앵글로-색슨 잉글랜드 사회의 신분적 유동성 = New Perspectives on British History : Articles ; The Mobility of Social Status in Anglo-Saxon England

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

During the six hundred years between the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and Harold`s defeat by William of Normandy in 1066, English society was in the state of continuous change and frequent upheaval. Although it remained throughout that period an overwhelmingly agrarian society in which social position was principally determined by possession of land, it never conformed to the ideal type of a traditional social order within which the families of landlords, petty proprietors, and dependent tenants or labourers succeed one another in unvarying accordance with inherited custom and in the absence of either technological or ideological innovation. On the contrary, the Standard modern accounts of the period all bring out, with differing shades of emphasis, the instability and disruption resulting from internal warfare and external invasion, land reclamation and settlement, urbanization, the expansion of manufacture and trade, the introduction of coinage, the increasing sophistication of government, the spread of Christianity and monasticism, the revival of learning, and the progressive evolution of new forms of social differentiation. But what has not been explicitly emphasized anywhere in the specialist literature is the degree to which these influences served to promote what must have been, in consequence, relatively high rates of social mobility for a society in which the majority of the population continued to be occupied in tilling the soil. It has of course to be recognized from the outset that there is not and never will be the quantitative evidence for rates of inflow and outflow or for probabilities either inter- or intra-generation short- or long-range rise or fall which would enable this claim to be conclusively tested. Further, it is always possible that even if the rates were relatively high, this was not a fact of any great significance for the workings of Anglo-Saxon society or for the attitudes and experiences of its members. It is, however, striking that all the evidence, sketchy as it may be, points towards, and none away from, the conclusion that rates of mobility accelerated steadily between the early eighth and mid-eleventh centuries, and that this mobility was over a sufficient social distance to merit serious attention from sociologists and historians alike. I shall, in addition to reviewing the evidence, offer an explanation in terms of the unusual combination of rising prosperity, endemic violence and the continuous expansion of the church peculiar to Anglo-Saxon England. I shall conclude with the suggestion that social mobility would have started to decline in the course of eleventh century even if the Norman Conquest had not taken place.