Call for Carnivalesque submissions

It may have been foolish of me to let the beleaguered Another Damned Medievalist persuade me into hosting the next edition of Carnivalesque, but I intend to gosh-darn well host it, if not perhaps bang on the dot of 18 May as has been advertised here because I’ll be elsewhere for much of that day and will likely return tired and slightly deaf. But I have been gathering links and worthy things where I’ve passed by in the last couple of months. All the same, I don’t cover so very much of the blogosphere, even its Middle Ages components, and I was expecting to get a few submissions from elsewhere. Well, there is this submission form at the Blog Carnival site which is set up for this, but as of the now I’ve had a sum total of one thing through that that wasn’t spam, although several things may have thought they weren’t spam but just not read the period. Sorry: try your post about something that happened in 1739 for the next one, that person.

But yes, not a lot. I’ll have a trawl through likely blogs closer to the hour but I’d welcome any suggestions. I realise you’re all at Kalamazoo or having video marathons but the days grow few…

 

Seminary XXV: why your Anglo-Saxon settlement maps need some rethinking

I have once before here mentioned my, well, friend is fair I think, Mary Chester-Kadwell, of whose research I am something of a fan. She works on archaeological landscapes in Anglo-Saxon East Anglia, but her approach is very technology-intensive and gets us a bit further than Myres’s distribution maps, and more towards what the context of our archaeological material is and how that explains some of what we find. This is in many ways the basic groundwork of archaeological interpretation, much like the basic `consider the author’ level of textual analysis, but it’s much harder to do in archaeology because you need so much context. Mary’s work draws on vast piles of records in archaeological archives and also, importantly, the ever-increasing body of metal-detector finds. Now there are arguments about the regulation, or lack of it, in British law about metal-detecting, and it is unquestionable that much more is found than is reported, but all the same the extra evidence we have because of this loose policy is undeniable. And on May Day Mary was at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge speaking to the Graduate Archaeological Seminar to the title: “The landscape of early Anglo-Saxon Norfolk: cemeteries, settlements and metal-detected finds”.

Mary is one of a number of scholars looking at approaches like this that involve a fairly serious reevaluation of our evidence. She is currently working on various forms of publication of her work, so rather than tell you what’s in it I’ll just give a few examples of the sorts of concerns she raises and therefore why I think her stuff is important. Her mapping is very dense: whereas many earlier interpretations of Anglo-Saxon settlement patterns tended to correlate only a few factors, settlement location against river access, against Bronze Age or Roman sites, against soil types, and so on, Mary is bravely trying to get all these things and more into play at once, and it is educational. In particular she was showing that we could, with such techniques, try and test some of the common assumptions about Anglo-Saxon settlement in the area, such as (i) that it’s usually riverside, (ii) that cemeteries often overlook significant places or routes, (iii) that the Anglo-Saxons favoured light well-drained soils because of not having the heavy plough, and (iv) that cemeteries are often placed near previous funerary monuments like barrows. Rather than just mapping the two things against each other and going, “Ta-dah! match!”, however, Mary computes baselines for a average distribution of, say, distances from rivers that are possible in Norfolk, and then applies the Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test to see how significant the data’s deviation from that expectation is. And in fact, in that instance, she finds that there is a stronger-than-expected tendency for settlement sites to be within 100 m of a river, for inhumation cemeteries to be about 200 m of a river, and cremation ones about 300 m from one, but that these are only trends and are easily countered with examples that form the tail of the distribution curves. So in that instance our understanding needs to be more complex. And this is the next step we have to be taking with evidence like this to start understanding what was really happening on the ground.

This sort of caution also allows one to start really facing the biases of the evidence. Example one: in archaeological digs of cemeteries, the metalwork that comes up is about as much iron as copper alloy. Metal detectorists don’t search for iron, though, so almost all of what they come up with is copper or precious metal, which means that sites only found by them look very different and perhaps shouldn’t. Example two: a very large proportion of Anglo-Saxon sites in the area are associated, or at least noticeably near, a Roman-period site. But there are shedloads more Roman sites known than Anglo-Saxon ones so that probably isn’t significant; it would be odder if they were not so associated just on probability. Example three: it is certainly true that a great proportion of Anglo-Saxon sites excavated have been on light well-drained soil. It is also however true that a vast proportion of all sites dug have been on such soil too, and there are plenty, if fewer, sites known from clay areas too. So we have to ask if really, that correlation isn’t more to do with where is easy to dig than where the Anglo-Saxons actually liked to live. Example four: there is a strong correlation between Anglo-Saxon mortuary sites that have been excavated and older barrows or barrow-like formations. But this correlation doesn’t exist with metal-detected finds, which suggests that the archaeologists are digging especially where there are barrows (as you’d expect), that the detectorists are avoiding such sites (which, since they’re not flat, I could understand) or both (which is probably the truth of it).

It all sounds terribly revisionist and destructive when I put it like that, I suppose, but firstly there is the usual argument for revisionism in such contexts, that it stops us saying things that are basically just plain wrong, and secondly there is the much more powerful argument that by trying to understand the complexity of the societies we’re looking at in all its horribly messy glory, using the sort of dense mapping techniques and data collection that Mary has done, we are likely to get further than we ever could by over-simplifying out most of the information. This way, I reckon, lies progress of a sort we previously couldn’t have made.

 

Charles the Simple, you are the weakest link

(I was quite right about the readership. Post something and you all disappear. What is up with that? Anyway.)

Forgive something without my usual depth of reference, link and footnote, but this is a post that has been brought about mainly by my awareness that I need to know more, so it seems silly to point you to references that I know aren’t adequate. This is stream-of-consciousness Carolingianist reflection this is, and I shall rely on your ability to Google and Wikisearch if you want or need more.

