British Library MS Cotton Augustus ii.38, otherwise known as Sawyer 876, a charter of Æthelred for the abbey of Abingdon from 993; click through to Simon Keynes's site for more images and his notes about why this one is odd

It’s actually quite hard to find many charters in translation. This is a problem I’ve met when being asked questions at interview such as the common one, “How do you incorporate your research into your teaching?” or, worse, “How would you construct a course based on your research?” because the honest answer to the latter is, “unless your students can all be made to study medieval Latin intensively beforehand, I’m afraid I can’t”. I do have some other answers, of course, and they’re not even untrue, but the fact that my primary materials are off-limits to most students is a real problem.³ Now, thanks to Whitelock and also to one Agnes Jane Robertson, England is actually unusually well-served with translated charters, but the problem is that while I learn most from a charter sample that is dense and focussed on a single area, the English corpus is usually anything but. One of the few periods where that’s close to not being true is the reign of Æthelred, which has given rise to a lot of interesting work on his reign using the charters.⁴ There’s a fair few of them, 117 in fact, and of these Whitelock gave eight, as well as four more that feature the king. This is obviously extremely selective, and the question of this post is how much of a mess does that make of the way one sees the king and his times?

Abingdon remembered their patron kindly enough to paint this picture of him c. 1220 in the Abingdon Chronicle, here scrounged from Wikimedia Commons

Let me be clear: there is no denying that Æthelred’s times were pretty bad. A king who is thrown out of his kingdom and then returns, allegedly on a promise to ‘rule better than he had done before’,⁵ has not had a trouble-free time, but the question has ever been: was he to blame, or is being put on the throne as a teenager in questionable circumstances and then beset by vast Viking armies and irremovable but treacherous magnates something that no ruler could have triumphed through? Perhaps, as 1066 and All That had it of King John’s similar successes, “even his useless character cannot alone explain”. Well, reading the charters that Whitelock chose and her eruditely condemnatory commentary leaves one in little doubt of where she stood. We have, respectively:

1. Sawyer 882, in which Æthelred allows land to be given to Bishop Æscwig of Dorchester in order to compensate him for having ransomed Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury from the Vikings; a sign of the times, or of a lack of royal response?
2. Sawyer 883, in which Æthelred intervenes to confirm some property to a sheriff who had accepted it from the family of a convicted felon so that that felon could be buried in consecrated ground, the king allowing this property to go to the sheriff and not the victims “because of the great love he has for him”.
3. Sawyer 886, in which Æthelred, basileus grants land that had been forfeited to him after the exile of its owner for theft.
4. Sawyer 877, in which Æthelred, ‘King of the English and Governor of the Orbit of Britain’, grants land in Kent to his mother that had eventually been forfeited after having been wrongfully seized by a man who was persistently summoned to court and wouldn’t go; after he died, but not before, enforcers were sent, and his widow and son, who had managed to add to the estate, killed 16 of them, effective action presumably being taken only after that.
5. Sawyer 939, in which Æthelred confirms that he will allow the will of one Æthelric Bocking to stand, on the plea of and payment by his widow, despite the fact that he was accused, if not convicted, of complicity in a plot to welcome the King of Denmark into England, for which his lands were declared forfeit at his death.
6. Sawyer 937, in which Æthelred grants various lands, including some forfeited from one of his ealdormen who’d stolen it from a widow, to the monastery of Abingdon, to make up for lands that had been granted to them by King Edgar but which Æthelred and his brother, King Edward the Martyr, had taken back as their own portion of the royal lands.
7. Sawyer 905, a grant of land in Canterbury by Æthelred to a follower of his of the same name which Whitelock included because of it mentioning things about the town street layout.
8. Sawyer 1536, the will of Ealdorman Wulfric Spott.
9. Sawyer 1488, the will of Archbishop Ælfric of Canterbury (not the guy who was ransomed).
10. Sawyer 909, best of the lot, in which Æthelred grants a substantial whack of lands, some of which I regularly cycle through as is made clear from the bounds, to St Frideswide’s Oxford, which needed them because when Æthelred previously ordered all the Danes in England “killed by a most just examination” [sic in the Latin; Whitelock assumed error and translated 'execution'], those living in Oxford had taken refuge in the church, whereupon the loyal townsfolk had loyally burnt it with Danes inside (though it would seem from more recent archaeology that at least some of them got out, a little way).⁶

At the end of all this it’s very hard not to see Æthelred’s reign as corrupt, ineffective, favouritist and violent, and also weirdly ready to confess blame, on the last of which quite a lot has recently been done.⁷ But is this fair? It’s just 8 out of 117 charters, and is therefore obvious cherry-picking. One might say, well, all very well, but you can’t just explain away treasonous pacts with foreign kings and men condemned for them without a hearing, functionaries forgiven for taking bribes because of ‘great love’, villainous land-thieves who die with justice unexercised or expropriations of churches, even if all but the last of those should more properly be listed in the singular. If this were a working régime, which of course Whitelock was sure it was not, these things wouldn’t have happened, right?

A slightly more contemporary, if perhaps somewhat idealised, portrait of Æthelred, struck in London between 997 and 1003 by the moneyer Eadpole

Well, the thing is it’s hard to tell because of a phenomenon that Dominique Barthélemy called the ‘mutation documentaire’.⁸ This is the idea that we see change when new things turn up in our documents, but what’s really happened is just that the documents are newly recording stuff their writers ignored before. This is a classic possible case, because if you look back at that, how much of our information by which we condemn Æthelred is coming from his scribes’ careful explanation of where the land came from? Really quite a lot, and the rest is coming from the explanations of why the grants were made. Now, if you look back in Whitelock at least, that kind of detail is extremely hard to find in charters from before Æthelred’s reign, there’s a new verbosity to these documents that means suddenly we have this information where we hardly ever do from before. (I will freely confess that I don’t know the early charter corpus at all well, but the new ‘verbose style’ is something one can easily find referenced.⁹) So, for example, in 804 when Kings Cœnwulf of Mercia and Cuthred of Kent together granted land to the Abbess of Lyminge ‘to serve as a refuge’, we would probably quite like to know what for as evidence for Viking attacks this early anywhere other than Northern coastal monasteries is a bit circumstantial, as of course we know.¹⁰ Were their enemies maybe more local? Is some less perilous sense of refuge meant, even? Æthelred’s scribes would probably have told us; Cœnwulf was less concerned about open government. And that’s a case where we even know what question we’d like to ask: motivations and histories of simple donations are just not available a lot of the time prior to the tenth century. You know? Maybe most Anglo-Saxon kings had favourites, couldn’t chase down violent local landowners, took bribes, dispossessed churches, slaughtered people to make a point and so on, and we just don’t see them doing it. Put in those terms, it seems less unlikely, doesn’t it?

British Library MS Cotton Augustus ii.22, a. k. a. Sawyer 898, a charter of Æthelred the Unready for one Clofig, 1001

Now, I can’t myself get over the feeling that Æthelred’s charters exhibit a weird kind of desperation and paranoia, maybe even in this very wish to make it all clear, that bespeak something very wrong with the court,¹¹ not least because I’ve heard people such as our esteemed occasional commentator Levi Roach telling me they do.¹² Also, I do notice something in this corpus that seems genuinely comparable with the earlier material, which is the peculiarly static nature of Æthelred’s court, almost the same guys almost every time with minimum variation over time except that presumably caused by death and succession. This is a time of crisis, and you’d expect the king’s most trusted men to be out all over the place doing his bidding, but as it only Ealdorman Byrhtnoth seems to be intermittent and we know what happens to him. The rest of the in-crowd stay right next to the king. That doesn’t seem too political healthy to me, and it’s not easy to see much like it in, for example, the charters of King Offa of Mercia included by Whitelock, where a steady group nonetheless comes and goes.¹³ Now again, that’s cherry-picking by using only the EHD texts, but this wasn’t what Whitelock picked them for. All the same: it may not be accurate. Can we ever be? Who knows, but cases like this make it worth considering.

Sala Conferenze in the Palazzo degli Uffici, Università degli Studi Federico II, Naples

The reason I had all the time I had to go sight-seeing in Naples was that the conference I was at didn’t start till the somewhat advanced hour of three o’clock the same afternoon. It then ran on till after eight, mind, but if you’re used to Mediterranean time-keeping that’s actually perfectly sensible. Anyway, I arrived slightly early, things started slightly later so I had the chance to catch up on old acquaintance here and there before the papers commenced. The venue for the first two days was the newer, less splendid part of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II in the Palazzo degli Uffici, but on the other hand it was one of the most technically well-equipped conference centres I’ve been lucky enough to present in, full PA and three projection screens, etc. One thing to its detriment was that the designers seemed to have expected people to be using all three screens at once; everyone who was on only one found, I think, that the detail of their slides was hard to see at the size it finished up at. This may be another way of saying that all digital diplomatists pack their slides too full.

The old building's kind of nice too, mind, and much easier to find

Anyway, there was an opening address that I understood only a third of (the third that was in French) and then there were some sessions. I’m conscious that much of the below is a bit technical, combining as it does computers and diplomatic, neither of them fields averse to labelling things with their own new words, so feel free to tune in next post if you’d rather. I’m guessing, though, that there are some people who would like to hear about it so I’m not skimping what’s necessary to make it meaningful for them. (Abstracts of all the papers are online, too, from this page which also has links to all our slides, so I’ll link the abstracts from the titles. Almost like being there!)

Linguistical Statistics

• Nicolas Perreaux, “From Accumulation to Exploitation? Experiments and Proposals for Indexing and for the Use of Diplomatics Databases“, opened up with a dilemma that we would keep coming back to again and again through the conference: there are now some really impressive digital corpora of charters online or otherwise available, about 150,000 documents at the time of presentation, with which some incredible work ought to be possible, and very few projects actually exploiting them.¹ He suggested that it might be because it still all needs sorting out and indexing, but really wanted to tell us about the testing of traditional diplomatic categories of document that he’d done in trying to work out if this could be done automatically. Basically, by lexical analysis as he did it, looking for distinct groups of words, only notitiae and episcopal acta are typologically distinct.² Even this, he thought, was a start in separating things out, but I thought that actually he’d shown that the categories themselves are pretty much bunk. This fits with a documented tendency of mine to ignore work coming from the German Rechtschule however, and it’s hard to say which of us is thinking more progressively here. The advantage of it as a technique is that it’s interested in what the sources themselves emphasise, rather than looking for what we think they meant, but in that case I think we should be ready to define new categories. But then would anyone outside the digital field ever use the stuff? He ended, however, with another big point, which I’ve noted as: “There is no perfect software: what questions do you have?” This, also, many people would pick up, and I thought this paper was a marvellous choice for an opener as it really turned out to encapsulate some of the conference’s agenda.

I’ve gone on in detail about this one, because I resonated with a lot of it as you can tell (both in and out of phase), but I must be briefer with the rest.

• Olivier Canteaut & Frédéric Glorieux, “Essai de classificiation automatique des actes royaux français (XIV^e-XV^e siècles)“, was as you can see related, and trying to get at the chancery practice revealed by a 13,000 document sample without being swamped by it. Their first problem was how much Latin inflection messes up searches for word groupings; their results were much better with French-language documents. This is going to have to be dealt with: surely we can come up with a Latin parser that rolls words back to their stems for these purposes? But it’s a bit of an overhead. They were instead going to come back round by assessing institutional culture and then matching the phenomena there to linguistic data, but again this seems to me to be giving up and using external models rather than letting the data speak for itself. Some useful issues highlighted all the same, however!
• Michael Gervers & Gelila Tilahun, “Statistical Methods for Dating Collections of Medieval Documents“, was talking about the DEEDS project at the University of Toronto. I’ve heard a lot of flak for this project from outside so it was interesting to get a view from inside on what it was actually doing, of which however this was only a tiny part. Basically, DEEDS have the problem that most of their documents aren’t dated, so they were using linguistic analysis to see if they could do a sort of linguistical palæography and date them by language use.³ Here again the key turned out to be very small word-groups, ‘shingles’ as they were calling them, and with an analysis based on two-word shingles deployed on a test set with known dates they were able to get a mean error in dating down as small as nine years, although in some periods when documents were fewer the results were a lot less certain. Still far better than `undated’ however! Professor Gervers was happy to admit that the method still needed work but that it works at all was fun to see.

The session was split over a coffee break, which was the first time I came across an important regional phenomenon. I am told that the further south you go in Italy, the smaller and stronger ‘a coffee’ gets. The next day on the way to the conference I was introduced to Neapolitan coffee as served in street kiosks and well, yes, it’s about four thimblefuls of espresso for which you pay a Euro twenty, but you don’t need more that soon. My then-companion described it as “punctuation for the day”, which I loved. However, a lot of people at this conference were from a lot further north and expected larger servings. It went quickly. I had two little plastic mugs and then found myself a bit shaky (and as I type this up I’m off caffeine briefly so now I shiver with envy of my autumn self). But I was in no danger of nodding off!

• Els de Paermentier, “Diplomatica Belgica. Analysing medieval charter texts (dictamen) through a quantitative approach: the case of Flanders and Hainaut (1191-1244)“, was trying something more directed than simple significance-fishing, deliberately looking for ways to recognise documents that were made by the comital chanceries of her two target counties from those that the recipients drafted and just got signed off. She was more or less able to do this, and thus establish that the chancery sometimes issues documents on behalf of relatives of the counts and lesser comital officials as well as just the counts. She also noticed that between 1200 and 1225 the chanceries also stood out for their modifications of phrases that everyone used into their own special versions, which I thought was quite interesting as the assumption is usually that documentary forms are set top-down, but of course over as short a period as that certain individuals could be entirely to blame. I actually don’t think that upsets the point…
• Robin Sutherland-Harris, “Applications of the DEEDS database to Somerset Charters: dating, diplomatics, and historical context“, was a paper by another member of the DEEDS team but showing the way forward by effectively having used DEEDS as a test set for undigitised records she was using for her own project, which were likewise broadly undated (“thirteenth-century”, sort of level). The things that Robin said that most caught my ear was a mention of a word only two of her charters use for the action of enclosing land, ‘perprisere‘; that is a word I know and was surprised to see here.⁴ Since her sample was 45 documents, however, it also seemed to me that any changes she is picking up must be personal choices, and she was kind enough to agree that that would be a next step.
• Timo Korkiakangas, “Challenges for the Linguistic Annotation of an Early Medieval Charter Corpus“, was an analysis of the charters from eighth- and ninth-century Tuscany, and was looking for software that would automate an analysis he was doing of variation from formulae, trying to sort willing alteration from mistakes. So far he had not found such software though he had tested a few! This was I think a good thing for the conference, because it caught again this mismatch between tools and historical enquiry that we had already come up against in the first paper.

Key Note

The closing presentation of the evening was given by Benoît-Michel Tock, under the title, “Digital Diplomatics, Magic Diplomatics”. This was essentially a retrospective from a man who has seen almost all of this stuff happen, having been involved for a long time with the ARTEM project that eventually went online via TELMA, putting all French original charters from before 1121 on the web. So he knows, and could also tell us that the copies are about to follow the originals up. The problem, of course, is in using these resources together: not all are full-text, different standards of mark-up have been used,⁵ and of course not everything is very relevant to everything else anyway. Little problems like the fact that many projects only digitise the faces of their charters make certain projects no more possible.⁶ Even something as basic as lists of what material there is and ideally, where it’s been written about) is often lacking, although weirdly (my point not his) this is where Anglo-Saxon diplomatic began the process, even though its sample is so much smaller. (Perhaps because of that!) There was, too, the very salient and often bitter point that it is both more interesting to do and easier to fund new projects than the maintenance of old ones, something anyone who has worked on an old database which people actually use knows all too well. Also, and this I thought was notable in a very digital conference, he pled for the continuation of publication of printed editions of charter material, arguing that anyone who has worked with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century editions knows that they are far from useless and that they will outlast many a format change and institutional bankruptcy. As long, of course, as we don’t ‘kill all the libraries‘… I think, quite frankly, we should be seeing print now primarily as a stable archive format, which is something we really do not have in the digital world, and so entirely agreed with this point, hence my emphasis here.

And then there was a very excellent dinner, in which I met some very cool people (despite the geekiness of the subject, there were a lot of cool people here), got to tell my father’s story about a friend of his who turned off a god’s electricity and so on, and it was all very good. Nonetheless, when I get to the second day’s report, it’s going to have to be briefer isn’t it? Sorry about that…

Let me ask you something that may reveal my ignorance. Or, it might reveal someone else’s, we’ll see. A while ago I saw the image below on the one Tumblr blog you’ll find in my sidebar, Medium Aevum. Now this is not an unfamiliar image to me, because it is the one used for the cover of Paul Edward Dutton’s excellent reader Carolingian Civilization in its second edition (and maybe its first, which I only ever saw in a library binding), and it ought not to be unfamiliar anyway, because it comes from the Sacramentary of Charles the Bald, so an actual piece of Carolingian book-painting (which is as you may well know about the only kind of Carolingian painting we really have).¹ And that manuscript is now Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Lat. 1241 1141, which means that a certain amount of poking around Mandragore can get you the full thing digitised, because the web is wonderful like that.

Now my query here is with the identification given to the figures in this picture in the Medium Aevum post, and indeed elsewhere. (The owner of Medium Aevum has disabled comments there because of abuse, so I hope they won’t mind my using their page as an example. The place I actually borrowed the image from, About.com’s Medieval History pages, makes the same statement though they do there at least notice some of the difficulties I’m about to point out.) There it is said to be Charlemagne, standing between Popes Gelasius I and Gregory the Great. That immediately gave me pause. Firstly I paused because, well, that guy just doesn’t look like a Carolingian: as has been said here before, there seems to have either been a strong resemblance between the males of the line or else a strong idea among artists about what they should look like, and it includes more jowls than that, also moustaches, and quite less late-Antique hair.² This looks like a young Constantine to me, not that an artist in 870 would have known what that looked like. But then there’s the popes. Why those two? Why not Leo III and Hadrian, the one whom Charlemagne was actually crowned Emperor by and the one he actually got on with?³ Gelasius, as the man who told Emperor Anastasius that his power was ultimately lesser than the pope’s (or at least, his responsibility was), I can kind of see although why a king would want that in his Sacramentary is harder to imagine. Gregory I would make a kind of sense, too, just because of his fame and connection with Saint Benedict, though I think the Carolingian fascination with him was lesser than the Anglo-Saxon one, but it’s still only a kind of sense, and certainly he had no special connection with imperial power (quite the reverse, in fact, if you look at his career, which was pretty much all about how to manage disconnection from Empire).⁴ Gregory the Great does admittedly turn up on the next page of the manuscript, being inspired by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove in that way that he so often apparently was, and they do look similar, so it’s not impossible, but still a strange thing to put a coronation of Charlemagne. If that’s what it is… Because I see nothing on the page that so identifies it; it’s not even clear if the text in the panel beneath them is actually from this page, because if you seek it out in Mandragore you’ll see that one of the two sources has reversed the image, and I think the text may actually have imprinted from the previous or subsequent page: Mandragore shows it faded and backwards, and very little left of the text on the subsequent page’s equivalent panel.

