Conferring over coins in Birmingham

Sorry about the lateness of this post; I write between two family gatherings that have taken up quite a lot of writing time. But here is a post even so! We’ve come so far with the whole world situation that people are contemplating having real in-person conferences again, but this post is still a story of the distant past for now, and specifically of 18th November 2017, when I was down in Birmingham and indeed my old place of employ, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, to listen to a conference about the collection I briefly managed, entitled ‘The Barber Coin Collection Colloquium Day: Past, Present and Future Research’. I didn’t speak at this myself, being somewhat embroiled with other work just then, but I learnt a few things by going. These were the speakers:

• Margaret Mullett, “The Legacy of Anthony Bryer”
• Rebecca Darley, “Sri Lankan Coins in the Barber Collection”
• Maria Vrij, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Mezezios?”
• Wei-Sheng Lin, “Armenian Cilician Coinage”
• K. MacDonald, “African Gold Sources for Byzantine Carthaginian Coins”
• Anika Asp, “Numismatic Sources for the Empire of Trebizond”
• Alex Feldman, “Coinage and Commonwealth, 9th-11th Centuries: local dynasties and mints in the ‘Ummā and Oikoumene”
• Joseph Parsonage, “Coins and Co-Emperors – Crowned Regents in Byzantium”
• Michael Burling, “Sasanian Numismatic Imagery and its Influence”

Now, of these, Wei, Alex, Joseph and Mike were at that stage various levels of postgraduate at Birmingham and were not primarily working on coins for their theses, and had really been introduced to them either by me or Maria as Curators, so they were presenting partly for practice and partly out of goodwill, and for that reason I shan’t discuss their papers in any detail. Professor Mullett’s presentation, in turn, was largely a biographical sketch of a man who had been involved in the negotiations that led to many of the collection items being in the Barber at all, and you can read about him in more detail yourselves if you like. So that leaves Rebecca, Maria and Dr MacDonald, all of whom had things to say which are still probably interesting if you’re interested in such things!

Gold imitation of a solidus of Emperor Theodosius II possibly made in India or Sri Lanka after 402 CE, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts LR0482

Rebecca’s paper was an analysis of the sale history of five late-Roman-or-Byzantine coins which, according to a note lurking in the Barber’s archives, had been found in Sri Lanka. This seemed, on the face of it, dubious. Now, not many people have a better idea of what imperial numismatic material is found in Sri Lanka, and as we’ve seen Rebecca also knows a thing or two about numismatic collectors. A false hope was realised by the possible connection of two of the coins to one Leslie de Saram, a man famous in Lankan archaeology but who nonetheless acquired pretty much all his coins on the London market; but the coin above, as well as one of Maurice, she thought could possibly be Sri Lankan finds given everything recorded about them in the Barber (not much) and the wider finds patterns, though even there the Maurice coin would fill a gap rather than having parallels.¹ It makes me suddenly think that if our failed attempts to get through the surface dirt on these coins with an X-ray had in fact been directed at analysing the dirt, maybe we’d have been able to settle this question! But as it is, it is still a matter of possibility whether the Barber does in fact hold coins that went all that way out of the Empire and then had another Empire bring them back again and out the other side…²

Gold solidus of Emperor Constans II struck at Carthage 641-654 CE, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B4100, tested in the All the Glitters project and not found wanting

Since we’re now talking about metals analysis, it probably makes sense to discuss Dr MacDonald’s paper next. This was coming out of a project that was trying, effectively, to work out when and if trade across the Sahara Desert can be archaeologically documented before the Islamic era. Part of this work had involved trying to work out if sub-Saharan gold had reached the north of Africa before that time, and one way to determine this was to test coinage issued in Byzantine Carthage, of which of course the Barber has a bit (and we tested some). The thing here is that Byzantine coins from Carthage took on an increasingly thick, globular aspect over the sixth century, as you can sort of see above, and it has been suggested that this is because the blanks were coming in as lumps from the Essouk goldfields, way way south, because such lumps have been found as production debris there.³ Somehow I didn’t write down what methods Dr MacDonald was using to test his coins, but the methods must have been better than ours as he was finding distinct differences between the normal, flat solidi previously minted by Carthage and the globular ones which did not themselves prove, but were consistent with, the idea of them being on Essouk blanks, and what the difference largely was was that the globular coins were made out of unrefined gold. I would have to say that this didn’t fit with what we’d found when we’d tested one, but then as we know our methods were not very good. This is why I (still) want to know more about his…

Gold solidus probably struck by Emperor Mezezios in Syracuse 668 CE, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B4272

Lastly, here if not on the day, Maria’s paper covered a very rare coin of which the Barber has one, apparently struck by a very short-lived usurper—I suppose if he’d been long-lived we’d just call him an emperor—by the name of Mezezios, who rose up in Sicily in 668 after the murder of Emperor Constans II. His coinage was first identified in 1979, but has been disputed ever since, and while Maria did not claim to have solved the problem herself, she did, by explaining the arguments for and against, make it seem much more likely that such a thing would have existed, and therefore that since there are several known from different contexts, they’re probably that thing. The argument really hinges on the fact that, iconographically, the coins appear to imitate those of Emperor Justinian I, from a century before, rather than anyone more recent, and while this has a been a mark against the theory for some people Maria thought, quite reasonably I reckon, that if you’re usurping the throne from a dynasty you don’t borrow their iconography, but go back to before their problem ever arose. Certainly this happens with those who finally did, temporarily, replace that dynasty by overthrowing Justinian II and reversed his numismatic innovations, so I don’t have a problem with it thirty years before either!⁴

All things considered, this was a good thing to have been part of. It did what I think Maria had hoped, by demonstrating that having a good collection in a university can actually be a generator of research and that that research, even on tiny things like coins, can open up bigger findings. It is necessary to remind people of this, every now and then, and while I’m not sure the people who most needed to know it were there, at least by writing it up, even this late on, I can help to remind a few more people of this significant truth!

