Small Worlds. The Village Community in Early Medieval BrittanyWendy Davies1998

Little enough is known about the development of early medieval society. This book, however, drawing on records found the influential monastery of Redon, is able to present a remarkably detailed picture of ninth-century Brittany: of the peasant farming communities, their internal composition and their relations with the wider world.

So rich is the material that we can see not only the composition of families but the changing configurations of local control. The ninth century was clearly a major period of change in the fortunes of these villages, a time when the political identity of power of the local territorial seigneur first began to make its mark.

By the 870s the vigorously independent free peasants proprietors of the early decades of the century were being replaced by a community of less vociferous tenants, more aware of aristocratic interests - and especially of the control exercised by the monastery, which continued as powerful religious corporation until the French Revolution.

Titre original : Small Worlds. The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (1998)