Seminars CXXVII-CXXIX: the price, the mark and the buildings of early medieval Christianity

Interior view of the Hagia Sophia mosque, Istanbul, in slightly better state than shortly after the Emperor Justinian built it as a church, when part fell down, as his rather conflicted historian Procopius records

I’m sorry to have gone silent again so quickly: in my defence, I was finishing a chapter for a book of essays in memory of Mark Blackburn, and that’s now done so we’ll see whether it passes muster. Meanwhile, I still have a backlog here of course. The seminar reports seem not to have drawn many comments lately, but I intend to persist, so for those not so interested I’ll try and stay brief, by my own elevated standards of course. The next three I have to report on are all Oxford ones, and they begin with a visit to the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies seminar there by Dr Peter Sarris of Cambridge on the 28th February 2012, whose title was “The Economics of Salvation in late Antiquity and Byzantium”. This was a wide-ranging paper, with examples from England to Anatolia, and as ever with Dr Sarris heavily erudite, but its basic thrust was in fact fairly simple: he argued that in the late Antique period, the drain that the relatively-new Church represented on resources that might have gone to other supporters of the imperial or royal régimes, and the Church’s consequent wealth as a land- and slave-owner, meant that there was in fact a detectable amount of opposition to it and that this probably retarded conversion and/or Christianisation for a long time. His starting point was the Emperor Justinian, perhaps unsurprisingly, of whom Procopius scathingly said, “Justice for him lay in the priests getting the better of their opponents”, but we rapidly got down to the peasantry, for whom despite what has sometimes been argued, the Church for Dr Sarris was no better and perhaps a worse landlord than the aristocracy might have been, because of its greater potential to develop estates, move people around and of course exercise a form of social control over them via worship, as well as having the best possible state backing most of the time.¹ Benefaction and support for the Church, in this view, would come principally from those who saw a means to profit or advancement in it for themselves, the sort of people who might build churches on their estates or want to safely house family property with the tax-exempt Church in such a way that the family retained a heritable interest, a compromise that was easy to manage (and, according to one study Dr Sarris referenced, could represent a 5.5% return on investment per generation!).² In questions, he was forced to back down a bit and admit that obviously there were also sincere believers who gave to the Church for their souls and to fund God’s work, and there was a lot of argument about whether the fact that that is overridingly the sort of language that the sources use of donation to the Church should be taken as evidential or as merely formulaic (or, as I would have preferred, the ineluctable result of only Church archives surviving). There was also some argument about which regions this might be more or less true in, but overall this was a provocative paper thoroughly put forward and those arguing with it needed their evidence about them.

Obverse of a bronze coin of Herod Archelaus, Ethnarch of Judæa (4 B. C.-A. D. 4), with Chi-Ro symbol in field

Reverse of 50-denarius silver coin of King Gelimer of Carthage, 530×534, from Wikimedia Commons, with denomination mark derived from a letter

Then on the 1st March, Ildar Garipzanov gave the second of his two Oliver Smithies lectures in Balliol College. This was entitled, “The Rise of Graphicacy and Graphic Symbols of Authority in Early Europe (c. 300-1000)”, and to an extent it went over the same ground as his similar paper given in London a little while back on which I reported, but here managed also to cover the periods before and after. Graphicacy, you may need to know, is the skill of determining information from symbols, and it’s most usually used of maps, but Ildar was more interested in monograms here, which since they use letters meant a certain amount of definition-chopping over what is and isn’t text. His key reference point therefore was the symbol above, the Chi-Ro, composed of the first two letters of the word Christos in Greek. The basis of this is in text, but its meaning as a symbol for Jesus goes far beyond the text and was recognised far far beyond the realm where the language relevant for that text was spoken or read. It is seen as a marker on Christian objects in Britain as early as the early fourth century, before Emperor Constantine’s conversion had made it famous, and in general has a lot to tell us. Ildar wanted this time however to try and bring this tradition together with a different one of ownership marks used on property in shipment, usually elaborations of a letter N, M or H rather than anything related to an actual name, which were also widely used, including on coins very occasionally, and suggest the two traditions converged into the authority-marking monograms on which Ildar is more known for working.³ He didn’t quite leave himself time to make this case, as I felt, and had to withstand a full-on interrogation from Jonathan Shepard afterwards so couldn’t expand on it, but I expect that we will see it fully made before long, because Ildar does write quite a bit.

Altar and sculpture in the Asturian pre-Romanesque church of Santianes de Pravia

Last in this batch was a paper given before the Medieval Archaeology Seminar on 5th March 2012 by Isaac Sastre de Diego entitled, “Early Hispanic Churches through their Liturgical Sculpture”. This paper had been provoked by a phenomenon that irks me a lot too, the acute dearth of excavation around early medieval Spanish churches. (Catalonia is probably better for this than non-Catalan Spain, by the sound of it, though even there there’s a big difference between digging in and also digging around.) The other target assumption was that before Spain caught Romanesque, everything went in sensibly chronological phases that can be plotted in architectural styles, something which has also been disputed here so in general I was well placed to like this paper. Isaac’s solution to the problem, the problem being that this set-up gives a nice sensible system of dates for standing structures which is in fact entirely artificial, was to deal with the church’s architecture in terms of what we know about changes in the liturgy of the times and basically to see how that affects the dating of the churches. This is a big project, and here he focused specifically on altars. There are several types of altar to be found in Spain’s pre-Romanesque churches (even I can’t get away from the adjective, drat it), some late Roman ones reused (again, a subject dear to me by now), some set up as slabs on a single pillar like a Tau-cross (as above, or the one at Santa María de Quinzanas which was dated to 725×825 by carbon-dating of the relics still in place within), some as table-like slabs set up on legs at the edges, some slab-sided and roofed and some built of piles of slabs. When one stops assuming that there is a stylistic sequence to these types, and looks for actual dating evidence, which is rare, it becomes clear, said Isaac, firstly that we have nothing from before the second half of the fifth century as yet detected (though I pointed out that Sant Feliu de Barcelona, the first cathedral there, is known to be earlier even if we don’t have its altar any more), secondly that regional styles of decoration are detectable within the sample (and across types) and that there is certainly no such thing as a `Visigothic’-style altar as the old phased chronology has it, and thirdly (as emerged only in questions) there is nothing either that can be dated to the eighth century, though plenty after. Isaac suggested that that was best seen as a time of low investment in the Church, rather than some mass abandonment of altar-building. I found the dating arguments in this paper generally somewhat hard to follow, and it was some time before I was sure that the dates of the altars in question hadn’t in fact come from the same typology Isaac was attempting to dismantle, but it was not in fact so and as he said, while there is not a lot to go on here yet it’s still a step forward towards something a bit more scientific, from which indeed new and better-founded typologies could still be developed. So there we have it for now! More soon.

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1. One thing about Peter Sarris’s papers is that they always feature a full bibliography, so I can tell you that the paper derived from some of the work in Sarris, Matthew dal Santo and Phil Booth (edd.), An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages 20 (Leiden 2012), which I’ve not yet seen myself but which looks really interesting actually.

2. For this figure the cite was Paul Gautier (ed./transl.), “La Diataxis de Michel Attaliate” in Revue d’Études Byzantines Vol. 39 (Paris 1981), pp. 5–143 at pp. 17-129 [sic].

3. I think here mainly of I. Garipzanov, “Metamorphoses of the early medieval signum of a ruler in the Carolingian world” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 14 (Oxford 2006), pp. 419-464.

Things that are (relatively) newly online

A quick post to point out some things I recently discovered before they go off, most of which are things I shall have to try and go to. First up, what looks like a really interesting weekend conference at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, entitled “Local Churches and Lordship in the European Middle Ages”. I’m not presenting or anything, but the range of speakers is such, including three Iberian papers, that I am really going to have to make all efforts to go. Full details here.

Next up, the new term’s schedule for the Institute of Historical Research’s Earlier Middle Ages Seminar is now published, and again, everything on it looks unmissable, so I really hope I can continue to make it to these. If not, however, I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who feels they might be able to write stuff up for inclusion here, with full credit of course. The schedule is online here, and a shiny PDF version for sticking on noticeboards has also been circulated, though it isn’t yet there: I shall therefore stash it here for you all for the time being.

I’m particularly interested by the seminar for the 13th October, because it is described thus:

Leslie Webster, Guy Halsall

Staffordshire hoard round table

Now, Guy Halsall has views on the Staffordshire Hoard, views with which I can only partially agree but no news there really, and I know this because I recently became aware that Guy Halsall hath a blog, which he has set up to help with his current project, The Transformations of the Year 600. Dammit, why wasn’t I notified, etc. So far it seems largely to be texts of his seminar papers and so on, all very interesting of course (the one about the Hoard is here). There’s a wealth of stuff there, and he says in the first post, “I hope too that it might bring about some useful and helpful discussions and sharing of ideas and information.” As far as I can see, however, this is a well-kept secret so far and no-one has actually commented. I’m not sure I want to be the first, since I don’t know enough to argue with Guy or contribute to a perspective so early, but I expect some reading may be less bothered by the idea, and I thought you might want to know. Here’s hoping he adds more soon.

