From the Sources IX: a network of dowagers

I can’t now remember what it was I read or remembered that made me suddenly remember this document and decide to put it before you, but it may even have been writing the Widow Warlords post of a while back. Of course, when I actually dug up the charter in question it turned out to be slightly different from what I remembered, but there’s still so many points one can make with it that it seemed more than worth translating. So, this is the first will of Viscountess Adelaide of Narbonne, dated 4th October 978.¹ (I don’t have a decent source to pin down the place-names, however, so most of them I leave in the Latin.)

“In the name of the Holy and Individual Trinity. Any man whatsoever, while he persists in this mortal pilgrimage, ought to raise his eyes up on high to the contemplation of the divine majesty, so that when he shall come to judgement, he shall be found justified. On account of which I in God’s name Adelaide, as I am exceedingly terrified of this day, order to be made [a document] in which I choose my executors [‘alms-givers’] so that, whatever they shall know of my will, that may they carry out. These are their names: Archbishop Ermengaud, & Raimond, & Vasadello, Seniorello, Bernard, Adalbert, Sigard de Petrulio.

Sadly the nunnery of Saint-Sauveur, entitled to the lion’s share of the properties listed below, doesn’t appear ever to have got finished… The lucky beneficiary would therefore have been this place, the Cathedral of Saints Just et Pastor, Narbonne, or at least its predecessor. By Benh LIEU SONG (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

“That holy work which I have begun outside [‘below’] Narbonne, to be built in honour of omnipotent God and the Holy Saviour, I leave to my sisters and to the lady Countess Arsinda, in such a tenor that my selfsame heredity of Vidiliano may revert to my sister Arsinda, and the selfsame alod of Tolomiano may revert to Ermessinda, and my heredity of Artimiciano may revert to Garsinda, and let them also hold these and possess them while they shall live; and if they bring the holy convent to completion, let the aforesaid alods all together revert thither in all integrity; & if they do not complete the aforesaid convent, after the death of Arsinda, let the selfsame heredity Vidiliano revert to the canons of SS Just & Pastor [Narbonne] in common; & the selfsame heredity of Artimiliano, after the death of Garsinda, revert in a similar way to the canons of Saint-Paul [Narbonne]; the selfsame alod of Tolomiano revert between Notre-Dame which they call la Grasse and Saint-Pierre which they call Caunes. The selfsame alod of Trolias with the selfsame part that I have in the same church, let revert to the monastery of Saint-Aniane. The selfsame alod of the villa of Boraxo let revert to the monastery of Saint-Pons [de Thomières], except the selfsame tower; let Aurice hold the selfsame tower with its manses that are tied to it while he shall live; afterwards indeed let it revert to the selfsame monastery of Saint-Pons. The villa of Bajas with its term, let Guadaud hold while he shall live, except those vineyards that others plant there; & when the convent of Saint-Sauveur shall have been made, after Guadaud’s death let it revert thither in all integrity; and if the convent shall not have been made, let revert those vines which come to my part in that villa to the guardian and keyholder of Saint-Paul who keeps the altar there; that villa with all its other heredity let revert in common to the canons of Saint-Paul. The selfsame alod that I have in the villa of Geminiano, which was Person’s and Daniel’s, and the selfsame vines that were Godrand’s, let hold the priest Dieudé while he shall live; afterwards indeed let it revert to the church of Sainte-Marie which they call Quadraginta. The selfsame alod that I bought from Bishop Arnulf in the term of Oveliano, with that same one of Taliaventos, let that now revert to the canonry of Saints Just & Pastor. The selfsame manse of Florenzac, which was Saint-Étienne’s, let revert to that same church. That alod which I have in the circuit of the castle of Saint-Martin, let revert to the monastery of Saint-Laurent. The selfsame alod of Cananiello let hold Golfred while he shall live; after his death let it revert, with the church of Sainte-Marie which they call Quart, to the monastery of Saint-Sauveur [Aniane]. That suburban settlement [burgus] which I bought from the woman Ebbo, let hold Hugues and Alulf while they shall live; afterwards let it revert to Saint-Paul, & let Saint-Paul hold among its possessions just as much the selfsame manse where the priest Nectar lives. The selfsame vines of Cesasinano, which Bon Vassal [or ‘a good vassal’] pledged to me, let revert to Umbert, as long as he redeems them from Bon Vassal. The selfsame manse of Aquaviva, which is in Lézat, let revert to Saint-Nazaire the see of Béziers. The selfsame manse within Narbonne which I bought from Saint-Pons, let revert to it.

