Two fields, three fields, four fields, five…

Today is one of those occasions when I need to correct, or at least update, something I wrote here years ago, and this time the subject is that ever-enthralling one, crop rotation. Don’t hide it, I know you’ve all been waiting for more on this… That said, last time I wrote on it there followed quite the conversation and people still wind up there from search engines, so I guess there may be interest there, in which case it’s quite important that they know that the research for (ahem) my recent article on early medieval agricultural productivity revealed that that post was badly behind the times. Thus, an update.

Organic winter wheat experimentally growing with red clover, image from Katja Koehler-Cole, “Research evaluates green manures as fertilizer in organic soybean-winter wheat-corn rotation” in Organic Broadcaster Vol. 23 no. 5 (Spring Valley WI 2015), pp. 9 and 12, online here, p. 9

So, firstly, what am I even talking about? Well, you may be aware that when you’re growing stuff in the ground for food, the earth only gives of her best for a short time before the land needs refreshing with the various nutrients that make stuff grow well. Historically, there have been two basic ways of dealing with this decline of productivity in the soil: either you give up on it and go and clear somewhere else to farm (slash-and-burn agriculture), or you let the land lie for a bit till it’s built up the things you need again, possibly encouraging that process by growing something different (like legumes) that fix nitrogen in the soil. This practice we call fallow. Now, in the traditional kind of literature that last time I was writing about, it used to be considered that in Iron Age and ‘primitive’ agricultures, if fallow was done at all, it was done one-year-on-one-year-off, so that if you had two fields, one of them was growing and one of them was lying fallow and then next year you switched them over, a two-field system. The alternative, to which European civilisation at large slowly supposedly switched, is a three-field one in which one field is growing a crop that needs all year to grow, such as wheat, one is growing a less exhausting spring crop such as barley or oats, and the third is lying fallow, which means that each year you’re getting two crops not one and are thus more productive and less dependent on a single harvest.¹ And in that long-ago post I was wondering if that change might have underlain the apparent increase in economic power that seems itself to have underlain the various social changes of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe that we still sometimes see called ‘the Feudal Transformation‘. OK? Now read on…

So, predictably, deeper reading told me two things. Firstly, I was by no means the first person to think of that causation, something which really I knew and should have remembered (but sometimes, of course, one learns these things so deeply that you forget that you ever had to be taught them—this is how patriotism and stereotypes usually work…).² Secondly, and inevitably, things were more complicated than that. In order to write my article, as I think I mentioned already, since it was principally aimed at destroying an argument of Georges Duby’s (an argument, mark you, which rested on arithmetic that completely ignored the need to fallow growing land even though that was the immediately previous thing he had written about in the relevant book…), I wanted to make sure that what he’d written in the 1960s he’d never in fact gone back on before his death in 1996.³ In fact he hadn’t, really, but this led me onto a special issue of a journal he’d helped to found, Études rurales, celebrating, reprinting parts of, but also updating his work.⁴ And there I found two articles that changed my picture.⁵

What does the new picture look like, then? Well, firstly, the basic progress from two-field to three-field is, predictably, deeply questionable. Our information is more limited the further back one goes, obviously, but it doesn’t look as if there was ever a time when you can’t find people doing either or even both, depending on what they were growing where.⁶ This comforted me in a way, since unlike the equally lame argument about the heavy plough, this one wasn’t even technological determinism, where once the right invention had been made the world changed but without it could not; for the two-field/three-field progress to be made a whole world of people whose lives rested on the fields had to have collectively been too stupid to think of this different way of managing them, despite all the work we have on the later Middle Ages that is obsessed with medieval peasants as rational economic actors planning for survival…⁷ Even now, in some areas of the world, with some crops, two-field systems yield better than three-field ones that can just exhaust the land more, and of course the imperatives of the market can alter everything, so that old argument also basically relies on the absence of market forces. All of this belongs to the world of Lopez’s so-called Commercial Revolution, in which capitalism was effectively born in the cities of high medieval Italy and Flanders and before that no-one had ever thought of doing anything for profit, and it’s time we managed to think outside that teleological box in which, like the heavy plough or indeed money, once capitalism’s invented no-one can possibly not do it.⁸

