![]() |
medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025
|
![]() |
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400 https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: verlag@oeaw.ac.at |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
DATUM, UNTERSCHRIFT / DATE, SIGNATURE
BANK AUSTRIA CREDITANSTALT, WIEN (IBAN AT04 1100 0006 2280 0100, BIC BKAUATWW), DEUTSCHE BANK MÜNCHEN (IBAN DE16 7007 0024 0238 8270 00, BIC DEUTDEDBMUC)
|

medieval worlds • no. 23 • 2025, pp. 97-114, 2025/11/27
This article begins and ends by arguing that social historians of the early Middle Ages interested in the relatively neglected themes of work and mobility would do well to refocus their energies on the »small worlds« unearthed by charter-based reconstructions of local societies – the latter a methodology associated above all with the pioneering studies of Wendy Davies since the 1980s. It argues that this approach – that is, what we might call a »reversion to the local« – remains relevant because most people’s social experience – indeed, their entire referential system – took root and developed within a limited geographical compass, so if we want to understand the structures that gave shape and meaning to non-elite life, it is imperative that we consider work and mobility – the principal themes of this article – in the specific local contexts in which they operated. Such an approach is of course constrained by the patchy survival of evidence from across early medieval Europe. But the mundane affairs of the village society of tenth-century north-western Spain can be tracked in some detail, especially in certain unusually well-documented villages, such as Rabal, analysed herein, thanks to significant numbers of surviving charters, allowing us to see something of the potential richness of »the local« as a frame of analysis. This article proposes that by focusing on the small-scale and the quotidian, we address the lives of rural cultivators, as far as possible, on their own terms, enabling us, to the degree that it is indeed possible, to set those lives within carefully historicised contextual horizons.
Keywords: work, mobility, local society, the peasantry, communal management of resources