Pastoralism in fourteenth-century Haute Provence: environment and society between the Alps and the Mediterranean

Thesis

The purpose of this thesis is to give a holistic analysis of pastoralism in Haute-Provence in the fourteenth century. The study of the rich archival evidence shows that pastoralism constituted a way of life embedded within the environment, in which terrain, vegetation, habitation, seasonality, climate, biology, mobility, expertise, custom, power, governance, gender, perception, ideology and unruliness all interacted. To make this analysis, this thesis asks new questions and uses research from environmental history and the history of institutions to enliven Provencal historiography, which—despite the pioneering work of the historical ecologist Thérèse Sclafert in the 1950s—has often focused on older questions of late-medieval economic transformation, local political culture, and the power of central government. I focus not just on the oft-studied practice of long-distance summer transhumance for market-oriented livestock raising. Instead, I paint a consistently mixed picture, of commercial activity combined with peasant households who used sheep, goats, pigs and cows to wrest subsistence from stubble land or uplands. Herders did so according to mobility patterns, temporal rhythms and geographic scales, altering the ecosystems they visited through fertilising and grazing. From a socio-political perspective, I offer a sceptical analysis of the extent of royal and seigniorial power. The mobility and informality of pastoralism diluted large-scale administrative projects: in the multi-layered governance of the pastoral landscape, many rules were asserted and ignored, resisted, negotiated or manipulated by herders and peasants who could navigate hotspots of authority and assert local custom to resist expropriation. Communal institutions appear somewhat closer to local perceptions of the environment, though community regulations and action were shaped by social priorities, environmental ideologies about the transformative effect of grazing, and a bitter resentment of outsiders.

Authors: Hegarty Morrish, P

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nrvmwmmn5
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: history of governance; pastoralism; social history; environmental history; landscape history; history of the commons; medieval history
• Subjects: Middle Ages; History