Seminars CXXXVIII-CXLI: busy in Oxford

The title is true of the present and the past, for I continue very busy even now that term has stopped. We will not speak of job applications, but even without that and purely domestic affairs, over the last week I have:

• finished a paper on Catalan place-names based on Latin palatium;
• travelled to Winchester to give that paper and been warmly hosted;
• sent off an abstract for my next paper, which somewhat unexpectedly is to be given in Australia (see sidebar);
• sent off final text of a chapter on the valuation of tenth-century cows
  for Mark Blackburn‘s memorial volume;
• gone through and sent off the second proofs of Medieval European Coinage 6, which is now very close to actually emerging at last;
• sent off various other things to further the emergence of Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters;
• and read quite a lot of Gregory of Tours’s Histories over breakfast.

What I have not done is written blog, as you have noticed and may also now understand. So, let me change that by giving an unfairly rapid account of four Oxford seminars from last May, connected by nothing more than their location and my interest but perhaps also yours!

Scylla and Charybdis

On the 7th May 2012, the speaker at the Medieval History Seminar in Oxford was Dr Paul Oldfield, now of Manchester, and his title was: “A Bridge to Salvation or Entrance to the Underworld? Southern Italy and International Pilgrimage”. This picked up and played with the facts that as pilgrimage to the Holy Land grew more and more important from roughly 1000 onwards, Italy became equally crucial to it as a point of embarkation for those going by sea, which was most people going, but that this enlarged transient population also bred an alternative economy of banditry and ransoming. Pilgrimage was of course supposed to involve suffering, though maybe not quite like that, and this seems to have bred stories that also greatly exaggerated its natural dangers, especially concentrated around the very busy and notoriously tricky Straits of Messina but also, for example, Vesuvius (3 known eruptions 1000-1200) and Etna (probably rather more). Classical literature that plays with these places as gateways to the bowels of the Earth was well-known to the kind of people who would write about these things. The result was, argued Dr Oldfield, that one might wind up unexpectedly meeting one’s Maker en route (and dying on pilgrimage was reckoned a pretty good way to go, in terms of one’s likely destination) but some of the things that might kill you were gates to Hell, at least as they were talked about, making Southern Italy an uncertain and liminal zone that reflected the status, decontextualised, uprooted and vagrant, of those among whom these stories circulated. This was all good fun and of course anything involving Italy always has splendid pictures, here especially of the pilgrim-favoured church San Nicola di Bari, so here it is for you below.

First-world problems

Next, on the 9th, Paul Harvey, emeritus of Durham I understand, came to the Medieval Social and Economic Seminar to talk to the title, “How to Manage Your Landed Estate in the Eleventh Century”. That sounded as if it should interest me, so along I went. Professor Harvey was looking for the kind of problems that manorial surveys indicate big English landowners were meeting before the end of the twelfth century, and observed several in them some considerable difficulty with actually defining demesne in terms of how its labour or revenues were organised differently from anywhere else. He wound up arguing that in England demesne land was really a late eleventh-century invention, and that the surveys’ expectations were all quite new. On the other hand, that doesn’t appear to have been a time of great change in land organisation or settlement nucleation, or so says Professor Harvey, and what might really have been happening is simply that the choice between direct extraction and leasing was made on the basis of what was convenient given the existing settlement patterns, but that the surveys themselves might be changing things by defining more closely who was responsible for what renders. In either case, using them as windows on earlier land use is probably dodgy! This mainly seemed to meet with people’s approval but it seemed to me that this must, if it’s happening, also be the point at which the Anglo-Saxon hide ceased to be a useful land-measure, as it was based on a standard yield. Land that could produce that yield was a hide; if yield went up, the hide got smaller. You can’t easily measure land like that, especially if you’re trying to change the obligations of a hide. When I raised this Ros Faith pointed out that Domesday Book uses plough-teams anyway, so I suppose it was kind of an obvious point, but I was glad to have thought it out anyway.

Buildings of opposition

The next week, speaker to the Medieval History Seminar was Isaac Sastre Diego, developing the work on which he’d presented earlier that year to the Medieval Archaeology Seminar. Here he took a group of Asturian monumental churches, Santa Maria del Naranco (above), San Miguel de Lillo, Santa Cristina de Lena and one or two others, that have distinct royal connections. The first and third have been called palaces, the former by modern historians and the latter in the seventeenth century when it’s first documented, but Isaac argued that they need to be seen as exclusive royal chapels in which perhaps the king himself was officiant, since the two `palaces’ both have altars in but no clear separation of space for the clergy. Isaac saw this as a deliberately new kind of display initiated by King Ramiro I (who is named in an inscription on the altar at Naranco) to deal with the similarly new monumentality of the rule of Emir ‘Abd al-Rahman II in Córdoba, perhaps also the Carolingians and most of all their probable candidate for the throne whom Ramiro had defeated, Nepotian (whom as we know would later be recorded as a lord of wizards). Isaac sees these sites as buildings of opposition, in which an explicit differentiation was made between the new r´gime and its competition both in the past and at the time. Discussion, especially with Rob Portass, brought out the extra dimension that at Oviedo, where the first two of these sites are, they would have been in explicit distinction to the cathedral and royal place of King Alfonso II, which were in the city while these still perch on the hills above. Chris Wickham suggested that San Vicenzo al Volturno might be seen as another such opposition building, which works for me. I had expected not to get much out of this seminar because of the earlier related one and in fact it was really thought-provoking, so I hope it gets published where I can easily find it.

Twelfth-century monastic xenophobia

Last in this batch, the same place a week later was graced by Professor Rod Thomson, with a paper called, “‘The Dane broke off his continuous drinking bouts, the Norwegian left his diet or raw fish’: William of Malmesbury on the Scandinavians”, which is hard to beat as is much of William’s work, which of course has mostly been edited by Professor Thomson. William was here talking about the Scandinavian response to the Crusades, where he gets unusually ethnographic, but as you see not necessarily without an agenda. As far as William was concerned these nations were still barbarian, and would be that way till they learnt civilisation, however orthodox and devout their Christian beliefs might be. This was a communicable disease, too, barbarians being more resistant to acculturation than those among whom they came to live! Most of the paper was however an exegesis of William’s method of using his sources, which was neither uncritical nor reverent but highly intelligent. There was even a suggestion that William might have had access to some saga material. This raised various intelligent questions, one obvious one being what he thought he was himself in ethnic terms, to which the answer seemed to be `the best of both English and Norman and thus neither’, and another being that of how far his sources and his audiences shaped his attitudes, which there wasn’t really time to resolve. It’s always impressive to hear someone who’s really lived inside a text without turning into an apologist speak about it, though, and Professor Thomson got points for this and also for being almost 100% unlike what I expected him to be like from his writing alone, all of which only goes to show that it’s not just the cover of a book one can’t judge by, both for William and his editor…

Right, that should do for this time; next time, much more than you probably want to read about mills, with footnotes sufficient for anyone who’s been wondering where they’ve been these last two posts! À bientôt!

Seminars CXXXV & CXXXVI: characterising some medieval disputants

The need to catch up on the seminar reports is still fairly urgent, so I must do my now-usual filtering of what is in the pile. Out, with reluctance because it was good but with reassurance because as so often Magistra has already covered it, goes the second Clerical Cosmos conference in Oxford, but do go have a look at Magistra’s reports if the subtitle, “Ecclesiastical power, culture and society, c. 900 to c. 1075″, sounds like it should hit your interests. That at last takes me into the Easter term of 2013, and that term was greeted in Oxford by a paper by Mark Whittow to the Medieval History Seminar on the 23rd April entitled, “Territorial Lordship and Regional Power in the Age of Gregorian Reform: Matilda of Canossa and the Matildine lands”.