The other major beneficiary, or at least the church that now stands on that site with a much more developed saint’s cult, Saint-Paul-Serge de Narbonne. Par GO69 (Travail personnel) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

“I also [wish that] this mercy and alms which I make on account of love for the highest eternal King, may be for the remedy of [my] soul, so that I may be able to avoid the punishment of [my] collected [sins], & attain to eternal happiness, and by His mercy the Creator may ignore the collected evils which I have done from the day of my birth until now, and at the same time the lord my man Matfred and my parents may provide for themselves a common mercy therein, and all my kinsmen and relatives, and all the faithful departed. The selfsame alod that I have between Biarum and Syronis, let revert to my son Ermengaud, and the selfsame church of Ductos which they call Sainte-Marie, with its parish, let revert to that same man. The villa Columbaria with its church of Saint-Pierre let revert to my son Raimond. The selfsame gold cups let revert to Ermengaud, and let him give fifty solidi for them to the canons of SS Just & Pastor which they may spend in common, & to the canons of Saint-Paul similarly 50 solidi, and to Saint-Nazaire the see of Carcassonne 50 solidi, & to Saint-Nazaire the see of Béziers 50 solidi. To Raimond let revert one silver chain, & two candelabra of silver, one with rolls and a belt, one with gold cublismonario [?], & let him give for those 50 solidi to Saint-Pons, & to Saint-Aniane 50 solidi.

Digs going on at another place that did all right from Adelaide, not the Saint-Sauveur she wished to build but that of Aniane, again in much later form

“Of the collected harvest of the vine and corn that I have in Florenzac, let the selfsame half revert to Ermengaud, of the other half the selfsame third to Saint-Thibéry [Agde]; the other two to Saint-Sauveur d’Aniane. Similarly of the harvest that I have in Nebozianense, let the selfsame half revert to Ermengaud, the other half let revert between the selfsame monks of Vabre and the monks of Joncelles. Of the harvest of Pociolo, & Urbanio, & Cavorras, let three parts be made; let one part be given to Saint-Michel de Galiaco, the other to Saint-Sauveur, & the other to Saint-Cecilia. If our convent shall have been completed, let revert thither my horses; if not, however, let 4 of them revert to Ermengaud, with the selfsame 2 mules, & 4 horses to Raimond. Of the other horses let three parts be made; one part let revert to the canonry of Saints Just & Pastor, another to the canons of Saint-Paul, the other to Saint-Aniane. Of the harvest of Villamagna, let half revert between Ermengaud and Raimond, of the other half let one third revert to Saint-Sauveur, the other two to Saint-Martin. Of the harvest of Vallemagnensis, & Caucenogilo, & Cogiano, let the selfsame half revert to Raimond; let them distribute the other half among churches and the poor. Of the harvest of Narbonne let revert half to the convent being built there; & if, God permitting, it shall have been constructed, I ask that my daughter may be abbess there, & to the selfsame woman let revert my jewellery, with the selfsame mancuses and golden things: the other half of the harvest let revert to Raimond. Let them make Archiberga & Adalberga & Belhomme & Aldeguer free and let each one of them be given five solidi. Of the chalice and offertory and 2 patens let the lord Ermengaud order one chalice to be made, & let him give it with the paten that Belhomme has to Saint-Paul. Let the cattle of Abuniano revert to the convent we are building. Let the cattle of Matucino along with all my swine revert to Ermengaud & Raimond, & let my aforesaid executors make a grand banquet of them. Of the substance they may have in their ministry, let them have for their work 20 solidatas, & afterwards whatever they may be able to find of my substance, let them faithfully divide it among churches and the poor, for the remedy of my soul; let them receive from me by God such a reward as the mercy for me for which they may implore Him.

I’m pretty sure that this chalice and paten are later medieval than is relevant for this post but they are firstly French and secondly absolutely gorgeous [edit: and, as it turns out, rather earlier than I thought, see comments…].

