Leeds IMC report for 2015, part 2

Back to the conference reportage, then, and far from the end of that too; you can probably imagine how much I want to be through this backlog, so I shall launch in and try to be brief… But the second day of the 2015 International Medieval Congress was a good one for me, as the sessions I went to covered pretty much the range of my interests and mostly they had people in I’ll go out of my way to hear talking, too. It unrolled like this.

539. Texts and Politics in the Long 10th Century, I: the Western kingdom

• Horst Lößlein, “Establishing Rule: Charles the Simple and the cases of Western Francia and Lotharingia”
• Fraser McNair, “Histories in Diplomas: kings, archbishops, nobles and the disputes over St Servatius’s abbey, Maastricht, 898 and 919”
• Ed Roberts, “Religious Patronage in the Reign of Louis IV: dynasty, memory and the monasteries of St-Corneille and St-Remi”

When I started in on this whole research thing there was approximately one chapter about tenth-century Francia that had been written in my lifetime, so it’s really good to see people interested in working over the difficult evidence of the period and trying to understand how we got from the imperial break-up of 887 to something quite like France, Germany, Italy and Flanders a century later. This is partly the fault of Geoff Koziol, who was invoked in all these papers, but the pieces still need assembly.¹ Each of these speakers had a piece, Dr Lößlein looking at the patterns of attendance at King Charles the Simple (899-923)’s courts and noting that although Charles was able to fight and negotiate his way into his secondary kingdom of Lotharingia, his inability to cow Duke Robert of Neustria, his eventual and short-lived successor, meant that there were large areas of his main kingdom of the West Franks where Charles could not actually go.² Not just Robert’s territories, too, I might have added, but the difference is that he had to work with Robert nonetheless, whereas he could wait for people from south of the Loire to come to him. Fraser, an old friend by now, appealed to my scholarly heart by pointing out that there are narrative sources for the early tenth century in Francia, they’re just in charters, and he showed the different spins that court and Archbishops of Trier put on one particular dispute when thus recounting it. I enjoyed this, but especially for the subtle observation that Charles the Simple’s diplomas stress consensus and participation much more than those of his predecessor in Lotharingia, King Zwentibold. Fraser may get me to revise my opinion of Charles yet. Lastly, Ed, who noted how difficult a relationship Charles’s son, the unlucky but dogged Louis IV, had with the legacy of his father, whose reign had ended in civil war and imprisonment by his magnates, something which Louis at least suffered only briefly. Ed argued that Louis made his own way rather than pursuing a ‘Carolingian’ policy and having now taught his reign, I’d be inclined to agree. Questions here revolved mainly around the Spanish March (I bet you can’t guess who asked that one) and queens, since Louis’s queen Gerberga seems to have been an awful lot of his support thanks to being sister of King Otto I of the Germans.³ All of this, I think, goes to show that the pieces are there, it just needs people to find the work interesting enough to make it so to others.



A rather wonderful Ottonian family tree from the twelfth-century Chronica Sancti Pantaleonis, image public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Note how Gerberga and her children appear but no mention is made of her unlucky husband…

Then coffee, and then a session about which I had no choice, because I was moderating it, but didn’t need one because it was also really interesting.

641. Re-Formed Coinage, Renewed Meaning: using, imitating, and disposing of Byzantine coins far beyond imperial frontiers

• Lin Ying, “Byzantine Gold Coins in Chinese Contexts: three approaches”
• Florent Audy, “Scandinavian Responses to Byzantine Coins”
• Rebecca Darley, “Valuing Byzantine Gold Coins in Medieval South India”

