In Marca Hispanica IX: actual charter scholarship

This is the last one of the Catalonia trip edits, so from here on it’ll be back to the more mundane writing and stolen graphics… So I thought I’d give you some hardcore diplomatic work as well as a pretty picture, by way of demonstrating that I wasn’t just being a tourist.

The last three days of my trip were spent commuting into Barcelona, rather than touring, you see. There was actually a bit of city-walking as I made an attempt to track down Professor Feliu in person, and that took me past the gardens of the Palau Reial and past a good deal of modern and impressive office architecture, but I didn’t have time to look at anything very much. I will say this, in case you ever find yourself trying to find a street address in Barcelona: the blocks may contain seven or eight different shops, offices or even houses each; or they may contain a single giant hotel. They are still numbered at a notional two numbers per block, and various crazinesses with “-bis” and so on are sometimes used to separate addresses but basically it’s impossible to count doorways to see how far you have to walk, or to tell when you’ve found your address unless it wears a name. Yes, I did have to walk some way. But once I’d got back into town (Professor Feliu in the end came and found me in town, for which I must thank him—we had a good chat, although it had to be in French) I got myself to the Biblioteca de Reserva in the old University building. I have to say, even with a Cambridge background, this building is quite impressive. It wasn’t so much the age of the buildings, or even its splendour though a big hallway with status of Isidore of Seville, King Alfonso X the Wise and other Spanish or Classical intellectual luminaries staring down from either side, will stick in my mind. It mainly struck me because it was so cool and quiet and lush, and full of plants and trees. For example, when I stepped out of the library to take a break, this was the scene that greeted me:

You see, I can cope with this as a study environment. So, what was I actually doing? Well, I mentioned above that I had some plans to work on the charters of Sant Pere de Casserres, and they are in the Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona. The staff there were very helpful, though more cautious than those at Vic; I had to surrender my passport and could only see a few at once. There turned out to be just enough from before my self-imposed date threshold to establish that it was a good point to choose as after that the diplomatic changed sharply, and although at the time of writing I haven’t had time to do any detailed analysis of the contents, I already know that there’s enough material here for two papers and one of them will serve for Leeds 2009. (If only I had my 2008 paper so well advanced…) So that was pretty encouraging.

Now, let me show you how a charter scholar does his work :-) Firstly, have a charter:

This is Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, Pergamins C (Sant Pere de Casseres) núm 20, and there is a full-size higher-resolution version under the image here if you want to study it closely. So the first thing to do is scribble some description, but as you can see it I’ll spare you. Note however that this one’s especially good for the range of scripts; all these people seem to have signed for real and they none of them show the same hand, which is interesting, because so much of the writing we have is in formal scripts, it’s fascinating to me that that isn’t what people use when they sign their names. Are they going up a register so as to stand out? Or are they reverting to their ‘usual’ hand? I don’t know.

Next question is, what does it actually say? And if you want to do this properly, you have to transcribe it. So, off the file created on the laptop I’d borrowed specially for this purpose, I give you the diplomatic transcription:

In dei om~ptis N~ne SciaNT [NT in ligature] o~nis d~m credentes quia mot? e~ placit: in sede uico Int~ cenobio Sci~ petri / kastru~ serres & Vutardo tarauellense de alaude q~d conda~ Reimu~d? drog? relinq~d ad p~fata / cenobii. Dicens p~phat? Vutard? q~d facere non potuit quia karta pr~ inde fecit ad socru~ suu~ olibane de cha/praria, In hac uero audiencia fuit brenar~d? uicescomes qui cum Reinardo abb~e sua~ exibuit leg / testimonia ante Wifredo iudice quia quando [change of pen here] ipsa karta fuit facta q~d Vuitard? ostendebat Reimu~d? prephat? / auctor demenserat & alienat? a sensa?, & ideo ego Vufred? iudex p~ condicionib? editis recepit ipsos testes & confirmo ipso / alaude in potestate sci~ petri & potestati de reimu~d? ut ab hodierno die in antea eu~ habeaNT [NT in ligature] que~ ad modu~ / at ordinauit p~phat? Reimu~d?. Condiciones uero que p~tin~ & ad Negocii reseruate ut conditeruNT [NT in ligature] in ipsa cenobio. Et si quis hoc disru~pere [..] libra~ auri p~soluat & hec consignacio firma p~maneat, Est aut~ ia~dictus / alaudes in ipso angulo ant~nunio , & suNT [NT in ligature] domos & t~ras & uineas & molinos cu~ t~minas & p~tinenciis & exios ut / ios. Kartam uero qui ostensa[.] i~ placito fuit in~ne olibane caprariense euacuata fuit & p~ma~sit / p~missu~ e~ cu~ testib? qui in condicionib? resonaNT [NT in ligature]. Facta deficione .iii. id~ marcii, anno, XXXIIIJ / rei~ Radb~to rege. *Guifredus l~ta q~ & iudex q~ cu~ guitardo recep~ / testes & sub SS
/
*hECFREdVS GRACIA DEI AbbA SS *SUNIARIVS m~cho SSS / *VUIlielmus X
//
SSS P&r? l~, Rogat? scripsit, & sub scripsit X die & anno q~d supra

