The fisc: cheap at the price?

I hear tell there are some historians reading. Can I ask you all something? This is a question connected to something I suggested to the estimable Another Damned Medievalist I might do at a future Kalamazoo, concerning the succession of the Carolingians to the royal, or even state, lands, or fisc (whence `fiscal’ as in policy, you see), of the Visigothic kings in Catalonia. Fiscal land is a weird thing in early medieval historiography. (The question’s coming in a minute. Bear with me.) We see the kings dole it out, apparently, and we worry over people making fiscal rights private property (the Visigoths even worried about the king doing this), even though we also worry about `public’ and `private’ rights as categories, which ought to make rubbish of the argument.¹ One of the reasons almost any royal family is supposed to fail is that they run out of fisc to give their followers, but we hardly ever check on how much fisc there was, or even read the work of those who have tried.²

This bothers me particularly because the word means something slightly different in my area, as I’ve mentioned before: when I see the term fiscus it usually means an allotment of fiscal land temporarily let out to an official in return for his service to the count. That’s why my lot mean by it till, ooh, 980 at least, and I can point you at a couple of castles whose fisc, that is their supporting allowance of land, is documentarily testified.³ Now this doesn’t stop the same arguments happening: Pierre Bonnassie, the late doyen of my field, reckoned that the counts of Barcelona were badly short of fiscal land after a while because of how much they gave away to buy followers. He saw the fisc as an ancient allotment, ultimately held over from the Visigoths, that the counts were squandering, and as I say this is quite an old model.⁴ The trouble is when you look at it that, as so often happens to use at our thousand-year distance, the word was not being used as Bonnassie expected it. One particular piece of what Bonnassie calls fiscal land (mainly I think because it has a castle in it) that the counts gave away, Bonnassie didn’t realise the priest to whom they’re selling it had given it to the count immediately beforehand, apparently so as to buy it back with a new tax-free status. He’d got it from someone else and it was named after a fourth person, so it’s not obviously ancient government land. And if that could be a fisc so could anything.⁵ Now the counts of Barcelona in the late tenth century were, almost certainly, rich men.⁶ They could avoid being short of land to give away merely by buying more of it, and in that example we see Borrell II doing just that.

So my question is, do we ever see the kings do this, buy land to replenish the fisc? I haven’t read a great many royal charters, compared to the private sort, and it’s hard to know why this sort of charter might be kept except that, if ordinary private sales are, things with kings in ought to stand a better chance, but I don’t recall coming across a king buying land. And yet surely they must have done. It would have been so much simpler than coming up with obscure and tangled power arguments about how it was theirs really, and continual dispossessions is no way to run a stable kingdom, as history tells us indeed. But I just can’t think of any cases. Anybody else got any? And may I borrow them, if so?

P. S. This has no connection to anything above but, I just discovered that there is Occitan Wikipedia and I am well struck with this idea and had to mention it.

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1. If I try and properly reference this post the notes will be longer than the content and it’ll take eight days to write. If you’re actually interested, then let me point you at Santiago Castellanos, “The Political Nature of Taxation in Visigothic Spain” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2004), pp. 201-228, which is actually a welcome attempt to ask something new about how the fisc worked, and is a good place to start. People have been going to town on the old school for quite a while (see Jane Martindale, “The Kingdom of Aquitaine and the ‘Dissolution of the Carolingian Fisc’” in Francia Vol. 11 (Sigmaringen 1983), pp. 131-192) but it won’t quite die.

2. I admit that even I haven’t read the obvious starting point, Wolfgang Metz’s Das karolingische Reichsgut: eine verfassungs- und verwaltungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Berlin 1960), but I will. My picture of work on the theme since then is that there have been a few local studies but nothing so all-encompassing: anybody feel like telling me differently? (Gosh, Regesta Imperii’s OPAC is good for this sort of question!)

3. Gurb, so documented in Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1122, and Sant Esteve de Centelles, so documented in Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, Biblioteca de Reserva, Pergamins C (Sant Pere de Casserres) 2.

4. Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse 1975-1976), I pp. 145-148, with a stern table of the counts’ fiscal alienations.

5. Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX i X, ed. R. Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascs, doc. nos 542, 551 & 552 (all these also in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV but I don’t have those numbers handy; these ones are referenced in it). Bonnassie noted Vic 552 (Catalogne, I p. 146), in which Count Ramon Borrell sold some fiscal land at Vilatorta to a priest Sunifred under a special tax exemption for 100 solidi, but did not note Vic 551, in which Sunifred gave the same land to the count. Sunifred bought the land the first time in Vic 539, when it was called alodes Cesarii, the alod of Cesari, but it wasn’t someone called Cesari selling it, so it had probably been a clearance effort a generation or two before. If you like this example you may want to cite Jonathan Jarrett, Social Relations and Political Control on the Catalan frontier before 1000 (London forthcoming) where I’m using it in what’s currently Chapter 3. Oh for page proofs…

6. I know that somewhere I have read the idea, which I think is wrong, that the counts of Barcelona sold so many of their castles because they were desperately short of cash. I just can’t find it. I can find a paper in which I don’t reference this claim which suggests that I couldn’t find it last time I looked, either. I think it must be Josep María Salrach but I don’t know where. I’ll find it, but not in the time this post is brewing. Sorry.

 

Harold, Viking lord of Bayeux, fl. 944-945

I need to spend some quality time with Richer of Rheims’s Historiae. It’s almost the only narrative source that pays any attention to my particular corner of Europe that’s even close to contemporary, though this is mainly because Richer’s teacher, the astronomical researcher, ecclesiastical politician extraordinaire, and eventual pope, Gerbert of Aurillac, or Gerbert of Rheims, or Pope Sylvester II, studied in Catalonia. He did so at such a time as to be taken to Rome by Marquis Borrell II, though, so Richer is practically the only cispyrenean source to even name Borrell (and he calls him Dux citerior hispaniae, which raises a whole bunch of questions about Borrell’s self-presentation). That’s why I should be reading him much more closely. And if not that, it should be because the excellent Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition includes a full facsimile of the autograph manuscript, including Richer’s own annotations, so you can really get to grips with what he was doing.¹

Opening page of the autograph manuscript of Richer's Histories, Bamberg, MS Hist. 5

However, why I currently want to read him is because I’ve just read something about which I had no idea. I was, obviously given my reading, dimly aware that in 945 King Louis IV of the West Franks had the ill luck to be captured by the Normans, whom he’d been using as allies against his nobility, and only rescued by his arch-enemy Hugh the Great, Duke of Francia.² But apparently this is not the whole story, because according to Richer the leader who actually captured Louis was not the Norman Count of Rouen, but someone whom the other contemporary chronicler, Flodoard of Rheims (Rheims was really where history happened those days eh?) called “Hagroldus Nordmannus, qui Baiocis præerat”, `Harold the Norseman who used to lead the people of Bayeux’.³ And although then, and probably in 944 when Duke Hugh had beseiged Bayeux but not taken it, Harold was against the Duke, before very long he was allied with him, that is to say he was not a Norman vassal but another independent leader following his own inclinations.⁴

Statue of Count Rollo the Ganger of Rouen, in modern-day Rouen

What this mainly has me thinking is how we sometimes make Normandy too, well, normative. In too many histories the Viking Age is supposed to end with King Charles the Simple establishing Rollo the Ganger and his men at Rouen and thus stopping attacks everywhere (except places like Brittany that didn’t count as anywhere from Rheims). This is often reckoned as the only thing Charles the Simple got right, though I wonder whether Philip Augustus felt that way as Richard the Lionheart charged out of the Anglo-Norman bridgehead once again. But here is Harold to remind us that Rollo need not have been the only one, just the most successful, whose descendants wound up ruling England and nearly half of France and even in the mid- to late-tenth century clearly being the ones whose story was going to matter.⁵ But there were, apparently others, or at least one other, and we just don’t know where he’d come from. How many “Viking allies” did Louis have? Had he put them there, or was this another bright idea by Charles that a later king came to regret, and that Flodoard, Richer and most of all Dudo of Saint-Quentin already knew, when they wrote, hadn’t lasted? How many Viking princes might Charles have put along that coast, in fact? Harold apparently didn’t enlist the Church structures of his area in his own cause in the way that Duke Richard I of Normandy (I mean Count Richard of Rouen) did, or his local propaganda specialists, and so doesn’t get the same sort of record.⁶ Also, it can’t be denied that the eventually-Norman dukes were particularly successful and so survived to be recorded in more detail; but the fact that Richard was later able to take Bayeux over shouldn’t be allowed to make Harold a priori less significant than the extremely young Richard in the years before then. I wouldn’t want to guess which one King Louis was more scared by in 945. I bet there’s more where this came from too. Maybe after Leeds.

