The Domain in The Countryside

Abstract

In 1193 the Master of the Hospitallers confirmed, with some slight modifications, the rights to tithes that had been enjoyed in the fief of Margat in the Principality of Antioch by the local bishop. Since seigneurial revenues were titheable he detailed them: the returns from villages, mills, olive-presses, gardens and demesne lands; the profits from the town oven, the markets and other commercial offices: and the dues paid in the little port on local products, fermented and unfermented wine, sumach, almonds and figs, jars, pots and pitchers.¹ The sources of revenue on this list must have been typical of many fiefs and we can divide them into those in the countryside and those in the towns, although in a monetary economy, where even the revenues from villages could be estimated in terms of money,² there were not as far as the lords were concerned the differences we might imagine between agricultural returns and tolls levied on the passage of commerce. From fief to fief the proportion of lands as opposed to money-rents retained by a lord in his own hands varied, but most lords must have held many of the villages in their seigneuries, whether in compact blocks, as in the district of Shuf in Sidon, or scattered, as in Caesarea.³