Original subtitles

For more than a thousand years all of Europe was a peasant society.

Generation after generation,

people with a close bond to the land took care of it

in order to feed themselves and their fellow humans.

But what do we know about their struggles and their dreams,

the solidarity between them and their revolts against the powerful

who sought to control their land and their labour?

With no power and no texts to describe them,

for a long time these people were consigned to silence and obscurity.

This way of life is now said to be dying out,

but its history is more relevant than ever,

with the same questions relating to the earth and how it is used

having cropped up throughout the past 15 centuries.

You can't go through all of your grass.

If you graze on grass which hasn't grown enough

and you cut it, then it will draw on its reserves

and the quality of it will deteriorate over time.

We try to make it last as long as possible,

10 to 20 years if possible. But for that

you need to protect it. You have to graze

when the time is right, when it's like this.

This is the three-leaf stage.

If you pull out a piece of grass

then there should be one, two, three blades, like this.

The standard height is 18 to 20 centimetres

for dairy cows.

The word 'peasant' refers to people

who shape the land, who make the land.

It's funny to think how big an impact

you have on your land.

Whether or not I cut my hedges, whether or not I plant.

If I were to replant hedges,

fruit trees and orchard meadows,

then in 100 years you'd have the pear trees that I planted.

That's really rewarding.

The aim is to leave something behind

that's beneficial, that's habitable.

There is another way of managing resources:

managing them by force.

Here nature is seen as an enemy to overcome,

like with these marshes near Rome

which Mussolini's fascist regime

decided to drain in 1934

in order to make the land arable.

The operation was known as The Battle for Grain.

Based on this newsreel footage,

it looks like war.

Europe experienced the same frenzied clearing of land around 1000 AD

when, after years of stagnation,

demographic growth and economic growth

picked up at the same time.

The ruling classes pushed for more and more farmland,

claiming land from forests and marshes,

like along the banks of the river Po in northern Italy.

The great monasteries and lords

identified these spaces

as new places of power.

They brought men in

to work the land

and grew rich off the profits.

This violence towards nature

often led to a reaction

on the part of nature.

When a river was channelled to create agricultural land,

this meant that when the river level was really high

the water no longer flooded non-agricultural land,

the marshland and woods

which had been there previously.

Instead the water ended up

spreading across farmland.

There were no longer consequences to flooding on uncultivated land,

but when this happened on land

that had been converted for agriculture,

it had serious repercussions

and could cause a lot of damage, not just to crops

but also to individuals

and the villages in the area.

But in the 11th century

growth was primarily seen as positive.

This was a new period of prosperity,

of which the construction of great cathedrals

was the most visible sign.

This was only possible

through the labour of peasants, the only source of wealth.

But despite the vast majority

of Christians being peasants, they were rarely depicted

on these cathedrals,

crowded out by all of the kings and saints,

never far from the monsters

and always at the bottom to remind them of their place.

PERRETTE, A MILK JUG ON HER HEAD, WENT CALMLY ON HER WAY

A peasant woman goes to sell milk at the market.

As she walks back home she dreams of becoming rich,

then her milk jug breaks.

No calves, no cows, no pigs, no piglets.

The earliest French version of this fable

dates back to the mid-13th century.

It was the sort of Christian morality tale

that a priest would preach to peasants on a Sunday

to warn them against getting ideas above their station.

But this fable also shows that medieval peasants

benefited from growth too

and made their own contribution to the development of the market.

As the market economy becomes more developed,

and this is very much a feature of the 12th century and onwards,

peasants participated in it as well.

And you can see this across most of Europe.

Peasants don't just

give rent to lords

and just barely subsist on the rest of what they grow.

Peasants have enough to be able to go to markets themselves

and sell grain.

They sell grain to towns.

Townsmen need that grain. They buy it.

The peasants then buy clothes,

iron goods, which are better than the ones they could make themselves

or that their neighbour the smith can make.

They become part of the market world.

And when that happens markets expand very greatly

because, of course, peasants are 90% of the population,

80 to 90% of the population.

So, if peasants start to participate in the market

then the market becomes much bigger

and in my view that's the cause,

that's the underlying cause

of the rapid expansion of commerce in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Life was better for peasants.

Money flowed around the countryside again,

enabling them to claim back a level of freedom.

