Seminar LXX: why you have to stay married, according to Hincmar of Rheims

From the web’s reaction to the last post I learn that ‘lottery’ is a bad keyword to give the spammer’s robots. Nonetheless, I struggle on with the backlog. You may be aware of a ninth-century churchman called Hincmar, who rose to be archbishop of Rheims and wrote a huge amount of stuff that survives, including perhaps most famously a Carolingian government manual called the De Ordine palatii, ‘On the Arrangement of the Palace’. You may also be aware, not least because this material is slowly being translated online in the Collaborative Hincmar Project Blog, that he got very deeply involved in the attempt of King Lothar II, one of Charlemagne’s great-grandsons, to divorce his wife and marry a concubine of his, something that his Carolingian uncles were keen to prevent as the wife was not making heirs and thus the uncles stood to inherit.¹ Hincmar’s involvement in this case was largely on behalf of King Charles the Bald, westerner of those two uncles, and it caused a lot of writing. If you know this much, you would probably have been interested in Rachel Stone‘s paper at the Institute of Historical Research’s Earlier Middle Ages Seminar on 27th October (for yes, I am that far behind) to the title, “Hincmar’s Use and Abuse of the Canon Law of Marriage”.

Images are hard to find for Hincmar. This is the Grand sceptre of Cathedral of Rheims, a fourteenth-century depiction of Charlemagne, which is maybe a bit relevant at least

Rachel, who cheerfully described Hincmar as “advisor to kings and pain in the neck”, had got into the canon law material used by Hincmar in this very same case, where he was drawing on whatever sources he could find to work out, or allow others to work out, what exactly the Church’s rôle in such cases could and should be, something which this case tested the boundaries of fairly thoroughly due to the involvement of kings, the bending of principles and the absence of decent evidence of quite a lot of what was being thrown around. Hincmar, like many of his contemporaries, was nothing if not an avid collector of authority, from the Church Fathers, from canon law, from secular law where it was available, anything that was endowed with reputation and, well, authority, to justify his positions. As Rachel made clear, he was less concerned with being fair to those sources or reconciling the inconsistencies of what he cited. Indeed, he was fairly unconcerned with rendering them accurately or completely either.

The material was also not used under any kind of detectable overall judicial system. There wasn’t a clear space allocated to courts of the king and another allocated to episcopal courts, if those even existed this early which Rachel questioned. The divorce was shunted from one to the other with each side insisting its incapability to deal with such questions; a hot potato no-one wanted to pick up, and presumably one that would, as famously they don’t, get hotter and hotter if it were left alone. The bishops were willing to act in cases that were pastoral concerns, but we see no sign of them setting secular penalties or taking fines so early on. (They did of course set penances in more regular cases, but that was pastoral really, it benefited them not at all.) Likewise, it is never reasoned out here whether secular law could bind the Church or Church law outrank secular law. Another thing that came out of this that I should own up to myself is that I have often cited, including here, the Council of Laodicæa, 298, as being one of the more crazy texts left over from the early Church and mentioned that as well as outlawing women priests and mathematicians it also says you can only name three angels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, because others lack the authority of Scripture and may therefore instead be demons. It turns out the names are a Carolingian addition; the original just has a blanket ban on invoking angels and I only knew the Carolingian version, repeated in Charlemagne’s ‘General Admonition’ of 789, and had assumed they’d used the text accurately.² This is exactly the sort of free improvement and adaptation Rachel was seeing in the canon law material and it caught me pretty thoroughly out. In questions Rachel described Hincmar’s technique as less argument and more exegesis, teasing out a helpful meaning of a text rather than constructing an evidenced set of points with it.

Contemporary manuscript of the Admonitio Generalis of 789, from Wikimedia Commons

Through all of the paper, anyway, Rachel showed us a highly learned and extremely resourceful churchman arguing what was largely a line of political convenience, but one designed more to suspend and prevent judgement than to sort out what it should be and how it should be given. Politically, after all, it was only necessary that the divorce never be granted, not that it be refused (although at points it was). Though there were in all this certain things that Hincmar would never concede, his tergiversation here made him a source for many subsequent malpractitioners (though I can’t help feeling that the excellent survival of his material may be more of a factor—but you could argue that it survives exactly because people liked it and found it useful, and Rachel did so argue). Susan Reynolds argued strongly in questions that one of the reasons Hincmar was so free to produce wildly inconsistent answers in the case was that in reality there really wasn’t an answer yet that he had to show or hide; the synods and councils were genuinely trying to work out what should happen, whatever political pressure they might be under, because it hadn’t yet been settled. John Gillingham added that in such a situation Hincmar was indeed exactly the man with exactly the tools they needed, and that concluding something may not have been what was wanted of him. This may be the first time I’ve ever seen these two agree, and it was worth going for that alone, but in general it was a good discussion about exactly where authority lay in this period and how far it was constructed the way we would normally now understand it in the twenty-first century. There may also be coverage of this at Magistra et Mater, for reasons that are probably obvious, and that will be better as Magistra knows this stuff much better than I do, but for now, there’s a report.