Ivory carving of Pope Gregory the Great being inspired by the Holy Spirit, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

With suspicions thus up, I started with Dutton’s book, whose back cover identifies the portrait only as “The Crowning of a Christian King”. Hmmm, I thought, and betook me armed with the shelfmark usefully given there to Mandragore, as described, and they entitle the picture, “Allégorie : royauté de droit divin”.⁵ Yes, I thought, that’s more like what I had in mind, so where on earth has this come from? And there I draw a blank. Medium Aevum almost always gives a source, and it’s usually Wikipedia; so it was in this case. The file on Wikipedia is called “Karl 1 mit papst gelasius gregor1 sacramentar v karl d kahlen.jpg”, which is fairly unambiguous, and as so often with Wikipedia too, it gives a source for this, but as is also so often the case, that source is a dead link, a course web-page at the University of (Edit: North) Florida whose course or whose owner has obviously left the building. And there the trail goes cold, although from Wikipedia it has grown widely as you will see if you Google elements of the filename. (There is a further link on the Wikipedia page to the Bridgeman Art and Culture image library, but, well, I do not retrieve this image on any search I can be bothered to follow through with, and certainly not one for Charlemagne.)

Now that's a Carolingian! To wit, Emperor Lothar I, illustration of a Tours Evangeliary now also in the BN Paris and also here taken from Wikipedia

So okay, there’s the question. Has anyone thought that this was a scene of the coronation of Charlemagne before, is this just out there in a book I perhaps should have read? If so, on what basis did that person make the identification of king and popes? And if not, how on earth has this idea got out there?

A view of the hills around Naples down the apex of a city street

A fourteenth-century church slowly mouldering between more modern buildings on a Naples street

I never even found out what this building was, though some poking at maps now suggests it is part of the Palazzo Reale enclosing the Piazza del Plebiscito, very democratic, but there was much more to be seen here.

The altar and the east end of Santa Chiara, Naples

The first medieval thing I found to get excited about was the church of Santa Chiara, which is opposite a quite different modern affair, the Chiesa del Gesù nuovo. That was also incredible, but in a completely different way, full of gilt, every surface covered in painting, impossible to look in any direction without being distracted and sucked in by splendour – but not even slightly medieval and with extremely stiff photography restrictions clearly posted that I didn’t feel up to defying. At Santa Chiara they were feeling much more indulgent:

Declaration of a plenary indulgence displayed in Santa Chiara

and so I got more to work with. It is a big church, and essentially single-naved, albeit with side-chapels. Everything I’ve found to read about calls it Gothic, or Provençal-Gothic, but I’m not seeing it: it’s massive, basilical, has a wooden roof and so on, despite the pointy windows, I want to claim it for Team Romanesque. There’s probably a good reason why that’s wrong, and maybe it was more Gothic before it was bombed out in 1943 and rebuilt in the early 1950s, but I didn’t know that then, and I thought (and think) it was great. It’s also so closely surrounded by other buildings, as so often with city churches, that from the ground you can’t really get its shape into a camera from outside.

North wall of Santia Chiara, Naples

Portal and upper west face

View down the nave, west to east

Happily the inside of the nave more or less makes it clear what’s going on where. Above you see that east end done in closer-up, and the thing here that I haven’t seen elsewhere, I don’t know how unusual it is, is the stand-alone shrines behind the altar. There were also a couple of these near the entrance, which allowed one to get a closer look at how they were done.

Shrine in Santa Chiara, Naples

Detail of carving (click for full-size)

I would also like to know how exactly this works. Do you just whisper your sins very quietly and hope no-one is standing close? Can the priest really deal with confessants on both sides, and if not, why equip the booths for them? So many questions!

So as you can tell I was very much taken with Santa Chiara, but there is far far more in this city than I managed to see. Some enduring highlights, aside from the promenade above, were this building that faced it, which turns out to be the face of the Palazzo Reale but in the evening lighting just made me think that centuries of skulduggery and intrigue could have been played out there:

Come on; it's baroque film noir, isn't it?

And, you know, that may not be wrong. And then this, which was from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, where I probably shouldn’t have been photographing, but who could stop themselves faced with this?

Porphyry dog

The Museo was interesting for a couple of reasons, but both slightly negative ones for me at least. Firstly, it was almost entirely Classical sculpture or if not sculpture, other Roman cultural material. I do realise that Pompeii is just across the bay and so forth, and that Naples was important then, but you could be forgiven for thinking that as far as the curators were concerned (and despite the line of medieval and modern kings of Naples buried in Santa Chiara) nothing of cultural note had happened here since about 200 CE, and very little before 200 BC (not least as the Egyptian gallery was undergoing renovation and the numismatic one was shut). Some of it—lots of it— is gorgeous, and in the case of a display of basically the contents of a whole villa that takes up much of the second floor (a place called the Villa of the Papyri, whose owners appear to have made so much milling papyrus there that they could afford a truly lavish range of domestic sculpture, both of which aspects were documented in the objects on display), really extremely interesting, but I went a long way up and round this building looking for anything medieval, and the only post-Roman thing in there as far as I could see was the statue of Charles III, the Bourbon monarch who gave them a lot of the collection. However, upstairs, as well as a Gabinetto Segreto that we were supposed to sign into to see (but with no-one on guard people of all ages and dispositions were wandering in anyway), I also found this:

This engaging fellow had travelled a long way to be here, in as much as this was part of a small gallery display proudly announcing the fact that the Museo had successfully reclaimed its contents from the J. Paul Getty Museum in the United States. The vibrant colours with which the display was set up, however, were rather contradicted by the fact that none of the objects had any signage or description, that in a room twice the size of my office they had only six items, I think, and that they were in the most inaccessible part of the Museum. I couldn’t help but feel that the Getty had probably loved these things more. Anyway. Obviously, as an ex-museum type whose old place of employ had several colleagues banned from Egypt on account of its holdings, I have a stance here, and it doesn’t need to come out now. Obviously as we’ve already established I absolutely wasn’t creeping round taking unauthorised photos and even if I’d seen something world-famous and iconic I certainly wouldn’t have grabbed a shot and then hidden my camera again as quickly as possible. That would have been someone else. Even if it had been this:

Mosaic of Alexander the Great fighting Darius King of the Persians

I’m glad we’ve got that clear. There will be further medievalist photos as I turn to the actual conference, for reasons that will be made clear in the telling, but for now that’s enough I think. Enjoy!

Because of the various things to do with the production of charters that are currently on my plate to do, it has become necessary to finish getting to grips with Michel Zimmermann’s immense thèse d’état, about which I have already griped.¹ Let me say once again that although it drives me nuts it is, honestly, deeply brilliant, full of insight and is written by someone who more than almost anyone, if not actually anyone (Anscari Mundó might perhaps challenge) knows the great bulk of the Catalan charter material, which gives him the ability to say some genuinely well-founded things about literacy and practice. And he does! It is merely that they are punctuated by things that are not well-founded, and even I can easily show this. It makes me afraid to recommend the book to anyone for fear of what they may take on trust (and indeed afraid of what I’m assuming is OK).

Let me exemplify. Chapter 3 is about the development of the notariate in Catalonia and what there was before there was one.² What there was, Zimmermann shows, is a world where basically anyone who could write might occasionally be invited to do a charter, which they probably did by reference to whatever other charters someone might have locally since there’s no evidence of formularies till later and yet (as we lately saw) the practice is fairly clearly-defined; there must have been a mechanism of continuity here somewhere.³ Over the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, production of documents specialised, so that fewer and fewer people were making more and more documents. Also, fewer and fewer of them were priests, whereas in the ninth century almost all of them were. (Lay scribes, who are really hard to prove because clerics don’t always use their titles here, seem to have stayed steady at between 6% and 10%, ninth to thirteenth centuries.⁴) Increasingly, these people became attached to institutions, or scribal work was increasingly done by people who were so attached; but some of them were attached only loosely, so it may well have been recruitment of good scribes on a loose retainer (inevitably, by then, a fief; Zimmermann gives several really neat little case studies of this, which fully demonstrate his wry perception of individuality⁵). By the thirteenth century, this was, more or less a notariate, but it had only really become fully professionalised in Barcelona, there were still other people writing documents and it’s not a simple transition. You see, this is good stuff, and amply demonstrated.

Arxiu Capitular de Vic, Calaix 6, núm. 2090

There is also more contentious stuff that is worth thinking hard about. A lot of people occur in these documents with the title sacer. I have always taken this to mean `priest’, that is, as a form of sacerdos, and I take some comfort in the fact that Ramon Ordeig does so too in the Catalunya Carolíngia, but Zimmermann rightly points out that the word doesn’t actually mean that, but just `consecrated’, and wonders if it may actually refer to those in monastic communities who have yet to take their vows.⁶ His reason for doing this is that sees their frequency in signatures rise along with monachi, monks, while presbiteri, really certainly priests, drop off. I don’t, myself, think that pattern is repeated in the sample as a whole, rather than just in who’s writing, but I haven’t done the numbers (which would be huge). In any case, plenty of people can be found who use both sacer and presbiter of themselves and indeed some sacri who were also monachi, so I just don’t think it works.⁷ I’m also pretty sure sacri occur in contexts that are unlikely to feature any monks, though I haven’t happened to come across those in the same way since starting this post, so I am dubious for several reasons about Zimmermann then merrily counting these guys among the monastic scribes henceforth, but his basis for saying it is at least clear. If he’s wrong, too, then why the heck is the word sacer apparently driving out presbiter; are we watching Gregorianism sink in at some level here? Because that would be really interesting. It has also forced me to stop and take a look at an assumption about words, so on the whole this is good even if I don’t agree.

Archivo de la Corona d'Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Seniofredo 39 (reduced-quality version)

So why, why, does he also say things like this? “À la fin du X^e siècle, un juge souscrit tous les actes du comte Borrell – il les souscrit SSS, c’est-à-dire qu’il est davantage qu’un témoin.”⁸ Let’s leave aside the argument about whether using a ruche means you’re granting legal confirmation rather than just witnessing, because I’m not sure there’s a difference but if there is one I can’t see it in, for example, the document above.⁹ Let’s just get straight to Borrell II. Did he really have all his acts signed by judges? And the answer is, of course, no, not even a bit. All Zimmermann’s examples postdate 985, so just staying within those final eight years of the count’s forty-eight in power, I can find thirteen documents he issued with no judges attested.¹⁰ Now, OK, easy for me, I have a database and so on, but Zimmermann has also seen several of these documents at least so I simply don’t understand where he’s coming from with this assertion. It’s not as if Borrell never had judges witness his documents, it’s not much less frequent than him not doing so, but I don’t think one can deduce from that that this is how they were authenticated; I just think it shows that there were often judges at Borrell’s court, which is, you know, not surprising.¹¹ And this, of course, makes the fact that Zimmermann draws this out to conclude that if people wanted their transactions legally authenticated, they made sure there was a judge present, very problematic, as does the vast wash of documents with no judge present that were still somehow worth keeping.¹² But if a reader didn’t know these documents, that reader would believe him. How does this fit with the good stuff? I still don’t get it.

The Landgate in Rye, East Sussex

If you are there and can see this view, turn around, there’s a nice pub just behind you on the photographer’s left… But this, the Landgate, is your actual medieval heritage: the sign on it reads:

This ancient monument was built in 1329 when Edward II made grants for further fortifying the town, and of the four gates then built it is the only existing one. It has a chamber over the arch and two towers. There were two gates, a portcullis and a drawbridge.

The other standing fortification, the Ypres Tower, I’ve never made it to for some reason—too far from the pub?—though it is centre of this view.

View of Rye from Landgate towards the Ypres Tower

It should be said that if you ask for directions to the tower round here asking for it as if it actually contained a Low Countries place-name, no-one will know what you mean. It was built by Flemish workers from Ypres in the fourteenth century, which is long enough for modern English spelling to have triumphed over French pronunciation: aujourd’hui il se prononce “Wipers”, so watch out. The town is pretty, but it does have these Little Britain aspects, which sometimes make for moments so straight off a postcard that you can’t believe you haven’t wandered into a set-up:

I did not Photoshop that Union Jack onto that scooter's luggage box or place it next to those cobbles. Someone here has a more developed sense of cliché even than I

Sometimes it genuinely is set up, of course: much of the town’s revenue now comes from tourism and there is a lot of art being made here for sale to passers-by. Some of it gets installed…

Skyline over the Sussex countryside seen through sculptures at the top of Rye

The oldest part of the town that now survives is, predictably, around the church. St Mary’s has been through a number of phases, at least one Romanesque but that’s now quite hard to see even from atop its tower, which can be climbed for a small sum; overall, the state of its building is a bit complex:

A combination of window styles in a junction

… but some of the surroundings have basically not been much altered over the last, say, four hundred years, except for maybe replacing the roof every few:

Actually-Tudor

Please forgive the glare: firstly, this was taken in summer, shortly after Leeds, hence its inclusion now, but secondly, it was done late in the day, and the space round the church is quite packed; getting an angle that escaped surplus light and wasn’t completely dim just wasn’t possible. This topography also makes it very difficult to get an impression of the church itself, by eye let alone with a camera, but as it’s the centre of the town, that’s obviously what should be in the seventh and last scene.

Crossing and north transept and aisle of nave of St Mary's Rye

In the real world, meanwhile, everything is editorial, but next time I’m here I’ll get to the Tower, and meanwhile, mine’s a pint.

In the name of ________¹. I _________² [along with my ________³ ____________⁴]** am|are donors to you, ____________________⁵. For it is certain and manifest that it pleased our spirits and pleases us to give to you, and so we give _________________________⁶, with all its _______________⁷, and all these things are in the county of ___________⁸, in the ________⁹ of __________¹⁰, at the place which they call __________¹¹; and this ___________¹² with all its ___________¹³ is bounded on the eastern side by ___________________¹⁴, on the southern side by ___________________¹⁵, on the western side by ___________________¹⁶, and on the part around indeed by ___________________¹⁷. Whatever lies within these four boundaries as described above thus we give to you in all integrity with its ways in and ways out, and it is manifest. For if we the abovesaid donors or any person at all should come against this same donation so as to disrupt it, let us or let him find perpetual _____________¹⁸ and a _________¹⁹ with ___________²⁰, and let this donation remain as before firm and stable and for all time.
This donation done on the _________________²¹, in the _________²² year of ______________________²³.
Signed ______________²⁴, who have made this donation and asked for it to be confirmed.† Signed __________________²⁵. Signed ______________²⁶. Signed _______________²⁷.
_____________²⁸ the ___________²⁹ who wrote this same donation and subscribed the day and year as above.

Key:
1. Your preferred entity, e. g. God, Capitalism, Bob, Flying Spaghetti Monster
2. Your name and title if any
3. Person’s connection to you, e. g. wife, child, cellmate
4. Person’s name
5. Recipient’s name and title
6. Description of object. And hey, the people who wrote this formula only really had one thing in mind, so this year why don’t you give the gift that keeps on giving, AGRICULTURAL LAND! It’ll make the rest of this make much more sense if you do.
7. Subsidiary components, e. g., water-mills, batteries, remote control, winepresses
8. Name of relevant county or local division
9. Type of jurisidictional settlement
10. Name of jurisdictional settlement
11. Name of homestead, house, etc.
12. Object being given
13. See 7.
14. Whatever is nearest to the object’s eastern side, probably wrapping paper
15. E. g. more wrapping paper – you can just say “similarly” if so
16. E. g. cardboard backing mount, neighbouring vineyard
17. E. g. instruction leaflet, mountain
18. A form of affliction
19. A fate
20. Person famous for suffering 19; traditionally “Judas, betrayer of the Lord”, but I don’t know, that seems more of an Easter thing to me? My suggestion: a “costume” with “a Mickey Mouse impersonator”!
21. Date in Roman calendar
22. Year in office of 23
23. Your current local ruler
24. Your signature
25. Signature of first witness: choose carefully! Or don’t!
26. Signature of second witness
27. Signature of third witness
28. Name of scribe
29. Title or office of scribe, e. g. ‘smartarse’. Have a good break, all, and I’ll be back with photos of things medieval before the end of the year.

The last day of Leeds was made extra-special for me, as had the last day of Kalamazoo been both this year and the last—it’s stopped being funny now and my have something to do with my decision not to present at either next year—by having to be up first thing in the morning after the dance to make sure my sessions ran OK, including, you know, my own paper. Basically the whole of the rest of Leeds for me was the Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic sessions and then missing booksellers with whom I’d reserved stuff, and finally goodbyes. So, the latter two need no discussion here and the former is quickly dealt with, thus!

1507. Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic, I: royal charters and royal representatives

Portrait of Charles the Bald in the so-called Vivian Bible

• Alaric Trousdale, “Some Thoughts on the Charters of King Eadred, 946-55″
• Shigeto Kikuchi, “How High the King? Monarchical Representation in Carolingian Royal Charters”
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Taking it to the March: Carolingian justice in 9th-century Girona”

Attendance was surprisingly good given the circumstances; even Alaric turned up eventually… But seriously folks: this was a pleasant mix of new and old because, well, you know, I was there at the start of these sessions and presented in every one of the six years they ran; Alaric was an early adopter; and Shigeto had only just met us all. Alaric showed indisputably that there is more that can be said about the politics of Eadred’s rule of England than what’s in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (though even there I think he shows up pretty well, consistently defeating all comers); Shigeto used both charters and art history to demonstrate that Carolingian kings or their clerks probably really did have a policy about what titles they used in describing their power in their documents, which was excellent—diplomatic and art history should meet more often—and then there was mine. I’ve already said I didn’t think much of mine: it was a game attempt to make something of a research question that didn’t come good, and I had to try and argue a trend from three instances of my chosen phenomenon (shifts in the representation of royal power at court hearings in Girona) because that was all there were. But hey, it made for a couple of good blog posts.

1607. Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic, II: members and margins

"Representation of the medieval social network with force directed algorithm", Boulet et al., "Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis", fig. 1

• Julie Hofmann, “Women and Witnessing under the Carolingians: a reappraisal”
• Arkady Hodge, “When is a Charter not a Charter? Documents in Non-Conventional Contexts in Early Medieval Europe”
• Fabrice Rossi and Nathalie Villa-Vialaneix, “Exploration of a Large Database of Charters with Social Network Methods”

This session was, in all ways, a bit less traditional in its modes. Julie was raising difficult questions about the assumptions people have made about what women were and weren’t allowed to do, in terms of dealing with property and being generally legally active, and even beginning to answer them using her forthcoming database of the material from Carolingian-period Fulda. Then, you may have occasionally heard, especially if you work on Ireland, Scotland or Bavaria, of property transfers being written into Gospel books or similarly solemn but non-documentary contexts. But wait: Scotland… and Bavaria? And in fact more widely than that, which is what Arkady was showing: he argued strongly that when you have this many instances of a weird oddity, we probably have to stop thinking it’s odd, which will mean actually thinking about it! And lastly Fabrice, who was the one of this pair actually giving the paper (though weirdly I met Nathalie at the next conference I went to), made a complex system with lots of maths in it understandable to a lay audience and I think left them fairly excited that they could probably get something new out of their datasets, however large, using this kind of technology. This is not easy to do, and he did it well, even though he was speaking in his second language, so I was impressed. And, of course, that this paper even exists is ultimately down to this blog post, and it may the most academic impact this blog’s ever had (unless stories of students printing posts for study purposes are actually true, which would be worrying). So it closes a circle or two to have ended with it.

Because that was the end of the Problems and Possibilities sessions, and I think it genuinely is the end. We certainly aren’t running any next year, whoever `we’ would be, and I don’t think it’s needed. Though we’ve managed to rally every time, it’s often been a struggle to get speakers for these, but this year that was because a lot of people who might have been interested were already presenting in other related sessions. There were other sessions dedicated to being clever about charter evidence. It would be nice to think we’d started a trend—maybe we did, maybe we were just on one—but at the very least it is no longer up to us, and specifically me, to keep it trending. So, for now, Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic ran from 2006 to 2011, inclusive, and thankyou to all who helped it do so.

