8. The Bloody Suppression of the Stellinga
The Stellinga Revolt erupted in 841. As described by contemporaries: “throughout all of Saxony the power of the slaves rose up violently against their lords. They usurped for themselves the word Stellinga, and they perpetrated much madness. And the nobles of that land were violently persecuted and humiliated by the slaves“. The writer, a royal chaplain, was biased against the rebels. The rebels had turned on the aristocracy, and such a turning of the worm alarmed many because it was seen as an inversion of the medieval world’s perception of what constituted the natural order of things.
Lothair I, the champion of the Stellinga, was defeated at the Battle of Fontenoy in 841, and he eventually signed a truce with his brothers. The victor, his brother Louis the German, marched against the insurrectionists, and defeated them militarily. He then had the captured Stellinga leaders executed. The Saxon nobility, who had been chased off their estates, returned to their land under the protection of Louis the German’s armies. They subjected their peasantry to a reign of terror and retaliatory vengeance that stamped out the insurrection by 843.