On peer review and an alternative

There is but little time in my world right now: I’m moving cities and decluttering on a manic scale. Let me therefore point you at someone else’s stuff again. Every now and then I have a bit of a rumble about peer review here, because although it is like democracy probably the least worst system it has undeniable weaknesses, as it relies on a professional detachment that we can’t all always manage and on editors knowing who the ideal reviewer for any given work should be, which makes it vulnerable to whom-you-know network constriction. Now, I don’t have an alternative to this, but I did recently read this, linked to in comments to one of Ben Goldacre’s recent posts at Bad Science, which proposes one. Specifically:

When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a “market for scientific work”. He envisages a situation where journal editors and their “scouts” search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. The best papers, he believes, would naturally be picked up by a number of editors leaving it up to authors to choose their journal. “Papers that no-one wants to publish remain on the server and are open to everyone – but without the ‘prestigious’ quality stamp of a journal,” Thurner explains.

Now, OK, he’s talking science, and the actual model-building the article’s mainly about strikes me as being uselessly simplistic and normalising, but this is still interesting. Aside from the presence of money in the system and the lead time to print there still isn’t that much difference at the publishing end between sciences and humanities, I think. I could imagine such a system in operation for history, although I can’t imagine us getting to a single clearing-house server: who would run it? (Don’t say Google! But how much would they love to do it? It might make Google Scholar useful!) We would have competing publishers or national academies for a long time. Who would control access, then? But if, for example, all research funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council were required to be submitted to such a server, then I bet scouting that server would be worth doing. And so on. The other question is that of judging articles etc. on saleability. Exciting and trendy topics would maybe reach a market more readily than grunt-work shifting data or editing. Of course, you could argue that they already do; that’s at least one meaning of trendy, isn’t it? I imagine that there would always be a market for journals that wanted to publish off the mainstream. But even that work would be easier to find this way. So I think the biggest question for me with such a system would be the same one I often ask: who keeps the gates? But if gatekeepers could be agreed upon to everyone’s advantage, do you think this would be better than what we have, or would it completely erode quality? Would we still need peer review behind it? Or could we rely on editor’s discretion? Would it open things up? Or dilute them uselessly? Your thoughts would be welcomed while I try and source more cardboard boxes and wonder if I really need all the books…

Eat like a Carolingian nun (but check with a doctor first)

The ruins of Notre-Dame de Soissons (perhaps betraying calcium deficiency?)

Taking in the last of those Jean Verdon articles I mentioned in my recent and apparently misjudged post about the range of female monasticism, I find a reference to an article by Michel Rouche about famine.¹ In it he apparently refers to a forged charter of Charles the Bald for the nunnery of Notre-Dame de Soissons, which specified the food that the various estates it claimed should render and the size of the community.² That size was 260 nuns and 200 servants and domestics of various kinds, which would have made the place far and away the largest Carolingian-period nunnery known and seems unlikely to be true.³ But, since the claims were presumably intended to be plausible whenever they date from, Rouche thought, and Verdon agreed, that they were reasonable evidence for the dietary allowances of an early medieval nun. So, dividing the daily allowance by the number of nuns, we get per inmate:

• 1,440 g of bread
• 1.38 l of wine
• 70 g of cheese
• 133 g of dry vegetables
• 16 g of salt
• 0.6 g of honey (which I guess was used in accumulated dollops)

Verdon (or perhaps Rouche) calculates that this is 4,727 calories and says that the required daily intake is 2,400. That was France in 1975, and a rapid websearch suggests that UK women are advised by the National Health Service to keep calories down to 2000 a day. Of course, there is a big difference in how many calories the nuns were burning in just not freezing for at least half the year, but Verdon is presumably still right when he observes that this diet was seriously lacking in protein and vitamins. I assume (without evidence) that they would have supplemented this with fruits and vegetables of the season when there were some, but it’s still not a rich diet despite the supposedly rich nunnery. All of this mainly leaves me wondering what the motives of the forgers were and how much information they had about food use from the house’s refectory, but since we like medieval factoids, there’s one for you, with suitable cautions about how the fields of both diplomatic and nutrition have moved on a bit since 1973 and how I haven’t checked in with at least one of them while writing this post.

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1. Jean Verdon, “Notes sur le rôle économique des monastères féminins en France dans la seconde moitié du IX^e et au début du X^e siècle” in Revue Mabillon Vol. 58 (Ligugé 1975), pp. 329-344, at p. 332 where he cites Michel Rouche, “La faim à l’époque carolingienne : essai sur quelques types de rations alimentaires” in Revue Historique no. 508 (Paris 1973), pp. 295-320 (some details supplied by me; non vidi).

2. The charter is †A. Giry, †M. Prou & G. Tessier (edd.), Recueil des Actes de Charles II Le Chauve, Roi de France (Paris 1927-1947), 3 vols, II no. 494, discussed by Rouche at “Faim”, p. 299 (cit. Verdon).

3. Comparators listed by Jean Verdon, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du nord aux IX^e-XI^e siècles” in Revue Mabillon Vol. 59 (Ligugé 1976), pp. 49-96 and idem, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du Sud aux IX^e-XI^e siècles” in Annales du Midi Vol. 88 (Toulouse 1976), pp. 117-138. The largest known to Verdon otherwise (though figures are rare) is Ste-Croix de Poitiers, which boasted a hundred nuns in the time of Louis the Pious (idem, “Monastères féminins dans la France du Sud”, pp. 133-134); congregations of 10 or 12 were much more usual (and in the former case, strictly speaking uncanonical).

