Franco wrote in a blog referring to the interwar period in countryside around Ravenna. For peasants, having a servant was as common as having a dog, Francesco Salvatici (1933–2006) maintained in 2005, remembering his childhood in Tuscany. There were hundreds of prospective masters who tried to find rural servants and vice versa, Crescenzo Iadanza (born 1921), reported in 2005, referring to the square in Benevento, in southern Italy, where he too, aged thirteen or fourteen, had tried (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a servant (valano).

These testimonies suggest that rural service was very common in Italy. Yet – broadly speaking – according to influential scholars this was not the case. Who is right? Historians or former servants? In this chapter I will try to assess the spread of rural service in Italy between pre-industrial times and the twentieth century. I will focus especially on life-cycle service, which since the 1960s has increasingly been considered a phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was a crucial component of the different European family-formation systems and marriage patterns, which in turn have been regarded as decisive in leading to low/high-population-pressure societies; in allowing for larger/smaller saving and accumulation; and, ultimately, in creating more/fewer opportunities for economic development. Moreover, the high/low presence of life-cycle servants has been deemed critical in fashioning weak/strong family ties and in stimulating the development of public or private/familial welfare systems.

ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT is usually characterised as having a drive to secularism, most obviously in the writings of those anti-clerical French philosophers – Voltaire, Diderot – who redrew the era's intellectual maps. The 1780s were a decade in which Enlightenment was as widely and explicitly pursued as it ever would be, before the implosion of the French Revolution turned secularism into an aggressive ideology determined to throw out old institutions and overthrow old class relations. What, then, is the significance of descriptions of aeronauts as gods? Is it a way of instating classicism as an alternative to clericalism? Is it a lightly allusive language that playfully creates a category of social actors for whom there needs to be distinction? Is it a carry-over from the ancient world, one of many that Enlightenment revivified, in which mythology appeals because it provides an explanatory system that is both secure and remote? What sort of ironies are at work in the metaphor? And how does the idea of aeronauts as gods fit with belief in God, which was upheld by much Enlightenment activity even as rationalism loosened the grip of piety for many? Why too did people evoke gods when they had a perfectly serviceable alternative, both classical and contemporary, in the term heroes?

Some light is shed by comparison to the language used about aeronauts in a later period. It has been suggested by a scholar of Victorian balloonists, Elaine Freedgood, that ballooning provided an escape from ‘the new social world created by industrial capitalism with its suddenly too-numerous and too-contingent object relations’, and that by the mid nineteenth century ballooning offered a way to enjoy silence and space, increasingly rare commodities. What she describes as ‘a necessary pause from the tearing pace of productivity and progress’ could equally apply to the 1780s, which felt hectic to people at the time. Even after fifty years of ballooning, the exceptionality of aeronauts was remarked on: ‘A person who makes an ascent in a balloon will become, at least in his own estimation, a person of consequence.’

The life-cycle servants of the pre-industrial, agrarian Swedish society could be described as an ‘elegant solution’ to the changing balance between labour power and dependants that a farming household experienced during its existence. Time spent in service also made it possible to earn a living until the prerequisites of marriage and setting up a new farming household became available, which is a part of the model that John Hajnal described as the European marriage pattern. Sweden was characterized by this pattern from at least 1750. However, the strict regulations which forced landless people into year-long contracts as live-in servants suggest that economic and demographic forces were not enough to make young people take up positions as servants.

The bases of the life-cycle servant system were challenged during the agrarian revolution, when a process of proletarianization rendered it more difficult to reach the position of a landed farmer after a period of service. Proletarianization refers to the process of a larger share of the population being obliged to sell their labour power instead of controlling their means of production, that is, land in the agrarian society. This left larger groups than ever permanently landless and a lifelong position as wage labourer became a threat as well as a possibility for larger groups in agrarian Sweden.

The aim of this study is to analyse how the power relations between servants and their masters and mistresses in the peasantry were understood and changed during this process, both as a labour market and as a gendered contract.

In 1700, Sweden had 1.4 million inhabitants, which had increased to 2.4 million at the end of the century. In 1870 the figure was 4.2 million people. The vast majority lived in rural areas and up to 1850 about 80 per cent of the population made their living predominantly from farming-related activities. The agrarian revolution took place in Sweden c.1750–1850 and involved population growth, clearing of land, the use of new tools and farming techniques, and new forms of ownership which created more efficient agriculture, as well as increased social stratification among the rural population. Between 1750 and 1860 the number of landed farmers increased by 10–20 per cent, while the landless group at least quadrupled in number.

Servants were paid workers who lived within the home of their employer, and who received board and lodging as well as a cash wage. They were employed for longer terms, typically several months to a year at a time rather than by the day or task. Both men and women worked as servants, and most servants were young, unmarried people. In terms of days worked, throughout the early modern period servants were the dominant form of wage labour in many European societies, particularly in farming households. For instance, one recent estimate for eighteenth-century England, suggests that there were 1.7 servants for every day labourer in the population. Early-twentieth-century histories of service tended to view the institution through a nineteenthcentury lens, and were largely concerned with domestic servants undertaking housework in middle-class, urban, and wealthy households. It was not until the research of Peter Laslett and John Hajnal was published from the mid-1960s onwards, that historians began to understand the ubiquity of servants in early modern society across large areas of northern and western Europe, and consider the wider implications of service for economic, social and demographic structures. Early modern Europe was an overwhelmingly rural society: before 1800 at least 85 per cent of the population lived outside of large towns. The great majority of people, including servants, lived and worked in households that had some involvement in farming. Yet the literature on servants continues to be dominated by studies of urban and domestic servants. To date, there is only one monograph on rural servants, Ann Kussmaul's Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (1981), and no book-length study that compares rural service in different European countries. This volume aims to redress this imbalance.

