ALTHOUGH THE PRIMARY sources leave many gaps, they allow us to form an outline of Agnès's life, and this skeleton can be fleshed out to some extent with evidence from other sources not directly related to Agnès. In this chapter I draw on some of these to animate Agnès's story while retaining a distinction between what the evidence says and my own conclusions.

I begin with a discussion of the young woman's move to the royal court. Then, to create the context for her activity there, I cut away from Agnès herself to focus on her environment, turning first to the royal family, whose problematic relationships represent the background against which the king formed his attachment to Agnès. What might have motivated Charles VII to enter into such an apparently intense liaison at that moment? I then broaden the scope to court factionalism, going into some detail about the conflicts that divided the court during Agnès's tenure, proposing that although to modern eyes these quarrels often seem to focus on gossip and petty jealousies, they represented deadly serious plays for power in a society where the signs of status often had material consequences.

After reconstituting this context, I bring Agnès back into the story, examining the references to her political intriguing in greater detail against their larger background. I conclude with a discussion of her mysterious death, prepared by the discussion of factionalism. Throughout I am conscious of manoeuvring between the related problems of historical timidity, given the relative dearth of sources, and unjustified ambition, given the relative abundance of them. But I hope to establish parameters for imagining what her role plausibly might have been by forming an idea of the world in which Agnès lived.

Agnès Arrives on the Scene

A long tradition held that Yolande, Duchess of Anjou (1379–1442), regent after the death of her husband in 1417 and mother of the duke's heir, Louis (1403–1434), Marie (1404–1463), René (1409–1480), and Charles (1414–1472) spotted the beautiful Agnès at the Angevin court and, hoping to influence Charles VII through her, proposed to the king that he take the young woman as his mistress.

This volume originated in three sessions on ‘The Rise and Nature of Landless Rural Households in Europe, 16th–19th Century’, as part of the European Rural History (EURHO) Conference held in Leuven (Belgium), 11–14 September 2017. The realisation of this project has been supported by the FWO-funded Comparative Rural History Network (CORN). Very sadly, we have to note that during the publication process, we lost one of the contributors. Dieter Bruneel of Ghent University died prematurely in September 2019 at an extremely young age. However, we are proud that we can present one of his last works as chapter 5 of this volume.

This chapter presents new findings about changes in the agrarian social structure of early modern Catalonia that illustrate the rapid emergence of landless households. The presence of this group in the Catalonian countryside has largely been ignored by historians, because evidence of its existence is difficult to find. In this chapter, we will examine new evidence of the existence of a large workforce of French migrant wage labourers, which points to the wider presence of such wage-earners in the rural economy. This adds another layer to the deep structural changes that the existing historical literature has already identified.

After the social and economic crisis of the late medieval period, many historians have stressed that important changes in property rights and land tenure led to the formation of new social groups. In particular, social differentiation increased among peasant groups. These groups consisted of the owners of a mas – the main productive unit of the Catalan countryside – who were still serfs but were successful in keeping the usage rights of their land from the lords; and those peasants who had lost their right to possess a mas.

Like other holders of perpetual customary tenures in Europe, in effect mas owners, also known as pagesos (s. pages), became landowners and could add extensive plots of land as well as other masos to their estate via the land-market and marriage strategies. The labour requirements for such enlarged farms could not be satisfied by the peasant family itself, so farmers had to adopt many strategies in order to get their lands cultivated. The most important of these was the leasing out of a mas to another peasant family, who became masovers (sharecroppers). Thus, sharecropping contracts increased from the mid-sixteenth century.

However, it was not possible for all peasants to lease a mas if they did not own one. Many households who had tiny holdings or no land had to turn to wage labour to make ends meet. During the early modern period, this social group increased both in number and as a proportion of all households in Catalonia. Their emergence was linked to the appearance of a new social label from the first half of the sixteenth century: treballador (labourer).