Carnivalesque leftovers and other fine webnesses

Sorry, yes, actual content will return shortly, in the meantime may I distract you with some links? There are a few things I wanted to include in Carnivalesque just gone, and didn’t, because I’d already used content from that source or because it just didn’t fit or whatever, and then there are also a few things that have cropped up since. Here goes!

• Patricia Sutherland is an archæologist in Canada, whom we’ve talked about here before, who appears to be determined to demonstrate contact between Norse settlers and the peoples of the Northern Americas who were there inthe Viking era. Some people think she’s too ready to interpret her findings to fit this theory; either way it’s interesting and Heather Pringle reports on her current work at The Last Word on Nothing, here.
• Not unrelatedly, the loquacious Dr Beachcombing reports on what may actually be a find of Viking-era coinage from New England; it sounds obviously likely to be a hoax, but if so it’s taken twenty-plus years to be identified, so a very long-burning hoax. Intriguing!
• Some Viking stuff is more famous for being found in the British Isles, of course, and among these few more famous than the Lewis Chessmen, about which it has lately been proposed that they were made in Iceland, not Norway as usually reckoned; no less a personage than Alex Woolf is quoted taking this idea by the horns on the New York Times chess blog, Gambit, here (hat tip to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria).
• While we’re still in Scotland, meanwhile, a recent dig at the Moothill at Scone, erstwhile royal capital of the kingdom of Alba, has pushed back the date of the Moothill almost to that kingdom’s inception, as reported here at Medievalists.net. The spokesperson, Oliver O’Grady, calls the finding “the birth certificate of Scotland”. Hmm, I thought that was in Paris… But it’s still an exciting find, however tempting it may be to hype.
• Rather more immediately attractive, however, are the Ethiopian Garima Gospels, a beautifully illuminated codex that was thought to date to the eleventh century but now transpires, says newly-tested radiocarbon, to be from 330X650. This makes it certainly the earliest illuminated manuscript from Ethiopia and must push into the earliest from Christendom overall, mustn’t it? It may also push it back to the era of the monastic founder for whom they’re named, which would be an unusual development to say the least. Full report, and a few images, at The Art Newspaper, here, with a hat-tip to Loose Images, here.
• Then, writing from a not completely dissimilar part of the world, Colleen Morgan at Middle Savagery records what may be the best job interview ever, and, oh yeah, also has some things of deep importance to say about literacy, technology and the supposed ‘death of writing’.
• Lastly, it’s always nice to see that some of my friends know about the Carolingians without me having told them, but imagine if Marnanel used his powers for good!

That’s it for now, back shortly I hope…

Domesday TV with Stephen Baxter

One strangeness of the whole Siena trip that I couldn’t really have anticipated was that I met someone who shared acquaintance with Dr Stephen Baxter, of KCL and reported here in the past, and then suddenly Stephen was news. I wouldn’t say I know Stephen well but we have exchanged draft work and argued a great deal about moneyers, and so on, and our interests overlap at the question of how aristocrats get into and maintain a position of control. Nothing too unusual. But when I returned from Siena it was to find that he was all over the Internet and being called “telegenic” by the Guardian, because of a programme he’d done for the BBC that was broadcast shortly after I returned, on Domesday Book.

Stephen Baxter with a replica of the Domesday Book at Kings College London

The programme appears to have gone down well with those who saw it: I have no television and didn’t get around to checking the BBC’s Watch Again service until much too late, but a clip is still there (I can’t embed Flash video on WordPress, and the BBC appear to be wise to VodPod-equipped browsers, so you’ll have to watch it from their page) and they have a fairly extensive web-page up in support of it. The clip is good TV and makes splendid use of Cambridge’s Round Church, so I have to love it, but Stephen’s historical impact is rather greater here than it suggests, because he seems to have weighed in with his own take on a long-running controversy, one of early medieval history’s most guilty secrets: we don’t know what Domesday Book was actually for.

The manuscript of Greater Domesday

It’s not that there are no theories, you understand. I’m not going to go into this in detail here, not least because I’m going to link to others doing so, but it’s been supposed to be a land survey, a tax-list, an inventory of feudal lordship and a few other things besides. All of these explanations, however, are hampered by the fact that the surviving manuscripts are recorded with several different levels of detail that show that each ‘circuit’ of inquisitors were working to different standards, and that substantial pieces of the kingdom, most especially London (which would, of course, have been incredibly difficult to survey and might have had some special tax provision via its Cnihtengild or similar… but, still) are not covered. Also, some precursor texts like the Inquisitio Eliensis include more information than any part of the ‘finished’ Book, so why collect that if it wasn’t going to be used? There’s too many sorts of information included for any one of the purposes that have been suggested and not enough of any one sort of information for it to have actually worked for any of these explanations. I used to think, therefore, that the best answer was probably that the text we have was written up only after William the Conqueror’s death, when the whole purpose was redundant anyway, and so simply doesn’t answer to it because it was never going to be used. And then, of course, it would have been impossible to use it for that anyway so we’d never know.

