For more than a thousand years, French winemakers have eagerly awaited one particular fall day: the Ban des Vendanges, when their local administration decides that the grape harvest can officially begin. Traditionally, it was marked with a festival, and you can still visit Ban des Vendanges celebrations today throughout France (even in Paris, which has a small urban vineyard in Montmartre). Today the Ban des Vendanges is mainly an occasion for celebrating and promoting wine, but it remains a minor administrative hassle for vintners if they want to harvest any earlier. So, all in all, the Ban des Vendanges is very French, as France is traditionally a big producer of both wine and administrative hassles.
The Ban des Vendanges emerged during the era of feudalism, which developed in France as a result of the constant wars, internal power struggles, and foreign invasions that made the ninth and tenth centuries so anarchic. With the inability of weak French kings to defend and impose order in their realm, local lords became the dominant authority figures. They built castles, organized resistance against aggressors, and ruled their territories more or less independently. The kings could not command them and did not have the financial resources to buy their loyalty, and so they had to create new political arrangements of mutual benefit. They granted land—or fiefs—to local lords in return for their political allegiance and the provision of military forces when necessary. Over time, these grants of land became hereditary. Bishops and abbots also became feudal lords, eventually owning perhaps a fifth of France’s territory.
The lords who owned these vast territories started granting land to their own vassals, who would then owe military service and allegiance to them. Thus, the feudal system was born. French society came to resemble a pyramid: At the top perched the king (who was a vassal only to God); underneath him stood the greater lords, the powerful dukes and counts of France; and underneath them were a larger number of barons, viscounts, and minor lords. A vassal was supposed to do homage to his overlord, promise to assist him militarily and financially if needed, and do him no harm. In return, the overlord promised to protect and dispense justice to his vassals. All oaths of obligation were sanctified in religious ceremonies, which in that deeply devout era carried significant weight.
At the bottom of the feudal pyramid were the peasants, who represented roughly 90 percent of the population.1 Every peasant also had a lord, depending on whose fief they resided in. In France, most peasants were serfs, meaning they were bound to their lord on a hereditary basis, and had to provide set amounts of labor and taxes. They needed the lord’s permission to marry, or to leave the land. There were also “free peasants” who rented land from their lord. These arrangements formed the backbone of the rural economy, which at that time covered most of France. Each fief, with its lord, serfs, and free peasants, strove to be self-sufficient.
In reality, feudal relationships did not always match this simplistic structure. Medieval towns were not included in the lords’ fiefs and answered directly to the king. This placed them outside the feudal structure, and as towns grew in size and importance, this eventually undermined the entire political order. In addition, a lord could own multiple fiefs, each with a different overlord, and this could result in some chaotic situations. For example, the dukes of Normandy, whom we met in the last chapter, were vassals of the king of France. But when a Norman duke named William conquered England in 1066, he became the independent king of England. In that guise, he might wish to declare war on the king of France, but as the Duke of Normandy, he was technically supposed to help the king of France if England invaded. We will see later on the many headaches this created in Europe for several hundred years.
By the end of the tenth century, the feudal lords were so powerful that they decided who should sit on the throne of France. This is how Hugh Capet became king in 987, thus ending the Carolingian line and beginning the Capetian dynasty. (He made the long-overdue decision that for a dynasty to survive, it had to have one clearly designated descendant; from then on, the eldest son of the king would succeed him.) Hugh was elected king by the other dukes and counts because he was not very powerful. He only directly controlled Paris and a small area of land around it called Île de France (Island of France). It was not physically an island, but the term aptly describes the political situation of France’s royal domains. Many of the great lords controlled richer and larger tracts of land, and a weak king meant that they could maintain that strength and independence. They were also free to fight each other, a near-constant feature of feudal society. Because of this, even the most minor nobles built castles of some sort to ensure they could defend themselves.
The nobility constituted one of the three social classes, known as the three “estates.” The First Estate comprised the clergy of the Catholic Church, which over the previous five hundred years had become incredibly wealthy and powerful. Aside from owning a lot of land, and dictating key aspects of daily life in this era of Christendom, the Church was allowed to impose a tithe, or religious tax, on the population. Some bishops and abbots were also of the nobility and could raise armies against their rivals.
The nobility formed the Second Estate. They could also tax the common people but did not have to pay taxes themselves. They had a host of special privileges and essentially ran the country. Despite this bounty of wealth and power, they made up only about 1 percent of the population—the original “one percenters,” as it were.
Everyone else in France, from the common peasant to skilled artisans and wealthy bourgeoisie, was a member of the Third Estate, which included about 95 percent of the population. As you can imagine, they were often unhappy about their exploitation by the other two estates, and eventually this would help lead to the epochal and bloody French Revolution. But well before 1789, there were frequent peasant rebellions and urban unrest in France. Feudalism provided a rather useful social structure for those in power, but they could not completely ignore the resentment and revolts it often generated.
One way of reinforcing the increasingly rigid distinctions between the social classes was through food. During the feudal era, the eating habits of the upper and lower classes diverged enormously. Food became more than just a marker of class—it was also used to justify the rule of one class over another. As certain foods became imbued with a sense of nobility and good health, others came to be seen as base and unhealthy, and it seemed only natural that those who consumed the former should enjoy an exalted position over the latter.