A few conventions there may need explaining. It’s supposed to be what’s on the document, exactly, unless it’s in brackets. Square brackets are my comments, angle brackets hypothetical readings. Slashes, tildes and asterisks are my exceptions to the exactness—the first are line breaks and the second are a representation of the marks of abbreviation, all of them alike, which is sloppy I know but forgive me a limited typeface. The asterisks indicate a signature not written by the main scribe. The question marks are one abbreviation mark I have preserved as is, that is, they’re not actually interrogation points but a mark meaning -us has been omitted. So there’s your transcription, and you may be able to trace this on the document (and if you think I’ve got it wrong I’m happy to be corrected). Now what does it actually mean? With the advantage of having read quite a lot of Catalan charters, I can fill in the gaps, but this is still a story in itself. If I just skip to translating, it goes:

In the name of omnipotent God. Let all believers in God know that there was held a hearing in the See of Vic between the monastery of Saint Peter of Casserres & Guitard of Taradell over the alod that the late Ramon Drog left to the aforementioned monastery, Guitard saying that he could not do that since he made a charter of it to his cousin Oliba of Chapraria. In this audience, indeed, was Viscount Bermon, who along with Abbot Reinard displayed his testimony before Guifré the judge that when this charter that Guitard was showing was made, the author, the aforementioned Ramon, had become demented and was out of his mind. And therefore I Guifré the judge, through sworn oaths, received the witnesses themselves and I confirm the selfsame alod in the power of Saint Peter and the power of Ramon so that from this day into the future they may have it just as the aforementioned Ramon ordered. In fact, reserve you the oaths that pertain to the business so that they can be archived in the monastery. And if anyone [should come] to disrupt this, let him pay a pound of gold and let this verdict remain firm. The alod itself is moreover in l’Angle in Antuniano, and there are houses and lands and vines and mills with their bounds and appurtenances and exits and entrances. Meanwhile the charter that was shown in the hearing in the name of Oliba of Capraria was disavowed, and the promise of that remains with the witnesses who are recorded in the oaths. Definition made the 3rd Ides of March, in the 34th year of the rule of King Robert. Guifré, deacon and also judge, who with Guitard received the witnesses and signed below.

Hecfred by the grace of God Abbot signed. Sunyer, monk, signed. Guillem X.

Signed and subscribed Pere the deacon wrote and subscribed X the day and year as recorded above.

All right, I haven’t finished thinking about this document yet, but let me call out some points for you.