You probably know that there are a variety of theories about when the Carolingian Empire really failed, but most of them would agree that by the deposition of Charles the Fat (who ruled the whole Empire between 884 and 887), when a non-Carolingian (Eudes, or Odo) ruled in the West and an only-just-Carolingian (Arnulf) in the East, soon to be replaced by an entirely new dynasty, the Ottonians (though they had Carolingian links, but really, everyone in the nobility had those), it was pretty much dead. And that is certainly fair enough but you then have to deal with not just one but two Carolingian restorations in the West, Charles the Simple in 899 and Louis the Foreigner in 936, both of which took territory on the eastern border at various points and in the case of Lothar III (Louis IV’s son) marrying Ottonian daughters and so on. Certainly in my particular corner of tenth-century Europe, they still thought the Carolingians were in charge until 987, and when they weren’t, they dated charters by the years since the last one died, and stuff like that. The Empire may have died, but the Carolingians hung on for a good long while. This is why it always bothers me when people talk about the late Carolingian era and mean, for example, Charles the Fat. There was almost as much Carolingian rule after him as there had been before, in terms of reign length; surely he is mid-Carolingian, because if he’s late, what’s Louis V? So yes: when I say late-Carolingian, as given my thesis and book title I frequently do, I mean later than that.

Now there is certainly an argument that the Empire is gone after Charles the Fat, not just because, well, it is, but also because if you believe Matthew Innes the patronage structures of the Empire survived being split into parts, but one man couldn’t then control all these separate multifocal parts from one throne, so it could never have been reassembled. Certainly not by a man with Charles’s particular defects and beset by Vikings, anyway. But the Carolingian state might have survived longer. There was, admittedly, localisation and break-up all around, and after Louis the Stammerer whole swathes of the south of France were effectively no go for the king, not that either Charles the Simple, or more importantly Lothar III, who was still giving orders to the Spanish March in 986 (albeit mainly because he was asked for them) ever entirely admit that. In the East the nature of politics itself is changing, to a highly ritualised court where the kings deliberately emphasise their theocratic status, because little else differentiates them from their peers except unction. In the West, before very much longer, the Capetians will have succeeded and have to learn to play a game of alliances, friendship, negotiation and temporisation that reflects their far slimmer resources in a world dominated by quasi-independent magnates. And one of the huge questions that has given rise to so much dreadful writing is at what point the grand authority and consensus that someone like Louis the Pious or even Charles the Bald could usually exercise, outside of times of generalised rebellion anyway, something which those two always come through in contradistinction to their successors, fell apart to a situation like Charles the Fat’s or Charles the Simple where their reigns end in ignominous deposition and captivity.

A traditional answer is one in terms of resources. Louis and Charles the Bald had lots to give, but it was easily lost especially in times of disputes when you, as prospective but not effective king, had to buy support with whatever you can. The old theory was that the kings just ran out of land to hold supporters with. Matthew Innes argues more subtly that the connections that the kings needed to pull broke and couldn’t be re-gathered, as I say. But that explains why no Empire, not why no state: Lothar III seems to have done all right at mobilising resources and even at bestowing honours, albeit in a rather changed political landscape. That change is the crucial thing to me. Lothar and his father Louis played a game, more and less successfully respectively, that looks to me from my cursory acquaintance very much like the web of friendships and alliances of magnates against other magnates that the successful Capetians also played. Louis VII and Lothar III make a very powerful comparison, except that actually Lothar was arguably the more important king, meddling in Germany and Spain and sought out by monasteries all over the kingdom still, even those bits where he really couldn’t intervene, for protection. And there was still a certain cachet in his family extraction, and indeed his name, that the Capetians took many more centuries to work up, and this is clearest in Catalonia but if you doubt it you should see how some southern French sources refer to Hugh Capet, the first Capetian, “qui erat dux sed sumpsit regni exordium”… The Carolingians retained legitimacy of a special kind to which later kings appeal again and again, and Lothar had nothing to prove in that respect. It didn’t make his subjects more obedient per se, but in the status game he had an extra card that he knew how to use.

All the same he was playing a different game. So when did the game change? Well, lately as the sidebar proclaims I have been reading a lot about the establishment of Normandy, so my eyes are very much on Charles the Simple. Now Charles is an interesting man who is long overdue a new look, and Geoffrey Koziol is I believe on the way to providing this as recent articles of his have shown, but for the moment no-one has done a proper look at him since 1899, since when for example all his charters have been published and other things that rather change the picture have happened. But one thing is clear: Charles saw himself, or at least presented himself, as an old-school Carolingian. He had the Big Name of Charlemagne himself; in his documents he sometimes had himself called “King of the Frankish and Gothic kingdoms”, “rex in regna francorum et gotorum”, referring to West Francia and the Spanish March. Now no king had been on the March since 829, but it’s not total rubbish: people from there came to get charters from him, and in 908 he appointed one of his courtiers to the bishopric of Girona, albeit only because the local counts had reached deadlock and couldn’t choose a candidate themselves. He even appointed churchmen in Aquitaine, which was closer to home and thus much more worried about him trying to muscle in. He wasn’t completely off the mark to present himself as such a king, is the point. But though he or his chancery talked the talk, could he actually rule like that? His end would suggest not, imprisoned in a castle by Herbert of Vermandois and brought out only to occasionally threaten the Burgundian king who takes his place. So what happened there then?

