Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 brill.

nl/hima

The Problems of Comparison

Chris Wickham
Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford
chris.wickham@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

Abstract
This essay replies to the various criticisms made of Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005). It
concedes a number of points relating to the importance of ideologies, the distinction between
élites and aristocracies, the issue of money, and the question of the importance of the productive
forces. It defends the comparative method and defends the discussions of coloni and of the spatial
limitations of the peasant-mode of production in Framing. It also explores the nature of the state
and aristocracy in this period.

Keywords
comparative method, fiscal system, peasant-mode of production, forces of production, coloni

It is not often that a historian has the opportunity to read a set of intensive –
and generous – critiques of his or her own work, and reading them is a curious,
though salutary, experience. Framing the Early Middle Ages is a large book,
with a wide geographical sweep, so I expected a certain amount of interest in
it, at least from early medievalists. I have had much more than that, however,
including a number of unusually long reviews; and, most importantly, this
engagement has often been on a theoretical level, including, as one would
expect, in these contributions to Historical Materialism. Historians tend to
avoid theorising; it is one of the most characteristic cultural features of the
discipline, in fact. But it is also one of its major weak points, for the attachment
of historians to the empiricist-expository mode only-too-often hides their
theoretical presuppositions, not only from others, but from the writers
themselves. As a result, historians can fall into contradictory arguments, and
risk overall incoherence; entire historical debates have, on occasion, depended
on theoretical presuppositions which were indefensible, and which would
have been immediately seen as such had they been articulated. I have made
mistakes of that kind in the past, and perhaps in Framing too; but the kind of
engagement that this group of articles shows is precisely the test one needs

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X564725

222 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231

to face, if one wants to mount a set of arguments that are coherent enough
to last.
Every one of the articles published here is stimulating, and in one way or
another telling. I cannot respond to every point they make, and it would over-
weight this brief reply to try to do so, but I will try to confront some of the
major issues that have arisen from these critiques, taken as a whole. I shall
concede some points briefly, and, equally briefly, maintain my position on
some others. Then I shall discuss, in turn, the peasant-mode of production;
the comparative method and some problems of its application; and, finally,
the fiscal system of the later-Roman Empire and its impact on exchange. I shall
refer, in these discussions, to some of the other reviews I have had as well, in
particular to two very long ones, by Brent Shaw in New Left Review and by
Laura da Graca in Edad media, as well as to an earlier review by Jairus Banaji,
published as an appendix to the second edition of his book Agrarian Change
in Late Antiquity, where he makes different points to those he sets out here.
I must also register an important set of spin-off articles which came out in the
Journal of Agrarian Change last year, edited by Peter Sarris and, once again,
Jairus Banaji.1
First, some immediate concessions. I use the word ‘aristocracy’ very generally
in Framing, to denote the élite-strata of each of the societies discussed in it.
John Haldon thinks I should have just called these aristocracies ‘élite’, as ‘a less
potentially misleading term’ – a parallel point was made by Paolo Delogu in a
debate on the book in Storica2 – and I now think that they are probably right.
Haldon similarly argues that I should not have excluded ideologies, including
patterns of belief, quite as completely as I did, for they can be guides, not just
to cultural representations (which were not in my remit), but to the choices
élites make about how to spend their surplus. This is certainly the case, and,
on occasion in Framing, I did discuss them: the abandonment of rural villas in
the West, and the foundation of urban churches on extramural sites, thus

1. Shaw 2008; da Graca 2008; Banaji 2007, pp. 257–68. For the articles in Journal of Agrarian
Change, see their 2009 special issue, Aristocrats, Peasants and the Transformation of Rural Society,
c. 400–800 (Volume 9, Number 1). I do not so much need to engage with the latter articles here,
for they concentrate less on my book than on new empirical material, which they approach in
ways influenced by an (often critical) reading of Framing. I applaud this. Banaji’s own piece
(Banaji 2009) is the most focussed on the latter book, along lines parallel to those here. In
addition to the Voß article he cites here, which I had simply missed, I would signal that I should
have engaged with Baber Johansen’s important book on Islamic agrarian law ( Johansen 1988:
cf. Banaji 2009, pp. 78–9), even though its empirical focus is on a rather later period.
2. Delogu 2006, p. 160 (in fact, he argues for the use of both terms, with a slight difference
in meaning); a whole section of the same volume, pp. 121–72, is another debate about Framing
with a reply by me.
 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 223