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1. H. Hoffmann (ed.), Richer von Saint-Remi: Historiae, Monumenta Germania Historica (Scriptores) XXXVIII (Hannover 2000); I wonder if there’s a market for an English translation of this? Someone must be doing one.

2. E. g. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London 1983), p. 316:

By 942, peace was restored between the king and all his nobles. The balance of power among the nobility, however, was altered radically with the murder of William Longsword in 942 by henchmen of Count Arnulf of Flanders, and the death of Herbert II of Vermandois the following year. Both left heirs in their minority. Louis quickly made peace with the four sons of Herbert and seized his opportunity to exert an influence in Normandy. In 944 he managed to get himself recognised by the Normandy Vikings as regent for William’s son Richard I (942-96). For a time Louis’ Viking allies proved invaluable in helping to pay back in kind some of the excesses of Hugh the Great’s vassals…. But in 945 Louis was taken prisoner by his Viking allies and only rescued from them, in exchange for Louis IV’s youngest son, by Hugh the Great.

3. Philippe Lauer (ed. & transl.), Les Annales de Flodoard (Paris 1905), s. a. 945, cit. Samantha Kahn Herrick, “Heirs to the Apostles: Saintly Power and Ducal Authority in Hagiography of Early Normandy” in Robert Berkhofer III, Alan Cooper & Adam J. Kosto (edd.), The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350: essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson (Aldershot 2005), pp. 11-24 at p. 19 n. 26.

4. Flodoard & Richer, both s. a. 945, cit. Herrick as above.

5. See for this background Pierre Bauduin, “Chefs normands et élites franques , fin IX^e-début X^e siècle” in idem (ed.), Les fondations scandinaves enOccident et les débuts du duché de Normandie (Caen 2005), pp. 181-194. I ought also to mention, and most of all read, Jason Glenn, Politics and History in the Tenth Century. The Work and World of Richer of Reims, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 60 (Cambridge 2004).

6. This is essentially the process that Herrick covers in “Heirs to the Apostles”, which is the article that sparked this whole post and is really quite sharp.

 

Yet to be wrong about Pictland

The problem with having academic interests as catholic as mine is that one ineluctably falls behind the curve of scholarship in those areas in which one’s not actively concentrating. On this occasion, this means that although when my paper on Pictland finally emerged, I knew Alex Woolf had written an article about Fortriu that might completely wreck it, I hadn’t actually found time to read that article.¹ I did however obtain a PDF of it to peruse later, and, well, this is how much later it’s turned out to be.

The battle scene on the Pictish Aberlemno stone, often supposed to depict the Battle of Dunnichen

The debate in which this article takes part is a bit specialised so I think a lot of detail would be unhelpful. The sum of it is that Alex looks at the untimely death in battle of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria at the Battle of Nechtanesmere in 685 against the army of his fratruelis King Bruide map Bile of Fortriu, canonically placed at Dunnichen in Angus, and points out that this hardly matches Bede’s description of the place at all. He comes up with a better candidate, in the far North at Dunachton, Invernessshire, but then runs up against the problem that Ecgfrith’s battle was supposed to be in Fortriu. Fortriu, whose name comes from a people whom Ammianus Marcellinus records as Verturiones, and makes one of the two main Pictish peoples along with the Dicalydones or Caledonians, is the only Pictish kingdom other than Orkney (and maybe Atholl) for which we have a name, and it’s conventionally placed in the lowlands. So Alex looks at all the evidence and arguments for that, finds them mostly wanting and where not wanting, at least only one of two or more place-name possibilities. Then he weighs up the arguments for a case that Fortriu was in fact in the North of Scotland, and finds them better, in the sense of more closely contemporary and less contradictory. It does all rather hang by a few whiskers, but this is the nature of scholarship on early medieval Scotland, there is so little evidence that the tiniest fragment has to be made suggestive and relevant. This is one of the reasons I loved the field at the time I worked on it—so much room for the imagination—and also why I was so glad to leave it, since with my stuff in Catalonia I can actually demonstrate things.

