A Theory under Siege

You may recall that some time ago I recorded that I had been reading David Bachrach’s Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany as part of my ongoing reworking of my paper about military service in tenth-century Catalonia.¹ There are ways in which that was really useful and ways in which we are just talking about different things, but a thing that we both talk about but take quite different views on is the normal size of early medieval armed forces. Now, this is an old controversy, which goes back far beyond this book and involves names like Halsall, Sawyer and not least, Bernard S. Bachrach, and in some ways I would prefer not to get into it, not least as several of these people including Professor Bachrach (the younger) have been known to read this blog, but I can’t avoid it.² I would confine myself to an argument that the situation I see in Catalonia, of guardposts and border-raiding and no serious armies except when an Andalusi one comes calling, is just very different from the full-on imperial warfare of Ottonian Germany, and in the article I expect that I will. But still, there are premises to the large army argument, as set up in this book at least, that I find hard to accept, and this post is an attempt at a critical examination of one of them. Where most openly stated, it goes like this:

“Ottonian military operations were consistent with warfare throughout the medieval millennium, which was dominated by sieges, particularly in the context of campaigns that were intended to conquer territory. Contrary to the long-established narrative that the Ottonian kings fielded small armies of a few hundred to a few thousand heavily armed mounted fighters (Ritterkrieger) led by warrior aristocrats, the siege operations that dominated warfare in the tenth century required very large armies, composed predominantly of foot-soldiers.³

One is, initially at least, left to assume the premises behind this. It’s easy enough to come up with some: walled cities are naturally quite large, and need a lot of defenders to keep a whole perimeter secure. If you’re attacking them, you must need more attackers than defenders, right? As it turns out, in fact, you allegedly need quite a lot more: once you get through to p. 226 you learn that, “in order to storm a strongly held enemy fortress an attacker required four to five men for every defender.” The justification for that, however, is farmed out to an article by Bernard Bachrach and Rutherford Aris.⁴ Now, if you actually get hold of that article, that doesn’t seem to me to be what it says: instead, by virtue of some extremely hypothetical probablity mathematics, it says that a charge by a Viking warband at a typical Anglo-Saxon burh defended by archers of the number implied by the Burghal Hidage (1 to every 1.3 m of wall) would probably have resulted in one to two attackers in every four being hit before they reached the wall.⁵ Even if that mathematics were somehow realistic, it’s quite a specific situation and one calculated on the basis that Vikings attacking a fortress would only have ladders to deploy so needed to make that approach.⁶ I don’t see how it can be transportable to a large-scale military operation with siege engines such as (David) Bachrach thinks the Ottonians were able to mount.⁷ Moreover, it doesn’t actually provide the numbers that he employs, only an implication that if you were to outnumber your opposing force once atop the walls you needed to allow for a fifty per cent casualty rate when planning your attack. That seems like awful odds that no commander would have risked to me, but it’s obviously not what an Ottonian planner would have been facing.

Interior view of the restored Romanesque city walls at Worms, one of the fortress cities Bachrach considers and possibly not too much unlike this in the Ottonian period? CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167751.

But let’s take one step further back. These are figures based on the idea that victory at a siege is achieved by storming and carrying the enemy’s defences, and indeed so is Bachrach’s account of Ottonian warfare against fortifications more generally.⁸ But this is, surely, not the only way. More conventional, if much slower, would be simply to starve the defenders out. Now, in that case, your army requirements drop radically. Whereas before you perhaps had to have men all round the fortification, now you really only need to guard the points of access. Possibly someone could resupply a city by hauling sacks up the walls in the dead of night but not, you might think, in any real quantity, especially if you as attacker are sending patrols around every twenty minutes or so, which I assume you, as a thinking tactician, probably would be. Their supply will still not be equal to their demand. This makes siege warfare a much less demanding effort in terms of numbers; one must still be able to supply the besiegers for a prolonged period of time, but that’s easier if there’s fewer of them needed.

Even more anachronistic, but far too good a picture not to use, an illustration of a (small) siege from the fourteenth-century Codex Manesse

Of course, you still need to have more men than the defenders do, otherwise they could just sortie out and squash your forces. But wait a minute. How many more men than you do they have to have to do that before it would mean leaving the walls partly undefended, giving your troops access to the city and thus losing the war for the sake of a battle? There’s more balance here than might immediately appear, because both sides need their forces at least partly dispersed to hold their positions. The various ways that concentration of force could play out here seem to me to be very hard to calculate with and I’m not at all sure it reduces to any simple arithmetic beyond the basic logic that the more troops whom you can feed you have available, the more tactical options you have. But in a siege situation, that proviso about feeding is quite important, often for both sides.