Countess Matilda of Canossa, enthroned with attendants, manuscript portrait from the Vita Mathildis by Donizone (who may be the cleric at her right)

This paper did the audience the good service of recapitulating Matilda’s career, something it’s quite hard to get in one place from literature outside Italy despite its importance in the politics of Germany and Italy (and especially both) in the time of the eleventh-century dispute of Holy Roman Empire and Papacy, and assessing her landed holdings.¹ Out of this came several observations, one being that little enough of her focus was actually in her marquisate of Tuscany, where competition for power was perhaps not one-sided enough, and another being that while she is often represented as a champion of public office because she held one, her armies were formed of vassals based in castles even if the emperor had approved the grant of the castles. In other words, she was pretty much as feudo-vassalitic in operation as the Dukes of Aquitaine, even if she was more closely involved with a persistent and intermittently-powerful royalty than they were. Nonetheless, there was a difference in the discourse of power Matilda used, with artwork and manuscripts presenting her as imperially-descended and legitimate and traditional in a way the Meridional princes wouldn’t have used unless they went for Roman roots, as Christian Lauranson-Rosaz would argue they did in the Auvergne.² That, at least, would have worked to undermine the claims of a royalty that drew its ancestry back to fairly recent, and certainly post-Roman, times, but Matilda was competing for the same grounds of legitimacy as her German royal opponents (and sometimes allies). So this was all very interesting and fitted Matilda into a different framework than the one where English-language historians usually meet her, but the thing that sticks with me is something that I had to raise in questions, that the pictures we have of her do, yes, twice show her on a throne, but they also consistently show her dwarfed by it, compared to her noble antecessors shown on the same throne in the same manuscript. The author of that manuscript knew the lady personally; it was hard not to conclude that the artist did too, and what he or she knew was that their patron was pretty small.³ This obviously didn’t make her any the less considerable, if so!

15th-century manuscript depiction of the Court of Common Pleas, London

Then the very next day the Medieval Church and Culture Seminar was lucky enough, as we were told at fulsome length, to be host to Professor Paul Hyams, who spoke with the title, “Disputes and How to Avoid Them: charters and custom in England during the long 12th century”.⁴ This appealed to me, predictably perhaps, as it was a paper about what the charters aren’t telling us, the trouble that a dispute settlement charter averts or that preceded its issue but which its scribe thought it impolitic to recount, at least from more than one side. It dealt with the invisible threshold of wealth beyond which written records were even available, specifically, and whether we can see serfdom in medieval England as early as it may start. I wouldn’t like to say that it concluded that we could, but the plea to consider what else was going on around the documents we have – the meetings, to and fro voyages of negotiation, the feast and the talk at dinner when a transaction was concluded, all of which probably explain a lot more about how a given transaction unfolded than does its surviving record – is a plea always worth hearing, especially when loaded with this many interesting examples.

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1. The core text here is a Vita Mathildis by one Donizone of Canossa, whence we get the charming picture, the text most recently edited and translated (into Italian; I’m fairly sure there’s no English translation) by Paolo Golinelli as Vita di Matilde di Canossa (Milano 2008); the secondary work that Mark cited included Golinelli (ed.), I poteri dei Canossa da Reggio Emilia all’Europa. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Reggio Emilia – Carpineti, 29-31 ottobre 1992) (Bologna 1994), especially Guiseppe Sergi’s “I poteri di Canossa: poteri delegati, poteri feudali, poteri signorili”, pp. 29-39, and Sergi, I confini del potere: Marche e signorie fra due regni medievali (Torino 1995); on the dispute between empire and papacy in which Matilda became so involved, I like Ute-Renate Blumenthal’s The Investiture Controversy: Church and monarchy from the ninth to the twelfth century (Philadelphia 1988).

2. For example, C. Lauranson-Rosaz, “La romanité du midi de l’an mil (le point sur les sociétés méridionales)” in Robert Delort (ed.), La France de l’An Mil, Points-Histoires H130 (Paris 1990), pp. 49-74, rev. as “La romanité du midi de l’an mil : le point sur les sociétés méridionales” in Xavier Barral i Altet, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Anscari Mundó, Josep María Salrach & Michel Zimmermann (edd.), Catalunya i França Meridional a l’Entorn de l’Any Mil: la Catalogne et la France méridionale autour de l’an mil. Colloque International D. N. R. S.[sic]/Generalitat de Catalunya « Hugues Capet 987-1987. La France de l’An Mil », Barcelona 2 — 5 juliol 1987, Actes de Congresos 2 (Barcelona 1991), pp. 45-58.

3. The manuscript is Vatican City, Biblioteca vaticana, MS 4922, and is edited in facsimile as Donizone di Canossa, La vita di Matilde di Canossa: Codice Vaticano latino 4922, ed. Golinelli, Codices e Vaticanis selecti 62 (Milano 1984). A few more bits of it are online here.

4. This was work deriving from a project to follow up P. Hyams, Rancor and reconciliation in medieval England (Ithaca 2003), and I guess we can expect it to start some disputes as well as settle some…

Seminars CXXX: a woman in a high castle

Seminars in both London and Oxford have now restarted, and I haven’t even reached the summer term yet with the reports, but what is to be done but carry on? And, by a curious coincidence, just as the term in London opened with a paper by none other than Professor Dame Janet Nelson, or Jinty as it is well-documented she would prefer to be known, a paper moreover to which I could not go drat it, so I now find myself with one of hers in Oxford to blog.¹ This was a paper before the Medieval Church and Culture Seminar on the 6th March, entitled “Putting Dhuoda in Context”.

There are no contemporary illustrations of Dhuoda and when I’ve searched for later depictions, before as now, this is all that comes up, which appears to be from something like a Unicorn Tapestry; if anyone knows more about it, I would love to… The page it’s from reprints a 1930 biography of Dhuoda in French.

Dhuoda is (as many of you will know) one of the very very few female authors known to us from the early Middle Ages, and extra interesting for me as the wife of one of the first Marquises of Barcelona, the unlucky but tenacious Bernard of Septimania. We know of her largely because she wrote a handbook of advice for their eldest son William, who like his father ended up dead in a rebellion against King Charles the Bald, and of whom I have often said that it could justly be said that he should have listened to his mother.² As Jinty said, in what was throughout an entertainingly personalised paper, she has spent much of her lifetime reflecting on this person, whom the historian Pierre Riché’s wife apparently knew as “that woman” with whom she had to share her husband, who was similarly afflicted.³ The trouble is therefore finding new things to say about her, but this is less hard than it should be because she has not often been looked at as we might look at a male noble of the period, in terms of ancestry, property, influence and so on. She does certainly have one important distinction that most of our medieval writers do not, that of being a parent (which helps us deal with silly ideas about indifference to children and so on—when your source-base is primarily generated by celibates, well, what might you expect?). But, because what we mainly know of Dhuoda is that she loved her husband and son and encouraged the latter to loyalty whereas he got into trouble despite her advice, it has been kind of assumed that she was powerless. Not so! She wrote her book at William’s coming of age, when he was leaving the fold, over a period of fourteen months, and largely it seems in Uzés, where in Bernard’s absence she was more or less acting as countess between time, or rather, writing the book in what were probably precious few idle hours. During the hours of business, however, she was running a decent chunk of the Spanish March for Bernard and fund-raising for his campaigning. Furthermore, she was on the border in several ways: Uzés would soon be shunted into the Middle Kingdom of the Franks by the Treaty of Verdun that brings me so much of my search traffic here, and she dates the book, “Christo regnante” and regem spectante”, two clauses which sing straight out of a great many of my Catalan charters to me; these are the dating clauses you use when you do not know who the king is, or, significantly, have decided he’s not legitimate.⁴

The high castles of Uzés, all rather later than Dhuoda but giving you an idea of how she might have surveyed the town

To see Dhuoda as anything less than a political player in a sensitive position, therefore, is to miss a major trick. This added an extra dimension for Dhuoda for me that I hadn’t previously got, though since it’s due to Jinty that I know enough to think of queens as not getting much time to sit down when the king’s away, perhaps I should have thought it this far through.⁵ Typically also for Jinty we got a discussion of the other family who were in the area, the wider networks of which Dhuoda was part and through whom she got and sent her news, and which sometimes, indeed, included Bernard; he was not always absent. Jinty also pointed out that they presumably met at court, and that Dhuoda was not writing advice on how to handle yourself there from a position of ignorance.

The Nîmes manuscript of Dhuoda’s Manual

Looking back at this paper, therefore, apart from the affection that Jinty brought to her subject and which the capacity crowd demonstrated for her, what stands out for me is that if all we had was the career pattern, some kind of itinerary (which in fact we don’t have) and the odd reference in other texts, except for being married to a man this career would look like a respectable one for any courtier of the period: get educated at court, marry someone you met there, wind up with an administrative position for which you’re partly qualified by your ancestry in a difficult position during a time of civil war that ultimately costs you most of your family… I mean, there are male relatives of Bernard’s about whom we cannot say as much or even demonstrate them as important.⁶ Just because the title of countess was not yet used by powerful women of the Midi as it would be a century later doesn’t mean that we’re not looking at one of them when we read this text, and that is important because it reminds us that powerful people of all stamps could probably also suffer loss and enjoy affection, even if only one of them for this period really cared to write about it.