The stuff I’ve been looking at about the treaty that put Rollo the Ganger, Viking extraordinaire, in charge of the Normandy coasts, and eventually Rouen (one of the interesting things in that book, which I’ll write about separately, is that Charles seems to have held authority in Rouen some time after Rollo was first evident on the political scene), suggests that what had happened is that Charles the Simple didn’t really realise that the game had changed. It may have changed expressly because in the absence of a Carolingian, Eudes and his family, from whom the Capetians eventually stemmed, had had to broker a consensus by agreements, alliance and back-scratching promises, as well as sub-par status play with religious houses and prominent bishops proclaiming them God’s choice, just as the Capetians did in their early stages. They couldn’t match either the Carolingians’ resources or their family status, so they had to build a ruling consensus a different way. But that doesn’t mean that the game was reset as soon as the Carolingians return. Louis IV and Lothar III, as I’ve said, did just this sort of thing but with an extra string to their bow. Their magnates’ opinion was still vital to them. Now Charles the Simple frequently tried to do without it, appointing his choices not theirs: the biggest problem for the writers of the time was his particular insistence on the promotion of a low-born favourite called Hagano, but this seems to be one tip of a far larger iceberg of aloof rule and bungled patronage. Louis and Lothar relied on friends and alliances, but Charles’s presentation seems to have matched his actual actions; he was the Carolingian, king by right restored over the usurper, and specially to be obeyed therefore. Only in the end, that wasn’t how the king had to play the game. Maybe he could have had what his titles suggested, if he’d been a better friend and listener, if he’d treated his most important subjects as allies rather than enemies. Or maybe I just haven’t understood the depth of his situation. But I think that I need to in order to be sure that I know what was happening circa 900. It may be a more important explanation of what happens circa 1000 than people have so far seen.

 

Are you writing this down? The Vall de Sant Joan hearing and its charter

There is, in the Arxiu de la Corona de Aragó, an absolutely huge charter from the year 913. It comes from a hearing in which the Abbess of Sant Joan de Ripoll, dear Emma of my first paper, apparently took her brother Miró, Count of Cerdanya and Besalú, to court over certain public rights that she claimed had been given to her by their father Count Guifré the Hairy, apparently as part of the endowment of the monastery. There is no such statement made in the document of the endowment, but then as I’ve shown that is a really dodgy charter, and because this charter is not the actual statement of the case, that we would sometimes expect to have under Visigothic law, we don’t know exactly what Emma was claiming. Whether these rights should have been in the endowment charter or not, what we have is the oath, sworn in the names of a total of 493 people living in the monastery’s immediate territory, that those rights should be Emma’s, because of her father having set her up as first inhabitant on this land that he had just recaptured from the Saracens. And Miró’s representative concedes, and there is another document in which he abdicates his master’s rights over the valley which tells us that they were fighting over “… servicium regis minus… id est, hostes vel alium regale servicium…”.

Now when I first worked on this document, I was interested in the conquest story that these people were being made to tell, because it really isn’t true. Although the endowment charters of both Sant Joan de Ripoll (now known as Sant Joan de les Abadesses) and its sister monastery of Santa Maria downriver have been messed about with, one of the reasons we know there’s some truth in them is because they record the people that Guifré had bought the relevant lands from—bought, not violently conquered. That has to be contemporary, because by 913 as you can see a different story was already being told. And a charter from 880 records a separate donation to Santa Maria, Sant Joan and Sant Pere de Ripoll, this being several years before those endowments and thus making it clear to us that there were going churches before the count put his daughter in as ‘primus homo’. And you can read about all that in the paper, which is these days online for free from my website (whose publication pages are even up to date at the time of writing). All of which made me think, and still makes me think, that actually what’s going on is that people are dubious about a woman being given these rights, and so her brothers turn up and lose to her in court so as to make it official and written, proven and established. This sort of case is not unknown and is usually called a Scheinprozess, ‘false trial’.

But then for my thesis, I went on to go into the question of who the people were and what they owed to Emma that meant she could call on so many people to swear untruths for her, and that in turn led me deep into the question of how the document had actually come to be written, which turned out to be very complex, and made me feel very clever when I worked it out. Unfortunately the word count is a harsh mistress. Lots has to go from the thesis as I convert it into a book, with new material as well making the pressure worse. So the extreme cleverness, because it is in the thesis to be referred to, and because I will almost certainly use it elsewhere when trying to show that charters are complex documents as I tend to do, has had to go. But I lament it, and want to show off. And, as has been said before, this blog is for nothing if not me showing off, so…

493 people is a lot of names. They’re mostly in pairs, too, one man one woman, which makes it seem that whole families were being sworn, not including children presumably but basically everyone of legal age in the Vall de Sant Joan, in twenty-one different subordinate hamlets, some of which had forty-odd people and one only two. So did they all roll up at the abbey and the scribe, whose name was Garsies, write them down as they identified themselves? It would have taken days, and in fact we can show that he did not do this. Instead, he had lists, and we know this because he shows every sign of having been unable to read them properly. We can tell because once the names of those present are listed, the matter of the oath is stated, and then their names are given again, and there are errors between the two sets. (There’s also quite a lot of people gone or added, but I’ll come on to that in a minute.) Once you lay them out next to each other in a table it’s pretty clear. For example, in the first set of names there is the meaningless “Aiorazel”, but the equivalent set in the actual swearers is “Aione. Razel” which makes rather more sense. So were the second set being given to Garsies out loud? No. There is also, in the first set of names, one “Imitara”. Lovely name, but not real; in the signatures, though, she’s called “Marcia”. How does Garsies manage that? Well, this is the second Marcia signing for that hamlet, so I think that what was on Garsies’s list was “item Marcia”, ‘another Marcia’. Therefore both exemplars must have been written Latin ones. (This was roughly the point at which I felt clever.)