“This testament done the 4th Nones of October, in the 24th year of the reign of King Lothar. Signed Adelaide, who ordered this testament to be made and signed and asked to sign. Sig+ned Aldo, who is called Baroncel. Sig+ned Arlabaud. Sig+ned Guadaud. Sig+ned Isimbert. Sig+ned Ramnulf. Dieudé, notary, wrote these words.”

There’s obviously loads one could say with this document, especially if you do more than skim it as I guess you mostly just did. The particular bigger point that made me choose this one needs other information, so I’ll go into that last but meanwhile there are three things apparent just from this that are worth highlighting.

1. Firstly, Adelaide comes over here as a patron of her city in a quite late Antique style. Most of the bequests favour either the cathedral (SS Just & Pastor) or the archbishops’ other church, St-Paul, with the little-known city monastery of St-Aniane coming in a reasonable third, and there’s also a clear expectation that it will be easy to sell things as needed, suggesting a ready market and in general an urban milieu. To me this looks different from my pet counts on the other side of the Pyrenees, except maybe the count-bishop Miró Bonfill’s investment in Besalú, but is that in fact because they have to rule differently? As an elderly city-based viscountess, her options to travel widely may have been limited compared to their more itinerant and military power.
2. Secondly, the main impression this will gives is that Adelaide had a lot of stuff and was managing it quite closely, with known persons in charge of almost every bit of it and produce and livestock counted to nearly the head (the horses at least). But actually these things are relative: she bequeathed property in eighteen places, about three hundred and fifty solidi‘s worth of treasure and money, an unknown quantity of cows and pigs but apparently no more than one banquest would demolish and at least eleven and probably at least fourteen horses, the last being impressive because horses were almost all war animals at this time. That seems a lot but isn’t out of the realm of possibility for a major castellan in my Catalan documents, and Adelaide is an apparently sovereign viscountess. It is at least clear that there was more in the tank, as she was bequeathing produce from eight different estates here and only one of the actual estates is itself bequeathed, had you noticed? And in fact she also made a later will in which she bequeathed an almost entirely different set of properties, including the actual honor of the viscounty, which went to son Raimond.² All the same, she doesn’t seem to have been in the top flight despite her position.
3. The third thought is a similar one: there isn’t much hierarchy visible here, is there? One of these people holds a tower; otherwise, she, her late husband and the archbishop are the only obvious aristocrats here. There is no count, fine, but where are the castellans? Not appearing in this film, it would seem. Her six executors and five witnesses are quite possibly military men, someone must be riding those horses she has, but again there’s not a lot here to distinguish her from a rich castellan herself. Was there anyone holding office from her, we might wonder? If so she doesn’t say so. If we hark back to Jeffrey Bowman’s five qualities of female aristocratic power, it’s not clear that Adelaide had very many of them.³

But the gender angle is important, and it’s what initially made me notice this document. It’s not just that Viscountess Adelaide was herself a woman in power, her world contained many other women. Although her daughters don’t seem to merit naming, unlike her sons, one of them at least was hopefully to be an abbess, and her sisters were to support the building of the nunnery, not any male relatives. The figure who interests me most here is the countess, however. Did you notice her? It would be easy not to, since she doesn’t apparently get any property, but nonetheless she is there, Countess Arsinda of Carcassonne, helping out with the nunnery by uncertain means. I can’t help feel that it’s significant that she bears the same name as one of Adelaide’s sisters, too. The female namestock round here was restricted, as we know—this is after all another post about a woman called Adelaide—but these two reasons to believe some kind of connection do support each other.