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1. There is now a book on this in English, a Dutch one by Karl Heidecker translated as The Divorce of Lothar II: Christian Marriage and Political Power in the Carolingian World, transl. M. Tanis (Ithaca 2010), but there must also be coverage in Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), and Rachel has started taking apart the bits of the theology in her “The invention of a theology of abduction: Hincmar of Rheims on raptus” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History Vol. 60 (Cambridge 2009), pp. 433-448.

2. A. Boretius (ed.), Capitularia Regum Francorum Vol. I, Monumenta Germaniae Historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum. Legum Sectio II: Capitularia Regum Francorum I (Hannover 1883), online here, no. 22, pp. 52-62, angels canon being cap. 16.

Conversion can be a bit of a lottery

An unsuccessful Baltic conversion attempt: the Prussians martyr St Adalbert, as depicted on the doors of Gniezno Cathedral, from Wikimedia Commons

Though no Christian I, I was still firmly schooled in a Christian tradition and every now and then I realise that my preconceptions of religion are kind of Christian unless shaken otherwise. For the early medievalist this can sometimes be an obstacle to understanding: the lord God I heard about most when I was a schoolboy was a jealous god, but many of his rivals maybe not so much, and when we deal with conversion from paganism this becomes relevant. The classic story for most of us is probably Bede’s report of King Rædwald of East Anglia, one of those in the Ecclesiastical History who got it wrong, in his case by being converted only so far as to install an altar to Christ in his multi-denominational pagan temple,¹ but there are others, and even where the cults are probably not similar at all the ready acceptance that Christ might certainly be a valid and powerful god, but not the only one, shows up quite a lot.

Map of the Baltic tribal zones, c. 1200, from Wikimedia Commons

I am currently reading something about Eastern Europe for review (no, I agree, I don’t know why either) and this came up again in a particularly charming case.² In the context of the Baltic Crusades, circa 1208, one particular group, the Latgalians, apparently found themselves caught between two sets of missionaries, one from the Germans and one from the Orthodox Rus’. Rather than decide their brand of Christianity, as the Rus’ themselves are alleged to have done, on the basis of which looked like more fun,³ they decided that only one source of guidance was appropriate for such a decision and cast lots before their own gods to decide which of these versions of Christ they should adopt. That’s not the best bit: they got an answer, and it was pro-German (or I doubt we’d hear of it). Given the immediate military circumstances that seems to be a politically switched-on god that answered, and he, she or it presumably continued to be on call in the future, though our source, Henry of Livonia, preferred to omit this implication.⁴ I need to remember about other world-views like this.

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1. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, transl. Roger Collins & Judith McClure as “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People” in eidem (edd.), Bede: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People – the Greater Chronicle – Bede’s Letter to Egbert, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford nd), II.15. I’m beginning to think there is more to be said about teleology in the HEGA, you know; does anyone know if there’s work on this out there somewhere?

2. Alvydas Nikžentaitas, A., “Die Möglichkeiten der alternativen Geschichte. Das Alltagsleben im Baltikum des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts” in Jörn Staecker (ed.), The Reception of Medieval Europe in the Baltic Sea Region. Papers of the XIIth Visby Symposium held at Gotland University, Visby, Acta Visbyensia XII (Visby 2009), pp. 397-419 at p. 399.

3. Samuel Hazzard Cross & Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (edd./transl.), The Russian Primary Chronicle, Medieval Academy of America Publication 60 (Cambridge MA 1953), s. a. 988.

4. Heinrici Chronicon Livoniae, ed. †Leonid Arbusow & Albert Bauer as Heinrichs Livländische Chronik: zweite auflage, Monumenta Germanae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi) XXXI (Hannover 1955), online here, XI.7, at p. 55 rather than the p. 59 cit. Nikžentaitis. Hmph. There is an English translation by James Brundage as Henricus Lettus, The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, Records of Civilisation (New York 1961, repr. 2004).

That Bonnassie story in full, or, psst! wanna buy a tower?

The monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès

I said I would tell you Pierre Bonnassie’s story that I used, with caution, in the Oxford seminar paper just gone, and so I will. It’s about a man called Hisnabert and a tower scam. No, not a pyramid scam: read on. Here’s how Bonnassie put it, in my own rough translation.¹ He was writing of the wild lands beyond the organised frontier, and said:

This extreme march was really a terra incognita, except to a few specialists. How can one not, in dealing with this, cite the enormous mistake committed in 1012 by the monks of Sant Cugat concerning their territory of Calders? At that date, a certain Hisnabert, pretending to be descended from a very noble line, presented himself to them and claimed that he had, with great effort and at great expense, installed his household, his peasants and livestock there, cleared the territory there and built a tower fifteen cubits in height. The monks, taking him at his word, saw in him ‘an envoy of God and of Saint Cucuphat’ and conceded the domain to him under very advantageous conditions. It would only be five years later, in 1017, that they discovered the imposture (nothing had been done and Calders was in the same state ‘of desert and of solitude’ as in the past!) and they delayed no longer in getting the donation anulled by the judges of the count, Ramon Borrell.