re-orientating urban structures, are both examples of it. But I could still have
discussed the issue rather more. John Moreland makes the good point here
that early Anglo-Saxon evidence actually tells us more about the patterns of
belief than it tells us about hierarchies of wealth, and that it is therefore only
sensible to use the former as guides to unpick Anglo-Saxon material culture
first, before we get on to what that material culture tells us about social
differentiation. This leads him to argue that I neglect the Church, too, a point
also made by others (most forcefully Marios Costambeys in Economic History
Review).3 I am not really sold on the notion of ‘the Church’ in the early middle
ages; there was always a network of competing churches, not all of them
analytically separable from their lay neighbours as political and socio-economic
actors (as cultural forces they were normally more distinct). But it is,
nonetheless, the case that the transfer of up to a third of the land of continental
Western Europe in pious gift to churches in the period 400–800 is an
important part of any analysis of the economic structures of the regions that
made it up, and that it deserved to be confronted more directly as a
problem.4
Haldon also thinks I should have been more theoretically explicit in this
book, a point made by Neil Davidson as well. I recognise that this point is also
well made. By the standards of historians, Framing is quite clearly theoretically
located, in Marx and Weber above all, and in economic anthropology,
particularly when I discuss the peasant-mode of production. But I set out my
theoretical starting-points fairly briefly in each of my sections, before going
into detailed discussion of empirical material. This was a deliberate choice,
because I wanted to privilege the data: not because they ‘speak for themselves’,
but because, without a critical approach to, and a direct analysis of, the
empirical material, it is impossible to say much about anything in this period
(or, indeed, any other). I would make that choice again, in fact. But insofar as
Framing is an intervention in social theory, which I would indeed want it to
be, I will concede that it is theory-light. When I have subsequently used the
material in more targeted ways (as in a more recent article in Historical
Materialism on productive forces and the feudal mode), I have been a bit more
theoretically elaborate.5
Some other criticisms made of Framing I am less willing to concede. Banaji,
in a highly stimulating critique, seriously disagrees with me over the status of

3. Costambeys 2006, p. 419.

4. Herlihy 1961. Note that Shaw 2008, p. 104, also says that I miss out Islam; but only a
small percentage of the inhabitants of my regions, even of Syria/Palestine, were Muslim before
800.
5. Wickham 2008.
224 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231

coloni in the late-Roman Empire. Some of the things he criticises me for are,
in my view, not accurate: I do say, for example, that late-Roman legislation
materially worsened the status of the tenant-population of the Empire.6 But
I otherwise argue against his overall position on the laws concerning coloni in
Chapter 9 of my book, and I maintain the position I argued for there. The
same is true for his arguments about tenancy as a category. Banaji, for some
years, has sought to disaggregate the category of tenancy, separating out more
dependent groups of workers who are more subject to the control of landlords,
and whom he wishes to see, rather, as rural proletarians. He makes the same
point here. I am not, however, convinced. I argued at some length, in Chapter 5
of Framing, that it was important to assess the degree to which landlords
sought to control their tenants, in particular concerning the way the latter
exploited the land, and that this correlated with an interest in selling surplus,
as well as, of course, in rural domination for its own sake. There was a very
considerable range of levels of control over tenants in the period discussed in
the book, from the high levels in late-Roman Egypt (whose documents Banaji
knows well) and ninth-century northern Francia, to the much lower levels in
some areas of weaker aristocratic power or involvement in the labour-process,
as in (say) eighth-century Italy. Some peasants indeed ‘had very little control
over their working lives’, in Banaji’s phrase. But they still lived off the land
they worked, and paid rent to lords. The ‘wage in land’ of Banaji and Ros Faith
is a tenant-plot, held on very restrictive terms for sure, but by tenants who
supported themselves from it. (It is a marginal point, but I do not think that
there is any empirical basis for Banaji’s claim that they were ‘often unmarried’.)
The phrase ‘wage in land’ instead hints, in my view unhelpfully, at some form
of salaried (or slave-) labour. There is to me, as Banaji recognises, a clear divide
between peasants, who support themselves, and slaves or proletarians, who are
fed by or have to buy food from others, and this re-naming does not to me
lessen that divide.
I think that Banaji and I have, at times, different views about the validity of
certain types of evidence. He is surprisingly attached to the idea that laws have
in themselves such force that we can use them as guides to real social processes,
not just the minds of legislators. I, of course, recognise that laws are an
important weapon in the hands of – in this case – landlords, in their coercion
of their tenants, or at least in their coercive negotiation with tenants. But the
degree to which they are put into effect depends so much on local situations,
local relations of power, the local force of (and the information available to)
courts, that just to tell us what a Roman emperor or post-Roman king enacted