A common focus of interest… The modern settlement of Saint-Pons de Thomières, which in the days of Viscountess Adelaide and Countess Garsinda was probably not much more than a new monastery. By Fagairolles 34 (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway, when I first read this document I couldn’t help but notice the countess, because this was the sixth time she’d turned up in the relevant documentary collection.⁴ Nor is she by any means the only countess or viscountess appearing with such frequency. That collection was selective, but unless the Benedictines who put it together had a real thing for women in office there is something going on here. Furthermore, as this document shows, they were not women apart, but seem largely to have known each other. Here we see Viscountess Adelaide of Narbonne relying in part on her comital neighbour Arsendis; that’s the only connection between those two this anthology shows us, but Adelaide also shows up twice with Countess Garsinda of Toulouse, who also spent some time as a dowager ruler; the first time they concur they were both giving to Saint-Pons de Thomières, as did Adelaide again in her will, and the second time is Garsinda‘s will, in which Adelaide was the largest immediate beneficiary.⁵ Since Garsinda’s appearances here otherwise are pretty much only to do with Saint-Pons, which was clearly a concern of hers, and that’s presumably what governed the editors’ selection from documents otherwise now largely lost, we’re seeing just once here a connection that obviously meant more to both of these women, as did that between Adelaide and Arsendis to them for all that we only get a flash of it. I’m pretty sure more could be done to reconstitute these networks, which were probably largely constituted by marriages, but the picture I was already left with was a half-century or so of the French Midi in which a number of ageing women organised several aspects of society more or less in cooperation with each other, having got used to government with their husbands and seeing no immediate need as yet to hand over to their sons. Unlike some of the other cases we’ve looked at here of female power, there is something here that looks usual as well as frequent, and I wanted to bring it to wider attention.

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1. Claude Devic & Jean Vaissete, Histoire Générale de Languedoc avec les Notes et les Pièces Justificatives. Édition accompagnée de dissertations et actes nouvelles, contenant le recueil des inscriptions de la province antiques et du moyen âge, des planches, des cartes géographiques et des vues des monuments, rev. Émile Mabille, Edward Barry, Ernest Roschach & Auguste Molinier & ed. M. E. Dulaurier, Vol. V (Toulouse 1872, repr. Osnabrück 1973), online here, Preuves : chartes et diplômes no. 130. It being online, I won’t type out the Latin for once; you can check, after all.

2. Ibid. doc. no. 151.

3. I’ve just linked to where I reference this paper, but because it could hardly be more relevant I’ll cite it here too: Jeffrey A. Bowman, “Countesses in court: elite women, creativity, and power in northern Iberia, 900–1200” in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (London 2014), pp. 54-70, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.883084. This post here is of course about the milieu in which almost all his example women grew up…

4. She occurs in Devic & Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc Vol. V, Preuves : chartes et diplômes nos 79, 89, 103, 104.4, 104.6 & 130, which as per the nature of the collection are from several different archives any of which might show her up some more.

5. Ibid. nos 125 & 126 respectively; presumably Garsinda’s earlier arrangements were timore mortis ones.

Seminar CC: Old English administration after the Norman Conquest

Moving now toward the end of March 2014 in the seminar report backlog, on the 26th of that month I was back in London for the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, because Professor Julia Crick was speaking. My work crosses very little with Professor Crick’s but despite this she has made a point of remembering who I am, I was still teaching Anglo-Saxon stuff at this point even if from much earlier and, after all, when one sees a paper title like “Who Were the Writers and Readers of Administrative English in the Century after the Norman Conquest?” it implies that there might be an answer and I wanted to know what it was. This was not least because, as Professor Crick made clear at the outset, the answer has until quite recently been basically negative: there were effectively none after about 1070, when central government switched from Old English to Latin for its writing. She exemplified this point of view with three quotes, one of which I’ll re-use:

“After the Norman Conquest the use of English for official, civil and ecclesiastical purposes was generally abandoned in favour of French and Latin, and the status of English as a literary language rapidly declined. Consequently, works from the twelfth century composed in English are exceedingly rare.”¹

But the trouble with this statement is that increasingly it looks untrue. Palæographical and prosopographical work, including computer-aided work in both cases and much of that, I have to give them their due sometimes, from KCL’s Department of Digital Humanities, has identified more than a thousand scribes writing in Old English at some time in the eleventh century, by no means all of them in the first half, and several new Old English texts from both eleventh and twelfth centuries.² What has been counted so far has largely been literary or homilectical (preaching) work, however, and Professor Crick was interested in those bits of this corpus that could be called administrative, glosses in working texts, memoranda, notes and occasional property records. We don’t, in fact, know who most of these writers were, but by their works we can know them at least a little bit.