Zing! How could this come about, you may ask, and there the answer is a bit more complex. Sant Cugat is one of the older monasteries in Catalonia: it later claimed to have been founded by Charlemagne (of course) but at the very least it was operational by the 850s, and in 878 it obtained a precept from King Louis II, the Stammerer as he is known to us, confirming all its properties.² This was, shall we say, aimed at the future, in as much as it included a huge swathe of frontier land at that point well beyond any organised control.³ But, by the approach of the year 1000 that had changed; continuous creeping frontier clearance had advanced the line of organised settlement well into these “extreme furthest ultimate marches” and Sant Cugat was now facing the possibility of being able to claim its rights in these lands, for which reason in 982 it had had them freshly royally confirmed so as to deal with any possibility of people claiming reversion under the Visigothic thirty-year rule and so on.⁴ The territory was still far from them and difficult to control, of course, so this was why someone like Hisnabert would have seemed so heaven-sent to them; a powerful man who could perhaps reduce some of it to order and get them something out of it. (And if he couldn’t, of course, well, nothing much lost, something that Bonnassie’s version chooses not to consider.)

A tower in Calders (probably not the right one but not far off the right height)

But is this really what was happening? If so, it seems very odd that we get to hear about it. That the story was written down once in the grant to Hisnabert is probably explicable: this was an unusual situation and probably demurring voices were raised at the monastery, so the story functions here as a kind of insurance, saying why this odd thing made sense to do. But why do we have it? Once the old grant had been proved worthless, would you keep the original? and would you then, as Sant Cugat did, copy it up later into your cartulary? Okay, maybe their copying endeavour was that attention-less and their archiving that shoddy, but it’s a problem, enough of one to make the original text worth hunting down, and happily for us all, Josep Rius Serra’s edition of Sant Cugat’s cartulary is online. So, what does that say? Well, this is a long document, by the should-be-legendary super-scribe, Bonhom.⁵ It begins with an account of the capture of Barcelona by Louis the Pious that brought these lands into royal control, the fact that they then remained unused,

because of the incursion and persistent siege by a multitude of the depraved and most savage Ishmaelite race with their troops which raised battles and raids without intermission against the fortifications and castles of the Christians which were founded in the marches of the aforesaid Barcelona

all of which made it a bit unsafe, if you see what he means, and so for more than thirty years, do you see what he did there (and Bonhom is a judge, his own copy of the Visigothic law survives, we know he knew what that implied) it was left for pasturing beasts and nothing more.⁶ He then sets out the bounds of the property, and there’s quite a lot. But, he adds, after many years of this ceaseless plunder and demolition by the Muslims, Ramon Borrell and his brother Count Ermengol (the First of Urgell) raided through to Córdoba itself, guided by the Hand of God, and:

they put all the Saracens and Berbers to flight, with the help of God, and the king of the Muslims [Mucelemiticum], who had fled to them, they placed in the royal seat at Córdoba. Then God gave tranquillity unto the Christians, and they went out and walked everywhere around the aforesaid Marches [presumably thereby setting boundaries…] and they built many fortifications and castles which had once been destroyed by the aforesaid power of the pagans.

And, you see, this is why I don’t mind so much that there are no chronicles from this area so early, because that’s most of one for 1010 right there. There’s even truth behind the Biblical triumphalism: it seems that a number of frontier fortresses were demolished as part of the peace terms between Borrell II (because he had to come into this somewhere) and his brother Miró III and the Caliph al-Hakam II after he came to power in 961, so these places would have been vacant for most people’s memory by this time.⁷ And this is the context into which Hisnabert arrives, after a full page of the printed edition gone on historical preamble. Bonhom goes on:

Meanwhile there came forth a certain noble man, Hisnabert, of the nobler sort of origin, who predestined by God and Saint Cucuphat had taken over much of the aforesaid place and sought it from us to live in, he having come there with all his household… [and the rest as in Bonnassie]. For this place, heavy experience tells, was placed in great terror and trembling, so that anyone who should live there from day to day would not escape being himself often subject to danger on account of his or others’ possessions or money. On account of which it pleased us [Abbot Guitard of Sant Cugat, in whose voice the document is phrased] and all the congregation of monks subject to the aforesaid martyr, with the consent of the lord Count Ramon, his wife Countess Ermessenda acquiescing, Borrell Bishop of Osona assenting, Pere Bishop of Girona and Ermengol Bishop of Urgell agreeing, we unanimously with good heart and prompt will give and concede the aforesaid town and its church of Santa Oliva with the money or offerings of first fruits or other gifts of the faithful, and of these tithes we dedicate two whole parts [presumably of three]… to you the aforesaid Hisnabert.

There then follows a long precision of the terms under which he holds, which are basically that his family may inherit it but that neither he nor they may bestow this property or its proceeds anywhere other than Sant Cugat, that Sant Cugat will still be able to pasture their animals there and they retain rights of access and can remove him if necessary. And the abbot and fifteen monks sign along with six untitled laymen and the count and countess. So okay, let me just pull out some things there:

1. If Hisnabert is actually a fraudster, it’s not just the monks and abbot he’s fooling here; he’s also fooled the count and countess and every bishop in Catalonia, some of whom know this area as only frontier landgrabbers could (that’s Saint Ermengol to you);⁸
2. the specification of the property’s bounds calls it Santa Oliva, “as it was called in antiquity”; I don’t quite know if they’re anticipating him restoring the church, they don’t say so explicitly, but they do appear to anticipate it rendering tithe (or rather money: denaria not decima), which in turn implies a reasonable population base and it’s hard not to imagine the church is already up and running;
3. it seems to be implied that Sant Cugat’s contact with this area has been, and will remain, running herds of animals through it; at that rate, they ought to be passing through the area probably twice a year if not more, and should also have known there was no tower if tower there wasn’t, not just far quicker than five years later but even before this was being granted, which is also implied by the gravis experientia of its vulnerability that they report; it all reads as if this was familiar territory to them, even if still wild.