David Roffe

A little while back, however, an independent scholar by the name of David Roffe started to put about an idea that the reason the texts and the apparent purposes of the inquiry that generated them don’t match up is that the texts we have were not generated by the inquiry. He argues that the inquiry of 1085 was very simply aimed at raising a huger-than-ever-before geld to pay the army that would be required to fend off an imminent Danish invasion. This all unrolled well enough, and the invasion never came—bonus! But Domesday Book is not, argues Roffe, [edit: and helpfully explains in a comment below after which I revised this paragraph] the text of that inquiry but a later piece of editing, probably for more local administrative purposes—he fingers Ranulf Flambard for Great Domesday, at least. Now, obviously this has not met with universal acceptance, and it doesn’t diminish the problem of what the much more detailed Little Domesday was for, but it can’t be denied that it would explain a few things. (His argument is set out in full on his webpage here and in his 2007 book Decoding Domesday.)

A page from the Exon Domesday, a separate survey of Devon and Cornwall that seems to have been part of the same project as the Domesay Book

Now, however, Stephen joins the fray, fresh from having superintended the addition of the huge amount of data on persons alive “tempus regis Gulielmi” to the equally huge Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England database. This gives him perhaps as good a perspective as anyone has on what’s in the text, and his argument is now that the book was a political exercise making it clear to his baronage that, well, he Knew Where They Lived, a process of record that they were prepared to entertain because the record itself gave them security of tenure. He has a lengthy blog post on the BBC’s World History site here where he explains himself. This too is pretty convincing, to me at least. I wonder if in fact one couldn’t go further—indeed, if Stephen didn’t in the programme—and see it as a nationwide propaganda exercise, intended to demonstrate to all to what depth the king ruled his country by inquiring into every last detail of it, ensuring that nothing was hidden, making him akin to the Final Judge, the one in charge of, you know, Doomsday… and of course, creating governmentality. Too glib, perhaps. What is odd about this programme and blog post, though, is that this is a pretty major piece of scholarly development, and like Roffe’s, it is basically being carried out on broadcast media. I assume that print publication is also in the works but by the time it emerges, the debate will probably have moved on. This is, I think, something fairly new for early medieval studies. I have no idea how it and the TV programme will be scored in the Research Excellence Framework! but then, neither does anyone else… I think this is encouraging, anyway, not only that TV (and “telegenic” TV at that) can be made from fairly abstract historical debate, and then that historians of the full calibre are willing to do that kind of work in this kind of forum, where people can actually see what we do and get excited about it.

Part of the manuscript of the Inquisitio Eliensis

The only thing, the only thing that bothers me about this really, is that the BBC and other sources more widely appear to have picked up the idea that the whole of PASE is Stephen’s baby. I believe he is now its coordinator, and I don’t doubt that he did the bulk of the Domesday work, but it’s been going rather longer than he’s been at KCL, I know several of the other contributors and indeed did some of the technical mangling of data that means it contains moneyers’ names myself. I don’t blame this on Stephen at all, I’m sure it’s the Beeb being sloppy, but all the same I feel a little narked on behalf of the people who gave their working lives to this project for years. Databases don’t get you jobs, we have found. Of course, with this kind of coverage, maybe that’s set to change…

Still! Never mind that. While attempting to see if anyone had illegally loaded the Domesday program onto Youtube, I instead found this small extra chunk of Stephen visiting a traditional parchment maker and this may serve many of you and interest still others, although it would be slightly easier to watch had I not seen too much of the revived Dr Who, I’m sure some of you will know what I mean. I commend it to the house, anyway.

Name in Lights III

I am running out of content here: I shall soon have to revert to charter stories, which might be no bad thing as I’ve just promised a seminar paper on them… Anyway, one of the things I have not yet posted is an announcement of various things I have done that are visible on this here world-wide web, so here goes.

• First and foremost, and no small effort by all concerned, The Heroic Age Vol. 13 went online a little while ago, and I have a review in it, of Edgar, King of the English 959-975, edited by Donald Scragg. If, after my last review, you believe that I am incapable of being positive about others’ work, which would be understandable, here is some counter-evidence.



• Secondly, here is something that isn’t medieval at all, but which I put a lot of work into and which I’m really quite proud of. Shortly after I arrived at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2006, we got a big collection of military medals among which was one of the twenty-three New Zealand Crosses ever issued, which had belonged to Antonio Rodriquez of the Taranaki Mounted Volunteers. We put this online and subsequently three separate branches of the recipient’s family got in touch with us about their ancestor’s exploits and history. Incredibly, none of them were aware of the existence of each other, but their various researches meant that we were able to get a very great deal more material on the man and his subsequent life. Using this, I put together a small virtual exhibition which is full of photos, illustrations and detail that really make the story a human-interest one, right down to the current generation.† I would be really pleased if you’d have a look: it’s here.

Then, in less scholarly and more self-publicising manner, it is probably worth mentioning that I have recently been persuaded onto Academia.edu. I’m not really there very much but will try and keep my pages there up to date and answer any messages. This made me wonder if it was really worth maintaining separate web-pages, especially given that I haven’t really touched my static ones since 2009. I decided, however, that it was and is, and that since the institutional page that has had my most up-to-date academic record on for some time is about to leave my control, I really ought to get my own pages in order.

I was going to use this for my new picture till I shaved

So far I’ve only updated the front page and publications list, in the former cases including putting a new photo on to replace the old one that made me look, in the words of a dear dear friend, “like a teenage vampire who needs a shave”. I dunno, I thought that was a good look (and it’s still serving as my Academia.edu profile photo) but it may not have been sending quite the right message, so it’s gone and a light refresh of the text is done too. The thing still looks as if it was written in 1998 (which is roughly when I learnt HTML, coincidence? I think not) but it will serve. I still want to update the “what I’m interested in page” and rebuild the mostly-dead resources page out of the random clutter I’ve amassed in the sidebar here, but it’s a start made. So now it is announced.