Corvée and serfdom gradually disappeared.

Lords gave peasants an opportunity to buy back their freedom,

opting to have the money

in favour of labour which, although free,

was far from willing.

Things may have improved for peasants,

but the elites of the Middle Ages

still didn't view them as entirely human.

In the Roman de la Rose,

the peasant's name is 'Danger'.

Meanwhile, in Yvain, the Knight of the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes,

the hero meets a peasant deep in the forest...

He had a gigantic head,

bigger than a horse's head,

dishevelled black hair

and a bare forehead.

His ears were hairy and as big as an elephant's

and he had bushy eyebrows.

His face was wide and flat.

He had the eyes of an owl, the nose of a cat,

his jowls were split like a wolf

and his teeth were sharp and yellow like a wild boar's.

The knight grew bold.

"Are you a good creature?", he asked.

"I am a man."

It's very much a feature of

many medieval sources that peasants

are regarded with total contempt.

It's almost a caste difference.

So, there is a fabliau in which a peasant donkey herd

takes his donkey, full of manure

into a town

and finds himself, by accident, in the spice market

and is so overcome by this

unaccustomed smell that he faints.

And he's only revived

when people put manure under his nose

so that he can smell something that he considers normal.

A neighbour of mine used to tell me that when he got to school

the kids would make fun of him for being a farmer.

He smelled of cow dung

because he used to have to clean out

the stables for the cows.

Throughout his childhood

he felt humiliated, looked down on.

Even personally,

I'm from a different generation, but I also felt that.

My childhood was the same.

I was humiliated because I was the daughter of farmers

and that was a shameful thing to be.

It was the lowest profession.

Someone once said to me,

"at least my dad is a lorry driver."

That was less shameful than your dad being a farmer.

Until recently, let's say 10 years ago,

it was banned. You couldn't use the word 'peasant'.

It was a pejorative word.

If you went on television to talk about the rights of peasants

you had to say 'small farmers'.

Once

we wanted to have a communication

and there was a journalist

and we kept talking about 'peasants'.

He told us, "stop saying peasants as I have to beep everything out".

As growth returned

a new player appeared on the stage: the town,

which was making its comeback after centuries in the shadows.

This had a brutal impact on the world of peasants.

In the countryside, city-dwellers now held all the power,

especially in Italy

where the big cities in northern and central Italy

served as a precursor.

When I say the word 'paysan' in French

I'm referring to the land. That is, to the countryside.

In English 'peasant' has the same derivation.

Meanwhile, in Italian, when I say 'contadino'

that refers not to the countryside, but to the city.

In Italian 'contado' is not the countryside,

but the countryside under the control of the town.

The town controlled the countryside

politically, socially and economically.

This was down to a unique feature

of the Italian aristocracy.

Although they owned the majority of the land,

they lived in towns from where they ruled over the countryside.

This is shown in the fresco The Allegory of Good and Bad Government

in which a productive countryside serves the city, Florence.

But looking more closely the peasants appear shifty,

as though they were up to no good.

Not only were peasants portrayed

as ignorant, unsophisticated

and illiterate,

but they were also portrayed as thieves, as being dishonest.

From the point of view of the Italian ruling classes,

from the Middle Ages onwards

and for the whole modern era,

this negative image of peasants took the form

of the deceitful peasant

stealing what he owes to the city-dwelling landowners.

The number one concern for landowners was profit.

This mattered far more than controlling people,

as was the case for the traditional aristocracy.

Along the Flemish North Sea coast

port cities also experienced remarkable growth,

gradually cutting the urban elite off

from the surrounding countryside.

Around the North Sea area you have the cities,

you have the world of merchants,

of bankers, of capital

living nearby these marshes

with their free peasant populations which also enjoy

good standards of living,

which also have political power.

And that's something which is very difficult to tolerate

for these urban elites.

What is dangerous for an ambitious urban dweller

are ambitious rural dwellers,

or ambitious farmers.

Peasants are not dangerous when they are poor and destitute.

They are no problem.

But when peasants got wealthy and powerful,

they are a problem for the urban merchants.

It's because of a sort of envy

and also a sort of anxiousness about

peasants which are not poor and destitute,

but peasants which are thriving

and which are social competitors.

And these peasants must

and would be crushed

by the alliance of urban elites, nobility

and the church.