The core question of this session is not hard to spot, I guess: Byzantine coins are found in faraway places where their context as imperial currency could not apply, so what were people doing with them? In China, Professor Ying told us, they were mainly burying them with dead people, and along the Silk Routes and into Sogdia making things that looked like solidi to do that with as well, usually doubly or triply pierced for wearing; there’s very little indication that this was more than a species of jewellery to a population to whom normal coins would have looked very different. In Viking Scandinavia, that was also happening but there is more sign of a discerning user-base: although Byzantine coins are a tiny fraction of the foreign money and bullion that was accumulating in Scandinavia in this period, the gold is never pecked or tested and very often set as jewellery, whereas the silver usually had been pecked but only when it was real coins; there were also imitations of Byzantine miliaresia but except in Finland, these don’t seem to have actually circulated even as bullion. So why make them? As with the Chinese context there is more to do here. Lastly Rebecca provided the Indian context, not unlike the Chinese one in as much as Byzantine coins were apparently commodities here but treated fairly consistently, usually double-pierced above the bust and also imitated but only in gold, not as plated knock-offs; the contexts are almost all lost but use in temple contexts seems a better fit to what there is than anything to do with commerce or ports. That provoked a sharp question in discussion, because while in India the focus is clearly on the imperial portrait, in China it can often be on the reverse, leading someone to wonder if the coins were appreciated as Christian symbols, which Professor Ying thought possible. Certainly, as someone else observed, that would be about all you could see on a coin someone was wearing as jewellery unless you were impolitely close! This all hung together very well and I gather that publication of something deriving from this is in distant prospect; it should be fun.




Double-pierced solidus of Justin II, found in a tomb at Guyuan; click through to an article on Lin Ying’s in which further context and some comparator finds are presented

That got me to lunch, and then it was off to a different bit of my interests! I do begin to understand how someone like me must be almost impossible to schedule for…

733. The Early Islamic World, VI: Iberia

• Nicola Clarke, “Law, Families, and the Frontier in Umayyad Iberia”
• Mateusz Wilk, “Power, Law, and Ideology in Umayyad Spain”
• Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “Conquest and Settlement: what al-Andalus can tell us about the Arab expansion at the time of the Umayyad Caliphate”

I will pretty much always go to hear Eduardo Manzano speak, but here there were obviously other things to interest me too. Dr Clarke dug into the agendas of the Arabic sources for the conquest of al-Andalus, all significantly posterior to events and for the most part more interested in trying to settle questions of how the caliph should behave to his lieutenants when they exceed his authority, and indeed who should have been caliph at all and why (for example, being able to restrain those same lieutenants), the result of which is that it’s quite hard to say how far either Caliph al-Walīd or the lieutenant in question, Mūsā ibn Nusayr, were in any real control of events. Dr Wilk, on the other hand, saw in them an attempt to picture Muslim Spain as a new and better Umayyad Syria, but with shifts once the Malikite school of law took hold there in the ninth or tenth centuries (and with no useful ninth-century sources, which is hard to say). This provoked surprising amounts of argument; commentators proved very invested in the importance of Malikism in al-Andalus either as a mark of Arabian connection or as the ineluctable result of fugitives from Arabia turning up there, and it would perhaps have been more fun to set these people arguing with each other than with Dr Wilk. Lastly Professor Manzano pointed out some odd things about the Muslim conquest of Spain, not least that it was accomplished largely by Berber auxiliaries whose acculturation to Islam took place largely in the peninsula, not before getting there, and that by moving a large salaried army into the peninsula and keeping it that way rather than settling it, at least at first, the new rulers committed themselves to importing a whole fiscal system, including gold coin for tax and copper coin for pay, where nothing like it had existed for a long time, which more or less required the cooperation of Christian worthies to make it work. This got Professor Manzano and me into an argument about the survival of the Visigothic taxation system and how far that involved copper, an argument that Ann Christys had to stop but in which I would now graciously concede that we were both wrong, which I’m sure would amuse him.⁴




A coin on the importance of which we could agree, a copper-alloy fals of the unlocated al-Andalus mint, struck in somewhen during the eighth or ninth centuries I guess, Jean Elsen & ses Fils,
Auction 120, 15 March 2014, lot 1594

Revitalised by dispute, I imagine I needed tea less than usual at the end of this session, but with the last session of the day still to come I certainly did still need it.