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† This involved being incredibly careful not to overstep any boundaries when talking about the Maori Land Wars, which is not easy for an Englishman to do mostly from secondary sources. If it seems to you I failed I would welcome a warning as soon as possible; I won’t have very long to change it now…

Cesari of Montserrat, tenth-century weirdo

Medieval religiosity can often seem very strange to the modern viewer, not least because decrying the Middle Ages as superstitious has been a major trade since the Renaissance, as Eamon Duffy and Kathleen Davis would in their very different ways contend. Monasticism, I think, we usually just about get, although we perhaps see it too much as the retreat from the world that we most of us sometimes want and too little as voluntary self-imprisonment under continual surveillance, which would be just as true. The cult of relics, on the other hand, is often beyond our sympathy. This runs us into another problem with studying other societies, now or then, which is that of normality. What seems odd to us may be or have been normal to them. This makes it difficult to recognise when something genuinely unusual is or was being done. But I think this one is a fair cop.

The hermitage of Santa Cecília de Montserrat

I’ve spoken of Abbot Cesari of Santa Cecília de Montserrat here before, because of his having been one of the four archbishops of Tarragona that tenth-century Catalonia didn’t have. I actually think the case for Cesari’s having been given some kind of uncanonical episcopate is all right, but if so it’s clear that no-one gave it any credit except in the immediate environs of the house he’d founded out on the wild frontier with several other companions from deep-south Hispania in 947. Now, that makes him odd for a start: it isn’t just everyone who wants to be a monk, and still fewer of those wander hundreds of miles north to an occasional warzone and beg land from a potentate with whom they have never before had contact in order to start their monastery. When, having done all that, such a person then starts getting himself called Archbishop, and claiming a synod in León made him so, I think it is fair enough to speculate that his contemporaries did not think this was perfectly regular practice or one of some set of competing norms…

The actual politics behind this episode are extremely tangly and if you want to know what I think in more detail than I’ve given it here before, you can see my upcoming article about the four fake archbishops.¹ But when I first looked at the episode, it wasn’t just circumstantial evidence that made me think Cesari was a nutter. In 970, you see, he seems to have written to Pope John XIII asking for support in claiming his archiepiscopal rights. The document survives in Vic, and it is a star piece of diplomatic oddity both intrinsically and extrinsically.² Quite apart from the actual claims it makes,

The document itself only adds to the impression of strangeness: its orthography is peculiar, phrases that the redactor presumably felt to be important are written in uncials, the florid and almost-incomprehensible arenga appears to be unconnected to the subject matter, and there is a peculiar and repetitive emphasis laid on the personal beauty of the Leonese bishops.

That’s from an earlier version of my article, but the final one says the same thing only shorter.³ But at the time I put this down to Cesari being old, possibly not very well and basically arguably no longer right in the head, or you would think that the various ways in which the content is barking would have been trapped also.⁴ Now, continuing the trawl through Catalunya Carolíngia IV, I find a longer perspective forming. The text in this case is the act of consecration of Santa Cecília, from 947 as I say, and as soon as I saw it I recognised the style: rambling verbose sentences of pious diction that don’t necessarily make sense, and amid all the pious formulae about why monasteries are great and necessary and deserving of princes’ favour, this:⁵

Eo videlicet ut isti neophyti quibus ita res a Domino fuit revelata et neofiter rehedificata, sic incomvulsi et absque terrore et sine infestatione malignorum ibidem maneant et sub regimine monastico Domino deserviant…

Now, stop me if I’m wrong—I know you will, which is part of why I put this stuff up here indeed—but I think that can be Englished as:

In such a way, namely, so that those neophytes to whom the property was revealed thus by God and rebuilt in neophytes’ manner, may thus stay there undisturbed and without terror or the infestation of evil men and serve the Lord under a monastic régime…

So, stop me, but is he not claiming that he’s establishing a college of visionaries? I realise that he could just be being metaphorical about the revelation but it sounds a lot more structured than that to me, what with the emphasis on their uneducated status (especially since two of them are actually priests); I think he’s stressing their holy innocence and purity as vessels for the Lord’s will. So, I had the natural thought of a medievalist in these circumstances, to wit: “that’s weird. I wonder if it’s Augustine?” But I hit up the Patrologia Latina database and it seems to be original, at least I can’t get ‘neophyti’ and ‘revelata’ out of it in the same sentence. So, I don’t really know whether this gives us valuable insight into the mind of a monastic founder, or if it just confirms my general feeling that the man was a fringe mystic who doesn’t really represent anything. I suppose it does help explain, in conjunction with work like Peter Brown’s on the charisma of holy men, how he managed to get his locality calling him archbishop and indeed how he persuaded Countess Riquilda to persuade her husband to give him so much of the locality in the first place.⁶ I mean, I imagine his preaching was pretty powerful, if a bit disorganised and frothing. Even that just goes to show how much of a journey it is for me to try and get anywhere near this man’s mind when I’m sat so firmly in a secular early twenty-first century, though. Maybe if I can get to Santa Cecília I’ll have a better grip on him and his like, if there were in fact any others like him…

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona. False metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München forthcoming), pp. 1-42.