In the 11th century

independent rural communities

began building dykes

in order to drain marshland along the North Sea coast,

thereby creating new land for growing cereal crops.

These dykes were basic,

built at the initiative of village communities

and maintained collectively,

held together by cooperation.

Each family was responsible for looking after a section of the dyke

proportional to the surface area of the fields they owned.

These dykes were fragile,

unable to withstand fierce North Sea storms.

They burst regularly,

but they planned for this and repairs were easy.

In any event the effects were limited

by the modest size of the dykes.

Things were looking good

until another storm appeared on the horizon.

A man-made one this time.

When land was flooded

in medieval times

the peasant communities would gradually repair the dykes.

Sometimes they managed to do that directly,

sometimes it took a few more years

and it took some time.

But gradually we see that flooding

is considered a failure

and the floods are used

to confiscate land from the peasant communities,

because if a dyke was broken, if the land was flooded,

this clearly was a sign that the peasant community

was not able to maintain

its dykes, its seawalls, in proper conditions.

In official legislation we see this new type

of customary law which said that

when the land could not be reclaimed

within one year after a flood

the former owners lost their lands.

They had to abandon their lands.

It's legal fiction.

It's legal fiction which is imposed from above.

It's imposed by

the jurists working

for kings and counts and princes and bishops

increasingly interested in these coastal lands

because there you could make a profit,

because there you could develop new lands.

But the land was not wasteland.

It was not wilderness, it was occupied

by these peasant communities.

So, they had to wait for floods, in a way,

to flood the land to observe that

the peasant community was not able to repair its dyke

and then the land could be confiscated

and new projects could be initiated.

After 300 years of constant progress

growth came to an end in the early 14th century.

Europe was plunged into a succession of overlapping crises,

from famine and war to disease,

as depicted in The Triumph of Death by Bruegel.

This nightmare was to last

for the next three centuries.

Since 1000 AD

growth had been predicated

on the continuous expansion of cereal crops,

which were of primary importance to both markets and people.

Such dependence resulted in catastrophe.

In the early 14th century

a succession of poor harvests was enough

to bring about a famine

the likes of which Europe had not known for centuries.

Known as The Great Famine,

it left millions dead.

The phenomenon of agricultural colonisation,

or the expansion of agriculture

to the detriment of other activities,

led to very serious famines in the early Middle Ages,

in the first half of the 14th century.

The peasant economy sought to diversify

by combining agriculture

with forestry.

And within agriculture

by growing a wide range of products.

In addition to wheat flour they grew rye, millet,

einkorn wheat, spelt, barley and oats.

This provided some security

in the event of famine

as each cereal crop

had different periods for growing and harvesting,

but over time this wide range of resources

was restricted

to agriculture alone.

As was written in an 11th century text,

it was impossible to survive without agriculture.

This is something

that a sixth century peasant would never have thought of saying.

Back then agriculture was important,

but you could survive without it.

A few centuries later this was no longer possible.

A shortage of grains or a shortage of cereals

automatically resulted in famine.

Chroniclers reported the most awful recipes.

Earth was mixed with what flour there was left

and this dough was kneaded into a bread-like shape

in order to keep up the illusion.

Known as famine bread,

this was a staple food for peasant families.

According to sources and written chronicles

it got to a stage

where men were no longer men.

They had abdicated their human condition.

The tipping point came

when they started eating grass

like animals.

"Sicut pecudes" it says in these texts.

Like livestock.

As long as they were still capable

of using grass and roots

to make a sort of bread

they were able to retain

their human identity,

their cultural belonging

to a society of human beings

who produced their own food.

This marked their cultural identity,

even in their very darkest moments.

Famine exacerbated tensions between town and countryside.

The towns had cereals in reserve

and peasants fled there seeking aid,

but the bourgeois didn't want to share.

During one particularly bad famine

the bourgeois of Troyes in Champagne

announced that bread would be given out

to refugees outside the city walls.

Once the peasants had left

they quickly shut the gates to the city

and the starving people were told to go seek help elsewhere.

This 14th century song

continues to be sung by choirs worldwide,

like this choir from Taiwan.

The 'dirty and smelly' kerels that the song refers to

are Flemish peasants from coastal regions

who staged a revolt in 1325

against ill-treatment by the Count of Flanders

and his ally the King of France.