But it doesn’t end with the sessions, folks! The reason that blogging has been so sporadic of immediate late is actually exactly the opposite of that. After the peak year in 2007 when we had nine papers and a tremendous audience, my co-organiser Allan Scott McKinley observed, “If people want to hear this stuff we should really think about publishing it!” and he was of course right, as I have found he usually is. It has just taken us a while, for various reasons, to get round to it.¹ But the other thing that happened at this Leeds was that we got given a deadline to come up with a book by our prospective publishers, and that deadline was December 31st. Yowch! It is of immense credit to our planned contributors that only one of the seventeen of them did not agree to try and meet this, and all but one have in fact managed it at time of writing despite immense odds against in several cases. I owe them each a considerable debt. I typed this on the way to and from meeting with Allan, now my co-editor as well, and as a result of that meeting I can say that I’m pretty sure this thing is going to happen, and that it will be pretty damn good. There’s two chapters here I already wish I could set for my students, they’re so helpful, and a bunch of other interesting things too. I won’t plug it in detail yet: firstly it has to go through full review still, and secondly it’s not yet clear exactly what the running order will be, but as well as the last two blog posts I wrote two thousand words of introduction today while perched on Allan’s sofa and this reaffirms in me the conviction I’ve had every time I pile this stuff up and look at it; this will be an exciting volume, which I think may be an unusual boast about something to do with charters. So look out for more as we have it. And that will have been the final upshot of my Leeds 2011 conference experience.

Sant Pere de Casserres, from above

Sorry again for delay: for various reasons it has been what I believe is known as “exploding head month” in these (and other) parts. Though by and large as described the Wednesday of Leeds was a grand success, there was some complication arising from the first session, as I mentioned. It will also resolve a few hanging hints if I say that this related to my work on the monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, and its preceding church, which one way and another took up most of my research time in the first part of the year. One of the papers at the Wednesday session mentioned the place, and so I was able to talk to the speaker about my work on it. As this is now shaping up (and as it was then indeed) I’m quite pleased with it: in its small way it calls into question categories that are often over-schematic for the early Middle Ages, like `monastery’, `forgery’, `memorial’, `history’, `original’ and so on, and shows how secular power can use spiritual affiliations to get cooperation from a local population. Furthermore, it’s the most interdisciplinary thing I’ve ever done as serious research: it uses burial archaeology and epigraphy as well as diplomatic, and also blends the influence of my two most influential teachers in as much as it has me talking about how people of that era could control and use the past, and how power sought roots in localities, and so on.¹ In its small way it’s a measure of how I’ve progressed as a scholar and I look forward to getting the thing out there.

Altar slab from the pre-monastic church of Sant Pere de Casserres

But, as you know, this has not been an easy task, not least because I’ve never actually had this as a primary project, and so it’s got done in rapid bursts which have not always been complete. Thus I started by just looking at the original charters in 2009, mainly because I wanted to use some unpublished material at last, and that gave me the basic diplomatic data, but then I found out that there were a shedload more from the place only preserved as abstracts.² So I found out where they were and started planning to go there to read them too, and thankfully I hadn’t actually got to the point of booking tickets when I found out they’d been freshly published with a bunch more and indeed the whole lot put online for free.³ And then I hadn’t been able to get at the stone with the inscriptions on, so I made a trip out there to see it again and they still wouldn’t let me look at it except as a normal visitor, and I wanted to visit the site and it was only by the rarest of good luck that I was actually able to, though that at least was no-one’s fault but mine. And all of this you’ve seen here.⁴ So when I got to July I’d already had to add in two extra caches of charters, which maybe I ought to have known about. But, it turns out, “there is another”.

Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, Pergamins, C (Sant Pere de Casserres) núm 20 (which I did see already)

More complicatedly, it’s apparently a private archive. The person who told me this is editing it, so it’s not completely locked away apparently, but nonetheless awkward. And, really, I probably only need an inventory listing; I think it extremely likely that there are no documents in this archive that affect my argument, but since part of that argument hinges on a couple of documents not existing (I should know better than to argue from silence, I know) it is kind of crucial that I know that that’s true. Otherwise the journal I want to give it to will inevitably send it to the guy in question for review and he’ll shoot it down.⁵ Now I have been in e-mail contact with him, but shall we simply say I did not learn anything more this way than what he told me at Leeds, which did not include for example such details as the name of the archive or its geographical location. I guess he doesn’t want anyone potentially publishing any of it before he can, though I wonder if its custodians know he feels that way.

Interior of the Hospital de Tavera in Toledo, home of the Archivo Ducal de la Casa de Medinaceli

Well, you know, I’m a researcher and I know this field a little bit. I gave up hoping for a useful e-mail and set to the question, and found out what the archive is and where it is, which was not very hard to do once I got going. It is the Archivo Ducal de Cardona, which is a non-public part of the much larger and usually more accessible Archivo Ducal de la Casa de Medinaceli, until recently in Seville but now in Toledo.⁶ And okay, Seville would have been a nice trip but I’m pretty sure I can manage with an excuse to visit Toledo and spend a day with some documents, if they’ll let me and if I even need to. Indeed if there’s genuinely nothing to interest me then it may take less than a day. (So I’d better allow two and have a back-up tourism plan.) There are far worse fates than having to take a long weekend in Spain in springtime. But it does annoy me that I may well be spending, what, three or four hundred pounds to find out I didn’t need to go, simply because someone won’t answer a polite question. Hopefully the Archivo themselves will be nicer about it.

Looking back at it, it does seem rather as if the 2011 International Medieval Congress was fairly intense for your humble blogger. Having been called to the warpath the previous day and then entirely surrounded by people with Livejournals, the third day of the conference, Wednesday 13th July, also provoked me in various directions. I’ll try not to relive too much of the drama, not least because I intend a separate post for one of the episodes, but this is roughly how the day went.

1014. Concepts and Levels of Wealth and Poverty in Medieval Catalonia

It is unusual for Catalan scholars to turn up in England, where Spain is usually represented only by Castilians, and I had read work by two of the speakers in this session and also its organiser, so I was determined to show my face. In fact the group had already discovered my book and thus my existence, so it was all quite well-timed and it seemed like a jolly happy meeting. There were also of course some papers and those went like this:

• Pere Benito Monclús, “Famines and Poverty in XIIth-XIIIth-century Catalonia”, looking closely at who spent their wealth on feeding the poor in time of famine when the usual Church safety net was stretched too far, concluding that it was the public power last of all.
• Francesc Rodríguez Bernal, “Rich Nobility and Poor Nobility in Medieval Catalonia, 10th-12th Centuries”, stressing how little we have actually found out about quite a chunk of the medieval Catalan nobility, and how varied it is; this was not really news to me as such, but it was actually really nice to hear someone talking about my research area as if it mattered all the same.
• Sandrine Victor, “Salaries and Standards of Living in Catalonia according to the example of Girona at the 15th century”, was doing careful quantitative studies of the demographic distribution of wealth, and had a lot to say about labourers and their accommodation (almost always rented, unlike their masters’ owned houses) in the late medieval city.

The last of these papers was perhaps the only one that was presenting new work as such, work in progress even, whereas Senyors Benito and Rodríguez had both elected to give papers that were kind of introductions to their topic for specialists from other fields. There were quite a lot of these papers at Leeds this year, it seemed to me, and though I would rather see more developed or developing work, I understood why they did; they wouldn’t have known there would be anyone who knew the area there and I’m hardly a whole audience anyway. It was impressive how many languages the questions were in, though: English, French, Castilian and Catalan (one question in German, too, that had to be translated), and the conversation afterwards was, well, extremely informative. But we’ll get to that next post.

1121. Making the World Go Round: coinage, currency, credit, recycling, and finance in medieval Europe, II

I got into this session late somehow, probably because of hunting really bad coffee with Catalans and then realising I needed to be across the campus next, but what I caught was interesting.

• Gareth Williams, “Was the Last Anglo-Saxon King of England a Queen? A Possible Posthumous Coinage in the Name of Harold II”

What was going on here, as far as I could divine after my late entry, was that there seems to have been a very short-lived issue of coins in the name of King Harold II from the royal nunnery of Wilton, almost all known from one hoard that also contains 1067-68 coins of William the Conqueror. Gareth suggested that the responsible party might be Queen Edith, Edward the Confessor’s widow, Harold’s brother, who owned the nunnery, and who didn’t submit to William straight away; that seems to make sense of what we’d otherwise have to assume was counterfeiting so that was pretty cool.¹

• Tom J. T. Williams, “Coins in Context: minting in the borough of Wallingford”

This was an interesting combination with the archaeological attention that Neil Christie had given Wallingford the previous day, though possibly only really interesting to numismatists; it did however include the fact that we can use Domesday Book to plot where one of Wallingford’s moneyers, Swærtlinc, actually lived in 1086, and he’d struck for Harold II as well so some English at least did come through, even if at a low level.² One of the questions raised (by Morn Capper) was whether moneyers were too important to remove or too humble, and we still don’t know, but Mr Williams is I believe aiming to try and answer this for the later period as Rory Naismith tried to answer it for the earlier one, so we shall see I guess!³

• Henry Fairbairn, “The Value and Metrology of Salt in the late 11th Century”

As you know I think the salt trade’s important—I must have read something once⁴—but I don’t really know how important so this was worth hearing. The units involved in salt-measuring are a bit obscure but by working up from tolls, we came out with figures of approximately 150 g of salt per penny in a world where a pig is 8 pence and a sheep 2 and a half. That makes salt less of a bulk product and more of a luxury than one might have thought and it must have been hard to get very much of it if you were a peasant. So that’s not nothing.

1202. ‘Reading’ the Romanesque Façade

I had wanted to go to this session partly just to see beautiful things and get my Team Romanesque badge metaphorically stamped, but also because Micky Abel whom I met a long time back was supposed to be presenting. In fact, though, she was unable to be there and then I got distracted by books, and so I missed much of the first paper. I have hardly any notes, but it was gorgeous to look at, because it was about the Conques tympanum and we know how that goes, right?

Typanum of the church of Sainte-Foy de Conques, from Wikimedia Commons

• Kirk Ambrose, “Attunement to the Damned at Conques”, thus argued that the passivity of the victims on the Hell side of the tympanum was actually supposed to frighten the viewer, and
• Amanda Dotseth, “Framing Humility at San Quirce de Burgos”, took us through a complex system of sculptural ornament that seems to have been dismantled and put back in a different order at some point in its history, but which also may have encoded the monks of the relevant church into the artwork

San Quirce de Burgos, including its intriguing portal

1301. Digital Anglo-Saxons: charters, people, and script

This was essentially a session advertising the work of the Department of Digital Humanities of King’s College London, still the Centre for Computing in the Humanities when the conference program was printed. The DDH is one of KCL’s expansion zones, and there’s a lot to advertise, so it was something of a shame that Paul Spence, one of the speakers, had been unable to show, not least because that was the charters one. Instead, however, his paper was kind of combined with one of the others. Thus, we got:

• John Bradley, “Anglo-Saxon People: PASE II – doing prosopography in the digital age”

This put the expanded version of the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, which now (as you may recall) contains all the people in Domesday Book too, into a wider context and emphasised how they had gone for a structure dictated by information, not by sources or persons, which he called a `factoid’ model. This seems like a really useful way to think about treating this kind of data, actually, and I was impressed with the flexibility it seems to have permitted them. Of course, I’d never then actually attempted to make serious use of PASE and having done so for this post now I’m slightly less sure how much use it is to me…⁵

• Peter Stokes, “Computing for Anglo-Saxon Palaeography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic”

Dr Stokes’s paper was about ASCluster, the umbrella project that tries to manage all the data that the DDH handle in their various Anglo-Saxonist endeavours together. Since they don’t all focus on the same sorts of data, trying to create a way of making them all connect is actually really tricky. You would think that pulling a personal name out of their charters database and also PASE and getting all the information together should be simple enough but the databases weren’t designed together and they aren’t searched in the same way, and so on. I could feel his pain; I remember these kinds of dilemma all too well. By the sound of it they have some challenges still to defeat, though the ability and lateral thinking on the team demonstrated by these two presentations would encourage one to think that they will in fact defeat them.

You can tell perhaps that I had mixed feelings about the efforts here. This is not just that I doubt that the money they’re likely to sink into this integration of their projects is going to see a return in terms of use; it’s already possible to search these things separately and compare the results oneself, after all. That isn’t actually their problem: they made a case for doing it, got the support and are setting about it, fine. Lack of use is a problem that a lot of this sort of project is suffering and we will hear more about this in future reports. No, my cynicism came from a much simpler source, which is that I had never at this point nor at many points subsequently managed to get their exciting-looking database of the Anglo-Saxon charters, ASChart, the one that I do have a use for, to work. Once I knew of it, I quickly found that the site would never load, from wherever I tried it, home, office, JANET or commercial internet, never. And I tried it many times, in the months after this session, every time I happened to have reason to check on this post whence I’d linked it in fact; nada. They must have known it didn’t work, because it can’t have been serving any pages, and yet it kept being advertised as a completed project, while actually the only recourse was Sean Miller’s scratch pro bono equivalent. This kind of thing annoys me. The result of an unsuccessful attempt to replicate an already-existing resource should not be that your team gets showered with more money and converted into a full department, especially in a time and at an institution where huge cuts had only a little while before been projected across the whole of the humanities. I don’t want them all fired, of course, quod absit but I would like the system to reward and therefore encourage fulfilment of the things that the money was awarded for. But no-one in power checks up and so there’s no consequence, bar slight embarrassment, if those things don’t work, and the system doesn’t actually incentivise them to improve the situation.

Screen capture of ASChart project homepage

I was all set up for this rant when I got round to writing this post, therefore, and so it comes as something of an anti-climax to have to say, er, now that I check, it seems to be fixed. But it does, so I do. If the DDH team are reading, therefore, I’d better say thankyou for putting the effort, the bigger server or whatever in that has made this resource finally available, not least because as far as I can see there was little that required you to do so. So, it’s up, and even if the charters after 900, i. e. most of them, are not yet there and the links through to PASE crash in a sea of Tomcat errors, nonetheless it is better—in fact the Tomcat errors have gone away even while I’ve had this post in draft and those links now work!—and I suppose therefore that we may hope for better still. There are now diplomatic indices, linked from marked-up XML texts, which bodes extremely well for the future when the whole corpus is loaded and is something that I would love, especially just now, to have for the Catalan material (albeit that there is something like six times as much of that and no-one has databased any of it except Joan Vilaseca). This also means that when they get the post-900 material up, the whole thing will actually deliver something that Sean’s site doesn’t already do, though his free-text search is still unique and could be used for some of the same things. Well, anyway, we have two online Anglo-Saxon charter databases now, and yes, I have said before that I wish funding bodies would JFGI when they get an application for such a project, in case it already exists, but these two both have their points and I am running out of reasons to be cross with the DDH so perhaps I’ll try and stop?

ASCharters site screen capture

Anyway. That was the last session of the day, and then there was dinner and then finally the dance, which was absolutely tremendous fun even if I did miss `Blue Monday’ but about which little can usefully be said here that hasn’t been said already. So with that I’ll wrap this up and move on to the more Catalano-centric post promised at the beginning there.

Here is something a bit lighter-weight before we get back to Leeds: about 0.9 g, in fact, I’m told. But first some background. Some of you don’t need introducing to King Henry IV of Germany (1056-1106, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1084) and Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085): in fact, almost anyone I’ve ever taught probably still feels their jaws tighten when those names are spoken near them, but let’s forget that. For those of you who don’t know, the coincidence of these two in power was pretty much the ultimate clash of ruling ideologies in the Middle Ages. Put in extremely over-simplified brief, the question was which was the superior power, pope or emperor? The papacy maintained, unsurprisingly, that ultimately the popes held authority over the emperors because they were ultimately responsible to God for the emperors’ soul and because their concerns were eternal not worldly and so forth; and the emperors maintained that the papacy had no business mucking round in affairs of the world for exactly that reason and should back out. This was a less theoretical conflict than that makes it sound because hanging down from this high position were concerns about how far kings or popes could choose or appoint bishops, how far those bishops could hold lands from kings and under what terms, how far they had to obey the pope, and ultimately the only point about which anyone was even slightly prepared to compromise was the details of the ceremony by which bishops were given, or invested with, their landed properties by the king. As a result of this the whole shebang, which extends beyond Henry and Gregory but of which they were the mutual pinnacle, is usually known as the Investiture Controversy, or Crisis, or Contest, whatever, but it was not, really, about investiture; at a purely realistic level it was about land and men and power over them, at a more theoretical level it was about spiritual purity and freedom from corruption on the part of those administering the sacraments of Christianity to the people, and at the ultimately theoretical level it was about nothing less than control of the world.¹ So you can see why tweaking a few procedural details didn’t ultimately solve very much.

Teaching diagram of powers in the Investiture Controversy, not my best diagram ever alas

There are some tremendous sources for all this mess, because nothing got medieval churchmen writing so much as a threat to the medieval Church, and both Henry and Gregory had clever men on side who likely genuinely believed in their positions and argued them with heartfelt fervour.² There had also been genuine ties of respect between the young king and the middle-aged pope, and that probably also led to an extremity of feeling. Only thus, really, can you get a royal letter to a pope that addresses him by his old worldly name and as “false monk”, and finishes by commanding him to get down off the papal throne, “Descende, descende“, and be damned. And Gregory’s stuff was no less angry. Henry wound up excommunicated, and with papal backing for his opponent for the kingship, and Gregory eventually wound up dying in exile. All the same, heavy though this all is one could be forgiven for thinking that it was pretty much exclusively a concern of men of letters. OK, in Milan Gregory was encouraging street-mobs who broke in on the homes of priests whom they thought had paid for their orders and took all their property (the Patarenes) but otherwise, did any ordinary person care about all this stuff? It wasn’t as if either Gregory or Henry would actually be in control of the world if one of them won, after all. Well, thanks to a cunning numismatic contact, I can now say that it does look as if a bit more than parchment was used to try and get these points across, by Henry at least.

Reverse (top) and obverse (reverse) of silver penny of Liège

This appears to have been struck in Liège, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, and it does appear to show an investiture. The person who brought it to my attention suggests that it represents Henry IV investing his son, the future Henry V, with the regalia of kingship, but I’m not quite sure myself if that’s what it does in fact show, because the things that the senior, and certainly crowned, figure on the left appears to be conferring are a ring and a staff, the very symbols of episcopal investiture over which (in the Empire, at least) the Investiture Controversy was fought. And Liège was an episcopal mint under imperial control. Either, in other words, this coinage is explicitly saying, “You know what? Kings are kind of like bishops, and the Emperor gets to invest them, amirite?” or else it actually is a bishop getting his stuff, which would be an even clearer statement of the royalist orthodoxy. Presumably the relevant bishop owed the king pretty heavily: that would not be unusual.³ Anyway: there are apparently seven of these coins (which used to be attributed to Maastricht, but which my informant thinks—and I agree for what that’s worth—don’t quite match the types there), and they’ve been found as far afield as Estonia (which is where this one came up), in hoards and in single finds, so, although they presumably weren’t common, neither do they seem to have been a ceremonial issue that didn’t go anywhere.⁴ So I think we have to look at this as a genuine propaganda coinage and the Investiture Controversy must be where it fits. There’s a lot more to work out here but it’s the kind of thing historians should have paid attention to a while ago, really. I wonder what other types might have something to say about these issues?

