Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 143

In the summer of 2003 René Noël, Professor of Medieval Studies jointly at the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix (Namur) and the Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) took retirement after forty years teaching in the Belgian university system. A disciple of Léopold Genicot, who created the centre for rural history at Louvain, and a colleague of Adriaan Verhulst at the University of Ghent, who founded the Belgian national centre for rural history, Noël defended his doctoral thesis in 1967 on rural settlement in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries across territory between the Semois and Chiers valleys. Located in the far south of Wallonia, this area was not far from his birthplace in the Belgian province of Luxembourg. With Genicot’s encouragement, Noël’s scope of interest and expertise broadened from the analysis of medieval documents to using field archaeology and fossil pollen records. His publications focused on the transformation of rural Belgium in medieval times but also embraced the rural architecture of Wallonia, the history of Namur, and teaching about the legacy of Charlemagne. The liber amicorum under review contains many of the presentations made at an international conference held in his honour at Louvain-la-Neuve in May 2003. Twenty-one essays by colleagues, pupils and friends deal with fundamental aspects of the transformation of rural settlement in Western Europe during the long middle ages.

The volume begins with a masterly, 75-page essay by Noël devoted to differing interpretations of the ‘medieval village’ proposed by an exceptionally wide range of authors. The traditional model was largely derived from critical evaluations of written material, and envisaged the nucleated village as being anchored in the distant past. However, important archaeological evidence became available during the 1950s and subsequently, with pollen analysis adding to site evidence. Examples of settlement desertion, as well as creation, in medieval times were being found in many areas. Hence, by the 1980s, a second model of the village was being advanced, which saw the nucleated village, with church, cemetery, cultivated fields and surrounding communal territory, replacing earlier, much more fragile and fragmented patterns. Having defined and compared the models, Noël then revisits a vast array of documentation and explores archaeological evidence old and new.

Drawing on findings from many parts of Western Europe, he concludes on page 75 that a kind of village existed in the early middle ages, but lacked the composition and characteristics recognized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It had neither a juridical identity nor communal lands. It was arranged spaciously, but was less disorganized and fragile than some scholars have supposed. Its inhabitants were not very numerous and shared the sorrows and joys of daily existence, meeting each other outside their dwellings, in the fields and on nearby roads. From the ninth century onwards, they assembled in their parish church on Sundays and religious festivals. After funerals and memorial services they visited the cemetery, walking across the graves of their ancestors, and evoking their memory. Older members of the group transmitted memories to younger villagers, thereby reinforcing a sense of collective conscience.

The remainder of Autour du ‘Village’ is structured into three unequal parts. The first traces the emergence of ‘the village’ in medieval scholarship, with four contributors discussing how this concept was handled by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and classicists. The second section contains eleven essays relating to areas located between the Seine and Rhine valleys, at various times between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. Five contributions explore such themes as grouped settlements, different types and uses of buildings, continuity of routeways, and opportunities – and challenges – posed by palynology for interpreting past landscape features. Six papers then discuss ‘structuring elements’ of the medieval village: churches, cemeteries, cultivated fields, communal institutions, and castles. The three essays in the final section examine the relationship between villages and their surrounding rural space in Brabant and the lower Sambre valley, and the utility of place names to elucidate changes in medieval settlement in north-eastern France.

This substantial volume casts fresh light on many of the themes that were central to René Noël’s own research, and present recent findings for areas that he knew from field experience. Financial and other problems delayed its publication, and some contributors took advantage to update their texts, but Autour du ‘Village’ has been well worth the wait.