Жизнь и смерть в Средние века. Очерки демографической истории Франции

The new period of French demographic history which started about the mid-fourteenth century, was marked, as is well known, by a great decrease in population (30–40 %). Nevertheless, contrary to some previous judgments, the mechanism of demographic growth formed in past centuries was not paralyzed either by external or by internal factors. Sustained by the deeprooted stereotypes of behaviour, it proved helpful not only in replacing the population in the fifteenth century, but also in creating a possibility to surpass the level of the thirteenth century in this respect. The phenomenon may be proved by a number of facts. By the end of the period, the proportion of childless families was reduced to 20 %. The average number of living children in the late fifteenth century, as compared with the thirteenth century, increased. Families with four children and more became typical of all the social groups. At the end of the fifteenth century, the attitude to the initial stage of old age changed, now in was considered to be 50, not 40. The proportion of people over fifty, and even sixty, increased. The average duration of life of those over 20 was now about fifty years. In the main provinces of France, the natural growth amounted, in the late fifteenth century, to no less than 0.5 % a year, and in some places even more than that.

All this was closely connected with certain deep social and mental changes. The demographic growth in the late fifteenth century was undoubtedly stimulated by the increased number of «vacancies» which had appeared in villages and towns as a result of the devastation of the previous decades. But it would be impossible to explain the rapid replacement and exceeding of the previous numbers of the population by these factors only. Fear of death, so very characteristic of the sentiments of the time, was but the reverse side of the lust for life. The sense of the life’s value told favourably on the attitude to children, to the weak, ailing and old. The stereotypes of behaviour, which had been formed in this sphere much earlier, were now given a new powerful incentive. The influence of these stereotypes was essential, though changes in nuptial models went in the opposite direction. The increasing rigidity of rules for church marriage reduced illegitimate childbirth. Birth-rate was even more reduced by the older age at first marriage for males (about 25 years of age), which became conventional in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Evidently, the complex of stereotypes of behaviour, rooted back in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, sustained and further developed in the fifteenth century, made possible an intensive demographic growth not always congruous with social needs. This growth could only be brought to nought by cataclysms equal to those which occurred in France in the mid-fourteenth century. Without such cataclysms, the role of arresting devices was played by the older age at first marriage (males), the growing proportions unmarried (up to about 25 % in young males), various ways of preventing remarriages etc. Objectively, it came as a kind of reaction to the excessiveness of human reproductive resources.

Demographic regulation was here functioning «from below». If even the elders, or local authorities, should recommend postponing a marriage, recommendations like that could emerge as a conventional norm of behaviour only as a result of longstanding practice, when they became an integral part of the code of morals. Since that moment, the attitude to postponement of marriage as a necessity functioned subconsciously, or not quite consciously; or in other words, demographic regulation in this form was spontaneous as a rule, based upon socio-cultural clichés, not on any legal prescriptions.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries retained the same forms of spontaneous demographic regulation, which at that time provided for a relative stability of population numbers, having become even more vivid than before. The eighteenth century saw a change of the situation: though the spontaneous reglamentation of the age at first marriage was still in action and even toughened, the period was marked by intensive demographic growth of a new socio-cultural standard of family birth control. The phenomenon of medieval France thus shows a great effect of stereotypes of behaviour on the character of reproductive process. It was regulated through changes within the system of mass socio-cultural concepts and stereotypes of demographic behaviour. These very changes checked the unbalanced demographic growth.