6. Wickham 2005, pp. 524–5.

 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 225

tells us very little. Similarly, the laws against marriage between free and unfree
peasants were, indeed, as Banaji says, ‘peculiarly repressive’, but they were also
routinely broken in practice, as was even recorded in legal documents, without
comeback, as Alice Rio has shown;7 this practice, although, of course, regionally
variable,8 is, to me, more important than any law. So I stick to my position
over these issues, without qualm.
Let us now turn to the issue of the peasant-mode of production, which has
interested several of my commentators. First, I have to thank Kelvin Knight
for a remarkable exposition and development of my views on peasant-agency.
I hardly dissent from it at all. I would only say here that perhaps Knight is too
generous in his Aufhebung of the sometimes considerable tension in my work
between an attraction to the abstract clarity of Althusserian thought (and
similar structural systems) and a recognition, as a historian, that agency is the
work of real human beings working in real social (economic, political, cultural)
contexts.9 But it remains the case that I would want to be doing what he says
I am doing. And he is right that my hostility to teleology does not encompass
the ends-driven action of humans; it is our teleologies that I am opposed to,
not theirs.
Davidson and Chris Harman argue that my view of the peasant-mode is
not sufficiently dynamic.10 That is correct; here, I felt constrained by my
sources, for they say so little about the mode at all that I avoided some of the
elaboration I could have engaged in. Davidson comments that my peasant-
mode actors are posited as uninterested in risk and technological development,
much as were the peasants under feudalism described in the 1970s by Robert
Brenner (who, in this respect, followed almost all his predecessors, in a view
now, however, widely and convincingly contested). He notes that I suggest
ways in which feudalism could develop from internal developments in the
peasant-mode, but also that these ways do not appear in practice in my
examples. That is fair; so also are the related suggestions Harman makes, which
are focused on developments in the productive forces. I think he is likely to be
right about the impact on peasant-mode communities of any development in
the productive forces that favours individual members (or families) in such

7. Rio 2006, pp. 16–23.

8. Cf. Wickham 2005, pp. 559–62.
9. Knight remarks that I do not define ‘articulation’ in Framing; I meant it in what one
might call a vulgar-Althusserian sense. But my uses of structuralism and poststructuralism have
always been deliberately eclectic (as well as ‘sceptical’ – cf. Knight’s typical generosity in n. 84).
Note that I was never a pupil of Rodney Hilton; just a younger colleague around 1980, and
enormously influenced by him.
10. Chris Harman died while this article was in press; I would like to record my huge respect
for him as a theorist, political actor and human being, and my great sorrow at his death.
226 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231