I think in fact they may well have been the same exemplars, but the second time the people who wrote them could tell Garsies what they said. All the same, some updating had gone on. 474 people are listed as swearing; 498 sign, and they’re not all the same people; seven people had gone, and apparently thirty more arrived. Children growing up and adults dying off? Possibly, but how long a timeframe are we stretching Garsies’s work over? More likely that a lot of this movement is migration, into and out of the monastery’s valley as opportunity beckoned or disappeared. But Garsies’s work did carry on, because five more names of signatories are later added between the witnesses, who must presumably have been recorded beforehand or else why would these people not be where they should be on the page? So that’s an update. And then six more further down in a different ink, another update. I honestly think that after that there just wasn’t room to add any more, or Garsies died. Because it does seem to have been important that it be him; he didn’t write anything else that survives, never turns up in another document and the nunnery had a kind of chief notary called Gentiles who did most of their charters, including the partner document to this in which Miró’s representative foreswore his master’s disproven rights. So Garsies was dragged in several times to keep this unique record going, and was therefore a man of some special status I can’t describe more fully.

[I wish I had an image of this document I could post here. I'm getting in touch with the ACA asking for a facsimile, and if and when it arrives I'll back-form it in here.]

But the point is, this is an original document. It’s got autograph signatures by the witnesses (though not by the people swearing the oath—given that all their names were on lists, were they ever there altogether?) and everything, the script is contemporary and lots of other things. Any diplomatist would have to call this both authentic and original. And this helps you not at all, because when you look into it and investigate it properly, you find that it was done on at least four separate occasions (first list, second list/witnessing, extra names one, extra names two), that the occasion it records probably never happened as recorded, and that the oath these people may or may not have sworn is a lie. The lesson here is, words like ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ don’t mean a damn thing.

---

The document is in print as R. Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1998), 3 vols., no. 119, and its partner document is no. 120, but the palaeography is only discussed in Frederico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18/Publicaciones de le Sección de Barcelona 15 (Madrid 1951), no. 38 (and the partner document as ap. IIA). Udina misdates the document by a month, apparently so as to place it at the Feast of Saint John. I discuss this in full in “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of London 2005, pp. 106-112, and the earlier work referred to is J. Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 pt. 3 (Oxford 2003), pp. 229-258. There’s a photograph of the charter in A. Pladevall i Font, N. Peirís i Pujolar, J.-A. Adell i Gisbert, X. Barral i Altet, R. Bastardes i Parera & R. M. Martín i Ros, “Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in A. Pladevall (ed.), Catalunya Romànica X: el Ripollès, ed. J. Vigué (Barcelona 1987), pp. 354-410 at p. 363, although it’s tiny, and Udina’s text is also reprinted there. Honourable mention also to the in-depth study of Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, “Sant Joan de les Abadesses: algunes precisions sobre l’acta judicial del 913 i el poblament de la vall” in S. Claramunt & M. T. Ferrer i Mallol (edd.), Homenatge a la Memòria del Prof. Dr. Emilio Sáez. Aplecs d’estudis del seus deixebles i col·laboradors (Barcelona 1989), pp. 421-434. And there you have it.

 

Webpage updates and current plans

In a brief lull in the job market (he laughs hollowly) I have finally got round to updating my academic web-pages, so that they actually reflect what I’m currently working on rather than promising that Lay Archives will publish something in 2007 and so on. But actually, even though I’m happy with how it looks, it’s not really descriptive of what my time is currently going on. It emphasises the spread of my research and the impact of my various projects, but I’ve learnt now not to promise when things are actually coming out…

All the same, the sidebar here is always a truer reflection of what’s actually passing across my desk or computer and I feel the need to set out plans somewhere… So this is the top few things I’m actually working on at the moment. I could add more and more but that would be digging into the strata of works undisturbed except for accumulating extra footnotes for years while I try and find time to read the three or four books they need to be aware of, or the various eager plans I have that will get in the way of my finishing those things… Anyway. So here goes.

1. First and foremost is the book of the thesis, Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia: charters and connections on a medieval frontier. About four-fifths of this is now in its final form and then there’s the new introduction and conclusion, plus bibliography, prelims and index (never done an index…). I’m giving maximum time to this as there’s nothing that can do my employment prospects as much good, and I sincerely hope to have a final text with the editors before the end of June so that I can go back to Catalonia with a clear conscience.
2. Next in line and getting the primary focus of my reading at the moment is a paper called “Digitizing Numismatics: getting the Fitzwilliam Museum’s coins to the world-wide web”, which is basically an academic explanation of what my job is for. This, which is destined to go online, should have been done ages ago (and I apologise to the editor whom I know is reading—this will be the best thing this blog has so far done for me other than provide a really important sense of relevance and a bundle of offprints from Professor Feliu), but a first draft shown to an actual numismatist proved that I wasn’t one and I’ve been filling in gaps. Done soon I hope, only four more articles…
3. Waiting for an editor to come back with a revised version is “Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics”, a paper about a renewal of the currency of Barcelona that I think Borrell II made in about 982 to quell worries about the silver standard in the area. This needs some slight extra reading and a brutal revision then it’s good to go.
4. In a similar state, but arguably more urgent since not waiting for the editor, is “Aprisio in Catalonia in perspective”, which is about the process, in law and on the ground, by which pioneers on the Catalan frontier took in waste land for cultivation, and what rubbish has been written about it. Third priority.
5. On the back burner for ages and possibly the most important thing I will write, if I can only ever finish it, is a methodological article about the interpretation of charter evidence. This began as the introductory chapter of the thesis, to show my markers that I knew that these things weren’t simple, but it became clear to me that this was not widely known other than among charter historians, and I gave a version at Leeds and eventually found a journal that would take it; but they wanted it to be much expanded into a kind of review article, and this meant an awful lot of reading that I have since then been struggling to fit in. There really is a lot of stuff I should know that I don’t in this field, having started with my own peculiar originals rather than the secondary work that other areas have generated. If I ever finish it, it’ll be something to refer people to for decades, he says modestly, so I very much want to keep this moving however slowly.
6. Needing very little work, but a decent publication strategy, is a long article I wrote and gave at the IHR a while ago about the Arabic-named communities that occur in tenth-century charters of León. I blogged about this at the time I gave it, but since then I’ve been at something of a loss. It’s two ideas in one paper, being used to illuminate each other, and it would in many ways be better as two separate pieces, but the obvious places even for the first half all want something shorter. I shall persist in looking for other venues.

