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Medieval commune

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500 and
before (including Roman Britain)

   Defensive towers at San Gimignano, Tuscany, bear witness to the
   factional strife within communes.
   Defensive towers at San Gimignano, Tuscany, bear witness to the
   factional strife within communes.

   Communes in Europe in the Middle Ages were sworn allegiances of mutual
   defense (both physical defense and of traditional freedoms) among
   community members of a town or city. They took many forms, no two were
   alike in organization or make-up. Communes are first recorded in the
   late 11th and early 12th centuries, thereafter becoming a widespread
   phenomenon. They had the greater development in Italy, where they were
   real city-states based on partial democracy.

Etymology

   The English and French word "commune" appears in Latin records in
   various forms. The classical Latin communio means an association. In
   some cases the classical Latin commune was used to mean people with a
   common interest. Ultimately, the roots are cum (with or together) +
   munire (to wall), literally 'to wall together' (i.e., a shared
   fortification). More frequently the Low Latin communia was used from
   which the Romance commune was derived. When independence of rule was
   won through violent uprising and overthrow, they were often called
   conspiratio.

Origins

   During the 10th century in several parts of Western Europe, peasants
   with a special craft beyond the immediate requirements of their
   isolated village, or with a self-reliant spirit, began to gravitate
   towards the walled towns. In central and northern Italy, and in
   Provence and Septimania, the Roman cities had almost all survived—even
   if grass grew in their streets—largely as administrative centers for a
   diocese or for the local representative of a distant kingly or imperial
   power. In the Low Countries, some new towns were founded upon
   long-distance trade, where the staple was the woolen cloth-making
   industry. The sites for these ab ovo towns, more often than not, were
   the fortified burghs of counts, bishops or territorial abbots. Such
   towns were also founded in the Rhineland. Other towns were simply
   market villages, local centers of exchange.

   Such townspeople needed physical protection from lawless nobles and
   bandits, part of the motivation for gathering behind communal walls,
   but the struggle to establish their liberties, the freedom to conduct
   and regulate their own affairs and security from arbitrary taxation and
   harassment from the bishop, abbot or count in whose jurisdiction these
   obscure and ignoble social outsiders lay, was a long process of
   struggling to obtain charters that guaranteed such basics as the right
   to hold a market. Such charters were often purchased at exhorbitant
   rates, or granted, not by the local power, which was naturally jealous
   of prerogatives, but by the king or the emperor, who came thereby to
   hope to enlist the towns as allies in the struggle to centralize power
   that was arising in tandem with the rise of the communes. "The burghers
   of the tenth and eleventh centuries were ruthlessly harassed,
   blackmailed, subjected to oppressive taxes and humiliated. This drove
   the bourgeois back upon their own resources, and it accounts for the
   intensely corporate and excessively organized character of medieval
   cities." (Cantor 1993 p 231)

   The walled city represented protection from direct assault at the price
   of corporate interference on the pettiest levels, but once a townsman
   left the city walls, he (for women scarcely travelled) was at the mercy
   of often violent and lawless nobles in the countryside. Because much of
   medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection, each
   city had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the
   city walls, and outside. Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for
   turning the cities into self-governing corporations. Although in most
   cases the development of communes was connected with that of the
   cities, there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that
   were formed to protect the common interests of villagers.

   Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at
   their heart, communes were sworn allegiances of mutual defense. When a
   commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an
   oath in a public ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of
   trouble, and to maintain the peace within the city proper.

   What did it mean for a commune member to defend another? Obviously if a
   commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call
   for help, as it would be unlikely anyone would be around in time.
   Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker,
   the threat of revenge being a form of defense. However, if the attacker
   was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle (as was often the case), the
   town commune could not muster the forces to attack him directly;
   instead they might attack the nobles family, burn his crops, kill his
   serfs, or destroy his orchards in retribution.

   The commune movement started in the 10th century, with a few earlier
   ones like Forlì (possibly 889), and gained strength in the 11th century
   in northern Italy which had the most urbanized population of Europe at
   the time. It then spread in the early 12th century to France, Germany
   and Spain and elsewhere. The English state was already very
   centralized, so the communal movement mainly manifestated itself in
   parishes, craftsmen's and merchants' guilds and monasteries. State
   officialdom expanded in England and France from the 12th century
   onwards, while the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by communal coalitions
   of cities, knights, farmer republics, prince-bishops and the large
   domains of the imperial lords.