508. Beyond the Invasion Narrative: the Roman world and its neighbours in late Antiquity, III – Romans and barbarians

Since, as recounted two posts ago, I’d realised on turning up in this strand that not only did it have a set of titles long enough to be a monograph series by some German academy, but also that it was where the excitement was likely to be for its duration, I was back in the Mortain Link Room at nine in the morning to see more. That went as follows:

• Alex Woolf, “From Civitas to Kingdom? Romanitas in the British provinces and beyond”.

Alex here raised with his customary sharpness of perception some important questions, not the least of which is what period were the “sub-Roman” British interested in imitating? The Roman buildings of Roman Britain were largely pre-third-century, for example. Does that mean that if someone was continuing to live like a fifth-century Romano-British noble, we would see him in his material leavings as British not Roman? Was public building and sculpture really the mark of Romanitas for these people, as it has been for some modern scholars? (Was it instead stone monumental inscriptions, basically only preserved from outwith the area of Roman government?) Alex also made the excellent point that the Old English wealh, usually translated as `foreigner’, was however not used of foreigners like the Vikings, the Gaels, Syrians, and so on, and that we might therefore do well to think of it as being linguistic, and applying to Romance-speakers only. How far Romance actually describes the language of lowland post-Roman Britain would be one of those questions where fewer people than usual would follow Alex’s arguments, I suspect, but the difference still wants an explanation.¹ Lots to think about here.

• James Fraser, “Thoughts on the Roman and Native Discoveries of Pictishness”


The ogam-inscribed symbol stone at Brands

This paper came very close to my areas of British interest, as you will understand when I say that James started by critiquing the idea that the Picts were a single people for whom a material culture identity might be detected. In this sense, as he observed, the classic volume The Problem of the Picts has itself become the problem.² Thereafter the paper became more of a historiographical survey of whom it is that the Picts’ identity has mattered to and how, but there were still some similarly live points, such as the observation that the word Brittones and its derivatives, originally Latin, appears to have been borrowed into the insular vernaculars only after a distinction had arisen between Britones and Picti; James can be found on record saying that probably the only difference between these groups was being inside or outside the frontier of the Roman Empire, which makes for linguistic difficulties as we’ve lately been seeing, but whether or not you buy that, he here has something that appears to need an explanation.³ James finally suggested that Pictishness was really a late construct used by state-building kings to meld a nation of disparate groups of peoples only lately differentiated from a generalised British identity, into a political unity opposed to English or Brittonic or indeed maybe Gaelic, stressing `barbarian’ cultural practices that were identifiable as such in Roman terms, like tattooing, like inscribing stones but not with Latin, and like deriving one’s origins from the Scythians, a reference that only makes sense in a Roman cultural complex.

I found all this pretty powerful, as you might expect from things I’ve said in the past, and asked in questions whom he thought the agents of this new cultural formation might be; he blamed the Church, which I think makes some kind of sense if we can see the Church as a tool of kings in this area. Before that however the session had been completed by…

• Fraser Hunter, “Breaking Down the Wall: Rome and North Britain in the late Roman period”

This was perhaps the least provocative paper of the three but that was not least because it was by far the best-evidenced, and left much less room for debate: Hunter showed simply that Roman luxury goods got beyond the wall into the lowland zone, and that after these goods stopped coming local cultural innovation attempted to make up the gap, which we kind of know, but that inside the walls a similar transition is happening from Roman soldier’s goods, money and gear to stuff that we would recognise as warband material. Rome, while it was active in the North of Britain, created haves and have-nots, but after it went only some of these people’s centres could keep some kind of supremacy going by continuing to import Romanitas. Thus, Dumbarton Rock and Edinburgh kept going, Birdoswald and others failed, and so the new political landscape was formed.

I don’t mind telling you that after this session was over my head was so full of thoughts that I obtained coffee, or at least the best available facsimile, and tried talking to Alex but had to excuse myself because I needed to try and write something down before everything I was thinking escaped; I couldn’t speak even to Alex in case it overwrote what I was struggling to articulate. After twenty-five minutes I had something like the plan of a paper, restating with extra nuance my thoughts about the regionality of the Pictish kingdom, and was able to put it away confident that some day I could write it (as indeed I subsequently have, though much of that first rush has then turned out to be unsustainable). That was the kind of session this had been for me, the kind that could not be fully contained in my head for the explosion of possibilities. “And I’m not even lying.”

608. Beyond the Invasion Narrative: the Roman world and its neighbours in late Antiquity, IV – new narratives in Hispania

Of course I don’t really work on Scotland any more, and if I ever finish that aforesaid paper it will likely be my goodbye to the research area. How convenient for me, then, that Professor Halsall’s excellent contributors also included a number of people interested in the Iberian peninsula!⁴? They were:

• Iñaki Martín Viso, “Fragmentation and Thin Polities: dynamics of the post-Roman Duero plateau”

The Duero plateau had been an integrated part of Roman Hispania, not rich but with many villas, but the events of the fifth century turned it into a frontier zone between the Sueves and Visigoths, neither of whom really had much governmental presence there, and as such seems to have localised its identity, with seniores loci mentioned by John of Biclaro and perhaps local coinage being issued. Hillforts grew up, though none have yet been dug so the association is kind of hypothetical. The Visigothic kingdom, when it re-established itself here, seems to have done so not least by giving the local élites rights to tax or withdrawing them, but the lack of towns meant that it was never an integrated part of Toledo’s enterprise. This does not however mean, argued Professor Martín, that it was not part of the state, and he argued that we should recognise this as a kind of `soft hegemony’ that might let us think usefully about how the successor states worked in their own terms, with the kings getting the status that kept them in power and the regions getting the autonomy that stopped them from wanting away from kings. We’ve seen something like this idea expressed here before, I think, so I was right down with this.

• Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo and Alfonso Vigil-Escalera, “The Elephant in the Room: new approaches to early medieval cemeteries in Spain”

Pretty much everything I know about burial in Visigothic Spain I read either in Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations or at Historian on the Edge, so I was keen to hear more from two names I have on several reading lists but have never quite got round to reading.⁵ The two of them, represented by Dr Vigil-Escalera alone, argued that categories like `Roman’ and `barbarian’ won’t cover this kind of evidence, which has urban `barbarians’, rustic `Romans’ and all kinds of other cross-category burials to accommodate, and that the variation could be explained without recourse to foreign populations, even if those were there; the burial evidence in their eyes neither proves nor disproves immigration. The archaeology instead shows a restlessness that is to be expected from a peninsula in political and economic turmoil. Instead of the stereotypes, they detect in the burial evidence a militarised élite interred in lead coffins, a lower grade of burial with few or no grave goods, and nothing visible beneath. Where there are cemeteries that associate with a settlement, 60-95% of graves are furnished, the figure being lower the later the cemetery runs; by the eighth century (but not till then!) grave furnishing had completely stopped. Beyond these generalisations, however, variation in this mortuary landscape was at the community level, not the level of whole `peoples’, and certainly can’t be broken down as `Roman’ vs. `Germanic’. Therefore, they asked, why blame barbarians?

• Guy Halsall, “Why Do We Need the Barbarians?”

In answer to that question came the last paper of the strand by Professor Halsall himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who’ve heard him speak or read him on the Internet, this was the one that really started the war. [Edit: and, indeed, some changes have been made to these paragraphs by request of one of those involved.] The consequences, if not of this actual speech, at least of its subsequent display on the Internet, have been various, unpleasant and generally regrettable, and I don’t want any of them myself. However, I think that what Professor Halsall was doing, which was to demand attention to the way that terms like `barbarians’ and `immigrants’ have been and are now deployed in political discourse, in short, to think who might be listening when we deploy these terms and for what, is something that it’s necessary to discuss. There may be other ways to say what he was saying, though they might be less effective. After all, an old colleague of mine sometimes gloomily observed of his scholarly opponents, “Y’know, you can’t change these guys’ minds, you can only wait until they die,” and obviously that’s not going to do much for public feeling and policy right now, which is where the fight is needed.



Dangerously empty bloviation

But the issues must not be dropped! Since 2006 I have been on the web proclaiming somewhat casually that when history is used it is almost always misused; glib and untheorised though that was when I wrote it, there is a point there, and it behoves us to keep an eye on what our work may be used for. Some people are more conscious of this than others, as the recent furore over the way that the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK appears to have picked up and run with the Conservative party’s campaign slogan in the last UK national elections shows; but this consciousness is usually with the misusers, and we could do with the same awareness from people who aren’t deliberately selling themselves for political funding (although it should be noted that the AHRC have claimed that they weren’t, without responding in any way to pressure to actually alter their agenda). How then do we fight the misuse of history by those with political agendas? Professor Halsall argued in questions that we have to take the fight to popular sources of information, to publish opinion columns, to get on the Internet, to colonise Wikipedia and not to assume that people can’t handle our sophistication. These seem like worthwhile, if taxing, endeavours that would bring us benefit whatever our politics. If the humanities were any good at coordinating our defence this would already have been encouraged in every faculty across the land, as PR for the industry of academia itself, dammit; instead they have successfully set us against each other and this is the result. Party politics, whether left-wing (do we still have one of those?), centrist or comfortable Conservative’s, really don’t signify here: there is no UK political party interested in funding the humanities. But you’ve read me on this before and you’ll read me on it again, so no more here.

The whole strand had been extremely provocative, as you can tell, and events subsequently revealed that it had perhaps been too much so, but I also think that we need to awaken some kind of social awareness about the uses, misuses, impact and importance of history. Everyone in the field must surely agree that that importance currently needs all the acknowledging, emphasising and directing that it can get. The furore over this presentation has unfortunately hidden these issues, which deserved to continue under discussion and not to become so personal as to be swamped in antagonism and threats. I’ll have more to say about this here—probably not very insightful but one should not stay silent—but for the meantime I can only advise you to keep a close eye on Historian on the Edge, for reflection on the social and moral imperatives of our work, whether you agree with him or not. We’d all like to think our work was socially and morally important, I’m sure, so it seems natural to consider how that might work out, doesn’t it?

717. Between Palatium and Civitas: political and symbolic spaces throughout the Middle Ages

Anyway. That was the final session in Professor Halsall’s strand, and things calmed down somewhat after lunch. Since time is short and the backlog long I’m therefore going to tackle the rest of the day in briefer form. I crossed the campus now to Weetwood Hall and there heard these people speak:

• Martin Gravel, “Built on Expectation and Remembrance: the visitation of kings as the symbolic recognition of palaces in Carolingian West Francia”
• Aurélien le Coq, “Contestation, Networks, and Places of Power in Grenoble during the Gregorian Reform: Guigues of Albon’s trajectory”
• Alexandra Beauchamp, “Royal Court and Capitals of the Crown of Aragon in the XIVth century”

Originally scheduled for this session had been Josianne Barbier, doyenne of the Frankish fisc, and given how much her work featured in my reading for that dead-stick Kalamazoo paper of a couple of years back, I’d been rather hoping to meet her. Alas it was not to be, but these papers were also interesting, for especially Martin’s, which wanted to look closer at what kings actually do with their palaces beyond turn up, issue charters (not always them of course) and leave. With a few documents of Charles the Bald and Louis the Stammerer he was able to do this, showing that certain palaces had certain functions and that they weren’t all equivalent. Obvious, perhaps, conceptually, but hard to prove! Martin did so. We subsequently proved to have an almost-inconvenient overlap of interests with regard to the later Carolingians and I’m looking forward to more of his work. Le Coq, meanwhile, I would like to give due honour for using the term “ecclesiamento” to describe the way that Grenoble came to be grouped around the bishop’s properties and interests in his period of study, and Beauchamp’s careful attempt to try and say something about how large the Aragonese court actually was, on a day-to-day basis, from an unpromising source base, was a near-perfect example of how to present a few key interesting things from what was clearly a much larger piece of work.

805. The Archaeology of Early Medieval Fortified Settlements in Different Regions of Europe

I try and go to as much of the relevant archaeological stuff at Leeds as possible, because there’s never very much and I want to encourage it, but also because it’s usually very interesting and full of information I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. This time I was also hoping to see and meet Marco Valenti, who is a name that crops up all over what had then been my recent reading, but in this I was disappointed. What we got was:

• Neil Christie, “Burhs and Defence: assessing the military status of later Saxon burhs“
• Marco Valenti, “Early Medieval Fortified Settlements in Italy from the 6th to the 10th Centuries”
• Hajnalka Herold, “Fortified Settlements of the 9th and 10th Centuries in Central Europe”

You will be observing that Valenti appears still to have been there, but in fact, his paper was read by Professor Christie, a compromise that was certainly better than no paper but didn’t enable the kind of debate it would have been good to have. In short, Christie himself gave the audience a quick introduction to the fortification programme rolled out by the kings of Wessex in their fight back against the Vikings, and asked how much actual use the fortifications, many of which have come to be towns now and may always have been meant to, were. Christie preferred to see them more as exercises in literally building community, while I might prefer to see them as exercises in power demonstration, like Offa’s Dyke; certainly, Asser seems to show us that the relevant communities didn’t necessarily feel it.⁶ The Valenti paper, next, concentrated on castles in Tuscany, for a long time supposedly part of a major set of social changes just before or in the eleventh century that we know well round here, but by the kind of survey Valenti has been able to demonstrably a much longer-term phenomenon, starting in the ninth century if not before. There has of course been very little digging of such sites but what has been dug has forced this kind of re-evaluation too (as previously reported here indeed). Lastly Hajnalka, whose work I’d met at Kalamazoo the previous year, reintroduced me and introduced everyone else to her extremely interesting élite settlement at Gars Thunau in Austria, which has in its history a ninth-century building programme that seems to be chronologically, but not otherwise, connected to a sea-change in the development of such sites over a wider area, all of which nonetheless show no archaeological connections with each other. There’s something big here which has yet to be identified, clearly; Dawn Hadley asked what and Hajnalka said that the presence of the Church needs to be looked at, but that it will only explain some sites. Nonetheless, paradigms like Martin Carver‘s of a reaction in stone to such new power groups might well help here.⁷

Now, after this was the blogger meet-up, which was quite odd in the way it worked out. I was late, I forget why but probably not for any good reason, and the Naked Philologist and Magistra were left to coordinate the initial stages without me even though neither knew each other. By the time I arrived, it was busy but not with people I knew, which was good but unexpected. I can now remember only two of these people, Livejournallers rather than deliberate academic bloggers both, so I won’t name them in case they don’t want their personal lives linked to, but it was a pleasure to meet them and others, and I seem to recall that the gathering went on for a long time. I know that by the time I got to the St Andrews reception they’d run out of wine, but I also remember that this had somehow happened far faster than they’d anticipated so it may still have been quite early. In any case, company remained good and chatter plentiful, as afterwards seemed to have been so for a great deal of the conference, and it had been a stirring day.

For by gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding, and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and ealdormen and nobles, and his thegns most dear to him, and reeves as well… to his own will and to the general advantage of the whole realm. But if, during the course of these royal admonitions, the commands were not fulfilled because of the people’s laziness, or else (having been begun too late in a time of necessity) were not finished in time to be of use to those working on them (I am speaking here of fortifications commanded by the king which have not yet [c. 883] been begun, or else, having been begun late in the day, have not yet been brought to completion) and enemy forces burst in by land or by sea (or, as frequently happens, by both!) then those who had opposed the royal commands were humiliated in meaningless repentance by being reduced to virtual extinction.

This passage doesn’t make me like Asser or Alfred any better, actually.

7. As in for example M. Carver, Sutton Hoo: burial ground of kings (London 1998), esp. pp. 52-93.

If I’d had two days
I would not be writing
Because I’d be sleeping
Or reading, slowly
Because term is ended,
The last meeting done
And I am so tired
That everything’s difficult
Especially getting up
(And, weirdly, going to bed).
Also, I have a cold
So thick you could cut it
Like smelly French cheese
That runs in the heat
And I really want
To fall over and rest.
If I’d had two days
I’d be there right now.
But there’s this paper.
It is overdue
And I’ve just not been able
To get four hours straight
To work these last weeks
To gather the sources
To bump them together
And think about them.
Instead I’ve been building
Slight lean-tos of words
Through which I lace charters
Like erudite wattle
Hoping each will stand up
And when it won’t, rebuilding.
Like science, if you squint
But alas, not so much
As to make a good paper.
It may yet be scholarship;
I can’t tell from here.
If I’d had two days
I’d have done it tomorrow
After sleeping a bit
And I would feel better
But libraries shut
On Sunday round here
And Monday is all forms
For interviews Tuesday
That run until Thursday
After which comes collapse.
In any case, Monday
Is now the new due date.
So I had one day
And one day was all
I could wholly spend
On this task, and so
I have spent all that day
And small hours besides
The paper is done
It will do, it’s enough—
In fact it’s too much
But leave that aside:
I’ve accomplished my task
I wrote on demand
In the way that I do, but
If I’d had two days
I can’t tell you how much
I would rather have slept.

The Stables pub, location of the occasional pint during the Congress

Actually I think I ought to start with the previous evening, when I arrived back from Lastingham and very shortly afterwards actually met she who is the Naked Philologist, who was more clothed and less immediately philological than advertised but still a splendid person and one whom it has been great to get to know then and subsequently. She was entirely surrounded by fellow female research students, and when I broke away from this gathering, to go find food or something, I got accused by a senior male colleague at the next table of departing “my harem”. My harem? My harem? Damn heteronormativity everywhere. Anyway; not very academic but it got the drinking started in good order and the academia followed next day. As to that, I skipped on the keynote lecture, which I’d already heard a version of one half of when Robin Fleming gave it at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and in the other half of which I wasn’t for some reason very interested (not sure why, as Sam Cohn is always interesting), but if you are, Magistra was there and wrote a blog post about it. Thus, the day started with this.

108. Small Worlds, Wide Horizons: local powers in the early Middle Ages

If there was a theme to this Leeds for me, other than always being among friends new and old, which I was and which was great, it was “sessions that felt like part of the Texts and Identities strand but weren’t”. Instead, this session was the extension, I think, of a conversation between Carine van Rhijn, Wendy Davies and myself at Leeds in 2009 about probably actually having the material to say something about local priests and their role in organising their communities in our respective areas. This was not that work, but it was in the same vein, and the people who were participating had all been in Texts and Identities at some point I think, though two also in my charters sessions of yore, so obviously I had to be there. The running order was:

• Steffen Patzold, “Priests and Local Power Brokers, 8th-9th Centuries”
• Bernhard Zeller, “Of the Lives of Centenarii and Related Local Powers in Early Medieval Alemannia, 8th-9th Centuries”
• Wendy Davies, “How Local was the Power of the Saio in Northern Iberia around 1000?”

This was all really interesting regional comparisons. Steffen had several pieces of evidence that appeared to show Bavarian and Italian cases of local communities effectively appointing their priests, and used this to vary the picture of the sorts of priests we could have found in Carolingian localities, appointed by people, princes or several kinds of power in between. Bernhard was looking at a layer of local officials in the St Gallen charters he knows so well who have titles like “centenarius”, “vicarius” and “centurius”, which as you’ll understand from last post interested me considerably. The last he only sees around Zürich, and they seem to be quite junior, whereas vicars were more serious contenders than anything less than the counts; Bernhard figured that these guys’ small range probably suggested they belonged to localities rather than being put there by the counts. This is not much like what I see but then where I see any of these terms but vicarius it’s where there aren’t really counts, and when they’re about to be the last ones using the word, so this may give me some idea of what an early Carolingian local administration looks like before you take its lid off and bake it for a century or so. Wendy, meanwhile, who as usual explicitly excepted Catalonia from her remarks, was looking at the closest early medieval Spain had to policemen, though a more accurate simile might be court bailiffs; she found saiones working for all sorts of judicial officials, from kings downwards, far from the Gothic origins of the title as armed followers, and all over the north of Spain, confined to areas of no more than 40km², or at least, not appearing outside those areas using their title. This gave me a lot of context for my own limited observations about saiones in Vallfogona.¹ All of this was right up my street, down my alley and in my grills, as it were, so I thought I’d started well.