Map of the ancient divisions of Scotland, for which as Alex shows there is no real evidence

All the same, I had one or two ideas about early Scottish history that I thought were worth something, and so when new work comes out in that field by people I rate, of whom Alex is most definitely one, because my ideas on the field were so few, I get the Fear that I may finally have been proved wrong. Happily, I think this time my case actually works better for Alex’s intervention. I was arguing that in the time of King Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata (Gaelic Scotland before 843), which was probably 574-608, the south of Pictland was firstly partly Gaelic-speaking (which should be obvious because Atholl, which appears happily in the Irish Annals, is a Gaelic name meaning `new Ireland’) and secondly temporarily carved up between Áedán and Bruide map Mailchon, the King of the Picts whom Columba went to try to convert, who had his base at the top of Loch Ness, to provide inheritances for Áedán’s surplus sons, who appear to appear in the Pictish kinglist. I think that actually this is the only way to make any sense of the fact that Áedán appears to have operated over such a huge geographical range, and it also helps explain a few of the names in the kinglist, but other than the internal strength of the argument there’s little enough evidence.²

The inner rampart of Craig Phradraig, supposed by some to be Bruide map Maelchon's stronghold

Now, I didn’t really need Fortriu to be anywhere; the political entity only appears later than my focus, and it was easy enough to argue that it was built out of the fragments that Áedán’s sons left behind by means of resistance to Northumbria orchestrated by increasingly powerful rulers, and to hypothesise a transfer of power from the North to the South for reasons we can’t explain but possibly connected with that nation-building process. But with Alex’s case we don’t have to explain why Bruide was in the North and Fortriu, apparently so important, wasn’t. The South can remain a jumble of bits that Northumbria and the Pictish North were able to hoover up for brief periods and fight over. This works fine for me. So far, I am not yet proven wrong, and in this field, with its special evidential problems, that will do me fine.

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1. Alex Woolf, “Dún Nechtain, Fortriu and the Geography of the Picts” in Scottish Historical Review Vol. 85 (Edinburgh 2006), pp. 182-201.

2. All the evidence for this argument is set out in the paper, Jonathan Jarrett, “The Political Range of Áedán mac Gabráin, King of Dál Riata” in Pictish Arts Society Journal Vol. 17 (Brechin 2008), pp. 3-24, definitive version online here, with bibliography here, both last modified 7 September 2007 as of 23 June 2009.

 

More on wizards in Asturias

Line drawing of the inscription from King Fáfila's tomb at Santa Cruz de Cangas

This is another ‘lest old themes be forgot’ post, referring back to one I wrote a while ago about a surprising reference to paganism in ninth-century Asturias. At that point Neville of the eponymous Combate linked in the blogroll showed up to explain that there was other evidence for this, not least an inscription recovered from the mausoleum in which is buried Fáfila, son of Don Pelayo the founder of the royal line of Asturias-León, and second king of Asturias, which records that the church in which he was buried was originally consecrated by a—well, shaman? The Latin is vates—called Asterio. (I feel he should have been called Getafíx, or at least Panorámix, but I guess the mason hadn’t yet heard of the series.) I realise your Spanish may not be up to this, but Neville has now written a full post of his own on the ‘mage Asterio’ and his milieu, which includes photographs of the stone and a full transcription, as well as a link to a scholarly publication of it. The importance of this is that in my post I asked whether someone whom a hostile chronicle called a magus might not, as had then lately been suggested by Celia Chazelle, have thought of himself as a priest. Asterio would appear to tell us otherwise, which means a bit of a rethink for me and perhaps for others. It’s a hundred years before the king I was writing about, but those who warned me not to underestimate residual pagan practices may have been more correct than I was. Sometimes a magical practitioner is just a magical practitioner…

The church of Santa Cruz de Cangas, whence the stone and where the tomb, from Wikimedia Commons

Hmm. Now that I go back over the comments of that post I see that I mentioned an idea for a future post which I’d since completely forgotten. I must pick that one up for you all. So, at least one more to come hey?

 

Seminary LIV: excellent Spanish charter workshop in Oxford

View of Balliol College, Oxford, from the sky

Given the length of the previous post I will try to keep this one brief and not froth too much, but it is very rare to get to talk specialised shop with so many interested people as I did the other day. There are in the University of Oxford a variety of lively postgraduate seminars, including six, count them, six medieval ones—I’m told good things especially of the mainline Medieval History one—and among them is one called Approaches to Medieval Spain. This runs at a time when I could never plausibly attend, but the last one in the term was sufficiently important that I took time off and travelled over in the sunshine to see what happened. Wendy Davies had organised it, you see, and the title was “The Language of Iberian Charters of the Tenth Century”. So the result was that as well as a range of people I didn’t know we got (in order only of their speaking) Wendy, Roger Wright, Alice Rio, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Adam Kosto, David Howlett, me, Chris Wickham and Michael Clanchy, all dealing with the question of how to read and what significances to take from the language of these documents.