1. Firstly, though I’ve translated fairly loosely in a couple of places there, this is very strongly styled. The drop into not just direct speech, but a direct imperative (“reseruate”, ‘reserve you’), is really unusual. Whoever wrote the text that this is derived from (see 4 below…) was apparently working from dictation more or less, and Guifré apparently wanted to wash his hands of it post haste: he ties up various loose ends as he thinks and gives instructions as if it were a memo, not a solemn court judgement.
2. His dismissal of the case and the details of it might be explained because, for example, it was well known to all parties that Ramon Drog had indeed gone a bit doolally in his last months and quite possibly sold his lands several times over, and the question was going to be whether Guitard of Taradell could put this over on the judge. Guifré, working out that he’s been had, gives Guitard short shrift and basically banks everything with the monastery, including the warning that the witnesses will remember him admitting the charter to Oliba was useless. It’s a fairly weak claim anyway, that the land can’t be the monastery’s because it’s someone else’s when that someone else isn’t the plaintiff, but the defence isn’t so hot either is it, “oh well he was mad, your honour, mad he was, oh yes, well known it is how mad he was honest”. But the people saying this are the local viscount and the abbot of the monastery so there’s little hope for Guitard really. Once the monastery had convinced Bermon to show up, and his mother had founded the place so they have a connection, Guifré was really just filling in the blanks. It’s tough to be up against The Man in early eleventh-century Catalonia.
3. Nonetheless, a few things here don’t add up. We don’t have the oaths of the witnesses; normally they would indeed be on a separate document, but it’s not here even though it was supposed to be kept in the monastery. Nor do we have any record of the gift to the monastery; Ramon made a charter to someone else, but the monastery have to rely on witnesses and heavy local enforcement, as well as claiming their donor later went mad. Where are these documents they should have, both before and after the hearing? You have to wonder whether it’s all entirely kosher, or if in fact this might be a Scheinprozess, a fake hearing intended to produce a document that proves property when other proof is lacking. And if they don’t have the oaths either, maybe it’s an entire fake, a document that records a hearing that never really happened.
4. Because, you see, the document isn’t an original. But it has the signatures on it, I hear you say, how can it not be original? Well, yes, signatures. And look, one of them’s the abbot. Not the abbot named in the text, but a subsequent one. Unless one of the four (which is very few, and two of them at least are members of the monastery) witnesses was an abbot from elsewhere, this was written up and signed later on, and Pere seems to write other documents for Casserres which are basically copies of older charters to which they apparently refer. I haven’t worked this out yet, but there are incontrovertible examples.

So quite a lot going on there. Next, try this!

No okay, only kidding. But you can imagine how my heart sank when I saw it. In fact, though, it’s fascinating, at least to me. There are five separate transactions written up here, and one, the third, has autograph signatures, albeit only two and them both clerics. The trouble is, it postdates the first one on the parchment, but this huge parchment was clearly set up to take that big transaction, not the tiny one, which seems to have been fitted round and so must have been written up from something else after the date of both of them. That in turn means that they either used new witnesses, or the two clerics were both still around to sign again. So much for autograph signatures as a proof of originality!

And meanwhile, what are they actually doing? The first transaction is so huge because it has 40 donors and vendors (they’re all called both) and deals with 23 pieces of land. It must have been a huge occasion! Except that, having given all the boundaries ,when the scribe gets to the bit where he should record the prices paid for these lands, he gives up and writes instead, “p[ro]p[te]r p[re]cio sic inclos[um] in ipsas scripturas resonat”, ‘because of the price that is recorded in the selfsame charters thus included’. In other words, he’s making a big narrative out of lots of charters, this isn’t one huge occasion, it’s a story combining 23 separate transactions for the sake of a permanent record. One might have guessed this from the crossings-out that imply fairly clearly that the scribe has lost his place or the plan of how to deal with a source text in front of him, but then he goes and admits it for us. This is supposed to be a very material foundation legend built as a kind of pancarta and then they add four more transactions that had happened already as well onto it like they were making a huge one-sheet cartulary (which is basically what a pancarta is, in case you were wondering; the web seems to have no useful definition). No wonder they abbreviate so heavily! But what I haven’t figured out is who it is doing this. There was a church at Casserres before the monastery, and this document doesn’t mention monastery or monks in any of its parts. All these transactions are dated to before the monastery was established, but we’ve already seen that that doesn’t mean much. And there’s four separate scribes with clearly different hands and another two clerics in the signatures. What parish church has five working priests and extra staff? There’s another just across the way at Sant Pere de Roda with a similar number, and they even own land around this church, so what on earth’s going on? They can’t both be mother churches so close to each other!