Ruins of the Templar Commandery of Ruou, image by Edouard-Rainaut — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But the other thing I now understand is that a two-field/three-field binary was never going to be enough. For a start, it ignores the supposedly ‘primitive’ slash-and-burn method, which is effectively a one-field system that moves, and where the land is always fresh and at its most productive. If you have the space and don’t mind being a bit nomadic, this is the most productive system there is, so why wouldn’t you? But equally, some land just needs more time to recover from agriculture. Fourteenth-century render lists from mountain estates that paid into various Templar commanderies whose records survive—records that Duby himself first put to use, so he did know—show some farmers running a four- or even five-field system across their scattered and marginal lands, with most of their land fallow most of the time. Other examples also exist, but these are the one that made me stub this post.⁹

And, of course, there is and was nothing to stop someone using several of these systems at once. Only the other day, for reasons I won’t bother you with, I was being towed around a farm in a tractor’s trailer with the owner explaining to the assembled gathering how he was, effectively, running part of a four-field system in the middle third of this large field to maximise vegetable crops, while running a two-field one in the field next door for different vegetables and growing cereals on a decent part of the rest of the farm, presumably on a two- or three-field rotation. Those weren’t the terms he used, but it’s what they amounted to. This was an organic farm, too, so not using modern chemical means of boosting soil productivity.

Another example of such modern polyculture, from “Crop Rotation”, Farm and City Centre, 15th September 2016, online here

In short, farmers can vary their practice a lot. The fact that really big Church estates of the early and high Middle Ages preferred things more uniform than that probably tells us more about their desire to be able to count their dues properly than of their keen eye on market productivity, therefore; as so many top-down states have discovered over time, if your first goal is for your farmers to grow a lot, rather than to organise how they grow it, then the best thing to do is to let them decide how to do it themselves. Of course, that probably means you have less idea of what they’re growing and how much of it you are owed; the estate managers, too, make their own choices, but once again, they aren’t necessarily capitalistic ones. This shouldn’t surprise us; but it did me, perhaps it will also you, and maybe that surprise explains the historiography that meant my article needed to be written in the first place. I continue to think that might be an important piece of writing…¹⁰

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1. This traditional narrative can still be found all over the Internet (I’ve linked an example above), but in the posts I’m referring to I was getting it from Helmut Hildebrandt, “Systems of Agriculture in Central Europe up to the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries” in Della Hooke (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford 1988), pp. 275–290. You could also get a more introductory version from, say, Norman Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (London 1994), which is about as up to date as such textbooks get even now.

2. In fact, the obvious person to whom to draw back the idea was none other than he whose work my article was written to oppose, Georges Duby, at first in his “La révolution agricole médiévale” in Revue de géographie de Lyon Vol. 29 (Lyon 1954), pp. 361–366, but more systematically and accessibly first in idem, “Le problème des techniques agricoles” in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 13 (Spoleto 1966), pp. 267–284 and in the book that was subsequently translated as idem, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, transl. Cynthia Postan (London 1968).

3. As close as he came was a note in his engaging little academic autobiography, Georges Duby, L’histoire continue (Paris 1991), p. 97, that he now accepted that he had not known enough about agricultural systems when he wrote the above works, but he stopped short of saying what he’d then have changed.