814. Networks and Neighbours, IV: tracing aristocratic networks in three early medieval kingdoms

I was here partly because the title involved some of my keywords and partly out of a loyalty to a related journal that was at that stage (this is a story for another time) still supposedly about to publish me, but also because Roger Collins was supposed to be moderating and that, unfortunately, proved not to be so. The running order was this:

• Paulo Henrique de Carvalho Pachá, “Searching for the Visigothic State: monarchy and aristocracy in the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo”
• Karen Torres da Rosa, “Merovingian Testaments and Power Relations in the Transference of Goods”
• Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, “Northumbrian Aristocracy through Archaeological Evidence: coins and coinage”

Señor de Carvalho engaged directly with the work of Luis García Moreno, arguing that rather than an eternal opposition between kings and nobles in Visigothic Spain we should see a periodic rebuilding of consensus between these and other elements of the state which could break down in a variety of ways, not just that defining cleavage, since the monarchy was obviously unable to operate without any aristocratic support at all and the aristocracy was frequently divided.⁵ This made sense to me and the only thing that surprised was the age of the scholarship being engaged, surely written before the speaker was born. Discussion here was very constitutional, and made my normal ‘realpolitikal’ take on such power dealings feel very out of place. Miss da Rosa’s work was at too early a stage for it to be fair for me to comment on it here, though, and Señor Rodrigues’s paper, about the early Northumbrian silver coinage as a tool of aristocratic power, I thought rested on some pretty unprovable assumptions about moneyers; there were many ideas here that needed better links to the evidence. I’m afraid that at the end of this, incipient local loyalties not withstanding, I was minded not to come to another Networks and Neighbours IMC session.

Obverse of a silver penny of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685-704), Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum CM.1980-2007

Reverse of the same coin. I think the triple-tailed wolf probably militates against this being an attempt to churchify the coinage, myself…

Looking back over this as I write it up, it strikes me suddenly how generalised the use of coin evidence is becoming in the fields of history I follow. Granted, one of these sessions was explicitly about it, but coins were part of one speaker’s evidence in two of the other sessions as well, which as you see makes hunting down suitable illustrations much easier for me! It’s nice to think, though, that the numismatic gospel might be getting out there. Anyway. What I did with the evening, I cannot now recall; I fervently hope that it was spent drinking with friends and colleagues, and certainly on one night of the conference I went hunting curry houses with two of the Birmingham posse; perhaps that was this evening? But in any case, it is another day recounted. Next one in two posts’ time!

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1. My point of reference would have been Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (Harlow 1987), pp. 305-339, but now as I say there is also Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: the West Frankish kingdom (840–987) (Turnhout 2012), and we’re still reacting.

2. On this I cannot resist citing Koziol, “Is Robert I in Hell? The Diploma for Saint-Denis and the Mind of a Rebel King (Jan. 25, 923)” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 14 (Oxford 2006), pp. 233-267, which is fun.

3. On Gerberga, see Simon MacLean, “Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s ‘Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist'” in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Vol. 86 (Bruxelles 2008), pp. 645-675, DOI: 10.3406/rbph.2008.7582.

4. I’m wrong because I hadn’t realised quite how early the Visigothic copper coinage we know about was, and it almost certainly wasn’t still running by 711; he’s wrong because it existed at all, dammit. See Miquel Crusafont i Sabater, “The Copper Coinage of the Visigoths of Spain” in Mário Gomes Marques and D. Michael Metcalf (edd.), Problems of Medieval Coinage in the Iberian Area: a Symposium held by the Sociedade Numismática Scalabitana and the Instituto de Sintra on 4-8 October, 1988 (Santarém 1988), pp. 35-70, but now also Crusafont, Jaume Benages, Jaume Noguera Guillén, Eduard Ble Gimeno, Pau Valdés Matias, Tomi Cartes, Xavier Sicart & Joan Enric Vila, “La sèrie de plata de la monarquia visigoda” in Acta numismàtica Vol. 45 (2014), pp. 71-80, which changes the picture quite a lot!