221. Gift-Giving: gift-giving and objects

I then followed a sense of obligation; I used to work with Rory Naismith, and have somehow never managed to catch one of his papers at Leeds, so now that he was on alongside Stuart Airlie I wasn’t going to miss it. Here, however, Magistra has beaten me to the blogging (not hard) so I shall save some catch-up time by referring you to her post again. The running order, though, was:

• Irene Barbiera, “Offering Brooches to the Dead: the changing gendered value of a gift between Antiquity and the early Middle Ages”
• Rory Naismith, “Making the World Go Round? Coinage and Gift in Early Medieval England and Francia (c. 675-900)”
• Stuart Airlie, “The Star Cloak of Henry II”

The only thing I’ll add to what Magistra says is that I was pleased to see Rory finding a way to respectfully step round Philip Grierson’s venerable article, “Commerce in the Dark Ages”, that I love so much, without losing its essential point, which was that coins are not enough to prove trading links because they can travel in other ways too.² Now, as Rory pointed out, we have incredible amounts more finds evidence than Grierson did in 1959, so we have to give more space to trade than he did but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right about the alternatives. Rory then went on to note various coinages and references to coinage that make more sense viewed as gifts than as currency. With the other two papers I think I have nothing to say that Magistra didn’t already so I’ll move on.

308. Beyond the Invasion Narrative: the Roman World and its Neighbours in late Antiquity, II – Changing Minds?

This strand looked, from the outside, like another Texts and Identities strand under new colours, though somehow including Guy Halsall, but a closer look revealed that something more challenging was going on; Guy had organised a strand with some real heavy-hitters on to ask serious and sometimes dangerous questions about how we as historians should deal with the supposed barbarian invasions that have for so long been supposed to bring about the end of the Roman Empire in the West, given the loads of work there has been suggesting that this is too simple, or even outright wrong. So either way it was a must-see, and in the first one I made it to I saw this.

• Walter Pohl, “Ethnicity and its Discontents”

This paper was substantially a pained but wry self-defence against what Professor Pohl felt was misrepresentation of his work by Walter Goffart in a recent publication, and misunderstanding of it in exactly the opposite direction by Marco Valenti; he therefore disclaimed belief in stable ethnic groups, the shared common cores of élite traditions proposed by Reinhard Wenskus, the culturally-constructed imaginary communities that extreme dissolutionists hold to (which Professor Pohl would accept if it were allowed that they can be actively created by people), and groups with no self-identification. Instead he argued for groups of persons that felt and acted with common interests, however recently-created, entry to which was to an extent governed by an in-group and recognised by out-groups, as a necessary basis for a self-identification. I understand how this concept is misunderstood; it kinds of slips from one’s hands when you try to press it to explain historical events, but that isn’t, I think, what Professor Pohl holds it for; he holds it as a working account of ethnicity. That is quite an important thing to have, if we can get one…

• Tommaso Leso, “Shifting Identities and Marriage in Ostrogothic Italy”

This drew out the various categories of marriage choice for the women of the Ostrogothic royal family and went through them in detail. This was one of those ones where if you want to know about it, you want to know more than I can tell you, but if it matters and you can’t get in touch with Signor Leso I’m happy to type out my notes in an e-mail.

• Roland Steinacher, “Response”

In the absence of one of the originally-planned papers, Herr Steinacher gave a response, and observed that political correctness makes the necessary argument difficult to have here; these things still really matter to people, and some writers are selling to those people without due care for the facts or opinions of their peers. He named names but I won’t, not here; he was far from the last to do so in these sessions, and I’ll say more about that in the second day’s report.

It’s hard for me to take a position in these debates that are about both the field and the people in it, especially on the open Internet, but you may deduce something if you choose from the fact that now I knew where the action was I stayed in these sessions till they ran out. More on this, therefore, as soon as I can. Presumably I did something in the evening; I remember that whatever it was kept me away from the Early Medieval Europe reception until all their wine had run out, so it must have been good, and probably involved good people and average alcohol. If you were one of the people, I’m sorry four months have blurred you out of my memory of the day but trust me, I remember you out of context…

The church of Sant Esteve de Palautordera, from Catalan Wikipedia

Well, why on earth not? Look at the ornamentation along the top of the nave there. I gather the tower was rebuilt in 1581 so that shouldn’t necessarily have caught me, but still. And worse, I should have known because I’ve read about it, albeit in the first documents I read relating to this area, not even during my doctorate but during my M. Phil. At that point, though, I had no connection to the place at all and wouldn’t have known the name, which is: Sant Esteve de Palautordera. It is documented as early as 862, in a grant by King Charles the Bald of the Western Franks to Count Sunyer I of Empúries, interesting as it’s a way from his territory as we know it.¹ Perhaps because of that, by 908 the church was with Count Guifré II Borrell of Barcelona, Girona and Osona, whose tomb I went to see this time out; and by 911 he had passed it onto the monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès, whose tower I use as my avatar. So every which way I turn the place is connected to something I’ve already done, and I found this out how? By idly checking the place out in the Catalunya Romànica when writing up the post on Sant Pere de Vilamajor.² Now of course the church you can see is not the church that was being granted and that presumably dated to my period, this being twelfth-century where it’s older than the rebuild and the original probably being wooden, but nonetheless the site, where I have been only for completely non-historical reasons, is positively loaded with significances I never knew.

There are two further reasons this is embarrassing. The first is the name of the place. You may be aware from my earlier writings here that place-names in Palau- are thought significant by some writers in this area; mostly the fact that the word, which is translatable as ‘palace’, crops up is taken to mean that they were once fiscal estates, and indeed, I found when studying Gurb that one of the largest of these areas, Palau de Voltregà, was almost entirely held by the comital family in the early tenth century and that its alienation to Santa Maria de Ripoll (without which, and their eventual loss of it to Santa Pere de Vic, we wouldn’t know much about it) required the signature of a mysterious judge called Centuri son of Centuri, whose status I examine in that little paper I was suggesting you buy the other day but who seems to have been concerned solely with fiscal properties.³ Now, there is an alternative view espoused by Ramon Martí of the Universitat de Girona that these place-names actually represent Muslim garrison sites from the brief Muslim occupation of Catalonia.⁴ This, shall we say, has not commanded universal acceptance, and if you follow the first link in this paragraph you will be taken to a paragraph where not only do I not accept it, I bring up an old story about one such place where the ‘Palau’ appears to have been the bishop’s sixteenth-century tithe barn, or so at least is the local story. You know where that place was? That’s right, here. You know when the place-name is first attested? 986.⁵ The local story is wrong. I should just shut up sometimes.

And the second reason? I found out in the Catalunya Romànica that Sant Esteve has what is apparently a rather fine relief of the Mother of God dating from about the same time as the tower rebuild, but I didn’t see it. (Neither can I find a photo online.) I didn’t see it because I was actually in the church for a service, for reasons to do with my domestic life and not for explanation here, but which were enough to cause minor ructions with the people I was staying with who had to get me down there. So things were already fraught, and I tend to find dropping in on others’ worship embarrassing, as I have none of my own. It doesn’t help when the service is not in a language in which I am comfortable—all the behavioural clues have to be got from movements of the congregation—and accompanied by an invisible guitar rather than anything more high church, which is what my limited Anglican experience tended to be. Organs, you know, which you could supposedly find in the most isolated Catalan churches in the ninth century after all. Anyway, the whole thing was sufficiently trying that I sat at the back and snuck out soon after it was over, and thus never actually went in far enough to realise how old the place or its paintwork were. I should hand back my historical explorer’s badge and my qualifications as a historian of the medieval Church. So okay, now I’ve confessed I feel a bit better, but no less stupid. But it was best that you know.

The excursion with which I preceded Leeds didn’t just go to Whitby, but called at Lastingham on the way back, which has a lesser but roughly contemporary significance as being a church founded by one of the earliest bishops of the English, Cedd of the East Saxons. That does raise the question of why he had a base in Northumbria here, but Cedd does seem to be a bit like a minor Wilfrid; he picked up land in several kingdoms, founded monasteries here and there and was at the Synod of Whitby in 663 deciding the fate of the Church of which he was a member, though unlike Wilfrid he died of plague in 664 so couldn’t create problems for Archbishop Theodore‘s grand attempt to make the English Church make sense from 673 onwards.

Church of St Mary, Lastingham, seen from the east, downhill

Cedd’s church is not what is now here, but what is here is almost as interesting if, like myself, you are a paid-up member of Team Romanesque. But for the dismal-looking sky, you could be forgiven for thinking I’d slipped a Catalan church in by mistake, couldn’t you? Round apse? Three-aisle layout? There are even double-arched windows in the tower, though they are trefoil arches rather than what you’d find in my area of study. The point is, anyway, this is an unusually Continental-looking piece of Romanesque building even if much about it is also typically English.

North-west corner and tower of St Mary's Lastingham

Once you get inside, too, the Romanesque impression continues: it’s rather delicately done here in fact but it does also do the thing that Romanesque does so well, of looking much more massive than it really should do given the space there is.

Nave and chancel of St Mary's Lastingham, with vaulting and internal Gothic arches

I include the people here more or less for scale, to support my point about constrained massivity, but you can also see here that we have Gothic arches inside; the whole building seems to have had something of a refit after a while and so here, arguably, we have the best of both worlds and indications that a reasonable amount of wealth was being spent here every now and then.

Carved stone in the crypt of St Mart's Lastingham, showing two serpents intertwined

Another carved stone in the crypt

One of the pillar bases supporting the vault in the crypt

But beneath, beneath there are signs that recall that this was not the first church here. The crypt, as well as a vault that seems to have been lowered at some point, as the corners of the room (which I couldn’t get a good picture of) show, contains quite a bit of the oldest stone-work. This may include the four columns that hold up the vault; Glynn Coppack‘s view, which he generously admitted was not the only one, was that if there is any Saxon fabric in the building it is the bases of these columns, which seem to be capitals that have been turned upside-down. (Again, hard to photograph well in the light, sorry.)

Cross slab reused as a door lintel

But of course this still wouldn’t be Cedd’s church, which is very unlikely to have been stone anyway. Still, there are bits, here and there, that may not be that much younger. I had to have this one pointed out to me:

And yes, that is a tombstone recycled as a lintel. But also, in a tiny room off the crypt, which appears to be a blinded stairwell that doesn’t make sense any more with the upper floor, there are these, which if anything appear to me to be cross-fragments.

This reminds me of nothing so much as a picture used by John Blair in a 1988 article of the church of Bakewell in Derbyshire, where the cross fragments have actually been recycled into the walls. Here, apparently, they had less use for them and just dumped them in a corner, or more likely in a heap, whence the few remaining bits were eventually dumped in this corner come some later building works, because by then they were of antiquarian interest. And indeed, they still are, though as yet they have not had much study. The whole place is worth a look, then, not least because it’s a rather nice building, especially inside, but also because more than many a church, this one has a good few questions whose answers it has not, yet, given up.

Altar in the crypt, where the mysteries should presumably be focussed

Cover of Richard Hodges's Goodbye to the Vikings?

Lately, or at least, as I first wrote this post it was lately, I have been chomping through Richard Hodges’s Goodbye to the Vikings?, which is a reprint volume containing ten of the controversial archæologist’s more recent papers and a couple of new bits.¹ I was doing this because someone had asked me, in the then-continuing absence of Hodges’s update of his 1982 book Dark Age Economics, the one that made his name, whether there was anything relevant in this volume, and there is in fact an essay reprinted from W. A. van Es’s Festschrift called “Dark Age Economics Revisited”.² Having skimmed that I thought I’d probably better read the book while I had it out of the library and having done that, I thought I might give some kind of account of it here.

I have been something of a fan of Hodges’s work, which I put down partly to its genuine quality—Dark Age Economics is legendarily impenetrable in parts but the other parts gave me a completely different view of the development of early medieval Western Europe than I could have got from anywhere else, and you’ve seen me praise his The Anglo-Saxon Achievement here before, even though I understand that it is not well-thought of³—but my adulation was doubtless also down to the way he habitually pitches his work. Only reading this volume has made this advertising strategy fully visible to me. Firstly, the reader is told that historians now have to give way to archæologists to fully understand the early medieval period, because texts have all these problems and there are only so many of them, whereas archæology on the other hand is always producing new stuff. Secondly, Hodges and his friends are the sole merchants of this new learning; it’s not that everyone else is stupid or blinkered, it’s just that the sites Hodges chooses to be interested in or is excavating are presented as the most exciting, significant and revolutionary ones there are. And, fair enough, Hamwic and San Vincenzo al Volturno really have changed our ideas about early medieval material culture and its interconnections. I’m less convinced about the revolutionary potential of Butrint, its big significance appears to be more or less ‘sites in Albania surprisingly like sites elsewhere on Balkan coast despite Albanian exceptionalism’.⁴ But, never mind that; the point is that the revolution is always happening right now, because of this new site, even though when you go back to Hodges’s earliest work you realise that this has now been his line for thirty years.

This kind of presentation, pursued with relentless energy and a considerable writing productivity, is a big part of what makes Hodges’s work exciting.⁵ It may therefore have been a mistake to combine so many papers that pitch this line from so many different eras in the one book, as one starts to wonder why the revolution hasn’t yet happened. It must not be 1998 yet! and so on. We have a mission statement of an introduction, revised heavily from a piece in Archaeology magazine, which is then reprised in the conclusion (new in the volume); its agendas are also picked up in a chapter on Pirenne, and somewhat in the van Es tribute piece. More England-focussed pieces reprise the themes of The Anglo-Saxon Achievement, and one paper on Butrint (or, more interestingly, on the politics of Albanian archæology) stands rather alone. There is also a solid seventy pages pulled out of various publications on San Vincenzo al Volturno, and these are perhaps the most valuable because they have been very well-chosen to give an overall view of the site and its significance, and also present some change in its evaluation over time.⁶ It may be significant that Hodges says in his introduction that these are the pieces he hasn’t revised.⁷ This also means that you can see the spin developing, mind, as we move from the presentation of the place that he published as A Dark Age Pompeii (because of the site’s rapid destruction and abandonment in 881 after a Saracen attack) to a more nuanced one incorporating a durée plus longue that chooses explicitly not to see the site as a Pompeii-like snapshot.⁸ The reader doesn’t get this shift in thinking in order, but one can see it happening. Only very rarely, however, does Hodges reflect on his own views; even in “Dark Age Economics Revisited” this is kept to a minimum compared to lining up more data in pursuit of the original study’s aims. So it always looks new and exciting.

The volume mainly impressed me with style, then, but that shouldn’t be taken to diminish the quality of the actual data or analysis, just the way it’s presented. Actually you can learn a lot from this volume, even if you might learn less if you’ve already read The Anglo-Saxon Achievement or (especially) Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne.⁹ Sometimes, however, just sometimes, the presentation has got on top of the sense. So with a paper called “Charlemagne’s Elephant”, which is quite fun in its way, using the elephant as a synecdoche of the long-range trade routes of Charlemagne’s era, and especially with the title article, “Goodbye to the Vikings?”, originally only two pages in History Today, which expands one of the other piece’s ideas.¹⁰ The core idea will look familiar to anyone who’s followed either Guy Halsall’s take on the fall of the Roman Empire or me telling you about that here; just as Guy argues that the fall of the Empire caused the barbarian invasions and not vice versa, so here Hodges argues that it was the collapse of the trade and patronage networks of Charlemagne’s era as the Carolingian Empire broke up that created the massive Scandinavian attacks of the First Viking Age. The problem with this as pitched by Hodges, however, is twofold. Firstly, of course, it falls victim to the Grierson Objection, that not all goods move by trade.¹¹ This looks particularly obvious when Hodges pauses to marvel at how the towns of the English Danelaw, created out of almost nothing, could start and sustain a good silver coinage where Northumbria itself had only had copper coins before the Vikings arrive. Leaving aside that that copper coinage is now being seen as a sign of commercialisation, I tell you, the words Danegeld or tribute do not feature here; it’s all trade.¹² No matter how important long-distance trade may or may not have been, there is something missing here.

Then of course there’s the chronology. It is certainly true that the bulk of the Viking attacks occurred in the second half of the ninth century and thereafter, and possibly even truer that the break-up of the Danish state has something to do with the collapse of its neighbour (which had been piling wealth into its various factions for a while) even if that process is obscure to us. But since the attacks began well before Charlemagne was even Emperor, it’s obviously not the whole answer, and then Timothy Reuter’s explanations based on richness and military over-stretch return to play and look very much as if they would explain both phases of activity.¹³ So: at the very least, I don’t think we can “say goodbye to the Vikings as we have known them”, if by that Hodges means forget that they appropriated wealth by many means and especially violence as well as trade.¹⁴ But also, although there is loads of good stuff here, the same things are made so much of so repeatedly that I am now much less anxious to read Dark Age Economics: a new audit than I was before it came out, because I suspect it will tell me rather less than I’d hoped, and this was not the result I expected from reading this volume.

It is good for historians and archaeologists to be provoked into rethinking the fundamental development of early English society, but this book is a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, many of his assertive conjectures will attract blind support. Had he indulged his penchant for the latest anthropological theories at the start, had he administered our dose of “commoditisation” before the last chapter, we could have been sure that only reviewers would have struggled with the whole book!

I deduce from the opening satire of Hodges’s stand against élite-driven text-based history (much like mine above) that the writer of the The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester 1984) felt himself implicated in the critique, but that closing paragraph tells you quite a lot about both book and reviewer.

4. Although the article here about Butrint, Hodges & W. Bowden, “Balkan Ghosts? Nationalism and the Question of Rural Continuity in Albania” in Neil Christie (ed.), Landscapes of Change: rural evolution in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Aldershot 2004), pp. 195-222, repr. in Hodges, Goodbye to the Vikings?, pp. 39-62, is interesting precisely because it tackles the historiography of that exceptionalism and does quite a lot to set the Albanian finds in context.

5. There are of course other things that are exciting about Hodges’s work too, and they might include, for example: a genuinely large-scale perspective with many comparanda; a theory-informed view of the economy, even of this period, as a system with rules that can be understood; an eye for the ordinary person in the record; and a good choice of illustrative anecdote. But the polemical prose certainly has to come in there too.

6. In order referred to, with reprint pages in brackets: R. Hodges, “The Not-So-Dark Ages” in Archaeology Vol. 51 no. 5 (Long Island City 1998), pp. 61-65, rev. as “Introduction: new light on the Dark Ages” (1-18); idem, “Pirenne and the Question of Demand in the Sixth Century” in W. Bowden & R. Hodges (edd.), The Sixth Century: production, distribution and demand, The Transformation of the Roman World 3 (Leiden 2003), pp. 3-14 (rev. 19-27); idem, “Dark Age EconomicsRevisited”; idem, “King Arthur’s Britain and the End of the Western Roman Empire” (new 28-38); idem, “Society, Power and the First English Revolution” in Il Secolo di Ferro: mito e realtà del secolo X, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 38 (Spoleto 1991), pp. 125-157 (rev. 163-175); Hodges & Bowden, “Balkan Ghosts”; Hodges, “San Vincenzo al Volturno and the Plan of St. Gall” in R. Hodges (ed.), San Vincenzo al Volturno 2: the 1980-86 excavations, part II (London 1995), pp. 153-175 (80-116); Hodges, “Beyond Feudalism: monasteries and their management in the eighth and ninth centuries” in I longobardi dei ducati di Spoleto e Benevento: atti del XVI Congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 20-23 ottobre 2002, Benevento 24-27 ottobre 2002 (Spoleto 2003), pp. 1077-1098 (141-156); Hodges, “The Ninth-Century Collective Workshop at San Vincenzo al Volturno” in J. Emerick (ed.), Archaeology in Architecture: essays in honour of Cecil Lee Striker (Mainz 2005), pp. 75-87 (117-140).