2. Edition of resort Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX i X), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), doc. no. 404, with partial facsimile ed. Miquel dels Sants Gros i Pujol, “Lámines”, ibid. pp. 681-890, lám 90; more convenient, however, is perhaps Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arquelògica LIII (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1080, which reprints that text.

3. Jarrett, “Ató”, pp. 13-14.

4. They are listed in vituperative style by José María Martí Bonet, “Las pretensiones metropolitanas de Cesáreo, abad de Santa Cecilia de Montserrat” in Anthologica Annua Vol. 21 (Roma 1974) pp. 157–182, where he decried the letter as a forgery, although in “Entre dues obediènces. Roma i Compostela” in Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia Vol. 67 (1994) pp. 387–397, he seems to have changed his mind.

5. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 543.

6. I suppose I think here mainly of Peter R. L. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity, Haskell Lectures on the History of Religion (Chicago 1981), which is the one that bit me particularly, though idem, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” in The Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 61 (London 1971), pp. 80-101, repr. in idem, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley 1982, repr. 1989), pp. 103-152, is more usually referred to.

Things that are (relatively) newly online

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

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

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

Leslie Webster, Guy Halsall

Staffordshire hoard round table

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

Bunch of cross-dressing skinheads the lot of them

Between 1975 and 1978 a chap by the name of Jean Verdon who has subsequently become quite important in the field—Regesta Imperii counts 23 books, produced at a fairly Pratchett-like rate—and who had at that stage only a couple of articles out suddenly came out with about ten more, of which a fair bunch were on nuns, one or two more on monasticism and the remainder either on women or the Chronicon Sancti Maxentii, of which he was then finishing an edition.¹ I presume that this must have been his thèse d’état, broken up into papers, but in those I’ve so far tracked down, the nuns ones mainly because of finishing a paper, this is certainly never said. Tracking them down is quite an effort though. I’m lucky, in as much as just down the road from my current location is a library which has all of Revue Mabillon, Annales du Midi and Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale and probably some of the others too on open shelves, but that can’t be true of many places. Some of the articles are really close analysis of social contexts, and some are little more than lists of recorded houses of female monastics with some generalised (and now badly dated) history attached.² But tucked into one of the latter I find this piece of Carolingian conciliar legislation which made my eyes widen rather:³

Si quae sanctemoniales causa religionis, ut eis falso videtur, vel virilem habitum sumunt vel crines adtondent, quia ignorantia magis, quam studio eas errare putamus, admonendas castigandasque decernimus…

Which, if I’m getting it correctly, Englishes roughly as:

If nuns for the cause of religion, as it falsely seems to them, either put on a male habit or shave their hair, since we suppose them to err more from ignorance than from zeal, we decree that they are to be admonished and castigated…

I’m afraid this made me think, irreverently I suppose but not uselessly, of the women’s colleges here in Cambridge when I was an undergraduate. Most people in these institutions were completely usual, and I don’t mean to suggest that the other colleges were any less weird in their various ways—some more—but the parallel of all-female institutions invites comparison. Because of their segregated environment, it was my sense then that the women’s colleges tended to pick up more than their share of two extremes, new undergraduates who didn’t feel ready or whose parents didn’t think them ready for the world outside their all-girls school, and radical ‘nu-feminists’ who wanted an environment from which men were mostly excluded. Some of the latter, indeed, wore male or ungendered clothing by policy and some shaved their heads; I fell half in love with one of the latter who later got back in touch with me only to invite me to her wedding, but that’s another story. The point I’m going to make with this, badly perhaps but stay with me, is that the sheer range of experience early medieval women’s monasticism is made to contain, from the teacher Abbess Hild of Whitby through Hrotsvita of Gandersheim and her poetry to the Merovingian rebel princesses of Poitiers and the many many denunciations for lust, laziness, disorder or plain old ignorance (on which Verdon mainly concentrates on in at least one article, sad to say), was kind of all there; earnest religious afraid of the dangers of the world, angry women keen to have power in an all-female space, dedicated teachers (of both girls and boys, I was supervised in Newnham College for a couple of years), and those who were fonder of close company than their agreed code of conduct might have permitted.

Eleventh-century capital from Poitiers showing two men squaring up to fight, with a (veiled?) woman behind each trying to pull them apart, from the Musée de Saint-Croix, Poitiers; somehow appropriate...

Of course these colleges are bigger than most nunneries would have been; for the simile to work one really needs the colleges to contain several variant congregations, which as I say, it seemed to me that they did. In the medieval case, an awful lot presumably depended on the abbess and other sources of prescription and enforcement. An effective abbess maybe wouldn’t have let this sort of thing happen, but on the other hand one also has to consider the nuns themselves and their station before one decides what ought to have been possible for an abbess: Gregory of Tours tells us that despite a future saint as abbess and a Mother Superior whom she had appointed, despite the entreaties of him as bishop and of other senior churchmen and orders from the king, yet, already, it still took actual military force to make the princesses at Ste-Croix de Poitiers, and the scratch group of bandits and soldiers they’d gathered, stand down from their revolt: “We are of royal blood,” he has them say, “and we will not set foot inside our nunnery until the Mother Superior has been dismissed.”⁴ Enforce an observance on that! An early medieval nunnery might have been any of these places, depending on who had founded it, who was recruited and who was in charge and how those factors interacted: a retreat for the pious, a family estate with liturgical cladding, a school for the local nobility, a hospital for travellers… it’s not surprising that despite the Carolingians’ best efforts, one Rule never really fitted all.

