I find myself, with some relief, advancing into June 2013 with my seminar report backlog, because on the 5th of that month I was at the Medieval Social and Economic History Seminar in Oxford and I was in fact there as the speaker, with the title “Two men and a monastery: clerical involvements in Manresa before 1000”. This was the first piece of work coming out of what then seemed like my new project, and since I am still trying to work out what to do with its findings, it may be worth explaining here what I thought I was doing.
Modern Manresa somewhat drowns out its medieval components, but they’re there, even if not of the tenth century.
At a late stage of my Ph. D. research, when I started having access to the volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia covering Osona and Manresa and thus basically to more than five documents covering Manresa at all, I noticed that there seemed to have been an awful lot of priests around the town, and that at least some of them seemed to write transaction charters involving land in many places around it, which suggested to me that they were in fact working in the town for anyone who wanted a charter written. At that point, all I could really do was bookmark this thought for future reference, but when I started to meet Wendy Davies’s and Carine van Rhijn’s and others’ new work on identifying and characterising the early medieval rural priesthood, I began to think that the Manresa stuff was the contribution I could make to such an endeavour and so when I shook off the slough of 2012 and tried to start doing something new, that’s what I did.1
Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, from Wikimedia Commons
Armed then with my own copy of Catalunya Carolíngia IV at last, I started pulling together the relevant documentation and the first thing that became very clear was that almost all of it came originally from the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages. That presented two problems: firstly, it probably meant that where the monastery didn’t eventually get property I had no information (and this was what the third paper out of the project came to be about) and secondly, because Sant Benet itself had priests on staff, I needed to be sure that I was able to distinguish them from priests actually based in the city. And as you have already heard complications arose with that very quickly that made this hard-to-impossible to resolve without access to the original documents, which even at this late stage (and still now) I had not been able to persuade the monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat, where they now largely reside, to give me. So this paper was largely about trying to deal with this complication.
An effective set of defences: Santa Maria de Montserrat
I had started by focusing on two particular men whose names I kept seeing in the documents, Baldemar and Badeleu, and they turned out to have oddly parallel career trajectories that both told me a lot about the situation I was looking at. Baldemar seems to have been the better-connected of the two; he first turns up in Balsareny to the north of Manresa, where he had family property, as a deacon in 961. He was at both the endowment, in 966, and the consecration, in 972, of the then-new monastery of Sant Benet, wrote a lot of documents for them during the 970s and steadily acquired property in two areas near the house (as well as from Count-Marquis Borrell II once); it’s not a complete surprise when in his penultimate appearance in 985 he signs as a monk, and in the ultimate one, a strange kind of Gesta abbatum-type charter from 1002, he is explicitly named among the congregation of Sant Benet. So we have a well-connected local priest who had long dealings with the monastery, probably knew the monks well and eventually joined them to live the life contemplative till his surprisingly late death (given he must have been at least 76 at his last appearance).2 This one is fairly easy to understand, although it is worth noting that we have no record of him ever having given any property to the monastery.
Baldemar is one of the few of these guys whose signature I do have, in pretty much the middle of the penultimate line of this charter, which is Biblioteca de Catalunya, pergamins 3096.
Badeleu is a bit less obvious. We see him as a cleric in 952 then as a priest in 961, in fact writing a sale of Baldemar’s to the founder of Sant Benet, the vicar Sal·la. Thereafter he appears about as much as scribe as anything else, often for property transfers very close to Sant Benet at Montpeità, and himself bought up quite a lot of land in two Manresa settlements called Vilapicina and la Celada, this going on till 995. In 982, apparently in fear of death, he made a big donation to Sant Benet, but reserved the property till he died, a wise move as it turned out. But he also bought land from Abbot Cesari of Montserrat, who was at this point insisting he was Archbishop of Tarragona and wasn’t entirely an establishment figure, and Badeleu also appeared as witness against Sant Benet de Bages in a court case of 1000. Despite that he also entered the monastery the next year, with a compensatory gift made to a son who doesn’t appear mentioned in any of his other documents, and appears among the monks—but still only as priest—in Baldemar’s final document, and probably his own, in 1002.3 Again it seems clear he would have known the monks for a long time but it’s less clear that he was probably always going to join them.
Another view of Sant Benet. «Sant Benet de Bages – General» per Josep Renalias – Lohen11 – Treball propi. Disponible sota la llicència CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
This got me looking harder at the rest of the monks, because both of these two suggested in their different ways that one could have been a member of Sant Benet in some sense without fully becoming a monk. And that is where the whole question of intermittent monks discussed in a post of last year came up: I’m not sure any of the first monks of Sant Benet actually consistently operated as such in their documents. They all seem to have continued to buy and hold property outside common and often to have written many non-monastic documents. I think, therefore, that the general conclusion of this paper was not about Manresa but about Sant Benet: just because the vicar Sal·la had founded the place, given it lands and so forth in 966, and even though his children then got its church consecrated in 972 did not make it a going monastery.4 Its monks took a long time to turn up. The first ones seem to do so in 979, but even then they seem to have kept their day jobs, being largely people like Baldemar and Badeleu who had important community rôles they presumably didn’t want to leave behind. This is not the stereotype of monastic foundation in this area, a stereotype which crazy Abbot Cesari had actually lived, of first getting your monks together then moving into the wasteland and building your new home yourself as soon as you had a gift of land on which to do it.5 Nonetheless, this one seems more understandable to me, building and building and not quite being sure whether it was time finally to leave the world or if there was still work to be done in it. But the result is that although I can probably identify 25 people who became monks of Sant Benet from my documents, I’m not sure whether they can or should therefore be excluded from the pool of priests working in or out of Manresa in the pastoral clergy!