Talking about bishops in Oxford

Statue of Bishop Oliba of Vic in the Plaça de la Catedral de Vic

There is a story, which somehow no-one told on the day I’m writing about, about Professor Richard Southern. Trying to get a colleague with a promising new research student to send her to a conference, he met with some resistance; his colleague didn’t think the student yet had anything ready to present. “Oh, come on, old boy,” Professor Southern is supposed to have expostulated, “she must have a bishop.” On 4th September 2010, there was a small conference in Oxford and I for one felt I was living up to that story by turning up with a paper about a bishop rather than ground-breaking new research. That said, he was actually an interesting bishop—there was brief discussion of how well a book called Interesting Bishops of the Tenth Century would sell, we thought it might do all right—and other people’s papers were rather more interesting than I (at first) felt mine was. The conference was called “The Clerical Cosmos: Ecclesiastical power, culture, and society, c. 900 to c. 1075“, and was capably organised by Bernard Gowers and Hannah Williams, both future colleagues which, given the standard of the conference, can only be a good thing.

I don’t have time to do the full write-up, but here is a list of the papers.

Session 1

• Julia Barrow, “Boy Clerics 900-1075″
• Theo Riches, “Changing episcopal attitudes to popular belief c. 1000, as illustrated by the heresies of Châlons-sur-Marne”
• Sarah Hamilton, “Response”

Session 2

• Simon Williams, “Preachers, Rebels and Courtiers: The representation of Bishops in Liudprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis
• Dominik Waßenhoven, “Episcopal claims and self-perception during royal successions in the Ottonian-Salian kingdom”
• Conrad Leyser, “Response”

Session 3

• Jon Jarrett, “Dilettante or Politician: Count-Bishop Miró of Girona (970-984) and his intellectual cosmos”
• Richard Allen, “Before Lanfranc. The career of Mauger, Archbishop of Rouen (1037-1054/5), reconsidered”
• John Nightingale, “Response”

General Response

Given by Henry Mayr-Harting

All of these deserved note in their various ways. Dr Barrow as ever covered considerable ground and had more evidence in reserve with which to answer questions, and reminded us that as far as Isidore of Seville was concerned adolescence went on until one was [edit:twenty-eight, and youth (iuuentus) until] fifty! She also explained something I probably should have known, that there are seven grades of ordination in the Catholic Church, but that by the ninththirteenth century at least it was common to go through the first four (doorkeeper, lector, exorcist and acolyte) all at once, which is presumably what my guys were expressing when they called themselves clericus. Theo went closely into three episodes of heresy at Châlons (he hadn’t read that morning’s blog post…) that are documented only from Liègeelsewhere and that really tell us rather more about how one Liège clericvarious biographers wanted atheir heroic bishops to be seen than about the heretics.¹ In the response Sarah Hamilton raised the question of whether the increased number of episcopal vitae in this period could be seen as one more index of the growing social change and ferment, thus invoking the spectre of the feudal transformation, about which I then argued fiercely with Conrad Leyser for much of lunch.² Alex Woolf, there by strange coincidence, observed I think quite rightly that by gearing up their response to it the bishops of the early eleventh century were recognising a power to heresy, but I felt that the thing that was going on was much more socio-economic than the change of mentalities most other people saw here, a bigger population, more surplus all round and much more town-dwelling making the speed with which ideas found new adherents newly faster than the old counter-measures could defeat.

Later tenth-century manuscript page of Liutprand's Antapodosis now in Münich, from Wikimedia Commons

In the second session Simon Williams continued his mission of making people take Liudprand more seriously than is generally done by making it explicit how much of the sex and gossip he lards his narrative with is directed to the main attack of the Antapodosis, eroding and ridiculing the reputation of King Berengar II by a kind of literary sleaze campaign. Dominik Waßenhoven meanwhile looked at the change in the rôle bishops took in elections in the German kingdom and suggested that it mostly arose out of disputes but could never then be removed. In his response Conrad asked a classic Timothy Reuter question, roughly, what does it do to our perspectives if Germany is taken as normal and functional rather than the countries like England and France where episodes of crisis like Magna Carta accidentally create a constitutional monarchy that the Whigs thought was the natural order. It’s a good question, though as Theo observed this is rather the core assumption of most German scholarship.

The third session had me in it. It has struck me that the most exciting way to cover my paper here might be to transcribe my marginal cue notes, so here goes, with no concession to comprehensibility:

Miró is a famous intellectual, where famous at all. Main source for him however is charters. Hard to see anyone here except through land and power, but Miró was more, we know. This has all been covered—in Catalan—his style, vocab., verse etc. but not really put into context of his life.³ Ancestry gives him independence. Brothers; mother’s regency; ascent into orders 938-947. Problems with Unifred – royalty helps? Promotion; 957 revolt. Main source disposal of forfeited land. The army episode and subsequent invisible deal with Borrell II. Back to diaconate. Donation time begins. Bait and switch at Sant Joan; very political donations, clearing it out of their lands. Sunifred dies with some warning; Miró becomes count, then a bishop dies. Girona’s problem status. Borrell’s trip to Rome; the neophyte. Bishop Miró with Bishop Godmar. Ató’s murder; Empúries connection; Miró a compromise candidate? Return to the county; careful use of title. Rome trips; reform commands. In later years concentrates on Besalú—Sant Pere de Besalú, Sants Miquel i Genís; hardly in Girona and chapter don’t seem to care much. Death and burial – in Ripoll. Church commitment continuous but sometimes drowned out in record. Must have known Gerbert when newly count. Nothing odd for a count to be patron, or to go to Rome; but reform concern (if his) and lack of children is odd; more bishop than count. A peace-maker, not warrior cleric; talks Borrell down. Writing peace too: the Ripoll consecration creates shared ancestral past for all counts –false, but who cares, or knows? Then uses this historical consensus to bind them into an immunity, their alliance replacing king and by inclusion implicitly creating Catalonia. His intellectual cosmos thus leaves marks on the ground; his thoughts have political effect. ‘Bizarre baroque’, yes, a reluctant count, an ephemeral diocesan, but politician more than dilettante even if always thinking and talking.

Man, even my short notes are long. The other paper in the session was an excellent one in which it was persuasively argued by Richard Allen that Mauger Archbishop of Rouen, son of Duke Richard II of Normandy, was removed not because of all of the myriad and scandalous failings that later chroniclers attribute to him but because of messy family politics. John Nightingale’s response to us asked whether we were in a reform age here yet or not; I thought that I personally was not, and this led to considerable discussion as to how much change in European mentalities we could justifiably really attribute to Pope Gregory VII. Even cynics such as us were inclined to think: quite a lot really. This was particularly nicely expressed in Henry Mayr-Harting’s magisterial, nay, professorial response, in which he stressed that we had chosen a period to look at in which the whole basis of clerical culture had been undergoing change. No accident there, I’m sure, and that’s probably why it was such a lively gathering.

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1. Theo was first to make reference to an article that kept coming up again and again, and which would obviously be the key reference for anyone wanting to do more with these ideas, it being Timothy Reuter, “Ein Europa der Bischöfe. Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms” in Wilfried Hartmann (edd.), Bischof Burchard von Worms 1000-1025, Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte 100 (Mainz 2000), pp. 1-28, of which an English translation is apparently forthcoming.

2. I observed to Theo after this that I didn’t seem to be able to talk to Conrad at all without falling into a fierce argument, friendly-like but still basically continuous. Theo pointed out quite neatly that it’s not just Conrad with whom I seem to do this and wondered if there could be a common factor…

3. I have since writing this remembered that Josep María Salrach did his tesí de llicençiatura on Miró Bonfill, and I haven’t read it, so it seems very likely that I am even less original than I had hoped with this perspective…

Leeds 2010 report I

Since I’ve already been to one other conference that I’m already opining about on other people’s blogs, and since I there plugged all heck out of this blog (not that this seems to have brought any great slough of visitors) it’s probably time I wrote something about Leeds. This year’s was a good Leeds despite the weather; I’ve said before now that bad weather can ruin Leeds because everyone is crammed inside small overheated rooms and can’t find each other, but although it bucketed down for much of the conference I didn’t find that to be the case this year. I had the impression that there were fewer people there than usual, in fact, although there were as many sessions as far as I can tell so I guess it was non-presenters who decided they couldn’t spare the money this year. Fair enough I suppose, but those who were there had a good time I think.

1. Keynote Lectures 2010

Gerald of Wales's Map of the Atlantic Sea, c. 1200

The theme of this year’s Leeds was travel and exploration, and I did as usual and basically entirely avoided the theme except for the keynote lectures. These were also about the only point when I didn’t have timetable clashes, too; for some reason the early medieval sessions were unusually conflictual this year, which I think may also reflect that there were an awful lot of them. Anyway. The keynotes were both good, and the first of them was Patrick Gautier-Dalché speaking to the title “Maps, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages”. What he was addressing here was the fact that to us, often, a medieval map looks worse than useless, used as we are to measurable scales and Mercator’s Projection. In fact, he argued, although maps were largely representational rather than scientific in the Middle Ages, they were far from useless. Some might be just for looking at, in the old picture worth a thousand words scenario, because a map, even a distorted one, is still a very good way of encoding geographical information.¹ Then, they could even be useful for actually getting to places, if you approached them in the right way. The Map of the Atlantic Sea by Gerald of Wales above, M. Gautier-Dalché claimed though if the image above really is it I see no sign of this, is marked up with not just the pilgrimage routes through Western Europe, but the distances between their various stopping points. As long as you could find someone to put you on the road to the next destination, therefore, you would still be able to use the map to budget your provisions and journey time and maybe carry some very basic local information. In cases where precision navigation was a bit more essential, to wit at sea, maps perhaps served as aides-mémoire more than literal graphical information; a reminder of what a certain coastline looked like when you approached it, what the hills round the port are like, and so on. Not much use for doing it first time, but perhaps quite useful for doing it first time in say, ten years. The last example was maps’ use in judicial cases; unlikely, you might think, but apparently Columbus’s maps were produced in court in 1535 to prove that he had actually discovered, and indeed drawn, the coasts of South America. So a map might be a teaching tool, a contemplative resource, a planning aid, a piece of judicial proof, and was above all an interpretation, but Mercator has perhaps spoiled us to their possibilities.