So there must necessarily have been a range of responses to standards of female monasticism, depending on who was involved. The article of Verdon’s that set this post off stresses, in its very closing pages, that there were many ‘good’ houses among the ‘bad’, accepting the contemporary moral binary of his sources, but this council extract seems to show a more nuanced treatment; acting weird out of zeal might have been different (OK? or more punishable? I don’t know) but plain ignorance was to be corrected, the girls to be set back on track and allowed to continue more properly. To me, you see, that seems more like the academic college than a carefully-sealed-off zone of exclusion designed to protect purity at all costs. So let’s be prepared for flexibility of standards, I suppose. This may not be a very good analogy, but I hope there’s a point in there somewhere that doesn’t completely succumb to wilful anachronism…

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1. The ones I’ve caught so far are J. Verdon, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du nord aux IX^e-XI^e siècles” in Revue Mabillon Vol. 59 (Ligugé 1976), pp. 49-96, “Les moniales dans la France de l’Ouest aux XI^e et XII^e siècles. Étude d’histoire sociale” in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Vol. 19 (Poitiers 1976), pp. 247-264 and idem, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du Sud aux IX^e-XI^e siècles” in Annales du Midi Vol. 88 (Toulouse 1976), pp. 117-138, and I guess I also need to get through idem, “Notes sur le rôle économique des monastères féminins en France dans la seconde moitié du IX^e et au début du X^e siècle” in Revue Mabillon 58 (1975), pp. 329-343. The edition I mention is idem (ed.), Chronique de Saint-Maixent, 751-1140 (Paris 1979). For the rest, you can hit up Regesta Imperii as easily as I could…

2. Verdon, “Notes sur la rôle économique”, is definitely the former, and idem, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins de la France du nord” and “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du Sud” are definitely the latter. That said, though in any individual case you would have to do further research since the sources tend to be hagiography or the Gallia Christiana which is not really that much better for accuracy and critique, just having a reasonably-full list of all recorded houses is quite useful, whether they’re dodgy or not.

3. Concilium Vernense (December 844), ed. Alfred Boretius & Victor Krause in eidem (ed.), Capitularia regum francorum Vol. II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges sectio II: Capitularia Regum Francorum) II (Hannover 1897), online here, no. 291, cap. 7, quoted from Verdon, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du nord”, pp. 64-65 & n. 305.

4. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum francorum decem, transl. Lewis Thorpe as History of the Franks, capp. IX.39-43, quote at IX.40.

Talking about bishops in Oxford

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

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

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

Session 1

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

Session 2

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

Session 3

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

General Response

Given by Henry Mayr-Harting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost in citation II: slaughtering sacred cows

For a variety of reasons, only one of which is my imminent departure, my department is currently in full-on publication frenzy. The boss has calculated that, if we include our personal work, the department is trying to send nine books to various presses by the end of the calendar year. One of these, Derek Chick’s corpus of the coins of King Offa, is already with the press; my magnum opus will be finally with the printers soon after mid-October, hopefully still available for Christmas :-) and that leaves me only three which remain my job for a short while longer. Of one of these will I speak. I shan’t say which one, though it will I guess be kind of obvious; that’s not the same, however, as making it web-searchable… It involves, once again, the ghost of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, so you may want to tune out now…

Gold solidus of Emperor Louis the Pious (814-40), Fitzwilliam Museum, PG.8162 (Grierson Collection)

In this text, the question is covered of what was used as a medium of exchange in Asturias and León before there was coin being struck there. There have been a range of theories about this, and a fairly recent article by Wendy Davies that is characteristically thorough covers most of the options.¹ She detects several regions of practice, some using metal-based standards and possibly, in León, actual metal proto-currency, but others using several value referents, including livestock:²

… there are some very clear regional differences: before 930, price in Sahagún texts was usually expressed in terms of clothing or farm produce, especially animals, which were sometimes given a valuation in silver solidi but more often not; and it was once expressed as a silver vessel.²⁰ Thereafter, price was often expressed in terms of solidi until the 970s, when this mode of expression came to predominate. Although the number of cases is smaller, Cardeña transactions more often used solidi to express price before 930, as they did from the 960s, but frequently used produce and objects in the 930s and 940s. Half of all tenth-century cases also had a valuation in solidi attached; records of Cardeña sales were more likely to use the concept of the solidus than records from the other collections, at any point in the tenth century.²¹ Celanova transactions, on the other hand, used metal concepts only rarely and they never predominated in this period. The contrasts between the three are therefore stark: western Celanova essentially non-metal-based; eastern Cardeña more metal-based than not; and central Sahagún changing its practice across the century….

So, OK, the question that arises is what these various populations thought a solidus was and what it was worth, and that’s where we come in. This certain work I’m copy-editing said, until quite recently, as follows:³

It has to be remembered that when there are no coins in circulation, the use of units of account is possible only on condition that a verifiable value referent exists. In the case of Galicia this referent was the ox, and logically that has to be taken to mean an ox of average stature, neither extraordinarily strong nor particularly thin. This could be modulated by a practice whereby more or less than the stated value changed hands if the ox that was actually given in payment was especially excellent or manifestly deficient. Some authors (Gautier Dalché, 1969a, pp. 49-50; Sáez, 1946, pp. 5-6) have failed to grasp this mechanism of fixing prices by equating a value of account with physical goods (an ox, a modio (measure) of grain, a sheep, etc.). On the other hand, Mínguez, 1979, p. 43, n. 5, accepts that an average value served as a reference. He admits that there could occasionally be some upwards or downwards variation in prices, but from a fixed referent.