Now, you may be wondering what it is about the language of these documents that is worth this many clever people’s attention, and the answer may lie partly in the fact that one of the questions we were asking is, “what language are they in fact in?” Let me give you a bit of transcript:

Zipriano, qui est mandatore de domna Goldregodo et adabatissa, et Belito et Kalendo, suas pesonas, et per sagionem Froilla. Gongnobimus nos in ueritatem quem aramus terra ic, Busti Gogiti, de testamento de Sancta Marina et de abatissa, de domna Goldregodo, per insapienia…¹

Which translates as, more or less:

To Cipriano, who is the representative of the lady and Abbess Goldregoda, both Velito and Kalendo, her men, by means of the Saió Froila. We do acknowledge in truth that we sowed this land, Busto Gogiti, which belongs to the testament of Santa Marina and to the Abbess, the lady Goldregoda, through ignorance…

Now, you may be saying, “if you can translate it, Jon, you must know what language it is” or even, “it’s Latin, Jon, wake up”. But is it? Cicero would barely have recognised this. The agreement and use of cases is all over the place, spelling is already quite Spanish, and some words seem misspelt in the direction of a Romance pronunciation. Is this in fact just what written legal Romance looks like, using a lot of grand old words that they spell old style even though they don’t pronounce them that way (as with the Old French terms in modern heraldry, or the Anglo-Latin terms that lawyers still like today)? And if so, can we get at the spoken language through these documents? Did they think they were speaking Latin, or something different? How different was the written language to the spoken, and why was it kept so if it was? And who trained the people who wrote it, and what with?

This was the sort of thing that we were discussing. The way that the day worked was that Wendy had assembled a cache of particularly good example charters, and she gave a short introduction, then Roger spoke briefly about the language, whereafter we discussed them all together in order.² Roger’s take is roughly the second given above, that this is what Romance looks like written down, though there was disagreement with this, including some from me on the basis of the Catalan feudal oaths that Adam has studied so well which contain what seems to be actual spoken language transcribed and which looks very different.³ Roger did admit that although he would call this Romance the writers would have called it Latin, and probably would their spoken language as well. So there’s room for a lot of debate over terms here but a more useful approach is to just treat it as one language in long-term flux and study the changes more closely.

I won’t attempt to replicate the following discussion, but some points that have been asterisked in my notes are:

• some of the changes to Latin we noticed were regular usage in the Visigothic period, so by the time of our documents already 300 years old or more;
• one or two of the documents showed signs of spoken language’s influence, including in one case an apparent speech defect, that implied very strongly that they’d been written at dictation by someone who didn’t know the written language very well, implying some odd edge cases or perhaps specialisations in documentary literacy; we can never have too much proof of this;
• people might well have deliberately added in obscure Latinisms for effect; Roger’s stock phrase was, “not ignorance, but educated ingenuity misapplied”
• scribes did do things differently just for fun, they were not robots in a wider regulating system of literacy;
• and that working on this sort of thing gets a lot harder when editors don’t indicate where they’ve expanded abbreviations.

If any of that gets you thinking, feel free to discuss below. It has me, but I intend to write about it where people can hold it in their hands, hopefully before too very long.

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1.J. A. Fernández Flórez & M. Herrero de la Fuente (edd.), Colección Documental de Otero de las Dueñas, doc. no. 43.

2. The documents in question being, if you want to have a go yourself, José María Mínguez Fernández (ed.), Colección Diplomática del Monastero de Sahagún (857-1300) I: siglos IX y X, Coleccion Fuentes y Estudios de Historia Leonesa (León 1976), doc. 151; José Miguel Andrade Cernadas (ed.), O Tombo de Celanova: estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. IX-XII) (Santiago de Compostela 1995), 2 vols, doc. no. 221; Emilio Sáez & Carlos Sáez (edd.), Colección documental del Archivo de la Catedral de León (775-1230) Vol. II (953-985) Coleccion Fuentes y Estudios de Historia Leonesa 42 (León 1987), doc. 442; Mínguez, Sahagún, doc. 329; Sáez & Sáez, León docs 310, 388 & 448; Mínguez, Sahagún doc. 205; Fernández & Herrero, Otero doc. 43 as above; and Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho & Joachim Jose de Silva Mendes Leal (edd.), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, a sæculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum, I: Diplomata et chartae, fasc. 1. Ante sæculum XII exaratae et ad origines antiquitatesque potugaliae utcumque spectantes (Lisboa 1856), doc. CLXIII (though we had a newer transcript for this one supplied by Roger).