I haven’t worked it out yet, but because I now have this stuff under my belt, I reckon I probably will. Just, maybe not right now…

And all right, I’ve finished now, I’m back in the UK even virtually now, back to the books and the blogs. I hope I haven’t driven you all off…

Attack of the Pseudonymous Medieval Commentators

I seem to have been contacted from beyond the grave. Mind you, this shouldn’t surprise me, I have Geoffrey Chaucer and the Emperor Antoninus Pius on my blogroll, after all, how far away could Archbishop Wulfstan of York be? Yes, an acquaintance of mine has brought to my attention a relatively new blog which rejoices in the name, What Would Wulfstan Do? Its noble aim is not so far off that of Modern Medieval, to give the people of the Middle Ages a voice that speaks to the modern reader, but so far the speakers are only two, though what a two: Archbishop Wulfstan, Lupus himself, and Ælfric of Eynsham. All the same, I gather that these two fear that they may not themselves be sufficient unto the day, and I have been asked to advertise their wish for collaborators. If anyone feels that they could channel some medieval opinion into the blogosphere, which let’s face it people are already doing, the archbishop and the grammarian would be joyous

In Marca Hispanica VIII: pilgrimage to see Emma

A long long time ago, as I know I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a paper about a woman called Emma, who was Guifré the Hairy‘s daughter, and whom he gave to the nunnery he founded at Sant Joan de Ripoll, as it then was. I wrote about how she built the place up by aggressive purchase and legal confrontation but eventually died without leaving it properly organised and how it went to the dogs thereafter. And, bless them, Early Medieval Europe decided they liked it and it was my first paper in print. So once finally out in Catalonia, it was obviously important to get up there, even if only to say `thankyou’ to Emma somehow for giving me the means to make my first break.

The town of Sant Joan de les Abadesses, as it now is, which stands just along the Ter valley from what is now bustling industrial Ripoll, is far tinier and very very focussed on its tourism industry. As well as Emma, who is remembered here, they make great play with the legend of Comte Arnau, a legendary evil ruler who is supposed to have abducted the abbess and caused the nunnery to collapse as a result. As I mentioned before, Comte Arnau was not real, and the real story of the nunnery’s dissolution is actually even more messy, but I can’t blame them for running with it, any more than I do Nottingham for making the most of Robin Hood. It did mean that a lot of their stuff also has nuns on it, but worryingly racy nuns, with visible ankles as they run through cloisters and so on.

So yup: this is the cloister through which they would have run:

The actual abbey, and its attached museum which is rather nice, are extremely small. The nuns and priests must have lived elsewhere in the town, or else, when this thirteenth-century building was done for the Augustinian canons who were by then the occupants, the whole thing was just a smaller concern. This is almost entirely belied by the church to which the cloister is attached, which is a fine example of a particular Catalan architectural theme, squeezing maximum geometrical splendour onto a fairly small ground footprint:

Here, I believe, the building is late eleventh-century. Still not the church Emma would have known, but probably its immediate replacement. Inside it’s a vast-seeming space that’s actually quite closely bounded, but the massive pillars in the nave, of which there are only two, make it seem as if there is actually much more that simply can’t be seen all at once, and the transept and apsidioles hide small devotional foci that, indeed, you can’t see from the main space, like this one to Guifré:

And this church wasn’t even where the people of the town worshipped. It may have been, when first built, but the canons and monks who variously replaced the nuns thought better of their seclusion and instead sent the plebs to a new church, of Sant Joan and Sant Pol (John and Paul—Ringo and George were presumably commemorated at Santa Maria), through this very door here:

Unfortunately, due to an earthquake in 1429, going through that door now doesn’t get you very much…

And after that, the monastery being long gone by then anyway, they let people back into the abbey church. But back over there, or wherever she is actually buried, Emma had rested sound through the whole thing and you can still sort of meet her there:

Salute, domina. Gratiam tibi debeo.

There speaks someone who’s sure of his funding!

The fifth interview in Pallares-Burke’s The New History is with Professor Daniel Roche. I found this one rather unsatisfying. Mostly this was, I think, because in the UK at least the times have now moved on from when you could use your students as research lackies without crediting them on the subsequent work—the sciences have taught us how to do co-authoring, for which of course there is a strict code—and I don’t think many of us would think that it was in any way ‘good for us’ to be so employed without credit, if only because the benefit of the credit would be so substantial on an early CV. However, the bit which did cause the outraged spluttering from yer humble correspondent goes like this:

“What kind of contribution can the historians make in today’s world?