Servants are important to our understanding of the society and economy of the past for a number of reasons. First, servants were an integral element of what Laslett describes as ‘the family in the western tradition’, and Hajnal ‘the north-west European simple household system’, now commonly referred to as ‘the European marriage pattern’ or EMP. This demographic system was characterized by the dominance of nuclear families (or ‘simple families’), relatively late marriage for both women and men, the setting up of a new household at marriage, and the circulation of young people between households as servants before marriage.

Coastal Flanders, the part of the county of Flanders bordering the North Sea, was among the first rural societies of north-western Europe to undergo a transition from a peasant society to a society dominated by large, commercially orientated leasehold farms between c.1300 and c.1600. By 1300, small freehold peasants, who also made a living from activities such as peat digging, salt-making or fishing, were still omnipresent in the region. Gradually these smallholders lost their properties to town dwellers and (ecclesiastical) institutional landowners. The new landowners leased their lands on competitive conditions for short terms. By the middle of the sixteenth century, large commercial tenant farmers dominated rural society. For this region, scholars have suggested that the process of enlargement of holdings created an increasing group of resident farm servants and full-time day labourers, working for most of their lives on a large farm in the neighbourhood.

However, research about the organization of rural labour in late-medieval and sixteenth-century Flanders remains scarce. Most studies have focused on the reconstruction of wages of building workers or excavation workers, employed by major institutions. Wages for labourers performing agricultural tasks such as ploughing, threshing or carting, and for harvesters are barely known. Moreover, the general significance of those wages for rural households remains unclear. Thanks to some rather anecdotal references, we know that large farmers made use of permanent, live-in employees from at least the fourteenth century onwards. The subdivision of rural labourers in a group hired per day or per task and a group hired for a longer period, during which the labourers lived at the farm, apparently dates back to at least the fourteenth century. However, only from the sixteenth century onwards, do sources permit us to learn substantially more about the latter, the servants. For early modern Flanders, the institution of service is well known, thanks to the research of Thijs Lambrecht. Evidently, the question arises whether the late-medieval live-in servants worked under the same conditions as their early modern colleagues.

Early in the 1880s, thus during the final years of the life of Bedřich Smetana, the Czech aesthetician Otakar Hostinský (1847-1910) sketched a conception of the further development of Czech modern music, reacting to widespread fears about the further fates of Czech music after the death of its founders and attempting to prevent its possible regression. He based his thoughts on the idea that continuous musical progress was indispensable:

Composers of the upcoming generation seemed to be the ideal representatives of such progress. In November 1893 early works of Josef Suk and Vítězslav Novák sounded in a concert of the Artists’ Society that was later declared “a memorable and important milestone in the history of Czech music,” and these two young composers became the official leading figures in Czech modern music. Their position as the main representatives of the ideal trend in the development of Czech music was somewhat shaken by the polemical conception of Zdeněk Nejedlý, who in his Dějiny českéhudby (The History of Czech Music), published in 1903, divided music after Smetana into two currents. For him the first, “progressive” current was represented by composers who followed most closely in the footsteps of Smetana; among them he gave first place to Zdeněk Fibich, Josef Boleslav Foerster, and later Otakar Ostrčil. The second, “conservative” current was represented by successors to Dvořák, thus above all his pupils Novák and Suk. Later Nejedlý's negative verdict also fell upon Leoš Janáček, whom he condemned as a “naturalist.” The confrontation between the “Smetanian” camp of Nejedlý and his supporters, whose forum became mainly the journal Smetana, and the “Dvořákians” grouped mainly around the journal Hudebnírevue (The Music Review), climaxed late in 1912 with the “battle over Dvořák.” These polemics, rather destructive to Czech musical culture, were interrupted by the world war and afterward by the rise of new stylistic trends in European culture which affected Czech music with full force and led to a certain regrouping of positions among Czech composers.

Ann Kussmaul's book on farm servants and farm service in early modern England is a rare example of historical research which resonates far beyond national, chronological and disciplinary boundaries. Following its publication in 1981, there was a wave of research on the history of farm service and its relationship with social, economic, agrarian and demographic structures and transformations. Kussmaul's book inspired Belgian historians working on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular. The survival of numerous and detailed population censuses and farm accounts from the eighteenth century have made this the preferred research period. Research on earlier periods, however, is almost non-existent. With the exception of the recent research by Lies Vervaet, little is known about farm servants before 1700. This also holds true for other regions: with the exception of England and Italy, relatively little is known about servants in rural Europe before the seventeenth century. In the case of the Low Countries, more research into the early history of servants and rural is warranted for a number of reasons. Recent research on the social and economy history of the Low Countries has revealed the early emergence and rapid development of wage labour in the countryside. It has been estimated that, in some regions, wage labour in agriculture accounted for more than half of all rural labour performed by the sixteenth century. Historians have assumed that a large part of this wage labour was provided by unmarried adolescents living and working in rural households as servants, but to date, empirical evidence is lacking. The role and place of service in the transition to wage labour in the countryside is still unclear. Recent research shows that labour markets operated differently during the sixteenth century, with possible repercussions and effects on the employment and recruitment of servants. Finally, the sixteenth century witnessed the crystallization of social, economic and agrarian transitions that started during the late medieval period. These transitions resulted in regionally differentiated rural economic landscapes. This chapter presents new empirical evidence on servants and the institution of service from the sixteenth century in light of these regional differences in rural economic structures. In particular, attention is paid to regional differences in employment patterns, wages and labour legislation.