4. Philippe Braunstein (ed.), Georges Duby, Études rurales 145-146 (Paris 1997), online here.

5. Those being Benoît Beaucage, “Les Alpes du Sud en 1338 : Sur les traces de Georges Duby”, ibid. pp. 113–132, online here and Mathieu Arnoux, “Paysage avec cultures et animaux : Variations autour du thème des pratiques agraires”, ibid. pp. 133–145, online here, though Maria Ocaña i Subirana, El m&ocute;n agrari i els cicles agrícoles a la Catalunya vella (s. IX-XIII) Documenta 1 (Barcelona 1998) and Bruce M. S. Campbell and David Hardy, “The Data” in Three Centuries of English Crop Yields, 1211-1491, online here, subsequently helped confirm it and I was subsequently pointed to Jean-Pierre Devroey and Anne Nissen, “Early Middle Ages, 500‒1000” in Erik Thoen, Tim Soens, Laurent Herment, Michael Kopsidis, Per Grau Møller, Jankh Myrdahl, Alexandra Saebznik and Yves Segers (edd.), Struggling with the Environment: Land Use and Productivity, Rural Economy and Society in North-Western Europe, 500‒2000, 4 (Turnhout 2015), pp. 11–68, which might now be the best place to start for the few who can afford the book.

6. On this, to Devroey & Nissen, “Early Middle Ages”, add Alexis Wilkin and Jean-Pierre Devroey, “Diversité des formes domaniales en Europe Occidentale” in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Vol. 90 (Bruxelles 2012), pp. 249–260, online here, or Marie-Pierre Ruas, “Aspects of early medieval farming from sites in Mediterranean France” in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany Vol. 14 (New York City 2012), pp. 400–415.

.7 Most obviously now David Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford 2005), but long-term readers may also remember me having a go at C. T. Bekar & C. G. Reed, “Open fields, risk, and land divisibility” in Explorations in Economic History Vol. 40 (Amsterdam 2003), pp. 308-325, DOI: 10.1016/S0014-4983(03)00030-5.

8. Referring to Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950‒1350 (New York City 1971); as for money, for examples of cultures where it might not be much use see Dagfinn Skre, “Commodity Money, Silver and Coinage in Viking-Age Scandinavia” in James Graham-Campbell & Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economy in the Viking Age (Walnut Creek 2007), pp. 67–92. Basically, money needs to be easily available, or the transactional costs of actually getting the means of payment render it uneconomical.

9. Beaucage, “Les Alpes du Sud”, modifying both Duby, Rural Economy and Georges Duby, “La seigneurie et l’économie paysanne : Alpes du Sud, 1338” in Études rurales Vol. 2 (Paris 1961), pp. 5–36, online here.

10. Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 67 (2019), pp. 1–28.

More Muslim invader genetics, but better

This is one of those posts with a long history suddenly brought into the light. I stubbed this in 2016, having just then found the article on which it is focused, but it relates to an older post of mine about a different article from 2008, so we are digging back a bit. And digging is the operative word, because what this post is about is three bodies that were excavated in Nîmes in 2007, whose erstwhile owners appear to have been the first Muslims in the area of modern France whom we can document archaeologically. A bold claim, you may think, though obviously somebody has to be, but the excitement here would be that they appear to date from the pretty brief period in which Nîmes was actually Muslim-ruled, more or less A. D. 719 to 737.¹

The obvious thing to illustrate here would be the bodies, of course, but that might be a bit insensitive, so instead here’s a view through the Roman gate of Nîmes quite near to the burial site, the Porte de France. Image by Bruno Fadat — Collectif des Garrigues, CC BY-SA 4.0, licensed through Wikimedia Commons

Given my long record of scepticism of surprising claims by scientifically-focused archaeologists who don’t consult with historians (or when they do, don’t give them authorial credit), which this team seemingly didn’t, you might expect me to be about to challenge this, but actually in so far as such a claim can be demonstrated, I think they’ve done it. The bodies were uncovered lying on their right sides with their heads to the south-east, more or less the direction of Mecca, with a small niche at one side of each grave, and this matches what they can say about Muslim burial elsewhere, including more or less the same time in the Pyrenees thanks to an Islamic cemetery uncovered a few years ago in Pamplona.² Christian burial would usually be on the back, heads east, and even the local pagan burials would usually have been face-up. So, that they were buried as Muslims rather than as Christians seems reasonable to me. Likewise the dating: they got radiocarbon samples from each skeleton, ran their tests against a good recent calibration curve and they came out centred on the beginning of the eighth century, which could hardly be better. And they also did genetic testing on DNA from tooth pulp, and one haplotype (I’m out of my depth with this terminology here still) and one Y-chromosome feature they detected, as well as a skeletal deformation, are common in modern African populations and vanishingly rare in modern French ones.³ So.