3. For Roger’s case in detail you would be well-advised to consult his Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France, ARCA, Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 8 (Liverpool 1982); Adam’s work referred to is Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word 1000-1200 (Cambridge 2001).

 

Rebel without a pension: the mystery of Aizó

On the way to a really great meeting in Oxford a few days ago, about which I’ll write separately, I took with me Jordi Camps’s Cataluña en la época carolingia and re-read a couple of articles in it by Immaculada Ollich that I’d skimmed for book purposes a while before but not, apparently, fully absorbed. Both of them heavily featured this one figure who seemed good material for a blog post, a man who threw back Carolingian rule in part of Spain for nearly sixty years, or so it is said, and about whom we know almost nothing. So I thought I’d do an exposé in the style of Carla Nayland or Judith Weingarten, complete with headings. But over the several days of on-and-off construction it’s turned into a four-thousand word monster (I am having real trouble typing that instead of `monastery’ these days you know) which closely resembles genuine scholarship and I thought perhaps it belonged behind a cut. I’d be delighted if you can find the time to read it but if not, don’t worry, there’ll be time later for other things.

 

Archaeology, peasants, women: links from the fringes

I have little of my own to add just now—the Leeds paper is taking my attention but you’ve heard what I have to say about that stuff here before—so let me instead draw your attention to a few interesting archæogical reports and other things of interest on the web this day that I write.

Archæology

• At home (England), it is possible that the first Saxon nunnery to be archæologically located has been found, at Berkeley in Gloucestershire. The next few weeks’ digs will presumably garner a reasonable amount of press attention, unless they don’t find anything. A careful eye on the Anglo-Saxon Archaeology Blog, where I found this item, will be worth keeping.
• If you want to know the time, ask a policeman ninth- or tenth-century monk, preferably one of Sankt-Quirin in Neuss, Bavaria, where a semi-circular sundial that once formed part of the monastery buildings of that era has been restored and put on display. This I learn also from David Beard’s Anglo-Saxon Archaeology Blog.
• On the other hand we have observed here before that in Ireland, what with so much work having been driven by road construction for which there is as of recently no money, digging has almost stopped for the time being; an article in the Irish Times now discusses the breather that this may give to interpretative work and analysis. This one I have, this time, from David Beard’s Archaeology in Europe.

Peasants and women

It’s approximately 15 years now since I studied the Peasants’ Revolt in any detail, and at first I thought a recent post by Bavardess was merely a worthwhile little reminder about the sequence of events. Actually, having done that, it goes much deeper into the scholarship by asking a very simple and damning question: the sources for the Peasants’ Revolt are full of women, where are they in the scholarship? And, well, I was slightly knocked back because I know that in the sources I got, they didn’t really appear and while I’m used to the idea that history teaching is gendered this is still pretty fierce. So I recommend a read of Bavardess’s post to rebalance yourself if you were taught similarly.

It’s odd that this comes at the same time that a vocal female reaction is making itself heard on parts of the web I pass near to a recent article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about the disappearance of ‘traditional’ history courses in the USA. It did cross my mind that I have seen such material termed ‘boy history’ in the past, and Claire Potter at Tenured Radical picks up the opposite end of the stick, shows that the first end is on fire and in your face and suggests that such laments and worries are principally caused by men on the defensive at a slightly greater incidence of women among the faculty. The figures she gives suggest that this defensiveness is, to say the least, well into no-man’s land and that the entrenchments of the establishment are still pretty safe for now. (Though it might have made her case stronger if, er, she’d read the figures that the target article presents…)

1381, 2009, who’s counting? Some men writing history are still scared of women with agency. This is one of those continuities between medieval and modern I wouldn’t mind disappearing. (And that’s intransitive, not transitive.) I suppose that a positive change is to be seen in the fact that now some women are also angrily defensive about such fears making rumour or even policy, but in words quoted about something else entirely by Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology at the same sort of time, “it is clear that non ah we ent arrive as yet“.

