The complexity of these political structures rests on the fact that, in many cases, claims of lordship overlapped on a local level. Even the successful territorial power complexes often divided their lordship of individual villages with potential rivals. The delineations of such rights were highly complicated, because local and regional lordships formed ties of dependence with one another through the granting of lordship rights as fiefs and pledges, and these ties manifested somewhat differently in each place. Moreover, factions among the peasants within a village were often bound up in clientage relationships with lordly officials, who in turn were bound up with greater lords.49 Under these circumstances, the regulation of local legal relationships often fulfilled functions that later, in modern states, became primarily the affairs of capital cities and high diplomacy; the village was the central object of and site for conflicts between rival lordships.
Intensifying Lordship
The administrative systems of the different power complexes experienced similar developments, though they also exhibited marked regional variations and proceeded at different rates of development. Greater lordships consolidated and standardized legal, military, and fiscal systems in their regions of influence. In contrast to older, personal networks of vassals and followers, new administrative systems fashioned themselves on territorial organizational principles.50 They supported themselves through longstanding official posts, the salaried holders of which were responsible for defined geographic regions. Thus by the thirteenth century, the Savoyards allocated the local lordships within their territories to castellanies, entrusting their administration to important supporters. At the middle level, the castellans of the territory were under the control of the Savoyard ballivate of Vaud or Chablais and eventually the central Savoyard courtly administration. From around 1400, cities also subdivided their territorial administrations into districts, each of which fell under the responsibility of a territorial steward (Landvogt) recruited from the urban elite.51 Eventually, administrative duties in the service of a greater noble lord and his knightly followers offered better prospects for wealth and prestige than the traditional exercise of local rights of lordship.52 While the social ruling class of the area under consideration still consisted to a considerable extent of relatively autonomous local lords at the beginning of the thirteenth century, by the end of the late Middle Ages these appeared ever more distinctly as a service aristocracy, into which members of the urban ruling classes could also ascend.
These developments resulted in far-reaching changes at the local level of the villages.53 Small, local lordship complexes were increasingly incorporated into large territories or used by members of the urban upper classes as negotiable investments. In both cases lordship rights were in practice increasingly exercised by officials who had often been recruited from the ranks of the local inhabitants.54 In everyday life, the exercise of lordship appeared less often in conjunction with lords than with their office-holding dependents. The retreat of local lords from the villages and the new, increasingly collective methods of production helped to raise collective or communal forms of organization—which were carried out by the local inhabitants themselves—to a higher political-legal status.55 Local communal institutions sometimes functioned as the means for enforcing lordly demands, but sometimes also as substrates of resistance by peasant populations and especially by village ruling classes. Communes often bought rights to taxation or to legal authority from their lords. Subsequently, communes functioned as de facto lords over their own members—as communal holders of taxation and regulatory rights.56
After the economic and demographic crises of the second half of the fourteenth century, many villages switched to forms of production that were focused less on self-sufficiency than on urban markets. This led to specialization in the production of particular goods like wine, meat, and raw manufacturing materials. As a consequence, rural producers also turned to purchases from markets to meet their everyday needs.57 From this arose both new possibilities for profit and new risks of poverty, which together heightened the social and economic inequalities in village society.58 Lordship institutions or individual lordly officers often played important roles as intermediaries between rural producers and urban markets, serving as creditors and brokers.59 This resulted in many interconnections between relationships of lordship and economic dependency. How this affected the implementation of local lordship rights remains to be examined.
The new ruling class made up of officials and members of the territorial power complexes became the agents of an administrative culture characterized by specific practices and concepts of order that went through fundamental changes. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, administrative specialists adopted increasingly elaborate writing techniques; borrowed academic methods for the determination, interpretation, and enforcement of rules; and developed a new understanding of order. From the early thirteenth century, this can be discerned first of all in attempts by church institutions to document local lordship rights systematically in writing. From the end of the century, the Savoyard administration, which had often modeled itself after northern Italian city administrations, took a leading role in the implementation of new administrative techniques. Here writing also increased the control of individual operations that were carried out through the law. Before 1300 the Savoyards had already assembled numerous lists of goods and services and developed a complex bookkeeping system for the finances of individual officials; they began to manage their archives systematically around the end of the fourteenth century.60 Such techniques arrived in other power complexes after a delay of sometimes several decades. Likewise, Italian and Provençal influence is responsible for the fact that notarial practice was already widespread in the fourteenth century in the western part of the region under examination, while in the east it was only during the early modern period that it gained similar significance.61
Regardless of the spread of notaries, there is a visible and common tendency around 1400 throughout the area under examination to document in writing the business dealings of a large portion of the population, and to make possible ever more systematic control by the lordship’s administration. In this context, even smaller power complexes increasingly relied on the service of administrative specialists, who often boasted at least a rudimentary university education.62 These developments cannot be described merely as “administrative progress” in the sense of an ever more efficient domination. They were bound up with more complicated processes, such as the implementation of new balances of power and new ways of negotiating the law and order of society.
Legal Systems
The textualization of law could take many forms that differed in details. Most of the territory under examination recognized what previous research has categorized as customary law.63 Customary law can most easily be described ex negativo as the totality of rules that were neither defined by Roman and canonical law—the jus commune—nor enacted by established authorities. In point of fact, it included norms that not only varied from place to place but also were not necessarily regarded as part of a unified system in a given place.
Around 1300, the southwestern portion of the region was the first to receive learned Roman and canon law. This expressed itself first in the borrowing of several principles, concepts, and procedural techniques. Among the courts of lay lords, only those of the Savoyards switched over; they systematically implemented regulations covered in the corpus of Roman law. One exception were the Savoyard courts in the ballivate of Vaud, which recognized the regional unwritten legal customs (a privilege they also granted to the Aosta Valley) even when these ran contrary to Roman law. The Savoyards may have given Vaud this special treatment earlier, but in any case it was confirmed in 1373 as a chartered and in fact widely respected privilege.64
The legal systems of those cities that enjoyed far-reaching autonomy relied first and foremost on statutes that the city councils had deliberately enacted—sometimes in explicit opposition to existing norms.65 To what extent such statutes should conform to or be supplementary to either the jus commune or unwritten legal customs