All of which then makes me want to look at the five-years-later charter, also available online.⁹ And, lo, it is a bit complicated, but basically what happens here is that a woman called Adelaide comes to court at Barcelona, on behalf of her infant son by her late husband Guillem del Castell Sant Martí, whose father Galí had cleared some frontier territory at Calders, and she says Sant Cugat are moving in on her land and what’s the count going to do about it? So the abbot rocks up with his papal privilege and royal precepts and so forth and sets them all down, but the array of judges present, including Ponç Bonfill Marc, Son of Ervigi Marc the Wonder Judge, look them over and find there’s nothing in them covering this property. Red faces for Sant Cugat’s men! But it’s no better for Adelaide, who also can’t prove any right to the land. “On which account,” intones young Ponç, “it was judged in the same court to be better and more true that this land should be princely land just like the other spaces of waste land,” or to put it another way, the count gets to swipe it. It seems to be at this point that the abbot produced the grant to Hisnabert, or Isimbert as Ponç prefers to spell it, which is the first point at which it becomes clear we’re talking about the same property or properties, but the judges decided that since Sant Cugat had held no right to the land, they could not rightfully have granted it to Hisnabert. The count, however, so careless about his property, decided that probably Sant Cugat should have it after all, now, and granted it there anyway, aww, whereafter,

since it is necessary to build castles and fortifications in the waste marches and in solitary places against the attacks of the pagans, and since Isimbert himself did not develop this land, which instead remains a waste and solitude, the above-noted Guitard, abbot, and his monastic brothers were advised and ordered, on the instruction of Countess Ermessenda and by her son Count Berengar, and by the men written below, that they should seek out such a man as would build and develop this waste land in the service of God and Sant Cugat, just as they should require, and they give it to that man by this precarial charter of donation for management together.

By this stage I’ve already lost track of just whom Hisnabert even would have ripped off: Galí and son, the monks, the count? But what is clear is that no-one is here saying he wasn’t a nobleman or had lied or whatever, or that there was no tower. That would have been at Santa Oliva, presumably; the land here is at Calders, and the problem seems to be that he hadn’t developed that, in other words, that his tenure had resulted in insufficient value added. The count, or rather the countess—this case, despite its date of 1017, seems to have dragged on past Roman Borrell’s death in 1018, take note—weren’t happy with that, but the implication seems pretty strong that if the monastery had not been told to do otherwise, they’d have given the lands straight back into Hisnabert’s hands. Instead, the document as we have it has the whole hearing copied out merely as a precursor to the new grant to one Bonet Bernat. And then, right at the end, in a fit of afterthought worthy of his learned father, Ponç adds, along with his own signature and that of the other judges, this codocil:

we the judges who edited this, and by the ordination of our competence gave a term to the waste land at Torre, the tower that Isimbert made in the lands of Sant Cugat by the ordination of the above-noted donation that Abbot Guitard made to that Isimbert, and we reserved all the lands brought under cultivation, and all the buildings and workings that are in the circuit of the already-said tower to that term. The rest however, we ordain just as is written here. Signed Ponç, also known as Bonfill, cleric and judge, who have written these things….

And that, I think, changes everything. Because look, a tower! It was there all along! And cleared lands and buildings and stuff! Hisnabert had done his stuff! Instead, what seems to have happened is that Adelaide’s suit, far from the only one that Sant Cugat’s efforts to make its privileges and precepts count in these lands kicked off, had started an enquiry no-one wanted, not even her at the end, leading to Ramon Borrell being able to assert fiscal control of the area and thus retaining the ability to direct it, via Sant Cugat. That this is so, even though the terms on which it was given back to the monastery grant them full right, is clear from Ermessenda’s later order to change its manager; Bonet Bernat was presumably one of her people she wanted in instead. Or, indeed, maybe Hisnabert just hadn’t done enough. But either way, Sant Cugat weren’t, to their credit, about to turf him and his familia out on their collective ear; his tower was quietly secured as its own term by the judges, quite possibly once the countess (not a woman it was wise to cross) had left, and left “the rest… just as is written here”. So for once, a happy ending, except for Adelaide and her little son Bernat (wait, Bernat? but no, there are probably a dozen Bernats here, it probably isn’t the son being put in charge alas) at least.

A charter of Sant Cugat (not the right one, but probably about the right height...)

Those of you who were at the paper will maybe notice that this isn’t quite how I told the story there: instead, I suggested that the monastery had dispossessed Hisnabert for some reason, and had kept the charter to be able to prove their own title to it and the terms under which they could do that, whereas actually it seems that they probably kept it because they still had him there on the land. I would have to confess that I seem to have relied too heavily on notes and didn’t myself then notice the codocil in the second document, which does rather alter the picture. Still, I take some small solace in the fact that apparently Bonnassie didn’t either and he had it in print for thirty-five years before anyone spotted a problem…

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1. P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse 1975, 1976), I p. 127.