7. He says, p. viii:

Some essays have been either partially rewritten or modified for this book; others, such as those relating to the ongoing excavations at San Vincenzo al Volturno (Italy), are unaltered. Even where the essays have been altered, I have not attempted to provide amplified bibliographies. To do this would belie the purpose of the book as impressionable sketches about general historical themes.

This leaves it fairly unclear what has been messed with how much, though all but the San Vincenzo chapters do have updated references.

8. R. Hodges, A Dark Age Pompeii: San Vincenzo al Volturno (London 1990); cf. idem, “San Vincenzo al Volturno and the Plan of St Gall” from five years later where he says, “The essence of modern archaeology is not what has been termed the ‘Pompeii premise’ – the prospect of finding a place fossilised from one moment in time (Binford 1981) – but the reverse, the opportunity to record how a place has evolved through time” (pp. 80-81 of the reprint, citing L. R. Binford, “Behavioural Archaeology and the ‘Pompeii Premise’” in Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 37 (1981), pp. 195-208).

9. R. Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: archaeology and the beginnings of English society (London 1989), as rev. by Brooks, ref. n. 2 above; Hodges, Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (London 2000).

10. Hodges, “Charlemagne’s Elephant” in History Today Vol. 50 (London 2000), pp. 21-27, and “Goodbye to the Vikings?”, ibid. 54 (London 2004), pp. 29-30, repr. in idem, Goodbye to the Vikings?, pp. 72-79 & 157-162.

11. P. Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 9 (London 1959), pp. 123-40, repr. in idem, Dark Age Numismatics, Variorum Collected Studies 96 (London 1979), II.

12. Hodges, “Goodbye to the Vikings”, pp. 159-160 of the reprint:

Worse still, Northumbrian coins of the central decades of this period – the so-called stycas – contained pitiful measures of silver in their otherwise copper-rich contents (Hodges 1989: 162). How, we should be asking, did the Danish kings of Jorvik suddenly find the silver to replace the devalued Northumbrian currency with a silver-rich coinage meeting international standards?

He goes on to look for, but not explicitly to find, the explanation in the levels of monetisation demonstrated by the so-called ‘productive sites’, on which see Tim Pestell & Katharina Ulmschneider (edd.), Markets in Early Medieval Europe: trading and ‘productive’ sites, 650-850 (Macclesfield 2003), in this case especially Mark Blackburn, “‘Productive’ Sites and the Pattern of Coin Loss in England, 600-1180″, pp. 20-36 there. Cf. also D. M. Metcalf, “The Monetary Economy of Ninth-Century England South of the Humber: a topographical analysis” in Mark Blackburn & David Dumville (edd.), Kings, Currencies and Alliances: history and coinage of southern England in the ninth century (Cambridge 1998), pp. 167-198.

13. T. Reuter, “Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 35 (London 1985), pp. 75-94, repr. in †Reuter, Medieval polities and modern mentalities, ed. Janet Nelson (Cambridge 2006), pp. 231-250.

14. Hodges, “Goodbye to the Vikings”, p. 162 of the reprint.

Skyline showing the ruins of Whitby Abbey from the carpark

Has everyone else finished their Leeds reports yet? Must be time for me to start then! Leeds, in this instance, being for those new to the blog where each year the principal European conference on medieval studies is held, the International Medieval Congress. I have been going for many years and intend to continue to for a while yet, though this coming year taking less active a role. Anyway. I had an excellent Leeds this year but it started early, because for once I had time to go on one of the excursions that are arranged as part of the conference, which was to Whitby. I’d been to Whitby before for a friend’s wedding during the Goth Weekend, and that was, shall we say, not as medieval as it sounds except that as I recall I spent most of the weekend in our room minding my infant son and reading Pauline Stafford’s Unification and Conquest as teaching preparation. In particular, I never got a proper look round the Abbey.

North transept of Whitby Abbey

As you can see, I fixed that. The abbey is largely thirteenth-century and largely ruined, though more of it stood than now does until 1914, when a German cruiser squadron bombarding the East Coast managed to put this hole in a wall.

Once were walls...

Not totally clear what they were aiming at, but that’s what they got, apparently. These and other details were supplied by our excellent guide, Glynn Coppack, and we had plenty of time to wander around and appreciate details by ourselves. I took loads of pictures, and can’t share them all, but there are some I took with particular people or facets in mind, so I’ll put them below the cut, along with one snapped by and kindly shared by the estimable Kathleen Neal, international medievalist extraordinaire, famed dancer and warmly regarded by all who know her, who had booked on the same trip by coincidence and who afforded me that vital asset for tourism, someone to point cool stuff out to. There was plenty…

Three stories of arcading from the main nave

Where it’s still up it extends, in its full Gothic complexity, to some height in some parts…

Windows viewed through windows

… and in others to some depth.

Apparently much of the Anglo-Saxon site’s location is suspected but has not been dug, or even surveyed which I find bizarre and improbable. One part that has, however, is the cemetery, but then that was easier to work out the placing of…

Column bases and ruined arcades

And there were plenty of living people around and about also, wandering the ruins. The ruins are actually quite informative about construction if you interrogate them carefully.

Inscribed stone reused in one of the arcade columns

Exposed core of a ruined column

But quite a lot has gone however you cut it, and some details can’t easily be recovered. Here, at least, is some vaulting (for Vaulting; sorry, there was no vellum available but then you have as much as you need…):

Detail of vaulting in the north nave

And some finer details of the ornament that had escaped me did not elude the eagle eye of Mrs Neal. Heads up!

Heads as ornament of an arched window

There is also a quite nice little visitor centre attached, to which we also went, and they have some perhaps older things, which I probably shouldn’t have been photographing but hey I’m sure no-one will find out from the Internet, right?

Sculpture fragment found in excavations

For Nicola and Michelle, some memorials of the Saxon abbey, including an actual memorial that has been read as belonging to one of the abbesses, I’m not going to try and guess which.

For Katrin, the textile-working stuff found in the 1930s digs. And then lastly a short selection from the church of St Mary nearby, which unlike a great many medieval churches, most of which were modified, added to, made over, filled up, padded out, and a dozen other things, has not subsequently had this work removed, and is thus a bit crowded:

Interior of St Mary's Whitby looking towards pulpits from nave

Pretty much whichever way you look. Mind your head!

Crossing and north transept

There was also a display of some stuff from the abbey that we might otherwise have missed, some of which is poignant enough even without the captioning:

But lighter relief was brought by one or two things that just caption themselves:

Hagioscope!

And outside back at the bus there was another of those:

What, you mean nobody told you? Well, now you’re told.

Distribution map of brochs, forts and souterrains in Scotland, from Martin Carver's Surviving in Symbols: a visit to the Pictish nation (1995), p. 12

This keeps getting harder. Firstly, as I delay, people like Nick Evans, James Fraser and Alex Woolf close down the angles, so that my point gets smaller and smaller (and more like the few bits of my first Picts paper I still stand by, which means there’s little point in saying them again). Secondly, people like Alex Woolf—in fact, exactly like Alex Woolf, with whom I had the good fortune to discuss this at Leeds and then again here just a few days ago when he presented here, both of which I will record eventually—keep coming up with things that just make me think I’m wrong, or at least that I have to think some more. It may turn out that I actually don’t have anything useful to say. And then thirdly, there’s the actual evidence, brought freshly before me by teaching as well as research. A lot of the distribution maps that were crucial in the original ‘Pictland should be plural’ post of 2008 just don’t make the case I originally thought they should. Partly this is because a lot of the symptoms of cultural production are clustered where there’s agriculturally-useful lowland, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. But also it’s because more stuff keeps turning up, and that was originally the point of this post when I began it as a stub in July. The thing is that as with most of my links posts, by the time I finally write it up there’s about twice as much as I’d originally expected, but with Pictish archaeology you’d not expect that so much. Even so:

• In July, first of all, a new Class II symbol stone was found, in Sanday, Orkney, where previously only a few Class I ones have been known (the difference being relief carving and Christian symbols, i. e. usually a full-length cross , on Class IIs), which makes it harder to assume that Orkney missed out on whatever cultural shift provoked Class II and thus helps to undermine the idea that II replaced I, something that Orkney previously supported. Alex Woolf (that man again) passed this on to me as soon as he got news of it, and I’ve rewarded this ill by doing nothing except muse on it. This, however, fitted fine with my argument and I was quite happy with it as information.
• And then another one came up in Easter Ross, in the Black Isle, in September, this one a Class I with a really clear Pictish beast.¹ This is considerably less surprising: there’s so much Pictish material in the Black Isle that there’s a museum at Rosemarkie for it (small but lovely), but it all adds to the pile.
• Almost at the same time, excavations at Fortingall in Perthshire revealed that what had looked from aerial photography like a monastic rampart probably actually was, as there’s a substantial wall underneath it and a road through a gateway in it, and this in an area which has already produced grave-stones with Pictish symbols on and a monastic hand-bell. We’re waiting on radio-carbon dates but all this is making the excavator, none other than Oliver J. T. O’Grady who has featured here before, talk in terms of a Columban monastery such as Portmahomack has been called by Martin Carver, and here there might almost be more evidence, in the form of the bell. Even more interesting is a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon bead found in the road metalling, and the fact that till now what Fortingall was mainly famous for was its 5,000-year-old yew tree, which probably has a lot to do with the location of any cult sites that may or not have been here. In my terms, I am fine with this too; there’s really no problem with arguing for a Columban presence in Perthshire, indeed James Fraser’s new book does so extensively, and if O’Grady’s right this would bear him out.²
• 

  An exposed section of wall from the ruined broch at Dunning

  Slightly before this, however, another Perthshire excavation had revealed a broch, of the first or second centuries AD, at Dunning, and this does actually cause me rethinking problems. Of course it is older than I care about, technically, even though it seems to have been demolished and a Pictish fortification built on top of it, which is described as palisaded but from which I am guessing there was no wood—no-one seems to be interested in its date, anyway, but I suppose it needn’t be very much later—but as a symptom of an older culture it’s still important, albeit maybe not as important as those that remained visible. ‘Lowland’ brochs are not unknown, but the huge round towers are much more common in the north (see the map above); the more of them that turn up in the south the less good the case for a regional identity based on them gets.³ I probably have to drop it, and it’s really the only one I had left. Ah well. I suppose that, unlike Slartibartfast, I’d rather be right than happy, at least about history.

711: reassessing the Arab conquest of Spain in its 1300th anniversary year

Friday 17 June 2011
Lecture Room, Institute of Archaeology (36 Beaumont Street)

• Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Arab conquest of Spain”
• Nicola Clarke, “Caliphs and Conquerors: images of the Marwanids in the Islamic conquest of Spain”
• Laura Carlson, “Negotiating the Borderlands: Frankish-Iberian relations in the wake of 711″
• Graham Barrett, “Latin Letters under Arab Rule”
• Javier Martínez, “Changing Urban Monumentality: Visigoths vs. Umayyads”
• Erica Buchberger, “Gothic Identity before and after 711″
• Rob Portass, “Galicia before and after 711″
• Chris Wickham, “Economy and Trade after 711″
• Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “Response”
• Javier Martínez, “Conclusions”

You would have to know the Oxford Hispanist establishment (though we do actually have one!) to know, but what we have here, small and perfectly formed which is just as well given that the Lecture Room in Beaumont Street is small and somewhat oppressive is basically two superstars bracketing a party of local research students. Now, some of these guys probably will themselves be superstars in due course and I already have to keep a close eye on Graham Barrett in case he ever starts wondering about Catalonia (local running joke, sorry), but I will confess that I had largely come to see Eduardo Manzano Moreno. He is one of the long string of people who set me to doing, directly or indirectly, what I now do. I know I’ve blamed a lot of people for this but one of them, David Abulafia, set me two of Professor Manzano’s articles when I was studying under him, and then I liked them so much that I came up with a Catalonia-focussed mini-project while studying under another of these people, Rosamond McKitterick, and that became the core of my doctoral proposal, so there you are. The two articles plus his first book more or less said everything you could usefully say at that time about the Christian-Muslim frontier, and I quickly found there was little to add to them, but it started me off.¹ So I’ve always wanted to meet him, and apart from the fact that he insists all his old work is rubbish and outdated—which as you can see doesn’t stop me citing it—it was an absolute pleasure. He broke down the questions of 711 into a set of issues, which were roughly as follows:

1. The Arab conquest of Spain is not the weird one—we have lots of parallels where a rapid military assault knocks over a failing political order, including the Arab conquests in the Middle East—but it’s not like the immediately-preceding Arab conquest of Africa, where resistance is stiffer and collapse much slower.
2. Although later stories of it make it a chance venture that got really really lucky, it plainly wasn’t: the attacks were coordinated, they had mints set up striking hybrid coin within weeks, governors appointed and generally an infrastructure plan was ready to roll.
3. The armies of conquest were organised on tribal lines but they were not established thus, other things like lineages or territories were more important. (Here he clashed explicitly with Pierre Guichard‘s work on this, and there was a lot of scepticism about this point in questions.²)
4. The conquest is usually seen as ‘pactual’, but the pacts have two very different outcomes: some local aristocracies are integrated into an Arabic one, but others are left in place for a while, until the ninth-century rebellions that effectively end their limited independence. Al-Andalus was not, in other words, a unified hierarchical polity until surprisingly long after its formation.
5. Relatedly, that is when most of the writing about the conquest comes from, when its results were being remodelled. That shouldn’t surprise us, really, but it is something that is often not thought about.
6. The continuity versus rupture debate is impossible to answer from a position equipped with hindsight; we need to think instead about when change comes and how people react in the circumstances of the day, not as if someone was working towards a goal of a new caliphate already in 715. 711 is the biggest of many points of change that eventually lead to that point.

This was an odd presentation in as much as it seemed to be an attempt to start six separate arguments rather than substantiate one. In fact, that’s exactly what it was, and Chris Wickham joined in happily at the end, with various hecklers asking ‘stimulating’ questions when agreement seemed too near. Between the two, however, we had Nicola Clarke, picking up in a way on point five of Manzano’s paper with reference to the way that the portrayal of the actual conquerors, Mūsā ibn Nusayr and Tarīq ibn Zayīd, changed in historical writing from the quasi-independents they probably were to loyal or disloyal servants of the Umayyad Caliphs, in sources of course written under Umayyad rule in Spain. We had Laura Carlson, flying some tentative kites about diplomatic contacts between Carolingians and Arab rulers in Spain, and reminding us that from an eighth-century Frankish perspective the Arabs were not the only problem people on that border, and that the centre was not necessarily the point they need to negotiate with.³ We had Graham Barrett, being as interesting as ever and this time about the few bits of evidence for Latin document-writing under Arab rule, all three of them, two of which relate to Catalonia so obviously I had to discourage him in questions, but I didn’t know about the third, which is from Portugal.⁴ And we had Javier Martínez taking a brief moment in the spotlight, or at least the projector glare, talking about the change from polis to madina, as Hugh Kennedy put it long ago, as perpetrated upon the Visigothic attempt to shore up Roman building traditions and even spread them between the fifth and eighth centuries, seeing between the two sets of projects a difference in audiences, from the civic public to the governing élites; this was a very subtle paper and full of impressive illustration that actually made up part of the argument.⁵ Then we got Erica Buchberger, talking about the political value of the Gothic ethnicity in Spain and arguing more or less that, despite the name of the chronicler Ibn al-Qutīya (`son of the Gothic woman’), politically it was the Visigoths that killed Gothicness and that only where Toledo had had least impact, i. e. the far north, did this seem like what the identity of the fallen kingdom had been. And we got Rob Portass, addressing the supposed isolation of Galicia and arguing that it was in fact more isolated from its neighbours by both geography and politics than from the old and new centres of power further south, but that the Arabs didn’t really ever try to integrate it because the perceived worth of doing so was so low.

Transitional dinar of the al-Andalus mint, 716x717, Fitzwilliam Museum, PG.13217 (Philip Grierson Collection), with Arabic obverse and Latin reverse

And then there was Chris Wickham, who talked about ceramic distributions and where the gaps in our knowledge of economic change in this period are: in so doing he argued as strongly as he does in Framing of the Early Middle Ages for an Iberian peninsula broken into regions where things happen almost disconnectedly, so that the far north could carry on making and using fine pottery long after the economy along the west coast of what’s now Spain had broken down to the most basic regional level, that the area where the Muslims centred their government was somehow better connected to Mediterranean trade even when they did so and revived complexity quicker but didn’t necessarily spread this till much later, and various other things.⁶ In the course of this he offhandedly denied that al-Andalus had a functioning tax system, however, and here he met some opposition, not least from Professor Manzano but from others too; the position eventually reached was that tax, too, was probably regional and may only have worked in the west. (I have notes here that paraphrase the argument as, “WICKHAM: It’s not much of a tax system. MANZANO: Yes it is!” We were nearly at that level, but all good-humouredly, it was good fun to watch.) In his response Professor Manzano repeatedly stressed that it was the ninth century that we needed to watch, when cities that had collapsed revived (though not all of the same ones!), when tax is spread more thoroughly, when rule is tightened and enclaves closed down. 711 is only the start of a long process, and we jump to the parts of Andalusi history that we can see clearly much too easily; in fact, as Javier Martínez said in summing up, despite its reputation as a polity of tolerance, enlightenment and scholarship, al-Andalus emerges almost fully-formed from something quite like a Dark Age as far as our knowledge is concerned, and that Dark Age includes 711 and its aftermath, rather than ending with it.⁷

Your first reaction might justifiably be, what were you doing at a high security prison Jonathan, are the experts in your field that difficult to work with? But in fact, the security is differently aimed here: this building is the bigger, newer part of the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. (Ordinarily I use Catalan for places and institutions in Catalonia, but there was so little Catalan and so few Catalans herein that I think it’s actually misleading. This place is part of a federal institution now and that seems to get right down into its hiring culture and language of operation.)

Entrance to the ACA; abandon Catalan all you who enter here...

I was here because the paper that I mentioned a while back that is technically forthcoming only not really, of which I have now had gloomy confirmation from its editor alas, really needs at least one good-quality image, and there are several other documents held here of which, again, I have long wanted a decent facsimile. So, I was after getting some. And in some ways this proved to be very simple, in as much as the Archivo and its staff were very happy to make this possible, in so far as they could understand what I actually wanted and I their instructions about how to get it. (El meu castellano es molt pitjor que el meu català; em disculpeu…) In other ways, much like their digital resource search engine I mentioned a few posts back, it was really pigging complicated. I had already identified the parchments of which I wanted images. There was a form to fill out. That form was then approved by a senior person. Now, he could take the (very small amount of money) they would charge me for this and they would send me a CD-R with the images on. But not straight away. No, first I had to send one of my copies of the form to Madrid, to be approved by the officials of the Biblioteca Nacional there. Then the form would come back to Barcelona, someone would make the images and tell Madrid to send me a formal agreement to sign. Once that was received by Madrid, they would tell Barcelona to send me the CD-R. Six separate stages. All this correspondence and office time must have cost them far more than I actually paid for the facsimiles. But, I got the first part of the form away very shortly after I got back, Madrid responded a month or so later, and then I probably waited a bit longer to answer again because of the exigencies of teaching. It still took rather a long time for the actual images to turn up, however. In fact I was getting rather annoyed and afraid they’d been mislaid.