A different (and more usual?) scale of opponent, crop-marks clearly showing a fortress, supposedly the Slavic fortress of Gana, at Hof-Stauchitz

I should say that I am not, a priori, against the idea that the Ottonians could sometimes field quite large armies, meaning in the double figures of thousands of men, although whether such were necessary for all their campaigns I rather doubt. When they were, though, they had a whole empire to draw upon and Bachrach has here a whole book full of details about how such things might have been organised, resourced, supplied and led which almost make his argument for him; one can reasonably assume that the Ottonians would have wanted to raise large armies and Bachrach shows us how they could have. But he argues it the other way around, from the necessary existence of large armies, through a reading of the sources which illustrates that, to the techniques for their provision and operation, and if these are the starting premises, they seem very shaky to me.

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1. D. S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany (Woodbridge 2012, repr. 2014).

2. In reverse chronological order, more or less, Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900 (London 2003); Bernard S. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization 481-751 (Minneapolis 1972), what I think of as the wellspring of the maximalist argument, and Peter H. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (London 1962, 2nd edn. 1971), which is the place where I first met a sustained attack on the numbers which early medieval sources used for army size. In all these cases, albeit Sawyer least and Bachrach most, references could be proliferated; a lot of Bachrach’s most relevant works are collected in his Warfare and Military Organization in Pre-Crusade Europe, Variorum Collected Studies 720 (Aldershot 2002).

3. D. S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany, p. 1, which is a good place to state your axioms after all.

4. B. S. Bachrach & R. Aris, “Military Technology and Garrison Organization: some observations on Anglo-Saxon military thinking in light of the Burghal Hidage” in Technology and Culture Vol. 31 (Baltimore 1990), pp. 1-17, on JSTOR here, repr. in B. S. Bachrach, Warfare and Military Organization, III, cit. D. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany, p. 226 n. 2. A much fuller version of the argument here is however to be found in B. S. Bachrach & David Bachrach, “Early Saxon Frontier Warfare: Henry I, Otto I and Carolingian Military Institutions” in Journal of Medieval Military History Vol. 10 (Woodbridge 2012), pp. 17-60, which was presumably not available to cite in D. S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany, and would have made that a much longer book to reprise there. I engage with the version in the book here, which I assume to be self-standing.

5. B. S. Bachrach & Aris, “Military Technology”, pp. 5-10 with an appendix for the mathematics pp. 14-18.

6. Ibid., pp. 3-5, on the not unreasonable basis that the Burghal Hidage uses the same ratio for number of defenders required for places with eight-foot thick Roman stone walls (Winchester) and earthen ramparts with wooden palisades (Wareham), so the writers obviously weren’t thinking in terms of attacks actually upon the defences.

7. D. S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany, pp. 151-167, covers Ottonian siege equipment, including ladders but also mantlets, rams, ballistas, catapults and mobile towers, largely by providing detail from Vegetius and anchoring it in less-detailed reports from Ottonian sources.

8. Ibid., pp. 12-13 and repeatedly exemplified in his narrative of Henry I’s and Otto I’s campaigns provided pp. 14-69; see also Bachrach & Bachrach, “Early Saxon Frontier Warfare” for a fuller statement of the position.

A Toppled Castle

This gallery contains 6 photos.

I’m sorry, there’s been more marking, I’m not sure another explanation for the pause is necessary… As a result I continue trotting along about eleven months behind, taking me to April 2015, when I was in the town of Bridgnorth. … Continue reading →

Seminar CCXXXVIII: digital eyes on the Lichfield Gospels

Those who keep track (not something I expect) may remember me posting about a field trip I did in my first year at Birmingham in which I took a small group of budding Anglo-Saxonists to Lichfield Cathedral, whose staff were absolutely marvellous with showing us round and with photographic permissions and so on, and which I thoroughly recommend as a place to visit. You’d have to have an unusually keen eye to have spotted that I borrowed one of the images there, of a page in the Lichfield Gospels or St Chad’s Gospels, from the website of a project run by Dr William Endres, but all the same I did, and so when he came to Birmingham on the 2nd April 2015 to present a paper called “The St Chad Gospels: a rare witness to early Anglo-Saxon England and beyond” to the Centre for West Midlands History Research Seminar, I thought that perhaps I’d better be there.