2. R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolíngis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica II & III (Barcelona 1926-1952), Sant Cugat del Vallès I.

3. Not that this area was completely anarchic! I have got so fed up of waiting for my paper on this to come out that it is very tempting just to stick the proof PDF on the web somewhere, but for now, I still hope that you will one day be able to see: J. Jarrett, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: Organisation of Society in the pre-Catalan ‘Terra de Ningú'” in †Alan Deyermond & Martin Ryan (edd.), Early Medieval Spain: a symposium, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 63 (London forthcoming), pp. 83-109, now heading for its fourth third anniversary in process.

4. On the thirty-year rule you can at least see my work, in this case, Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the King’s Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320-342 at pp. 325-327.

5. The document is edited as J. Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés (Barcelona 1946), doc. no. 449.

6. On Bonhom, meanwhile, see Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca 2004), pp. 84-92, where his copy of the Forum Iudicum is briefly described and where references to it are given.

7. See Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona. False metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München forthcoming), pp. 1-42 at pp. 14-15 with references to the Catalan scholarship.

8. On whom see Jeffrey A. Bowman, “The Bishop Builds a Bridge: Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees” in Catholic Historical Review Vol. 88 (Washington DC 2002), pp. 1-16.

9. Rius, Cartulario II, doc. no. 464. This one’s brilliant.

Seminary LXIX: me telling stories

Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, Pergamins, C (Sant Pere de Casserres) núm 20, source of one of the stories

I said below that I had a good reason for missing Gabor Thomas’s paper on Lyminge, at least, and that I would explain what it was. Duly, therefore, it was that I was presenting a paper approximately an hour later at the Oxford Medieval History seminar, and though I now know that in theory I could have made it to both, the possibility didn’t actually occur to me that day and I think this is just as well, really. I was talking to the title, “A Likely Story: narratives in charter material from early medieval Catalonia”, and it went fairly well, really.

The title came about through a combination of two factors. For a long long time now I’ve had work in draft about why charters are a tricky source that need reading critically as well as just for data, because the people creating them were not above misrepresenting stuff, leaving important details out and so on and because the form itself encourages such elisions and illusions. I’ve spoken about this before at Leeds briefly, it’s touched on in my thesis, I’ve had many a conversation about it, but one thing I haven’t really explored, except here where I use it as post fodder, is the fact that quite a number of charters actually contain quite lengthy stories to establish the set-up that leads to the transaction that’s being recorded.

The remains of Castellnou de Carcolzes, subject of one of the stories

The second factor was that the seminar convenors are both people who work on themes close to my own, they thought it would be good for my scholarly profile here and, flatteringly, for their seminar or so they said, for me to show up in it as soon as possible, and would that be possible? And I said, more or less, if you want something that contains research, then not till next term, but I can pull you something together out of bits and string sooner; one organiser then said, roughly, “hurrah, bits and string it is then, see you in second week” and I went, “oh what seriously? but now I have to write the thing” and started panicking. So, the actual paper contained two stories from an earlier Leeds paper later sort-of-published as a thesis appendix and here as this blog post, one that I never got round to using because Adam Kosto beat me to it in his excellent (if tactically peculiar) 2005 Speculum article, several about the 985 sack of Barcelona that have been collected by Michel Zimmermann and Gaspar Feliu to name but two, two that you all saw here first in two other blog posts, one that Pierre Bonnassie told in his 1975-6 book that I’m not entirely sure I believe, the classic one that gave me my first (and prize-winning, I might add) paper and which you’ve heard about here endlessly (because I’m sure I haven’t finished yet) and one from a paper given only a few months before here in Oxford that will have been familiar to at least some people in the audience, not least because it had also appeared in the part of this year’s Leeds paper of which that paper was an expansion…¹ This is what happens beyond a certain level of academic busyness, I guess, you either learn to say no or you start recycling…

So, in other words, the only new material in this at all was constituted in the facts that I compared Count Guifré the Hairy to Batman, and that in pulling all these things together as examples of a single phenomenon, stories in charters, I was forced not just to ask but also to answer the question of why this happened, and also why it didn’t always happen, and that was something I hadn’t done before. Now, it appears to my considerable later chagrin that the tools I took to answer this question may ultimately have been acquired from Hayden White, via who knows what intermediaries, which would be horribly ironic (and not unparalleled alas).² I should really know more about where my theory is coming from… But ultimately, my conclusion was as follows:

Some of the tales we’ve seen here apparently had holes in big enough to get an extra arm through, but the requirement was not to convince by argument, but to establish an acceptable version on the basis of which events could now proceed as required. These were after all transaction documents; they existed only because two or more persons had found terms on which they could do business already. Sometimes those terms were usual and the formulas would suffice, though even that is a narrative assertion of a kind, stating that the transaction was normal enough that that was sufficient. When, however, the transaction was evidently not usual, because of having been agreed while chained to a prison wall or glared down by the local viscount, because of being completely fabricated or deliberately incomplete, or because, in the case of Count-Bishop Miró Bonfill and his cousins, because to get this lot to agree on anything needed something really special, the best strategy was, apparently, to tell a story. These are not micro-histories as we usually understand the term; they are very small macro-histories, frames of collectively agreed reference that enabled new actions.

