1. R. Fossier, “Les mouvements populaires en Occident au XIe Siècle,” Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; comptes rendus des séances de Vannée 1971 (1972): 257–269, at 257.
2. Two recent publications assume the ordinary laity of ca. 1000 worthy of extensive discussion and the sources relating to them significant enough to critique. The collection assembled by T. Head and R. Landes brings together some of the most important European scholarship on social movements in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries specifically (The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Most recently, R. I. Moore’s account of changes and their causes from ca. 970 to 1215 places great emphasis on the seigneurial and agrarian systems of the period and on clerical and social reforms, processes to which the role of the peasantry in ca. 1000 was central (The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). S. Reynolds’ thought-provoking insights into what we can learn about lay communities in town and country in western Europe are useful in noting much continuity over the period, in which most studies emphasize change (Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The “feudal revolution” in Francia, on the other hand, is asserted by various important regional studies, cited below, their arguments synthesized in J-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, The Feudal Mutation, 900–1200, trans. C. Higgitt (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991), esp. pp. 119–140, 246–271 and 309–318. D. Barthélemy’s account of what occurred has proved the most challenging to this model (La mutation de l’’an mille, a-t-elle en lieu?: servage et chevalerie dans la France des Xe et XIe siècles, Paris: Fayard, 1997), and he challenges the existence of apocalyptic expectation as well as social crisis (“Le Paix de Dieu dans son contexte,” Cahiers de civilisation médievale, 40 (1997): 3–35). The peasantry patterns of social change have been addressed less extensively elsewhere. However, R. Faith’s work on the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon state and estate management is an extremely convincing model by which to explain the experience of the peasantry in England, making comparisons and contrasts with what was occurring on the continent more feasible than was previously possible (The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship, [Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997). For Germany, Iberia and Italy we have some regional studies, as cited, and W. Rösener’s German-centered survey is not so chronologically general that deductions about ca. 1000 are impossible (Peasants in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Stützer, Cambridge: Polity, 1992). R. Fossier’s own observations on peasant life in the west from ca. 1000 is also a very good critical synthesis of modern literature since the Dubyesque orthodoxies were challenged, although its general focus is a little late for the period subject under consideration (Peasant Life in the Medieval West, trans. J. Vale [Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1988]). H. Fichtenau’s observations on the peasantry closer to our period I find somewhat paternalistic and have used more critically (Living in the Tenth Century, Mentalities and Social Order, trans. P. Geary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). All references are to page or column numbers except where specified.
3. Fichtenau, Living, 305–306 and see similar conclusions about their low aspirations in his Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. D. A. Kaiser, (State Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 3.
4. Fichtenau, Living, xx; R. Erdoes, ad 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse (San Fransisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 2. Erdoes’s evidence is uncited, but presumably stems from H. Focillon’s assertion of the same unsourced commonplace in L’An Mil (Paris: Editions Armand Colin, 1952), 149.
5. E. R. Wolf on Max Weber’s indentification of the origins of scholarly misunderstanding and mistrust of peasant mentality, in Peasants (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 105.