The Rusticated Life of the Early Middle Ages

Ausonius lived in a complaisant world that was still recognizably that of pure antiquity: an urban and urbane upper class indulging in similarliterary pursuits and consuming foreign luxuries. A century later, Gregory of Tours lived in a social world already akin to Charlemagne's: horseback riding and hunting have replaced urban styles of high living. Foreign luxuries lie graded status symbols (they never disappeared), only when they are no longer as central to the lives of the upper class.

The significance of this is that classical antiquity was not a truly mercenary civilization. It was essentially an aristocratic consuming civilization, but urban in its complexion. The engages of its sophisticate upper class supported extensive distribute, as did the tending of imperial institutions such as the army. When the imperial system was humiliated and the upper class grew selfsufficient and rusticated, the classical commercial sparing died for lack of sustenance.

The principal coinage of classical antiquity was florid, and postclassical gold coins such as the voluminous hyperpyron continued to circulate in the West throughout the low-spirited Ages, though in small numbers. Locallystruck gold coins essentially vanished (Block 186ff). Still struck occasionally in Merovingian times by the Carolingian period, the

In this great transition, bullion played the part of both cause and assemble. The scarcity of specie in the ignominious Ages do it difficult for longrange trade to "get send off the ground." Once money became available in significant quantities, trade grew and increased the demand further, and eventually matured to the point where fiducial money could replace metal specie as the true basis of the financial system.

The dramatic increase of Italian transportation in the Eastern luxury trades was accompanied, moreover, by a humbler but equally profound trend: increasingly, hatful goods as advantageously as luxuries were traded in the money economy. Roman Europe had been fix together by roads, designed mainly for use by armies, and of economic use mainly to merchants with lowbulk, highvalue merchandise.

HighMedieval Europe was tied together by waterways, rivers and increasingly, canals. The efficiency of water transport was such that even bulk goods could be transported profitably over some distance. By nigh 1100, the new system of waterways was wellestablished; older towns extraneous from the rivers decayed, and new ones grew up along their banks. The growth of trade in basic bulk goods vastly increased the number of proceeding in the money economy  and made them more relevant to the real economy. Cash no longer bought only trade luxuries, but everyday necessities.

It is difficult to separate cause and effect in the reemergence of a money economy after around AD 1000. On the one hand, the feudal economy, though still largely selfsufficient and rustic, grew steady in absolute terms as new globe went under the powerful moldboard plow and water move proliferated in estates and villages across the landscape. The general increase of population and drowsy development of the underlying material economy increased the demand of Europe's upper classes for traditional Eastern luxury goods.

In general, money was a specialpurpose medium in the Dark Ages (Hodges 105). Man
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