ing of taxation, were the essential means by which free peasants were reduced to servitude, hereditarily bound to their tenements and liable to arbitrary levies and labour services. Poor harvests and flight from marauders were both factors which could lead a freeman to surrender his liberty, but it is likely that the pressure came from above and was not willingly conceded from below, because the most rapid subjection of the peasantry came not in the tenth century, at the time of greatest instability, but rather in the eleventh when harvests were improving and lords looking for the means to build in stone rather than wood. The process was still in train well into the twelfth century. Between 940 and 980, 80 per cent of the donations made to Chartres cathedral were by peasant freeholders; between 1090 and 1130 the equivalent figure had fallen to 8 per cent, but during the thirty years before that the figure was still as high as 38 per cent. Further south in Burgundy the abbot of Cluny still hoped during the 1130s that he could attract freeholders to surrender their plots to his abbey in return for a milder lordship than they might find elsewhere. Further east on the borders of Saxony the peasantry was also able to retain its freedom longer; slaves taken from its pagan neighbours offered an alternative source of labour and the vulnerability of these lands to raiding meant that lords had to treat their peasants more generously if they were to hold them at all.
From the eleventh century lands began to be cultivated which had previously lain fallow. This is evident in southern France from the 1020s, northern France and Spain from the 1060s, and in Germany from the 1130s. Forest clearance, improved drainage, and in Flanders a laborious reclamation of land from the sea, all brought fresh land under cultivation. The process was partly a response to a growth in population, but was also, and perhaps more significantly, a means by which lords aimed to increase their revenues. When Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (near Paris) founded new villages on his abbey's estates in the 1130s, he was quite consciously attempting to increase the monastery's revenue rather than reacting to any overpopulation in his existing villages. At the same time cereal production was improved by an increasing use of horses rather than oxen for
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