Archivo de la Corona d'Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Seniofredo 39 (reduced-quality version)

But now I don’t mind any more because at the end of last month, a mere six months after I began the process, the images turned up and they are bloody great, as you can see above. So now I can finish this post, and any other gripes I might have had are blown away by the pixel depth and the seamless enlargement I can push these things up to. Look, for example, below at the autograph signature of a certain well-known abbess, which on every facsimile I ever saw of this document before was largely hidden under a huge black patch of discolouration. Now, you can still see the patch: but you can also see the word underneath it. It helps to know it’s got to be “abbatissa“, of course, but you can see where it is. And in order to show you this I have blown it up to something like ten times life size. Trust me on this: you can’t do that with most documentary facsimiles. So I’m pretty pleased with these. I would use the word “fids!” except that I’m not sure any of the readership would recognise it (though we can soon fix that); if there’s any that do, however, that is at least how pleased I am. The wheels of the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón grind exceeding slow and not a little erratic; but look how fine they are…¹

Signature of Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de Ripoll

The cunning and alert reader will notice a suspicious similarity between paper subtitle and the title of my book (which, I seem not to have said for a while, you can buy here), and that would be a fair cop. I was not quite presenting new research here, although there was some towards the end; if you happened to have and have read my book, have heard me at Leeds in 2010 and also read this blog post, I’m afraid you would have learnt nothing from this presentation except by linking it all up. I don’t think anyone there present fell into all those groups, however, so I hope it was diverting for them, and there were at least some pretty pictures. What the paper did, essentially, was to give the overall thesis of the book, with some cherry-picked examples, synthesize my conclusions there, and then as a kind of epilogue talk about my next major project, and the comparisons in the way that Borrell II and his contemporaries presented their power in their documents that I have been able to make as part of the early work on that project. As such, there might be some point for the person who hasn’t read my book, but is wondering if they should, in reading this paper first, and if it leaves you wanting more, well, it’s out there. For that reason, and also just out of vanity, I uploaded the text I wrote for this to Academia.edu here. I have no plans to do anything further with it, so I imagine it will stay there unless Academia.edu melts down or disappears. You should be aware that I didn’t have time to put notes on it, so all my claims are unreferenced, but most of them are in the book and the rest will shortly appear.²

Alice Rio invites an audience member to make their point, if they dare (I kid, I kid...)

Vain though I undoubtedly am, however, I am not actually the point of this post. The era whose end I’m documenting is not, in fact, the Carolingian one in the lands of its most loyally disconnected supporters, but one in the history of the actual seminar. Again, long-term readers will know I have been going to this seminar a long time, and it’s a lot longer than the blog too, but it goes back far further than me; it was, I believe, started by none other than R. Allen Brown, and taken over subsequently by John Gillingham and then/also Jinty Nelson. In other words, its second set of convenors have now retired. (Susan Reynolds includes some of these details in her reminiscences here; like her, I have found this seminar a lifeline, albeit for different reasons given our respective statuses.) And in that time, it has almost always been held in the Ecclesiastical History Room of the Library of the Institute of Historical Research, in the Senate House of the University of London. This, by ancient precedent, allowed those attending to haul volumes of the Patrologia Latina (or occasionally even the Græca) off shelves to check references during discussion and on the other hand by equally ancient precedent prevented anyone else using the books in there during the seminar. The other ancient custom, which had to be explained with embarrassment to every new speaker, is that the audience did not applaud, a rule which I only very rarely saw broken.

Professor Reynolds herself, centre of photo, among other worthies of the seminar

This has now all stopped. The Senate House is being extensively rebuilt internally, the entire IHR is being refurbished in a two-year project, and the Library has therefore been moved to the other side of Senate House. Once it reopens, the seminars and the books will be housed separately and basically it will all be different. Whatever that room is to be used for in future, it seems unlikely that it will ever again house this seminar (though the seminar itself continues meanwhile, in new accommodation). And for that reason, once I’d wound up, Jinty Nelson had the typically excellent idea of getting people to photograph the room, the gathering, the proceedings and the surroundings, so that it could be somehow recorded for posterity. And Jinty and Alice Rio, both of whom I can never disappoint, asked me to put it up on the blog, and so now I have. And when it moves off the front page I shall set it up as its own page and link it from my Seminars page in the top menu bar there, and so, I hope, it will be documented as long as I have the blog, which is something I have no plans to stop doing soon. If it lasts as long as the seminar has, though, that’ll be something…

Jinty herself, centre back, explaining; not sure what the others are looking at, probably a camera by this stage!

Modern-day Ullà, Empúries, Catalunya

The Bishop of Girona doesn’t always win. I know that by now, you might have reason to think otherwise. This was, after all, the place in Catalonia that took the most trouble to ensure that it had up-to-date royal charters for all its properties at all times and persistently brought them forward in court to others’ detriment; this we have seen.¹ But of course it’s what we would see, because as I mentioned last time but one, Girona does seem to actually have sorted through what documents it wanted copied up, so even if it did have documents in which it lost its cases, it probably got rid of them after a while, and it is more likely that those cases only gave documents to the winners who were, it’s more or less safe to guess, not going subsequently to donate their property to the cathedral thus getting their documents archived. So we’d have to be extremely lucky to see anything other than resounding victories in their cartularies, no? Well, lucky us: look at this.²

When in God’s name the illustrious man Teuter, bishop of the See of Girona, was staying in the village of Ports, which is in Empúries territory, along with the illustrious men Delà and Sunyer, counts, in the public court for the hearing of many cases and the definition of right and just judgements, and also in the presence of Viscount Petroni and the judges who were ordered to judge or determine the cases, that is, Ferriol, Undilà, Godmar, Teudard, Manuel, Frugell, Lentio and Roderic, Ardovast the saio, Esperandéu, Hostal, also Junià, Trastildo, Benet, Ferriol, Blanderic, Eldegot, Guifré, Eripio, Esclúa, Untril·la, Comparat, Lleopard, Daniel, Undiscle, Armentary, Miró, Petroni, Adalà, Fluiter, Galí, Castí, Agelà, Adilo, Sendred, Perell, Truiter, Salomó, Lleo, Elanç, Pasqual, Revell, Segobran and the other priests, clerics, a great multitude of lay and other worthy men who were there present.

The grammar in this next paragraph is completely out to lunch as copied, so I’ve emended freely towards what the sense appears to be.

Thus there came into their presence the Archpriest Estremir, who is the mandatory of the abovesaid bishop, and he said, «Hear me, because that there Andreu’s houses, courts, orchards and fruit-trees and lands that are in the term of the villa of Ullà, which is in Empúries territory, those ought to be the aforesaid bishop’s on account of the claim of Santa Maria and Sant Feliu, which are sited in Girona and next to the selfsame city, by a precept of the lord king, which those men made of the aforementioned Santa Maria and Sant Feliu for their own. That Andreu holds them unjustly as an aprisio as part of the villa that is called Quarto, which they call Bellcaire. That same Andreu holds them unjustly and against the law.»
Then the aforesaid counts, bishops, viscounts and judges demanded of the aforesaid Andreu what he said to this. That man then said in his responses: «Because those houses, courts, fruit orchards and lands aforesaid which that same priest Estremir, who is mandatory of the aforesaid bishop, demands, I do not hold them unjustly but I hold them legally, by aprisio and by a precept of the king and as part of the aforesaid villa of Bellcaire, just as the other Hispani do».

There now follows a long paragraph in which the whole court slogs out to this place, details one of their number to measure the land in question and then divide it in half, and they give the measurements in great detail including specifying how long the perch they’re using as a unit is (8½ feet, since you ask). But we don’t need that much detail here, really. On with the rest of the text!

And then the already-said bishop, counts, and judges ordained that within those villae of Ullà and Quarto, which is called Bellcaire, they would set up five fixed stones as landmarks or boundaries, and so indeed they did. And the already-said Andreu received the half of those perches nearest the well on the northern side and Archpriest Estremir similarly the other half nearest the villa Ullà on the southern side.
And then it was agreed between the aforesaid bishop and the already-said Andreu that each one of them would hold as far as those fixed stones as a division of those villae, so that whoever [meaning `both'?] might judge and defend and securely possess forever in peaceful fashion.
Then it was set down that each one of them should have a notice from this about the selfsame aforesaid properties, signed and confirmed, just as it is, and let each one of them rejoice to see his justice in our court.
Notice given the 16th day of the Kalends of June, in the third year that King Louis was dead.
+Riquer, archpriest, SSS. +Guiscafred, archpriest, SSS. + Pere, priest, SSS. Reccared, priest, SSS. Teudegild, priest, SSS.

This document is quite important. The cathedral gets something out of it, and the boundaries set will have prevented Andreu or his family ever taking any more out of the cathedral’s land, so it’s understandable that Santa Maria kept it. All the same, this obviously wasn’t the result they were after, and thus what it shows us is, firstly that Girona wasn’t the only entity in the area who could get royal charters for their lands – it would seem that in this respect Louis the Stammerer was more sympathetic to those willing to come to his court than his father had been, and furthermore possibly keeping better track of what had been given out since he also awarded a precept to Girona cathedral that doesn’t cover this land³ – and that people still thought it was worth having one; secondly, that those people were right as even though Girona cathedral was often able to sway cases with such evidence as we’ve seen, it would seem to have been the evidence, not the cathedral, that impressed the court in this case. And thirdly of course it shows us that, since therefore the kind of claims that people have been known to make that the Church always won trials because it was literate and made the records don’t work here, we are probably missing an unguessable amount of material where the cathedral’s case didn’t come off. You win some, you lose some, as they say; but if they didn’t win, we’ve lost it. This does not mean it wasn’t there. That is all.⁴

Map of Viking migration routes, by Suzanne Kemmer

Lesley’s title was “Migration, Diaspora, and Identity in the Viking Age”, and it posed a question that we’re also wont to set in exams round here but to which, all the same, we don’t really have an answer, to wit, once the various Scandinavian populations had settled in the various parts of the world that they did in the ninth to eleventh centuries (say), was there anything remaining that identified them together, if so what, and how long did it last? She defended the use of the term `diaspora’ despite its political loading, but argued for a cultural identity preserved at courts most of all and trickling down in greater or lesser degree to the localities connected to those courts. This took some fairly subtle argumentation and my notes are pretty dense, but I made special emphasis marks in the margin (as I do) where she suggested that towns were the obvious fora for the transmission of a cultural repertoire and that that repertoire was both portable and purchasable, that is, you can buy your way into a Scandinavian identification. (This fitted quite snugly with what Jane Kershaw had argued in the same room a few months before, of course.) Into this also came the great disparity of origins among the warband apparently executed on the Ridgeway, along with the filed teeth of one of the skeletons, a particularly painful piece of display, so many seminars were linking up here for me. Also discussed, indeed, was how much the links fed back to the homelands, and how far they were directly connected themselves, just one of many dispersed networks that were webbed over the various lands where Scandinavians were or had gone: politics, family, marriage, trade, exploration, raiding and war, as well as Christian missions of course, a myriad of individuals making choices in which we try to discern trends. Art styles especially criss-crossed this, and though the use of such styles don’t tell us much about the movements of peoples or the origins of the wearers, it does tell us that élite fashion moved fast and that for a while these places and styles were fiendishly à la mode. I do begin to wonder if modern fashion isn’t even a working analogy; I know little enough about it but I am conscious that with many of the same designers exhibiting in New York City, London, Paris and wherever else, while no-one would say there is no local style in those places nonetheless we can speak of haute couture with some justification as a single cultural layer. And perhaps nearly as money-hungry!

Portal of the urnes stave church, Norway, in the Ringerike style, photographed by Nina Aldin Thune and available under a Creative Commons license; if you web-search images of Ringerike style, however, what you'll mainly get is people trying to sell you jewellery, QED

Of all the papers I’ve been to at the IHR, which is a few, I think I have more notes from the discussion after this one than any other. This is in part because I find this stuff deeply interesting but also because Alan Thacker, David Bates, Barbara Yorke, John Gillingham, Stephen Baxter, Ryan Lavelle, Gareth Williams, Andrew Reynolds and various others too can obviously say quite a lot about these things when in the same place. When Lesley publishes this work, it’s almost going to be a shame that the discussion here won’t be published with it, but it was one of those seminars where you can feel the ideas being hammered out on the forge, real constructive criticism and contributions of information knocking the metal into something with tempered and genuine strength. It also left me with a new regard for Lesley’s cool head in dealing with this barrage and the depth to which she’s thought this stuff out. It will make a terrific and sensitive publication.

Page from a c.1150 manuscript of Dudo of St-Quentin's History of the Normans in the British Library

Patrick’s paper on the 14th June 2011 was a quieter affair, and less wide-ranging but still full of interest; his title was “Ireland and the Normans c. 1000: the evidence from Dudo of St-Quentin’s History of the Normans“, and he was looking for links between Normandy and Ireland ‘before the Normans’, in the words of a major textbook on the Emerald Isle.¹ Dudo’s History is an immensely problematic source, with legend and fact both misreported, but as Patrick observed we still have to use him and it is a fact that some of his stories of Normandy do contain Irishmen, so that at the very least we know he knew the place existed. In fact we can say a bit more than that, as Patrick went on to show, but the question is how much can we substantiate? Patrick argued that at least we should allow that he is careful about ethnonyms, because he was in fact doing ethnogenesis, writing history for a new ‘people’ (in whatever sense the Normans were a people at that point). Dudo separates Hibernenses and Scoti for example, and it’s probably not just out of ignorance. What it is, however, remains to be worked out… The connections could be found in the other direction, too, Patrick pointed out, as St Ouen, Norman saint par excellence, was being culted in Dublin by a point somewhere in Bishop Dúnán I’s lifetime, 1028-1074. There’s more to do here, but when you’re dealing with sources that tell you things like, “The Men of the Isles fought with the Men of the Isles” and give no more details, it may take a while to do…

Storefront of the Llibreria Carlemany, Girona; click-through and examine their logo if you care to...

There is also the factor that what I do has become increasingly focussed on having original documents. This is partly because it’s much easier to tell whether they’ve been messed about with subsequently (or indeed not—sometimes they’re just weird, and you can’t tell in a copy which was true), but it’s also because copying tends to be selective and so you only get certain things. Now, at Urgell, at Vic, and at a few places outside Spain, St Gallen for example, the fact that there was a cartulary later compiled doesn’t mean that the relevant archive got rid of their originals; but this does seem to have happened a lot elsewhere, and sadly Girona is one such case. From the state of the transcriptions, it is easy to think that this might be because they were already becoming hard to read, not just in terms of script though garbling does show that this was a problem, but also in terms of words being missed out, I presume because of fading. Anyway, the preservation is selective: whereas elsewhere in Catalonia and in Spain I would usually expect a tenth-century archive to be say, forty per cent sales, thirty-five per cent donations, fifteen per cent other stuff (wills, hearings, royal precepts, papal Bulls, letters, oddities), at Girona we basically only have precepts, Bulls and hearings.⁴ But the hearings, as we’ve seen here before, are often kind of fun.

Graph of documentary preservation from the county of Girona 785-884, by me, from my Leeds handout, more intelligible at full size and so linked

These too can be selective, of course. Have a look at this for the confusion of recording only what’s necessary:

In the judgement of Viscounts Ermido and Radulf and also in the presence of Otger and Guntard, vassals of the venerable Count Unifred, and also the judges who were ordered to judge, Ansulf, Bello, Nifrid, Guinguís, Floridi, Trasmir and Adulf, judges, and the other men who were there in that same placitum with those same men.

There came Lleo and he accused Bishop Godmar, saying that that same aforesaid bishop unjustly stole from me houses and vines and lands and courtyards that are in the villa of Fonteta, in Girona territory, that my father Estable cleared from the waste like the other Hispani, wherefore I made my claim before the lord King Charles so that, if it were so, he might through his letter order for us that the aforesaid bishop should return the aforesaid aprisio to me, if he were to approve. And while the aforesaid bishop, rereading, heard this letter, he sent his spokesman who might respond reasonably in his words in this case. Then I Lleo summoned that same mandatory of the aforesaid bishop, Esperandéu by name, because Bishop Godmar, whose rights he represented, stole my houses and courtyards and vines and lands that are in the villa of Fonteta or in its term, which I was holding by the aprisio of my father or I myself cleared, so that same aforesaid chief-priest did, unjustly and against the law.

Then the above-said viscounts and judges interrogated that same above-said mandatory of the above-said chief-priest as to what he had to answer in this case. That man however said in his responses that he had his possession by legal edicts from that same Lleo, which that same Lleo had made before the above-said judges, that as for those lands for which the above-said chief-priest and his mandatory had previously appealed him, which are in the above-said villa, another man had cleared those houses from the wasteland and not him or his father, but whatever his father had or held in benefice in the selfsame villa or in its term, he had this from the late Count Gaucelm.

Sant Feliu de Girona, the ultimate beneficiary here, is one of the oldest church sites in the city, but the current building is fourteenth-century. Still rather good though.

And while Esperandéu was presenting that profession in the court, that I Lleo had made and confirmed with my hands without any force, and it was found to be legally written, then I Lleo claimed before the above-named persons that Esperandéu brought this profession to be re-read by force, and that he made the claim of that same Lleo by force. I Lleo responded to myself and I said that in truth I had never been able to have [the properties].

Then they ordered my profession thereof to be written of the things which I Lleo have professed, and thus I make my profession that in all things the selfsame profession that I gave which that same Esperandéu showed in your presence here to be re-read in my voice, it is true about those selfsame things written there in all aspects and legally recorded, and I have confirmed with my hand, and neither today nor in any court can I prove that I made it under duress, but it is true thus just as is here recorded and the bishop did not take them from me unjustly by his same above-written mandatory already said, but the most venerable Charles, most pious king, for the love of God bestowed them upon Saint Felix, martyr of Christ, by his most just precept, which I have remembered, and so I profess.

Profession made on the 11th day of the Kalends of February, in the 10th [recte twentieth?] year of the rule of King Charles.

Signed Lleo, who made this profession. Signed Estable. Signed Guistril·la. Signed Receat. Signed Ansefred.
Signed Lleo, who made this profession.

You see immediately the problem with the copying.⁵ Did Lleo also happen to be a scribe, and so sign off both as author and scribe? Or has the copyist just skipped a line and copied the same signature twice? Is there really a woman witnessing (not impossible—it’s never impossible—but unusual) or could the scribe just not read the name that he’s rendered as Guistril·la? Is the date right? If it’s not, then we can identify the count whose vassals are turning up; if it is we have an otherwise unknown Count of Girona to deal with, assuming of course that the name is copied right…⁶

A page from the actual manuscript, the Cartoral de Carlemany of the Arxiu Diocesà de Girona

Also, of course, there is the bigger problem with just what the heck was going on? Here is the chronology of what Lleo seems to have asserted:

1. Estable, father of Lleo, cleared some lands at Fonteta.
2. Lleo also cleared some of the lands, presumably after inheriting.
3. Bishop Godmar unjustly moved in on those lands, presumably expropriating Lleo.
4. Lleo therefore went north to seek out King Charles the Bald, from whom he apparently got a letter ordering the bishop to do whatever was right.
5. The bishop temporised by sending his man Esperandéu somewhere—to the royal court? to this trial?—to plead against Lleo.
6. Lleo therefore makes this plea in the court right now.