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1. That Maurice coin is Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, B1767, visible here.

2. Rebecca now has a version of this story in print, and indeed online, as Rebecca Darley, “‘Implicit Cosmopolitanism’ and the Commercial Role of Ancient Lanka’ in Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (edd.), Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (London 2017), online here, pp. 44–65 at pp. 51-56.

3. Dr MacDonald cited what had then just emerged as David W. Phillipson, “Trans-Saharan Gold Trade and Byzantine Coinage” in Antiquaries Journal Vol. 97 (London 2017), pp. 145–169, online here.

4. My bit of that is due soon to emerge as part of Jonathan Jarrett, “Coinage in the Western World at the End of the Roman Empire and After: Tradition, Imitation and Innovation” in Journal of Ancient Civilizations Vol. 36 (forthcoming). You will hear here when that happens!

Changing Ways to Read a Graph of Landlordship

A day early and about four years late still, here is this week’s post. While in the very last days of my previous bout of research leave, in late 2017 and early 2018, I was reading my way through the various Italian polyptychs and inventories in a 1979 volume edited by Castagnetti; two of them actually contain crop yields data, only one of which I’d known about, and I wanted to make sure that I found any more.¹ Now, there weren’t any more but there were a lot of references to a couple of early articles by David Herlihy. Herlihy was a bit of a legend, mainly for his work on town and women’s life in later medieval Italy but he also did a rook of short articles in the late 1950s to early 1970s on the basis of a huge database of published charter material he’d assembled somehow, and some of those articles are still really big in the literature. If you’ve ever seen a claim that in the Middle Ages the Church owned up to a third of all land, for example, that was Herlihy, and he also stands out as one of the first people to point out that actually female landownership is not uncommon in medieval documents, which gathered him a small raft of students who have become important gender historians, mainly because he was willing to see what was there.² So I’ve always thought that Herlihy was not a bad model for the kind of historian I’d like to be, and when I catch references like these to work of his I’ve not read, I try and follow them up. And in one of these, there is this graph.³

David Herlihy, “The History of the Rural Seigneury in Italy, 751-1200” in Agricultural History Vol. 33 (Washington DC 1959), pp. 58-71 at p. 60

Now, if there is a weakness in these early articles of Herlihy’s it’s a tendency to proffer a single explanation and then cover no alternatives, which is why he could do in twenty-five pages what would take most people a book, I guess, and this is no different. Here Herlihy argued that money rents were the weak landlord’s option compared to service, since commutation to money deprived him of guaranteed labour and foodstuffs and subject him to the market (Herlihy liked the market, so he didn’t say that last bit, but it’s implicit). They also broke the closeness of a landlord’s connection to his tenants. For all these reasons, for Herlihy what this graph shows was a tightening of landlords’ control under the Carolingians and then its loss as the Italian kingdom disintegrated in the late ninth and early tenth centries, accompanied by an increase in tenurial fragmentation which he thought he’d showed in a previous article, till the economy was in genuine crisis, with which various ‘vigorous’ landholders dealt by consolidating holdings in aggressive campaigns of acquisition and subjection. But we should see those as a good thing! because they revitalised the agrarian economy and allowed the development of towns and government and developed economies and the Renaissance and so on.⁴ That last bit makes me wish to be Herlihy a bit less, I admit, but it’s an impressive bit of theorisation of massive changes from one graph. But there are times when a graph is not enough…

Ph.D. Comics for 13th February 1998. Admit it, you have seen this done in presentations

… and it’s necessary to ask what else might be going on here. As a self-denying numismatist, for example, one thing struck me straight away which is that you could, if you wanted to be equally careless, read this instead as a graph of monetisation of the Italian economy, by assuming that everyone would have used money if they could have, and so if they weren’t it wasn’t available.⁵ Certainly, Herlihy never really thought about money supply; he apparently just assumed it could be got if needed, but I’m not sure that was true in this era and in notes occasionally it becomes clear that neither was Herlihy, really.⁶ But it needs factoring in for his deductions to stand up. That is so not least because he stated an assumption that a shift to money rents automatically meant that the landlords were giving up on farming their manorial lands directly and breaking them up into tenancies because of no longer having labour available, but obviously that need not have been so if they were hiring labour instead, in which case of course they might have wanted money rents, because then they’d have been able to get work done when they needed it and not just when their peasants’ obligations came up.⁷ I don’t think that’s necessarily what’s happening in Herlihy’s graph but he certainly didn’t show any signs of having considered it.