This was the first major peasant revolt of the 14th century.

It remains little-known despite its violence and duration:

it was three years before the peasants were crushed

at the battle of Cassel.

Royal accounts celebrated this victory.

Manuscript illuminations show the King of France

with his fleurs-de-lys,

but no matter how hard you look you won't see any peasants.

It would probably have been seen as dishonourable

to show the king being forced to fight

against simple, rebellious louts.

This construction of the peasant as being

an inferior being,

which I think probably becomes more powerful

as the Middle Ages goes on,

is related to the fact that

chroniclers don't know what to do with peasant revolts.

Peasant revolts are literally incomprehensible

because they show a peasant protagonism

which has not been directed by a lord

because they're revolts against lords or against the state.

And so they're treated as literally meaningless,

irrational. Peasants are irrational;

they don't know what they're doing.

Their actions are completely incoherent

and that all you can really see is meaningless violence.

In modern France any explosion of popular anger of which the causes

are unknown or ignored are referred to as 'jacqueries',

like this demonstration by peasant farmers from Brittany in 1967.

The violent clashes and fires are what gets remembered,

but the real reason is forgotten:

a sudden collapse in the price of pork.

The very first jacquerie, known as La Grande Jacquerie,

was that of the Jacques Bonhommes,

the contemptuous nickname the peasants were given by lords.

The revolt began in May 1358

with the massacre of four noblemen out in the countryside.

Then came an anti-feudal explosion all across Ile-de-France

which no-one had foreseen

and which no-one was able to quell.

For three weeks the insurgent peasants hunted down noblemen

and pillaged their castles.

The noblemen regained control in June and crushed the 'jacquerie',

killing thousands of rebels.

Contemporary chroniclers stressed

the savagery of the peasants,

believing the revolt to be absurd.

But it did have a genuine cause:

the start of the Hundred Years' War.

Peasants knew they were always the first victims of war,

while noblemen saw it as an opportunity

to prove their courage

and to show their colours.

They looked upon war as a celebration.

The money they extorted

from peasants, theoretically

in exchange for their protection, was spent on finery.

The very foundations of the feudal pact had been destroyed.

It might seem as though the director is exaggerating,

but illuminations from this period vindicate the peasants,

who accused the mafia-like lords

of transforming the fruits of their labour

into shimmering fabrics and silk stockings.

As though the horrors of war were not bad enough,

the same period also saw the worst pandemic

that Europe had ever seen: the Black Death.

In Nosferatu, a film by Murnau,

a terror arrives via the sea.

In the film this terror is a vampire from the Carpathians.

However, as we know now, the plague came from Central Asia.

It didn't arrive in Bremen like in the film,

but in Marseille

and instead of going up in smoke at sunrise

it ravaged Europe for more than two centuries.

The first wave hit in 1348,

killing thousands

whose bodies filled mass graves.

Not knowing what was happening, people accused Jews

of poisoning wells, or believed it was the wrath of God

whom processions of flagellants sought to appease.

Against this backdrop of extreme tension,

in 1381

the King of England sought to introduce a new tax on peasants.

They refused and revolted,

thousands of them marching on London,

pillaging monasteries and abbeys along the way.

One of their targets was the great abbey at St Albans,

whose abbot had seized all of the peasants' millstones

so that they were forced to use

the abbot's mill.

The abbot then came up with the idea

of recycling the peasants' millstones

to pave the floor of his parlour.

When the peasants captured the abbey

they ripped up the floor

and broke the millstones into tiny pieces

which, according to a chronicle,

they shared like the host given out on Sundays at church

so that the people knew vengeance had been taken.

When they reached London

the rebels were quickly defeated and their leader,

the priest John Ball,

was tortured before being executed.

Yet another defeat.

But for the first time

the voice of a peasant revolt had properly been heard.

Contemporary chroniclers had transcribed John Ball's sermons,

without realising their significance.

He had called on the peasants to kill the lords,

comparing this to pulling up weeds.

To the chroniclers the revolt is so meaningless

that the chroniclers actually include

in their accounts

some of the documents of the peasants themselves

because these documents have no meaning

to them and so they might as well just include them.

