Discussing the peasantry at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious, though they constituted at least nine-tenths of the population of the kingdom, is a hard task. Nor is it made easier by the fact that it fits ill into the context of a celebration of the millenary of the Capetians, for the obvious reason that the vast majority of the peasantry was probably totally ignorant of the events to be discussed. Certainly, everyone knew there was a king, but what picture could they have of him and how many of them even knew his name? We will never know. The task is made all the more difficult, finally, by the relative paucity of evidence.

The narrative sources devote little attention to the lot of the peasantry, for whom the chroniclers (and, more generally, the educated) almost invariably professed hostility and contempt. The peasant was the animal brutum of Bernard of Angers, the rusticus piger, deformis et undique turpis of Adalbero of Laon, a creature whose behaviour demonstrated agrestis ferocitus to William of Jumièges. The chroniclers hardly mention peasants other than in exceptional circumstances, such as, for example, the catastrophic famines of 1005 and 1031–2, or the uprising in rural Normandy in 996–7.

The archival documents are not, as is too often claimed, rare, but they are very unevenly distributed – several hundred, even several thousand, tenth-century charters have been preserved for regions such as the Mâconnais or Catalonia; for large areas, in contrast, the silence is total or very nearly.