An obvious, if early, example of the kind of marginal writing we’re talking about, the so-called Ely Farming Memoranda, British Library Additional MS 61735, complete with bonus portrait of Christ.

Saying anything useful about the quantity of this is quite tricky, because it’s one of these things like powerful medieval women where there’s quite a lot of it but proportionally to the rest it’s still negligible (the last fact, I have to say, only becoming clear in questions). It was widespread but rare, common but unusual and these other paradoxes that dog the study of marginal behaviours in the Middle Ages (er, no pun intended). One thing it does show, however, as Professor Crick pointed out, is that the idea that written Old English entered an immediate and terminal decline as soon as the Normans took over has to be abandoned; whatever it was being used for, that didn’t stop till the twelfth century. Perhaps we should have known this: the scribes who put together the legal assemblage known as the Textus Roffensis could copy and translate Old English quite happily and, as Professor Crick pointed out, there is only one twelfth-century cartulary which doesn’t contain any Old English, even if the main text and business is in Latin in all of them.³

Fo. 59r of the twelfth-century portion of the Cartulary and Register of Evesham, London, British Library, MS Harley 3763, with glosses at top right that could be in Old English? They’re so abbreviated I find it hard to tell, but I can’t easily read the abbreviations as Latin…

So what was keeping this going, when the centre was no longer interested in Old English administration? Professor Crick suggested that it might have been the use of the vernacular in court, when witness testimony was required to confirm boundaries, when oaths were made or writs and so forth were read out, when presumably after the switch to Latin they were translated. This would not be at the royal courts, but at hundred and shire courts. This would, Professor Crick argued, keep the language in use at a legal, and thus sort of official, language, though Susan Reynolds contended in questions that the hundred and shire courts were assemblies, not law courts, so not quite that kind of officialdom.⁴ I don’t think that would stop this being important, however.

Closing page of the canon tables from the St Petroc or Bodmin Gospels, London, British Library Additional MS 9381, fo. 13r., with a manumission record (in Latin, but it’s a good image) distributed between the leftover spaces.

More debated, perhaps, were the suggestions Professor Crick made based on her observation that quite a lot of this Old English extranea is to be found in Gospel Books. She thought that this might be partly down to the better preservation of Gospel Books than estate archives, but that it still needed accounting for. The problem I saw, and raised in questions, is that it is by no means just an English practice or a post-1066 one to write documents and administrivia in Gospel books, not even in the vernacular: the earliest written Scots Gaelic is in the Book of Deer, the earliest written Welsh is supposedly that in the Lichfield Gospels that I’d seen earlier that month, we could add Bavarian examples of Old High German too…⁵ To this Professor Crick answered that the Old English examples are largely in books much older than the writing, so it is obviously new to the English, but that, while true and something I’d never noticed, still needs some explanation, I thought. Professor Crick also saw the Gospel books as repositories for oaths and similar because those oaths would have been sworn on altars, where the Gospels were kept, so it made sense as a way to immortalise testimony (and perhaps new precisely because the change of language at law had removed whatever previous process for this had been employed, I might subversively suggest). Professor Crick saw here a tension between legal practice, conducted in the vernacular, and the liturgy with which these books and ‘Scripture’ more generally were associated, definitively in Latin, but Chris Lewis suggested that there was probably more cross-over of capability here than we might expect. What there isn’t, at least—Stephen Baxter asked and was answered—is any sign of written French in such contexts: whatever was going on here was at least a way of involving the natives, not the incomers. My sense here is, therefore, that Professor Crick has pointed out something large, variegated and potentially quite revealing and informative, but that characterising and explaining it is going to be a work in progress for quite a while still.⁶

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1. Patrick P. O’Neill, “The English version” in Margaret T. Gibson, T. A. Heslop & Richard W. Pfaff (edd.), The Eadwine Psalter: texts, image and monastic culture in twelfth-century Canterbury (London 1992), pp. 123-138 at p. 136.

2. Here was cited Peter A. Stokes, “The problem of Grade in English Vernacular Minuscule, c. 1060-1220″ in Elaine Treharne, Orietta Da Rold & Mary Swan (edd.), Producing and Using English Manuscripts in the Post-Conquest Period, New Medieval Literatures Vol. 13 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 23-47.