The kind of money the peasants in question either could or could not get, a silver denaro of Emperor Otto I struck at Pavia in 956-973, image by FabioRomanoni – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

In the end, therefore, I like this article to think with and I’m always impressed how well Herlihy’s charter stuff holds its worth, largely because of being so directly data-driven, but what is maybe most interesting to me is the difference your starting assumptions make to how you read that graph. Herlihy had already detected what he thought was a break-up of landholding and an economic crisis that fitted this graph’s chronology; but the sadly late Peter Spufford would probably have seen signs of European silver famine here, a number of economic historians might prefer to see a growth of wage labour hindered by big bad feudalism and eventually triumphed over by the dialectical triumph of the capitalist market economy, and I’m not sure where I myself stand but it definitely comes from Pierre Bonnassie‘s and Chris Wickham‘s similar but differently-timed cases for a period of light obligations on the peasantry in the early or central Middle Ages.⁸ I suppose it’s a reminder that data may be neutral but its interpretation is another matter…

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1. Andrea Castagnetti, Michele Luzzati, Gianfranco Pasquali and Augusto Vasina (edd.), Inventari altomedievali di terre, coloni e redditi, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 104 (Roma 1979); see now Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 77 (Reading 2019), pp. 1–28 at pp. 16-19 & 25-26.

2. His greatest hits would probably be D. Herlihy, Pisa In The Early Renaissance: A Study Of Urban Growth (New Haven CT 1958); idem, Medieval Households (Cambridge MA 1985); and idem, Opera Muliebria: Women And Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia PA 1990); but one also has to list the two ground-breaking articles, idem, “Church Property on the European Continent, 701-1200” in Speculum Vol. 36 (Cambridge MA 1961), pp. 81–105 and idem, “Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200” in Traditio Vol. 18 (Fordham NY 1962), pp. 89–120, repr. in Susan Mosher Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia PA 1976), pp. 13–45. He also had at least one Variorum volume which must have collected these and others like them.

3. David Herlihy, “The History of the Rural Seigneury in Italy, 751-1200” in Agricultural History Vol. 33 (Washington DC 1959), pp. 58-71 at p. 60.

4. Ibid., pp. 68-69, almost as explicitly as I render it; the previous article was Herlihy, “The Agrarian Revolution in Southern France and Italy, 801–1150” in Speculum Vol. 33 (Cambridge MA 1958), pp. 23–41, again not a small-scale study.

5. For a really sane critique of these kinds of views, see Dagfinn Skre, “Commodity Money, Silver and Coinage in Viking-Age Scandinavia” in James Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economy in the Viking Age (Walnut Creek CA 2007), pp. 67–92, effectively printed again as Skre, “Commodity Money, Silver and Coinage in Viking-Age Scandinavia” in James Graham-Campbell, Søren M. Sindbæk and Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800 – 1100: Studies Dedicated to Mark Blackburn (Aarhus 2011), pp. 67–91, whence online here.

6. Herlihy, “Rural Seigneury”, p. 68 n. 53 is a dismissal of an argument by another historian that depreciation of the coinage might explain the drop in rent value, which of course it might; Herlihy argued that the coinage was down by half but the rents went up tenfold, but here and ibid. p. 61 where he suggested that peasants would have struggled to convert all their crop to cash, he showed some awareness that money supply might be a problem, a problem which he otherwise blithely ignored, presumably because that observation was all he needed to support the idea that money rents were necessarily a poor option. We might now think differently about the monetisation levels of the Italian countryside, but admittedly we might also not; see Alessia Rovelli, “Nuove zecche e circolazioni monetaria tra X e XIII secolo: l’esempio del Lazio e della Toscana”, ed. Alessandra Molinari, in Archeologia Medievale Vol. 37 (Firenze 2010), pp. 163–171.

7. Cf. Herlihy, “Rural Seigneury”, p. 61.

8. Pierre Bonnassie, “D’une servitude à l’autre : les paysans du royaume” in Robert Delort (ed.), La France de l’An Mil, Points-Histoires H130 (Paris 1990), pp. 125-141, transl. as Bonnassie, “From one Servitude to Another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdom at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987-1031)”, in idem, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, transl. Jean Birrell (Cambridge 1991), pp. 288–313; Chris Wickham, “La chute de Rome n’aura pas lieu”, transl. André Joris, in Le Moyen Âge Vol. 99 (Bruxelles 1993), pp. 107–126, published in English as Chris Wickham, “The Fall of Rome Will Not Take Place” in Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (edd.), Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings (Oxford 1998), pp. 45–57, or Wickham, “Sul mutamento sociale ed economico di lungo periodo in Occidente (400-800)” in Storica: rivista quadrimestrale Vol. 8 (Firenze 2002), pp. 7–28, transl. Igor Santos Salazar and ed. Iñaki Martín Viso as “Sobre la mutación socioeconómica de larga duración en Occidente durante los siglos V-VIII” in Studia Historica: historia medieval Vol. 22 (Salamanca 2004), pp. 17–32; but cf. now Wickham, “How did the Feudal Economy Work? the Economic Logic of Medieval Societies” in Past & Present No. 251 (Oxford 2021), pp. 3–40, which I haven’t yet had time to internalise but threatens to change really quite a lot…

Eight-year late news photo update

(Jonathan Jarrett (left) and Allan Scott McKinley (right) celebrating the publication of their edited volume, Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, International Medieval Research 19 (Turnhout 2013) in the Post Office Vaults, Birmingham, 2014; photo by Rebecca Darley)

I realise that this comes a little after the actual news of this publication—nearly eight years after, in fact—but someone just found and sent me this photo, which I didn’t previously have, and so I thought I’d share by way of a tiny extra post this week. I’m still very proud of this volume, but I am quite pleased to have photo evidence of my pride then too. Thankyou Rebecca!