“Geographic repartition of the Y-chromosome lineage E-M81 characterised on the SP7080, SP7089 and SP9269 human remains”, from Yves Gleize et al., “Early Medieval Muslim Graves in France: First Archaeological, Anthropological and Palaeogenomic Evidence” in PLoS One Vol. 11 (San Francisco 2016), e0148583, fig. 4, with its own DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148583.g004

It’s not that I have no quarrels with this piece, obviously; I remain myself. But relatively, they’re small. Firstly, I wish the authors didn’t finish by deciding that the men (for all three probably were men) were probably “Berbers”, because that’s a modern term and gets you into some awkward assumptions about ethnic continuity that otherwise this article does pretty well avoiding.⁴ At the time people from North Africa would probably have been called Mauri by their hosts in Nemausus, ‘Moors’ to us, and for all we know, they might have disagreed and thought themselves Vandals or Romans or who knows what, or alternatively they might have been doing their best to pass as Arabs, with all the social cachet that brought in the early Islamic world. That brings us to the second point, which is that old one, their skeletons don’t preserve their minds and just because we have a historical framework into which these men fit doesn’t mean we understand who they were. The authors of the article are alive to this to an extent: they say it would make sense if these men were soldiers but they show no skeletal features that would substantiate that guess, and other people also moved with Muslim armies.⁵ But there is also a Christian burial lying between our three, which the article authors tell us (without any evidence provided, this time) is also seventh- or eighth-century.⁶ Well, OK, that’s a long window, and if he or she was buried there in 650 and our Muslim men were buried in 725, or else the Christian followed them in in 775, then probably no connection really, or even necessarily any knowledge by whoever came second that the first burial had happened. If they are associated, though, which at least spatially they are, then we have to consider the possibility that whatever these Muslim men were, this Christian person also was, at least to those who chose where he or she should be buried, and that warns us that we might not be seeing the aspects of these people’s identity that most mattered. What can you tell now about someone from their choice to be buried or cremated, after all? Or about someone’s lifetime religious beliefs if they’re buried in a war cemetery?

“Map of the medieval town of Nimes, with a zoom on the excavations area that revealed the Muslim burials SP7080, SP7089 and SP9269 (analysed in the present study) and the burial SP8138”, from Gleize et al., “Medieval Muslim Graves”, fig. 2, DOI:nbsp;10.1371/journal.pone.0148583.g002

Oh yeah, that’s the third thing, the cemetery. The authors are circumspect about this, but it doesn’t seem really to have been one. The ground in question contained, as they say early on, “about twenty medieval and modern graves scattered across the countryside”. If we use the smallest spread over time that those words, strictly applied, make possible, and suppose that these burials are the earliest and the latest were from only just A. D. 1500, that would still only mean on average a burial every forty years, ‘scattered’.⁷ The site was inside the old Roman walls, and seems once to have been occupied, since Roman building stone had to be moved out of one grave, and it was close to a road, but I still think we mean more ‘abandoned ground’ than ‘organised burial plot’. The authors flannel and say that burial didn’t happen in centralised places yet, but I know the paper they cite for this and its author says that churchyards are late, not any kind of cemetery burial, and there were actually lots of early medieval cemeteries before churchyard burial became usual.⁸ This pretty obviously isn’t one, though. The authors admit that the burial location raises questions, but demand to see it as inclusion in the community in a complex way; I am less sure.