communities, and I would go along with his formulations of how these might
produce a shift from the peasant-mode to feudalism. Harman cites more than
one different version of the peasant-mode in his article, for Sachs and Harris
each set out different possible configurations of autonomous local economies.
We must be careful not to attach our models to too-specific a version of the
mode (if we do so, we will replicate the unhelpful view, though one now less-
widely held than in the past, that the feudal mode is supposedly impossible
without legal serfdom and labour-service); but, rather, we must recognise
explicitly that the peasant-mode has many different forms, and thus many
possible paths of potential change. In that context, it is worth also observing
that the best documented examples I can think of from the early and central
middle ages in Europe of a peasant-mode actually shifting to a feudal one, in
parts of tenth- and eleventh-century northern Spain and in thirteenth-century
Iceland, each seem to have been marked, not by technological change, but by
changes in the relations of production, in which local big-men did indeed
manage to assert themselves at the expense of their neighbours, in the
‘bottom-up’ process characterised by Davidson. I would not wish to exclude
other ways in which this change took place, however.
Carlos Astarita argues that I understate the extent of the peasant-mode in
the early-medieval West; he extends my arguments for Britain and other
northern regions to the Frankish heartland, and to Spain. I think he over-
generalises. I would perhaps inevitably think this, as I argue so often for
regional difference, but I certainly do here. Northern Spain, as I have just said,
does indeed seem to me one region where the peasant-mode was important in
many places from the eighth century onwards, in much the way Astarita says.
I said this in Framing, too,11 but I did not really develop the point, for the
main period for the dominance of that mode postdated that of the book (and,
above all, all the evidence for it is later – there is almost no eighth-century
material for the region at all). Although even this must be nuanced micro-
regionally (lords, I am sure, always dominated in many areas, such as in Galicia
and around Oviedo), it remains a guide for much of the north. In Francia, I
am less convinced by Astarita. The weakness of the Merovingian manor does
not seem to me demonstrated by the Tresson charter; nor am I convinced that
palatia were ‘symbolic rather than . . . monumental’ (the word palatium has a
clear material correlate far more often than it is figurative). We do not know
anything detailed about the materiality of Frankish élite (aristocratic and
royal) residences before Charlemagne’s time, but it is unlikely that royal
residences were so very meagre in the seventh century, given their great

11. Wickham 2005, pp. 227–9, 584.

 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 227

impressiveness in the late-eighth, at Aachen or Ingelheim. The evidence for

aristocratic wealth in Francia is not perfect. Some indicators I used for it are,
admittedly, labile, particularly in the sixth century; but the scale of landowning
visible in our seventh-century lay and ecclesiastical documents remains huge,
far greater than in any other part of contemporary Europe or the Mediterranean,
and this – plus the geographical scale of some Frankish distribution-networks
for artisanal goods – reinforces my view that the peasant-mode must have
been relatively unimportant in much (although not all) of northern Francia in
particular.
This brings me to some of the implications of the comparative method in
itself. Da Graca remarks that my use of comparison is more useful as a guide
to which explanations do not work than it is as a generator of which actually
do, a process which tends to be more ‘conjectural’. She is right here, and it
seems to be a generalisable (and, if unrecognised, problematic) feature of the
comparative method as a whole. She is also right that the hierarchy of causes
I invoke under these circumstances risks circularity; in the specific Frankish
case I have just mentioned, sometimes I propose that the level of artisanal
exchange reflects aristocratic wealth, but sometimes I drift towards proposing
that the former demonstrates the latter, which is a proposition of a different
order. I raise this issue as a warning: one must be precise and consistent in
one’s claims about what causes what. (Here, I regard élite-wealth as the causal
motor, and land-documents are the real basis for my belief in it.) I have tried
to be consistent, but, of course, we are dealing with the early middle ages,
where so little is certain; one thus has to construct a plausible social picture
out of fragmentary empirical evidence, at the same time as explaining it; so
I may have slipped. Da Graca’s critiques of my views of causation (and also of
the heterogeneity of my ideal types) are here to the point.12
The Gaul/Francia comparison is particularly important for understanding
Britain, which started with a fairly similar social structure to northern Gaul
(in 300, say), but which, already by 450, was radically different. I made some
proposals in Framing as to why that might be,13 based, above all, on the
argument that Britain was more civilian than northern Gaul, so its élites were
less able to react to the total breakdown of the Roman state in this region.
Moreland points out some of the flaws in this argument; as he shows,
aristocratic power was both more privatised and more military in fourth-
century Britain than I claimed. It will clearly be necessary to find more
developed explanations for Britain’s economic meltdown than those I suggested.

