Conclusions

Villagers in medieval Japan were quite capable of taking up the fight if they felt threatened, and when facing a superior force they could mobilise their extensive networks, which often reached well beyond the narrow confines of the individual estate.

The proprietor and his deputies in the estate were often central to the organisation and mobilisation of the villagers in defence of the estate. Loyal fighting was rewarded by the proprietor in a way more commonly associated with ‘warrior society', creating a strong bond of clientele between the absentee proprietor and the estate residents. However, when a private initiative by a villager was perceived to constitute a threat to the central control of the estate it was punished by the proprietor. It is probably no exaggeration to say that for the proprietor, estate control and the safe shipment of revenue from the estate had a higher priority than the safety of the estate population. When, on the other hand, the proprietor did not carry the responsibility of guaranteeing the safety of the estate or the economic interests of the residents, we sometimes find the latter in direct confrontation with the proprietor and his local estate administrators. The proprietor had lost his legitimacy to control the estate and extract revenues, but the confrontation should not be seen as a rebellion as much as a means of negotiating with the proprietor.

Conflicts concerning one or more parties seizing lands either from absen­tee proprietors or from local residents form the undercurrent in thousands of documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Local security strategies have often been discussed in the context of the government and its corps of local, professional warriors. This has in part resulted in an artificial distinction between ‘warriors' on one side, and cultivators, artisans, monks and merchants on the other. This is problematic since after all it was it was not at all uncommon for peasants to work in the fields one day and to fight against neighbouring villages or forces from the outside the next day, and it is not an easy task to establish how belligerent a peasant has to be in order to be ‘raised' to the level of warrior in any historical analysis. Fighting in low-capacity states does not necessarily require official recognition from central authorities or a particular moral high ground to be legitimate in the eyes of the general population. When a cultivator took up arms and engaged in violent encounters, either as aggressor or as defender, this may not have made him a warrior in the eyes of the martial or cultural elites in the capitals - and it may in fact often have earned him the label of bandit - but his actions were no less significant for the local negotiation of power. In order to understand these local power negotiations and displays of collective violence we therefore need also to consider organisational struc­tures at a lower level of local power hierarchies, such as cultivators, mer­chants and foresters to name but a few, and not necessarily to see these conflicts as residues of central conflicts between estate proprietors or between central elites and power seeking warriors.