I don’t know how much use that is going to have been to anyone else listening, but it will be very useful to me, so one of the things this experience also proves, I guess, is how the best way to find out more about what you know is to explain it to someone, in this case about forty-five people I’d mostly never met before in a place I’m going to be visible for the next two-and-a-bit years. There were some useful questions and comments, to, about the moments monumentalised in these memorials (I exaggerate the alliteration of the original comment only slightly) and the multiple uses of a document at the transaction and, separately, thereafter, and that’s all good stuff. But mainly I’m just startled at how sometimes, I can pull something useful out of almost nothing merely by framing something anew under the pressure of immediacy. Tutorials are really good for this too, I may well be learning more than the students. Anyway, there it goes. And I should tell you the story Bonnassie told, too, because as he read it at least it’s a good one, but that can wait for a further post. Quite enough to do here meanwhile!

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1. Phew, referring to, er:

1. J. Jarrett, “Sales, swindles and sanctions: Bishop Sal·la of Urgell and the counts of Catalonia”, paper presented in session ‘Telling Laymen What To Do’, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 21 July 2005, printed in idem, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia” (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of London 2005), pp. 290-308;
2. Adam Kosto, “Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: The Example of Catalonia” in Speculum Vol. 80 (Cambridge MA 2005), pp. 44-74, which is odd mainly because in order to make a sound and important point it erects a whacking great straw man that is then destroyed with only the point left standing in the hay-strewn wreckage;
3. M. Zimmermann, “La prise de Barcelone par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historiographie catalane” in L’Historiographie en Occident du V^e au XV^e siècle. Actes du Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur. Tours, 10-12 juin 1977, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest Vol. 87 (Rennes 1980), pp. 191-218;
4. Gaspar Feliu, La Presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007), online here, last modified 15 September 2008 as of 3 November 2008;
5. P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse 1975, 1976), I p. 127;
6. J. Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2003), pp. 229-258;
7. and idem, “Dilettante or Politician: Count-Bishop Miró of Girona (970-984) and his intellectual cosmos”, paper presented at conference The Clerical Cosmos: ecclesiastical power, culture, and society, c. 900 to c. 1075, Faculty of History, University of Oxford, 4 September 2010 and “Caliph, King, or Grandfather: Strategies of Legitimization on the Spanish March in the Reign of Lothar III”, paper presented in session ‘Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic’, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 12 July 2010.

2. I found this out by asking about it on Academia.edu, which would make that seem like quite the resource that it claims to be were it not that, shortly afterwards, I got a message from its founder, saluting me as one of the most prolific contributors in the history research area and asking if I would like to test their new questions feature. I had been on it about two months at this point and was (and am) logging in maybe once a week, but had of course, already tested the new questions feature. I’ve no idea what he was measuring but I faintly wanted to wash after seeing it had been measured.

There then followed a period of seminar fail: notes of what might have been

As the second week of term dawned here I organisationally ploughed into the dirt somewhat, and started missing things I’d wanted to go to. The first lecture was probably an active factor here, but I was very much struggling to work out a daily routine that would let me actually get incidental things done as well as routine ones, and to be honest I still am. It’s not much of a post to say what I missed, but I just want to take stock, avoid any expectations of particular seminar reports and beg for notes or guest entries from anyone who made them, I guess.

Dedication stone of Lyminge Abbey

I did not make it to Gabor Thomas presenting at the Medieval Archaeology Seminar here on 18th October, which was a pity as Gabor is a man who can make strap-ends interesting so to hear what he’d do with material like, “Recent excavations at Lyminge: settlement, community and conversion in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent”. If anyone made it to this and would be able to spare a few short words, that would be great, though the project website is a start at least. I did have quite a good reason for not making it to this, though, and we’ll come to that next post.

Gold aureus of Emperor Commodus in the Government Museum, Chennai (Madras)

Likewise, I did not make it down to hear my erstwhile quasi-colleague and friend, I think, yes! friend, Rebecca Day presenting to the Royal Numismatic Society on the 19th October, because I was lecturing the next day, but she has been kind enough to send me a text of her paper, “Late Roman and Byzantine gold coins in the Madras Government Museum – fashion, imitation and the economics of religious devotion”, and I can tell you that it includes, by way of passing reference or deeper exploration, Roman obsession with Indian food, early medieval Indian faking of Roman gold coins (some of which were then exported to China!), 6th-century Tamil poetry and 9th-century Byzantine flat-earthism, which is I reckon a reasonable amount of bang for the aureus. I can say more about this if you would like, and if she doesn’t mind, but I hope and assume that it will be published.

Obverse of a silver penny of King Æthelred the Unready

Then the next day I didn’t make it to London again, this time for Professor Simon Keynes, presenting the David Wilson Lecture for the Joint Institute of Archaeology and British Museum Medieval Archaeology seminar and the Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages seminar, on “The Archaeology of Æthelred the Unready”, and although I have been hoping notes might appear on the Cambridge ASNC Department’s blog, as yet no such luck. I actually saw Professor Keynes a few days later at a meeting of the Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles/Medieval European Coinage committee, on which I now have the honour to serve (which means it’s my fault once more, though it’s not my fault the webpage hasn’t been updated any more…), and he said there was no text, as such, and that may be why. Still, again, I’d welcome comments from anyone who was there and feels able to offer them.