Obviously not cricket

Bibliothèque national de France, MS Latin 10910, fo. 75v, showing a portrait of a holy figure with a cross and book

I have another conference on which to report, but in case those are not your favourite posts, I thought that this week I’d first jump to the very end of 2017 in my backlog, when in a flurry of reading at the end of my first ever study leave, all intended to finish the article which became my “Nuns’ Signatures”, I was moving at speed through Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, by Felice Lifshitz.¹ It is an excellent and provocative book, but it also contains a reference to this image, which I then went and looked up, and then I became quite confused.²

I take comfort in the fact that it is apparently not just me whom this image has confused. The manuscript cataloguer for the Bibliothèque nationale de France, when needing to tag this image, has opted for ‘probablement le Christ’, probably Christ, so they apparently weren’t certain either. I mean, there is the nimbus around the figure’s head and there is the Cross, and the robes of the ancients, so I see how they got there, but this identification still leaves things unexplained. The first of these is what this portrait is doing in this manuscript, which is a text of the Chronicle attributed to ‘Fredegar’ from the late seventh century.³ The image, a full-page drawing, falls within the account of failing diplomacy between King Alaric II of the Visigoths and King Clovis of the Franks, failing because it didn’t stop Clovis invading Visigothic territory and killing Alaric a very short time later, nearly provoking a war between every power in the Continental West.⁴ It’s interesting history, but it doesn’t mention Christ or explain this portrait at all. And then the second and arguably more important question is, why is He wearing cricket pads?

Now as it happens, I think I can explain the cricket pads, but I’m not completely happy with my explanation. There is a particular depiction of Christ that is very common and has Him enthroned, with drapery over His knees which might, if you had only a poor version or a sketch of a sketch or something, be rendered in this fashion. Here’s a good manuscript example of the kind of image I mean.

I. Berkovits, Illuminated Manuscripts in Hungary, XI-XVI Centuries, transl. Z. Horn and rev. A. West (Budapest 1969), plate IV, from Budapest, Országos Széchényi K&omul;nyvtár, MNY I; I have the cite from this page and that doesn’t give closer referencing, unfortunately

And here’s an Arab-Byzantine coin, where the same drapery technique for Emperor Justin II and Empress Sophia have been rendered into something very like our cricket pads here.⁵

Obverse of a copper-alloy follis struck at Jerash in 636-698, Washington DC, Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection, BZC.2004.34, showing an emperor and empress enthroned

However, this only gets us so far. Firstly, I can’t quickly find any parallel for Christ enthroned so early which has Him carrying the Gospels; the usual pictures of Him with the Gospels don’t have the throne. That by itself doesn’t mean much: I’m not an art historian and someone with a better internal mental library could probably find an example (and hey, maybe that person is reading…). But I don’t think even they will find Him also carrying the Cross, or wearing a crown, both of which we have here. So I wonder if this is really what we see here, and as it happened, Professor Lifshitz didn’t believe it either.

Instead, as part of a larger argument that Carolingian nuns often sought out and either wrote about or had stories copied for them about great religious women, by way of gender-appropriate role models and inspirations, Lifshitz identifies this image as Saint Helena, Emperor Constantine I’s mother who is famous in Christian sacred history for relocating the True Cross on which Christ was crucified.⁶ She gives no justification or explanation for this, and it does fit her argument very snugly, but one can more or less reconstruct the argument that perhaps she would make: it is obviously a holy figure, because of the nimbus, but apparently also a royal or imperial one given the crown; it is distinguished by the Cross, which as an attribute belongs to Helena more than to anyone else; and it is pretty plausible, what with the unusually long hair and what one can read of the body shape, as well as the fact that any source depiction of Christ being used here would have been bearded, which has also been changed, that this is meant to be a woman. And if that’s the case, there is perhaps no other Christian candidate. But the book and the throne remain unexplained—I suppose except in so far as Helena was an empress, and in so far as she is supposed to have found the Cross by painstaking contemplation of the Gospels and prayer?⁷

So I can construct a road that gets me to the same reading of this image as has Professor Lifshitz, but I’m not sure if I can construct it far enough backwards from the image. For a start, I am struggling a bit to imagine the source. It seems likely to me that it was not another manuscript, because I think the cricket pads can only be the result of stylisation or simplification, and so I, perhaps inevitably, suspect that the source is coin imagery, not least because we can see one die-engraver doing something very similar with knee drapery on the Arab-Byzantine coin above. But the empress in such portraits is always accompanied and always crowned, plus which the Arab-Byzantine derivation can’t be the manuscript source because it’s too late, and one might expect the image to be rightly understood if the source was an original coin of Justin and Sophia. So actually I wonder if the archetype is Christian at all, rather than Christianized, because there’s also another possibility.

Reverse of a gold solidus of Emperor Justin II struck at Constantinople 565-578, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, B1154, showing Victory seated half-right with long sceptre and cross on globe

The pagan deity Victoria, even if Christianized by association with the Cross—and thanks to Constantine Victory was the other female figure who regularly appeared with a cross—would perhaps explain the body shape in our manuscript, and perhaps the knee drapery. But, she’s only ever depicted in this half-stance, with only one metaphorical pad facing the metaphorical bowler, and she also always has one hand up on the long staff. And she doesn’t in any way explain the book. But I can see a path in which someone started with this as a prototype of an enthroned female figure with a cross and then altered it to more closely convey what they knew of Helena’s story. Unfortunately this still leaves us the question of why.

