Medieval economies were far more complex than the traditional image of peasants working the land while lords collected their rents. In one of his later scholarly articles, the renowned medieval historian Chris Wickham explored how these economies functioned, why peasants played such an important role in their development, and why centuries of economic growth did not automatically lead to capitalism.
Wickham, who recently passed away, was one of the leading historians of medieval Europe, particularly known for his studies of social and economic history. His work challenged conventional interpretations of the Middle Ages, often using comparisons between different regions and societies to explain how the medieval world operated.
In his 2021 article, “How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies,” published in the journal Past & Present, Wickham tackled a fundamental historical question: what were the economic rules that governed medieval societies? His answer places peasants at the centre of the story, showing how their control over agricultural production helped shape economic development across Europe and beyond.
What Made the Medieval Economy Different?
Wickham begins by arguing that historians cannot simply apply the principles of modern capitalism to earlier societies. While supply, demand and prices existed throughout history, the relationships between those who produced goods and those who controlled wealth were fundamentally different.
In a capitalist economy, production is largely organised around wage labour and the market. In what Wickham calls the feudal economy, the foundation was instead the peasant household. Peasants cultivated land, raised animals and produced much of what they needed to survive. They also surrendered part of their production to landlords through rents, services and other obligations.
RIP Chris Wickham. Unlike so many historians who emphasise particularities and contingencies, he was the master of constructing grand, coherent, beautifully rendered worlds out of his evidence. This, from his 2021 Past and Present essay, is a masterpiece of historical writing.
For Wickham, this relationship between peasants and lords was the defining feature of feudalism. He uses the term in an economic sense, rather than to describe the familiar political relationships between kings, nobles and their vassals. As he explains:
So, if we want to understand history — or economics — better, we need to understand feudalism better.
The distinction matters because peasants generally retained considerable control over how they worked their land. Lords could demand a portion of what was produced, but they were usually not directly responsible for organising agricultural production. This gave peasants an economic importance that could extend well beyond their apparently subordinate position in medieval society.
Medieval Peasants Were Also Consumers
Merchants and customers buying and selling goods in a medieval marketplace, depicted in a 15th-century manuscript.
One of Wickham’s most interesting arguments concerns the relationship between peasants and markets. The traditional picture of the medieval countryside often assumes that peasants lived largely self-sufficient lives, producing what they needed and having relatively little involvement in trade. Wickham demonstrates that this interpretation is inadequate for many medieval societies.
Archaeological evidence reveals that rural households regularly acquired goods manufactured elsewhere. In Byzantine Greece during the twelfth century, for example, archaeologists have found glazed ceramics and wine amphorae at villages and isolated farms. These objects came from specialised production centres, including Chalkis and Corinth, suggesting that at least some rural households had the resources to purchase relatively expensive goods.
Similar patterns appear in medieval England after 1200. Excavations of deserted villages have uncovered pottery, knives and coins from different production centres. The relative scarcity of loom-weights at some settlements also suggests that villagers were purchasing cloth rather than producing all of it themselves. These discoveries demonstrate that peasants could participate actively in regional markets.
The picture was not limited to Europe. Wickham also discusses eleventh-century Egypt, where rural producers cultivated flax for commercial markets, and medieval China, where peasant households increasingly produced silk and cotton textiles for sale. Such examples show that the economic activities of ordinary rural households were essential to understanding the development of trade.
How Medieval Italian Cities Became Economic Powerhouses
Florence in the 14th century
Wickham devotes considerable attention to northern and central Italy, one of the most economically developed regions of medieval Europe. Beginning in the late twelfth century, cities such as Milan, Genoa, Venice and Florence experienced substantial commercial and industrial expansion.
By the thirteenth century, Italian towns supported large populations of artisans producing textiles, metalwork and leather goods. Woollen cloth became particularly important, while cities such as Milan and Cremona also manufactured fustian, a fabric made from cotton and linen.
These industries depended on extensive trading networks. Italian merchants imported wool from North Africa and, later, from Castile and England. Cotton arrived from Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean, while grain was brought into northern Italian cities whose growing populations could no longer be supplied entirely by the surrounding countryside. Banking and credit also expanded, with Italian financial institutions eventually lending money to rulers across Europe.
Yet Wickham argues that this remarkable commercial development did not mean that Italy had somehow escaped the feudal economy. Its prosperity remained closely connected to agricultural production and the relationships between peasants and landowners. Lords and wealthy urban residents provided substantial demand for manufactured goods, but peasants also contributed to commercial growth by selling agricultural products and purchasing goods themselves.