You see here that we are in good old regula magistri territory here, and so I thought it would be best to cite some actual evidence for the practices we’re talking about here, not least because I’m not sure I believe in any value standard where an ox could be worth the same as a sheep. Would you believe, the evidence turns out to be harder to find than you might expect? I mean, there are some fabulous prices: “a chestnut-coloured cow, a quilted and lined linen cloak, 12 cheeses, and this price in the place of 4 gold solidi and 1 tremiss”, but this just doesn’t help at all because (a) the authors quote it wrong, reading ‘IIIIor’ as ‘4 or’ not as a short-form of ‘quattuor’, whereas there is really no gold referred to, (b) in the manuscript there are seventeen spaces after the word for ‘cheeses’ so the price is probably incomplete (and was perhaps never actually fulfilled) and (c) there are of course no gold solidi for them to be talking about, Louis the Pious’s above being unknown in this area and the only coin of that denomination that has been minted in the West for more than a century.⁴ Of course, arguing from silence with Spanish coin finds is a dangerous game but it’s a problem.⁵ So what about them there magistri? The authors cite three works that tried to address this very problem by collecting references to prices in León, Galicia and Portugal in this period. Surely exactly what’s needed! Well—you know what’s coming—no.

The most up-to-date of these references was the first blow from Don Claudio, a paper from the Spoleto conference of 1960. However, that only actually refers back to an earlier article of his for the data—yup, we’ve played this game before—and it also makes it clear that the equivalence of a sheep to a solidus is being made via the grain measure known as a modius; that is, we see that a modius can be worth a solidus and that a sheep can be worth a modius, and therefore…⁶ And OK, that is logical, but it still gives us a chain at whose ends we can have supposedly equivalent sheep and cows and I don’t reckon this much. Also, Sánchez-Albornoz thought these were probably sometimes being paid in leftover Roman silver coin, which numismatists and historians since him have found frankly implausible.⁷ Next up would be the Portuguese contribution, which was published in Don Claudio’s own journal, and that has a long list of equivalencies, but only one mentions a sheep with an equivalence to something else, and that’s a modius. Only halfway there I’m afraid. It’s slightly better for cows, but their value (where it can be clearly averaged to a single cow, which is very rarely) is usually around the two-solidus mark and sometimes rather higher. The lowest it gets is one-and-a-half.⁸ And then there’s a study on Galician Celanova, and that messes things up further by having two sheep that were worth four modios (which the author suggests may be because the modios were of barley not wheat, thus unhinging any hope of using his own evidence that way because of course this is never specified) and eight sheep elsewhere that were worth twelve solidi.⁹ And these two and Sánchez-Albornoz’s paper all refer to an earlier paper of his, and that refers you back to almost his first paper of all from 1928.¹⁰ How anyone who doesn’t have access to an incredible research library is supposed to follow this up is beyond me.

Some cows will sell for more than other cows at market

So with the 1928 paper, at last, we reach port. Here are 266 price equivalencies from the early eighth century to well after 1000, meaning that another factor that we simply can’t calculate for is inflation. We can tell it’s a factor because he cites a Celanova reference in which four cows are worth forty solidi from 1001. In 796, however, the other articles all said, there was a cow worth one solidus; but it turns out that when you actually check the real document’s text it’s actually two separate prices, a cow and a solidus.¹¹ What there is quite a lot of is boves soldades, which it is assumed are cows worth a solidus. It’s not clear to me that that’s what it means at all, however, I could equally argue that soldadis is derived from solidus the adjective, solid, worthy, especially as this is also the period in which people start referring to their liege followers as homines solidi, which I don’t think means they are people worth a solidus. (Slaves usually go for much more than that.) And, furthermore, the prices are off still: Castile shows us a bovis soldadis worth two modios and a goat worth one, and Celanova often talks about ovelias modalias, which by analogy ought to be sheep worth a modius.¹² The prices, if they suggest anything at all overall, may suggest that an average cow was worth roughly twice what an average sheep was, but we’re still talking median not mean and it’s still not matching neatly to any currency equivalent. These animals vary in worth and that’s all there is to it.

The Catedral de León, still home of the eponymous Archivo

So, even if I could find the two documents that Sánchez-Albornoz cited as proof that a sheep could be worth a solidus too, documents from 1001 and 1008 that pay 100 sheep or 100 modii, or 100 modii or 100 solidi, I might still be inclined to dismiss them as singletons. But since a hundred of anything ought to average out quality variations a bit, it’s still worth investigating, of course. Sadly, however, these are the only documents Sánchez-Albornoz cited from the Archivo del Obispo de León, as opposed to the Archivo de la Catedral. You might think these two would be the same things, but apparently not. The latter has been edited, for a start, and these documents aren’t there.¹³ So, where are they? You’ll notice that if you search on Google for ‘”Archivo del Obispo de León”‘ the only hits are from Don Claudio’s work. I can’t find any other reference to this archive. Complete-looking lists like this one don’t mention it. I realise not everything is on the web, but it’s also not mentioned in the edition of the cathedral’s documents. I do not know if it was a separate thing (which happened at Barcelona, so quite plausible¹⁴) or what. Maybe it got destroyed or dispersed during the Civil War. I presume Don Claudio didn’t actually make it up! But it’s not apparently there now and its documents’ shelf-marks can’t be traced. So there’s basically no proof of this solidus sheep at all, and the cow looks pretty weak also (otherwise it’d be worth more, oh ho ho). This, by itself, cannot constitute evidence of social practice over three very different economic zones over a century and a half of considerable economic change. This bit has therefore been removed from the text and I hope that in the long run our authors will agree that was for the best. As to the actual situation, perhaps it’s best to leave Wendy the last word there:¹⁵

