THE URBAN MILIEU OF MEN like Galbert and Salimbene has been the predilect focus of studies of ‘the medieval individual’, but the overwhelming majority of the medieval population lived in villages and farms. In part, this imbalance reflects the availability of evidence. The historical record is richer for the cities, which is in itself significant: the higher literacy levels and more intense social competition of the urban world are conducive to the development of a stronger sense of personal identity and effectiveness in the world. But the paucity of non-urban evidence should not be exaggerated. As discussed in the Introduction, the revival of the self-narrative among twelfth-century intellectuals was paralleled by the exponential growth and increased diversity of administrative, private, and even everyday records in the thirteenth century. Such documents open new perspectives on life in the lordships that dotted the medieval landscape. The early-medieval evidence is often limited to monastic cartularies – registers in which land deeds and records about an abbey's patrimony were compiled through a selection that left out the documents pertaining strictly to the lay world. For twelfth-century France a dossier that reaches the critical mass needed for studying an individual's social strategies – some twenty documents, perhaps – cannot normally be put together for men below the ranks of magnates. By contrast, for the period 1190–1250, the lay cartulary at the centre of this chapter compiles close to two hundred deeds, homage charters, and notes covering two generations of lords of a seigneurie encompassing no more than a third of the county of Amiens in northern France; other records surviving independently of this register increase the documentary tally. Much of this material concerns the relations between the head of the seigneurie and his aristocratic subjects, but many of the latter, though styling themselves knights, were little more than village notables. Commoners also surface in the documentary record, some based in the town that developed near the lord's residence, the socioeconomic centre of the seigneurie.

Arguably the more significant reason why lay charters and cartularies were rarely explored in the study of individual agency and identity is that they were so heavily used for a different task: the study of local lordship. There is no good reason why the two should be competing rather than complementary research directions.