Agrarian milieus, landownership and landowners have, for the most part, been the main focus of historical research in the rural context. The land-poor and landless, on the other hand, have been the subjects of far less research – despite their numbers rising significantly in most European countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This rise was connected with the increase of proto-industrial production, with declines in wages, with agrarian structures dominated by small units of agricultural production or based on day labour, and with agricultural crises and agricultural reforms. In Prussia, for example, the landless and land-poor accounted for one-third of the population during the mid-nineteenth century. Research on proto-industrialisation has generated significant interest in those whose tenancy placed them in a fixed relationship with landowning peasants. Among this group were the so-called Heuerlinge – who were regularly forced to renegotiate the conditions under which they secured their livelihoods. Comprehensive research on agricultural labourers has been conducted by Craig Muldrew, and impulses for further research in this area might find a home in the diverse forms of mixed economies5 and shadow economies that existed at the time, as well as the new attention being paid to pluriactivity. Thomas Piketty's widely discussed findings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century give wealth – particularly inherited wealth – new prominence in the debate as a necessary complement to the focus on income. This approach could also be fruitful for the topic of landlessness, as could the nuances that are a feature of newer research on poverty to which Steven King has recently referred: how one must assume a broad spectrum of people were affected, how attention should be directed to specific contexts and situations that generate poverty, and how one must always consider the matter of agency, in the sense of an ability to negotiate.8 Thus, the status of landless and land-poor people needs to be viewed not as permanent, but as situational and partly compensated by specific skills – even if it did frequently become firmly established.

The landless and land-poor should not be considered under the a priori assumption that they were a clearly defined group or even an established social class.

This was written in 1879 by F. De Roo, tenant of the Hof te Biesdonk, to the administrators of the Civil Hospices in Oudenaarde, his landlord. The Hof te Biesdonk was a large farm in Machelen, a village at the Lys River near Deinze, Flanders. After renting the farm for eighteen years, he wrote them a letter recounting how many investments and how little profit he had made. He informed them that, if they did not lower the rent and accept more lenient conditions, he would try to find another farmstead.

In this fragment, he lamented the scarcity of labour and the ‘soft’ and ‘not-so-soft’ power at his disposal to make people work for him. His means of soft power included the fodder and services he provided his neighbours with, either cheaply or even for free. Yet clearly, he believed the not-so-soft means worked better: he was able to sublet some land to his workers (a lease that he could terminate if they refused to work), but wished he could rent them houses as well, because that would do even better. Later, Benoît Bouché, in his 1913 study on farm labourers in Belgium, wrote that these means of soft power, the manifold services provided by farmers to their workers, were ‘gaining ground’.

In this chapter, I will first sketch out developments in the shares of landless and land-poor rural households in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century after briefly going into changes in the earlier centuries, building on available datasets in the literature. For this analysis, landless and land-poor households can be divided into three categories: (1) farm labourers with hardly any land; (2) very small peasants or cottagers who could not sustain themselves from their holdings; and (3) artisans and others wholly or partially specialised in non-agricultural work. Their importance differed distinctively by region, for instance between coastal and inland parts of the Netherlands.

In the rest of this chapter, I will concentrate on the final quarter of the eighteenth and on the nineteenth century, and on the first group outlined above, of landless unskilled labourers, especially in coastal Groningen and partly also in inland Drenthe, both situated in the north of the Netherlands. Questions that will be answered are: what were the survival strategies over the lifecycle of labouring families? How did their members’ employment opportunities vary according to the seasons in the nineteenth century? What was the social origin of the parents of labourers and what were their children's chances of escaping from the labouring class?

The development of landed and non-landed rural households in the Netherlands, 1600–1900

First, we will briefly sketch the development of the Dutch rural population from the sixteenth century to 1900, followed by a discussion of the development of the rural social structure until 1800. The main part of this section will deal with the rural social structure from about 1800 onwards, when statistical data on rural households becomes relatively more abundant for the Netherlands. The problem, however, is that different definitions must be used to distinguish the different social segments in society. We will look first at the number of households using at least one horse and try to combine them with census-data around 1909 and occupational data around 1807. The use by a rural household of a horse – for which some statistics are available – implies in general that this household has a reasonable amount of land at its disposal, making the possession of a horse necessary to help cultivate it.