“I don’t think we have any lesson to teach and I don’t believe this is the role of the historian. It is very unusual for a historian to play a part in the political and spiritual organization of society. Our role, whatever the type of history we do, may just be to provide examples of critical reflection. I mean, it is the historian’s job, as I see it, to show that things are always much more complicated than people think.”¹

So how could we summarise that, as a motto? ‘To problematise and complicate?’ Surely only one short step away from “To patronize and annoy” already, isn’t it? And heaven forfend we should try teaching anyone anything… Suffice it to say, I don’t think we should be in the game of intellectual one-upmanship that this seems to suggest, and I hope that I’m not.

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1. Daniel Roche, interview with Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Paris May 1999, ed. Pallares-Burke as “Daniel Roche” in eadem, The New History: confessions and conversations (Cambridge 2005), pp. 106-128 at pp. 126-127.

In Marca Hispanica VII: Besalú and its rainy gardens

Trying, more or less unintentionally, to get as many of the old comital capitals into one trip as possible? Possibly, but I had been told to go to Besalú anyway, and it had been on my mind since the road from Hostalric to Vic through Arbúcies and Sant Hilari de Sacalm, that we’d taken to get to Vic from where we were staying, had led us through place after place whose name I knew. I knew them from a single document, usually, that document being the will of the Count-Bishop Miró III Bonfill, Count of Besalú 957-984 and Bishop of Girona 970-984, having previously been a deacon from early in his life. Miró was a fascinating man who seems to have read Greek, in fact to have generally read a lot and sponsored astronomical research as well as founding shedloads of monasteries.¹ But as we drove along that road, it became clear that he had also carefully amassed a swathe of property by his death that led more or less directly along the route from his bishopric to his county’s capital. I don’t know if they’re all a comfortable day’s walk from each other or not, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’d have found that new road very convenient, as he must have done the journey rather a lot. So I was already fairly happy to be seeing some of his work. Because, you know, they say charity begins at home, and so when you get right into Besalú you can see how Miró took this to heart, because the town square is mainly taken up by this:

`This’ is the old monastery of Sant Pere de Besalú, that Miró founded, and though it would have surprised him like this because of a twelfth-century rebuild, it’s still a good focus, and although the nave is locked away from you by a glass door you can stand in the porch at its open end, and for the cost of a Euro, illuminate the altar at the other for three minutes, which is quite a nice gimmick. But this is getting ahead of things, because to actually get that far you have to park up outside the town and come in this way:

There’s been a bridge here since the eleventh century, but lots of what you see here is fourteenth-century, and its building generated quite a drama;² I don’t know how people got across the river before that, although on the day we were there it was shallow enough to ford no problem, despite the rain that may or may not be evident to you in the photoes. And behind it the town just sort of piles up, medieval stones on medieval stones:

And then once you’re across the bridge, you are in this maze of medieval streets, that has basically not changed except in terms of cleanliness and shopfronts since the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. It’s like Girona’s medieval centre except much more compact and, whereas Girona is kind of like one large museum piece, here people were still living and working in it. I thought this continuity of use was fantastic, apart from anything else for the quality of building it implied but also for the apparent cultural assumption that you couldn’t go replacing this stuff. That said, again and again during this trip I came across buildings that turned out, despite being apparently medieval in style and fabric, to have been there only since the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries or even later; it was just the way people built here for a long long time.