 

Name in print II lights pixels

For a while now I’ve been lamenting how slowly stuff that I’ve actually written, finished and sent off takes to appear. I’m happy now to say that Larry Swain and the rest of the team at The Heroic Age have won the race to be my next imprimatur, or whatever the online equivalent be, since their new Issue 12, which Larry announces with relief and glee here, among other places, has a piece by me in it entitled, “Digitizing Numismatics: getting the Fitzwilliam Museum’s coins to the world-wide web“, which is basically a short paper explaining what my job is and why you, as medievalists, should care about what I do. If you know nothing about numismatics and are bewildered every time I mention a coin’s obverse, hopefully this will explain matters for you. And there are many shiny pictures, including of Alfred’s monogram and Nero’s chins.

There’s loads of other interesting stuff in there too, which I’ve hardly yet had time to read. It’s not without amusement that I find myself sharing a journal issue with Cullen Chandler, as some will appreciate, but his review of scholarship on the Carolingian regions, while obviously limited in spread by the works he was reviewing, is a remarkable attempt to summarise a whole field in a webpage. (And I’m not just saying that because he cites me.) The other articles all look good too, but you hopefully won’t blame me if I emphasise the one that concerns me most :-) So yes: I have something more out, and you can read it right now if you like. So do, er, nine other people, and the Heroic Age now steps one volume closer to one that I’ve promised to orchestrate, so I need to get onto marshalling some contributors! Happily, Leeds is just round the corner… argh &c. See you in a bit…

 

Notice to LJ users – OpenID broken

I know that some people have this blog’s OpenID listed as a friend on Livejournal so that I can read their friends-locked entries and comment there. Well, not any more I can’t, because WordPress have wisely made their login server secure. Although the actual address of the blog remains http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com, its admin ID is now https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com. This, I have just found, appears to break the OpenID link to LJ. I can login as that address but it isn’t the one you have friended so I can no longer see your private posts. I don’t know if you can do anything about it but I thought you ought to know.

All other readers, apologies for the post for an audience of very few. At least a little more regular content will arrive very soon.

 

Seminary LIII: brain-stretching new take on late Anglo-Saxon England

Sometimes, not as often as one wants but perhaps as often as one can deal with, one gets as an academic to see research presented that you know is going to be really important. It’s like being at the first gig of a truly incredible new band, except with a rather better chance that the scholar will get a deal for his album (though neither will get paid anything for it, I have to point out). You try and soak it all up, but actually it’s stuff that will change the way you think and you can’t understand it straight away; only once you’ve been able to work out what of what you understood before remains and how much you have to re-envision will you know what you have learned. Now, I was pretty tired and spaced-out—the summer is really messing with my usual Circadian polyrhythms—but this is the state in which I left the Institute of Historical Research on 10th June after Chris Lewis had presented a paper called “The Ideology and Culture of Anglo-Saxon Government” to the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar. It was too rich to summarise; I feel like the only way I could get its points over to you is to type up my notes, but there are lots. So I’ll just try and explain the set-up and then say that if you see Chris, and he appears in many places, urge him to get this written up. It could be a book, it could be an important book, and it might get us through some increasingly stagnant debate about how powerful the Anglo-Saxon royal government was and out into new thought about how to understand what it did and why.

The Shires of England in the Tenth Century, hosted at the University of Wisconsin

Chris expressed this stagnation when he said that he thought that, for Anglo-Saxon England, there just isn’t the evidence to give a sustained political narrative: we’ll never do it, and all work on such things only advances us halfway there, like Zeno’s paradox. What we can do is explore our evidence in a modern way, looking at ritual, language and organisation, exploiting the sources (coins, documents, art, material all alike) for ethos rather than dates, and in general attempting to compile an ideological understanding of the enterprise of English government, what it was doing, why and how rather than the tiny details of when and where. He thus wound up with an approach that could be called instititutional history, political thought or social history, but was really many things at once. So, for example, there is a debate on when England was divided into shires, and who had this big idea. It has died down, mainly because it can’t be given a single answer. Chris instead described what we can know about shires: that they were linked to the centre in a uniform way, that they were not universal (Rutland is its current tiny anomaly because it was never allotted to a shire, for example) or always fully manned, they don’t match bishoprics perfectly, that they were done in stages without a big plan but apparently with a consistent ideology, that they stay more or less fixed, and that the actual borders are dictated by (and therefore a source for) local politics to an astonishing degree. Lists like this were a big feature of the paper, and kept demonstrating that really, when we step back from the detail questions it’s possible to group quite a lot of evidence together to describe these large themes (if you’ll forgive the Byzantinist pun) and we do in fact know a lot, or at least can.

