Les temps du travail et ceux de la consommation alimentaire. Systèmes de production économique et de pouvoir dans les monastères du haut Moyen Age en Italie du centre-nord (VIIe-XIe siècles)

The monks did not work the fields themselves; they only helped farm in cases of dire need. There was a tendency to entrust farm tasks to serfs – who were nearly slaves – and to farmers. As of the 10th century the latter were referred to as lay brothers, laymen who joined the monks. The lay brothers, their actions, and their need to work to earn their daily bread, to see to the community’s subsistence, yielded consequences essential to the formation of post-Roman European civilization. Serfs and lay brothers began tilling, irrigating, and draining the land around the monasteries to plant that necessary to their survival. They developed grain farming and zootechnics (particularly of sheep), cut down woods, and drained marshes, dug canals to irrigate the fields, planted vineyards, and prepared the ground for a type of economy that in the Early Middle Ages would classify as sustainable and perfectly integrated in an equal balance of resources and production capacity. While serfs and lay brothers had control over the production systems, the monks were the ones that managed them. First and foremost this meant the sale of the surplus from farming, handicraft, manufacture, and silvopastoral activities performed by each individual monastery. Thus, it was the monks that sparked the development of an economic system, which not only rendered the individual monastic communities independent and self-sufficient, but also provided adequate means and resources to organize fairs and markets in certain periods – and therefore to implement trade and commerce – and to control important import-export activities. The profits were then used to purchase sculptures, paintings, gold objects, and precious stones.