5. That work being Luís Agustín García Moreno, Historia de España visigoda (Madrid 1989), to which one might for example compare Javier Arce Martínez, “The Visigoths in Spain: old and new historical problems” in Walter Pohl & Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 31-42.

Leeds 2014 Report III: priests, charters and finally Hungarians

The church of Santa Maria de Manresa, where as I argue below we can probably be fairly sure some local priests were based in the tenth century, even if not in this actual building. “Seu de Manresa” by Josep Renalias – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Sticking determinedly to the reduction of my backlog alongside the notices of what I’m currently up to, here’s the third section of my report on the International Medieval Congress 2014 (or Leeds, to habitués, an ambiguity I am now going to have to get used to disentangling). This covers the Wednesday, 9th July, which was also the day I was presenting. Partly out of grace and mostly out of interest, I spent much of that day in the sessions of the strand in which I was doing that, so there is a heavy concentration here on priests, which was what I had to talk about at that point, but kind of ineluctably I broke out for some charters at some point and, also ineluctably, I was talking about my priests from charters, so this is quite a traditional Jarrett post in a lot of ways, getting down into what people did away from political centres and how we can know about it.

1011. The Clergy in Western Europe, 700-1200, I: education, training and liturgy

• Carine van Rhijn, “More Than Pastoral Care Alone: local priests and their communities in the Carolingian period”.
• Bernard Gowers, “Clerical Apprenticeship and Clerical Education, 10th & 11th Centuries”.
• Helen Gittos, “The Use of English in Medieval Liturgy”.

This was about as stimulating an early morning session as they get, and for me especially because of Carine van Rhijn’s paper. She had been going through many manuscripts probably used in Carolingian-period schoolrooms and working out what the people who used them cared about knowing how to do, and the answers were illuminating: calculating the date of Easter, yes, carrying out a correctly-worded Mass, yes, the right dates of saints’ feasts, yes too, but also yes to odd notes of Biblical history, the signs of the Zodiac, ‘Egyptian days of ill omen’, the correct prayers to say before a judicial ordeal but also before a haircut, prayers to say over sick animals or for good harvests… As she said, this was a very broad model of pastoral care, in which people might go to a priest about almost anything, and as Sarah Foot pointed out in discussion, they might also have been going to or previously have been going to other people, of whom such sources would tell us nothing except that this was how the Church competed. Bernard then talked about the different ways in which the training of priests was carried out, distinguishing two overlapping processes, the in-house socialisation of a future priest by living with a senior relative, a kind of life-shadowing apprenticeship, as opposed to a more scholarly style of education in which texts and literary knowledge were the primary focus; some people, like Raoul Glaber, evidently got more of the latter than the former… And lastly Helen Gittos argued that there was much more spoken English in the liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England than our texts and preconceptions would immediately suggest, especially for things like responses from the congregation, though my notes suggest that I was anxious about the lack of evidence from the actual Anglo-Saxon period she had available to demonstrate this. Still, I went for coffee with a great deal to think about.

Now, that thread continued into the next session, but I was presented with the chance to hear three experts talking a problem that bothers me a great deal in my work, that of whether we can deduce from charters issued by kings what those kings wanted to do in the areas concerned, or whether what we mainly learn from this is what recipients of such documents wanted the king to do for them.¹ Accordingly I deserted the priests for an hour-and-a-half to go to this:

1124. Empire and Regesta, II: Carolingian diplomas and their recipients as sources for royal acceptance

You see how I couldn’t not. This was the running order:

• Tobie Walther, “Regesta regni Aquitaniae: recipients and beneficiaries in the diplomas of Pippin I and Pippin II of Aquitaine”.
• Irmgard Fees, “The Diplomas of Charles the Bald: the problem of lay recipients”.
• Horst Lößlein, “Royal Diplomas as ‘Performatives’? The Recipients of Diplomas of Charles III the Simple”.