Different valuation systems clearly meant different things to different people in northern Spain in the tenth century. All those considered here were notional units of account – mental constructs…. In some parts – near Celanova and Sahagún especially – they related to active systems of commercial exchange; in others – near Cardeña – the systems belonged to the world of writing and had less to do with buying and selling. The Atlantic systems were distinctive, but not wholly cut off: they certainly indicate thriving exchange economies, with some commercial aspects – the very existence of valuations makes this a sale culture. The systems of the meseta were even more obviously thriving, more commercial, as also more urban and less characteristically rural, and already by the late tenth century were beginning to be related to the wider economic networks of Spain and of the world beyond. Their relationship to the economic mainstream of western Europe obviously cannot be assessed in respect of the tenth century alone and needs a forward look into the eleventh, but the fact that transaction practice was already changing in mid-tenth century is an important signal of wider
and deeper change.

Slaughtering the sacred cows of Iberian numismatics one at a time, Jarrett, out.

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1. W. Davies, “Sale, price and valuation in Galicia and Castile-Leon in the tenth century” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 (Oxford 2002), pp. 149-174. Not only is this thorough about saying what the evidence says, it also sets out how much evidence there is and how it’s distributed over time. There are graphs of charter survival. That’s what I call thorough.

2. Ibid., pp. 157-158.

3. I shan’t give a citation for this, partly because of the nod towards discretion already mentioned, partly because I gather that the one of the authors who had their name on it may actually have let the other write it, and largely because this text is not going to survive so even if you knew what the finished book was you still wouldn’t find this there.
4. Actual text P. Loscertales & G. de Valdeavellano (edd.), Tumbos del Monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes (Madrid 1976), doc. no. 18: “Precio, id est bove colore marceno, manto laneo vilado et chomacio, kaseos XII [                 ], et est ipso precio in aderato solidos IIII^or et I tremese”. On the absence of gold solidi in the West, which went back to the Visigothic kingdom at least, see Mark Blackburn, “Gold in England during the ‘Age of Silver’ (eighth-eleventh centuries)” in James Graham-Campbell & Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economy in the Viking Age (Walnut Creek 2007), pp. 55-98. On the Visigothic coinage the new work of resort is Ruth Pliego Vázquez, La Moneda Visigótica (Sevilla 2009).

5. Jonathan Jarrett, “Digitizing Numismatics: Getting the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Coins to the World-Wide Web” in The Heroic Age Vol. 12, online at http://www.heroicage.org/issues/12/foruma.php, last modified 12th June 2009, §5.

6. C. Sánchez-Albornoz, “Moneda de cambio y moneda de cuenta en el reino asturleonés” in Moneta e scambio nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 8 (Spoleto 1960), pp. 171-202 at p. 183.

7. References to the debate in Davies, “Sale and valuation”, pp. 161-164.

8. P. Laguzzi, “El precio de la vida en Portugal durante los siglos X-XI” in Cuadernos de Historia de España Vol. 5 (Buenos Aires 1946), pp. 143-147.

9. Ernesto Sáez, “Nuevos datos sobre la costa de la vida en Galicia durante la Alta Edad Media” in Anuario de Historia del Derecho España Vol. 17 (Madrid 1946), pp. 870-885.

10. Sánchez-Albornoz, “El precio de la vida en el reino astur-leonés hace mil años” in Logos: Revista de la Faculted de Filosofia y Letras, Buenos Aires Vol. 3 (Buenos Aires 1945), pp. 245-264, repr. in idem, Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas (Mexico City 1965), pp. 369-410, citing idem, “La primitiva organización monetaria de León y Castilla” in Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 5 (1928), pp. 301-345, repr. in idem, Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales, pp. 441-482.

11. L. Sánchez Belda (ed.), Cartulario de Santo Toribio de Liébana (Madrid 1948), doc. no. 67.

12. Homines solidi: Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutation d’une société (Toulouse, 1975-1976), II pp. 743-746. Bove soldado worth two modii: Loscertales & Valdeavellano, Tumbo de Sobrado, no. 29. Goat worth one modius: J. A. Fernández Flórez (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (857-1300) (León 1987-1993), doc. no. 357. Oveliae modaliae: J. M. Andrade Cernadas (ed.), O Tombo de Celanova: estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. IX-XII), Fontes Documentais para a Historia de Galicia (Santiago de Compostela 1995), doc. nos 340 & 403.

13. They ought, if they were going to be there at all, to be in José María Fernández Caton (ed.), Colección Documental del Archivo de la Catedral de León, III: 986-1031, Fuentes de le Historia Leonesa 55 (Leó 1995), but they ain’t.

14. As with many cathedral and monasteries, in the high Middle Ages the bishop’s property at Barcelona was administered separately from the cathedral’s proper, which was held by the chapter: unlike most of them, this separation still persists today meaning that there are two parallel editions of the early cathedral’s documents divided according to which half of the operation wound with the lands concerned!

15. Davies, “Sales, prices and valuation”, pp. 173-174.