3. The stock reference for Old English in manuscripts, so stock it’s not even in Professor Crick’s otherwise comprhensive handout, is Neil R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (Oxford 1960), which is obviously the survey from which the negative picture with which the audience began largely comes but still might be all right for the cartularies. We now have to add to it, however, David A. E. Pelteret, Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge 1990), but as he himself freely acknowledged in questions, this is no longer adequate to cover the sample, and Donald Scragg, A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960-1100 (Cambridge 2012) is where most of the evidence presented in this paper could ultimately be found.

4. I would still tend to refer to Henry R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 500-1087 (London 1984), but I should probably cite something more modern like John Hudson, “Order and Justice” in Julia Crick & Elisabeth van Houts (edd.), A Social History of England 900-1200 (Cambridge 2011), pp. 115-123; also probably worth mentioning in this connection are Elaine Treharne, “Textual Communities (vernacular)” and Julia Crick, “Learning and Training”, ibid. pp. 341-349 & 352-372.

5. Arkady Hodge, “When Is a Charter Not a Charter? Documents in Non-Conventional Contexts in Early Medieval Europe” in Jonathan Jarrett & Allan Scott McKinley (edd.), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, International Medieval Research 19 (Turnhout 2013), pp. 127-149, DOI:  10.1484/M.IMR-EB.1.101680.

6. Other references that seem worth emphasising from the handout are Mark Faulkner, “Archaism, Belatedness and Modernisation: ‘Old’ English in the twelfth century” in Review of English Studies New Series Vol. 63 (Oxford 2012), pp. 179-203; Kathryn A. Lowe, “Post-Conquest Bilingual Composition in Memoranda from Bury St Edmunds” ibid. 59 (2007), pp. 52-66; and Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: the politics of early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford 2012), and not from the handout, Julia Crick, “The Art of Writing: scripts and scribal production” in Clare A. Lees (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (Cambridge 2013), pp. 50-72.

Managing without an archive in c. 1000 Barcelona

There’s a story I’m fond of and that I’ve told you here before, in which a woman came to the court of Marquis Ramon Borrell of Barcelona in 1005 claiming that the monks of Sant Cugat del Vallès were moving in on her land.¹ There’s all kinds of strange things going on in the background of this case, and I do urge you to read the older post, but the bit that interests me on this occasion is the basis on which the plaintiff lost her land, which is that Ramon Borrell and his tame judge decided that the land was in fact the count’s, by virtue of having recently been wasteland, “just as other waste lands belong to the right of the prince”.² It’s a pretty mean claim given that most people got to hold onto lands they’d cleared, and if the monastery hadn’t also had a claim I doubt very much this bit of casuistry would have been perpetrated upon her. When I’ve looked at this case before, therefore, I’ve either seen it as an instance of the importance of back-story in this legal environment when one was fixing a verdict, or else as an instance of the fact that these rights the counts were claiming over waste lands were not in fact regular and were probably therefore new, which bears heavily on the theory that this was an ancient and long-respected right of the public power.³ Y’see, it’s a very rich case. But what I want to focus on today is the appearance that the document gives that the count didn’t realise, until the problem arose, that this could be claimed as his land. Up till now I have always figured this was simple exigency, that ordinarily he’d never have pressed such a claim unless it was of immediate political use, and I would still think that if what I was reading when I wrote this hadn’t just presented me with another case.⁴

Cover of Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013), which is what I had in fact been reading when this post got written

This one’s from 1013, and it’s Ramon Borrell again, at court with his good lady wife when a delegation arrived from a placee called Villalba near Cardedeu, complaining that the count had some time ago been persuaded by one Rigoald to sell him a meadow next-door to Villalba in what the document has the count call “an innocent and unreflexive manner”, and that Rigoald and his wife and son had started making encroachments into the villagers’ common land.⁵ Rigoald now being dead, the villagers dared at last come to the count, and he and Countess Ermessenda apparently called the widow and son, Quixol and Ramon, to court, had their charter examined and found it, “made in a fraudulent and deceptive manner, alien to right and to all justice.” Therefore the charter was destroyed in court, and Quixol and Ramon fined thirty sheep, which by a coincidence is exactly what the villagers gave the count in gratitude for the justice he had done them.