Nonetheless, this is a useful article; I’ve already taught with it twice since I stubbed this post, in fact, and undergraduate history students can get the point of it. What, however, makes it ‘better’ than the 2008 article I mentioned at the start? Well, there’s several things that give me more confidence in this one’s findings. Most obviously, we are dealing here with historic material, not modern DNA, and even if the historic DNA can only be compared with modern people’s at least the points of comparison are more or less known. Secondly, there is corroborating information; the chance of their being right about what they have just from the DNA is already higher here than with the 2008 study, but the radio-carbon dates clinch it, for me. The range of possible interpretations is so much more closely confined. The two studies weren’t, of course, trying to do the same thing really, but they were using some of the same techniques and for me this is just a safer use of them if what you want to do is history (or indeed archaeology). Still: I do wish they’d actually included a historian as part of the team…

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1. Yves Gleize, Fanny Mendisco, Marie-Hélène Pemonge, Christophe Hubert, Alexis Groppi, Bertrand Houix, Marie-France Deguilloux, Jean-Yves Breuil, “Early Medieval Muslim Graves in France: First Archaeological, Anthropological and Palaeogenomic Evidence” in PLoS One Vol. 11 (San Francisco 2016), e0148583, online here.

2. Ibid., p. 2, citing J. A. Faro Carballa, M. García-Barberena Unzu, M. Unzu Urmeneta, “La presencia islámica en Pamplona” in Philippe Sénac (ed.), Villes et campagnes de Tarraconaise et d’al-Andalus VIe-XIe siècles :la transition (Toulouse 2007), pp. 97–139.

3. Gleize et al., pp. 6 for the radio-carbon and pp. 6-7 for the DNA.

4. Ibid. p. 9.

5. Ibid. p. 8.

6. Ibid. p. 6.

7. Ibid. pp. 3-4.

8. Ibid. p. 9, citing Elizabeth Zadora-Rio, “The making of churchyards and parish territories in the early-medieval landscape of France and England in the 7th-12th centuries: a reconsideration” in Medieval Archaeology Vol. 47 (2003), pp. 1-19, DOI: 10.1179/med.2003.47.1.1, which I actually got to see given live, the second seminar I ever blogged in fact. As I said, this post has a long history…

Chronicle IV: April to June 2016

I am, slowly, increasing the speed at which I move through my backlog on this blog, but I’m still not quite at real-time speed… Still, the perspective of retrospection is often valuable and I make sure you hear about up-to-the-minute stuff one way or another, right? So I now reach the fourth quarter of my reports of what was going on my life academic as I acclimatised to that elusive permanent employment I now have. This picks up in the Easter vacation of 2016, and I’ll break it down into the now-usual headings.

Teaching

The academic calendar is semestral at the University of Leeds where I work, so you might think that teaching was done by Easter vacation, but it’s more complicated than that. Leeds has examinations after each semester, you see, and because there’s no space for exams after an eleven-week semester before Christmas on a UK timetable, the exams are held in the first two weeks of the following semester. We then have a week to get them marked, and then teaching starts again, but we can’t be through all eleven weeks before Easter falls, so the semester breaks over that, with two or three teaching weeks that come once term is resumed after the vacation. Then we examine again, this time for six weeks, then mark for two, then finally it’s the end. Complicated enough? I won’t tell you when I discovered this, but it was well after I’d started work at Leeds and I had to amend a lot of materials…

It’s hard to know what to illustrate this section of the post with, so here’s some documentation, the cover of my module handbook for the module I now go onto talk about, HIST1045 Empire and Aftermath

So anyway, that means that term restarted with a jolt for me in the middle of April, though as you may recall this could have been worse, since I was at that point only running one module, the late antique survey I’d inherited on arrival. I was still new to more of it than I would have liked, but it went OK. I had had to envisage a final-year two-semester special subject enough to pitch for it at a module fair we run to compete for students with our colleagues, but that was obviously a lot less work than actually having to teach it (though I did in fact get four pupils so had to run it next year). Apart from that and joint care of a visiting Chinese doctoral student, though, my load was really pretty light this term, for the last time too really.

