Correction: the men of Gombrèn less confused than I thought

Long-term readers may be able to think back to the end of 2009, when I was jubilating over having got decent facsimiles of a few of the charters of Sant Joan de les Abadesses about which I’d had questions. I wrote about one of them then, a hearing in which Abbess Fredeburga of Sant Joan got several people (and apparently fewer than had been anticipated by the scribe) to swear to her nunnery’s long possession of the castle of Mogrony and its term.¹ You may even recall that I was previously dubious about this document because the people who swore were given any kind of context in the signatures at the end of the document, and that on seeing the facsimile I was able to conclude that that was because the whole occasion had apparently been confusing and the scribe had made a mess of the document, leaving out various important details that he’d had to fudge back in later. With me so far? Because having now properly incorporated the actual text of the document into my files, I see that I’ve missed a crucial detail, which actually rather alters my idea of what was going on.

Arxiu de l’Abadia de Sant Joan de les Abadesses, volum de pergamins dels segles X-XI, significant bit the long and crowded signature near bottom right

The crucial thing is the position of the men of Gombrèn, or as the settlement appears in the document, “Gomesindo morto”, dead Gomesèn, presumably a settlement founded by someone of that name some time before.² Something I hadn’t previously taken fully on board is that this place was within the castle term of Mogrony, although I’d assumed something of the sort as otherwise why would you get those people to swear? But it was, anyway. What I hadn’t previously paid proper attention to is the exact wording of the clause that identifies these men in the signatures. One of them signs for all, a fellow called Admir, and his signature clause is as follows, exactly as in the original save the decoding of the graphical Signum and the filling-out of the abbreviations:

[Signum] Admiro·quimandatarius·fuid[e]ipsoshominesdegomesindo·etsacram[en]to
| superiusconprehenso recepi·p[ro]pterea me exvacuo in istoiuditio deipsu[m]alaude[m] | quiinfraconstitutosterminesestq[uod]superiusresonant

Which, translated as closely as I can get, comes out as:

[Signed] Admir, who was the representative of the men of Gomesèn and received the oath included above, on account of which I quit my claim in this court to the selfsame alod which lies within the assigned boundaries that resound above.

And this is kind of crucial. I’d somehow only ever got as far as the first clause, that he was the representative of the men of Gombrèn, never to the following section. What this means, of course, is that this is not the supporting witness; this is the opposition. The men of Gombrèn had presumably attempted to claim some kind of autonomy from Sant Joan de Ripoll (as it then was), and the abbess had therefore followed her predecessor Emma’s very good example and come to court with witnesses prepared to swear that Emma’s father, none other than Count Guifré the Hairy as you may already know well, had assigned the castle term of Mogrony to the nunnery. That in turn would seem to imply that the Gombrèn men had attempted to claim, not that they were not in the term or that they alone didn’t owe whatever it was to the nunnery, but that the whole term was not the nunnery’s property. (I don’t know who the castellan of Mogrony was at this point, no-one does, but I bet he wasn’t unhappy with this idea; all the same, it evidently wasn’t he who fronted the resistance.³)

Sant Pere de Montgrony, centre of the point of contention in its slightly more modern form of both building and spelling, from Wikimedia Commons

Now, the sad thing about all this is that Admir and his cronies were probably right. As I said in the earlier post, everything that connects Mogrony (or Montgrony, as it now is) to Sant Joan in its earliest documents either doesn’t exist any more but is reported secondhand in antiquarian works, or else does exist and is patently interpolated.⁴ The nuns had obviously had, at some point, to fake their claim to this castle. And it’s interesting that Abbess Fredeburga didn’t bring documents to this court, but witnesses to long tenure, 50 years indeed which would have qualified as unchallengeable under the Visigothic Law that ran here still. A scholar who’s recently looked at that usage, Jeffrey Bowman, sees this as the kind of defence that unlettered peasants use against wily churchmen, and although I think that it’s often more knowingly legal than that, nonetheless, it’s certainly not the defence one would expect a nunnery with a good archive to use.⁵ Where are their charters? I suspect the answer is, not faked yet. However, she found her witnesses, though it may not be surprising that there were apparently fewer than they’d hoped, and the court found for her, and that’s the end of the story for Gombrèn. As I have oft-times remarked here, it’s tough to be up against The Man in late-Carolingian Catalonia, and this is true even when The Man’s a woman (and the Carolingians are about to run out; this all occurred in 987).

We are here; Gombrèn shows up just south of Mogrony if you zoom in one step

None of this in any way forgives the scribe, the usually super-competent Wonder Judge Ervigi Marc, for his numerous blunders. Why is the most important part of the document, the quit-claim that actually prevents the case being raised again, relegated to the very bottom right-hand corner in tiny script? It shouldn’t even technically be on this document: Roger Collins would tell us that for a trial under Visigothic Law there ought to be three documents preserved, the description of the case, the oath of the witnesses, and the quit-claim of the losing party.⁶ There’s very little incentive to preserve all three of these if you’re the winner, so we usually only have one or two, but here parts two and three were combined, and in a hurry too. Nul points, Ervigi Marc. And all my previous points about the bodges of vital information also still stand, except the linkage of this signature to the confusion over who was swearing, because the people swearing were not the men of Gombrèn; I got that wrong. So I thought I should own up to as much, and now I have.

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1. The document is now best edited in Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueollògica LIII (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1526.

2. For a suggestion of the founder’s identity, see Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (Woodbridge 2010), p. 61, which unfortunately contains a typo but nothing that makes anything unclear.

3. Manuel Anglada i Bayès, Antoni Pladevall i Font, Maria Lluisa Cases, Joan-Albert Adell i Gisbert, Rafael Bastardas i Parera, E. Bargallo i Claves & Jordi Vigué i Viñas, ‘Sant Pere de Mogrony’ in Pladevall (ed.), Catalunya Romànica X: el Ripollès (Barcelona 1987), pp. 110-117. I have long-held views on Mogrony’s early control but they turn out to probably be wrong as well, look for more on that in the near future.

4. Jonathan 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 at pp. 235-241.

5. 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. 47-51.

6. Roger Collins, “Visigothic Law and Regional Diversity in Disputes in Early Medieval Spain” in Wendy Davies & Paul Fouracre (edd.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1986), pp. 85-104, repr. in Collins, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain, Variorum Collected Studies 356 (Aldershot 1992), XVI.