An ancient stitch-and-glue boat hull on display in a restaurant in Zadar, Croatia

The second keynote was given by Dionysius Agius, and was entitled, “‘In these Seas Horrors beyond Count Befell [Us]: travel in medieval Islam”. This was less of an argument and more of a tour of the evidence for medieval Islamic travel, which was fine by me as I know very little of it beyond the names of Ibn Battuta and al-Mas’Udi, and it was also accompanied with some fabulous, and indeed very presentist pictures, illustrating continuities of construction technique, goods trafficked, routes and so on, not least the stitched boats of which an older example is shown above. He talked us through the trade routes, both overland and overseas, without leaving much time for detail on any of them, just telling us a good story or two, and you know, this too is a skill, especially for a keynote on a specialised theme before a general audience. I did sort of know, for example, that the ends of trade routes across desert zones (and indeed the middle of them) tend to shift according to where the nomads who run the entry-points to them have currently got their shops set up, but it was as well to be reminded in the same few minutes as having the seasonal cycle of the currents of the Indian Ocean explained, there being a large part of the year when it’s far easier to go one way than the other, which is then reversed for another equally large part. After all, some people were plotting to get goods all the way along both routes. The other thing that I technically knew but which was well linked up here was that, at the period when Islamic ships were breaking out into the Indian Ocean (and indeed further) they were far from the only ships sailing it; indeed, as Professor Agius pointed out, they were sufficiently outsized and outnumbered by Indian and Chinese vessels that sometimes those groups were induced to provide warship escorts to keep away fleets of cannibal pirates (or so the travel narratives earnestly tell us, anyway). Whether the stories of Sindbad the Sailor really have a medieval context may, as we have said here before, be doubted, but Professor Agius happily brought them in anyway to illustrate the sort of stories that were probably told. So, not afraid to indulge in anachronism, and perhaps even Orientalism, but not to a bad purpose I thought and an entertaining lecture to attend.

105. Texts and Identities, I: Merovingian Queens – Narratives and Politics

Fifteenth-century illumination of Queen Clothilde offering prayers to St Martin

This was where the clashes started. I probably wanted, in retrospect, to go to 104. Popular Politics and Resistance in East and West but I hadn’t fully absorbed what I’d be missing (Robert Moore insisting there was no popular heresy that counts in early medieval Europe, Andrew Marsham saying what were apparently really interesting things about rebellion against the Umayyads and Bernard Gowers, whom I already needed to meet, talking about peasants, which I am very sorry I missed but may at least be able to get a copy of) until I’d run into one of the speakers from 105 and assured her I’d be at her paper. A man of my word, therefore, I was there for the following:

• Julia Hofmann, “Betrayal or Portrayal? The Depiction of Fredegund and Clovis in Gregory of Tours’ Decem Libri Historiarum V. 39-49″. I mainly attended this so as to have seen Julia Hofmann and Julie Hofmann in the same room, in fact. Here the argument was that whereas Gregory of Tours was usually hopelessly partial in his depictions of Merovingian court politics, which is an obvious problem for working out whether he can be trusted to tells us about them, in this particular bloody and skulduggerous episode of family in-fighting he appears to have loathed both protagonists about equally, which suggests that it may even be a fair depiction. I’m not convinced we’d think the same if it were Liutprand of Cremona, myself, though I do understand the great emotional need not to write off so much of our evidence for the sixth century as Gregory represents.
• Erin T. Dailey, “Merovingian Polygamy”, a title that drew me in but disappointed rather as it largely concluded that there probably wasn’t really any Merovingian polygamy per se, and did so largely by refusing to nuance the category of concubine, which as a couple of people pointed out to me afterwards needs doing because sometimes concubines’ children become kings. So, while marriage may be an important distinction (and valuable security for the wife, as long as the mother-in-law wasn’t Brunhild) it isn’t a total one, and the fact that there’s only ever one queen at a time doesn’t remove the need to ask how far queens are different. Only twenty minutes, I know, but he was pressed on the matter in questions and didn’t get much further with it.
• Linda Dohmen, “The Adulterous Queen in Early Frankish Historiography”. Full disclosure requires that I admit that I’ve known Linda for ages and it was her I’d promised to come and see, but I thought this genuinely was a good paper, carefully balanced between spice and analysis. It also did something useful by balancing Gregory of Tours out with other sources covering the same era, in their equally biased ways, the Liber Historiae Francorum and ‘Fredegar’.² What stories like the classic one about King Chilperic, coming home early to Queen Fredegund fresh out of the bath, catching her unawares with a slap on the rear and she telling off the lover she assumed it was rather than the husband it actually was, illustrate, other than in some ways there’s not much difference between a sixth-century court and a twentieth-century soap opera in terms of plot, is that a lot of people were prepared to get into risky situations for a chance to get with the queen, and not, we presume, simply because Merovingian kings selected irresistible brides Balthild not withstanding,³ but because it was a position of power; queens could bring legitimacy to a pretender or an arriviste, could be grounds for launching a coup or mounting a rebellion and could, also, be vital tokens of continuity when those events were unrolling for other reasons. Here as often happens we need a way to express this sort of position of power often occupied by women in the Middle Ages, power which is not the same as agency, which they often didn’t enjoy (Fredegund as with so much else an exception here), being unfortunate prizes to be contested between men who certainly did, but still incredible focuses of… what? One almost wants to use ancient anthropological terms like tabu, did I not know that modern-day anthropologists of my acquaintance (and indeed modern-day feminists) would probably kick me in the constructs for it. But the word ‘power’ doesn’t really get there, and it’s very hard to discuss without accepting the sources’ language of objectification. So yes, this one is still making me think.

209. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: reassessing politics and culture in the 10th century

Decorated initial showing Pope Gregory VII excommunicating King Henry IV of Germany

My colleague Rory Naismith and I have been at the same conferences several times now, and at Kalamazoo we were somehow scheduled against each other, which has happened before too. This not being the case this time, I told Rory I would go to his session (221. The Anglo-Saxons and Rome, II: routes, coins and manuscripts) and then gathered that one of its speakers had pulled out and that this one was on in the same time-slot… I think I’ve still seen more of his papers than he has of mine but he definitely has the moral high ground for now. However, I struggled to find the session I was going to instead and so arrived in a terribly full room slightly after the beginning of…

• Theo Riches, “Once Upon an Iron Age: telling the story of the long 10th century between Carolingians and ecclesiastical reform”. Some day I hope Theo will write a follow-up to Tim Reuter’s contribution to the feudal transformation debate; I’ve heard Theo discuss this and his Germanist’s perspectives are really interesting.⁴ However, he keeps letting some excuse about that not being his actual subject get in the way, and so this was not that paper but instead a likewise interesting one about bishops and ritual. He was picking up on a recent piece of Steffen Patzold‘s about the use of ritual in Ottonian court society, as propounded by Gerd Althoff, which makes the very useful distinction between the rules of the game and manœuvres in the game, and the need to be aware which the evidence is showing us.⁵ This fits well with my objections to some of the French school of dispute scholarship that emphasies competing norms; sometimes, I like to point out, people are actually abnormal, and this was implicit in Theo’s discussion.⁶ Theo also wanted us to remember the audience, and that it is not necessarily passive; these rituals may be worked out beforehand, but they are pointless unless they are seen, which means that they are also open to interpretation. Patzold sees a change in bishops’ rôles in these contexts in the 820s, from potestas to ministerium, moving from being in charge of their own subjects to the whole of God’s people, with a consequent distancing from politics in detail. Theo suggested seeing this as move from being a player of the ‘game’ to being an umpire, and that the 820s are the point when episcopal lordship starts to become qualitatively different. This was music to my ears as my very first Leeds paper suggested that bishops in my area were lay lords plus, with extra means of recourse and a few corresponding restrictions, but essentially doing the same things;⁷ Theo’s take here, and Steffen’s behind it, may give me the means to nuance this. I also really liked Theo’s statement in questions that “Canossa breaks deditio, you can’t use it any more” (deditio being a ritual of simulated self-abasement to demand forgiveness from a ruler for disobeying him). This is one of many ways in which the contest between King Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII overdrives medieval politics, he’s right, things do break in that contest, and arguably not least the Holy Roman Empire…
• Steven Robbie, “The Duchy of Alemannia in the Early Tenth Century: an ethnic community?” followed Theo, which is hard enough to do, but Theo speaks quite loudly and Steven speaks quite softly; also, it was after lunch and the room was hot and stuffy. I fear Steven may have lost some of the attention of his audience for what was quite a subtle take on the question of the Stamme, the core ‘ethnic’ territories that are supposed to underlie German duchies in a certain old-fashioned sort of historiography. Steven illustrated that this won’t work for Alemannia, which is reconstructed pretty much as needed in the political circumstances of each age and only maps to later Swabia in fairly transient ways. When all of Alemans, Thuringians and Swabians are supposed to be the same ancestral community, you realise that ethnogenesis is a game that many can play.
• Simon Williams, “Playing to the Gallery: reinterpreting Liudprand of Cremona’s Antapadosis in its contemporary context”, did indeed play to the gallery in as much while I may some day hear a Liutprand paper in which the speaker does not tell the story everyone’s favourite Italian scandalmonger reports about Queen Guilla hiding a valuable belt where only a woman could, this was not it (and neither, of course, is my report of it). However, he did do some interesting stuff pointing out how quickly Liutprand’s work circulated, well within his lifetime too, so even if he was initially writing for a small audience that wasn’t what he revised for. Simon in fact suggested that the target audience was Bishop Abraham of Freising and perhaps Bishop Dietrich of Metz as well as Bishop Rather of Verona, and that we underestimate Liutprand if we see him as a marginal player. Liutprand writing about you, in other words, was something like being mentioned in Tatler; probably unpleasant and trivial but unfortunately read by people whose good opinion of you may be important some day…

Coffee break next but I find it combines badly with adrenalin, so I didn’t, because next was nothing less than my paper!

301. Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Caliph, King, or Grandfather: strategies of legitimization on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar III” is actually one of my better pieces of work, I think, and compares three contemporary Catalan counts’ reactions to what I’m now arguing is a resurgent Carolingian royal self-assertion by King Lothar III. This is kind of part two of my Haskins paper from 2008 and I hope to have them both in process soon so I’ll say no more here unless people are curious enough to ask.

Grant of King Æthelred II to Abingdon Abbey, 993 (Sawyer 876)

• Levi Roach, “The Voice of Æthelred?” explored the group of lengthy royal charters of King Æthelred the Unready in which he apologises for the misdeeds of his youth and makes compensation gifts. Levi was arguing that the imagery employed here is sufficiently consistent, across several archives and many scribes, that these documents must represent an actual statement of sorts by the king, even if he probably didn’t choose the actual written phrasing. Charles Insley, who gave a not dissimilar paper a few years ago,⁸ was generous enough not to point this out in questions, but Levi rallied to what I think is actually new ground in reaction to a question from Steven Robbie about how long it can possibly take to be sorry; these documents after all span most of a decade. Levi’s response was that the only way it all makes sense is a rather paranoid policy of penitence till the bad stuff stops happening, which after these charters stopped was shifted onto the whole kingdom under the influence of Archbishop Wulfstan; in other words, this court’s response to crisis is to escalate repentance until the handles come off and it all goes to Hell… Which, even if it’s overstated, gives one to wonder how neutral a perspective on things anyone at Æthelred’s court could possibly have maintained… What price groupthink? and so on.
• David Woodman, “The Rewriting of the Anglo-Saxon Past: a Middle English Rhyming Charter of King Æthelstan and the Beverley Cartulary (BL, MS Additional 61901) in context”, lastly, dealt with a rather lovely piece of Middle English fabrication in which Beverley Minster tried to claim foundation by the selfsame rex totius Britanniae in the fourteenth century. The result looks and reads nothing like an Anglo-Saxon charter, and nor does much of the stuff it’s put into a beautiful cartulary with, but it still won them several cases. David set out exactly who the enemies were in this case, and explained the success of the claim not in terms of the cluelessness of the panel judging but of opposition between the abbey, Archbishop Neville of York and Richard, Second of That Name, Kynge, but one was still left with echoes of the story in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the eponymous publication’s lawyers successfully argue that beauty is truth so the prettier story is automatically true, as one would like rather like Æthelstan to have been one of those congenial souls…

Now. I want to talk to you, Internet, about the Problems and Possibilities strand and what’s happening with it, but this is long enough already. I’ll do it in a separate post later on. Instead let it be noted that I managed to miss two separate receptions where free wine was available, somehow, mainly to get lightly drunk with such fine upstanding members of the Internet as Another Damned Medievalist and Ealuscerwen, in the same place but not with Gesta, which seems to be the usual way of things, and a few people who have real names, and I went to bed merry and exhausted.

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1. Something that all of us who were in Siena and now also commenting at In The Medieval Middle seem to be agreeing on; a conceptual map of that city might be a lot more use than a strictly geographical one.

2. Pronounced, as I once heard Roger Collins say in a paper he was giving on the author in question, “with the inverted commas silent, like the P in Psmith”.

3. In fact, it surprises me that in a session about Merovingian queens not only did Balthild only get a passing mention, but her supposed seal was completely omitted. It’s got to be part of any discussion about how queenship is visualised, hasn’t it, especially since if it is what is claimed, it’s actually a source generated by or at least for the queen. I begin to wonder if there’s a perhaps a case for asking medieval historians to ask themselves, “is there a good reason your paper is entirely text-based?” And I am not just saying this because it’s lewd, I am saying this because I think we were already dancing near the lewd and it would have been a way to let it in without risking sounding as if one actually wanted to talk about sex.

4. Referring to T. Reuter, “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution’. III” in Past and Present no. 155 (Oxford 1997), pp. 177-195.

5. Referring here to Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt 1997) and S. Patzold, Konflikte im Kloster. Studien zu Auseinandersetzungen in monastischen Gemeinschaften des ottonisch-salischen Reichs, Historische Studien 463 (Husum 2000).

6. See, if you should really want to, my review of Stephen D. White, Feuding and Peacemaking in Eleventh-Century France, Variorum Collected Studies 817 (Aldershot 2005) in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 15 (Oxford 2006), pp. 124-125.

7. J. Jarrett, “Sales, Swindles and Sanctions: Bishop Sal·la of Urgell and the counts of Catalonia”, paper presented in session ‘Telling Laymen What to Do’, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 21 July 2005, available to you as J. Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (University of London 2005), pp. 289-313, online here.

8. His webpages mention a chapter, “Rhetoric and Ritual in Late Anglo-Saxon Charters” in P. Barnwell and M. Mostert (edd.), Medieval Legal Process: Physical, Spoken and Written Performance in the Middle Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 19 (Brepols 2009), which will probably be worth consulting on this if it’s actually out; a rapid web-search reveals publication dates of 2008, 2009 and ‘in preparation 2008-2009′, but the publishers seem less sanguine. In fact, damn, I need that book even though I heard half the papers…

A woman, a priest and an inheritance

This post fulfils an old promise. After a careless footnote in which I maintained that, despite all the counter-examples mentioned here there were some women from Catalonia in my period who were not called Adelaide, she who is The Naked Philologist demanded a story about one by way of proof. One sprang immediately to mind, and I then failed to write it up for what is now months. So OK, here she is. I grant you that Riquilda is almost as common a name in my documents as Adelaide, but at least she’s not also a major city in la Philologiste’s country of origin, so slightly more exotic perhaps. So, OK, Riquilda Saruilda, come on down!

We know about Riquilda from a gift that a priest called Seniol made to her in 989.¹ She doesn't seem to occur anywhere else, at least not with that surname, and without it it's hard to be sure that any given woman of that name is her. I have my ideas but we'll come to them later. First it's best to get the charter into play.

In the name of the Lord. I the priest Seniol am donor to you the woman Riquilda whom they call Saruilda and your sons and daughters born of one father. By this scripture of donation I give to you my own alod, houses and courtyards and orchards, lands and vines and trellises, cultivated or waste and all the sorts of trees which are there and mills with their millstreams and with all their equipment. And this is that which came to me through my parents and in part through purchase. And all these things are in the county of Osona, in the area of the Castell de Voltregà, in the place which they call Vila Segari, and some in the area of Roda or Savassona, in the place which they call Esplugues or On the Ridges.

He gives the boundaries, and goes on:

All these things written above I give to you Saruilda fully and integrally with their exits and entrances, in such a way namely that while you shall live if you do not join yourself [te non coniunxeris] to any man through any libidinous urge you may hold and possess and make to nourish your sons and daughters therefrom and make well or better whatever you see or are able to, after your death indeed let it revert to them freely and intact and let them hold and possess and divide equally between themselves. For if you shall join yourself to any man [te coniuncxeris] all these things that are written above shall come into the power of your sons and daughters who are born of one father without any delay and they may do about these things as is written above.

And the rest is the usual ‘if anyone abstracts this stuff they must give back twice as much’, the dating clause and the witness and scribal signatures. For once, I’m not interested in them.

Sant Martí Xic, Castell de Voltregà, where Riquilda might have gone to repent her misspent youth (if she regretted it)

The first thing to say about this is that although the phrasing is a little lurid, it seems to me, what was legally going on here is not unusual or unprecedented. Plenty of transactions exist in which a woman was given property on which to support herself and her children, but if she should remarry it was assumed that she would thenceforth be supported by her new husband so the kids could now enjoy the full share. (This also stopped their stepfather claiming it was his and passing it on to any new children instead.) But this is almost exclusively done in wills by a still-living husband looking ahead to when he would not be there. That’s not what was happening here, because there’s no relation at all specified between Seniol and Riquilda. Also, they do usually talk about remarrying, whereas Seniol manages to give the impression that Riquilda’s hormones were perpetually on the point of getting the better of her and that marriage might be something she asked about afterwards, if at all.

With that conundrum set up one starts to wonder what was not being said. Does the peculiar emphasis on children ‘born of one father’ imply, along with the sex-negative emphasis, that Riquilda had offspring by more than one man? If so, why on earth didn’t Seniol specify which father was at, er, issue? This was obviously open to misuse. If not, on the other hand, why bother to say anything extra? Was this some kind of moral congratulation for continence? It’s a bit weird if so. Secondly, why was it Seniol who had to provide for her? The property was coming from ‘his’ parents, not ‘their’ parents; it’s not that, or at least not said that, this was family property to which Riquilda had any kind of right, and even if some of it were, that certainly wouldn’t apply to the parts of it that Seniol had bought. As I say, this is the sort of provision which you’d only ever see normally being made by a father for his children.