Modern stained-glass depiction of the monastic founder and reformer Archbishop Oswald of York

Chris has another paper under work on the political unity of Anglo-Saxon England, which is an essential prerequisite to any attempt to answer what the effects, abilities and intentions of its government were, so here he confined himself to questions about that government’s ideology. The argument was thick, well-sourced and full of meat (as a Northerner, Chris will probably not mind the almost inevitable comparison to gravy I seem to be drawing). I won’t try and repeat the act, but will say that by the end we had come to a series of interesting conclusions, among which were that the ideology of late Anglo-Saxon royal government was essentially a Benedictine project (which raises questions that we’ve asked here before, apropos indeed of something to which Chris contributed, about why their project is pro-royal and not pro-papal); that this means it was restricted to areas where Benedictinism itself was powerful, and that these left short many parts of England, most obviously the North but also Kent, Essex and East Anglia; that this project was most active only over the short period 970 to 1010; that with Cnut and Edward the Confessor, first kings for a long time to have succeeded as adults and both with experience of the German Imperial court, a much more regalian and less monastic ideology was begun; and that over many other parts of England and times of its history a quite alternative royal and Christian ideology may be propagated through the minster churches that disseminated ideology where the monasteries were fewer and unreformed. He also pointed out that the Normans were able to partially adopt both of these ideological systems.

Silver `Pointed Helmet' type penny of King Cnut, 1026

Points of discussion arose over much of this, of course (not least the coins: Stephen Baxter and I had to agree to differ amicably over the initiative of moneyers with the royal portrait on English money, I seeing it as essentially a stereotype whose regulation was unimportant and Stephen seeing it as a vital propaganda tool that must have been controlled). One of these I raised, which was that Chris himself admitted that Cnut first continued to use the old Benedictine scheme of royal power, until the death of Archbishop Wulfstan (whereafter, as Chris pointed out, lawmaking stops; no more laws till William the Conqueror!), and that this looked a lot like the importance of Benedict of Aniane to Emperor Louis the Pious’s earlier and not dissimilar reform project, a man without whom the project simply couldn’t continue. This raises questions about why, in either case, the Benedictine project hadn’t managed to reproduce itself in a new generation of similarly able firebrands. The fact that Wulfstan didn’t, as far as we know, teach, is very interesting here. Did they not think anyone could replace them either?

Page of the only manuscript of Beowulf

Another point that is likely to interest some of my readers here is that Chris thought that though there is very little evidence which could be used to do a similar project for the `minster ideology’ of Englishness, royalty and Providence’s place for the Anglo-Saxon state, there is probably some. He noted that the Exeter Book, for example, was given to its cathedral home by a bishop who had been a canon, not a monk, and that much of its content is theologically quite irregular, and it may well tell us some of what such a person thought of in these ways. Other contenders might be the Vercelli Manuscript, and also British Library Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV, that is, the Beowulf manuscript. Chris was prompted to imagine someone reacting to the Benedictine preaching in his locality by saying to his colleagues at the minster, “look, this isn’t what I think of when I think of as the important things that make us us, this is all Roman liturgy and law. We should write something properly English” and coming up with a story harking to a distant past but full of contemporary resonance that then wound up bound with a very strange set of other things that they were interested in. It gave us pause for thought. But then, so did all the rest of the paper. The small conclusions I’ve given are only the top of the iceberg. We could really get somewhere with this kind of all-inclusive questioning that lets the sources illuminate each other. I’ve seen a manifesto like this before, in fact:

Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate and unrelated groups – Science, Religion, Sex, Relaxation, Work etc. The main emphasis in his language, his system of storing knowledge, has been on the identification of objects rather than on the relationships between objects. He is now forced to use his tools of reasoning separately and for one situation at a time. Had man been able to see past this hypnotic way of thinking, to distrust it (as did Einstein), and to resystematize his knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally, he would now enjoy the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with his life in its entirety.

Well, apparently, we don’t need drugs to upset Aristotle, we just need people being really clever and this was what we got. It is part of the continuing shame of the discipline that people like this can’t find jobs; what hope is there for the rest of us? But the cynic may say, the discipline can save its money here because Chris is clearly going to do it anyway, and for that we can all be thankful.