1 The first of Wendy’s contributions on this score is now out, I believe, it being W. Davies, “Local priests and the writing of charters in northern Iberia in the tenth century” in Julio Escalona & H. Sirantoine (edd.), Documentos y cartularios como instrumentos de poder. España y el occidente cristiano (ss. viii–xii) (Toulouse 2014), pp. 29-43; Carine’s have already produced at least A. C. van Rhijn, “Priests and the Carolingian reforms: the bottle-necks of local correctio” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel & Philip Shaw (edd.), Texts and identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12 (Wien 2006), pp. 219-237, but I believe that there is an actual volume of essays in process too.
2. His appearances are Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. nos 881, 975, 977, 985, 995B, 997, 1006, 1014, 1032, 1043, 1057, 1059, 1108, 1114, 1115, 1139, 1143, 1154, 1158, 1160, 1165, 1171, 1187, 1193, 1224, 1225, 1236, 1279, 1280, 1281, 1305, 1316, 1320, 1348, 1405 & 1489 & Jaime Villanueva, Viage Literario a las Iglesias de España tomo VII: viage a la iglesia de Vique. Año 1806 (Valencia 1821), ap. XIII.
3. Badeleu appears in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 692, 881, 884, 939, 1021, 1109, 1156, 1164, 1181, 1183, 1223, 1225, 1267, 1270, 1278, 1286, 1297, 1299, 1335, 1346, 1360, 1401, 1422, 1432, 1448, 1456, 1487, 1514, 1516, 1527, 1544, 1551, 1554, 1603, 1604, 1701, 1702, 1713, 1750, 1777, 1814, 1840 & 1864 & Villanueva, Viage Literario VII, ap. XIII and at least one other document, his entry to the monastery, mentioned but not cited in Jordi Bolòs & Victor Hurtado, Atles del Comtat de Manresa (798-993) (Barcelona 2004), which I don’t have to consult right now and thus can’t give a page number from, sorry, making me just as bad as them…
4. The most recent version of this story is told in Francesc Junyent i Mayou, Alexandre Mazcuñan i Boix, Albert Benet i Clarà, Joan-Andreu Adell i Gisbert, Jordi Vigué i Viñas & Xavier Barral i Altet, “Sant Benet de Bages” in Vigué (ed.), Catalunya Romànica XI: el Bages, ed. Antoni Pladevall (Barcelona n. d.), pp. 408-438.
5. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 543.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
I am with you on that. My hope – and work – is to try to show that locating groups of people, not only individuals, can make a difference. In other words, maybe trying to solve a bigger problem we could find a better solution! :)
Well, in general I absolutely agree with you there as you know: one of the things that is distinctive about people in charter records is their associations, and it’s also what interests me from a research point of view. But in this case the few attempts I made at this didn’t get me very far: they all turn up together! I’m not sure how many people called Adroer there are in these documents, but it’s at least three, and they all appear with at least two of the other maybe-monks… Manresa must have been a busy little city in the late-tenth century!
The problem in working with groups in charters is that it’s very, very easy to end up with circular reasoning. For example, you have two charters, one of which is witnessed by Allen, Bob and Charles, and the other by Charles, Alan and Bob. It’s all too easy to conclude that Alan and Allen are the same person (because they appear together in documents with Bob and Charles) and then argue later that Alan/Allen, Bob and Charles form a group because they often witness together. If you’re going to study groups in charters you need a way to locate them that isn’t dependent on first identifying the people within them. That’s where I think some clever computer work can come in at the name level.
In one sense, any charter C1 can be considered as a set of personal names (N1, N2, N3…), plus a place of redaction (possibly unknown or uncertain) and a date of production (possibly also unknown or uncertain). And you can use something like Nomen et gens or Repertori D’Antropònims Catalans to produce standardised forms of each name in the set. (I suspect Joan has already got most of this information potentially available in his marked-up charters).
What you can then do is have a computer program compare the set of names in each charter and output pairs of charters which have more than a certain threshold of names in common. (You’d need beforehand to exclude any charters which include an anomalously large set of names, like Abbess Emma’s monster).
So you know after that, for example, that charter C1 and C2 have 6 names in common, a potential group G1. At this point, you’d probably need to check (either manually or via the computer, depending on how stable the data is) that C1 and C2 are sufficiently near in date and place of production to make such a name-group plausibly also a person-group (i.e. that C1 doesn’t come from Barcelona in 890 and C2 from Pallars in 970). You take the name-groups you’ve got left after that winnowing out and then use a computer program to check for each of the charters how many of the names in this group appear in that charter. If you get a substantial number of charters in which 4 or more of the same names recur, you’ve then got good grounds for thinking that you’ve got a group, before you’ve had to identify names as belonging to particular people.
At that point, you probably need to go back to traditional historical methods and see whether these names plausibly map onto individuals who might form a group in real life, but you’ve eliminated one source of bias and probably also found potential groups that you wouldn’t have spotted with the human eye. I think locating multiple names that co-occur in charters is one of those things that human minds just naturally aren’t good at, both because of limited working memory and because the difficulty of comparing names in charters increases as the square of the number of charters, not linearly.
Ah, now Joan and I have both been thinking along these lines for a while, though Joan’s actually put time and code behind it and I’ve just put references to earlier attempts his way. Barbara Rosenwein’s work on the Cluny documents in Neighbor of Saint Peter rested on just such a program developed at Münster in in the 1970s, and my database makes an attempt at least to display groups that may contain such groups. So you have a small crowd of conversi here for what is nonetheless an excellent sermon…
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