Catalan illustration of another famously misunderstood mother

So on first reading I was led to look very suspiciously at Seniol. There certainly were some priests who gave alms to get people out of poverty, redeem captives, free slaves and so on, but this was a very generous endowment if all he wanted to do was keep her off the breadline. You have to wonder in how many other ways he had fulfilled the rôle of a father, or at least, I do. As a priest, he probably shouldn’t have been having children, though plenty did admit families with no problem. And maybe that’s why no father is specified; he and Riquilda would both have known who was meant but it still wasn’t going to go down in scriptura if he could help it… And so I thought that Riquilda might actually have finally done quite well out of a series of ill-fated liaisons, because you know, mills were a money-earner, the properties she was getting are not small as we can tell from the boundaries, she was sorted for life here, as long as she didn’t marry. So, was the idea here that if she stay comfortable she also stay quiet? (Worse, was he perhaps even keeping her available?) Certainly some kind of arrangement seems to have been made here in which her children acquired a lasting interest in his family property, and whatever the explanation actually was it would seem to involve some fairly close connection.

Now, sadly, there is a better explanation, though it does involve positing some important and inexplicable omissions in some documents, and it doesn’t in any way remove the idea of people having sex with other people whom society might expect them not to. My attention was initially drawn to Seniol because I thought, at an early stage of my doctorate, that one thing it might be interesting to do was to track down people who appeared in the documents of more than one archive, and see what their connections were. This wasn’t actually very interesting, as it turned out, but Seniol was one such man. There is a charter from rather before this, you see, 978, in which one Seniol made a substantial gift of property which he had been holding in trust to a newly-adult lad by the name of Guillem Amat, whom we have met before, the son of a castellan called Unifred who had a wife and a lover, or at least a documented lover. Guillem was not the son of that lover, however, whose name as you may remember was Sesnanda, but of Unifred’s actual wife, whose name was… Riquilda. And Seniol was Guillem’s uncle, and presumably therefore (since he is never named among Unifred’s well-documented brothers) Riquilda was his sister. To top it off, there too property as at a place called Esplugues is concerned. This one has been taken to be in the county of Barcelona, like all the rest of the properties mentioned, but actually the way the text is phrased does not make that certain.² This seems like too many coincidences. Can this be therefore the same Seniol?

Sant Pere de Savassona, another possible prayer location for the 'lucky' mother

It would make a certain amount of sense. Unifred was indeed dead by 989, so Riquilda would have been without support (though it does imply that both his partners must have been contemporary). The family may well therefore have had to pony up for the children, and perhaps Seniol was all the family that was left. If, just possibly, Unifred had dumped Riquilda because she’d got pregnant by someone else, Seniol’s attitude and silences might still be explicable in terms of disgust, and he have had to disburse property like this now only because the other guy had stopped supporting her as well. If he was already holding property for one of the sons, and had handed that over before Riquilda had had hers, she might have had quite a claim on him as he arguably should have given her hers first.³ Of course, they probably weren’t at that point forecasting that she’d be put aside by Unifred, if that happened.

The biggest problem with this is that the Seniol who gives to Guillem Amat did not use a clerical title. Not just that, but he repeatedly appeared with Count Borrell II without doing so.⁴ There are certainly cases of priests who didn’t always use their titles in documents, but that many times in that exalted a company is a bit much for me.⁵ So there are problems either way. If this guy was not Riquilda’s brother, I think he had some explaining to do. If he is, what is he doing with this priestly rank? I don’t know. But either way, Riquilda seems to have done all right out of him. I like to think she had a joyful life, anyway, if a slightly careless one, and that this represented a happy ending. I’m aware that’s not how it works out for a lot of single mothers, but we can but hope for her.

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1. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1564.

2. Federico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18/Publicaciones de le Sección de Barcelona 15 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 182.

3. If for some reason you should want a quick primer on inheritance law in this area at this time, I would recommend you to Nathaniel L. Taylor, “Testamentary Publication and Proof and the Afterlife of Ancient Probate Procedure in Carolingian Septimania” in K. Pennington, S. Chodorow & K. H. Kendall (edd.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress on Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City 2001), pp. 767-780, online at http://www.nltaylor.net/pdfs/a_Testamentary_Pub.pdf, last modified 9th December 2006 as of 24th June 2007, which will tell you where everything else you need is. Beyond him the key work is Antoni M. Udina i Abelló, La successio testada a la Catalunya altomedieval, Textos i documents (Barcelona 1984).

4. He also occurs in A. Fabregà i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844-1260. Volum I: documents dels anys 844-1000, Fonts Documentals 1 (Barcelona 1995), doc. no. 201; Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, docs 1238, 1266, 1464 & 1635 & J. Rius (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés Vol. I (Barcelona 1945), docs 126, 191, 240, 295 & 302.

5. The best example is in Jesus Alturo i Perucho, “Le statut du scripteur en Catalogne (XII^e-XIII^e siècles)” in Marie-Claude Hubert, E. Poulle & Marc Smith (edd.), Le Statut du Scripteur au Moyen Âge. Actes du XII^e Colloque Scientifique du Comité Internationale de Paléographie Latine (Cluny, 17-20 Juillet 1998), Matériaux pour l’Histoire publiées par l’École des Chartes 2 (Paris 2000), pp. 41-55 at pp. 44-45 but I can find you more if you really need them.

Help with some Cordoban Latin scuttlebutt?

Of recent days I have been reading Samson of Córdoba’s Apologeticum contra perfidos, which is a lengthy work of ninth-century theology aimed at stemming the increasing control of the Cordoban Church by people who didn’t, as Samson saw it, even really understand the Trinity and were in place largely because of having been suitably unctuous at the Emir’s court.¹ He aims to rekindle the wonder and mystery of Trinitarian Christianity in the reader and thus encourage a new generation to take up the torch, but in the course of doing so he goes properly Gildas about the political parachutists, who, he says, have basically turned the Church into a state revenue apparatus to their own benefit. These are the people he wants out, not least because they briefly managed to get him degraded for heresy in a trumped-up trial by wilfully misunderstanding his doctrine about the Trinity (though I actually think that’s fair enough, as he basically says it’s not comprehensible, albeit some respect is due to him for using paired senses of the Latin word ‘comprehensibile‘ in doing this).²

The tenth-century Church of San Lorenzo in Córdoba

Why are you reading that, Jonathan, you may be asking, and the answer is that in the course of indicting his enemies, as well as some good scatalogical late-Antique-style slander,³ he tells several stories that reveal some quite important things about the tax system and the way the Emirs were dealing with control of the Church. I’ll talk about that a bit more in a moment, but first I’d like to ask for help with one of these stories. This is about Samuel, Bishop of Granada, the uncle of Samson’s main enemy—who was Bishop Ostegesis of Malaca (more like Hostis Ihesus! puns Samson)⁴—and I don’t think I can tell exactly what he is being accused of:

In ipso quippe Parascefe die, dum ante parum tempus pro male gestis a pontificali officio fuisset remotus, Iudas Scarioth nouus Cordobam petiit et tonso tenus cute capite Xpm denegans Muzlemitis, quia iam circumcisus erat, facile adesit et ritui eorum post sacerdotium inseruiuit.⁵

So, okay, a rough translation:

On the day of the Parasceve, indeed, while before—and not for long enough!—he had been far from the pontifical office in pursuit of evil intents, the new Judas Iscariot betook himself to Córdoba and, having cut his hair almost to the skin of his head, denying Christ to the Muslims, since he was already circumcised, easily clung to and afterwards took care of their rite after the priesthood.

I think that’s pretty close to the Latin but what the goshdarn heck it actually means is another question. Is Samson saying that this guy did convert to Islam? or that he pretended to have done so before, and meanwhile operated as something administrative in the Christian Church as a kind of double agent? Whose priesthood? Islam doesn’t have an organised one in the way that this seems to imply, but the (grammatical) antecedent is pretty clearly Muzlemitis (and yes, it is interesting that he uses that word; elsewhere he uses Caldei, but more on that in a moment). If anyone can see through the grammar to work out what Bishop Samuel is actually supposed to have done, I would be grateful for your input.

Manuscript illustration of the judges at the Millennium judging the souls of the martyrs of Córdoba

The world in which Samson operated is quite hard to fathom in a number of ways. I think that he must have been ignoring quite a lot of change. He refers to people taking bribes in solidi, for example, but the coins had long since been dirhams, so that can only have been a unit of account if that.⁶ It’s clear that the ‘kings of the Ishmælites’ basically nominated to Church offices, as they can be induced to do this by people like Ostegesis and Samuel who are happy to spend their flock’s offerings on holding banquets for the priori domum regiæ, but (perhaps naturally) he has nothing bad to say of these ‘kings’, who are always anonymous and usually plural, though he will name their functionaries, some of whom are called saio muzlemitus.⁷ All his terminology is Christian, therefore, and much of it Visigothic, even though the offices and officers he describes are not at all. On the other hand, he renders Arabic names more or less cleanly, and was able to do far more than that since, at one point, his enemies decide to move against him (by getting a Christian who is on trial for blaspheming against Muhammad (‘him whom the Chaldæan people cult as a prophet’) to indict Samson and his protector Bishop Valerius of Córdoba, though the ‘kings’ decide to ignore that testimony, which may be why Samson is neutral about them) because he has been employed to translate a letter from ‘the king of Hispania’ to the king of the Franks “ex Caldeo sermone in Latinum eloquium“, and this sign of emiral favour panics them into action.⁸ Point being, apparently Samson could translate Arabic…

So, the whole thing does read as if he is trying to hide the political situation from his readers, or else somehow doesn’t think it very relevant. The problem he sees with the Church is corrupt and ill-educated priests and bishops, not the fundamental fact that it is in the power of Muslims. The Muslims are tolerable; they’re not really interested, but they’re amenable to reason as well as bribery, and the only really bad thing they do is subject the Church as a whole to tribute, but they only do that (as Samson tells it) because Servandus, Ostegesis’s right-hand man, turns over several Christians to the authorities for hiding things on which they should have paid regular tax under altars in the city’s churches, whereafter the authorities punish the whole Church.⁹ Again, somehow he blames the Christians, not the state. On the other hand, it’s what, era 901 he says so 863 AD, the Muslims have been in power in Spain for a hundred and fifty years and they’re only now putting the Cordoban Church under special taxation, as well as apparently being accessible to anyone even claiming to be a bishop and hiring hardline Trinitarian theologians to do secretarial work, so this attitude may be fair enough. All this makes it a very interesting source for the doublethink involved in being on the underside of al-Andalus’s well-known convivencia, but that doublethink is hard to see through. One can’t help seeing Samson as an ostrich with his head in the sand, however viciously he pecks at all the other ostrich’s feet.