Dr Walther had an interesting case study to work with here, because of Aquitaine having been ruled by its own subordinate kings between 817 and 848, if somewhat intermittently towards the end of that, so that questions about attachment and royal policy could have different answers here from elsewhere. The paper didn’t really draw any conclusions, however, and the presentation of the data was hampered by not considering that documents to lay recipients would have survived less well than those to churches; I’m not sure I believe, therefore, that King Pippin I focused his patronage mainly on monasteries, just that that is what we still have evidenced dotted between the numerous forgeries in this area.² Professor Fees engaged more closely with the question of whether or not we have a clear picture of whom it was got most gifts from kings from such documents, and with Geoffrey Koziol’s new book, by pointing out that even what we have preserves a fragmentary secondary history of laymen getting the gifts they then made to churches, and that we can therefore say what kings gave to churches much more securely than that they gave less to laymen. I would have told you we knew that but it’s always worth having someone put actual data behind these statements.




The object of desire, a precept of immunity from King Charles the Simple to the canons of Paris, 911


Lastly Herr Lößlein engaged with another part of Geoff’s argument, that the point of issuing such diplomas was partly so that the king could stage a big performance around it. Some of the texts clearly allow for that being possible but others are much more basic and functional, argued Herr Lößlein. From this he more or less reconstructed the argument of Mark Mersiowsky cited above, that Charles the Simple at last (and for Mersiowsky at least, also his predecessors) granted only where people wanted him to grant, rather than in areas where he was trying to intervene; we don’t see how he or anyone established such relationships from royal grants, because those relationships have to have existed first.

I found this rather frustrating, overall. When I first read Mersiowsky’s chapter during my doctoral study it seemed like someone clearly stating what should have been obvious, and I would find the various reactions to Geoff’s provocative counter-arguments more enlightening if they showed more awareness that Geoff had in fact been writing against something.³ For my part, it seems clear from Catalonia that people sought royal charters when it was easy or immediately profitable for them to do so. Both Professor Fees and Dr Lößlein noted that the south-west of the kingdom gets a really substantial proportion of their chosen king’s grants at certain times of their reigns, for Charles the Bald in 844 and for Charles the Simple in 899. It seems obvious to me that this is because Charles the Bald spent a good part of 844 besieging Toulouse and everybody from Catalonia realised that there would never be a better chance to meet the king so went off to get their diplomas renewed, and because in 899 Charles the Bald was holding a council to which the Bishop of Girona and Archbishop of Narbonne had both gone, presumably with a sheaf of requests from their peers and clients. That didn’t happen again later, so the charters peak there, but it’s not because of Charles’s preferences. In short, the key factor here was not royal choice but royal accessibility, married with the beneficiaries’ local circumstances. I hope that some day soon we can stop reinventing this wheel… Anyway, then, after lunch, it was showtime. Obviously I had to go my own session, but I probably would have done anyway given the first speaker…

1211. The Clergy in Western Europe, 700-1200, III: local clergy and parish clergy

• Wendy Davies, “Local Priests, Books and Things in Northern Iberia, 800-1000”.
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Counting Clergy: the distribution of priestly presence around a 10th-century Catalan town”.
• Grégory Combalbert, “Did Donations of Churches to Religious Houses Have Consequences for the Parish Clergy? Parish Priests, Ecclesiastical Advowson, and Lay Lords in Normandy, Late 11th-Early 13th Centuries”.