Other Efforts

On the other hand I was keeping busy in other ways! For a start I was, now that I look back over my calendar, doing quite a lot with coins, including going to meet the University’s principal donor of them, who was (and is) a very interesting fellow. He gave us some more, so I guess it went well? I also took up inventorying the University’s collection again over the summer, which has stood me in good stead ever since, and as you’ll shortly see I also did a short introduction session to the collection for my colleagues, although I’m not sure I persuaded any of the unconverted of their teaching utility…

Here’s one of them, here the obverse of a copper-alloy 40-nummi of Emperor Justin II struck at Nicomedia in 574-575, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Thackray Collection, CC-TH-BYZ-227…

… and here its reverse

I was also mentoring four doctoral students I didn’t supervise; I went to Birmingham for an exhibition opening I told you about at the time, was back there again to give a guest lecture I’ll tell you about in its turn as well, and in between those things, believe it or not, was in Princeton to speak at a conference that the XRF numismatics work had got me invited to, about which I’ll also write separately. Then there was the Staffordshire hoard exhibiton here in Leeds, and of course exam marking, a departmental research away day, and a doctoral transfer for someone I’d later, for reasons of staff change, wind up supervising, so that also stood me in good stead for later. I don’t mean to pretend that this is a lot, but I think I was being a good colleague wherever the chance arose, and getting engaged in the local academic community as well as holding my ties to my old ones where possible, which is generally how I like to play it.

Other People’s Research

On that subject, I was also still going to seminars, though this was kind of a quiet period for them anywhere outside Leeds, and even there a lot of it was internal stuff like work-in-progress meetings I don’t plan to talk about here. Running through my notes files, I find these:

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Medieval Coins for Beginners: a Workshop”, Medieval Group Seminar, University of Leeds, which I’ve already mentioned and will describe briefly in due course;
• Joanna Phillips, “The Sick Crusader and the Crusader Sick: A ‘Sufferers’ History of the Crusades’, Medieval History Seminar, University of Leeds, one of our own then-postgraduates here showing that she could compete with her graduated colleagues on a perfectly equal footing, in a careful and entertaining talk that crossed the history of medicine and philological text critique in a really good showcase of how our department’s strengths could combine;
• Coins, Minting, and the Economy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy Conference, Princeton University, already mentioned and definitely deserving its own post;
• Jonathan Jarrett, “The Marriage of History and Science: Testing the Purity of Byzantine Gold Coinage”, Guest Lecture at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, likewise already mentioned and worth at least a quick note, I feel, given that this is my blog;
• Caroline Wilkinson, “Depicting the Dead”, Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Leeds, probably worth its own post too as the issue interests me;
• Mark Humphries, “‘Partes imperii’: East and West in the fifth century”, Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, a detailed study of recognition of emperors in the western half of the empire by the eastern ones and indeed vice versa, neither of which were as simple or common as one might expect in the tangly history of the fifth century and the sources for which each have problems not always appreciated;
• Philip Kitcher, “Progress in the Sciences and in the Arts”, Leeds Humanities Research Institute Seminar, which I was going to blog about separately as it definitely provoked me to argument in my notes, but I now discover that the speaker was giving this all over the place at this point, so you can see it for yourself, I have a lot to write up already and my views aren’t necessarily the same in 2019 as they were in 2016, so I shan’t, leaving it to you to decide what you think if you like:
  
• Andrew Prescott, “New Materialities”, Cultures of the Book Seminar, University of Leeds, a visit to the Brotherton Library by a man I knew well to be an Anglo-Saxon manuscripts specialist, who was as the title suggests talking mainly about digitisation but emphasising the sometimes unappreciated physicality of the digital medium—you work it by touch—and the changing rôle of the library—perhaps only some libraries—from being literacy stores to being special archives, as well as the persistent worth of many old technologies (such as, you know, the book).

And that, I think, gets us to the end of the list for that quarter, and my main impression looking back is that there really was a lot going on in Leeds! It definitely helped me feel that I’d wound up in a good place, even if, as mentioned at the time, outside events were threatening to crumble some of my plans for it.