The Gospels, on display in Lichfield Cathedral, albeit with special access for our 2014 visit

The St Chad’s Gospels have had a complicated history. There were once two volumes of them, made probably in Mercia in the 730s, but the work seems to have been stolen, for which Vikings usually get the blame, because there is a vernacular inscription in the surviving volume by a man by the name of Geili who had bought the two books (possibly still one then) and was now giving them to the Welsh cathedral of Llandeilo Fawr. This inscription means that among its other distinctions, the volume contains the earliest written Welsh. By the tenth century it was back in Lichfield, because Bishop Wynsige of that city 963-975 has signed it, and both volumes were still there in 1345, but by the time of the English Civil War (which the manuscript survived in hiding) there was only the current one, which has been safe in the cathedral since 1673. And since 2009 Dr Endres has been digitising it.¹

Screen capture of Reflective Transformation Imagery picture of the Welsh note in the Gospels, which is, I should say, Lichfield Cathedral MS 1, fo. 71r.

You may think that project is taking a long time even for one man, but the truth is that by now he has digitised it several times. In fact, he told us, he has photographed each page in 13 different spectra, all of which his website allows you to display either overlaid or singly, sliding from one to another. This is very helpful for tracking colour change and deterioration, of which there is thankfully little. Dr Endres has also added historical photographs of the Gospels from two old sets from 1887 and 1969, so there is a long-term check of some kind built in. But he has also started doing 3D photography of the pages, with pictures overlaid for which the lighting was set at different angles, allowing a kind of artificial tilting of the page under the light. I’d seen this done before but it’s always impressive, and in particular it had allowed Dr Endres to detect erasures and marks made by pens without ink, including dry-point glosses, which were mostly personal names, including those of three women in the margin of the magnificat of the Virgin Mary. That looks like selection, but the custom as a whole is hard to explain: why did people get to write their names invisibly in an old Bible? Dr Endres’s suggestion was that the names were meant to be read in Heaven, and I don’t have a better idea, I have to admit.

3D visualisation of fo. 113v, swung so as to make visible the dry-point name at bottom centre near the marker

For me this was the most exciting part of the paper, as a lot of the rest was either about the philosophy of digitisation or was context to situate this Gospel Book in the context of others like the Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels, of which more people have heard, and that was not so new to me.² There was also more hypothetical stuff about the volume’s history and use. Some of the suggestions in my notes are quite high-flying, and I would particularly like to have got a reference for the half-joking one that it shows that St Augustine invented peacock jerky. Unfortunately, for reasons I now forget, I couldn’t stay for questions, but it was still nice to hear about this project, which I’d seen one side of on the web, from the inside, and I was able to express genuine pleasure to have been there to Dr Endres when I subsequently met him later in the year. It’s possible to look at this manuscript in great detail on the web at varying degrees of intensity, and it’s all been done on relatively little money. Once again we see how the lone interested person can often achieve nearly as much as a massive multi-institution project for a fraction of the cost, and wonder why there aren’t more projects like this one!

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1. Jennifer Howard, “21st-Century Imaging Helps Scholars Reveal Rare 8th-Century Manuscript” in Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5 2010; William Endres, “More than Meets the Eye: Going 3D with an Early Medieval Manuscript” in Clare Mills, Michael Pidd & Esther Ward (edd.), Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012 (Sheffield 2014), online here; Bill Endres, “Imaging Sacred Artifacts: Ethics and the Digitizing of Lichfield Cathedral’s St Chad Gospels” in Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture Vol. 3 (Stockholm 2014), pp. 39-73, online here.