But it’s not just buildings. From the bridge side the town slowly climbs down to where the river loops round in slightly more reachable fashion, and out there there is an expanse of market gardens, the Horts de Besalú, that apparently go back to the tenth century, although I assume that the actual terracing and structures are more recent than that at least:

These gardens were something of a revelation to me, dull though they look, firstly because I see the word ‘ortos’ a lot in my documents and this made it make a lot more sense in my head. Secondly, although I couldn’t get a decent picture that would bring this out, because the cabbages and cauliflowers growing in some of these gardens were bigger than some children, I mean truly giant vegetables that would make nonsense of the entries at most British country fairs. And thirdly because they’re achieving these monster vegetables with an irrigation system that looked extremely familiar. Forgive the strange angle, which was adopted not for style but to get the complexity of the system in:

I grant you straight away that these are made of concrete and may well not be any more medieval than you or me. However, compare these, which are in Shiraz in Iran and may have been since about the same time Besalú’s bridge was put in place:

If it works, why fix it I guess?³ Admittedly, the pouring rain that shortly after this drove us to take refuge in a café and then run for Girona where my companion of the journey so far had to catch a plane, and also forbade any more photoes, made an irrigation system seem pretty redundant, and it was sloshing out spare water like a storm drain, which it had effectively become, but the low river still told us why it was there, and why people had been maintaining this essentially ninth-century Arabic technology so that they could continue to grow outsize cauliflowers. Really, they haven’t changed much of medieval Besalú, it’s worth a look.

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1 On Count-Bishop Miró and his monastery work see Josep María Salrach, “El Bisbe-Comte Miró Bonfill i la seva obra de fundació i dotació de monestirs” in Eufèmia Fort i Cogul (ed.), II Col·loqui d’Història del Monaquisme Català, Sant Joan de les Abadesses 1970 vol. II, Scriptorium Populeti 9 (Poblet 1974), pp. 57-81, with English summary pp. 422-423; on his learning and savvy generally, see Salrach, “El comte-bisbe Miró Bonfill i l’acta de consagració de Ripoll de l’any 977” in Estudis de llengua i literatura catalanes oferts a R. Aramon i Serra en el seu setanté aniversari Vol. IV, Estudis Universitaris Catalans Vol. 26 (3^a època, Vol. 4) (Barcelona 1984), pp. 303-318.

2. There has recently been a historical novel set around its building, indeed, by Martí Gironell and called El Pont dels Jueus (Girona 2007), though how close it is to history would be something to read up on I suspect.

3. If the irrigation is something you find interesting, aside from Googling for « qanat » you could try either (for Catalonia especially) Pierre Guichard, “L’aprofitament de l’aigua” in B. de Riquer i Permanyer (ed.), Història Política, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans volum 2: la formació de la societat feudal, segles VI-XII, ed. Josep María Salrach i Marès (Barcelona 1998; repr. 2001), pp. 332-333, or more generally Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge MA 1970), online at http://libro.uca.edu/irrigation/irrigation.htm, last modified 8 December 2001 as of 26 March 2008.

In the family or on the money

Sometimes I come across things I just really should have known. This is quite a substantial one, because you’d think that by now I’d have more or less got up to speed with Carolingian numismatics. But one of the things I ‘knew’ about Carolingian numismatics is that the Carolingians don’t mint coins with their portraits on. And whereas with a lot of medieval kings the coins are the only contemporary portraits we have, with the Carolingians we’re actually not badly off. Charlemagne himself is a bit of a problem, unless the famous equestrian statue actually is him and contemporary:

But Hraban Maur put a lot of effort into depicting Louis the Pious:

Even Lothar I, who is generally undersourced, exists in paint and parchment:

And Charles the Bald has several depictions out there, of which the stock one is so like Lothar there, for all that the manuscript it’s in was supposedly presented to Charles, that I actually thought one of the others might be more representative:

And there’s more than a bit of family resemblance, too, which has always amused me. But but but. Turns out Charlemagne did mint a portrait coinage, although possibly only for two years, after the Byzantine emperor had recognised his title as Holy Roman Emperor in 812. There’s one in the Fitzwilliam, even, I’ve sat next to classes where it was being handed round (very carefully) and never noticed. Pah. Ours isn’t online, but this image is:

Check out the moustache too; it more or less matches the one on the statue. Furthermore, for a short while his son Louis the Pious continued the theme with a version of his own:

This one’s particularly fun for numismatists because it’s from Melle, where the Empire’s major silver mines are and so it has on the reverse the hammers and dies for striking the coinage that was the town’s major interest. Well, there we go: don’t tell the interview panels how shaky my knowledge is please…

Edit: further enquiry reveals that Lothar I also minted some portrait issues, probably in Italy. So really I should have just held this post back a month or so more and posted more holiday photoes… But, although I haven’t been able to find an image of Lothar’s coins that’s either online or copyright-loose, they seem pretty cartoonish; I can’t help but wonder if he was using coins of Constantius II as a model, which are also pretty bizarre. In any case. For all I know, it seems, all the Carolingians put their faces on coins once in a while. I’m just not going to risk any more generalisations on the subject.