That seems to be six already, which is probably enough, There are two more papers in complete text, a draft of an introduction for what I hope will become a volume of contributed essays based on our Leeds papers, plans for two more books… but I have to focus a bit here I think. So you’ll hear more here when one of these things actually gets finished and out where you can see it. For now, I should get on with it…

 

The Google Generation debunked II: Grauniad catches up

I have said this before, I do not get you, readership. I’ve been quite busy the last few days, and have been neglecting you. So I logged in guiltily on Wednesday, knowing that I’d not posted anything for you all, and there’d been double the number of readers from the previous day, quite close to my best day ever. Then I come in today and discover that yesterday, when the drought continued, there were almost as many again. It’s tempting to leave it and see how much longer this trend goes on for; I bet if I actually post something you’ll all disappear again… All the same, if you’re reading presumably you want writing, and I seem to have some, so…

Back in February, you may remember, I drew the readership’s attention to a report that the British Library were circulating about the so-called Google Generation and modern habits of research and information access. The British daily newspaper The Guardian, affectionately known as The Grauniad because of a legendary propensity to typoes,¹ was apparently aware of that report, and on 20th April came out with an eight-page supplement called “Libraries Unleashed”, reporting on it, responding to it and getting other responses from various academic libraries. Those of you who were interested in my post may want to explore this further.

As you can tell from their title, the Guardian’s spin of the report is more optimistic than mine was. Though everyone consulted and writing seems to agree that there is a basic lack of critical faculty among their students and userbase, and that that is the real problem, people not reading deeply enough, they seem contrariwise relatively optimistic about them actually reading. I remember the report’s conclusions rather differently, and see the sort of whole-essay-question search queries that referred to every day; it has made me think that if I get hold of some students at a basic level again one of the things I am going to have to teach them is how a search engine actually works, viz. on keywords. But the Guardian is spinning the upside, about the undeniable benefits of the wealth of information that is online, and the opportunity that libraries have to enlarge their newly exciting rôle in bringing that information to the user.

They have a number of success stories from libraries already facing these issues. I can’t help noticing that the ones best placed are those whose institutions have sunk an awful lot of money into redeveloping the actual environment of the library so as to make it a place people come because it’s pleasant to work there. That seems like a really obvious thing looking back, but perhaps we have been dominated by the need to store books at maximum effectiveness. The University of Warwick’s Learning Grid (pictured above) is perhaps the best example; most other places just try and make sure there are desks and computers near the books somewhere (but never seem to give you enough space to have a book at your computer, have you noticed?), but here the book storage, while close by, is second in priority to the working space. Once the students are there in the first place, you see… and that seems to work. But if you’ve got no money to entirely redevelop your library, you have to put the money into IT provision and staff training to help people use it correctly, it seems, and that tends in the opposite direction, more and more content online, fewer and fewer students actually present in the library. And a viciously tempting circle of buying fewer actual books, which cost space and time to store, and more e-books, thus reducing further the utility of the actual physical space of the library. These two trends seem to me to lead in exactly opposite directions, but I know which I like better. And fewer buyers means higher per-unit publication costs and therefore more expensive books. Mind you, too many books are published, but still.

Once you have your resource, of course, you have to ensure it will still be there in ten years. The Internet Archive is trying to expand to meet this rôle, but it’s not what it was originally intended for; instead, the Guardian draws attention to an initiative called LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) which is trying to ensure at least six copies of various academic subscription packages are kept on disk somewhere against the day that the publisher goes bankrupt and their web service ceases to exist, at which point an e-journal might just disappear in the way that a print one never could.

Another theme that they barely touch on, but which also needs considering is, it’s all very well digitising vast swathes of stuff, especially when as in the case that they highlight, the British Library’s sound archives, the machinery to access them is getting hard to find or keep going. But firstly you then have to store it, and keep updating its format to keep it readable (plain text is all very well but there is no standard format for sound), and then you have to have people know what’s there. Catalogue interfaces and indexes need a lot more thinking about. People aren’t going to go and hit up individual library pages in the hope that they have something relevant; they’re going to expect that the FWSE du jour turns this stuff up. So website design and catalogue servability is an issue we need to spend more time on perhaps.

I say `we’, and of course here I write as someone who regularly spends his working days up to his virtual elbows inside a catalogue database that goes to the web. As academics, we might think this is other people’s work. But if you’re teaching, and your library has these resources, you want your students to know. You also want them not to use stuff that’s really dodgy when there is the good stuff out there. One of the other things that the librarians in the articles are to be found saying is that they can’t be expected to teach the students critical reading of sources themselves; the faculty staff have to help. And of course we do, because we have to, but what’s going on here? I learnt my source criticism studying the Peasant’s Revolt at A-Level. Who can’t get the idea of source bias when comparing Henry of Huntingdon to Thomas of Walsingham? and the British curriculum is still stressing this with those materials. So why aren’t the students coming up to university with all this familiar? Why do we still have to tell them “the Church was not a unit and not everyone in it was biased about the same things”? Why do we still have to say, not everything on the Internet is true? Is that the result of the web flattening everything out? Because this is all stuff I thought I knew when I was 18, but it’s hard hard work getting it into the heads of the young now. Did I just have good (and cynical) teachers? Well, I certainly did, but they didn’t make me read very much, because I hardly needed to (sorry—I was a smug A-Level pupil). The whole deep reading thing came at University, but because I knew that the sources were all crook. I hadn’t really internalised it but I knew to keep it in mind. So was I just lucky, or is the real danger in this report’s findings that the web has helped to erode that by making authority so much easier to assert, and even to find? I don’t know the answers to anything in this paragraph, but it’s where I think the real problems are, and what we maybe need to act on soonest.