My Own Research

I was almost dreading writing up this part of this post until I went briefly through my files. I’ve no clear recollection of what I was working on this long ago and I was very afraid I would turn out still to have been in the kind of vague fugue I mentioned in one of the earlier ones of these posts. But not so! With the weight of teaching mostly off me, apparently despite all the other things I was up to I was also getting some work done. Not only were there those three papers I mentioned, but on inspection I find that I also turned round a new draft of that article on Carolingian crop yields that has now come out; that in this period I also reworked and sent out again my ill-fated article from Networks and Neighbours, though you’ve heard how that turned out; I must also have been reading Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez’s excellent then-new book on those Andalusi frontier warlords par excellence, the Banū Qāsī, because I was slated to speak about them at the fast-approaching International Medieval Congress, and was because of this able to do so; and I was also writing pretty decent chunks of what was then supposed to be my second book, on Borrell II.¹ All of this, of course, took some time thereafter to come to fruition, where it has at all, but at least I was doing it then!

So yes: I think I was having a good time in these three months, looking back. There were certain other griefs that must have damped that impression at the time—my partner and I had decided we needed to move out of the area we were in, which did not like us, and so were doing a lot of house-hunting in this period, for one thing—but writing it up, from the academic side, at least, I wish it was always like that! And I shall move on now to telling you more about some of the interesting bits…

This, sadly, was not where we wound up, although it is extremely suitable for medievalists and was on sale while we were looking… but for rather more than we could afford! But it has a crypt bathroom and a neo-medieval hall and went for less than a million…

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1. The book I mention here is Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, La dawla de los Banū Qasī: origen, auge y caída de una dinastía muladí en la frontera superior de al-Andalus, Estudios Árabes e Islámicos: Monografías 17 (Madrid 2010).

It’s not adultery, but…

Sorry for the break in posting here; I was away on holiday, a holiday that contained some medieval bits and pieces that may show up here in time. For the moment, however, I want to conform much more closely to type with a post about something to do with power I found in a Catalan charter. I can’t remember why it was that I was reading this document, but when I did it chimed with something I covered in an old post long ago. Do you remember a lady in tenth-century León who got fined for eating a vast quantity of cheese with her lover? Well, how could you forget? But the reason I originally heard about that charter was the fact that the local count had somehow managed to claim the fine for this essentially private misdemeanour, as if it was an offence against the public order that meant he, as the public representative, could claim damage.¹ This seems to have been what good old Foucault called governmentality, that is, the powers-that-be expanding their reach into areas they don’t really yet control by assertion from a place of strength.² At that time, this looked to me like a privatisation of public power by the local counts of León, and that was not least because I’d never seen any of my Catalan counts pull this kind of trick, which suggested to me that the background of official power the two areas shared didn’t include this. But now I have found them doing it. As I say in the title, it’s not adultery, but…

Church of the monastery of Sant Pere de Camprodon as it now stands, from Wikimedia Commons

The scenario is a donation to the monastery of Sant Pere de Camprodon, which was a foundation by the counts of Besalú to rival the important nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses; I’ve written about this if you need context, but basically the counts did a lot of stealing Sant Joan’s land and then selling it back in exchange for concessions to Camprodon.³ This, however, is not one of those occasions. This time, on 16 May 969, Count Miró Bonfill of Besalú, was giving Camprodon a homestead at Carrera, in modern-day Montagut de Fluvià, and two pieces of land in Campllong, on quite elaborate terms.⁴ I’m not sure if Miró actually knew how to do things on any other terms, but, for example, he ordained that any infringers of the grant would have to pay back the damage threefold rather than the usual twofold, and has a middling-length consideration of the state of his soul at the beginning and so on.

We're more or less here, presumably somewhere along the main road either west or east of the town...