Medieval Christianity

   Communes were very important for the medieval church according to John
   Bossy (Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford 1985)). The word that
   Bossy uses is fraternity. The medieval church had a main focus on
   establishing peace. The main sins that had to be overcome to stop the
   killing, according to many theologians, were pride, envy and wrath.
   Communes could help bring peace, because people would cooperate instead
   of acting egoistically. In many places, fraternities and guilds were
   formed before a parish was established. They were formed by common
   people who imitated the way of life of the monks, without becoming part
   of a monastical order. Another method to establish peace was the
   confession. Medieval confessions were different from the modern day
   practises in the Roman Catholic church. A confession was held by a
   person in public instead of alone with a priest. The main theme was
   expressing sins committed against neighbours. Forgiveness was asked not
   merely from God, but also from one's neighbours. The 15th century
   brought a positive view on individualism expressed in the humanist
   movement of the Renaissance. Rising commerce was the cause of this
   individualism. Communalism has remained very popular within and without
   Christianity until this day.

Social order

   According to an English cleric of the late 10th century, society was
   composed of the three orders: those who fight, pray and work (the
   nobles, the clergy and peasants). In theory this was a balance between
   spiritual and secular peers with the third order providing for the
   other two. The urban communes were a break in this order. The Church
   and King both had mixed reactions to communes. On the one hand, they
   agreed safety and protection from lawless nobles was in everyone's best
   interest. The communes intention was to keep the peace through the
   threat of revenge, and the Church was sympathetic to the end result of
   peace. However, the Church had their own ways to enforce peace, such as
   the Peace and Truce of God movement, for example. On the other hand,
   communes disrupted the order of medieval society; the methods the
   commune used, eye for an eye, violence begets violence, were generally
   not acceptable to Church or King. Furthermore, there was a sense that
   communes threatened the medieval social order. Only the noble lords
   were allowed by custom to fight, and ostensibly the merchant
   townspeople were workers, not warriors. As such, the nobility and the
   clergy sometimes accepted communes, but other times did not. One of the
   most famous cases of a commune being suppressed and the resulting
   defiant urban revolt occurred in the French town of Laon in 1112.

Rural communes

   The development of medieval rural communes arose more from a need to
   collaborate to manage the commons than out of defensive needs. In times
   of a weak central government, communes typically formed to ensure the
   safety on the roads (Landfriede) through their territory, to enable
   commerce. Perhaps the most successful such medieval community was the
   one in the alpine valleys north of the St. Gotthard Pass: it later
   resulted in the formation of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The Swiss had
   numerous written acts of alliance, so-called Bundesbriefe: for each new
   canton that joined the confederacy, a new contract was written. Besides
   the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft, there were similar rural alpine communes
   in Tyrol, but these were quenched by the House of Habsburg. Other such
   rural communes developed in the Grisons, in the French Alps (
   Briançon), in the Pyrenees, in northern France (Forêt de Roumare), in
   northern Germany ( Frisia and Dithmarschen), and also in Sweden and
   Norway. The colonization of the Walser also is related. The southern
   medieval communes most probably were influenced by the Italian
   precedent, but the northern ones (and even the Swiss communes north of
   the St. Gotthard pass) may well have developed concurrently and
   independently from the Italian ones. Only very few of these medieval
   rural communes ever attained reichsunmittelbarkeit, where they would
   have been subject only to the king or emperor; most still remained
   subjects of some more or less distant liege lord.

Decline

   In the Holy Roman Empire, the emperors always had to face struggles
   with other powerful players: the princes on the one hand, but also the
   cities and communes on the other hand. The emperors thus invariably
   fought political (not always military) battles to strengthen their
   position and that of the imperial monarchy. In the Golden Bull of 1356,
   emperor Charles IV outlawed any conjurationes, confederationes, and
   conspirationes, meaning in particular the city alliances (
   Städtebünde), but also the rural communal leagues that had sprung up.
   Most Städtebünde were subsequently dissolved, sometimes forcibly, and
   where refounded, their political influence was much reduced.

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