12. da Graca 2008, pp. 283–94.

13. Wickham 2005, pp. 331–2.
228 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231

But Moreland is led by this argument to suggest that British aristocracies, as a

result, also survived better than I had proposed, because they were indeed
more capable of adapting to a post-Roman environment. Here, however, the
Gallic comparison imposes itself as a serious problem. Whatever aristocratic
survival there was in Britain, it was at a far simpler material level than in Gaul.
There is no sharper break, anywhere in my regions, than that between the
archaeology of northern Gaul and that in the British lands just to the other
side of the English Channel by the sixth century. Moreland is led by the logic
of his argument to talk up continuities and survivals, but I think he exaggerates;
the Gallic contrast must be kept in mind – and explained – here, no matter
how many continuities there might have been in Britain. (By contrast, his
argument for a greater degree of exchange in late seventh-century England
than I argued for makes sense; it was still far less large-scale and complex than
in Gaul/Francia, but the signs are there. I underplayed them precisely because
of the Gallic contrast, but it is wrong to talk them away entirely.)
The final issue I would like to reply to concerns the late-Roman state.
Haldon gave most attention to this here, though his arguments also match
with those of Shaw in New Left Review, and those of Banaji in Agrarian Change.
All three criticise my dependence on a fiscal model so as to explain exchange,
and unpick it in interesting ways. Here, it is necessary to reply (as Haldon and
Banaji say they recognise) that I am more interested in an aristocratic (i.e.
élite-) than in a fiscal demand as the basis for complex production and exchange
in my regions. I invoke a fiscal motor14 for inter-regional exchange above all,
which I argue consistently to be less important than exchange internal to
regions. Even then, the fiscal system facilitates that exchange, rather than
generating most of it. Interestingly, Haldon and Shaw both invoke François de
Calataÿ’s 2005 article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology to support the
proposition that, in reality, Mediterranean inter-regional exchange began well
before the Roman Empire and began to ‘decline’ before the late Empire.15 This
short and stimulating article by one of the most active classical numismatists
offers a small set of highly generic proxy-indicators for the global scale of (in
particular) metal-production, but it surely cannot by itself counteract the scale
of archaeological work on all the sites of the late Empire – this is the kind of
article we used before archaeology was available, rather than in the present
environment. But, overall, these three have a tendency to concentrate too
much on what I say about taxation and exchange, and too little on what I say
about élite-demand – some of which is fuelled by the local control of taxation,

14. Wickham 2005, pp. 717–18, 820.

15. de Calataÿ 2005.
 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 229

of course, but most of which is not. Their own preoccupations have led them
to erect something of a straw-man.
Where Haldon and Banaji hit home is over money. I did not discuss coinage
in Framing. I felt guilty about it even at the time, but I thought that Chapter 11,
which discussed exchange, would get out of hand if I did, as well as feeling
that its importance had been overstated in the past. I still think that; but
Haldon and Banaji – and also Moreland, writing on seventh- and eighth-
century England – certainly show that there are exchange-elements which are
shown up by coin-finds and not by any other evidence at our disposal. It is
also, of course, the case that states depended greatly on precious-metal reserves
(the thesaurus as it was called in Francia; although it was valued in coins in our
narrative-sources, it was not by any means all necessarily in coined money);
but, above all, detailed work on coin-distributions in Sicily, England and
elsewhere shows up economic relationships I did not spot. I still do not think
that we have enough evidence of coin-quantities to show how much money
was in circulation at any one time, or who used it. All the same, I recognise
that I am on the defensive here. Coinage is a substantial evidence-base for this
period, and I should have used it.
There are plenty of other things I could have done in Framing and did not.
I should have discussed al-Andalus, Arab Spain, more; I think now that some
of the elements in its development from the eighth to the eleventh centuries
were much more similar to those in other regions of the West than they were
to the heartlands of the Arab Caliphate. I should also have characterised more
sharply the distinction between an early middle ages in which the exchange-
motor was élite-demand, and a later middle ages, in which a mass-demand
for artisanal products is much more visible in our sources, and the wealth
of the élite becomes less of a discriminator. (Had I tried to do so, however,
I would have run into difficulty, for the twelfth century, my best bet for the
century of the shift, has never been analysed anywhere from this standpoint,
and it would not be at all easy as yet to do so – central-medieval archaeology
is, in general, less well developed than early-medieval archaeology.) Both
would have helped to clarify some of my points about political systems and
about exchange, and about the economic dynamic of my societies, in particular
of the feudal mode, which would have been useful. Both would also have
required me to go substantially beyond my cut-off date of 800, however, and
then I would have had to become enmeshed in the analysis of a further set of
societies, including the Carolingians and the ‘Abbāsids, which I wanted
explicitly to avoid.
What I do want to finish by saying, however, is that I am not repentant
about the focus of Framing. Its interest to readers of Historical Materialism
230 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231