It turns out in searching that Cardedéu has a rather nice Romanesque chapel sitting in its midst, so although I can’t make any direct connection between it and the post I think it will do for illustration anyway don’t you? I’m so glad. By Miquel vico (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s hard to see how anyone but the count and countess won here. Quixol and Ramon presumably felt they were secure enough with their charter, even if they had maybe overstepped its bounds; instead they lost all title to their lands, and what happened to them is not clear, and they lost thirty sheep as well, while the villagers had to pay the same just to get what they had argued was rightfully theirs. What good sixty sheep did the count and countess of Barcelona is less easy to see, but it is reasonably clear, as Josep María Salrach says in his discussion of this case, that Ramon Borrell got a considerable height of moral high ground, defending the loyal peasantry against oppressors even when those oppressors were in fact himself, correctly broadcasting an adherence to right over advantage, even if that right was best paid for. I’m more interested in the thread that seems to me to tie these two cases together, however, which is that Ramon Borrell apparently had only the sketchiest idea of what property he actually controlled.

This isn’t from the comital archive, but it is a charter of Ramon Borrell, with Ermessenda, Arxiu Fidel Fita d’Arenys de Mar, Mas Gelat de Santa Susanna, Mas Bellvehí de Vidreres, 91.0.1 of 1001. Their signatures, done by the scribe I think, are dead centre of the last full line of text.

In some senses this may not surprise anyone who’s spent much time with the documents from this area, because one of the noticeable things about them is the scale of comital property, which is, tiny and widespread. It is at least arguable that the counts held some really big estates and, because they kept them, we have no transaction evidence in which to see them—there’s a huge complex at Palau de Gurb that we only ever see because it was slowly and reluctantly given to Santa Maria de Ripoll, but it would never have got there had it not originally been part of a comital son’s entry-gift, for example⁶—but they certainly also held an immense variety of tiny stuff. There’s almost no castle term in which some comital property doesn’t show up, even if it’s just a couple of meadows or similar, and of course they presumably considered the actual castles theirs in some way, too, but that’s not what I mean. Keeping track of this mess of busy little farms and smallholdings would have been beyond most administrations, and yet on the other hand the reason we know about this land is because people near it knew it was the counts’ and said so when called on to detail property boundaries. We know here not to underestimate the ability of tenth-century lords to take inventories and make lists, I think, so there seems little question that the counts could, just about, have known what they owned. So why does Ramon Borrell seem not to have?

This, on the other hand, is from the comital archive, is in fact Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancilleria, Pergamins Ramon Borrell 2, but is nothing to do with the counts and doesn’t feature the man under whom it’s indexed! Funny old world, archives.

Well, there is one fairly obvious excuse in the form of the sack of Barcelona by a Muslim army in 985.⁷ Lots of documents got lost in that, and because preservation from the Barcelona comital archive is so patchy for the early period, it has been assumed that the counts were among the losers that day.⁸ I’ve always struggled with this, however, because while it is patchy it is very far from non-existent, so either they didn’t lose it all, or some of the documents that later came to the archive were held elsewhere in 985 despite being about comital property, in which case we’re already looking at a rather less centralised administration than the kind of property tracking we’re looking for might have needed.⁹

Besides, it’s not just Ramon Borrell who seems to have had this problem: a remarkable case from the reign of his father Borrell II, which Salrach also explores, shows the same issues coming up. This is a hearing from a place in Manresa called Vallformosa, in 977 so that the “day Barcelona died” can’t yet have affected things.¹⁰ Borrell was presiding over this court, which makes it all the more surprising what happened: his agent summoned the men of Vallformosa (some of whom were women, but fairly few, so probably the communty’s heads of houses) and claimed that their land was comital property because it had been so in the times of Borrell’s father Count Sunyer. The villagers however claimed that no claim had been made on them for more than thirty years, which under the Visigothic Law was the limit of any outstanding property claims, and so the lands were now theirs whatever the past situation might have been. The judge asked Borrell’s man Bonhom if he had any evidence to refute this, he had none, and so he had to make a quitclaim in front of his boss admitting the collapse of the comital claim, and that document then went into the comital archive.