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1. Samsonis apologeticum contra perfidos, ed. Joan Gil in I. Gil (ed.), Corpvs Scriptorvm Mvzarabicorvm Vol. II, Manuales y Anejos de «Emerita» XXVIII (Madrid 1973), pp. 505-658.

2. Samson, Apologeticus I.9.

3. For example, he goes into unpleasantly gruesome detail about a struggle to remove the foreskin of Ostegesis’s octogenarian apostate father, driven to convert when arrested for non-payment of taxes (Apologeticum, II Præf. cap. 3). This is, I presume, damnation by association, as Samson puts some store by lineage, but there’s plenty of allegations of sexual impropriety too. I don’t like this kind of writing much, though I recognise it’s in a good Roman tradition; it seems so mean-spirited, condemning the accuser as much as the accused, and to diminish the force of the main accusations. On the other hand, I wrote much of this post while listening to the Dead Kennedies’ Plastic Surgery Disasters, which is, after all, an erudite, scathing and often scatalogical attack on people prostituting themselves to a corrupt and uncaring power structure, and which I enjoy thoroughly, so really, where’s that moral high ground I had a minute ago?

4. Samson, Apologeticus II Præf. cap. 2.

5. Ibid., II Pr. 4.

6. Ibid., II Pr. 2 & 8.

7. Ibid., II Pr. 8.

8. Ibid., II Pr. 9, inc. “illum quem gens Caldea profetam colunt“.

9. Ibid., II Pr. 5.

I left my heart phone charger in St Andrews (2 of 3)

The island of Noirmoutier, first site of the community of St Philibert; perfect for isolation, sea breeze and Viking raiders...

The second day of the St Andrews conference just mentioned dawned comparatively kindly since proceedings didn’t start till the civilised hour of 10 o’clock, which suits me very well, leaving time between closing time and breakfast time for enough sleep and then for enough reading and tea to become coherent by the time anyone tries to talk to me. And the way the programme unrolled, it was a while before I thought of anything to say anyway, but Christian Harding‘s study of the peregrinations of the monks of St Philibert, who once they were shifted from their original coastal house at Noirmoutier during the Viking Age went through about six more locations before finally settling at Tournus many decades later, did raise some questions. He was seeing the monks and the gifts from the kings by which they were able to move as political tools in the rivalry between the Carolingian kingdoms, starting as a loyal outpost in the Breton march where, as we’d heard yesterday, Carolingian control was never as tight as might be wished, and then being competed for between Charles the Bald and Pippin II of Aquitaine his nephew on that border. This raised questions about whether you could really shunt a community around like that, or whether they had serious problems settling and begged more and more land, where, in short, the initiative was in all these translations, questions that could have been argued for much longer than we had.

St Edgwad's Llanegwad, Wales, 10th or early 11th century structure with later modifications

In the second session Thomas Owen Clancy talked about the leadership of the familia of Columba (not Columbanus this time) and Alex Woolf addressed the question of how the Welsh Church ran before the Normans got to it, focusing on the secular nature of its church communities, who seem to have operated by dividing the church property between them in private tenure. This is something that, though the Normans saw it as something in need of reform, I could easily recognise from the way that the pre-Catalan Church uses deacons and priests as unofficial managers operating from mother churches, and which Anglo-Saxonists might recognise as a bit like the `minster hypothesis’. As I said to him, Alex has a particular talent for taking a tangled argument and suggesting a brilliantly simple solution, and here again he had chosen one good way of doing this, which is to wonder if the situation was really weird or if what’s going on was what was going on in other places under different words. He also raised the important point that we often identify church sites with enclosures as monasteries, but the fact that there was a monastery at a site doesn’t necessarily imply that the site is a monastery.

The modern church of San Vincenzo al Volturno seen through the ruins of the Carolingian abbey, from Wikimedia Commons

In the session after that Federico Marazzi, who is leading the continuing dig at the huge Italian monastic site of San Vicenzo al Volturno, gave us an extensive introduction to the site, which raised among other things the peculiarity that the huge abbey church appears to have been accessible only via the cloister, and therefore to the monks and those they admitted; the locals, such as they may have been, must have worshipped elsewhere on the site. Melanie Maddox then told us about how Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, used not just force of arms but forces of clerics in her reconquest of the North-West from the Danes and Norse, by translating saints’ relics into new churches she’d set up, not least St Peter’s at what might have become a new Mercian capital at Chester.

The Mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna, one of the establishments local sources consider a 'monastery', from Wikimedia Commons

In the last session that day, all certainties were temporarily dissolved. We had begun the conference, most of us, reasonably certain that we knew what a monastery was and that, fundamentally, there was a Benedictine ideal in play for most of our period to which places either conformed or did not. Now, Tom Brown told us (more) about Ravenna, where drawing the line between monastery and not-monastery is made harder by a plethora of tiny little private cells with a population of maybe one or two who really lived elsewhere, more like Egyptian hermits’ cells than Benedictine abbeys except for the fact of their urban location. Monasticism can, as he said, mean a lot of things. But this was nothing compared to what Albrecht Diem unleashed by what started as an innocuous comparison of Gregory of Tours’s Vita Patrum to Jonas of Bobbio’s Life of Columbanus (told you we’d be back there). He stressed that almost all our sources operate by asserting some kind of continuity with the time of writing, even if it’s only a recognisable location, and that the present therefore shapes the past in its reporting, but then brought out specifically how Gregory’s and Jonas’s times and agendas bent some of our primary established facts about the ecclesiastical set-ups of their times. Gregory has a range of ascetics from all walks of life doing their various things, but the noble bishop is still the boss; but Jonas makes the ascetic the boss, even telling kings what to do and immune from their attack (both legally and by miraculous intervention), and the interesting thing is that he’s using Gregory as he does it; the parallels Albrecht drew were pretty damning. Someone out there can tell me where the maxim about not dismantling your master’s house with his own tools comes from (yes, OK, so can Google, it’s Audre Lorde), but here is Jonas at the very least rebuilding his master’s house with exactly the same equipment. Take that, Loltheorists!* The upshot is that we really don’t know a lot about the politics of these people’s times even though it seems as if we do. If the Vita Columbani is at least partly literary construction, how much do we really know about how Merovingian kings operated? Almost only what’s in Gregory, who makes them seem like illiterate buffoons because of his basic “trust the educated bishop” message. And for an encore, in questions, Albrecht went on to question the historical existence of Saint Benedict of Nursia and whether the Rule of Benedict even existed as a text before the Carolingians asked for a copy. I’m not joking. Piotr Górecki summed up with the air of a man slightly shellshocked, and urged that a book should come of all these papers; I later gathered that this is indeed the plan. If so Albrecht’s paper will be the kind of reading that makes the floor seem worryingly flimsy beneath us.

A later illumination showing Archbishop Gregory of Tours as suppliant before a king

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* Yes, I know that’s nothing like what Lorde meant, I’ve even read the original essay, and I will willingly admit that I am inappropriately using it to describe a contest of wits between two privileged members of a white male élite; but nonetheless they are politically opposed over where the control of monastic life lies, and one of them is repurposing the literary work of the other to completely invert his point. I think it stands up.

I left my heart phone charger in St Andrews (1 of 3)

Right! I’m really back now. And I used up all my buffer while I was away so had to actually write stuff. To help me with this, the world broke my catch-up lie-in with two early morning doorbells, the second of which woke me from a dream about how I’d forgotten to get up in time and had lost the whole day and not fed the child yet (the child gets his own breakfast quite happily but my subconscious is not satisfied with dull facts), and this left me deeply confused about what time it actually was. I could wish I’d been feeling cleverer when I wrote this, because there are agendas to be considered in the reportage. Quite apart from the basic complications of saying things about others in public, one person I’ve met wanted not to be reported without seeing it first, which is quite understandable but not my usual practice, and it will be difficult to write anything at all without endangering other bloggers’ anonymities. So if any of the below is incoherent all that’s why. Anyway. I think I have about eight posts I have to write. This is the first, and is about a conference I went to in St Andrews. Before I got very far trying to write this up short it became clear that it wouldn’t stay that way, so instead of one Leviathan this is the first of three posts, one for each day with the last half-day also having a round-up and the shout-outs. Okay!