1548 woodcut of John Wyclif, the original Lollard

Between Professor Keynes and Dr Thomas that was two of the more relevant things to what I’m teaching that I might have gone to, and I didn’t, so it was ironic that the next thing I did make it to was Alexander Russell presenting at the Medieval History seminar here on 25th October, to the title, “England’s Involvement with the General Councils of the Church, 1409-1449”, which was I think not something I myself can use, though there were lots of interested questions from others and it was certainly interesting of itself. I’ve expressed uncertainty about whether I should cover these here already, however, and I think that I won’t this one, as it’s far enough out of my period that I feel under-qualified and also I don’t think the speaker would expect or necessarily welcome it. But I was at least reminded that I should really know more about Lollards if I’m going to go round doing things like this.¹

So, I offer those mainly as points of discussion. Blogging will resume with the standard ridiculous self-promotion and then with a pedagogical question for those of you in the USA, and finally a proper IHR seminar report such as is expected by the readers of what I have now heard called “your improving blog”, and readers, he meant it transitively. I am not sure this post will have improved you much but, if not, better luck soon!

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1. If you feel an urge to say something like O HAI CEILING LORD CAN HAZ FREE WULL PLZ at this point, at least provide the accompanying macro. (And if you have no idea what I mean, you may as well start with the big one…

More bullets of the new job, and, Jonathan Jarrett is going to Hell

As often already, in lieu of the content about my stuff I would like to have written by now…

• Richard Hodges’s The Anglo-Saxon Achievement appears to be another of those books that sank very deep and I didn’t realise.
• There seems to be much more Romano-British archaeology nowadays than anyone cared about when I first learnt this stuff.
• This may well be because I was not being taught by a specialist in the field and I am very conscious that I am now repeating some of the same ignorances, in other words, we are the problem as has been said before.
• On the other hand it’s inescapably true that it’s much easier to give a good lecture (in so far as a lecture is ever useful) when you don’t know too much.
• I met some medievalists who say that no-one round here goes to the pub; I agreed that this was a crying shame and now that I’m beginning to balance my time to make this possible, find of course that I forgot who they were…
• Perhaps because of thinking in these terms too much, I am informed that:
  

  The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell!
  Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

  Level	Score
  Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
  Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
  Level 2 (Lustful)	High
  Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
  Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
  Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
  Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
  Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
  Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
  Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very High

  Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

I’m quite impressed by this. I should reassure readers that the high (or low, depending on where you wind up) ranking is mainly down to a few things that Dante thought were violent and irremediable crimes (not puns, though I had been warned about that) being considered harmless leisure activities in the twenty-first century West, at least in my state. All the same, if Pascal lost his wager, I should have some interesting company in eternal torment.

And lastly.

• I don’t really think two days, especially not two days in which I have a tutorial to give, a seminar to attend and a lecture to write give and you know a job, is a fair amount of time to ask me to turn round final proofs of the book in, you know. I might call it unrealistic. But since to do so would probably prejudice its chances of finally emerging with a date on its titlepage that isn’t a lie, I may not be very evident online for a few days.

Seminary LXVIII: a namecheck to be treasured

I am conscious that I’m writing these up more slowly than I’m amassing the notes, but this will presumably ease once term does and speed up once I finally get online from home, whereas, as it is, all blogging is kind of stolen moments. However, since I came into the office an hour earlier than planned the day I wrote most of this, because of missing the UK’s winter clock change, I suppose I have stolen some. On 13th October the Institute of Historical Research’s Earlier Middle Ages seminar hosted a round-table about the Staffordshire Hoard, and it was jolly interesting. The speakers were Guy Halsall, Leslie Webster and David Ganz, and this had attracted such a crowd that Guy, who turned up perhaps a little bit behind the dot (not that I can talk) almost had nowhere to sit. There were plenty of others on the floor, I’ve never seen that room so full.

Images for this post are not going to be hard to find (and they're all Creative Commons licensed)

Alan Thacker introduced the proceedings, and the Hoard, and in doing so added several facts that I hadn’t managed to gather, and in particular hadn’t known when I wrote my Cliopatria piece about the Hoard some time ago: that the Hoard was found at Hammerwich (which as he said was an auspicious name for a metalwork deposit) and that the site is very close to Watling Street. It also emerged later that the deposition site may have once had a mound over it, which would have been quite clear from the road, and this considerably alters my thinking about it, but all that can come in a minute. Guy, who has written about this on his own blog indeed, once again presented the very strong case against the Hoard being a collection of trophies, because the identity of trophy items is important. If one had captured some really impressive swords, one would show off the swords, not their fittings, and so on. He also argued, and argues, that the size of the Hoard indicates that we should be thinking in terms of early medieval armies of hundreds or even thousands, not a 36-man warband as the Laws of Ine seem to imply. Then, most shockingly to me, he said that until a short while before he hadn’t had a better answer, but now he’d read one on the web and it was mine. Guy didn’t actually know I was there at this point, and so I was left in the corner with the usual bottom-of-stomach-missing reaction when an academic talks of my blogging—it is where my biggest dose of impostor syndrome is located, because I’m well aware that I don’t research these posts as closely as I do my academic work. Nonetheless, Guy liked the interpretation of the hoard as a ransom paid after a defeat, a humiliation by denuding the weapons of the defeated, and although, as I said cautiously in questions, that’s a very romantic interpretation, damned if I can think of a better one. And that was apparently roughly how Guy felt, although he went on to differ from me about the nature of the deposition, which is fair enough as, given the information about the mound, I think that what I then suggested about the deposition (that it was an attempt to steal the goods back gone wrong) is less plausible than Guy’s explanation of it as a symbolic deposit, neutralising the wealth of the enemy.¹