So, the sermons of John Ball,

written in English, are preserved

in English in Latin chronicles,

not exactly as a joke, but as

instances of the kind of thing that peasants say

which obviously have no meaning.

If you actually look at these sermons they have plenty of meaning.

They construct a world that peasants

are going to be able to understand,

that have meaning for us because we know more

about what peasants think from other sources.

So, John Ball's sermons are about trust, for example,

they're about mutual solidarity.

The most famous of these sermons,

which was taken up by English socialists in the 19th century,

questioned the very principle of social inequality.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

who was then the gentleman?"

The quote that is ascribed to John Ball,

which seems to be authentic, is:

"when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

In other words, in the Garden of Eden there were no lords.

That is certainly a religious image,

but is that image more important than

people not wanting to pay the poll tax?

That's not what is entirely clear.

I think that people can hold - people still do hold -

contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time

and the idea that there is some perfect past

which you can return to,

in which there are no lords,

is an image that you can hold at the same time

as thinking:

"I just don't want to pay this tax and I don't want anybody

ever to ask me to pay it again."

Well, the contradiction is

that going back to the Garden of Eden is much, much,

much more radical than not wanting to pay a tax.

In the century which followed the English peasants' revolt,

social unrest turned its attention

on the Catholic Church,

accusing it of serving the powerful

and betraying the egalitarian message

of early Christianity.

In the early 16th century the German Martin Luther

became the spiritual leader of this movement

which led to the Protestant Reformation

and inspired the largest peasant revolt

which Europe had ever seen.

The revolt began in the strangest of circumstances.

In the summer of 1524

a countess in western Germany

ordered her peasants to go out into the fields

to gather snail shells.

This was somewhat of a whimsy and, worse of all,

this request came during the harvest season.

The peasants refused

and their revolt spread quickly across Germany.

The village assemblies wrote up a list

of over 300 demands,

outlining all of the abuses of the feudal system,

from the practical to the symbolic.

If you think from the perspective of a lord

the landscape is an area in which you go hunting

and if you have to ride across the fields then you do.

It's about space and the distances

that you can cover on a horse.

But for the peasants

to have someone ride across the land

where you've just planted crops,

that's infuriating.

A hunting horse, a battle horse -

they're different animals from the working animals

that some peasants have.

What a horse does if you ride it

and you're not using it to power a plough,

what a horse does is it gives you height.

And that means that if the lord

comes to you and comes on his horse,

he's high above you. You have to look up.

He literally looks down on you.

So, one of the things the peasants say is,

"when you come to see us you have to get off your horse."

And it comes up with dogs as well.

The lords have hunting dogs

and these are big dogs

and they put them in peasant houses

and make peasants feed them.

So, you'll get complaints from peasants saying,

"we have to feed the lord's dogs.

We can't feed our own children

and we have to feed these dogs meat

and if we don't feed them

and if the dog is thin, when the lord comes

we get into trouble and then we feel

the lord's displeasure."

In the spring of 1525

the peasant assemblies agreed on a set of 12 articles

outlining all of their demands.

The most radical demanded the abolition of serfdom

wherever it still existed.

These 12 articles, which were accompanied by Biblical references

justifying them, were what held the armed revolt together.

The peasant manifesto spread across Germany

thanks to a new invention: the printing press.

The manifesto had 20 print runs with 25,000 copies printed,

a remarkable figure for the time.

Then there were all of the satirical images

denouncing the corruption of the Church and its monks.

At its peak the peasant armies

had as many as 300,000 men.

The long list of places they captured

included not only castles, but also monasteries,

which they particularly hated and which were specifically targeted.

Monasteries are incredibly powerful at this point.

They are lenders.

They are overlords.

They have huge areas that they control.

They seem to be increasing the sorts of burdens

that they're placing on their peasantries.

And then, I think

these monasteries,

when they're in the countryside,

they really stick out. It's clear what they are.

They are concentrations of wealth,

of crops, of plenty.

This was the first time

that a peasant revolt left traces of it behind

like this series of images

showing the attack on Weissenohe Abbey.

What is even more surprising

is that these works were commissioned by the abbot himself

who can be seen fleeing on horseback

followed by monks on foot.

The rebels pillaged the abbey,

emptying fish ponds, larders and cellars;

gorging themselves, getting drunk and fighting with each other.