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1. It’s documented, for example, in Paul Fouracre & David Ganz, “Dame Jinty Nelson… An Appreciation” in eidem (edd.), Frankland: the Franks and the world of the early middle ages : essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester 2008), pp. 1-6 at p. 1. It’s important to get it in early on you see!

2. The most relevant translation, though there are many, is probably Marcelle Thiebaux (ed./transl.), Dhuoda: Handbook for her warrior son, Cambridge Medieval Classics 8 (Cambridge 1998). There did also come up in questions the rather poignant reflection that one of the manuscripts of the Manuel is now in Barcelona, where indeed it has been studied by none other than Cullen Chandler, in “Barcelona BC 569 and a Carolingian programme on the virtues” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 265-291, and one possible explanation for the text having been preserved there is that perhaps William did in fact listen at least to his mother’s injunction to keep the book with him, and so it wound up in a Barcelona library when he was killed there…

3. Lately accumulated in Janet L. Nelson, “Dhuoda” in Patrick Wormald & Nelson (edd.), Lay intellectuals in the Carolingian world (Cambridge 2007), pp. 106-120.

4. Jinty offered the former interpretation, and the latter is not something I’d quite want to attribute to Dhuoda, but it’s certainly how one needs to read the later charters: see (with all the usual cautions) Michel Zimmermann, “La datation des documents catalans du IXe au XII siècle : un itinéraire politique” in Annales du Midi Vol. 93 (Toulouse 1981), pp. 345-375.

5. I suppose that my default reference here is Janet L. Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume 2: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 387-430, but it probably ought to be Nelson, “Medieval Queenship” in Linda E. Mitchell (ed.), Women in medieval western European culture (New York City 1999), pp. 179-207.

6. Starting with Bernard’s brother, and sometime co-Marquis, Gaucelm, if you want someone to research (please…). This is not the first time that I have expressed amazement that there is so little literature on such a crucial figure of the Carolingian period, given some of the people who’ve had monographs: there is, quite simply, no focussed study of Bernard of Septimania other than Lina Malbos, “La capture de Bernard de Septimanie” in Le Moyen Âge Vol. 76 (Bruxelles 1970), pp. 5-13, which is, you know, not a lot. More can be added via Martin Aurell, “Pouvoir et parenté des comtes de la Marche Hispanique (801-911)” in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La Royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IX^e siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve d’Ascq 1998), pp. 467-480 or Josep María Salrach, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII-IX), Llibres a l’Abast 136-137 (Barcelona 1978), vol. I, but this is somewhat of a local historiography.

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.

Seminars CXXV & CXXVI: differing data from the East

In the continuing attempt to clear some of my ridiculous blogging backlog before the new academic year starts in the UK, I am sadly going to pass over James Palmer‘s paper at the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar in London in February this year, not because it wasn’t interesting but because Magistra has already covered it, and this brings me back to Oxford. As we saw with the last of these posts, on a Monday when it seems to be required, it’s possible to attend both the Medieval Archaeology Seminar and the Medieval History Seminar here as there’s half an hour’s grace between them, and the 27th of February was such a day, as a remarkably complementary pair of papers were being given across the two. The first was “Between the Carolingian West and the Byzantine East: fortified élite settlements of the 9th and 10th centuries AD in Central Europe”, by Dr Hajnalka Herold and the second was “Dirhams for Slaves: investigating the Slavic slave trade in the tenth century” by Dr Marek Jankowiak.

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The hilltop over which stretches the site of the Gars Thunau hillfort complex, on what seems to have been a horrible day when whatever satellite Google gets its pictures from flew by

I first heard Hajnalka speak at the Kalamazoo of 2010, as is duly recorded here indeed, and this meant that some of what she was presenting was not new to me, as in order to set things up she had to talk us quickly through a number of sites which are not exactly household names in the West. (I sympathise with this: it frightens me how few people have any clear idea where Girona is and no-one but me and by now you has heard of Vic or Urgell but at least, bar the latter perhaps, people can usually spell the names from my area once they’ve heard them.) The sites are scattered across a zone shared between what is now Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the state of publication and excavation is very various but, starting especially from Gars Thunau in Austria, Hajnalka is trying to fit these various, and variously-sized, power centres into wider frameworks, and as you can tell from the title of her talk is willing to look quite widely to find out what the builders thought they were doing and what kind of position they’d achieved that meant they could do it. The zone lay between empires, Frankish, Byzantine and at times Bulgarian, and any of these might be found pushing their influence into it at a given point in the period. The two former especially competed in the mission field, and had done for some time of course, which makes it particularly tantalising that many of these sites contained churches, in fact in the case of Mikulčice, in Moravia, nine churches, and in Zalavár in Hungary, a huge one which seems to have been of a size and complexity to rival pretty much anything in the West of the time, and a number of smaller ones on neighbouring patches of sandy ground. A Salzburg text called the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum claims that this was the work of the Archbishops of Salzburg, but it would be nice to know which phases and when, if that’s even true…¹ (I note that further south, in Croatia, there is dispute over whether the Aachen-like complex at Zadar was put there in emulation of or in reaction against Carolingian ecclesiastical pressure.²)

Reconstructed ruins of the ninth- or tenth-century church at Zalavár, Hungary, from Wikimedia Commons

It’s easy initially to see what unites these complexes: firstly, they’re all fortified settlements and secondly, where there is good dating evidence, they seem to have all got new ramparts at the close of the ninth century. That’s more or less where the similarities end, however: the technologies of building, the size and focality of the complexes and likely, therefore, their apparent purposes all differ site to site. Furthermore, with only archæology to go on (the few written sources here, Conversio included, don’t help very much at all putting together a big picture) it’s hard to guess at who was in charge of any of these places or how they were supported.³ There are aspects that look familiar from the West: all these sites showed evidence of craft manufacture (though glass and precious metal were confined to the biggest ones), of space for Christian worship and for burial (not obviously non-Christian, if there is in fact any such thing archæologically-speaking) and of social stratification. On the other hand, these sites were not emporia, their trade links as so far testified in the material culture were thin and almost incidental, although quite farflung, there’re almost no coins and so forth. (More digging could change this in almost all cases, however.) The links that we do see, however, run both east and west, and this is clearest in the dress hinted at by the burial evidence: broadly, Hajnalka sketched, we’re looking at a set of sites at which the men dressed Frankish and the women dressed Byzantine, high-status persons in both cases of course and not without exceptions. The rank and file (and indeed the slaves who must have been there) are less distinctive. So the big message that Hajnalka had was that, although it is very easy for Westerners to look at a scenario like this (or that at Zadar, as noted above) and see a reaction to the Carolingian and Ottonian Drang nach Osten, in which local élites funnel luxury goods from the pressuring western empire and use that wealth to build up structures against it, when you’re on, and indeed in, the ground at these places the Franks were very far from being the only players for these people’s attention and imitation.⁴ But there is much more to be done to work out what the people in question were actually up to, in political or other terms, and we can hopefully look to Hajnalka to do some of it!⁵

Silver dirham of Caliph al-Walid I from Tashkent, struck 713, found in Latvia

The Medieval Archaeology seminar has lately taken to laying on tea and cake afterwards, which is very welcome and made it much more possible to pay attention to Marek Jankowiak after the brief trot to All Soul’s College. My notes indicate that he had an excellent set of visuals to back up his argument, about which sadly I can remember nothing, but those of you who may be setting up to see what must be a related paper at this term’s Institute of Historical Research seminar are in for a treat, at least. Here I can only recreate from my notes alas, and they tell me that what was principally at issue here was the absolutely huge preservation of Islamic silver coinage in Northern Europe. Dr Jankowiak wanted to get us thinking about how they had wound up there and what was moving in exchange. This first entailed a more detailed analysis of the finds than I’ve seen before, noting that particular areas receiving dirhams seem to have blipped in and out of the record at different times (except in Gotland where deposition was pretty continuous), and that the area providing them seems to have shifted from Iran to the Samanid Emirate at Khorasan over the tenth century, with Iraq hardly showing up and Spain not there at all. These were supplemented by imitations of such coins from the Khazar and Bulgar areas, again shifting from one to the other over the tenth century. By a series of rather unlikely calculations, Dr Jankowiak hypothesized that, if 75%-80% of this exchange was being paid for with slaves (a figure whose basis he did not explain) then we might be thinking of an export of 30,000-60,000 human beings over the century, a few hundred every year, but that that would not include exports to the West which, however they were going, were obviously not being paid for in a medium so readily hoarded. Identifying the slaves archæologically, given that they were exported and acculturated, is basically impossible but just because of the numbers involved Dr Jankowiak wound up developing a picture in which entire peoples, small tribes or whatever, were basically hoovered up and fed into this market by their more powerful neighbours, and thus suggested that the reason for the sudden boom in fortification in Central Europe in this era is because those who could be wanted to be on the rich side of this process, not the poor side! He saw in this the origins of settlement nucleation in Poland, especially, and suggested that we should perhaps see the lesser hillforts not so much as fortifications but as slave corrals with garrisons via a chain of which the unfortunate human goods were convoyed eastwards, a system out of whose profits new states might bloodily grow.