The peasant diet was dominated by grains, particularly rye, barley, and oats (wheat was mainly the preserve of the upper classes). These were either cooked into a porridge or gruel, or baked into bread. Another substantial portion of the daily diet originated in vegetable gardens, which, not being taxed by landlords, were both highly desirable and ubiquitous. Leeks, onions, carrots, parsnips, and spinach were particularly common sights on the peasant table. Meat also featured occasionally, especially pork. Beef might be eaten, but only when the cow had ceased to be productive. Eggs and cheese were frequently available. The peasants enjoyed wine, or perhaps cider or beer, as much as the nobility and drank it in what we would today consider to be excessive quantities (though perhaps understandably; water was known as a potential source of disease, and milk was something that only barbarians drank straight). This was all assuming that no war was being waged and bad weather had not destroyed the harvest; food scarcity and famine could occur at any time. But overall, agricultural cultivation and production expanded enormously during the feudal era, thanks to population growth and technological improvements. This, in turn, stimulated more trade and commercial markets and helped drive the growth of towns and cities.
This map of tenth-century France reveals the limited extent of the king’s domains. From Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Edition Bance-Morel, 1856), 136.
A noble table would look very different, and not only because the quantity of food on offer would be vastly more abundant (an easy way to show how powerful and rich you were). The nobility tended to adhere to an elaborate gastronomic code that ranked food in a hierarchy according to the four classical elements of fire, air, water, and earth. As in ancient Greece, fire was considered the noblest element, followed by air, water, and then finally the most despicable element, earth. Nobles shunned most vegetables, especially root vegetables, which grew underground. Onions and garlic were particularly offensive. Plants that grew out of the soil and reached for the sky—and were therefore closer to the second element, air—were nobler. It was therefore acceptable to eat cereals and bread, as well as fruits growing on trees.
Fish were not highly valued as food, because they were associated with the religious fasting so frequently required in those times. On Christian fast days, one could eat fish but not meat or, often, animal-derived products such as butter, cheese, and eggs. On non-fasting days, called jours gras (fat days), nobles would eat meat and meat and, if possible, a bit more meat. Unlike the peasantry, who usually boiled their meat, the nobility preferred their meat roasted, with no intermediary elements between the noble element of fire and the meat they consumed. In a culture where physical strength was prized, and seen as legitimizing a noble’s right to rule over the population, it is no wonder meat was popular, as it was believed to be the best food for sustaining a man’s strength. In some ways, it became a very symbol of power itself.2 Disgraced knights, for example, might be commanded to not only give up their arms but also abstain from eating meat. Game was particularly desirable, mainly because it was a product of hunting, a warriorlike activity in which every lord and king partook. Beef, on the other hand, was seen as a vulgar and common meat, only good for peasants and their rough stomachs. Birds that flew in the lofty element of air were popular, including some we rarely see on tables today, such as heron, swan, and peacock. (It’s also possible that medieval cooks just liked these birds because they could be presented in a grand way.) Highest on the list of noble meat were phoenix and salamander, mystical creatures who lived in fire. If only one could find them . . .
To finance their superior eating habits, as well as all their castles and wars, nobles needed money, and for that they had a very convenient power called the droit de ban (literally, the “right to ban”). This wide-ranging authority allowed a lord to dispense justice in his lands, to impose fines and taxes, and to force his subjects to do any work he deemed necessary, such as building or mending his castle. A lord could also force his peasants to use his mill or wine press, collecting a tax in the process. And he could also set the day on which the grape harvesting was supposed to start, hence the term Ban des Vendanges. This ensured that everyone would start the harvest at the same time and would make it easier to collect taxes on the harvest. It was also meant to ensure a better quality of the wine by forbidding people from harvesting too early. The lord could also institute a banvin, a ban on other people selling wine on his lands, leaving him as the only seller and giving him a monopoly on the product. In some places, the banvin lasted only a day, but it could also last nearly the whole year. (The lords who had the longest banvin were the Templars, which didn’t help to make them very popular.)
So for several hundred years, the lords had a great time in feudal France. But the conditions upon which feudalism depended, such as a weak monarchy, were not permanent, and the system was gradually undermined as the French kings began reclaiming land and authority from their vassals. Strong kings such as Philip Augustus, Saint Louis, and Philip the Fair solidified Capetian control over the French state, which became more and more centralized. Better economic conditions meant that the French kings could afford to pay professional soldiers rather than relying on their vassals to provide military forces. The expanding size and wealth of towns, with their newly prosperous merchant classes, brought them considerable autonomy and increasing political influence. And by the early fourteenth century, most peasants had been given or had purchased their freedom, although they remained under the jurisdiction of their local lords. The crown had grown weary of peasant revolts and welcomed the influx of revenue from peasants purchasing their enfranchisement.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the golden age of feudalism in France had passed, although it would be several centuries before it faded completely. The last remnants of the system were finally destroyed in the great cleansing that was the French Revolution, at which time all bans were abolished. But communes were still allowed to issue a Ban des Vendanges if they wished, and some thought it still actually had merit—it ensured better wine quality and a more level playing field between the bigger and smaller vineyard owners. So they kept issuing the Ban des Vendanges, and to this day this very old tradition can still be found in France’s wine-growing regions.