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I actually found all this out by reading the Reverend Simon Coupland’s “Charlemagne’s coinage: ideology and economy” in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester 2005), pp. 211-229 and his “Money and coinage under Louis the Pious” in Francia Vol. 17 (Sigmaringen 1990), pp. 23-54, both reprinted in Coupland, Carolingian Coinage and the Vikings: studies on power and trade in the 9th century, Variorum Collected Studies, I & III respectively.

In Marca Hispanica VI: Plana de Gurb (but not the castle)

The area around Vic, if you’re looking at it through the lens of a tenth-century charter sample, is dominated by a few places where Vic cathedral had serious interests. For the third chapter of the thesis, and for part of the third chapter of what will be the book, I focussed on one of these, Gurb, where a powerful castellan lineage managed to anchor themselves by playing off patronage from the counts against patronage from the bishops.¹ So I went rather hoping to see what they’d done.

The trouble with looking for material remains from my period, when people are largely building new things in sparsely-populated areas that they’ve organised, which is precisely why it’s exciting of course, is that they tend to build in wood, and then a few decades later when the area’s filled out a bit and the population is under tighter lordship, somebody replaces it with stone and wipes out your archaeology. So though I have plenty of mentions of churches in the Gurb area like Sant Julià de Sassorba and Sant Cristòfol de Vespella, and indeed Sant Andreu de Gurb itself, none of the surviving fabric is what my subjects would have known or worshipped in. The buildings there are still really quite old, eleventh- to twelfth-century in their various cases, and in the case of Sant Julià at least really rather beautiful, in a layered kind of way, especially in glorious morning clear:

Sant Julià de Sassorba in the early morning, being overflown by a hot air-balloon

(N. B. the hot-air balloon is not medieval, but I was rather pleased by it anyway.)

Sant Cristòfol is more sober and functional, and also weirdly foreshortened:

Sant Andreu de Gurb itself is bigger than either, and someone (I think I can guess who) put some extra work into it after 1091, when it was consecrated as is, to make this relatively minor church look a bit more splendid and major:

But even getting that far was something of a battle. Gurb is not hard to find on a map. It’s incredibly hard to find on the ground, because it’s not where the map puts it. The map and also the roadsigns direct you to the new town, which is about four housing estates, a street of warehouses and retail giants and an edge that blends indistinctly into the suburbs of Vic itself. It’s been swallowed by the expanding city. We got very frustrated by this, because I knew there was a church there somewhere and it was apparently invisible. So we made like proper invaders and climbed a hill to get the lie of the land, whereafter it became apparent that Sant Andreu was actually up the road that was not signposted to Gurb, but to Sant Bartomeu del Grau. So we went there, and having found the church, which is now surrounded by about two other houses, under almost any of which there must presumably be archaeology of habitation, we looked at how we might climb up to the castle. Only…

Right, you see how the top of that hill that the camera thought was too close to the sun has a built-up look about it? That’s where the castellans hung out. It’s on a walking route from the church, but it looked from what we could gather as if it would take about an hour and a half. And I might have tried that, had we been able to see where the route went, but the only ways forward seemed to lie through private land. No useful signposting. I had reluctantly to give up on my castle visit, although even knowing that it was so distant from the village helped me to rethink the way people must have related to it. Apart from anything else, if the castellans had decided on a rampage, you’d have had a good half-hour’s warning at ground level…

So what we did instead was to follow the road up to Sant Bartomeu del Grau, which was a brand-new settlement in my period. It perplexed me because, due to this, I was imagining that it was tiny. But, all the same, it must have had some agricultural land so as we drove further and further up the mountain across the Plana de Gurb from the Castell de Gurb, I got more and more confused as all the growing surface passed behind us. Only when we got to the top and I found that there is, on top of that mountain, about 120 acres of good flat growing land, which is now being used for a shiny new town development around the old Romanesque centre (whose church is now being reconstructed from a state so ruinous it wasn’t even worth photographing). That made it a lot clearer to me why someone would have thought it worth climbing up here and building things in the first place.

