Medieval Commune - Rural Communes

Rural Communes

The development of medieval rural communes arose more from a need to collaborate to manage the commons than out of defensive needs. In times of a weak central government, communes typically formed to ensure the safety on the roads (Landfriede) through their territory, to enable commerce. Perhaps the most successful such medieval community was the one in the alpine valleys north of the St. Gotthard Pass: it later resulted in the formation of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The Swiss had numerous written acts of alliance, so-called Bundesbriefe: for each new canton that joined the confederacy, a new contract was written. Besides the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft, there were similar rural alpine communes in Tyrol, but these were quenched by the House of Habsburg. Other such rural communes developed in the Grisons, in the French Alps (Briançon), in the Pyrenees, in northern France (Forêt de Roumare), in northern Germany (Frisia and Dithmarschen), and also in Sweden and Norway. The colonization of the Walser also is related. The southern medieval communes most probably were influenced by the Italian precedent, but the northern ones (and even the Swiss communes north of the St. Gotthard pass) may well have developed concurrently and independently from the Italian ones. Only very few of these medieval rural communes ever attained Reichsunmittelbarkeit, where they would have been subject only to the king or emperor; most still remained subjects of some more or less distant liege lord.