A friend of mine in astrophysics has a talk online called “Saturn Tricked Us All With Magnets”. Maybe all of our courses should open, year 1 session 1, with a class called “They’re all lying even if they don’t know it: searching for truth in history”. If you kept it to one session, you might be able to stop it going all post-modern and just leave them with a basic ringing warning to consider the author. But I fear not.

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1. A reputation that, I’m glad to say, they manage to defend by repeating a word on the front page of the paper version right in the middle of talking about the lack of critical reading among the young. Always best to typo stupidly when you’re calling others thick, isn’t it? Gaw bless you Grauniad, long may you rein.

 

Loads of medieval Latin online

Did any of you happen to follow that link that I FWSE‘d up back there to the Latin text of Isidore’s Etymologiae? It goes to the Latin Library at an organisation called the Ad Fontes Academy, which appears to be a Christian school in North Virginia, not even higher education. But this site is huge. It’s not terribly well organised, but the alphabetical drop-down, as well as a raft of Classical authors and an entry for Medieval Latin, includes Alcuin, Ammianus, Aquinas, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Einhard and the Theodosian Code, and that Medieval Latin entry leads to a page whch names many more. And for each author it’s only the obvious big works but that gives you the whole of Augustine’s Confessions and the De Civitate Dei, it gives you (for example) what is I guess the RHC text of Albert of Aachen’s history of the First Crusade (among several other Crusades texts), Einhard’s Vita Karoli, Thegan’s Gesta Hludowici Imperatoris, Nithard, Richer, Magna Carta, the Origo Gentis Langobardorum, Dante’s Monarchy… and more I don’t even recognise. It’s a treasury, and it’s searchable and copiable e-text, whereas the Digital MGH for example is image files precisely so that you can’t just copy and paste chunks out of their copyright publications.

Of course, you have to ask where these texts are coming from, because no copyright is given, and neither is the source edition indicated anywhere. A brief page-by-page of the text here of Einhard’s Vita Karoli and the dMGH version leads me to believe that they are in fact the same, so I guess this voluminous resource has been assembled by OCR’ing venerable copies of the Monumenta, the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades and the like and carefully removing all apparatus, editing marks, signes de renvoi and indeed anything that might let it be traceable. I have to wonder exactly how hard permission for this was sought, and ask if this is really a very moral way to assemble a Christian study library. Nonetheless, is that going to stop me using it? Well, when it’s something I can read through the dMGH, yes. When it’s one of the few volumes of RHC that Gallica have left online at the Bibliothèque Nationale, then again, yes, although if I just want to copy and paste a quote this version may well still be tempting. But there’s loads of stuff here I would not easily find elsewhere, so it’s moral quandary for me when those texts beckon. For those without such qualms, meanwhile, there it is… (Also added to the increasingly confusing list of Resources in my sidebar there.)

 

In which Robert Darnton appears to have the answers

I mentioned that I had another post brewing featuring a further interview from Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke’s The New History, and that interview is with French Revolutionist Robert Darnton. I once studied this stuff, as an undergraduate, and I didn’t know the name, which is odd because I recognise a lot of what he seems to have said from lectures; Tim Blanning and he must work in parallel brains. All the same, I’m not going to go hunting his work right now: I did mention a to-read pile half a mile high, as you’ll recall, and I finished that book chapter today and generally Clio is keeping me busy right now.

But there are a couple of really heartening perspectives in the interview. Pallares-Burke tailored her questions to her subjects, and edited out the least interesting answers I assume, but there are some running themes that come up in most of the interviews: the importance of women’s history, the balance between empirical work and theory, and so on. Sometimes the interviewees have answers, sometimes they gloomily disclaim the possibility of answering them, but Darnton frequently comes over as just having the answers to everything and making them seem obvious.

The first of these is where he is asked why he has such a passion for history, and his answer really is for me “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”:

I find something deeply satisfying about the study of the past, and I don’t know quite what it is. I feel it most when I work in the archives. As the tenor of a life begins to emerge from the manuscripts and I see a story unfold from one document to another, I have the sensation of making contact with the human condition as it was experienced by someone in another world, centuries away from mine. It may be an illusion, and I may get it wrong. I may sound like a romantic. But the archives, in all their concreteness, provide a corrective to romantic interpretations. They keep the historian honest. Unlike literary scholars and philosophers, we must marshal evidence in order to sustain our arguments, and we cannot pull it out of our heads. We extract it from boxes in the archives.

And he goes on with a short defence of the existence of actual facts, but already he’s got my vote there: that is exactly what I do it for, and if I’d paid attention to this when I first read it you’d all have been saved my waffling for several screens trying to say the same thing only worse. You get a glance of someone else’s life for a short space of time: and you know that it was real, that this character you find or envision really did have a life and that you may with some luck and judgement be imagining them correctly, because there was a reality that you might be able to approach. Real people. It is the point.

The latter, and less inspiring perhaps but still very neat, is where Pallares-Burke poses him the query that she has put to several of the other historians interviewed: when you go to the archives, do you go with no idea of what to look for, and just report on what you find, or do you go with a theory and a set of questions? The one risks finding nothing because of lack of focus, the other risks finding what you looked for and no more. And, well, yes, true to an extent but surely there’s some better conception because look, we do in fact get some history work done. It takes Darnton to add sense and a third way:

I love to do research because you never know what you’ll find when you open an new dossier and start reading… I think that intellectually it’s also invigorating, even though in my manner of describing it it may sound as if the historian’s task is digging a ditch. The reason for its being invigorating is that you go to the archives with conceptions, patterns and hypotheses, having, so to speak, a picture of what the past was like. And then, you find some strange letter that doesn’t correspond to the picture at all. So what is happening is a dialogue between your preconceptions and your general way of envisaging a field, on the one hand, and on the other hand, this raw material that you dig out and that often does not fit into the picture. So, the picture changes and you go back and forth between the specific empirical research and the more general conceptualization.