The other reason though was also evident: firstly, the plateau is slightly higher than the Turó del Castell de Gurb across the way, and secondly, though you can see the castle clearly enough, it’s hours away, on foot or on horseback. Hours away and just over there… You may recognise the rectangular shape on the right-most crest, it’s the same one as in the previous photo, now viewed from the other side:

And somewhere down there on the Plana, a long time ago, the people I write about, and though they’d have been working it harder, that landscape at least hasn’t changed much since they were there. I’ll get the castle next time, somehow, but I understand where it fits far better now.

By the way, isn’t it gorgeous? It was really very hard crossing the Pyrenees back again and seeing all the land become flat again. I may have accidentally become a Catalunyaholic.

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1. There is a lively feeling of community among the housing estates of Gurb, it seems, as it managed to generate Santi Ponce i Vivet (ed.), Gurb: un poble arrelat a la terra (Gurb 2003); for work on the churches, the archaeology and lots of photoes however see the articles in Jordi Vigué (ed.), Catalunya Romànica II: Osona I, ed. Jordi Vigué (Barcelona 1984). The castellans are basically studied by Albert Benet i Clarà, La família Gurb-Queralt (956-1276): senyors de Sallent, Oló, Avinyó, Gurb, Manlleu, Voltregà, Queralt i Santa Coloma de Queralt (Sallent 1993). Of course, there is also Jonathan Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London 2005, pp. 156-209, and before too long I’ll be able to format that like a book. You may, er, you may then recognise some of the illustrations.

In which Keith Thomas says it for me

I quote:

“You often use literary sources as well as archival ones. What can they offer that the ‘documents’ cannot?

“… Well, they cover a wide range of experiences essentially, and clearly they present serious problems of interpretation, but no more serious than the traditional documents did. I mean, a play or a poem is a certain literary genre, is subject to certain conventions, and is influenced by certain models, and therefore you must be careful with what you are quoting. But if that is true, the same points can be made with equal force about anything in the Public Records Office. The documents there also need interpretation and sensitive handling…

“Arguing, in 1988, that the distinction between fact and fiction is a matter of prevailing convention, you’ve urged, against powerful current trends, in favour of the reconciliation of history and literature. Would you say that in the last ten years this has gone too far?

“Yes, I do think it has gone too far. I believe that there is a difference between fact and fiction and that, no doubt, dates me. For me it’s true, and not fiction, that we are sitting here on this Thursday, the 28th of July. So I certainly think that the tendency to blur the genres is unhelpful. As is the new historicism, I welcome it to an extent, but their history, their historical dimension doesn’t strike me as very rigorous.

“I found most of the writings of Hayden White, La Capre and others ultimately a little disappointing because they don’t get to grips with the sort of historians we actually read. I mean, I don’t want to be told what particular tropes Michelet employs, for example, because I don’t use Michelet. But if they really got to work on the latest numbers of Past and Present and said something about the tropes there, then I would find that much more illuminating. The case with these writers reminds me a bit of the analytical philosophers writing on history. What they discussed was always far away from what historians actually did.”¹

I haven’t read half of what Professor Thomas has of course, or even a tiny fraction, but I think that if I had it would not change my tendency to agree with pretty much all that. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that I reject the efforts of someone like Magistra to try and get some information out of literary sources, despite what she seems to think I think; the post of mine that she was protesting about was on a seminar where, it seemed to me at least, the conventions of the genre in hand weren’t being given enough space, because they might have considerably weakened the case being argued. I found the trope there easy enough to guess at…

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1. Keith Thomas, interview with Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Oxford, 27^th July 1998, ed. Pallares-Burke as “Keith Thomas” in eadem, The New History: confessions and conversations (Cambridge 2002), pp. 80-105 at pp. 100-101.