In the winter of 1823, the parish tailor Jacob Sahlstedt was accused of theft in the local district court. He had broken into his neighbour's house (with a female accomplice) and among other things had stolen a bottle of spirits – footprints in the snow were interpreted as proof of their wrongdoing. In court, the couple eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. While the tailor was incarcerated in Hämeenlinna castle, his landlord, the landholding farmer Carl Rekola, cancelled his tenancy agreement. A copy of the lease, dated 1809, survives in the court records, and it reveals that the tailor had agreed to do all the tailoring required by the Rekola household and in return for his labour gained access to a small plot of land (9 acres) and a room to live in (along with a sauna). However, because of his prison sentence and loss of reputation, he lost his lease and was evicted from his home.

Most craftsmen in rural Finland were so-called parish artisans like Jacob Sahlsted. Formal recognition of their status required a licence to work (granted by the provincial governor) and the obligation to pay a special craft tax. There were also other kinds of artisans in the countryside, such as village blacksmiths and craftsmen working in manor houses. Some of these people lacked an officially acknowledged status, but they made handicraft products all the same. Some peasants also plied a trade, but they were registered as peasants rather than artisans, because it was considered more prestigious to be a landowning farmer. As a result, Finnish artisans were by no means a homogeneous group and their esteem varied according to their position within this group. However, the special skills possessed by some craftsmen meant that they were held in higher regard than other non-landed households, and often had access to land. This chapter will examine artisans’ opportunities to engage in agriculture: discussing which of them had access to land and in what circumstances. Next, it will review the general position of artisans in local society, especially by looking at the marriage markets and godparent relations.

In early modern Finland, the ownership of land was legally restricted and connected to villages and the possession of whole estates or farms because the Crown did not want landownership to be divided into small parts.

This chapter discusses the existence and conditions of non-landed households in rural Sweden (including Finland) in the seventeenth century. This heterogeneous group encompassed both landless and semi-landless people, from relatively affluent, independent artisan families to destitute beggars. Some had access to land, albeit little, and should be referred to as semi-landless or land-poor. In the administrative thinking of the time, however, they were all part of the non-landed1 population, that is, those who did not contribute to the state economy by paying taxes based on their holdings. What united them was that they had no or very little control over land.

As we will show below, the story of the Swedish non-landed population in the seventeenth century is one full of contradictions. On the one hand, hostile attitudes to households and individuals without land were typical and widespread in this regime. On the other hand, the economy depended on their labour. Repeated ordinances declared that lodgers should not be tolerated, that cottages and crofts were to be torn down and that temporary labour was forbidden; yet lodgers, cottages, crofts and casual labour abounded in rural Sweden and Finland. We investigate how this was possible, and how – given the many restrictions and official attitudes – households with little or no land were able to survive. Thus, the chapter contributes to the discussion of ‘pauper agency’ and what people on the margins did to survive. In general, the historiography of the European poor has witnessed a shift from attention to structures, such as the extent of poverty and the institutions of poor relief, to an interest in agency and coping strategies.

We first introduce the agrarian system of early modern Sweden and the non-landed groups within it, then describe the hostile environment in which they had to navigate and the laws and underlying interests that created it. We show that the numbers of landless and semi-landless households in seventeenth-century Sweden were substantial, despite regulations. Finally, we discuss the opportunities that nonetheless were at hand and how non-landed households exploited these.

Landless rural families existed widely in England as across Europe since medieval times, but recent research on long-term growth and changes in male occupational structure suggests that in England the landless proportion of the population was significantly higher than in most neighbouring European countries by 1800, and almost certainly by the late seventeenth century.

The proportion of the population working in English agriculture was about 70 per cent in 1500 and fell to less than 40 per cent by 1800. As English urbanisation started from a low point in 1500 when less than 10 per cent of the population lived in towns, with no more than 30 per cent in 1800, the scale of rural landlessness was probably significantly higher than in Europe generally. This chapter analyses the nature and scale of landlessness in early modern England, first by discussing its relationship to urban growth, to changes in occupational structure and to the family economy of the landless rural household; and subsequently by focusing on where, how and why numbers of rural landless families were rising.