Again, he is right. Those Casserres parchments I blogged about earlier were my latest case of this: I went expecting to find a vicecomital takeover of a small church and a raft of donations and found instead what seems to be the wholesale adoption of a substantial mother church’s archive by making what French diplomatists would call “copies figurés”, copies meant to look like originals, and getting people to sign the new copies but putting them all onto as few parchments as possible… And I’m still going back and forth between what monastic archives are supposed to do and what this one seems to have done as a result. He has it right, I tell you.

Darnton seems to interview a lot: I found two more, both focusing on the impact of the Internet and Google (and Google Books, in one case), whilst looking for an image of him just now; so if you would like to know more, and since those subjects are hot concerns of both mine and others, you may find these links interesting.

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Robert Darnton, interviews with Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Oxford, July 1996 & May & June 1999, ed. Pallares-Burke as “Robert Darnton” in eadem, The New History: confessions and conversations (Cambridge 2002), pp. 158-183, quotes from pp. 162 & 170-171.

 

Cartulary of Sant Cugat del Vallès now online (data data data!)

Hispanists rejoice! It seems to have been a long while since The Library of Iberian Resources Online was updated, but it recently has been. Wait: you didn’t know about LIbRO? It’s worth knowing about. What it is, is e-texts (and pleasantly laid-out ones, too, not Project Gutenberg style plain text) of important scholarly texts covering the period 500-1500, and it’s not just secondary work but some really useful sources, most obviously until now, for me at least, Scott’s translation of the Visigothic Law, but also a few important chronicles. They have a link offsite to a text of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, which would be a glorious thing for many if it were still there. It’s not, but a cursory Google reveals that the whole thing, in Latin of course (I’m not even sure how you could translate an etymological dictionary, even one as packed as that), is in fact still online here. They also link out to a page that, o important thing, turns out to be all the journals of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas online, or at least their most recent issues, which has given my reading list an immediate and guilty start as I discover what’s been in the last two issues of Anuario de Estudios Medievales that Cambridge UL haven’t yet made available. But anyway, LIbRO has been worth a look for some time, and is now even more so as a small shedload of new texts seems to have gone up in the last two months.

For my immediate purposes the most exciting and useful of these is the first two volumes of the cartulary of Sant Cugat del Vallès. I’ve written here before about Sant Cugat and its charters, but to reprise, Sant Cugat’s archive is one of the largest in the area, and although its records only go back to 875 (and are then very patchy till about 940) even though it has claimed to be much older, they are important for two reasons. Firstly, they are from an area which is rich, and much focussed on by the powerful because of being near the capital and the fertile and commercially-useful coast which is also the first line of expansion. Secondly, there is that expansion. In 875X7 King Charles the Bald conceded to Sant Cugat a huge swathe of territory in the far edges of the frontier which at that time was utterly beyond use and contact with authority. Then, over the next hundred years or so, the border of authority inches forward by a process I’ve referred to in the past as “the continuation of Carolingian expansion”, and about which I hope to be writing again soon. And by the 980s, say, Sant Cugat, which has a long memory, are suddenly looking at these lands that they were then given being accessible to them. Now of course, people are living there, people who do not recognise the monastery’s supposed rights, and who even if they did would and do appeal to the Visigothic Law’s thirty-year-rule that says unchallenged tenure for that long is permanent. And the result is loads of hearings in which these frontier people, whom Sant Cugat’s monks either joyfully greet as friends of the saint or dismiss as christiani perversi or worse, depending on how opposed they are, turn up and state their positions. It’s gold for someone like me who wants to find out what existed out on the edge. Also, because Sant Cugat are dealing with so much of this stuff, they get blasé about it. There is for example a place which is now called Sant Boi de Llobregat, a big town. Barcelona cathedral has lands there, given by Count Miró Borrell II’s brother, and so from various other sources do the Barcelona monasteries of Santa Anna and Sant Pere de les Puelles. And so does Sant Cugat, but it’s only from Sant Cugat that we know that the place was actually called Alcala, that is, the Arabic for castle, al-qalat, until quite late, because Sant Cugat see Arabic names and weird half-Christians all the time and don’t see the need to dress it up, whereas the city institutions seem to want to make their properties look, well, proper. So if you are looking for frontier weirdnesses and places where people have made their social structures up out of leftover bits, this is where you’ll find it.

The only downside is that the fourth, index, volume, which was done by a different editor some thirty years later after the original editor died ‘in post’, is not here. In fact I only know of one place that has it, although quite a few places in the UK have the original three volumes of texts. If and when that goes up it will be a huge help, because simply searching is not very effective. LIbRO’s searchability leaves much to be desired, and even Googling will not usually get you through the various possible spellings of the Romanticising Latin used by the scribes, though it’s a start. But even for the meantime, just having the actual texts that handy will be useful to me again and again. I have no idea whether it might also be to you, but I thought I would enthuse about it anyway.

 

Actually doing research: "nobles of the palace", Barcelona 990 A. D.

Lately my work has been held up by a single piece of research I’ve been trying to do as quickly as possible for the last chapter of the eventual book (though don’t get over-excited, I’m not revising these things in order and there’s still loads to go). This bit however needed new work and has been a right dog. It’s kind of done now and I thought there would be worse things I could do than say something about it.

