Жизнь и смерть в Средние века. Очерки демографической истории Франции - Юрий Львович Бессмертный
The analysis of all these intertwined objective and subjective structures opens up a possibility to understand anew and more deeply the relation and interrelation of various phenomena in history. It seems the more interesting, as the demographic development in the medieval West as a whole, and in France in particular, has nearly never been studied in the way here suggested. One of the reasons of the lack of such studies lies in the laconism of medieval sources, which very seldom hold direct information on demographic phenomena. The researcher is therefore forced to focus his attention upon revealing indirect and implicit information carried by the sources. In this task he may be very efficiently assisted by the analysis of demographic concepts as a product of people’s subjective perception of the objective processes in the society they lived in, and in the demographic sphere in particular.
In this sense, the direct and indirect data on demographic concepts and the changes the concepts were undergoing, can be used for a mediated characterization of the very demographic processes themselves. And vice versa, the data on some specific variants of demographic behaviour, appearing from time to time in the sources, can be used in order to find in them information on the demographic concepts of the time. Last but not least, elucidation of the system of demographic concepts in one or other period of the Middle Ages will help to form a balanced assessment of fragmentary evidence, scattered in the sources, of demographic processes as they were.
The complex character of the research required a great variety of sources to be used; among them were treatises on theology and morals, penitentiaries, chronicles, acts, coutumes, church council, statutes, polyptiques, censiers, hagiographic texts, genealogical materials, biographies, literary works.
The Carlovingian epoch was chosen here as the initial point for the study, as that was the time of France’s emergence as an independent state (Chapter 2). The subsequent chapters deal with the flourishing period of French feudalism (Chapter 3), its critical stage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the premise of the pending crisis of medieval society (Chapter 4), and the decline of feudalism and the genesis of capitalism in France in the period of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (Chapter 5). The intensive historio-demographic exploration of the latter period on-going in France allowed the present author to restrict Chapter 5 to a generalization (in the main) of scientific data already accumulated, while the previous ones are based wholly on the author’s own research. The first four chapters present a parallel elaboration of the methods of research and subjects under study, as without the specially elaborated methods of analyzing the sources, it would have been impossible to solve the posed problems.
All the chapters have a similar structure: they describe nuptial patterns and nuptiality; concepts of family and family models; attitudes to childhood and the number of children; attitudes to women and the number of women as related to the number of men; attitudes to old age, death and longevity; views on the ages of man and the age structure; the rate of population growth and demographic dynamics.
The demographic results proper given by the research are as follows: in the Carlovingian period, the concept of marriage had not yet acquired a strict meaning. It embraced various nuptial models inherited, as a somewhat changed version, from the Romans and ancient Germans. The monogamic church marriage was but one of numerous nuptial patterns existing at that time. Therefore, the age at first marriage and the proportions marrying at that time should be assessed on the basis of all existent nuptial models. Most often, men married for the first time under twenty, girls even earlier then that. No more than 15 % or 20 % of peasants remained single; as to the nobles, the proportion was even smaller. Peasant families with children, in «peaceful» times, usually had two or three children who reached adulthood. And yet, the total number of the younger generation very slightly, and not everywhere, exceeded that of the older one. The high rate of infantile mortality, the mortality of mothers at childbirth and the shortness of adults’ lives brought the proportion of childless families in the Carlovingian epoch up to 30–45 %. As a result, the natural growth evidently did not exceed 0,1 % a year.
In the flourishing period of French feudalism, the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the situation in the country changed for the better. Nuptiality rate remained very high, which might be explained, in particular, by the existence of free nuptial models along with the church marriage, which by that time had become predominant. The age at first marriage and proportions unmarried (peasants particularly) did not increase, while the number of children, and their proportion as to the whole population, grew considerably. And no wonder it was so, as inner colonization, urban growth and economic upsurge at that time went side by side with the changes in the conventional vision of the world. The increased prestige of worldly values found its expression specifically in intensified vital behaviour, in improvement of puericulture, as well as a better care of the old and ailing. The proportion of childless families in that period seldom exceeded 30 %. Families having children had now no less than three or four children alive. Old age, in common view, began at forty. The average life