For Professor Lifshitz, the answer is obvious: a female scribe or artist, looking for a female holy figure for more relatable inspiration of devotion. And I can see how that might work, but is it what was happening here? My stumbling block is the text: with the best will in the world I cannot imagine anyone using the Chronicle of Fredegar for devotional inspiration, especially this bit. But some kind of illustration was always meant to go into this gap, because the text is continuous either side of it; the space was left clear at the time of writing. And the text doesn’t mention Helena, or Christ, or any saint or religious motif at all. (It is not the only image of a saint dropped into this text, I should say, but it is the only one which looks to be a woman.) So what were these nuns doing? And at that point, it is hard not to ask, how do we know they were nuns anyway? The manuscript’s provenance is not clear; it could have been made in a nunnery, but it could not’ve.⁸

The answer for Professor Lifshitz is simple: they were drawing a woman, so they were interested in women, so they were probably women. And this is not her only example.⁹ But this risks becoming circularity, where we use women’s drawing habits as evidence for women making manuscripts that we then analyse to deduce those drawing habits. It may be consciousness of difficulties like this that led Professor Lifshitz to say earlier in the book, “In the final analysis, a scholar’s own lens may be the determining factor in how the ambiguous evidence is interpreted,” and as long as that’s conscious, as here it evidently was, fair enough.¹⁰ But my lens may be differently focused, because while I am able to accept that whatever this picture is it is a female figure, and I can even probably explain the cricket pads, I don’t really think I understand why someone put this drawing there in the first place.

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1. Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: a study of manuscript transmission and monastic culture (New York City NY 2014), p. 205 (with note p. 282 n. 86). My article to which I refer is of course Jonathan Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures, and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia” in Traditio Vol. 74 (Cambridge 2019), pp. 125–152.

2. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Lat. 10910 fo. 75v (not 75r as per Lifshitz’s cite), online here.

3. The Chronicle is printed in its original Latin in Bruno Krusch (ed.), Fredegarii et aliorum chronica; Vitae Sanctorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum merovingicarum) 2 (Hannover 1888), pp. 1-193, with the relevant bit here being p. 83. There is no translation of this early part of the text, I’m afraid. The text is not fully understood, but a serious attempt is made by Roger Collins, Die Fredegar-Chroniken, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Studien und Texte) 44 (Hanover 2007).

4. For context for this I went first of all to Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (London, 1994), but his discussion pp. 46-48 doesn’t use Fredegar’s evidence, and I actually can’t quickly find someone who does. I am probably missing something here.

5. There’s a much better example in Philip Grierson, Byzantine Coins (London 1982), Plate 34, no. 612, which is apparently (p. 364) a British Museum coin, but I can’t make it fall out of the British Museum’s online catalogue with the available search tools, so can’t give you a picture.

6. See n. 1 above.

7. I should admit at this point that most of my grip on Helena’s career comes either from numismatic works or Cynewulf, Elene, transl. Charles W. Kennedy (Cambridge Ont. 2000), online here, which is not exactly historiography; I should probably read something like Andriani Georgiou, “Helena: The Subversive Persona of an Ideal Christian Empress in Early Byzantium” in Journal of Early Christian Studies Vol. 21 (Baltimore MD 2013), pp. 597–624, the better to understand what sources there are for Helena’s life.

8. There is a good argument that we have a lot more manuscripts copied by women, but not named, than people tend to consider: see Janet L. Nelson, “Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages” in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (edd.), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford 1990), pp 53–78, and Rosamond McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century” in Francia Vol. 19 (Sigmaringen 1992), pp. 1–35, repr. in Rosamond McKitterick, Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th to 9th Centuries (Aldershot 1994), chapter VII.

9. Lifshitz, Religious Women, pp. 196-206.

10. Ibid., p. 192.

Books and coins in Blackburn

Having been sadly recalled to the present, it now seems safe to retreat again to the past, and specifically 9th and 10th November 2017, when I was in Blackburn by way of a favour for someone who often features on this blog, Dr Rebecca Darley of Birkbeck, University of London. A further chain of favours and persons hangs thereby, and the story of how I or any of us came to be there is a little complex, but it can be told fairly briefly and involves a conference and some coins, so is definitely the kind of story this blog tells. So: it begins with an industrial ropemaker in the town of Blackburn by the name of Robert E. Hart.¹ Hart was quite the collector, especially in the field of manuscripts and early printed books but also of Roman and Hellenistic coins, and when he died in 1946 he left most of his collection to the people of Blackburn as, as he had put it, “something for my native town”. And there, in what is now Blackburn Museum, those collections largely remain.

R. E. Hart, in a much-reproduced portrait here borrowed from and linked through to Wall Street International’s page about the permanent exhibition at Blackburn

It took a while for them to come to notice, however. In the proceedings of this conference, Dr Cynthia Johnston explains how their cataloguing in 1962 led a thin trail of scholars, one by one, north-west to see the various things which interested them, and in 1976 some of the manuscripts were exhibited, but it was really only when Cynthia herself got involved in 2012 that a momentum built up.² By the time I made it to Blackburn to see any of this stuff there had been two exhibitions and two conferences, all in London where Cynthia is based, but this was the first event that had really been possible in Blackburn itself.³ This was the running order (and where the papers occur in the proceedings, I’ve given a reference).