Whereupon Esperandéu apparently produced a document by Lleo himself disclaiming any rights to the property, admitting that his father had never cleared it – though he held some land in the area that was from Count Gaucelm (brother of Bernard of Septimania should that interest you) – and nor had he. Lleo next claimed (though the wording is extremely strange!) that this document was got from him under duress and then immediately (as the document has it) contradicted himself and admitted that his claim is fraudulent. So this is full of questions: what evidence did Lleo take to court? How did he ever think he could get away with this trial? Why did he give up? Was it the royal precept the document just happens to mention at the end? Was anyone actually taking Lleo seriously enough for that to be needed? And, the necessary alternative, may he actually have been stitched up? We have seen, repeatedly, that it is tough to be up against the Man in early medieval Catalonia. It may just be that Lleo had in fact made the first profession under some sort of duress, and then was duressed into making this one too. It doesn’t look that way, admittedly, but it wouldn’t, would it?

The thing is, we will never know because it wasn’t thought important. There would have been another document, in which the actual proceedings of the trial were recorded, the different sides’s statements, any proof that Lleo could bring (like a letter from the king for example).⁷ Because that document existed, Lleo’s eventual profession and quit-claim, which is what we have, didn’t need to record those details; we only get the ones it was important that Lleo himself said (such as that he had made the first document without any force and then claimed otherwise). On the other hand, when Girona’s copyists got busy in the thirteenth century, if the trial record still existed, they didn’t need it: this one names the property and makes it quite clear who lost the case and who got the land and where their claim came from (the royal precept mentioned right at the end, which the cathedral presumably brought in evidence, and which is still known, though it must have been younger than Lleo’s father’s time, again raising the possibility that there was more to Lleo’s claim than he was allowed to admit).⁸ So the old one would have been one long document at least that they could not bother with, if they could even read it. It was probably binned with a sigh of relief, or put aside to be turned into book-bindings. And that’s the way a lot of our source material has probably gone. Sobering, isn’t it?

(Somewhat vainly crossposted at Cliopatria.)

This view of Potes in Liébana, Cantábria, seems weirdly familiar

The big one hundred goes, by more or less complete coincidence, to a fellow Hispanist, Rob Portass, who lately finished his doctorate in the History Faculty here and was thus able to be coaxed out into daylight to address the Oxford Medieval History Seminar on 6th June, which he did with the title, “Magnates and their monasteries in the tenth-century kingdom of Leon”. Rob, who has since got a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship so that we get to keep him for a bit, is another person who has realised that the peculiar depth of Iberian charter evidence for the early Middle Ages lets one do serious microcosmic levels of study of society, but he differs from me firstly in that he’s gone to the opposite Northern corner of the peninsula, working on Galicia and Cantábria, and that he works on an even closer scale, individual valleys, which even I could only sustain for a chapter before breaking out to where the castles are. Rob’s two valleys, for this paper at least, were that around the monastery of Celanova (in Galicia) and that of Liébana, where there are two monasteries, Santo Toribio and Santa María de Piasca, to tell us what was going on in the areas.¹

Map of early medieval Spanish archive preservation by Wendy Davies

With this paper Rob was addressing an idea that when things went feudal in Northern Iberia as of course It Is Written that they did, the monasteries assisted in this process, being functionally equivalent to greedy landlords acquiring seigneurial rights over their local populations by subjecting their lands, and often becoming controlled by noble family interests anyway.² To cut a long and careful story short, he finds this difficult to see in the charter evidence. Especially in Liébana, where one family did indeed get hold of the monastery of Santo Toribio, donation and sales to it came substantially from the wealthy and that not for very long. The peasantry just didn’t really interact with it at all (and consequently, of course, we can hardly see them). The local wealthy were only locally wealthy but all the same, Rob did not think they could be reckoned peasants by any stretch of interpretation (though we did try and stretch him on this). At richer Celanova the picture is a bit more conventional, but has its own peculiarities; here peasants did sell to the monastery, in some number, but they did not donate at all.³ Rob argued that this was too busy a land-market, and too various, to be explained as has been done in terms of poverty and bad harvests forcing people to sell up in order to obtain food, and that really this is business, and can’t be assumed to have been only to the monastery’s advantage.⁴ This also provoked questions, including one or two about how far we can assume that the charters give us a representative picture, even though Rob had cited me earlier on on such matters, which surely ought to have been enough! (I jest.⁵) But at the end of the paper and the discussion, all the same, I think Rob had successfully put across what my final paragraph of notes records: “One model here won’t do, but neither will the existing one. Our two noble abbots operate on a different scale, but local community must still be engaged and in Liébana that can’t be done.” If the model can fail, then, we need to know more about why, and for that I suppose we must now read Rob’s thesis!

The chapel of San Miguel de Celanova, with the baroque walls of San Salvador, the Cistercian house that replaced the one Rob's subject population was dealing with, behind it; I include this because, if it is as the architectural historians think tenth-century, some of Rob's people probably went in this building. From Wikimedia Commons

• First and foremost, matters blogular. Had you noticed in my sidebar that the well-known Alaric Hall, elf expert, environmentalist, drummer and general good thing, has been on tour and blogging about it? Since Alaric is a man who is not afraid either to post detailed literary analyses of novels in Icelandic or to describe his experience of a major North American city as “as great as a skate on a plate”, I reckon you’ll enjoy his writing as I don’t quite see how anyone couldn’t. Not convinced? Who do you think wins in a fight between the Rockies and Iceland? Go see.
• More formally, those who know me well and have been at conferences in the UK with me will probably recognise who has briefly stepped into the blogging world with this post at the British Museum’s site. Now that was an interesting job!
• Then, going back a long way, we have mentioned the fort of South Cadbury here in the past, largely because it’s supposed to have been Camelot. It goes back to the Neolithic, but was like many hillforts in Britain refurbished in the period immediately after the Romans left, including a timber hall dated to between 460 and 500, and reused Roman ceramics at table and so on. In 1971 Leslie Alcock, a major figure in my early medieval British thought-world, put forward a well-known argument for an Arthur-like figure based on this site, arguing that its huge perimeter could only have been manned by a substantial army and that therefore someone in that period and in that hall must have been able to raise such an army.¹ (He later retracted almost all of this, but it has stuck around.²) I should have realised that there was an alternative explanation after going to l’Esquerda but recent digs at Ham Hill nearby in Somerset have raised the issue somewhere less soluble; here, the perimeter is more like three miles and you just couldn’t really have got enough people in it to hold it. The answer may therefore be that these places were both actually settlements not fortresses, and I now need to get back and read more about Cadbury-Camelot and see whether that would work.³ The Ham Hill digs are reported on in the Guardian here, which I found out about at David Beard’s Archaeology in Europe, to which a hat duly tipped.
• Next up, we have often talked about capitularies here, those very diverse collections of legislative bullet points the Carolingian kings issued that hardly ever seem to have been acted upon.⁴ I was in correspondence with someone who was lamenting that the manuscript of the collection of these things made by one Ansegis that survives from the Catalan monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, ACA MS Ripoll 40, was not yet digitised, and I bethought me: hang on, isn’t there a rolling initiative of the Spanish government to digitise their archives’ manuscripts? I wonder if… And lo it has been done and is here,⁵ so your Carolingianists who want to see how far that law got, here you are, and meanwhile I can pay a bit more attention to what other texts may have come in by the same route during the short period when the Carolingians really were trying to govern the Spanish March as directly as their other provinces.
• Now that’s pretty cool, but it pales into insignificance for my work compared to news that has lately been e-mailed me by Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean at the Université de Bourgogne, which is the launching of this site, a philologic index of the medieval charter material from Burgundy. A laughable claim, you may think, knowing that that would mean digitising all the thousands of documents from St-Pierre de Cluny; well, look and marvel. You realise what this means? For the first time since they were written, and 120 years or so after they were actually published, the charters of Cluny that have been the source of so many controversial and influential works have been indexed.⁶ You can now look things up in the Cluny charters. If you want to know how this might help anyone, imagine how much less frustrated this post might have been if this had happened sooner… But it’s not just Cluny, there’s are literally about forty different archives in there and this is a resource with which it is possible to get something serious done. So, if you don’t know I’m letting you know; there it is. And, furthermore, they’re having a conference to encourage people to do this stuff. You would have to get busy as they want submissions by October 30th, but they say:
  

  The present symposium will deal with the revisiting of several research experiences using this database, ranging from punctual experiments to fully-developed academic works. The objective of this gathering is to invite researchers to become familiar with this interface and to assess it. All researches who desire to share their experiences are welcome to make a presentation. We would appreciate it if you can let us know of your part-taking before October the 30th (email addresses provided on the header). Presentations already confirmed by Alain Guerreau, Eliana Magnani, Nicolas Perreaux et Armando Torres Fauaz.

  … and that looks like interesting stuff to me even if I can’t actually go. They sent me CFP PDFs in French and English so I’ve linked them there for you.

• Lastly, it is always worth publicising the Earlier Middle Ages seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and so I let you know that their Autumn schedule is now online. But! This news strikes me with great chagrin as I see that Alex Woolf is first up with what looks like a really interesting paper (does he do any other sort? I ain’t seen it) and I can’t go. So, an undergraduate-like plea that someone will go and take notes for me, and my apologies to Alex, though I will at least be able to deliver those in person as well when he comes to Oxford later in the season, so hurrah for that and also a passing notice that that seminar and others too will surely also soon be detailed online, here, and are open to visitors. [Edit: I should also have mentioned the similarly excellent Cambridge Late Antique Network Seminar, whose program is also online already, and full of stars including Alex Woolf again! How does he do it? But he does, so there it (also) is.]

There is also a shedload of stuff that could be mentioned about Picts, but since that is relevant to my interests just now and I haven’t finished thinking about what the new finds mean, or indeed likely talking about them to Alex (again) who was kind enough to alert me to one of them, I will write more on that further down the line. For the moment, here’s a post!

The new term looms and I haven’t even reached the summer, I realise, but undeterred I press on with the seminar reports since they are apparently things that people like to read, and this one was actually requested of me a while back. At last I deliver, and may even be able to upload in the next couple of days. On the 1st June 2011, Professor Anton Scharer, no less, was at the Earlier Middle Ages seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, speaking to the title, “The King’s Voice: expressions of personal concern in royal diplomas”.

Signet ring of King Childeric of the Franks

The topic of this paper was one that we have discussed here before, not least because our frequent commentator round here, Levi Roach had spoken on a fairly similar subject only a few months before. I had thought, because of Professor Scharer’s writings on Alfred the Great,¹ that he too would be talking about Anglo-Saxon charters but in fact he ranged very widely, not just through Frankish and Ottonian documents but also Merovingian seals and artistic representations of kings. By this kind of survey he was attempting to show that the king was symbolised in many aspects of the royal charter’s difference from the everyday document. Not the least noticeable point of this for me, in the league of things I’ve known for ages but never actually thought about, is why the Carolingian royal charters are in a cursive hand. This is after all the administration that so valued empire-wide uniform legibility that they gave us, as it turns out, most of our modern type-faces in the form of Caroline Minuscule; but the royal diplomas needed to look authentic, and so they carried on in the same horrible chancery cursive the Merovingians had used because that’s what royal documents looked like. For those with the knowledge to read more than just the text, the look and the ceremony (Professor Scharer had one example of a royal charter being actually read out at the recipient’s church, in a case from Paderborn in 813), there were also other clues: the Tironian notes with which Carolingian royal diplomas were usually finished off sometimes record the king ordering the charter drawn up. But it wasn’t always the king—interestingly, under Emperor Louis the Pious it’s more often Empress Judith than Louis, though this is also to say she is known to have done so twice—so when it is, that’s quite possibly genuine information, since it was apparently possible to say something else.

Sealed precept of Charlemagne for Mainz, 813; online with detail view at the Landesarchiv Stuttgart, linked through

The question remained, of course, whether the kings genuinely had any input on what words were used, even if they were apparently closely involved with the actual making of documents. Here Professor Scharer argued from a very few cases where feelings that only the king might be expected to have had appear to be recorded in charters, such as an unusually long list of family anniversaries given in a precept of King Charles the Bald of the Western Franks in a grant to St-Denis; it’s hard to imagine who else can have thought it necessary to commemorate so many of his minor relatives, and subsequent related grants did not record the same number, so it does look like a unique piece of input based on family knowledge, and Otto I can be found doing something similar for his family’s foundation of Quedlinburg.²

The castle and monastery of Quedlinburg, founded by Otto I's sister St Matilda, from Wikimedia Commons

I could see other arguments here at least—St-Denis strikes me as a good place to look for genealogy-crazy royal functionaries who might want to show off to get the king’s good attention—but I was a bit more enthused by a document of Emperor Henry III that Professor Scharer cited of which we have two versions, one of which contains much more information on the emperor’s connection to the beneficiary monastery of Hildesheim; this version was enacted, and the former was not, suggesting that it was a first draft that was sent back by the emperor for revision (though someone did wisely raise in questions the issue that somehow, the recipient house also preserved this supposed rejected draft, to which Professor Scharer had only jocular answers).³ This, I can imagine happening much more readily, and it is kind of the minimum that I think is implied by the penitential charters of Æthelred the Unready which Levi had discussed, too; their shared agenda is so closely defined that there must have been some check on their conformity to it (even if in that case it might as easily have been carried out by Wulfstan).⁴ Whether we can jump from there to the king actually telling his scribe what the thing should say, in detail, especially for a period earlier than the eleventh century when document use is booming in these areas, is a lot harder to say still, I think; but at the very least, papers like this make complete scepticism about the possibility less justifiable.⁵

Cover of Jonathan Jarrett, Coins in Collections: Care and Use

In late September 2009 I published a little booklet on coin collections and the looking-after thereof. This gives me some sadness just now as Mark Blackburn wrote a good third of it and insisted he should not be credited, but, be that as it may, actually a number of people have been after knowing where to buy it. I am happy to tell those people that it is now available postage-free for £7.99 from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s online shop here, and if that link doesn’t work, a search for “Jarrett” in their search box will turn it up. I hope that’s useful and I’m sorry it took so long.

Cover of Deyermond & Ryan, Early medieval Spain: a symposium

Then more recently and more on my actual topic of study, in late 2010 a volume I’d been awaiting eagerly came out, that being no. 63 of the Queen Mary University of London series Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar. This too is tinged with sadness in as much as it bears the name of another dead scholar we have good reason to miss, but, it is a thing of joy in itself, containing as well as myself waxing lyrical about the weirdnesses of the uncontrolled frontier beyond early medieval Catalonia, Jinty Nelson wisely setting early medieval Spain in a European context (which is very rarely done), Ralph Penny asking how many languages early medieval Iberia had, Wendy Davies being sage and clear about counter-gifts and Rose Walker making sense of some of the manuscripts of Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, as well as much more, of which quite a lot by Andrew Fear. I think it is a jolly useful little volume and it will set you back a mere £16·15. Further details and a purchase link can be found here. So there you have it, commercial over and I will return in the next day or two with more thoroughly academic content.

Letter from Jerome to Pope Damasus IV on the correction of the Bible, in Codex Sangallensis 48 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The sad result of this is that my notes, while quite entertaining where legible, I think don’t always have much to do with what David was saying, as my subconscious was clearly getting the upper hand of my listening ear at some points. Nonetheless, I feel fairly safe in telling you that David talked about:

• copyists, starting with the kinds of errors and corrections that we know about because they were faithfully copied over (apparently St Jerome excused himself in one manuscript from fourteen different sorts of scribal error, which is proof if any were needed that pedantry does not bar one from Heaven);
• about the diffuseness of this sample and the very small number of scribes we have who show up more than once, which shows the vast number of books there must once have been if there was even occasional employment for all these people that we only get one glimpse of (like die-links in numismatics, this, I like it so I hope David actually said it);
• about the authority for changes, and the respect for manuscript integrity that leads to colophons telling us who copied a manuscript’s exemplar being carried over into the therefore anonymous copies that we have, which happens in four ninth-century manuscripts of things copied by Bœthius whose actual scribes we have no idea about;
• and about how difficult it was, when only 8% of manuscripts (taking Lowe’s CLA as an inventory) of this period even name scribes, of working out who was employing them. Almost all of those 8% are churchmen, so ‘the Church’ would be a simplistic answer, but as long as one of them is a notary (and Vandalguis (sp?) who wrote our manuscript of the Laws of the Alemans claimed so to be) there must have been other structures.

I am guessing that David will call me out on any errors here, in fact I entreat him so to do as I’m sure there must be some and I don’t want to copy them over…

Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where Professor
Sarah Foot is a lay canon by right of her post

Then two days later a rather different occasion, involving more gowns and gilt and fewer images, when Sarah Foot, who is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in these parts, gave her long-delayed inaugural lecture, “Thinking with Christians: doing ecclesiastical history in a secular age”. In checking the date I find that the Theology Faculty evidently recorded this and already have it online as a podcast, so you could listen to it yourself, but what you will get if you do is quite a clever balancing act between the interests of various parts of her audience, the Anglo-Saxonists who know Sarah’s work,² the theologians and canons who are her new colleagues, and the University’s old hands who will turn out for any event where lots of people will be wearing gowns in public and there will be free wine. Thus there is much about the history of the Chair to which Sarah has now succeeded and the denominational politics of the English Church that have sometimes dictated what the theologians of the University thought were the important things for a church historian to be working on (viz. the origins and basis of their denomination), and about the increasingly social basis of the discipline since the 1970s (in a kaleidoscopic barrage of citation that included Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Robert Moore, Clifford Geertz and Jacques le Goff to name but a few) and the threat she perceived in it that ecclesiastical history per se might become (as with so much else) just a particular flavour of cultural history. Sarah suggested that having had a ‘cultural turn’ now it might be good to have a ‘religious turn’, linking faith and thought as a theme of study. If that sounds like an interesting manifesto, you could go listen to how she argues it.

Psalm 23 in the St Hubert Bible, one of the manuscripts of Theodulf of Orléans's corrected text of the Bible (British Library MS Additional 24142)

After that, to my shock, I seem not to have been to any kind of academic public speaking for a week and a half. Perhaps I was full up, or perhaps (more likely) teaching and deadlines collaborated to keep me from it. Either way, I resumed with Laura Carlson’s presentation of a paper called “An Encyclopedic Theology: Theodulf of Orléans and the Carolingian Wiki-Bible” to the Oxford Medieval Seminar on the 30th May. I don’t want to say too much about this, because I notice that Ms Carlson has what looks like a related paper coming up at the Institute of Historical Research and so to do so might constitute spoilers. Broadly, however, she was drawing out the difference between two different Bible-editing projects running simultaneously at the high point of the Carolingian Renaissance, Alcuin‘s single authoritative text as found in the Tours Bibles, and Theodulf’s comparative version, which drew as she sees it on a considerable range of texts, Italian and Anglo-Saxon themselves drawing on Greek, Vulgate, Cassiodorian and Irish traditions, and tried to incorporate the useful bits of all of them, as well as occasional Hebrew readings, slices of Patristic theological commentary, Visigothic Law and Spanish spellings (because, as we have discussed, Theodulf thought he was a Goth). Now, whether all this justified the title “Wiki-Bible” or not would be a vexed question (`citation needed’!) but it does go to show once more that the idea that the entire mission of the Carolingian intellectual court was standardisation needs questioning. Not least because, as Ms Carlson pointed out in questions, neither Alcuin or Theodulf ever cited their own versions of the Bible when doing other sorts of study!