The Italian example demonstrates that a society could possess sophisticated markets, international trade and financial institutions while continuing to operate within an economic system fundamentally different from capitalism.
Why Peasants Had More Economic Power Than We Think
Peasants breaking bread. Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, 14th century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Département des manuscrits, Français 22545 fol. 72.
Perhaps the most distinctive part of Wickham’s argument concerns the balance of economic power between peasants and lords. Although landlords exercised considerable authority, their ability to extract wealth from peasants was often restricted by established customs.
Rents and other obligations could remain relatively stable even as agricultural production increased. When peasants cultivated additional land or improved their yields, they could retain a growing share of the resulting surplus. As Wickham explains, this “also gave peasants more surplus to buy things with, or to become small entrepreneurs on their own account; and it did not change back again if and when the economy contracted.”
This did not mean that medieval rural society was peaceful or equitable. Lords could impose new obligations through force, and Wickham discusses examples from France, Italy and Spain where expanding lordly authority increased the burdens placed on rural communities. The development of more restrictive forms of serfdom in parts of eastern Europe likewise demonstrated how landlords could strengthen their control over agricultural labour.
Nevertheless, such changes required sustained intervention. Under more ordinary circumstances, peasants possessed an advantage because they remained directly involved in production, while landlords were often more removed from its everyday organisation. This helped explain why rural households could retain access to markets and maintain some economic independence despite the demands imposed upon them.
Why Didn’t Medieval Economic Growth Lead to Capitalism?
A medieval market or fair, depicted in an early 15th-century manuscript of Le Chevalier errant by Thomas III of Saluzzo. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 12559, fol. 167r
The final question Wickham addresses is why commercially advanced medieval societies did not simply continue developing until they became capitalist economies. Medieval Italy, for example, possessed large cities, extensive international trade, sophisticated banking and substantial manufacturing industries. Other regions of Eurasia achieved similarly impressive levels of economic development.
Yet such periods of prosperity did not necessarily produce permanent economic transformation. Wickham argues that the structure of the feudal economy helps explain this pattern. He writes:
There are two key points here, both of which fortified that persistence. First, exchange in this system had a double limit, in that elite, or lordly, demand, the fundamental motor for exchange, and capable of considerable growth, was always restricted by the fact that elites were a small minority; and peasant demand was, given the peasantry’s unmarketized subsistence base, finite.
Second, the more solid commercialization was, under normal circumstances, the less likely it would be that most peasants would be forced off their holdings for economic reasons, and potentially proletarianized. Lords can of course coerce peasants to leave their holdings in some circumstances, or limit peasant economic resources coercively, as with enclosure movements, but these are, as I have stressed, complex and difficult actions to achieve, and need a lot of targeted work.
In other words, peasants who benefited from commercial opportunities could become more secure on their land, making them less likely to lose their holdings and become dependent on wage labour. In this way, commercial growth did not necessarily lead towards capitalism.
When trade contracted, peasants could often return to producing more for their own consumption. This flexibility helped medieval economic systems survive periods of growth and decline without fundamentally changing their structure.
For capitalism to emerge, a more substantial transformation was necessary: large numbers of people had to become dependent on wages and markets for their survival, rather than retaining direct control over the production of their basic necessities. Wickham points to the eventual transformation of rural England as an important example, while stressing that the precise causes of the Industrial Revolution lie beyond the scope of his article.
Understanding the Medieval World on Its Own Terms
Wickham’s study offers a different way of thinking about medieval economic history. Rather than treating the Middle Ages as an incomplete stage on the road to capitalism, he argues that medieval societies operated according to economic principles that were coherent and remarkably durable. Their markets could expand, their cities could prosper, and their peasants could become active producers and consumers without necessarily undermining the underlying economic system.
At the centre of this interpretation is the relationship between peasants and those who extracted wealth from them. Wickham never loses sight of the coercion and inequality that characterised this relationship, but he also emphasises the capacity of rural households to shape their own economic circumstances.
Wickham would develop these arguments further in his 2023 book, The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180. Published by Oxford University Press, the book offers a detailed comparison of the economies of Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, Byzantium, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and northern and central Italy. Drawing extensively on archaeological and written evidence, Wickham argues that regional economic development, including the purchasing power of peasants, was more important to Mediterranean prosperity than long-distance trade alone.
The book represents a substantial expansion of the ideas explored in this article, demonstrating how the relationships between peasants, landlords and markets shaped economic development across the medieval Mediterranean.
It is an approach that reflects much of his wider scholarship: questioning familiar historical assumptions, comparing societies across geographical boundaries, and looking beyond kings and political institutions to understand the structures of everyday life. For readers seeking to understand both the medieval economy and Chris Wickham’s contribution to its study, his article remains a valuable starting point.