Defining landlessness in an English context is complex. A definition based on ownership criteria – not holding land on any form of tenure (be it freehold, copyhold or long-leasehold) that had lifetime security for an individual and their heirs – would exclude a substantial proportion of farming families, since by 1700, and even more by 1800, many farms were held on year-to-year tenancies, or on leases of up to twenty-one years, or as sub-tenancies of copyholders. On this definition, some ‘landless’ families could farm on a substantial scale. Many prosperous farmers working leased land invested their savings in small landed estates or cottage property both as a secure way of holding wealth and as a point of entry into political participation both locally and nationally. The ownership criterion is also complicated by urban dwellers making widespread investment in rural land and housing in the period before 1750. Henry French and Richard Hoyle have identified and quantified this in their detailed case study of Earls Colne (Essex). This chapter will therefore use lack of regular working access to defined areas of land (i.e., not common land) as the criterion for landlessness.

In the eighteenth century, an increasing proportion of rural households in north-western Germany had little or no access to landed property. While the population grew, and the impartible inheritance system left many young people without access to landed property, more and more families established themselves as renters of farms or house owners. In some regions, rental agreements included limited access to land, while in other regions, there is no evidence that these families were provided with land or given access to the commons. In this chapter, these families will be called ‘renters’: they lived in their own households; therefore ‘lodger’ would be a misleading term; and since only some of them also leased land, but others did not, ‘tenant’ would not be appropriate, either. It will be demonstrated that German rural society experienced different types of integration of landless families into local communities.

So far, these landless families have gained only little attention within historical scholarship. The chapter will first give a brief overview of the available literature on landless families in north-western Germany. Then the first results of a larger project on the landless and land-poor population in a north-western German region (Münsterland) will be presented. The chapter will focus on the prevalence of landless households in different regions, discuss the relations between landless and landowning social classes and explore the place of landless households in eighteenth-century rural society.

The alleged lack of interest in the non-peasant part of the rural population may in part be explained by the notion of the countryside as a ‘peasant society’, strongly promoted by nineteenth-century scholars like Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, one of the founders of folklore studies or, as we call it today, cultural anthropology. For a long time, peasants and rural society as a whole were considered as a bulwark against modernisation, as a stable and constant force of persistence. The dynamics of a changing countryside, with vital industries and an ever-growing population of non-peasants, did not fit this image. In the late nineteenth century, however, modern reformers and early social scientists discovered the rural labouring classes. The Verein für Socialpolitik, an association of reformers, scientists, officials, industrialists and landowners, initiated an investigation of the social situation of agricultural workers, as an important part of addressing the social conditions of workers. Max Weber was one of the main researchers and wrote a detailed report on rural labourers in Eastern Prussia.

Despite the huge volume of research on relief practices, experiences of poverty, provision for the elderly and the adequacy (or otherwise) of waged labour, English historiography has paid relatively little attention to the relationship between the landlessness of the rural workforce and rural poverty. Two of the most notable conceptual considerations of this relationship, by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly and Larry Patriquin, adopt a Marxist perspective. Both have suggested that the universal system of English parochial relief facilitated (as well as compensated) the growth of the landless agrarian population in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. As Patriquin put it: ‘Poor relief was a substitute for access to land and common rights, a virtual exchange of money as compensation for the creation of absolute private property, brought about by competition, enclosure and engrossment.’ In addition, there has been some debate about the frequency and effects of labourers’ access to common land. Jane Humphries demonstrated the financial value of access to common land in the late eighteenth century by showing that the annual income from a cow ‘was often more than half the adult male laborer's wage’. Craig Muldrew found that 44 per cent of his sample of (relatively prosperous) labourers’ probate inventories included cattle in the eighteenth century, but few listed leaseholds of land. However, in eighteenth-century Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire Leigh Shaw-Taylor found that only ‘around one labourer in ten had access to land’, even before common lands were enclosed. Other studies found no statistical link between enclosure and increases in per capita relief levels, which implied that labourers had no land to lose.

