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3 results

  • 3 - Merchants, markets and towns

  • from PART I - GENERAL THEMES
  • Edited by Timothy Reuter, University of Southampton
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    13 March 2000, pp 64-94

  • Summary

    The beginnings of the European town in the form known to us from the late Middle Ages lie in the tenth century. The trading of Islamic merchants was shaped by a detailed legislative framework based on writing. In the regions outside the old Roman Empire incorporated into the Frankish empire during the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, people find very varying beginnings for quasi-urban settlements and for mercantile centres. Markets for wholesale and long-distance trade, merchants' inns, and also markets for the agrarian produce of the hinterland lay on the periphery. In the transalpine regions of the former Frankish empire, in what were becoming France and Ottonian Germany, the development of towns took a quite different path. Although the development of towns and markets in France, Lotharingia and Germany was strongly influenced by regional political forces, the Ottonian rulers played a decisive part.

  • 19 - Rural society in Carolingian Europe

  • from PART II - GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONS
  • Edited by Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 1995, pp 510-537

  • Summary

    In the Carolingian period, from 750 or so onwards, people began, for the first time in European history, to see rural society more directly. This chapter provides an understanding of how rural social relationships actually worked in practice, on the ground. It talks about four areas as brief examples of the local societies, and discusses what their similarities and differences might tell us about the vast range of small-scale realities that made up Europe as a whole. The four are two small Catalan counties, Urgell and Pallars; the villages north of the Breton monastery of Redon; Dienheim in the middle Rhine, just upstream from Mainz; and Cologno Monzese, a settlement just east of Milan: from, respectively, a marginal frontier area, a more prosperous marchland, a core area for Frankish political power, and the urbanised heartland of the Lombard-Carolingian kingdom of Italy.

  • 26 - Language and Communication in Carolingian Europe

  • from PART IV - CULTURE AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 1995, pp 695-708

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the application of modern socio-linguistic advances to the Carolingian period. From the socio-linguistic point of view, the transition from different kinds of spoken Latin to the Romance languages, and the corresponding wreck of general Latin communication, led, from the 750s onwards, to the establishment of a situation of diglossia. The end of the Merovingian centuries and the whole of the Carolingian period in the linguistic and cultural history of Europe can be described in a way which, however complex its elements, reveals a creative development, much less confused than appeared at first sight; the ills and the disorders which the language of the Merovingian charters appears, time and time again, to display are the indirect sign of an intense linguistic activity, from which would emerge the new and unforeseen perfection of the Romance dialects, fruit of a process by which final order was born of apparent chaos.