Chris Wickham’s article, “How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies,” was published in Past & Present. Click here to access it.
Top Image: Two men threshing grain in the Luttrell Psalter, an English manuscript produced around 1325–1335. British Library, Add MS 42130, fol. 74v.
Medieval economies were far more complex than the traditional image of peasants working the land while lords collected their rents. In one of his later scholarly articles, the renowned medieval historian Chris Wickham explored how these economies functioned, why peasants played such an important role in their development, and why centuries of economic growth did not automatically lead to capitalism.
Wickham, who recently passed away, was one of the leading historians of medieval Europe, particularly known for his studies of social and economic history. His work challenged conventional interpretations of the Middle Ages, often using comparisons between different regions and societies to explain how the medieval world operated.
In his 2021 article, “How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies,” published in the journal Past & Present, Wickham tackled a fundamental historical question: what were the economic rules that governed medieval societies? His answer places peasants at the centre of the story, showing how their control over agricultural production helped shape economic development across Europe and beyond.
What Made the Medieval Economy Different?
Wickham begins by arguing that historians cannot simply apply the principles of modern capitalism to earlier societies. While supply, demand and prices existed throughout history, the relationships between those who produced goods and those who controlled wealth were fundamentally different.
In a capitalist economy, production is largely organised around wage labour and the market. In what Wickham calls the feudal economy, the foundation was instead the peasant household. Peasants cultivated land, raised animals and produced much of what they needed to survive. They also surrendered part of their production to landlords through rents, services and other obligations.
For Wickham, this relationship between peasants and lords was the defining feature of feudalism. He uses the term in an economic sense, rather than to describe the familiar political relationships between kings, nobles and their vassals. As he explains:
So, if we want to understand history — or economics — better, we need to understand feudalism better.
The distinction matters because peasants generally retained considerable control over how they worked their land. Lords could demand a portion of what was produced, but they were usually not directly responsible for organising agricultural production. This gave peasants an economic importance that could extend well beyond their apparently subordinate position in medieval society.
Medieval Peasants Were Also Consumers
One of Wickham’s most interesting arguments concerns the relationship between peasants and markets. The traditional picture of the medieval countryside often assumes that peasants lived largely self-sufficient lives, producing what they needed and having relatively little involvement in trade. Wickham demonstrates that this interpretation is inadequate for many medieval societies.
Archaeological evidence reveals that rural households regularly acquired goods manufactured elsewhere. In Byzantine Greece during the twelfth century, for example, archaeologists have found glazed ceramics and wine amphorae at villages and isolated farms. These objects came from specialised production centres, including Chalkis and Corinth, suggesting that at least some rural households had the resources to purchase relatively expensive goods.
Similar patterns appear in medieval England after 1200. Excavations of deserted villages have uncovered pottery, knives and coins from different production centres. The relative scarcity of loom-weights at some settlements also suggests that villagers were purchasing cloth rather than producing all of it themselves. These discoveries demonstrate that peasants could participate actively in regional markets.
The picture was not limited to Europe. Wickham also discusses eleventh-century Egypt, where rural producers cultivated flax for commercial markets, and medieval China, where peasant households increasingly produced silk and cotton textiles for sale. Such examples show that the economic activities of ordinary rural households were essential to understanding the development of trade.
How Medieval Italian Cities Became Economic Powerhouses
Wickham devotes considerable attention to northern and central Italy, one of the most economically developed regions of medieval Europe. Beginning in the late twelfth century, cities such as Milan, Genoa, Venice and Florence experienced substantial commercial and industrial expansion.
By the thirteenth century, Italian towns supported large populations of artisans producing textiles, metalwork and leather goods. Woollen cloth became particularly important, while cities such as Milan and Cremona also manufactured fustian, a fabric made from cotton and linen.
These industries depended on extensive trading networks. Italian merchants imported wool from North Africa and, later, from Castile and England. Cotton arrived from Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean, while grain was brought into northern Italian cities whose growing populations could no longer be supplied entirely by the surrounding countryside. Banking and credit also expanded, with Italian financial institutions eventually lending money to rulers across Europe.
Yet Wickham argues that this remarkable commercial development did not mean that Italy had somehow escaped the feudal economy. Its prosperity remained closely connected to agricultural production and the relationships between peasants and landowners. Lords and wealthy urban residents provided substantial demand for manufactured goods, but peasants also contributed to commercial growth by selling agricultural products and purchasing goods themselves.
The Italian example demonstrates that a society could possess sophisticated markets, international trade and financial institutions while continuing to operate within an economic system fundamentally different from capitalism.