2. On which see most obviously George Henderson, From Durrow to Kells: the Insular Gospel-Books 650–800 (London 1987).

Seminar CCXXXVII: East-West links in the ninth-century Mediterranean

I write this while waiting for two captured lectures finally to save my edits and be available for my doubtless-eager students, and this may take a while, so what better way to while away the time than to go back nearly a year—ouch—and report on a seminar from back in Birmingham, on 26th March 2015, when Dr Federico Montinaro spoke to the General Seminar of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies with the title “The Photian Schism (858-880): towards a cultural history”. Now, I suspect that only the most erudite of my readership will immediately be responding, “Ah yes, the Photian Schism, I know it well”, so perhaps it’s best to start with a basic chronology as Dr Montinaro presented it. The events were:

• 858: For reasons we didn’t cover, Emperor Michael III deposed Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople, and replaced him with a layman called Photius; Ignatius went into exile.
• 867: Patriarch Photius excommunicated Pope Nicholas I, of whom we have spoken here before, over a range of ‘errors of the Latins’ which he found intolerable, as well as the papacy’s interference in the Balkans, which Byzantium considered its ecclesiastical territory.
• Still 867: Michael III was succeeded by Basil I, who immediately deposed Photius and recalled and reinstated Ignatius.
• 870: a council was held in Constantinople over the East-West division, attended by representatives from the West (in particular the Greek-speaking historian and scholar Anastasius the Librarian), but didn’t really resolve much.
• 871: meanwhile, a joint campaign by the Carolingian Emperor Louis II and Basil’s forces in Southern Italy had gone so badly that there was a falling-out there too, in which the legitimacy of Louis’s imperial title was called into question.
• 877: Patriarch Ignatius died, and perhaps because the West was no longer in his good books, or perhaps because of local pressure, Basil reinstated Photius.
• 879×80: Pope John VIII, anxious to rebuild bridges, confirmed Rome’s recognition of Photius’s election.

And thus ends the Schism, although by no means the difficulties between the new Western and old Eastern empires and their two patriarchal bishops.¹ Now, Dr Montinaro’s quite short paper aimed to convince his audience that the extensive back and forth of embassies, letters, abuse and diplomacy actually brought the West and the East closer together during this period, increasing contact and familiarity at the highest levels. The dispute is certainly one of the few episodes involving both the West and Byzantium which we can usefully study with sources from both sides, not least the Historia Tripartita of the category-defying Anastasius, and if one does so (as Dr Montinaro has) the level of information the two sides had about each other does seem quite high; there were what seem to be quick reactions from one side to domestic controversies going on on the other, and theologians busy in both courts coming up with lists of the other side’s errors or defences of their own practices, all of which must have required some starting knowledge.² Nor was this traffic all one-way; this is also the sort of time that the Greeks started to use a minuscule book-script such as the Carolingians had invented for Latin, and manuscript preservation in the Greek area also begins to climb in this general period. So Dr Montinaro closed with a plea that we should expect, and look for, more influences between East and West than is usually imagined.

A tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad in Greek minuscule, not to me looking very much like a case of Carolingian influence but the minuscule script itself is the novelty, I understand… This is Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822.

That conclusion seems perfectly admirable to me, but some of the steps to it are not things I would personally tread on, because correlation does not equal causation. Certainly, if one compares this situation to the arguments over images of God in the time of Charlemagne and the Isaurian emperors, it is clear that whereas Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, commissioned to write the Carolingian response to that problem, seems not to have had a clear idea of what the Byzantine positions actually were and the Byzantines paid no attention to the Carolingian theology of images at all, by the time of Photius the bandwidth of intellectual communication was clearly much higher.³ But several things then seem to partway explain that: by the 860s, the Carolingians were no longer a new dynasty and had Greek-reading theologians at some of their courts, and in any case, most of the interactions in this scenario were with the Carolingians and the pope in Italy, where contact with Byzantium had been continuous and regular in a way that Charlemagne could not have managed even if he’d wanted to from north of the Alps.⁴

Photius himself being interrogated by a panel of ecclesiastics, from the Madrid manuscript of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes via Wikimedia Commons

The background signal of contact, in other words, might well be high enough that the Schism was not even the vehicle of such contact, but actually its result, as the East dealt with enough Latin churchmen that a catalogue of their ‘errors’ could even be collected. I also thought, and said, that what was missing from any explanation was much evidence of the people who actually went and made contact; in the schism Anastasius is almost the only one we can name, but there was clearly much more passing between the two empires than that, and at that rate, once we have to suppose any invisible contact, tying it to the Schism seems like that venerable game of medievalists, pushing two pieces of an incomplete jigsaw even though they don’t really fit because they’re the only ones we have. In other words, I was entertained but not convinced. Still, it would be nice to have all those references in print…

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1. The standard work on the schism seems still to be František Dvornik, Le schisme de Photius : histoire et légende (Paris 1950).