They were living up to the savage image the masters had of them.

But the rebels themselves saw things differently.

You and your guys

rock up at a monastery

and you can go in and take it.

You turn up at a castle,

someone knows how to burn down a castle:

you throw the incendiary stuff into the castle,

you put in gunpowder and you blow it up.

So, seeing everything that's high in the landscape

fall to you

so that you change the landscape of lordship,

it's visually different.

I think that was part of it.

But also what you're doing is marching

through the landscape with others,

probably also hearing preaching,

which must have been very exciting too,

travelling as a group,

marching to places that are often

quite considerably further than the markets

they normally would have walked to

and living a different life

outside of time,

outside of feudalism,

outside of all the constraints of ordinary life.

Pragmatic in terms of their demands,

the peasants were mystical in their beliefs.

Convinced that the stars

and divine providence were on their side,

they were certain of their triumph over the old, corrupt world,

but their armies were crushed one after the other

by professional soldiers working for princes.

130,000 peasants were killed

in the fighting and the repression which followed,

but Martin Luther,

whose ideas had inspired the revolt,

sided with the victors.

"My Lord", he wrote,

"whosoever can should smite, strangle and stab,

for there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious

and devilish than a rebellious man."

It is perhaps this betrayal,

this stab in the back

that is being alluded to in this plan for a monument

to the peasant defeat by Dürer.

Atop a column made out of symbols of rural life,

sitting on a crate of chickens,

is the defeated peasant,

a sword sticking out of his back.

His posture is exactly the same as that of Christ

in another drawing by Dürer.

In the 1930s a Czech writer

wrote the story of an inventor

who develops a new machine

capable of imitating human work.

He called it 'robot'

from the Old Slavic word 'robota'

which means servitude or forced labour.

For peasants in this part of Europe

serfdom was not such a distant memory.

It had survived there into the 19th century,

although it should be said

that it had only arrived there in the 14th century

at a time when it was already on its way out in the West.

This five-century difference between East and West

was a consequence

of the spectacular drop in the rural population

caused by the Black Death.

In Western Europe a decrease in available manpower

put the peasants in a strong position

in relation to those who employed them.

Seeking to hold on to this now rare commodity,

they granted them what was necessary: their freedom.

In Central and Eastern Europe it was the opposite.

With workers increasingly rare

the ruling classes imposed serfdom,

something that was not common here prior to this.

This meant forced labour

and being unable to move

or get married without the lord's permission.

For women, meanwhile, it meant

staying single or widowed

if they wanted to keep their farms.

In normal western European societies

in the period from the 16th

to the 18th century

about 15% of peasant households were headed by women

at any one time, so women were perfectly capable

of running a farm household.

In areas of Europe

which had very strong serfdom

the percentage of female household heads

in peasant villages was about 5%

and the reason was that the village oligarchs

and the landlord

collaborated with one another to kick women out of their farms.

In 1604

in the Duchy of Friedland in northern Bohemia

a peasant woman, the widow Teschner,

refused to give up her farm.

In the manorial court records

I can follow the conflict

between this extremely strong widow Teschner

and both her village community

and the landlord who are trying to forcibly sell her farm

because the village community wants her out

because I think her male relatives want to get the farm.

And the landlord wants her out because landlords

in Eastern Europe

didn't regard female-run farms as having enough labour

to do the three to five days of forced labour

or 'robota' as it was called.

So, old widow Teschner,

she lost in the end,

but she kept her farm for another three years

and in the end the landlord said,

"either you get kicked out of your farm

or we forcibly sell the farm

or you marry off one of your daughters

to get a man to run the farm."

And the frustrating thing is that

the court records break off there

so we don't know what happened to old widow Teschner.

And it's actually possible she hung on for a few more years.

If she managed it for three years,

maybe she managed it for another three years.

It wasn't until the 18th century

that Joseph II, Emperor of Austria,

discovered what life was like for peasants

and finally abolished serfdom.

And it took another 50 years

for that abolition to actually take effect.

This delay is one of the reasons

for the economic and social differences

between Eastern and Western Europe.

A lot of the industry before the Industrial Revolution

took place among peasants in the countryside

who set up textile industries or made nails

or made straw hats. They did everything

and the landlords didn't completely choke that off,

but they tried to restrict

what their peasants could do.