• Nigel Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter: a 13th-century manuscript by the artists of the Bible of William of Devon”⁴
• Scot McKendrick, “Contextualising the Art and Innvoations of Blackburn’s Treasure of Early Netherlandish Illumination (Hart 20884)”⁵
• Catherine Yvard, “Picturae antiquae: a dismembered Book of Hours reconsidered (Hart 20984)”
• Eric White, “Toward a History of Early Printing used as Binding Waste”⁶
• Rebecca Darley with Jackson Hase, “Collections to Think With”⁷
• Emma Herbert-Davies, “The Winchester Cabinet: unlocking an eighteenth-century coin collection”
• Cleo Cantone, “Bird’s Eye View: travel and pilgrimage to the holy cities of Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina”⁸
• Ed Potten, “A Monastic Pharmacopeia: Robert Edward Hart’s copy of the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit“⁹
• Cynthia Johnston, “‘Given Me by Mr. Maggs’: the relevations of R. E. Hart’s ‘Connoisseur’s Library'”
• David McKitterick, “Collecting – For Whom?”¹⁰

Obviously, this is not really my field for the most part and there are only limited comments about the actual papers I can make here; if I don’t mention them all, it’s not because the ones I don’t mention were any less interesting, it’s just because my notes don’t now let me give a fair account. My notes make it look as if I was especially struck by Eric White’s painstaking detective work in tracking down fragments of books now scattered about various European libraries after being dismembered to serve as bindings for later books, which he described as basically a habit of 1550-1650. The best example he gave was a 1459 Psalter printed in Mainz, which went through 56 editions and which we have in bits of 70 copies; all but 10 of those bits are binding waste…¹¹ Emma, of whose work we’ve read here before, introduced the Winchester Cabinet in the Brotherton Library at Leeds to this audience as a kind of parallel to Hart’s collection. Rebecca’s paper was (as you’d expect me to say) excellent, and focused on the learned networks into which Hart’s coin collecting, as revealed by the notes in his ledgers and papers that are still in the museum, propelled him and the numismatic world in which he thus took part. Lastly David McKitterick rang numerous bells of recollection for me by linking Hart’s activity to a wider world of industrial collecting, already gestured at by several other speakers but here explored, even if through the medium of books, by reference to many other collectors, some of whose coins I’d worked on in my time at the Fitzwilliam long ago; it seems as if it was pretty normal to acquire both manuscripts and coins in this world. In the proceedings of the conference, Rebecca explores this world still further with some really interesting reflections on the civic identities and local pride which explain why these collections actually exist where they do to be used, and Cynthia also does a more holistic take on the world of book-collecting in which Hart so thoroughly took part.¹² And the exhibition which went with all of this made very clear what a richness there was to display, and included a small display of some of Hart’s coins with some of his books and study tools, as if he’d just stepped away from the desk for a minute to check something and would be back when he’d found it.

Manuscripts from the Hart Collection in the Blackburn gallery

But, you may reasonably be asking, where are you in all this, Jonathan? You wouldn’t be blogging it unless there were something about you, now, would you? And I might, actually, but this time that’s a fair cop. You see, as part of the activity around the exhibition, the Museum had been able to get money together for a refurbishment of its major gallery and the construction of a new study space above it (as well as, for a short while at least, the salaries of the staff necessary to make any of this stuff available…). And so, the evening before the conference, there was an open evening for the new study room, with handling sessions available with some of the collection objects. Rebecca had been asked to do one of these sessions with some of the coins—because the Blackburn collection of coins is rather bigger than just Hart’s stuff, and includes some really unusual stuff such as a decent-sized and basically unknown collection of Sasanian Persian drachms—but she was teaching that evening, so asked me if I could do it. And so a few weeks before I’d come up, had a rather whistlestop introduction to the coin cabinets and nominated my four pieces, and then on the evening in question I was set up with a table, a tray and some handouts, and basically made myself available to anyone who wanted to check out some old coins.

Obverse of a silver sixpence of King Charles I struck in Newark Castle, 1646, Blackburn Museum

Reverse of the same coin, which is Spink 3146 in the relevant catalogue

This kind of work is always fun and it’s possibly the second thing I really miss from the museums world (the first, I admit, being the unfettered access to the treasure troves of stuff). Coins are such an excellent teaching tool, because (for now at least) everyone’s used to using them and thinks they know how coins work, but they often don’t read them in any depth, so by confronting people with coins that aren’t quite familiar, but can be read, you can teach them not just about the era of the coin in question, but also of a new way to look at the material culture of their own lived world as well. The four pieces I picked were a London bronze of Emperor Constantine I from after his supposed conversion showing the Unconquered Sun, a teaching point of which I never tire, a Canterbury ‘PAX’ penny of William the Conqueror (also one of my stand-bys), a Lancaster halfpenny token of Daniel Eccleston (there being no actual Blackburn tokens I could immediately find, alas), and the above. The above is probably the most interesting piece of the bunch, not really being a coin as such, and having a very specific context: as my handout has it,

“During the English Civil War which ended with the capture, trial and execution of King Charles I by the forces of Parliament in 1649, a number of royal outposts were besieged by Parliamentary forces, very few of which could be relieved. Money was among the supplies that did not reach the defenders, forcing their leaders to cut up silver plate and ornaments to make coins with which the restless troops could be paid. Newark was besieged three times during the war, but never fell; this coin survived from the final siege between November 1645 and May 1646.”

It drew a lot of interest because of its shape, of course, and kept it when I told the story that goes with it, but I probably still shouldn’t have used it! It was only afterwards, you see, that I did a cursory search and found that, of course, because such pieces are fantastically rare given how few were issued and how briefly, its probable market value was a full order of magnitude greater than any of the other three. But we were careful and everything was still on the tray when we closed, and perhaps, indeed, we might have relied on that same pride on the part of the visitors in their native place and the collections belonging to those who belong there. As Rebecca’s paper explores, these things get complex. Anyway, it was all great to be part of and got me into a collection I’d never have known about otherwise, and with which I’m still trying to come up with a way to work in future. Who knows but what this may some day come off, and if so, of course, you’ll hear about it here.