Naszacowice hillfort, Southern Poland, from the air, rebuilt 989 after destruction by fire of unknown previous date

At that point, of course, these two papers came directly into conflict. For example, in Dr Jankowiak’s Southern Poland, apparently, many of the forts (and there are many there, but of course only a few have been dug well enough to provide dating evidence) show destruction layers. Is this because Poland was developing a central power that had to suppress these places? In that case, one might equally expect the Polish forts to be refuges, something that Dr Jankowiak ruled out due to the very small number of finds there that suggests to him only temporary occupation. But, many of these sites were dug (when they have been) a long time ago and it’s debatable what would have been found in such excavations and whether occupation, rather than just ‘artefacts’, would have been recognised. Anyway, the point of refuges surely is that they’re only temporarily occupied. And so on. These are issues I’ve brought out myself, but plenty of other people also had objections, about the neglected contribution of the fur trade (better seen in animal bone evidence further east than here, according to Dr Jankowiak), about the effects on prices of this influx of money that likely make a constant figure for the tenth-century slave economy problematic and (of course) about the hypothetical mathematics, it wasn’t even me for once. I did, however, ask about the hoards in Scandinavia, to wit: why on earth is there deposition on such a scale here without retrieval? Because if you have a hoard, one thing you can say for sure is that the owner didn’t come back for it. Was Scandinavia then even less stable than Central Europe’s slave-grounds? Dr Jankowiak thought that the hoards might be sort of treasure banks that were accessed on a small scale only, an increasingly fashionable idea, but if so, what the finds evidence seems to be showing us is an Eastern Scandinavian economy that brought in a great deal of coin but seems then to have considerable difficulty doing anything with it, which must make it worth rethinking whether this was in fact about getting rich. So there was a lot of debate. All the same, there is this much that cannot be gainsaid here: we know there was a slave trade, some of this money that we have found must have been paid for slaves, the changes in its deposition probably do reflect a variation in the availability of goods that Islamic merchants would pay for and so there’s a certain horrible plausibility about some of the mechanisms Dr Jankowiak laid out here, even if not whether the forts are part of those mechanisms or not. With that much accepted, if I can bring George Bernard Shaw back in again, we may just be haggling over how much was involved…

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1. This intriguing but allusive text was edited by Herwig Wolfram as Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum: das Weissbuch der Salzburger Kirche über die erfolgreiche Mission in Karantanien und Pannonien (Wien 1979) and he seems to have spent a long time since then trying to figure it out, resulting in idem, Salzburg, Bayern, Österreich: die Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum und die Quellen ihrer Zeit, Mitteilungen des Instituts Österreichs für Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungsband 31 (Wien 1995). This is not my area and I’m not going to pretend to have read either of these (I’ve seen quotes from the former), but they exist should you want to.

2. Here I know what I know from Miljenko Jurkovic and Ante Milosevic, “Split. Croatas y Carolingias: arte y arquitectura en Croacia en la alta edad media” in Jordi Camps (ed.), Cataluña Carolingia: arte y cultura antes del Románico (siglos IX y X) (Barcelona 1999), pp. 165-170, transl. as “Split. Croats and Carolingians: art and architecture in the early Middle Ages”, ibid. pp. 501-504.

3. One possibility, which I understand from Hajnalka may indeed be feasible at some of these sites, could be the kind of analysis of animal bone that Leslie Alcock was able to get done at the very early medieval Welsh site of Dinas Powys, and which showed that the cattle they were getting there were all young animals, not the spread of ages or mostly mature beasts that you’d get from a natural herd, thus showing that the occupiers of the site were probably receiving tribute: see his Dinas Powys: An Iron Age, Dark Age and Early Medieval Settlement in Glamorgan (Cardiff 1963), reprised and updated in his Economy, Society and Warfare among the Britons and Saxons (Cardiff 1987), pp. 5-150 where the animal bones are discussed pp. 67-82.

4. For a round-up of the post-Carolingian view of this general area see Matthew Innes, “Franks and Slavs c. 700-1000: the problem of European expansion before the millennium” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 6 (Oxford 1997), pp. 201-216.

5. And indeed since this paper took place she has done, in the form of “Fortified Settlements of the 9th and 10th Centuries AD in Central Europe: Structure, Function and Symbolism” in Medieval Archaeology Vol. 56 (Leeds 2012), pp. 60-84, DOI: 10.1179/0076609712Z.0000000003. I’m not quite clear if this is actually out yet: the journal’s website says the current issue is Vol. 57 (2013) but only gives indices for up to Vol. 55 (2011). In either case I must thank Hajnalka for sending me a preprint version ahead of publication.

Seminar CXVI: beware of Greeks starting Crusades

This particular backlogged seminar report has more history behind it than usual. You very nearly got a post on this subject a while back, when a story appeared on News for Medievalists, recycled as is their wont from the Australian,¹ entitled “Historian Peter Frankopan is challenging a millennium of scholarship in his view of the First Crusade”. This caught my attention straight away, partly because I’m interested in the First Crusade as we know but mainly because I do a lot of copy-editing and this headline struck me as being in need of modification, in the light of the fact that it has not yet been a millennium since the First Crusade occurred, for example. However, on inspection, it turned out that the press release they were running from, about this Frankopan character’s new book, had only claimed, “nearly a millennium of scholarship”, which is probably still contestable depending on whether we count the Crusade chronicles as scholarship, but let’s move on. What was the challenge? Well, briefly put, he was reported as arguing that the First Crusade was provoked not by Pope Urban II’s brilliant speech at Clermont (though that helped) but by the political situation of the Byzantine Empire being so desperate that they had had to ask the West for aid.

1490 manuscript illustration of the Council of Clermont, earliest I can find, from Wikimedia Commons.

Now, in some sense this is news, yes, because the conventional version of the history of the First Crusade almost always does start with the Council of Clermont, but it struck me immediately that it was not exactly new news. I mean, not least, you could find me saying that the Greek appeal must have counted for a lot here in 2007, but I only got to say it because of a long chain of people arguing similarly, Paul Magdalino and Jonathan Shephard most recently but this really starts, in the Anglophone scholarship, with the translation endeavours of Dana Munro in the USA around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the work of his generation.² So, you know, not new exactly. And I was all set to write a post about this, which might well have employed snark, when I discovered two things: firstly that Dr Frankopan is somewhat local to me, being a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, and secondly that he was addressing the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies Seminar in Oxford on 24th January 2012 on the very subject, and so I thought I’d postpone judgement until I’d heard him make his pitch, and off I duly went, and somehow it is now August. So, leaving that aside, how was it?