Alongside evidence of the pervasive landlessness of English agricultural labourers in the eighteenth century, detailed research by Mark Blaug, Daniel Baugh, Richard Smith, Thomas Sokoll, Steven King and Samantha Williams has highlighted how the cost of poor relief increased from the early 1780s and accelerated rapidly after 1794. Poor harvests in the late 1790s were compounded by wartime trade blockades and price inflation. Although prices eased after 1813, the subsequent period of deep recession in the arable economy caused severe unemployment among rural labourers in Southern England until at least 1825.

In this chapter, I will focus on a specific group of landless people, the so-called forest settlers (boskanters in Dutch). In general, research in rural history has a strong bias towards the landowning part of the rural population. Regarding landless households, considerable research has been done on the income strategies of households involved in rural proto-industries. Landless people making a living from agricultural wage work and rural craftsmen have gained much less attention. In recent years, those groups (who generally formed the poorest part of rural society) have partly been studied by historians focusing on migration, settlement and poor relief – or more broadly welfare entitlements. Some interesting research has also been done on rural servants and the place of service within the lifecycle of rural populations. I want to add to this inspiring line of research with a study on the survival strategies of settled landless households around the Forest of Houthulst during the period c. 1500–1900. I will specifically focus on the origin of these landless groups and how forest enclosure impacted upon their socio-economic position. In doing so, I will build on a reappraisal of the legacy of E. P. Thompson in the work of Nicola Whyte and Andy Wood and their explorations in writing a landscape history from below. Rather than looking merely at how landless families shaped the landscape, I focus on how these groups experienced and strategically used an unclear property situation to make their livelihood in this specific region.

Although the Forest of Houthulst and its boskanters have gained some attention in the literature, from the Flemish writer Victor Huys (1829–1905) to the famous French-Belgian author Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–87), the subject has been largely neglected by twentieth-century historians. However, during the nineteenth century, renowned historians such as Jules de Saint-Genois (1813–67) showed great interest in the boskanters, linking these forest settlers to the ‘primitive inhabitants’ of Flanders. All these writers had experienced the Forest of Houthulst in its ancient form, even Yourcenar who spent parts of her childhood in a North French country house owned by her family, in a hilly region some 30 kilometres away from the forest.

In France, the nineteenth century was a time when many people dreamed of becoming landowners. Novelists, like Émile Zola and Jules Michelet, and urban officials emphasised and criticised rural men's attachment to land. In fact, the urban upper and middle classes competed with peasants to own land. They coveted property so as to gain a private income, as well as the prestige and the voting rights it conferred before universal male suffrage was achieved in 1848. Peasants dreamed of possessing their fields, that is, of owning their means of earning a living and becoming economically independent. Property meant liberty. Moreover, governments privileged small owners because they were supposed to be attached to the established order. Nonetheless, many rural households were landless. We might assume that this was simply because they could not afford to purchase land. However, landless households were sometimes headed by merchants or craftsmen, who might be more prosperous than labourers but who only purchased land if they were very well off. Consequently, most landless rural households were unskilled or semi-skilled workers active in agriculture, some of whom might also have been active in other economic sectors.

Surprisingly, historical research on French rural workers is limited. In 1986, Yvonne Crebouw studied wages and wage workers in the nineteenth century, and in 1962 Françoise Langlois researched wage workers in the twentieth century. In 1971, Philippe Gratton focused on class struggles in the countryside. Landless households are even more neglected by research than rural workers in general. The latter group featured the volume of essays La Moisson des autres (Harvest for others), which gathered some new research in 1996. Instead, most of the insights regarding rural workers can be found in the kinds of regional studies that flourished in France between 1960 and 1990: a small number of these works devoted some attention to landless households and will be used here. However, the size of this blind spot within the bibliography is illustrated best by the chapter about France in the synthesis Rural Economy and Society, which barely discusses the landless.