They made their peasants pay loom fees

and spinning fees and nail fees and so on,

so it tended to delay that sort of development.

And so, on the whole, it took much longer

for the areas of Europe under serfdom

to actually unleash

the peasant economic dynamism

which was always there,

but was restricted by the landlords.

So, the whole economy matters.

But if 80% of the whole economy is peasants

then what happens in the peasant economy matters more.

Beginning in the 16th century

a new crop began to compete with traditional cereals.

It was given all sorts of names:

Indian wheat, Turkish wheat,

Egyptian wheat, Barbarian wheat.

Behind these aliases

was the sacred plant of the American Indians:

maize.

Before becoming the common field crop it is today

maize was grown in secret in the gardens of peasants.

To begin with peasants grew maize

in their own vegetable gardens.

This way they wouldn't need to pay any tax on it

as vegetable gardens were a sort

of protected space, a sanctuary

that were exclusively for the use of peasants.

They were very important to the peasant economy

as vegetable gardens produced a lot all year round

and were exempt from taxes.

Over time maize moved out of vegetable gardens

and began to be planted in fields.

The lords wanted it, essentially.

They didn't see it as a means of generating profit.

The aim was not to sell it on the market.

It was, however, a good product

to feed their peasants with,

meaning they could take other cereals from them

which were better suited to being sold on.

And so the emergence of maize

in the peasant diet

further widened the gap between the food eaten by peasants

and the food eaten by those who bought their produce.

Wealthy city-dwellers weren't the only ones

to benefit from the emergence of new crops.

They were a boon to mosquitoes as well,

who spread thanks to the development of rice growing.

Rice was highly profitable as yields

were much higher than with traditional cereals.

The 15th century saw the emergence

of enormous, fortress-like rice farms in northern Italy

like Tenuta Colombara in the Vercelli region.

The elites had the capital

while the labour was provided by peasants,

reduced to the status of agricultural workers.

As a by-product of paddy fields

mosquitoes spread a deadly disease:

malaria, marsh fever

or the paddy field plague.

Not that this worried the urban aristocracy, who grew rich

and enjoyed sumptuous risottos

while banning paddy fields from being planted

near cities

in order to protect themselves from the stench and disease.

Hard lines for all the little people

forced to trudge through those marshes

up until the 1950s.

The Flemish coastline around Antwerp

provides a striking illustration

of the major changes that took place

between the 11th and 15th centuries.

On one hand you have what is left of the wetlands,

the primary resource for peasants in 1000 AD,

while on the other is the landscape

as it was remodelled on the cusp of the modern era.

What you see in the new polder landscapes,

which were created by merchant capital,

mostly merchant capital in the early modern period,

is a sort of radical simplification of nature.

So, you've got these new coastal landscapes

which are very rational,

entirely geometric,

which were designed at a drawing table

and then implemented in the landscape.

And they serve a new type of agriculture

which concentrates on a single commodity,

which uses scale

and the advantages of scale

to produce one commodity

in a cost-efficient way.

For me it's a sort of testing ground of how

capitalism could rework nature

in a very radical and a very destructive way.

The 'tempestaire' was a figure from ancient peasant mythology

who had the power to control the elements

and tame storms using just his breath.

The new 'tempestaires' in 16th century Flanders

were water engineers.

Their increasingly imposing and sophisticated structures

were designed, so they said,

to resist the fierce storms of the North Sea,

dykes so safe that you could live right next to them,

knowing they wouldn't burst.

But they always burst

and the consequences were awful.

We see that often after 20-30 years

these newly constructed seawalls, they broke,

as did their medieval predecessors,

but the difference was that there were no people living

nearby the seawall

as if the seawall could not break.

And that's what explains these tens of thousands of victims

in different floods

in the 16th, 17th and 18th century.

That's what explains the last

major flood in the North Sea area, which was in 1953,

which still killed 2,000 people.

And you still see the same processes at work,

a sort of social differentiation

between the labourers living

in low-lying locations nearby the dyke,

very exposed, very vulnerable

and the larger farms in the middle of the polder,

in their large farms,

one, two, three metres higher,

and one, two, three metres higher

when a flood happens that makes all the difference.

It's the difference between drowning

and saving your life.

SUBTITLES BY PAUL MULLANEY