View of St Andrews from St Rule's Tower, by Joel Afferty

St Andrews is one of my favourite towns, to visit at least; I might find it a bit slow to live there, but I keep hoping to try anyway. I have friends there, some of the people in the profession I would consider friends even if they weren’t colleagues and some others not in the profession, and I always find stuff there to make me think. This time the stuff mainly came from a conference organised by two postgraduates under the name of Monasteries and Secular Authorities in the pre-Millennial Medieval World, and it must be said that they did an awesome job. Maps, programme, equipment, accommodation and free-flowing socialisation all just seemed to unroll without any major problems, and these guys could surely be making better money as PAs somewhere, though I hope that they don’t take it. The whole programme was full of good stuff. You can read it at that link so I won’t replicate it here but just remark on a few of the papers that really made me think.

Aerial view of the Irish monastic site of Clonmacnoise

The first session was on the existence or not of the town in early medieval Ireland. It is widely argued that there was nothing in Ireland that scholars of other areas would recognise as a town until the Vikings fortified Dublin, and the debate isn’t even about that, really. The question is whether, until then, monasteries fulfil a similar function as centres of population, production and exchange. It seems to me that this is essentially subjective. A Roman villa could fit that description. Is Clonmacnoise up there any bigger than a Roman villa site? How large does a place like that have to get before it stops just being a farm with a religious function and perhaps some legal jurisdiction? This is a semantic field really and I prefer to deal in the archaeology of what was there, which is why I prefer the approach Martin Carver et al. have taken with Portmahomack in Scotland where such questions have essentially been secondary. Anyway. There’s some useful introduction at the link under that image if you want to know more. Charles Doherty argued that the important churches of Armagh and Kildare had political jurisdictions by virtue of being associated with kings and particular kingdoms from early on, but they eventually had to settle for essentially spiritual jurisdictions as politics left them behind. Against this Colmán Etchingham argued that a lot of the evidence for non-agricultural activity, especially assemblies, at these places is based on faulty equivalences between modern Irish and Old Irish terms that have shifted their meaning. Agreement was not general with either speaker, but these two have apparently been sparring for a long time and were able to disagree like gentlemen and be friendly to all, which is exemplary. It did make me think, however, that by their criteria any of my subject monasteries are towns, which makes no sense in a landscape with cities in it such as I have. I just don’t think it makes any more sense in a landscape where the cities are missing; there’s just a sort of social articulation that doesn’t happen in Ireland till later, though it’s worth saying that Dr Etchingham thought that the paper I mainly have this idea from was all kinds of wrong.

Ruins of the medieval abbey of St-Guenolé de Landévennec, Brittany, from Wikimedia Commons

In the second session Roy Flechner introduced us to the questions around Irish kings who were clerics, clerics who fought in war, monasteries that went to war against each other and in general a rather different attitude to war and its combination with the life spiritual than we usually think of even for the Middle Ages. Then David Dumville gave a paper about the monastery at Landévennec in Britanny. I suppose many people know that I have old personal issues with Professor Dumville but this was he at his best, sharply discriminating with the evidence and imaginative with its solutions, as well as crystal clear in delivery. Landévennec is important because so much that we know about early medieval Brittany comes from the abbey of Redon, which is right on the border with Francia and very much a colonising enterprise, whereas Landévennec is right on the western coast in the Celtic-speaking zone. Unfortunately it also got trashed by the Vikings several times, its monks became fugitives and the documentation from it is basically missing, so it also contrasts with Redon by mainly being an archæological site. Professor Dumville looked dubiously at the precept that the monastery later claimed to have got from Louis the Pious via an abbot whose name appears merely to be Breton for `good monk’, and which has been used to argue that Louis put Brittany under Benedictine observance, his doubt largely because it’s simply unproven that the Carolingians ever controlled that far into Brittany. He suggested that any such success was instead driven from the bishopric of Tours, and that the best division to make in Brittany might not be Frankish/Celtic, native/incomer, or whatever, but pro- or anti-Tours. I think that has something going for it but obviously the fact that sometimes there were dukes or kings opposing the Carolingian kings needs to be in there too, though we don’t really know how much they controlled either.¹ The other thing that came up in this paper was the fact that there is, despite the social dislocation that they caused, very little Viking settlement evidenced in Brittany, except right up in the north-east near Coutances. This caught my ear because Coutances is very near Bayeux, where we were discussing Viking settlement only a short while ago, and Alex Woolf later informed me that the Norse names in that area are in fact predominantly Hiberno-Norse, suggesting that the invaders came from Ireland. This may be where the Benjamin Hudson theory one commentator on the previous post mentioned is coming from.

The tomb of St Columbanus at Bobbio

The third session opened what was going to become something of a theme of the conference, the monastic family of houses left scattered across Europe by Saint Columbanus. Opening the theme was Sarah Tatum, who argued that the Vita Sadalbergae, ostensibly the saint’s life of the foundress of Langres and Laon, should really be seen as a piece of writing intended to stress their connection to the Columban familia, as opposed to the foundress’s own family who only get the endeavour into trouble. I have to say that I thought she made her point pretty convincingly. The other paper in that session was given by Alex O’Hara, who was looking at conflict between Columbanus’s house at Bobbio and local aristocracy in the tenth century (which is, as I’ve said to many people these two weeks, where it’s at). Here the interest for me came in the questions when Federico Marazzi suggested that the real deal here might not have been the landownership exactly, but who had the lordship of lands that had been public within the monastery’s endowment. As the royal ability to control the fisc waned, that is, this might have come up for competition in a way that it hadn’t before. This of course entails knowing more about the fisc… but I think there’s something in it, even if only one case of many. Damn, that makes this a feudal transformation post…

St Gall illustration of Notker the Stammerer, from Wikimedia Commons

The last two papers were perhaps the most challenging for me specifically. They were given by two of the people involved in the Lay Archives Project, of which I have oft-times spoke, and first up was Warren Brown who was emphasising again what he has said before, that the formula or model documents that we have lurking about in various early medieval collections tell us about a much wider range of things than those documents that usually survive, which are naturally enough usually about land (because that, too, survives longer than most other goods).² The formulae preserve all kinds of unusual operations a scribe might have to record, but it is often argued that they are relics of an age when document use was different. One set that’s definitely not, as Warren was here emphasising, was that written up by Notker Balbulus, the Stammerer, monk of St Gall and biographer of Charlemagne, d. c. 912, which Warren therefore used to explore how lay people were using documents in Notker’s time.

One of the things that came out of this, among much else that might be of interest to few, was that one of the things Notker thought his pupils might need was a document whereby an old or infirm person made a donation in exchange for his upkeep for life, not to a monastery or cathedral necessarily (which are of course the ones we have) but to a layman. This is one of the things which, counter-intuitively, the Lay Archives project has repeatedly come up against, that really when we can see laymen using documents, they do just the same things as ecclesiastics do with them, albeit here saving body rather than soul.³

The reformed church of Wynau, Switzerland, once St Mauritz, proprietary church of the Bechburg family, eleventh- or twelfth-century

The second paper in that session was given by Hans Hummer, who was looking at monasteries as centres of lordship. The interesting thing there for me was his pointing out that really, though churches do not die in usual circumstances and are indeed not vulnerable to the divisions of inheritance, you still don’t necessarily want to try and shunt all your family lands into a church you control so as to keep them together, as has been suggested people did, because churches are vulnerable to other authorities, kings, bishops, reformers, and so on. You never wholly own a church, because it has a place in some wider hierarchy that’s outside your control. (Unless, as in the Catalan case, the bishops are all your cousins…) Because there is a body of work that contends that Merovingian- and Carolingian-period nobility, among others, did just this, the counter-perspective was useful.⁴ I wouldn’t like to guess which is more predominant but I like to have people considering alternatives.

The papers were given a closing review by Thomas Owen Clancy, who was erudite as ever, and then we dispersed to various locations for dinner that, St Andrews being the size it is, all wound up being the same one. I got drinking with Anglo-Saxonists, which can be dangerous, but lived to tell the tale and here I have been telling it. More will follow…

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1. The top-down version of this story is told, as Professor Dumville graciously conceded, about as well as it can be told in Julia Smith’s Province and Empire: Brittany under the Carolingians, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4^th Series 18 (Cambridge 1992).

2. Warren has said this where others can read him in Warren Brown, “When documents are destroyed or lost: lay people and archives in the early Middle Ages” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 (Oxford 2002), pp. 337-366.

3. See for Catalonia this case put in Adam J. Kosto, “Laymen, Clerics and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: the example of Catalonia” in Speculum Vol. 80 (Cambridge MA 2005), pp. 44-74.

4. The place I was most convinced by the original argument was Régine le Jan, “Convents, Violence and Competition for Power in Seventh-Century Francia”, transl. Jinty Nelson in Mayke de Jong & Franz Theuws with Carine van Rijn (edd.), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Roman World 6 (Leiden 2001), pp. 243-269, where the case is argued specifically for nunneries, but I was told at this very same conference by the estimable and charmingly irreverent Sarah Tatum that her thesis has thrown up a number of problems with le Jan’s examples, so that while the theory itself remains plausible actual evidence of it happening is somewhat lacking.