12th-century miniature portrait of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, from Wikimedia Commons

Well, the seminar was a lecture on this occasion, in fairly splendid surroundings in St John’s College, and the lecture was more or less a book launch, being entitled the same as the book, “The First Crusade: the call from the East”. It addressed the whole question of crusading briefly, and the interest it continues to generate (Thomas Asbridge’s TV series was screening at this time and that helped make that point), but then dug into the question of why it happened when it did, and maintained that the only answer to this is Emperor Alexius I Komnenos, the ruler of Byzantium, and his 1095 appeal to Pope Urban and the West at large at the Council of Piacenza in that year. So far, so much like the newspaper story, but the extra depth came from the fact that, presumably as part of the same work that allowed him to renew the translation of Anna Komnena’s biography of her father, that same Alexius, in 2009, Dr Frankopan really does know the Byzantine material covering the Crusades well.³ He argued that Anna’s subtleties and strategies of concealment of awkward facts (like, single successful campaigns that she refers to again and again at different points inthe narrative, disregarding chronology) have not been fully recognised and that by reading her more carefully we get a much more serious idea of the Empire’s plight in the early 1090s than we have previously done, helping to explain why such desperate measures as Western help were on the table. This helped ease my mind somewhat: though the fact that Alexius’s appeal was well-known in the scholarship was not mentioned, and though I thought he talked down Urban II’s importance (which while certainly not as great as one would expect from the word `pope’, since he was but one of two and not the one who could get into Rome, was still more widely recognised than the casual listener might have gathered from this), Dr Frankopan certainly has some extra pieces to add to the story and I learnt a lot from listening. I have now relearnt most of it and more from his book, which I borrowed a quid in order to buy that same evening, so you can tell I was at least decently impressed.⁴

Alexius’s part in the Crusade, for Dr Frankopan, continued at full strength right up to the point when, in order to prevent the force dissolving at the siege of Antioch, the Crusader leaders had to finally break from the Byzantine strategy and start working for themselves, and thereafter we return to the conventional narrative. That narrative is well dealt with, though: the book is stylishly written and well-referenced (endnotes, but what can you do) and I found it pleasant but erudite reading. I do feel, admittedly, that one would benefit from reading it with Dr Frankopan’s translation of the Alexiad open as well, so that one had some means of seeing what Anna was actually saying and why, on this occasion, we should not believe here when elsewhere in the narrative she is used uncritically. Obviously, if he’d made that argument every time he cited her the book would have been three times the size and half as readable, and wherever alternative sources are available he does use them too, but he does ask for a lot of trust in his judgement of her veracity, given how important to his theory her alleged lack of it can sometimes get.

So: one should not go mistaking this for a full new scholarly history of the First Crusade but it certainly is a good and learned book on it, and even if some of its supposed novelty kind of rubs off in the wider scholarship, there is still a need for it. It is possible, as I say above, that there are places where Dr Frankopan’s emphasis on the Byzantine role and deprecation of the Western initiation of the Crusade goes too far, but on the other hand, one could, for example, compare it to Thomas Asbridge’s likewise recent book on the Crusade and notice how really, Alexius is just wheeled on there when dramatically necessary, as the real story is about Westerners versus Easterners, and not in a simplistic way but the Byzantines confuse the binary by being between the poles.⁵ So there is room for a take from the ‘third side’, for sure. Of course, Dr Asbridge managed to build on that book with a much larger one about the Crusades as a whole and then successfully managed to take it to TV.⁶ I didn’t see much of that, sadly, but what I did see had quite a lot of Syrian buildings of about the right period, a great deal of sunshine and Dr Asbridge almost mercilessly walking towards the camera, hands flying, and talking at it with great emphasis. I kind of think Dr Frankopan would like a TV series too, but I can’t help feeling his would involve a lot more indoor scenes, dark decisions being made by half-light, measured and careful delivery and an actress playing Anna scribbling away and crossing out ill-temperedly between every few scenes. I’d quite like to see that programme. Till then, the book will have to do…

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1. Why do stories about Oxford University keep appearing in this paper, anyone? They were the only media coverage at all I saw of the ongoing sell-off of the History Faculty’s library building, and as with this story got most of the details wrong while still being remarkable for thinking it worth reporting in the first place.

2. J. Shepard, “Aspects of Byzantine Attitudes and Policy towards the West in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries” in J. D. Howard-Johnston (ed.), Byzantium and the West, c. 850-c. 1200: proceedings of the XVIII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford 30th March-1st April 1984, Byzantinische Forschungen: internationale Zeitschrift für Byzantinistik Vol. 13 (Amsterdam 1988), pp. 67-118; Paul Magdalino, The Byzantine Background to the First Crusade (Toronto 1996), online here; previously Dana Carleton Munro, “Did the Emperor Alexius I. Ask for Aid to the Council of Piacenza, 1095?” in American Historical Review Vol. 27 (Washington 1922), at pp. 731-733; E. Joranson, “The Problem of the Spurious Letter of Emperor Alexius to the Count of Flanders” in American Historical Review Vol. 55 (Washington 1950), pp. 811-832.

3. Anna Komnena, Alexiad, transl. E. R A. Sewter, rev. with intro. by Peter Frankopan, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth 2009).

4. Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: the call from the East (London 2012), a damn cheap hardback considering how nicely made it is. I note also that even Dr Frankopan feels that he cannot avoid starting with the Council of Clermont even if it is followed with five surprisingly readable chapters on Byzantine politics.

5. Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: a new history (London 2004, repr. 2005).

6. Idem, The Crusades: the war for the Holy Land (London 2010), now translated into four languages.

Seminar CXV: making a state in tenth-century England

I am sorry about the sporadic nature of posting here in recent months. There was Leeds, and either side of that I had house guests, and through all of this I’ve been processing new charter information, which inevitably takes daily time or it doesn’t get done and which, shall we say, starts more projects than it finishes. These things are now all winding down and I hope to spend August determinedly clearing backlogs, among which the posts I have been intending here, lo these many months. This must, I think, require some fairly tough decisions about what seminars to cover, but one that I don’t want to miss is the one that was already next up, when George Molyneaux spoke to the Oxford Medieval History Seminar on 23rd January with the title, “The formation of the English kingdom in the tenth century”.

The point at which one can sensibly talk about a single English kingdom in the Middle Ages has been a long debate, and actually quite a lot of that debate has been led from Oxford. Names like James Campbell and Patrick Wormald come up, who were in post here when they published the things on this subject which have been influential, or Michael Wood, who started here before going on to greater things, and Sarah Foot, who was not here when she took her place in this historiography, now is.¹ One might expect the next step in the debate to be taken elsewhere, therefore, but in actual fact George, one of the scary Prize Fellows at All Souls College, has led the charge from the inside. In the previous stage of the debate King Alfred tended to loom large; George’s first published step into this started the process of diminishing the responsibility of Alfred’s court (itself another Oxford pursuit) and now he is in the process of turning his doctoral thesis into a book which may even finish the job.² This paper was, I think, more or less a pitch for that book, and it made it sound extremely necessary; I shall try and do the same.³

The hand(out) of George: sketch-map of England and its parts in the tenth century, with added information

I had a very slight advantage over some of the audience for this paper, in as much as George kindly lectures on a course I convene here so I’d already heard some of what he might say. So, what’s the argument? Well, an elevator pitch of it would be fairly simple: it is that the really big work of setting up and structuring a kingdom of the English should be placed in the later tenth century and not before; before that is only a military unity, periodically fractured by a resurgent Viking York or whatever cause it may be, but by 1000 one has structures like shires (only apparent north of the Thames in the last third of the tenth century or so), hundreds (on sites that had often had a focal role from much longer ago but now doing something new, as George qualified in questions), and the courts at both of those levels, fortified towns (as opposed to just fortresses that would later become towns), mints (with a number of new mints set up by King Edgar (959-975), who then got all active mints striking the same sort of coin at once) and many other things. George stressed that he didn’t want to make Edgar into a new Alfred here, not least because for some of this King Edmund (939-946) may also have to bear some blame and presumably there’s also room to rehabilitate Eadred (946-955) and Eadwig (955-959) at least a little bit too, but the opportunity given Edgar by the temporary cessation of Viking attacks must have counted for a great deal, it seems to me; Eadred deserves more recognition than he gets for defeating every, considerable, military threat that arrived but it can’t have left him a lot of time for civil reform.