Sant Salvador de Servitge de Vallformosa, which though much modified is possibly the oldest building standing in the village as far as websearching can tell me. Photograph by Antonio Mora Vergés.

Speculation about this has tended to go two ways, and Salrach covers both of them.¹¹ Firstly, it can be seen as proof that the counts could lose, and that they did not have the will or resources always to force a verdict in their favour against determined opposition. Point against this view: why would you have the trail? Bonhom must have known he had no evidence to present, yet he sued the villagers anyway. It would have looked better for his side not to bother. Thus, a second point of view has been that the comital side must have intended to lose, the point being to establish publically the villagers’ rights; that is, that this was what is known in the scholarship of Italy and Germany as a Scheinprozess, a show trial. Point against this view: why must the count lose to do this? Why could he not just grant them a franchise or immunity? These documents were made by others, and indeed by Borrell himself before long, so this seems a very odd way to do it.

So I wonder if in fact they did all know what the outcome must be, or whether in fact no-one was really sure whether Vallformosa’s inhabitants would be able to raise a group of oath-swearers or that Bonhom would not be able to until too close to the trial to call it off. I wonder if, in fact, a trial like this was how both sides settled a question of ownership that beforehand they could not answer. A point for this idea, unlikely though it may seem, and a point against both the other two theories, is that the Vallformosa and Villalba documents survive in the comital archive. What I have called ‘Winner’s preservation’ here before ought to militate against this: why would the counts be keeping records of what they had not been able to claim? These documents ought to have gone to the villagers, so that they could be produced if the matter was ever raised again. The fact that what we have is the counts’ copies suggests to me an archive that barely existed, that was being assembled by chancing this kind of case and filing the results so that if, in the future, someone in Barcelona went, “That place Vallformosa, up north-west of Manresa, that’s ours isn’t it? Bishop says it’s not his…” someone checking would then be able to say, “Ah. No.”

I seem not to have images of anything from the comital archive from before the sack of 985 that doesn’t hail from Sant Joan de les Abadesses, whose stuff got added in later. There are some, all the same, but this is ACA Cancilleria Pergamins Borrell II 63, a Barcelona sale of 992 that, again, doesn’t feature the count and presumably arrived in the comital archive for some other reason

I admit that there is a nastier possibility, that the counts might lose the case but claim the right to keep the record, far away in Barcelona where no-one from Vallformosa could easily get at it. I would have to admit the possibility of that: but a comital administration with that kind of plan surely wouldn’t be as confused about its rights as it in fact seems to have been. I don’t want to let go of my older idea that Borrell and his son were actually trying to push for new rights under old legal cladding, and that what they attempted to get was sometimes unobtainable precisely because no-one had asked before. (This chapter of Salrach’s book is really good at adding texture to this idea, for a start.) However, I do now think that we probably ought to realise that a governmentalising apparatus with all kinds of strategies for power still doesn’t have to have been very good at them or well-equipped to carry them out…

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1. J. Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés vol. II (Barcelona 1946), online here, doc. no. 464.

2. Ibid.: “Propterea iudicatum est in ipso iudicio melius et verius esse hec terra iuris principalis, sicut et cetera spacia heremarum terrarum…”.

3. J. Jarrett, “A Likely Story: narratives in charter material from early medieval Catalonia”, paper presented to the Medieval History Seminar, University of Oxford, 18th October 2010; idem, “Settling the King’s Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320-342, DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-8847.2010.00301.x.

4. Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Refeències 55 (Vic 2013), here pp. 114-118.

5. Gaspar Feliu i Montfort and Josep María Salrach (edd.), Els pergamins de l’arxiu comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I: estudi i edició, Diplomataris 18-20 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 105. I’m working off Salrach’s account cited in the previous note here, which only quotes the document in Catalan translation, but he did edit the thing so I’m guessing it’s OK.

6. 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 419 & 420, show the dissection of the Palau de Gurb estate.

7. On which see 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.

8. Federico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos XVIII (Barcelona 1951), pp. xxxii-xxxiv.

9. Ibid., doc. nos 9, 12, etc.

10. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1229 (or Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. no. 181, because it too is in the comital archive of before).

11. Salrach, Justícia i poder, pp. 109-111.