2. Not least John Scot, Eriugena, Greek-literate and writing on such issues for King Charles the Bald in the 860s, as Dr Montinaro pointed out.

Money of post-Viking Brittany

I only have time to write a very short post, but happily I have something quite short to communicate, arising from an equally short article by my old colleague Rory Naismith in last year’s Numismatic Chronicle.¹ I suspect there is interest among the readership, somehow… Basically, in late 2011 there went through a Brussels auction house, as part of a small but really good collection of Carolingian (and some other stuff of interest to those of more classical and modern bents) coins, a two-coin hoard apparently found in the 1990s on the banks of the Loire near Saint-Florent-le-Vieil. The first was a penny of King Edward the Elder of England, and the second was this, which I reproduce from an old online copy of the auction house’s web catalogue:

Our mystery coin

If you follow the link that goes through that image to Sixbid.com you’ll find that the auctioneers, although they had successfully talked quite a lot of rare and unknown stuff, had really struggled with this one. Their description reads: “England. Vikings (?). Penny (AR, 1.30g, 10h). Uncertain mint. 885-954. Small cross pattee. Rev. Moneyer’s name. Possibly unpublished.”² Rory, however, has other ideas. He notes firstly that it is more of an Anglo-Carolingian hybrid than an Anglo-Viking one, presumably working off the arrangement of the moneyer’s name, and then points to the near-Breton findspot and finally reads off the moneyer’s name as CONGVION, Conwoion, also Breton. All in all, he argues, this is probably a Breton coin.

Now as we have frequently observed, in print we academics are limited by the standards of reasonable proof and so on but here on a blog I can speculate if I like. As Rory says, the coin:

“stems from the aftermath of a period when Brittany was threatened by viking [sic] attacks, and its leaders sought refuge in, and support from, England. Alan Barbetorte (‘twisted beard’) (d. 952) returned from exile in England in 936, and had vanquished the vikings by 939, thus establishing himself as Count of Cornouaille and Nantes. His position remained tenuous, however. Sporadic viking attacks continued into the 940s, sometimes under Norman patronage, and Alan also faced attacks from Judicael Berengar, count of Rennes.”³

So that’s our context. There’s nothing here to say this is a coin of Count Alain, however. The obverse inscription, which Rory reads as FELECMANIS, is obscure; Rory compares it to the mint signature for Le Mans, CENOMANIS, but it seems to me that this cannot what the engraver was after; although they don’t seem to have been familiar with this kind of work (two forms of E, backwards Ns) their mistakes are still competently carved. So it could be a mint we don’t know about – on an unparalleled coin that probably isn’t as surprising as it would be otherwise – but it could also be a person, for whom this apparently-Breton moneyer Conwoion (and I feel obliged to say that a Breton name does not of itself make someone Breton) was striking coin.

Google map of Brittany and the approximate findspot of the coin, marked as ‘Loire’ down towards the bottom centre

Now I have no idea at all who this person would be, count, bishop, abbot, untitled warlord or immigrant pirate chief, though Feleman or Felkman might have been their name. I have to admit that the word appears to be in the genitive (i. e. the possessive case), which makes a place-name more likely, but even if the issuer is not named here, there must have been one. If Rory is right, someone in that uncontrolled Channel coast zone had decided it was time their area had money again, money that would look roughly acceptable in both England and in Francia but which presumably to them sang of their locality. Now, I have to admit that I come back to that ‘Breton name need not equal Breton’ problem, or more specifically need not equal Brittany. If I were guessing what that signature FELECMANIS meant, I think I would pretty quickly light on Fécamp in Normandy as a possibility [Edit: though as Fraser gently demonstrates in comments, I’d be wrong to do so], and then remember all the links between Bretons and Normans that we can recount and think that maybe this is a Norman coin with a Breton moneyer striking it. There’s no way to decide, and Rory’s proposal may be the simpler, but wherever it was, someone there had decided enough was enough and there needed to be money in the area that was internationally recognisable and communicated both to England and to Francia, thus claiming their own authority in the area. It’s an important early sign of independent state formation in this old fringe of Francia, and I wish we knew more about it. I suppose we can hope for more to be found or recognised!

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1. R. Naismith, “A Pair of Tenth-Century Pennies Found on the Banks of the Loire” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 174 (London 2014), pp. 223-225.