A silver penny of the Stamford mint from after Edgar's 973 coinage reform, Fitzwilliam Museum CM.ME.364-R

What George ended up pitching here, by means of a comparison of how he saw royal government before and how he saw it after his identified change, was a shift of emphasis from extensive to intensive government, from a peripatetic court with an essentially military and seigneurial dominion to one that commanded through law and through a devolved and consistent structure of administration, as far as local variation would admit anyway. He put this down to an end to the possibilities of expansion now that all the Viking kingdoms were conquered, to the reform ideology of the period pressuring the king to take control for the good of his people and his own salvation, and to the economic growth that was going on everywhere at the time and the intensification of lordship that it fuels, the first argument not unlike that put forward by Timothy Reuter for the Carolingian Empire of course and the last one that readers here will likely recognise though George was getting it from Rosamond Faith, not from anyone I tend to cite.⁴

First page of the lawcode IV Edgar, King Edgar’s laws issued at Wihtberodestan, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 265, p. 216

The result – if George is right about this – was that for the first time the kingdom and the realm of the English were relatively close to being the same thing, as opposed to a people with many kings. It also made England different from its neighbours in a way that was hard to undo: to be under the rule of the English king was a different kind of experience of power, involving a more regimented access to judgement, to markets, to warranty, to protection and (I’m sure John Blair would have added) to the sacred than one found outside its borders, which one might now therefore have been able to define. In England, royalty ruled not just by charisma and self-presentation, but now also by routine. And this, you see, is one of the reasons why the tenth century is where it’s at. It will not be long, I suppose, before the full version of this story as George sees it is available, and I think it’s going to be necessary reading not just for Anglo-Saxonists but for anyone who believes similarly in the importance of the tenth century or wants to know how one goes about forming a state in the early Middle Ages. Because you see, by the end of it that is what we’re talking about and just making that clearer will not be the least of this work’s impact.⁵

I asked one of my wooliest questions ever after this paper, because at that time I had hundreds on the brain and was still unable to get away from the antiquity of many of the sites where hundred courts were held. By the time I’d stumbled the words out, it all seemed rather obvious and yet it’s not, perhaps, often enough stated: quite a lot of what underlies these processes must, it seems to me, be men (and even women) in power seeing the possibility of turning existing structures to their agenda and converting them into part of the government. I kind of hate this argument because it rings of Foucault, but when you have kings apparently giving the hundred moots, whatever they did beforehand, new jobs and new jurisdictions and limits probably but often on the old sites, or Alfred (yes, I will keep him in this at least this little bit) using the Viking threat to put areas of his kingdoms under obligations to build fortresses and do military service that had maybe before only run in detail in Mercia, I think that these changes have to be seen this way.⁶ The coinage system must be another thing that can be fitted into that template; Offa of Mercia and indeed Alfred were obviously able, at a push, to call in the whole coinage or at least decree that an old one would cease to be acceptable; Æthelred the Unready, whatever his failings, could do this frequently. (I’m sure George will cover this last in the book, indeed.)

Visible remains of the burh wall at Wallingford, from Wikimedia Commons

In each of these cases, a structure or process that had been occasional or reserved for emergencies wound up serving a new, governmental purpose and becoming a routine operation. I don’t mean to say that Edmund and Edgar and their advisors didn’t think of anything new, not at all, but that the things they carried out were in part dictated by the possibilities of what already existed. If I’m right about this – sorry – there are two important implications, one of which is that those who managed to lay down the precursors should be credited with assisting the later creation of that state we’re talking about, but the other of which is that encroachments on liberty by government can be sincerely meant to be one-off but still open up possibilities for successors who don’t see the constraints so clearly. I’ve been worried about this ever since the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was passed in England, and the Terrorism Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act only made those worries worse. It seems unlikely, from here, that people in tenth-century England saw the institution of regular shire and hundred courts as a nosey and potentially dangerous intervention by tyrannical higher-ups that removed their personal liberties, though the attempts of the Anglo-Saxon kings to restrict trade to places where royal reeves could witness it probably seemed more like that sort of thing despite the obviously sensible purpose of limiting the possibility for disputes. And, then as now, if there was opposition, it certainly wasn’t unified, coherent or resourced enough to resist these changes. All the same, there are two ways to see the building of an England in this period, quite apart from the debate over whether it happened thus and then, and I find that contemporary politics make it harder to see the positive side that was perhaps more apparent to those who remembered the Second World War firsthand.⁷ It may be a thousand years ago and more that George is writing about, but the reasons people may care are very current. It’s not actually necessary, to drive those arguments, that the picture we have of the formation of England be correct, but I take some comfort anyway in thinking that with George’s work we’re a step closer to being correct about it all the same.

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1. James Campbell, “Was it Infancy in England? Some questions of comparison” in Michael Jones & Malcolm Vale (edd.), England and Her Neighbours, 1066-1453. Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London 1989), pp. 1-17; Campbell, “The Late Anglo-Saxon State: a Maximum View” in Proceedings of the British Academy Vol. 87 (London 1995), pp. 39-65, both repr. in his The Anglo-Saxon State (London 2000), pp. 179-199 & 1-30 resp., and several other chapters of that volume; Patrick Wormald, “Engla Lond: the making of an allegiance” in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 7 (Oxford 1994), pp. 1-24; Michael Wood, In Search of England (London 1999), pp. 91-106; Sarah Foot, “The making of Angelcynn: English identity before the Norman Conquest” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th series Vol. 6 (Cambridge 1996), pp. 25-50, repr. in Roy M. Liuzza (ed.), Old English literature: critical essays (New Haven 2002), pp. 51-78; cf. Susan Reynolds, “What do we mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?” in Journal of British Studies Vol. 24 (Chicago 1985), pp. 395–414 and Pauline Stafford, “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, identity and the making of England” in Haskins Society Journal Vol. 19 (Woodbridge 2007), pp. 28-50.

2. George Molyneaux, “The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?” in English Historical Review Vol. 124 (Oxford 2009), pp. 1289-1323; see also Malcolm Godden, “Did King Alfred Write Anything?” in Medium Ævum Vol. 76 (Oxford 2007), pp. 1-23 and cf. Janet Bately, “Did King Alfred Actually Translate Anything: the Integrity of the Alfredian Canon Revisited”, ibid. 78 (2009), pp. 189–215.

3. Part of me wishes also for the book that Chris Lewis might write on this, as has been recorded here before, but perhaps the existence of George’s will provoke him!

4. Rosamond Faith, The English peasantry and the growth of lordship (London 1997).

5. Rees Davies, “The Medieval State: the tyranny of a concept?” in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 (Oxford 2003), pp. 280–300, vs. Susan Reynolds, “There Were States in Medieval Europe – a reply to Rees Davies” ibid. pp. 550-555.

6. What I know about legislation around the hundred, I confess, I get principally from Dorothy Whitelock (transl.), English Historical Documents vol. I: c. 500-1042, 2nd edn. (London 1979), no. 39. On military service, see Nicholas Brooks, “The development of military obligations in eighth and ninth-century England” in Peter Clemoes & Kathleen Hughes (edd.), England Before the Conquest: studies in primary sources presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge 1971), pp. 69-84, repr. in David Pelteret (ed.), Anglo-Saxon History: basic readings (New York 2000), pp. 83-105 and in Brooks, Communities and Warfare, 700-1400 (London 2000), pp. 32-47, but to see this in action (or not!) see Asser, De rebus gestis Ælfredi, transl. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge in eidem (transl.), Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources (London 1983), cap. 91 (ed.); for more recent assessment, David Hill & Alexander Rumble (edd.), The Defence of Wessex: the Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications (Manchester 1996).

7. For sharp comparanda for this kind of assessment, see Catherine Hills, Origins of the English (London 2003), pp. 21-39.

Seminars CXIII & CXIV: Vandals and burning houses

Okay, the marking is done, the exam scripts handed back, and I have a bunch of posts mostly written up, just wanting images and links. But on the other hand I also have a load of freshly-transcribed charter data, an upcoming fortnight of very welcome and distracting house guests and then Leeds (I am going, but for once not presenting), and possibly I should think about finishing some work, you know. So those posts can wait till time is shorter and in the meantime I shall make a gesture towards reducing my ridiculous backlog with reporting on seminars, by telling you about two papers I saw back in January, to wit, Philipp von Rummel presenting on “The Search for the Vandals on the North African Kingdom” to the Late Roman Seminar in Oxford on the 19th January and Maureen Mellor presenting on “The Archaeology of Stuff: scorched interiors” to the Medieval Archaeology Seminar on the 23rd.

Silver 50-denarius coin of Carthage in the name of King Gelimer, 530×534, from Wikimedia Commons. Barbarians I tell you! Denominations of 50 denarii? It’s just not Roman!