Wendy was interesting as ever: she was basically presenting the numbers from the northern Iberian documents she now knows so well on books, books given to churches, books recorded in wills and really any books mentioned at all. From this which she was able to deduce that probably most local churches had a small set (median 4·5…) of liturgical volumes: an antiphonary, a Psalter, a hymnal, an ordinary and the peculiar Iberian phenomenon known as the Liber commicus, not a comic book but a kind of liturgical pick’n’mix (we also see the word as ‘conmixtus’, mixed-together) of the working bits of the Hispanic liturgy, still very much in use in these areas apparently.⁴ To get anything less immediately practical for a working church you had to go to a bigger monastery, many of which had libraries of tens of volumes. Wendy also noted that an average book seemed to be valued at between 2 or 3 solidi, which I note mainly because as I’ve shown cows also sold for about that price in these areas at this time, and yet almost any book would have meant the slaughter of several animals, perhaps sheep but perhaps cows, so that it almost seems like separating it from its owner and putting words on it involved a considerable depreciation of the value of that animal hide…



One of my slides, showing the breakdown of priestly activity in the charters from the Manresa area in the tenth century. This is why I like dense data…

I, meanwhile, was presenting something like some preliminary conclusions from my Manresa project about which you’ve heard so many different bits. What I started out doing that project for was to try and work out if we could see the organisation of pastoral care around tenth-cenury Manresa from its unusually rich record of land charters, given how many priests turn up in them. This involved me in wrestling with the fact that almost all of the evidence is from the nearby monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, not from the mother church of Manresa itself, but I think I am able to show that other factors turn up alongside the monastery’s interests, even if priests tend to show up more than any other clergy. This seems to have been because people who wanted charters written preferred priests to do it, though plenty of others also did and therefore could. The monastery’s priests do show up more often than others, but not by much, and the areas with the most monastic property are not necessarily those where most priests are recorded. Using all this I argued that there were two sorts of structure here, an established and very localised priesthood mainly visible on the inwards side of the city, where churches had been going for longer, and then another body of priests who appeared all around the city, including towards the frontier in the east and south-east, where there were at this time rather fewer churches, and who therefore were probably based in the city, in something like a temporary minster system which was expected to move towards local establishment when practical.



The observable sequence of priests at the church of Castellterç. Sant Fruitós de Bages, from my paper

I think this was the first time I’ve ever given an academic paper I hadn’t written out beforehand. I usually have a text somewhere, even if I don’t necessarily refer to it, but this time there had been no time and I just had a thickly-commented printout of my slides. I’m not sure it went any the worse for it, but I do wish I had written down something about what questions I got. Anyway, last but not least was Dr Combalbert, who was asking, basically, was giving a local church to a monastery a way to ‘reform’ it, in terms of the standard of life and worldliness of its clergy? His conclusion was that it wasn’t, not least because the new onwers didn’t necessarily get to replace priests in these places; even where they had the right to appoint a new one (which is what the word ‘advowson’ means, in case you were wondering) they had to wait for the old one to die first, and there were very often arrangements in place that, even if they didn’t ensure that the priesthood in the church proceeded in heredity (though they sometimes did), made very sure that the donor or local lord retained his ability to have his voice heard in naming the candidates from whom the monks chose the new priest. Such lords also usually kept most of the income, and if they didn’t, the monasteries very often did anyway. I suppose the priest would never have been used to having it, either way…

Then there was tea and then the final session of the day, which was a man down but the remaining two still justified it for me.

1318. Visions of Community, III: shadows or empire – 10th- and 11th-century reactions

• Bernhard Zeller, “Changes in Documentary Practice in the late 9th and early 10th century: the evidence of royal charters – the case of St Gallen”.
• Maximilian Diesenberger, “Worrying about Hungarians in the Early 10th Century: an exegetical challenge”.

Bernhard was telling us a tale of decline, at least in numerical terms: over the period he was looking at, the monastery of St Gallen, which preserves one of our largest caches of original early medieval charters in Europe north of the Pyrenees, did so less and less. Of the documents they did preserve, too, more and more were royal. This was probably partly because as the Carolingian kingdoms broke down the kings most relevant to St Gallen were also closer to it and more reliant on it, but also, it seems, because the monks were getting non-royal charters made less and less. They had the sort of rights over their area by this stage that might have meant they simply didn’t need them, but they never seem to have used charters in court much and a lot of the gifts they received were so hedged about with conditions as not really to convey anything, so Bernhard mainly thought that they just preferred to get grants from the kings now it was so much more possible.