I’ve been looking at Borrell II, again, and in particular at whether he had a steady court of followers and dependants, or whether he had to draw a self-standing nobility to him by patronage. The answer is kind of `both and neither’ as you’d expect, but in order to give some concrete examples of this I’ve zeroed in on one particular hearing.¹ It’s an interesting and unique hearing in itself, as the matter of it is that an official called Sendred whose title is custos monetae—if he were an organisation he’d be a Currency Watchdog I suppose—appeals one of Barcelona’s moneyers, Guiscafred, for making substandard coin. What we have is not actually the document where he was tried, however, because Bishop Vives of the city immediately sails into action and tries to argue with the count that, because Guiscafred is the bishop’s man, the bishop ought to try him. Now this is of course the right of clerical privilege that got Thomas á Becket killed, but Borrell and Vives, at least as they are recorded by the unusually verbose and hyper-accurate judge Ervigi Marc, whose detail is often really useful in these records, have a civilised exchange about it. Borrell is said to have emphasised that it’s his business to protect the public, and that however much he respects the Church action has to be taken here, and Vives therefore offers the compromise that if Borrell tries the case Vives can administer sentence. This settlement, not the actual trial, is what the document is intended to record, but it’s already opened up many many cans of worms that tell us loads about how money was being produced, used and checked in the city at a time when other documents tells us its standard was a problem.²

But the interest for me, at least today, is that Ervigi Marc (call him Harvey Mark if it helps you) states that this hearing was held in the palace of the count in Barcelona, which although we have reason to believe it had recently been rebuilt is the first mention we have of that building, and he calls the assembled worthies who are hearing the case “nobles of the palace”, nobiles palatii. So my question was, immediately, who are these people and how ‘palatine’ are they?

Methodologically this is a lot of what I do, a kind of poor man’s prosopography, but there are problems, mainly the lack, except in the case of the august scribe, of surnames. So someone is present called Sunifred: you wouldn’t believe how common a name this was at the time, and there’s just no way to say which of the other Sunifreds who turn up with the count or the bishop are when they’re not closely associated with some land where they turn up consistently. Likewise people called Miró. But with some of the group we can do better. There are for example two people called Guitard. This makes it almost vanishingly unlikely that one of them is not Guitard de Mura, a minor noble who makes it good by getting concessions of castles from both count and bishop of Barcelona beginning at about this time; he will surely have been there when the two came into dispute in his home city. That leaves the question of who the other one is, and there’s a guy who turns up witnessing for the monastery of Sant Cugat for areas all over the general Barcelona area (which Guitard de Mura does not, as his lands are all further away or actually in the city, as far as we can tell) who is at least a possible.³ There are several other names that leap out at me from Borrell’s other documents; it is at least a good chance that the attenders called Bonnuç & Seniol are the men of that name who sporadically and separately witness Borrell’s documents all over the frontier territories, here with the boss on this occasion. A deacon called Arnulf who seems to have otherwise only appeared in or around Girona also turns up only with the count, and was therefore perhaps a tame and apparently portable chaplain, which makes it likely that some Girona contingent was there, so that the Gauzfred who is present is probably the Vicar of Girona we know from later documents. And the judges are Borrell’s men too, of course, and one deacon present, Adalbert, seems to be a judge in training who only gets the full title in later appearances. Another Recosind appears to be a city landholder who deals occasionally with Borrell. Likewise, there is present a Marcuç who seems to crop up in city contexts and maybe also occasionally witness for the nearby monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès. But it’s not just Borrell’s men: one person called Sesnan, I can’t find in Borrell’s documents, but one such is in a fair few of Bishop Vives’s, and seems to be someone the bishop gives land at the end of his life, perhaps as a reward for years of service. You’d expect there to be a few of the bishop’s men present, after all, given that one of them is the accused. And the bishop’s palace is actually right next door, possibly even adjoining the comital palace, so ‘nobles of the palace’ could be a bit relaxed as a term?

But there are also a bunch of people who just don’t recur. The names are sometimes so odd that I would think it was a garbled copy, except that it’s an original and Ervigi Marc is firstly easy to recognise by his signature and secondly not a man to make that kind of mistake. It does however mean that you can sure, when someone is called Falcuç, and is a deacon, that he is not seen elsewhere, because in any of the documents from Osona, Manresa, Girona, Besalú, or the archives of the cathedral of Barcelona, the counts themselves (though that is patchy this early) or that of Sant Cugat (though there there is a later monk of the same name at least). This guy is a one-off appearance, and there are a few others like him too. What kind of ‘nobles of the palace’ can these be who are never seen there, or anywhere else either? Not nobles at all, surely.

So my initial conclusion is that, unfortunately, Ervigi is talking a regular gathering of incidental petitioners up big because big people are involved. Actually the assembled are there for a whole bunch of reasons, and some of them are probably ordinary citizens just come along for the ceremony or to plead their own cases. Someone wanted a good crowd for this one, hauled them all in, and Ervigi lets style get ahead of fine status gradations. But it’s still a good little exercise in who might be there when the count holds court, and shows quite nicely that the body is always changing because many of the count’s men all have lives of their own and turn up either when he needs them or they need him but not by default, which is more or less what the rest of the discussion into which this chunk will go has been showing as well. So I would say that’s what it shows of course, at least it’s consistent with that. But if anyone would prefer to offer a different view I’m open to it…

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1. A. Fabregà i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844-1260. Volum I: documents dels anys 844-1000, Fonts Documentals 1 (Barcelona 1995), doc. no. 201.

2. On which you will some day be able to see J. Jarrett, “Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 168 (London forthcoming).

3. I’m not giving the detailed cites for these people’s occurrences, it would swamp the page and you don’t really need it. Or, if you do, you can wait till the book comes out :-) But at least you can now access the Sant Cugat documents online. That’s such good news, in fact, that it will make for a post by itself…