Three sorts of priest, part 2: the lost mother churches of St Peter

It’s long past time for the second of these posts about priests. Last time I dealt with cathedral chapter priests spreading the Word in the cathedral’s different properties, books in hand; this time I have less of an answer and more of a question. As before, however, we’re still dealing with the servants of St Peter. In particular, the servants of this place here:

The ruins of Sant Pere de Roda de Ter, as they stand today

This is what’s left of the Romanesque church in the old Iberian fort of l’Esquerda, otherwise known as Roda de Ter, about which I’ve written before. The ruins in the photograph are pretty much all twelfth century except some of the floors which have been cleared down to the palaeochristian levels, but we first know about this place in documents, other than when it was sacked in 826 by the mysterious rebel warlord Aizó, because of the act of consecration of an earlier church, probably wooden, from 927. There is a pattern here, of places whose existence as a community we only see when their members get together and contact the bishop about this church they’ve built, rebuilt, restored or just decided to have consecrated, but they’re usually further out than this, which is actually on the inwards side of the then-new cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic relative to the frontier. For this and for other reasons, which I won’t go into here, it seems that this whole area had been somewhat left behind since being at the very edge of Empire in the time of Louis the Pious.¹ This gives us problems in saying anything about it, as the charters relating to the place are very few. The church itself may have had a fair few, but as you can see it’s in no shape to hold them now, and they don’t seem to have made it anywhere else, so what we have is the records from other places who held land nearby, which were few; the good land round here appears to have been on the river, where a lot of mills were set up including some apparently operating commercially and one owned on a timeshare. Worse, about half the charters we do have, we don’t have full records of: those of Santa Maria de Ripoll all got burnt in 1835 and are now only known from archivists’ regesta, and those of the pre-monastic church of Sant Pere de Casserres, which we’ll come to in a moment, don’t appear to have made it through the later monastery’s rather curious preservation filter and are only known where the cathedral later acquired an interest in Casserres as a parish and made notes of its earliest records for its own purposes. Santa Maria’s regesta usually give boundaries, but Casserres’s don’t, and neither give witnesses, so all the stuff I would usually do linking people together through transactions can’t work here. That means that we may well not be getting the full picture and what I’m about to say could be changed by further evidence if there was any.

That said, even in what little there is there are loads of clerics: twenty-one in total between 927 and 1000. This is more than one priest per parish per life, you know? Four of these people are identifiably chapter priests from Vic, but the other seventeen do not appear at Vic, or, as far as I can tell, anywhere else; they’re just here. Most of them are priests, but sometimes they have juniors along with who are only described as clericus. When I first came across this material, therefore, having Anglo-Saxon history deep in my background, I thought, ‘well, it’s a minster, isn’t it? The old fort’s still a centre for this, they’re doing the pastoral care for the whole area from the old city’.² But there’s a problem with this idea, alas, and it’s shaped like this:

Monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, Osona, as it stands today

The building you see here is the early eleventh-century monastery, but before that was here there was a church here, also dedicated to Sant Pere, and there was a castle at the other end of the stack in the middle of the Riu de Ter on which they both stand. It is about 3 miles from Roda de Ter (and, according to the Google Map below, about 5 km now by road; point A is Casserres, point B l’Esquerda), very definitely within any plausible term before industrial population levels, which in any case didn’t really hit this area.³ Most of this church’s early documentation is only known as regesta and there’s precious little of that, but after approximately 1005 (actually it must be later, but we’ve covered this already and it doesn’t affect what I’m observing) full documents exist from here and those, also, are full of clerics. Hardly surprising, you may say, given that the place was on the verge of being converted into a monastery, and that’s fair enough. It could just be that Sant Pere de Casserres, because of receiving patronage from powerful people whereas Sant Pere de Roda just had its own closed group, had a natural advantage and that the bishop or whoever was easily be persuaded to move the local pastoral care network out a bit further. Roda is, after all, very close to Vic, as dragging the map below so as to see south-west will show. But some of the priests at Casserres don’t go on for very long, and though they were apparently able to turn up to sign new documents of transactions that they originally witnessed, I wonder how long they’d been in the area. Also a complication, and a bigger one: Sant Pere de Roda itself owned land on the Casserres rock, so some of these priests of Casserres may actually have been priests of Roda. These things make a simple shift from one to the other, while not impossible, a bit messy. In any case, we seem to be looking at a system quite like an English minster system where a lot of clergy share a base, but it’s right close to the cathedral and they never turn up there. So I think this is the system before the cathedral and parishes, slowly being over-written by new jurisdictions in this centre that power left behind. What that doesn’t tell you of course is what these priests were like, whether they had any training beyond hand-me-down tradition, what their actual responsibilities were except for care of what was an ancient burial ground like so many other hilltops; but I think they were definitely a sort apart from the chapter clergy and their Carolingian Renaissance book-learning we saw in the last post.⁴

View Larger Map

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1. All of what follows is based on either or both of J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power (London forthcoming), Chapter 3 part 2, or the paper that I have to write for Leeds this year whose topic is basically the formal presentation of the second half of this blog post of the past.

2. For the ‘Minster hypothesis’, cf. J. Blair, “Ecclesiastical Organization and Pastoral Care in Anglo-Saxon England” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 4 (Oxford 1995), pp. 193-212, Eric Cambridge and David Rollason, “Debate: The pastoral organization of the Anglo-Saxon Church: a review of the ‘Minster Hypothesis’”, ibid. pp. 87-104, and David Palliser, “The ‘minster hypothesis’: a case study”, ibid. 5, pp. 207-214.

3. I guess this will be covered in Teresa Soldevila i García (ed.), Sant Pere de Casserres. Llegenda i història (Vic 2004), which will also cover the 1993-1997 excavations that revealed the necropolis here (yes, here too), but I haven’t been able to get hold of that yet and am working from Antoni Pladevall i Font, Joan-Albert Adell i Gisbert, Xavier Barral i Altet, Esteve Bracons i Clapes, Marina Gustà i Martorell, M. Hoja Cejudo, Maria Gracià Salvà i Picó, Albert Roig i Delofeu, Eduard Carbonell i Esteller, Jordi Vigué i Viñas & Roser Rosell i Gibert, “Sant Pere de Casserres” in Vigué, Catalunya Romànica II: Osona I (Barcelona 1984), pp. 354-91. If by some mischance you don’t read Catalan and would still like to know more, the old monastery’s website is genuinely very good if you can stand Flash, but it doesn’t tell you much about the surrounding area’s demography, and the CR article does.

4. It’s not just in Catalonia that almost every hilltop appears to have an Iberian or Roman necropolis sunk into it, either; see José Antonio Benavente Sorriano, Juan Ángel Paz Peralta & Esperanza Ortiz Palomar, “De la Antigüedad tardía hasta la conquista cristiana en el Bajo Aragón” in Philippe Sénac (ed.), De la Tarraconaise à la Marche Supérieure d’al-Andalus : les habitats ruraux (IV^e-XI^e siècle). Desde la Tarraconense a la Marca Superior de al-Andalus: los asentamientos rurales (siglos IV-XI), Méridiennes: Études Médiévales Ibériques 2 (Toulouse 2006), pp. 99-119 for more examples.

Two seminars, two cities, part 2: Seminary XLI for added Wendy Davies

Miniature from the Codex Goticus Legionensis (c. 960) showing priests toasting each other

As just mentioned, from having tried arguing with Peter Heather about DNA evidence (and discovering that I was under-read) I went back to work and then hoofed it for London as soon as the Museum shut so as to hear Wendy Davies telling the London Society of Medieval Studies her answer to the question, “What Can We Say About Local Priests in Northern Spain before the Year 1000?” I was actually slightly late because of the afore-mentioned transport troubles but I got most of it. If you’ve read Acts of Giving since I told you to (come on, come on) you will know some of what she can do with the charter evidence on this subject, but because this was new work, it went beyond what you can find there.¹ And since it will be coming out, and indeed first be developed at Leeds I believe, as I have reason to, I don’t want to say too much. I will however mention a few bits and pieces, as I usually do.

A lot of the scribes in the León and area evidence are seen enough times that we know they worked for big people, the cathedral of León itself, the kings, or the big monasteries whose archives give us all this information. However, when a certain priest only turns up in one archive writing transactions that relate to one area, especially when that area is way up in the Cantabrian mountains miles from Sahagún (as it might be—okay, this was one of her examples) then you can be fairly safe in saying firstly that this guy was the local priest and secondly that the local priest wrote charters for people. It’s much harder to see him doing anything else, but Wendy did draw out some evidence. They got thanks gifts for teaching and preaching, so they did do that, though we don’t know how much or what; they dealt with burial. We have surviving liturgical works and vessels, but putting them in a local context is frequently very sketchy. The local ones seem to be rich for their villages but not on a kingdom scale, though priests that rich do turn up, including one Vincentio at León who is the only person Wendy has ever seen in a contemporary medieval source described as “dives”, rich, rather than great, powerful or some similar term, and he gets called it by the Queen, too, or her scribe at least, so that was interesting.

Another thing that came up was orthography. The spelling of charters tends to vary a lot from Classical norms, and one of the things we’d like to know is how much this reflects the spoken language. In Catalonia it all looks quite plausibly like Romance influence until about the 1020s when suddenly we have feudal oaths that preserve actual spoken Romance and it turns out to be a whole different order of thing.² Here Wendy also weakened such hopes by pointing out that some scribes will vary spelling even between documents, or spell witness’s names in two different ways, and so on. I have seen this from my texts before but never thought of making it make a wider point; as ever I bow to her on this sort of deduction.

There were lots of questions and a great deal more that I could say, but firstly time is short, and secondly I would like at least some of you to come and hear Wendy’s account of this work at Leeds and so I’ll leave it there. There will be more Wendy Davies posts very soon (though I’ll stop before too long, I promise) so this is probably enough to be going on with.

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1. Wendy Davies, Acts of Giving: individual, community and church in tenth-century Christian Spain (Oxford 2007), pp. 36-65.

2. On which you should read Adam Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word 1000-1200 (Cambridge 2000).