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1. I draw these background details from Cynthia Johnston, “Introduction. A British book collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery” in Johnston (ed.), A British Book Collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery (London 2021), pp. 1-5.

2. See Johnston, “Introduction”, p. 2; for that exhibition, see J. J. G. Alexander and P. Crossley, Medieval and Early Renaissance Treasures in the North West (Manchester 1976), and note how the title sort of implies that it needs specifying that these things are not in London.

3. Publications resulting from the earlier ones were C. Johnston & S. J. Biggs (edd.), Blackburn’s Worthy Citizen: the philanthropic legacy of R. E. Hart (London 2013), C. Johnston & J. Hartnell, Cotton to Gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial North West (London 2015), T. Burrows & C. Johnston (edd.), Collecting the Past: collectors and their collections from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Abingdon 2019) and C. Johnston, Holding the Vision: collecting the art of the book in the industrial North West (Blackburn 2020).

4. The printed version being Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter and the William of Devon group” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 23-59.

5. Printed version McKendrick, “Contextualising the art and innovations of the Master of Edward IV in the Blackburn Hours (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Hart MS 20884)”, ibid. pp. 93-143.

6. In the proceedings, White’s paper is “Fragments of early Mainz printing in the R. E. Hart Collection”, ibid. pp. 145-164.

7. Published as Jackson Hase and Rebecca Darley, “Collections to Think with: Collecting, Scholarship and Belonging in the R. E. Hart Collection (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery)” in Journal of the History of Collections Vol. 32 (Oxford 2020), pp. 369–378, DOI: 10.1093/jhc/fhz022.

8. Printed version Cantone, “Journey in the mind’s eye: the virtue and value of virtual pilgrimage” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 191-212.

9. See Potten’s own report of the conference here.

10. Printed as McKitterick, “The Loyalties of a Collector” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 7-21.

11. White, “Fragments of early Mainz printing”, pp. 159-164.

12. Darley, “The value of the past: heritage between local, global and national” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 213-228; Johnston, “Book collecting in context: Hart and his contemporaries”, ibid. pp. 191-212.

In celebration of the life of Susan Reynolds

It has become all too frequent a thing, as I get older and those who have helped me along my career remain the same distance older than me, that I have to put aside whatever I had meant to post on a given blog day because news reaches me that somebody who deserves celebration or memorial has sadly died, and thus it is today. Susan Reynolds, whom I feel as if I’ve mentioned on this blog a hundred times, passed away on Thursday morning, with family and friends around her, I am told. (There don’t seem to be any obituaries up yet; I have to thank Fraser McNair and David Ganz for making sure I knew.) She was 92. I am very sad about this, because I enjoyed her work and indeed her company a lot and I know I’m not alone in this, but I’ve had a couple of goes at writing this as tidings of doom, and it just won’t write like that because everything I remember of her was basically uplifting and encouraging. So I blog not to mourn Susan but to celebrate her, and I hope that if you knew her you can do likewise.

This seems to be the only photo of Susan on the Internet, and is probably from the 1980s? And more immediately it’s from the IHR website, linked through

I suppose that for most people, or rather for people who didn’t have the privilege of hanging around the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London a while, Susan Reynolds is a name one knows primarily from her books, and especially Kingdoms and Communities in Medieval Europe and the almost-infamous Fiefs and Vassals.¹ There were actually more than that, including two Variorum collections of essays and her last actual monograph, completed in 2014 when she was a mere 85, plus a plethora of useful and incisive chapters and articles I could cite, but those two books especially kept her on reading lists across the English-speaking world within quite a short space of their publication and will continue to do so for a while yet.² That’s because there are few people who could deal as well as Susan did with all the difficulties of interpreting massed textual sources by people whose thoughtworlds were a millennium removed from our own and still extract some kind of synthesis about what they did and why, often over really quite a scale. So there’s all that, the kind of scholarly legacy we might all hope to leave but must know that few of us will, but if you know Susan’s name it’s because you know some or all of that already. What might not be so obvious, without having met her or talked to her, is quite how remarkable it was that any of that came to be, because Susan’s passage through the life academic was not by any means what would now pass for normal.

Now, I’m not going to recount her life here, partly because who am I to do that and so on, but mostly because she did it herself, in an interview for the IHR in 2008, and it’s online here. The sound file is gone from there, but happily, if ironically, the Internet Archive has preserved it where the IHR’s own archive pages have not, so there you can not just read it but hear it—and you don’t have a full impression of Susan unless you know how she talked. So I very much recommend giving that a listen. But, either in text or in sound, gather in the first fifteen minutes or so, in which she laid out her scholarly biography, because it’s sort of amazing, for at least these reasons:

1. she did not get a first at undergraduate, she had no MA, no Ph. D., and her only postgraduate qualification was a diploma in archive management;
2. she was never a professor; in fact I’m not sure she was ever promoted in any of her jobs; and
3. much of her substantial work was only begun, let alone published, after she retired at age 58 from what was only her second university post; even Kingdoms and Communities only came out three years before that.

It’s easy to say to all that, well, things were different then (and she repeatedly stressed those differences in the interview), but that makes it sound as her work also dates from some distant era, whereas actually, Fiefs and Vassals came out when I was an undergraduate; Kingdoms and Communities went into its second edition just as I finished being an undergraduate; and her last book came out when I was working in Birmingham. And this was a retiree, turning out work that overthrew or updated whole subfields in ways that young ambitious scholars would have suffered greatly to achieve. In her sixties into seventies, in other words, Susan Reynolds became a whole new big thing in the field. If anyone’s life demonstrates that it’s never too late, surely this is it.

