trasts the demographic profile of the early medieval Münsterhof cemetery with the much lower rate of infant mortality and much longer life span of late- twentieth-century western Europe. Based on J. Schneider, D. Gutscher, H. Etter, and J. Hanser, Der Münsterhof in Zürich: Bericht über die vom städtischen Büro
Cemetery evidence on its own does not, however, fully explain early medieval patterns of fertility and mortality, for both are also shaped by social conventions of a type not amenable to archaeological enquiry. For example, archaeology cannot elucidate whether fertility rates were affected by deliberate limitations of family size. From the earliest Christian times, churchmen had inveighed in vain against both contraception and abortion, and there is no doubt that common herbs with effective con- traceptive and abortifacient properties were well known throughout early medieval Europe. Occasional instances of infanticide cannot entirely be dismissed, although arguments that systematic female child killing was practised in some ninth-century peasant communities and in Viking-age Scandinavia remain quite unconvincing.
There are two interrelated issues here. First, unlike the numerous cemeteries that suggest a sex ratio in favour of women, the ninth-century estate surveys consistently report more men than women. To explain this by invoking female infanticide is to ignore the good reasons why women tend to be under-recorded in surveys of agricultural estate workers. Secondly, deliberate measures to limit family size are more plausibly as- sociated with the constraints of poverty than those of gender. To the ex- tent that it is possible to estimate the number of surviving children born to each couple, only amongst the royal dynasties or the most rich and powerful continental aristocracies of the ninth and tenth centuries are families of more than three or four children at all common. A frequently repeated pronouncement against abortion offers vital evidence of the way in which the conscious limitation of family size might correlate with poverty: after imposing differential penalties for termination of a preg- nancy within the first six weeks or after a foetus has quickened, the rul- ing continues: ‘but it makes a great difference whether an impoverished woman does it on account of the difficulty of feeding the child or a pros-
titute for the sake of concealing her crime.’17 Other texts too impose a
much lighter penalty on the impoverished woman who slays a child. The recognition that poverty might drive a woman to abortion or even infan- ticide gradually became an established aspect of ecclesiastical law, but cemetery evidence can never reveal the extent to which this was practised. If poverty constrained fertility at one end of the social spectrum, then lifestyle may have influenced mortality at the other. Analysis of animal bone remains from high-status sites suggests that early medieval elites enjoyed a diet rich in the meat of domesticated animals raised for early slaughter when the flesh was of optimum quality, supplemented with wild- fowl and game such as boar and deer. Food remains from peasant sites, on the other hand, point to the consumption of the flesh of much older
animals, livestock whose primary function may have been to provide wool, milk, or traction rather than meat. Better diet and access to such medical expertise as was available may have helped elite women survive the traumas of childbirth a little more readily than other women, but their menfolk were perhaps more susceptible to early death than the men of other social groups. The German aristocracy of the tenth century offers a well-studied and extreme example of this. Hunting, war, feuding, and ju- dicial duels thinned out the ranks of the men of the Ottonian aristocracy, who were often long outlived by their female relatives, whether sisters ded- icated to a life of Christian celibacy or widowed wives and mothers. In this context, mortality might have serious political repercussions. When the ruling dynasty itself was involved, a bitter succession dispute or the accession of a minor, usually under the tutelage of his mother, was the likely consequence.
In any society, demographic changes reflect a complex interaction between external factors such as climatic disaster and famine, on the one hand, and, on the other, such internal social conventions as constraints on family size, attitudes towards contraception and abortion, medical know- ledge, and the prevalence of dangerous lifestyles among certain social groups. Fragmentary and impressionistic though the early medieval evidence is, it shows clearly enough the main patterns of fertility and mortality. The physical discomfort of chronic illness probably affected most people; endemic disorders were exacerbated from time to time by epidemics of infectious diseases, of which the plague was only one. Amid these difficulties, infants, women in labour, and aristocratic men all faced an enhanced risk of death, yet Europe’s population nevertheless managed to increase in the course of the early Middle Ages. Although individual communities experienced fluctuating patterns of fertility and mortality, the overall upward curve is clear.
Moreover, as the millennium approached, erratic demographic change was giving way to a steadier rate of increase as the constraints on growth eased. Certainly, the climate was generally improving by the year 1000. Documentary evidence suggests that land clearance projects were taking place on an enhanced scale. Local and regional trade networks were in- tensifying, transporting foodstuffs to towns whose growth, especially in northern Italy and the Low Countries, must have relied upon surplus rural
population.18By the opening years of the eleventh century the population
and economy of Europe were entering an era of sustained growth that would last into the thirteenth century. The developments of the high Middle Ages did not suddenly develop out of nothing; but they did con- solidate changes that had hitherto been faltering or spasmodic.