Resumen de Growth and Peasant Labour in the 10th-13th Centuries: Between Constraint, Consent and Economic Mechanisms

Laurent Feller

• Analysis of the connections between medieval growth and peasant labour calls for some preliminary considerations regarding the seigneurie’s place and part in economic life, the tools available to us for comprehending medieval economic life, and the notion of labour itself in a medieval context.1 Can we simply accept the economists’ definition, which makes labour a factor of production like land and capital? Jacques Le Goff pointed out that there is no medieval word equivalent to our modern idea of labour, that is, a factor that can be numerically measured and described, and whose value is determined in monetary terms