Dr von Rummel was asking a simple but important question, which was basically, how much difference did the historically-attested ‘migration’ of the Vandal armies from Spain into Africa in the early fifth century make to the archæology there? Is there a rupture, or continuity? This is not, of course, a simple question because it has been usual to assume that we can recognise barbarians in the archaeology, whereas firstly material culture is portable which means anyone can wear or use it, depending on how the fashions of the day are running, and secondly the fifth-century Roman military and a fifth-century group that identified as barbarians but who’d spent most of a king’s lifetime travelling through the Roman empire and some of that time doing military service for it might well look pretty similar, if not actually be the same.¹ And in fact the archæology of the supposed Vandal homelands obstinately refuses to provide anything much one could use as a marker by way of distinctive material culture, because they were already looking pretty similar back there too. So, until very recently, contended Dr von Rummel, archæology of these areas was looking at burials for ‘Europeans’, ‘Germans’ or some other form of alien, and being surprised how little evident they seem to be, focussing on types of fibula that are not foreign so much as new and can also be found in Rome of the period, and so forth. But we know the Vandals came so there must be something, right? I mean, Victor of Vita talks about habitus barbarus and Victor was an honourable man. But no: we get slow change in military culture and no destruction layers.² Archæologically you’d not know it happened. The towns were in decline in the Vandal period but they were before as well, so that’s actually continuity. And these factors only get worse when one asks the question that’s not about reprehensible but memorably-painted supposed Germans and says, “what about the local ‘barbarians’?” because the same arguments apply to Moorish populations in the archæology, except without the variety, even though their leaders’ names are inscribed in major towns.³ Even the mausolea that now arose were not so much new as really old-fashioned (and with good precursors, see below). And these are of course the populations among whom the Tablettes Albertini were written and that written Latin was continuing alongside a vibrant set of local languages and that, too, was nothing new.

The local `Moorish’ heritage: the tomb of the Numidian king Juba and his Queen Cleopatra Selene, Kur-er-Rumia, near Algiers, from Wikimedia Commons

It’s not, however, that there’s no crisis or no collapse. The economy shrank considerably over the fifth century, and that does show up in the archæology. Roman state patronage had stopped and the new masters had an alternative organisation to support in the form of the Arian church. The market for products seems to have gone local, the land market’s prices to have shrunk, and the North Sahara zone may be drying out, making previously habitable areas marginal. But it’s hard to blame the Vandals for that! The end of Roman state patronage, of course, is probably a fairer cop, but since what that probably meant was that the area was getting a better return on its exports (and imports of Eastern Roman pottery actually go up during the Vandal period at the coast at least, or so we were told), the effects of it are not actually simply and obviously destructive.⁴ Instead, Dr von Rummel argued, what was happening if anything is that Rome ceased to be the best alternative and what has been really going on, old habits and practices, returned to view with the ceasing of the Roman cultural bombardment.⁵ And the Vandals just didn’t matter in any social way. Poor Vandals.

Pottery crucible for metalworking from the Saxon village at Faccombe Netherton, now in the British Museum

By contrast with the Vandals, ironically, Dr Mellor was talking about places where destruction was much more obvious, because in the course of a much larger project about domestic interiors of the Anglo-Saxon period, a tricky thing to reconstruct as you may imagine, she has repeatedly come up against houses that were burnt. This was probably pretty common – interior hearths, thatched roofs, straw mattresses, you can see the problems – but of course it can preserve a building in a ‘Pompeii moment‘, even if it was then flattened and built over; at least the warped and scorched stuff under the collapsed roof and so on stays where it was in the house, thus giving some kind of sense of what ‘lived’ where. This is handy because a lot of the time objects one finds in Anglo-Saxon domestic buildings, of which we do know the locations of a good few, and of which some have yielded a lot of small finds,⁶ are not where they were used, whether because they’ve been swept to the edges of the floor having broken or been lost, or because they were deliberately put in foundations or elsewhere as special deposits. That could obviously make a fantastic amount of difference to how we should interpret the objects: waste or treasure? Functional or token? And even when something is broken, it might tell us a lot about how it had been used if we were able to say how it had broken… And this work of distinction has not really been done and interpreting objects could really be an awful lot more complicated than it usually is. So now Dr Mellor is in progress with this work, but the task is immense and maddening, so I don’t know how long it may be before we hear more, which is a pity because, whether I’ve made this clear or not, this was a really interesting paper. One often says that archæology gets you back to how ordinary people lived but this kind of work gets a lot closer to taking you into their houses and watching them cook, eat and generally do things with stuff than, some.

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1. As you know by now I guess, my text of resort for these matters is Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 (Cambridge 2007), and here esp. pp. 101-110, but you may justly suppose that others would disagree and chief among them would be, I imagine, not yet having made time to read it, Peter Heather, Empire and Barbarians: the fall of Rome and the birth of Europe (Oxford 2010). I don’t see exactly how one argues with Professor Halsall on this but I’ve heard Professor Heather do it anyway.

2. Dr von Rummel did, in justice, admit that this is easier to say since one of the few places the sources are insistent was destroyed, the theatre at Carthage, was excavated but the findings never published and then it was reconstructed over the diggings so that there’s no prospect of checking again. But even then, we have seen in our lifetimes, have we not, that the destruction of an iconic and highly-visible building in a busy city does not in fact equate to the end of that city’s urban existence…

3. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 405-411, is illuminating about these supposed barbarians who didn’t migrate.

4. The economic effects of the Vandals now owning one end of the old grain supply route to Rome are teased out and placed in context in Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford 2005), pp. 635-644.

5. Something like this argument has also been made about the ‘return to the hills’ in sub-Roman Britain, of course, a native culture resurgent, but there the circumstances are rather different because of the scale of social collapse. Africa kept most of its cities and continued to ship in wine, use Latin and worship Christ, and the situation is just a bit different…

6. Here again, however, work is stifled by the amount of these sites which have never been published, like the many boxes of small finds from a post-late-seventh- but pre-mid-eleventh-century mill at Old Windsor, never catalogued because of the increasing difficulty and then death of the excavator, Brian Hope-Taylor, only one of several examples that featured in the earlier part of this paper.

Seminar CXII: ladies love generalisations based on gender

This is longer than I meant resumption of blogging to take, though posts have been being written behind the scenes, but in any case, as a blogological colleague has but lately observed, when you fall off a horse it is commonly recommended to get back on. And when the post you have been tinkering with most immediately is a difficult one to write right, and may well cause unwanted offence or feature catastrophic gender-fail, obviously that’s just more reason to remount, right? Oh well, here we go. I owe Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary a favour or two for offering me the teaching slot I had there a few years ago, and for helping out with some of that teaching, and when you’ve seen someone give a scratch lecture on Pope Innocent III to a group she’s never met before, while you stand on a chair in front of her desperately trying to keep going a failing data projector that forces her to do much of the lecture without her slides displaying when planned, and she still rocks it, then you acquire a respect for them that’s entirely apart from their work. I have somewhat reluctantly gathered that Professor Rubin’s work has a mixed following, including among this blog’s readership, and I don’t actually know it that well, but I know that she’s interesting to listen to, and so when she came to present at the Europe in the Later Middle Ages Seminar in Oxford on 17th January 2012, I made sure I was there.

What she gave us was something like a state of the question paper garnished with a mise-au-jour, and its title, “Gender: a useful concept for medievalists”, was of course a knowing reference to an article by Joan Scott from the 1980s.¹ Of course work on gender is older than that, but it began enveloped in work on women, work that was more or less politically driven, and strands of it have periodically returned there, while others have broken off to join larger politically-driven subfields. The overall trend that Professor Rubin sketched out, with detailed bibliography in support, was for the subfield of women’s studies, and then gender studies, to have made their way upwards into the light of more general recognition and be diffused by acceptance, more or less grudging, and incorporation into everybody’s mental toolkit. If I can use myself as an example, I am not a historian of gender. But, I was taught by and have been encouraged by people who have published such work, and I happen to have some extremely informative sources that were written for, and in some cases on by, nuns. The nunnery that generated these documents, Sant Joan de Ripoll of course, was shut down in 1017 by a papal Bull that had been obtained because a good chunk of the Catalan ecclesiastical establishment went to Rome and told Pope Benedict VIII that the nuns were “parricides” and “whores of Venus” (meretrices Veneri), and then pensioned most of the nuns off and used the remainder of the lands to endow a new and ephemeral bishopric for the then-top count’s son. You can’t really ignore how that episode is loaded with and operates using gender politics, or at least, I can’t, now, having come up through the fields I’ve come up through, and that’s more or less what I mean; mostly, people are aware that this stuff is worth considering. What this might then mean, of course, is that like any subfield, gender is forever in danger of losing its distinctiveness as an interest and field of enquiry, so that periodically it goes through a ruction and a new flower blooms from the stem that recovers some of that speciality. I’ve struggled somewhat with describing this and in the end I decided it would be simplest just to try and chart it.

