‘The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages’ by Shane Bobrycki review

Early medieval history is a crowded field. Despite the small source base, which only grows meaningfully in terms of archaeological data, the period has enjoyed the sustained interest of a large (and, until recently, growing) number of scholars. A premium is therefore placed on the questions historians ask and the frameworks they apply. Discoveries tend to come by looking at old problems in new ways, rather than uncovering new evidence. It is this which accounts for the success of this pithy new book by Shane Bobrycki. Bobrycki takes as his subject the humble crowd, showing that it has its own distinctive history, one which can be deeply revealing. For Bobrycki, the crowd is a prism through which to see the transformations Western Europe underwent between the eclipse of Roman authority in the fifth and sixth centuries and the urban and economic boom of the 11th and 12th centuries (what R.I. Moore once called ‘the First European Revolution’).

At the hands of a lesser historian, this material would have swiftly dissolved into a series of disparate observations. For the task Bobrycki has set himself is vast. He examines the figure of the crowd in its many forms across five centuries (c.500-c.1000) and all Western Europe (albeit with an avowed focus on Francia and Lombard northern Italy). Despite the notorious paucity of sources from these years, this is a massive undertaking. To read all the relevant written sources alone would be a lifetime’s work; to master the secondary literature fully would require truly Mosaic longevity. Bobrycki’s success may be attributed not only to his unusually wide reading (there was much in the notes which was new to me), but also his uncanny knack for distinguishing the wood from the proverbial trees.

For Bobrycki, the demographic thinning of the fourth and fifth centuries, occasioned by ecological and epidemiological disaster, set the scene for what he terms the new ‘crowd regime’ of the early Middle Ages. The crowds of Roman antiquity shared much with their later medieval and early modern counterparts. They were treated with studied ambivalence by the (largely elite) commentators of the era, who knew their importance in generating political consensus and legitimating regimes, but were equally aware that they could be double-edged swords. In the large and populous cities of the late Roman empire, crowds broke political regimes just as quickly as they made them, turning on emperors and governors who were perceived to have failed in their calling. By contrast, in the largely rural and agrarian society of the early Middle Ages, large gatherings were rare and typically required a degree of elite initiative (the largest were the armies called up by rulers – hardly a natural revolutionary force). This was a world in which crowd control was much easier for elites. As a consequence, we see a number of interesting semantic shifts, with terms such as turba, a largely pejorative term for crowd in Classical Latin (think perturbed), taking on neutral or even positive connotations.

Large bodies of people were never entirely predictable and there remained a degree of instability to gatherings, particularly in those regions in which urban culture survived longest (such as Italy and southern France). Still, non-elite resistance tended to take forms which Bobrycki terms ‘slantwise’, borrowing a concept from the anthropologists Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman. This refers to resistance which challenges the socio-political order indirectly, often adopting the outward trappings of legitimate action. In Bobrycki’s case, this means gathering at the wrong time or in manners which undermined the original purposes of an event; it could also involve redirecting licit action towards illicit (or at least undesired) outcomes. Such activity is particularly clear within the religious sphere, where much of what is spurned as ‘superstition’ by ecclesiastical authorities can be helpfully understood as slantwise resistance: conscious heterodoxy which fell just short of outright heresy. So, while elites found early medieval crowds more amenable than their antique forebears, they never achieved full dominance over them.

Bobrycki’s arguments are intelligently made and well supported throughout, making complex issues seem deceptively simple. At times, though, he risks assuming too much of his readers. While fellow specialists will catch most of his allusions (‘Bakhtinian carnival’, for example), many readers will not. The precise geographical compass of his survey could also have been clearer. Bobrycki focuses on Francia and Lombard central and northern Italy, but Spain and England both make periodic (and helpful) appearances. Less clear is the status of places such as Ireland, Wales, Scandinavia, and the Slavic lands. Bobrycki’s linguistic survey of terms for crowd includes the relevant vernaculars and he does occasionally cite evidence from Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland; otherwise, these regions are conspicuous by their absence. The biggest question left unanswered, however, is how Bobrycki’s model of the early medieval crowd regime might interact with other ones of power and domination in these years. Bobrycki’s analysis suggests that it was fundamentally demographic and economic factors which led to the overhaul of the early medieval crowd regime and the return to something more akin to late antique patterns of crowd behaviour in the central Middle Ages. He is doubtless right in part here. Yet he misses a trick in not engaging more directly with the work of Thomas Bisson and Alessio Fiore (among others), which identifies precisely these years as a period of dramatically increasing elite chauvinism. The benefits of economic and demographic growth only accrued to a small few, a fact which helps explain the more uppity crowds of the 11th and 12th centuries.

These quibbles do little to take away from the achievement represented by this book. It is a superb study, with wide-ranging implications not only for medieval historians, but also their antique and early modern colleagues. Historians should be thronging for it.

• The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages
  Shane Bobrycki
  Princeton University Press, 336pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter.