Studies on the Merovingian fiscal documents from the Abbey of Saint-Martin at Tours.

1993 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 04610230
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: History of Europe and America
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: SATO Shoichi Nagoya University, School of Letters, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (80131126)
• Project Period (FY): 1992 – 1993
• Keywords: France / Merovingian era / Touraine / Abbey of Saint-Martin at Tours / Accounting documents / Corn production / Three-fields system / Size and type of the family group

Research Abstract

The so-called Accounting documents from Saint-Martin Abbey at Tours provoked a kind of sensation, when they have been re-discovered in 1960s, after a long space of time of ignorance and neglect of their values as historical sources. I have proceed and always is proceeding my investigations trying to understand the documents as a whole. Firstly, I explored material aspects of this document in BN in Paris, and confirmed that they haven't been collated when they were used as instrument for tax-collecting, so they weren't the register book like a Domesday Book or Carolingian Polyptychs, but merely a practical document. I think that there has been a registration book'now lost, which gave a series of information that enabled the monks to redact those practical documents. Secondly, I tried to locate a number of place-names on the topographical map as well as to identify those that haven't been located with Carolingian royal charters, the other sort of acts and Cassini's Map made in 18th centu ry. By doing so, I realized not only the distribution of manors possessed by the Abbey, but also the state of rural settlement and population at the end of Merovingian era in the mid-Loire valley. After having done a work of interpretation for the technical terms concerning fiscal administration in the document, thirdly, I evaluated the levels of agricultural productions, namely of corn productions of each peasant who has been charged to pay the land-tax due to the Abbey.
I have been persuaded that its better that we fix the value of modius, a meterology of contemporary dry-materials, as it were three times larger than that fixed by B.Guerard more than one and a half century before. With the help of a dietetics coefficient, I calculated a hypothetic average size of peasant family that the corn production, after the extraction by the tax as well as the reserve for seeding next year, could maintain. The answer was about four persons. So we must consider that the peasantry dependent on the Abbey has formed in the most part a nuclear family with a parent and two children. This was confirmed by the anthroponymical analyze of names that bore the peasants. Finally, I challenged the problem of notorious three-fields system in the demesne of Saint-Martin. The mode of association of plural corns that produced each peasant and the quantities of corn productions enabled us to conclude the three-fields system has been just in arisen or is arising, and originated first of all from the medium stratum of the peasantry, in the Touraine and its neighboring region.