Sketch diagram of the development of gender studies, by Jonathan Jarrett (you know, me), very possibly without adequate information or thought (full-size version linked through)

And from that you’ll see where I worry about ending up, in much the same boat as Guy Halsall floated about interdisciplinarity at Leeds in 2009, to wit, that beyond a certain point of despecialisation, basically every way of looking at the past becomes cultural history. I mean, this is in some ways the mirror of the old Raymond Chandler argument that genre fiction that’s good enough transcends genre and just becomes literature.² But when a field has a political agenda, such generalisation threatens to rob it of the power to change things. Now this was not what Professor Rubin was arguing: she was more of the view that gender has gone mainstream and thus won the battle for recognition that the work in the 1960s started. “Gender has rewritten what it is to be human in the Middle Ages,” she said, by opening up questions about agency, social rules and programming, inner worlds and feelings that were opened up initially as a way to study women and recover their experience but have turned out to have application to the whole human experience, as indeed one might have hoped given that all persons involved were and are human.

So I pondered this for a while while writing it up, and began to worry that I was treading water in which I’m not qualified to swim. (It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, and I would welcome perspectives and corrections this time too.) But, I’ve consulted one of my female gender scholars of resort and they said, “Have you read Judith Bennett? Judith Bennett covers this.” And a few years ago, largely because of the really interesting round-table that was mounted at Blogenspiel and The Adventures of Notorious, Ph.D., among other places, on Judith Bennett’s book, History Matters, but also because the author of Blogenspiel was standing at my elbow telling me how much I needed to read it, I did actually buy History Matters and to my shame I had not yet read it. So on receiving this instruction I went and got the book off the shelf, burrowed into the first couple of chapters and topped that off with the conclusion. It’s nicely easy reading, in fact, and it does indeed cover the question of what happens if you let gender history get `mainstreamed’.³ (I will read the rest at some point, honest.) But it fits much more closely to my misgivings than to Professor Rubin’s optimism: Bennett argues that gender history has achieved what general recognition it has largely by detaching itself from feminism and depoliticising itself, that it has had to draw its own teeth to be allowed into the public sphere. And she argues that the field needs to recover its sense of its own history, and of the long-term history of women’s second place in society, and remember what the issues are that it has the power to address. In other words, Judith Bennett sees women’s and gender history as being under threat from a patriarchally-structured normalisation; Miri Rubin, if I was following her correctly, sees it as having got within the normal structures and altered them in a lasting way. For Bennett, the field is in danger; for Professor Rubin, it’s never been better. Is this just a glass-half-full/glass-half-empty matter of perspective? Can both be right? I don’t know, but while I want Professor Rubin to be right my natural paranoia and cynicism mean that I struggle to accept it. Did I just read The Second Sex at too formative a stage? What do you think?

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1. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis” in American Historical Review Vol. 91 (Chicago 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

2. I remembered that this point is made in R. Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 174 no. 6 (December 1944), pp. 53-59, repr. as “The Simple Art of Murder: an essay” in idem, The Simple Art of Murder (Chicago 1950), and I suppose it is, but I seem to have adopted a formulation of it I came up with in a review I wrote as an undergraduate and not one that Chandler actually used. Chandler’s essay, however, is very much worth the read, which is more than mine likely was. It’s where the phrase “Down these mean streets a man must walk…” comes from for a start. It’s not so hot on the gender issues, of course…

3. Judith Bennett, History Matters: patriarchy and the challenge of feminism (Philadelphia 2006), esp. pp. 6-29.

Seminar CXI: hostage to vocabulary

With something of a shock to the system, my seminar reports are now only a bit more than a term behind as I hit the beginning of 2012, when Adam Kosto presented to the Medieval History Seminar in Oxford on the 16th January with the title, “Free men made bond: finding hostages in the medieval sources”. Adam is another of those people who could obviously have done my thesis – there seem to be more than you’d think – and indeed has come a lot closer than some,¹ but he has been busy for the last few years partly with Lay Archives stuff, even now in production with CUP I understand, and mostly with investigating the ways that hostage-taking in the medieval West worked, and that, as you can see, was what he brought to us in a whirlwind trip to this side of the Atlantic. This was good, as despite our overlap of interests, we’d never managed more before than to wave at each other, so the chance to actually talk with him was very welcome. On, however, to the paper!

Richard the Lionheart – Not A Hostage

The first problem was definitions; the potential from taking someone as a hostage, in terms of aims and outcomes, varies a lot depending who it is and whose behaviour you’re trying to coerce, and a lot of the categories one might apply prevent certain uses of the term applying. Adam opted for a restricted definition of a hostage taken by a second party who was in some way a guarantor of behaviour by a third party; that hostage was not to be ransomed, which is something different, was physically constrained, and was given not taken, albeit under duress. There’s a lot of people conventionally thought of as medieval hostages, from Richard the Lionheart to Galla Placidia, whom this excludes but one can see that there is a difference. Whether it’s a difference the writers, from all over Europe, of documents and narratives both, from whom Adam was trying to glean sense from saw, however, is harder to discover: the word obses covers basically any meaning for ‘hostage’ you might want and then some, including some who would only become hostages in Adam’s sense if something went wrong, and meanwhile fideiussor, usually ‘surety’, has some semantic overlap, if that surety has to hand themselves over to be confined.² Adam excluded fideiussores, but these criteria of inclusion and exclusion were what generated most of the discussion in questions.

Harold Godwineson in the Bayeux Tapestry – Hostage Or Not? At Least Brother and Uncle of Hostages

Adam’s findings, other than that much to his chagrin the first reference to a conditional hostage as described above comes from the year 1000, was that this sort rose to mostly replace other sorts over the course of the following century, although never to exclusion. Ultimately, he figured that the thing that made all these cases the same in some way was the sense of guarantee, and that it was legal guarantee, and ways that you could do that where the parties didn’t share a legal system, a superior arbitrator, or just much trust, that formed the framework in which medieval hostages (in his sense) should be seen. One of the other things that was raised in questions was whether this wasn’t so desperate as to be marginal, given how often it could go wrong, but of course that didn’t stop people resorting to trial by ordeal, and just as there, there’s a possibility that the proposal might be made as part of a game strategy in negotiations, and that one may not necessarily have been making a proposal that was meant to be useful to both parties. Sometimes, however, it seemed to me, it must have been the best way to build a bridge between two parties in a dispute separated by more than they were united by, whether they liked the option or (as Adam stressed was often the case) not. In that respect, though Adam has greatly widened his spread, he’s still interested in how people make agreements, and that’s always a good thing to look for.

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1. True story: when I was in the closing stages of writing up my Ph. D., my supervisor, a collaborator of Adam’s, said at one meeting that I’d probably better have a look at Adam’s newest paper, his “Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia” in Speculum Vol. 80 (Cambridge MA 2005), pp. 44-74, as it probably touched on my stuff to an extent that needed to be taken into account. That was putting it mildly: we’d started with the same example charter! (That charter deserves a blog post of its own really, but I have no image of it, and besides, Adam’s kind of covered it…) Happily for me Adam usually works the other side of the year 1000 from me and his excellent Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: power, order, and the written word, 1000-1200 (Cambridge 2001) really only crosses with me a little bit, where we mostly agree.

2. For sureties, I at least am used to resorting to the work of Wendy Davies, most obviously her “Suretyship in the Cartulaire de Redon” in Thomas Charles-Edwards, Morfydd Owen & D. B. Walters (edd.), Lawyers and Laymen. Studies in the History of Law presented to Professor Dafydd Jenkins on his seventy-fifth birthday, Gwyl Ddewi 1986 (Cardiff 1986), pp. 72-91, repr. in Davies, Brittany in the Early Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies Series 924 (Aldershot 2009), VIII, but now also her “On Suretyship in Tenth-Century Northern Iberia” in Julio Escalona & Andrew Reynolds (edd.), Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages: exploring landscape, local society, and the world beyond, The Medieval Countryside 6 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 133-152, but obviously that only covers early and one of the interesting things about Adam’s work is that it will carry this idea later, where I know of no literature except on Old Norse material.