All this fits onto a page of the edition easily, so it’s not a really characteristic charter of Miró’s, but it does tell us where he got the land, and that’s the interesting bit: “That same alod that is named above came to me through a scripture of sale which Theudered and his wife, Adalvira by name, made to me or through the selfsame theft that they committed.”⁵ I guess that the couple were fined more than they could pay without liquidating their property. It would be nice to think that they got something back—depending on what they had stolen and from whom, I suppose, which no document records—but we do also have the charter in which they sold him this land, two months before, and despite it being a ‘sale’, vinditio, there’s no price specified or any indication that one was paid. The language of the charter actually makes it sound as if they were paying off a debt, “on account of the selfsame forfeit that we made and on account of the selfsame trial which condemned us and through the selfsame law which we must compensate.”⁶ We don’t, however, know anything else about the couple, what they had stolen, whether this left them bankrupt or basically unhindered, or even where they otherwise lived; it’s possible that they were now tenants of the count on the same lands, but it’s also possible that they just didn’t sell anything else to anyone whose documents now survive or whose lands were next-door to their old ones, so never show up again.

We don’t have any pictures of Miró, but we do have his signature in a good few documents; here he is as deacon, Miro leuita SSS, twenty years before the transactions of this post, from Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Pergaminos, Cancilleria Real, Seniofredo 39

So, what does all this mean in bigger historical terms? Well, it means that we have some sign in Catalonia too that the representatives of public power thought that they could take fines on behalf of, I guess, the state for offences that hadn’t directly impinged on their property or rights. Here, of course, there was no higher royal claim to such rights that the counts might be considered to have appropriated as there was in Asturias-León, although I’m not sure that scholars there now see the comital claims to power in their territories in those terms.⁷ It’s also possible that, just as I have argued that Miró’s cousin Borrell II was claiming rights that his predecessors hadn’t in Barcelona and Osona, and trying to make them sound authentic and legal, Miró had just paid closer attention to the Visigothic Law than his predecessors and found that it entitled the state to make such fines, and decided that, “l’estat, és mi”.⁸ There may have been governmentality going on here too, in other words, cladding new claims in old language. Or fines like this may have been being taken all along, and since that wouldn’t necessarily involve land transfers if people could pay the fines, we just don’t have the documentation of them. But there are nearly twice as many charters in Catalonia as from Asturias-León, so it seems less likely to me that it has just survived in four or five cases there compared to only one here than that there was actually a difference in how these men were working their power in the two areas. In future work, assuming I ever get to do any of it, I hope that I’ll be able to get closer to what that difference might have been and how to explain it. Till then, this is not adultery, but it might mean something anyway.

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1. I learnt about all this from Graham Barrett, “Literacy, Law, and Libido in Early Medieval Spain”, presented at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, West Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 15th May 2010, still unpublished.

2. See Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, transl. Rosi Braidotti, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (edd.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL, 1991), pp. 87–104, online in PDF here.

3. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 64-71.

4. Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Sebastià Riera i Viader and Manuel Rovira i Solà (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, rev. by Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueolòica 61 (Barcelona 2009), 2 vols, doc. no. 400.

5. Ibid.: “Et advenit mihi iste alaudes quod superius resonat per scriptura venditionis quod michi fecerunt Theuderedus et uxori sue nomine Adalvira vel per ipsum furtum quod illi fecerunt.”

6. Sobrequés, Riera & Rovira, Catalunya Carolíngia V, doc. no. 397: “propter ipsum forisfactum quod fecimus et propter ipsum placitum que nos condemnavit et per ipsa legem quod nos debemus componere.”

7. The new guide on such issues is Wendy Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800-1000 (Abingdon 2016), where pp. 20-31 cover the power of the counts in court and their right to take this fine, which is called iudaticum. I don’t think “forisfactum” is being used in so technical a sense here, but with only one usage how can we tell? The obvious resorts for such questions in Catalonia, Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 2004) and Josep M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), don’t as far as I remember cover this.

8. A quick check of S. P. Scott (ed./transl.), The Visigothic Code (Forum judicum), translated from the original Latin, and edited (Boston, MA, 1910), online here, suggests that VII.2.13 would have given Miró all he needed.