Why Peasants Had More Economic Power Than We Think
Perhaps the most distinctive part of Wickham’s argument concerns the balance of economic power between peasants and lords. Although landlords exercised considerable authority, their ability to extract wealth from peasants was often restricted by established customs.
Rents and other obligations could remain relatively stable even as agricultural production increased. When peasants cultivated additional land or improved their yields, they could retain a growing share of the resulting surplus. As Wickham explains, this “also gave peasants more surplus to buy things with, or to become small entrepreneurs on their own account; and it did not change back again if and when the economy contracted.”
This did not mean that medieval rural society was peaceful or equitable. Lords could impose new obligations through force, and Wickham discusses examples from France, Italy and Spain where expanding lordly authority increased the burdens placed on rural communities. The development of more restrictive forms of serfdom in parts of eastern Europe likewise demonstrated how landlords could strengthen their control over agricultural labour.
Nevertheless, such changes required sustained intervention. Under more ordinary circumstances, peasants possessed an advantage because they remained directly involved in production, while landlords were often more removed from its everyday organisation. This helped explain why rural households could retain access to markets and maintain some economic independence despite the demands imposed upon them.
Why Didn’t Medieval Economic Growth Lead to Capitalism?
The final question Wickham addresses is why commercially advanced medieval societies did not simply continue developing until they became capitalist economies. Medieval Italy, for example, possessed large cities, extensive international trade, sophisticated banking and substantial manufacturing industries. Other regions of Eurasia achieved similarly impressive levels of economic development.
Yet such periods of prosperity did not necessarily produce permanent economic transformation. Wickham argues that the structure of the feudal economy helps explain this pattern. He writes:
There are two key points here, both of which fortified that persistence. First, exchange in this system had a double limit, in that elite, or lordly, demand, the fundamental motor for exchange, and capable of considerable growth, was always restricted by the fact that elites were a small minority; and peasant demand was, given the peasantry’s unmarketized subsistence base, finite.
Second, the more solid commercialization was, under normal circumstances, the less likely it would be that most peasants would be forced off their holdings for economic reasons, and potentially proletarianized. Lords can of course coerce peasants to leave their holdings in some circumstances, or limit peasant economic resources coercively, as with enclosure movements, but these are, as I have stressed, complex and difficult actions to achieve, and need a lot of targeted work.
In other words, peasants who benefited from commercial opportunities could become more secure on their land, making them less likely to lose their holdings and become dependent on wage labour. In this way, commercial growth did not necessarily lead towards capitalism.
When trade contracted, peasants could often return to producing more for their own consumption. This flexibility helped medieval economic systems survive periods of growth and decline without fundamentally changing their structure.
For capitalism to emerge, a more substantial transformation was necessary: large numbers of people had to become dependent on wages and markets for their survival, rather than retaining direct control over the production of their basic necessities. Wickham points to the eventual transformation of rural England as an important example, while stressing that the precise causes of the Industrial Revolution lie beyond the scope of his article.
Understanding the Medieval World on Its Own Terms
Wickham’s study offers a different way of thinking about medieval economic history. Rather than treating the Middle Ages as an incomplete stage on the road to capitalism, he argues that medieval societies operated according to economic principles that were coherent and remarkably durable. Their markets could expand, their cities could prosper, and their peasants could become active producers and consumers without necessarily undermining the underlying economic system.
At the centre of this interpretation is the relationship between peasants and those who extracted wealth from them. Wickham never loses sight of the coercion and inequality that characterised this relationship, but he also emphasises the capacity of rural households to shape their own economic circumstances.
Wickham would develop these arguments further in his 2023 book, The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180. Published by Oxford University Press, the book offers a detailed comparison of the economies of Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, Byzantium, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and northern and central Italy. Drawing extensively on archaeological and written evidence, Wickham argues that regional economic development, including the purchasing power of peasants, was more important to Mediterranean prosperity than long-distance trade alone.
The book represents a substantial expansion of the ideas explored in this article, demonstrating how the relationships between peasants, landlords and markets shaped economic development across the medieval Mediterranean.
It is an approach that reflects much of his wider scholarship: questioning familiar historical assumptions, comparing societies across geographical boundaries, and looking beyond kings and political institutions to understand the structures of everyday life. For readers seeking to understand both the medieval economy and Chris Wickham’s contribution to its study, his article remains a valuable starting point.
Chris Wickham’s article, “How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies,” was published in Past & Present. Click here to access it.
Top Image: Two men threshing grain in the Luttrell Psalter, an English manuscript produced around 1325–1335. British Library, Add MS 42130, fol. 74v.
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