2. Jean B. Forestier & Maxime Mégret-Merget (edd.), The Bru Sale Numismatics and Paper Money Auction 6, 6th December 2011 (Brussels 2011), online here, lot 153, from a ‘European private collection’. The record on Sixbid suggests that it didn’t sell, and Rory informs us that the coin is in a private collection, but whether it’s still with its 2011 owner I couldn’t guess.

3. Naismith, “Pair of Tenth-Century Pennies”, p. 225.

Seminar CCXXXVI: a few steps closer to Flodoard

Trying to get back on the horse while I’m still in sight of it, here is a report on a seminar I was at on 25th March 2015, which was when Dr Ed Roberts, then of KCL and now of the University of the Basque Country, presented to the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research with the title, “The Composition, Structure and Audience of Flodoard’s Annals“. Flodoard of Reims was that rarest of things, a historian of the tenth century, so you’d think I’d know a bit about him, but in actual fact because his Annals finish in 966 and don’t mention Catalonia at all, and his massive History of the Church of Reims is understandably even more local, it’s just never been urgent.¹ The result was that I learnt a lot from this, although predictably perhaps, a lot of what I learnt is what we don’t know about the Annals and their author.

One of the manuscripts of Flodoard’s Annals, Biblioteca di Vaticano MS Reg. Lat. 633, fo. 42v, from the site of a French project that was in 2011 going to do what Ed is now starting towards

The things we do know, from Flodoard’s own works or those of his successor as Reims’s historian, Richer, can be reasonably quickly set out: Flodoard was born in 893 or 894, was in school at Reims cathedral between 900 and 922, was bounced out of the chapter in 925 for refusing to support the election of Archbishop Hugh (then 5 years old), went to Rome in 936 and was recalled in 937 by Archbishop Artold. Artold had been put in place of Hugh because of the age thing, but Hugh had strong supporters which was how that had happened in the first place and in 940 Artold was deposed and Hugh resumed his throne, at which point Flodoard was arrested. His position between then and 946, when Hugh was again deposed and Artold restored, is quite unclear, but some of it seems to have been at the court of King Otto I of the Germans, who was brought in with the pope and King Louis IV of the Franks to settle the rights to the see definitively in 948. After that Flodoard returned to his chapter, wrote the History of the Church of Reims and retired in 963. He seems to have started the Annals long before that, however, in 923 probably, and carried on adding yearly entries until his death in 966, so it was a lifetime project carried on through a quite turbulent life by the standards of a comfortably-placed medieval cleric.²

The seal of the cathedral of Reims, showing a building perhaps more like the one Flodoard knew than the current one. By G. Garitan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

These then are the things we know but there is also quite a lot which we don’t, and the obvious ones are why he wrote the Annals and who his audience was supposed to be (or even actually was). In a career like that one can see how axes could need grinding, and some of these are evident in the History, but the Annals are much more neutral, or perhaps better, more careful. Their author is hardly present in them, and six out of the seven manuscripts remove most of what biographical detail there was in the first version, as well as adding a short continuation for 976-978. Ed suggested that the very longevity of the project made it likely that Flodoard did not, in fact, know who his audience would be which was precisely why he was being so careful, which makes sense but is a little frustrating. In discussion both Alice Rio and Susan Reynolds raised the possibility that Flodoard wrote mainly for the love of doing so, which I think shows you what we were all getting from Ed’s study, a sense that this author about whom we mostly knew very little was on the cusp of being detectable as a personality in his work, but still at this point just over the threshold. There’s not much to compare him to, very little way therefore to check what he was including or leaving out, but I think that Ed did manage to convince us that there was still probably something more to be got from him, so I hope we get to see what it is that Ed finds out can be found!

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1. The stock edition of the Annals is still, I believe, Philippe Lauer (ed.), Les Annales de Flodoard, publiées d’après les manuscrits, avec une introduction et des notes (Paris 1905), online here, but there is now also Steven Fanning & Bernard S. Bachrach (transl.), The Annals of Flodoard of Reims, 919-966, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Culture IX (Toronto 2008). As for the rest, there is Flodoard von Reims, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, ed. Martina Stratmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores in folio) XXXVI (Hannover 1998), online here, and there my knowledge runs out but I’m not sure there’s much more.

2. Most of this was coming from the work of Michel Sot, Un historien et son église : Flodoard de Reims (Paris 1993), which is more or less what Ed now has to replace…