Now of course, she was an ageing lady by then and, as that interview shows, deeply conscious of having once been brighter and faster and being able to remember more. I had a couple of conversations with her where she lamented this, while I wished I were half as sharp even then. She had a reputation among attendees of the IHR seminar as a fierce questioner, and certainly she would pin anyone down on matters of what the terms used in medieval sources really meant—one of her hobby-horses, definitely, though again, the interview is very good in explaining why it matters—but I don’t think I ever saw her kick downwards, beyond that injunction to think about words. The impression I formed was that she didn’t think it was fair to attack anyone her junior, and of course by the time I knew her there weren’t many people who weren’t… The two people I saw get the full force of her critique, in fact, were John Gillingham, in person, and Rees Davies in print, and it is to be noted that she singled both of them out, in that interview, for praise as brilliant scholars; so I think she just felt that they should have known better…³

Certainly, what I mainly remember Susan for is interest and kindness. Quite early on we bonded somewhat over being the only two people in England whom each other knew to have thought about what the people called Hispani in the legislation of the Carolingian rulers actually were, in terms of status; but I used to make a point of chatting with Susan whenever I was in the IHR and saw her, partly in the hope of some delicious bon mot that could be quoted later, I admit, which I was not the only one collecting, but also because it was always interesting to talk with her and because she was always happy to be interested.⁴

The Semantic Triangle, as conceptualised by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards and as used by Susan Reynolds, from Patricia Brenes’s In My Own Terms, linked through, where further explanation is provided

On one occasion, when she had a presentation to give in the near future in Vienna and was reckoning to use Powerpoint for the first time, in her eighties let’s remember, she asked if I could work through the software with her when I was next in London, to prevent her holding everything up and being “foolish”. I think it was me just because I was there while she was worrying about it, but we set a date anyway. By the time it came round, every other reason I’d had for being in town that day had collapsed. I went down anyway though, from Birmingham I think, because I just couldn’t face cancelling on Susan. I went straight to the IHR, found her in the tea-room, corralled an empty seminar room in which to do the computer demo, and spent ten minutes coaching her with the software and fifty fascinating minutes discussing the implications of the single diagram she’d painstakingly got onto the slide for her paper, which I have found again and which you see above. We got chucked out of the seminar room when someone actually needed it for a seminar, parted ways and I went straight back home on the train, and that was basically my day. I look back on it now as a day tremendously well-spent, and kind of an honour. The volume of essays that was dedicated to her clearly professes that it wasn’t just me who felt this way about her, either.⁵

So as I say, I tried to write this sadly, and obviously I am sad that she’s died, how could I not be? Apart from anything else, lockdown must have been tremendously hard for someone whose life was so arranged around the sociability of London academia and a regular routine of library visits, and I’m glad that at least by the time the time came people could be with her again. But I also don’t suppose she was actually finished, despite being 92; I imagine there were things she was still working on and indeed work of hers that must still be in press and will now follow her intellectual cortège, and we might wonder what else there would have been if she’d been given any more time. But despite all this, I cannot remember Susan Reynolds sadly. Tales of her will continue to delight me, her work will continue to anchor and inspire my own, and I hope I will always smile, even if sadly, to think of her. And I hope this all sort of explains why. I feel very fortunate to have known her.

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1. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford 1984; 2nd edn 1997); eadem, Fiefs and Vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford 1994).

2. What to select, where to start? Firstly the other two monographs, of course, Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford 1977) and eadem, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good (Chapel Hill NC 2014), both prefigured by useful shorter pieces. After that, a top five illustrative shorter pieces might be eadem, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?” in Journal of British Studies Vol. 24 (Chicago IL 1985), pp. 395–414; eadem, “The Historiography of the Medieval State” in Michael Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (London 1997), pp. 117–138; Susan Reynolds, “Empires: a problem of comparative history” in Historical Research Vol. 79 (Oxford 2006), pp. 151–165; eadem, “Early Medieval Law in India and Europe: A Plea for Comparisons” in The Medieval History Journal Vol. 16 (New York City 2013), pp. 1–20; and eadem, “Society: hierarchy and solidarity” in Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (edd.), The Cambridge World History, volume V: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE (Cambridge 2015), pp. 94–115.

3. I can’t remember what John had done to catch Susan’s ire, but I think it must have been at his IHR presentation of the paper which became John Gillingham, “Fontenoy and After: pursuing enemies to the death in France between the ninth and the eleventh centuries” in Paul Fouracre & David Ganz (edd.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester 2008), pp. 242-265, which was before I began blogging. In Davies’s case the problem was caused by Rees Davies, “The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?” in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 (Oxford 2003), pp. 280–300, to which cf. Susan Reynolds, “There were States in Medieval Europe: A Response to Rees Davies”, ibid. pp. 550–555. Davies’s piece was itself a critique of Reynolds, “Historiography of the Medieval State”, so it could be argued that he started it.

4. For which reason, in Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320–342, you will find on p. 321 n. 2 a citation of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 107-111, which until Cullen J. Chandler, “Between Court and Counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio grant, 778-897″ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 (Oxford 2002), pp. 19–44, to which I was responding in my piece, was the only work in English in what Carolingian or Catalan aprisio might in fact be. The thanks that Susan, among others, got on p. 320 was for exactly those kinds of conversations.

5. That volume being Pauline Stafford, Janet Nelson & Jane Martindale (edd.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester 2001).