Helmet cheek-piece from the Staffordshire Hoard

Leslie Webster substantially agreed with Guy, but added a few very useful points. The first of these was that, since we can now say that the fragments of helmet in the Hoard don’t add up to one complete helmet, or even part of only one helmet, but bits of several, it is likely that the Hoard was only part of a larger assemblage, so that we need to keep the phases of accumulation, selection and deposition rigorously separated in our interpretation. My explanation really only covers accumulation. She also noted that (unlike Sutton Hoo!) almost all of the metalwork was of English origin. Dating of any of the individual objects is practically impossible; furthermore, the variation in the possibilities of dating them means that another possible source of variation, geographical origin, is smoothed out to invisibility. To put that another way, if two contemporary pieces of ornament differ because they were made one in Middle Anglia and one in the kingdom of the Hwicce, for example, but we don’t know that they’re contemporary, we are as likely to attribute the variation to development over time as to geographic separation. (This is why stylistic dating is so rubbish.) And when we add into that the problem that individual metalworkers at this standard were probably highly mobile… we’re just never going to know for sure. Much of the silver looks less military than the gold: there are for example quite a lot of things that seem to be cup-mounts. She agreed that the Hoard is definably male and almost entirely secular, however, and though I make her presentation sound substantially negative because of the dating impossibility, there was a wealth of snippets of observed information that possibly no-one else could have given us.

The inscribed gold strip from the Staffordshire Hoard

Lastly David Ganz (for it was he!) spoke carefully about the script on the metal strip that is the sole textual component of the Hoard. He also revealed one thing that I hadn’t spotted before, which is that the strip is inscribed on both sides (as witness above), but the other side appears merely to be a botched attempt at the same inscription as on the side we had already seen, so he suspects that this tells us that it was stuck fully down to something so that the mistake was invisible. He also told us (and few people could say so more authoritatively) that the text chosen, from Numbers, is not one that attracted very much interest from medieval commentators, unlike a similar one from Psalm 67 (as the Vulgate numbers it; you may, as I did, find it as Psalm 68 in your translation), so that the script as we have it is an odd choice. It does however crop up in the Life of Guthlac, which is of course almost the only Mercian text we have that isn’t a charter, and would presumably have been available to many from the liturgy. The orthography, he said, is unparalleled, suggesting that no actual text was available to copy from: someone who knew the text must have told it to the smith or the smith remembered it himself. As to its date, he would say no more than seventh-century, perhaps best paralleled by manuscripts from the latter part of that century (not least the Cathach of Columba) and Welsh inscriptions, but even that is enough to help decide between the widely-separated dates given by Michelle Brown and Elizabeth Okasha, the latter of which pushed the strip far later than we suppose anything else in the Hoard to have been, however wide its date-range may be. He lastly pointed out that the text itself is written in the body of a beast which forms the strip, which may indicate the banishment of the Devil by the incantation.

Obligatory pseudo-hoard photograph of material (including the above pieces) from the Hoard

There were some lively questions, so much so that it was only at the very end that I could reveal my presence to Guy. Roy Flechner pointed out that St Patrick, on returning to Ireland, is said to have brought with him a collection of treasure with which he could buy stuff, and wondered if this too could be some migrant’s treasure trove, ‘banked’ in the ground and accessed as needed as Patrick’s would presumably have been. I don’t think that works for this, it’s just too special, but as a reminder of how such things might have worked in other cases it was very salutary. Guy wondered if it really needed to be so high-status, if armies were as large as he believes, but Leslie Webster pointed out that only at Sutton Hoo do we have any other case of sword pommels being deposited; otherwise, presumably, they were always kept back, but this Hoard has many of them. So whatever it is, and at the end of the day despite Guy (and me I suppose, indirectly) the jury was still out on that, we are pretty much agreed that it’s one of a kind. What that kind is, we may yet hope to agree at least, but maybe not when or whose alas.

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1. I always struggle with this, because if one buried a lot of robbed precious metal somewhere obvious, my natural expectation is for it not to be there next day. And yet, we have Sutton Hoo, and there’s no way that the deposition of a boat full of treasure in a huge mound can have gone unnoticed by the local populace or been obscure of purpose to immediately-succeeding generations, yet it was left alone. And the same goes for every other rich and conspicuous burial, really. I recognise my twentieth-century capitalist upbringing shaping my expectations here, therefore. It’s later these things get stolen, if they do; the Hoard, if it had been deposited like that, could well have been left until no-one remembered it was there.