(and to most other readers who are not early medievalists), and the interest of
the often arcane debates in these pages about the affairs of societies active
some 1500 years ago, lie in the plausibility of the large-scale socio-economic
contrasts which were presented there, as well as in my attempts to compare
and explain them. Whether or not my ambition came off, I am not sorry to
have been ambitious. I wanted to compare regions, to cut through some of the
rubbish that had been written about them by people who only knew about
one area and therefore had no controls for their hypotheses. The regions turned
into the dramatis personae of the book, in a humanisation-process which I
tried to restrain (because I knew it did not make any sense), but which sat at
the back of my mind for all that; but all this seemed worth it, given my interest
in comparison. I also wanted to categorise, to frame. Shaw explicitly doubts
the utility of this (‘whatever the story, it is not susceptible to framing’); he does
not even believe there was an early middle ages to frame, though he does not
give his reasons.16 In my view, categorisation, drawing distinctions, working
out the nature of difference and the reasons for it, is more simply what history-
writing is about, and that if we do not do it, we fail as historians. We also can
and should argue about the categories (and about agency, and the internal
dynamic of systems and processes), as the authors of these critiques have so
ably done here. This is how historical debate moves on, and the authors of
these critiques have moved it on. That is our task, and we learn something real
when we do it properly.

References
Banaji, Jairus 2007, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity, Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—— 2009, ‘Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages’, Journal of
Agrarian Change, 9, 1: 59–91.
Costambeys, Marios 2006, ‘Review of Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages’, The Economic
History Review, 59: 417–19.
da Graca, Laura 2008, ‘Reflexiones metodológicas sobre el estudio comparativo de Chris
Wickham’, Edad media, 9: 265–97.
de Calataÿ, François 2005, ‘The Graeco-Roman Economy in the Super-Long Run’, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 18: 361–72.
Delogu, Paolo 2006, ‘Una discussione con Chris Wickham’, Storica, 34: 152–63.
Herlihy, David 1961, ‘Church Property on the European Continent, 701–1200’, Speculum, 36,
1: 81–105.

16. Shaw 2008, pp. 110–14. On p. 113, he says that if anyone still believes in the early
middle ages after reading Framing, ‘then there is probably very little that the reviewer can add to
change their minds’. Well, yes. He goes on, however, to lambast the subordinated rôle of the
middle ages assumed by every grand narrative of modernity; I am certainly with him there.
 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 231

Johansen, Baber 1988, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent, London: Croom Helm.
Rio, Alice 2006, ‘Freedom and Unfreedom in Early Medieval Francia: the Evidence of the Legal
Formulae’, Past and Present, 193, 1: 7–40.
Shaw, Brent 2008, ‘After Rome’, New Left Review, II, 51: 89–114.
Wickham, Chris 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— 2008, ‘Productive Forces and the Economic Logic of the Feudal Mode of Production’,
Historical Materialism, 16, 2: 3–22.
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