The entry of the Magyars into the Carpathian basin, from the Chronicum Pictum, 1360

In a rather different type of assessment of reaction to crisis, Dr Diesenberger took us through some bishops’ letters showing that the tenth century at large was wrestling with how properly to understand the increasingly severe attacks of the Hungarians in terms consonant with everything being ordained by God. Most of all, did these bow-wielding horsemen from the East herald the Apocalypse? The bishops’ letters argue otherwise, but this probably shows that someone else was arguing for. After my year’s teaching this stuff I had by now become pretty clear that there’s always someone out there preaching the Apocalypse, in the Middle Ages and now, and that the question is how many people care, but what Dr Diesenberger also took from it was that the bishops knew that the kings were becoming unable to help: what was really needed was not prayer or penance but a better means of guaranteeing troop numbers, thought Bishop Salomon of Constance for example, but the overall community that could orchestrate such a response was broken, and the Church was the larger whole that remained for people to hang their identity on. This was very interesting indeed, and if Dr Diesenberger had only not said that the Hungarians didn’t attack Western Francia after 926 I’d have had no quarrels at all.⁵

Anyway, after that there was wine in the sunshine laid on by the city of Leeds, and after that dinner somewhere out of the way seemed like a good way to decompress. That took longer than I expected, and when we got back the dance was under way. Last year the dance had been in the refectory, but apparently people had complained that this made it feel like a school disco so this year it had been moved into the club run by Leeds University Students Union. What this meant, from my consumer’s point of view, was that it was cramped into a far smaller darker dance floor where there was no room to move, that there was only expensive bottled lager or alcopops available to drink, and that it was much louder, and while I like loud music as much or more than the next man, the whole place seemed unpleasantly like a hot dark gladiatorial arena with a nineties soundtrack and nothing made me wish to stay there rather than go to bed. So I did not dance, and was duly mocked for it next day by those who had noted my absence, but I’m still not sure I regret my choice. I was, in any case, in much better shape than I would otherwise have been for the final day, and I’ll tell you about that after another couple of posts on other things!

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1. You can probably see immediately how this is an issue for someone studying the area of the Carolingian kingdoms perhaps most durably attached to one in name and yet also most beyond the reach of its kings, as I do, but you can find the problem also expressed for the core in Mark Mersiowsky, “Towards a Reappraisal of Carolingian Sovereign Charters” in Karl Heidecker (ed.), Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 5 (Turnhout 2000), pp. 15-25, to which the field is now avidly contrasting Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: the West Frankish kingdom (840-987), Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 19 (Turnhout 2012).

2.. The documents in question are all printed in Léon Levillain (ed.), Receuil des Actes de Pepin I et Pepin II, rois d’Aquitaine (814-848), ed. Maurice Prou (Paris 1926), but Herr Walther argued that one of the documents Levillain had thought was false may not have been while five more he had as genuine probably weren’t.

3. It’s not like Geoff doesn’t cite Mersiowsky (first at Koziol, Politics of Memory, pp. 28 n. 32), but I’ve yet to hear anyone else going round this particular circle do so.

4. As Wendy duly pointed out, this is very like what Michel Zimmermann found doing the same sort of enquiry for Catalonia, despite the supposed Frankish influence there, but he finds a lectionary much more common than the ordinary and increasingly replacing the commicus: M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècles), Biblioteca de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, I, pp. 523-607, here esp. pp. 523-525. There’s a subtle but quite large point hidden in this about exactly how much difference the Carolingian takeover in Catalonia actually made to how people worshipped there, and I haven’t done enough on it, but what I have done with charters would fit with this in suggesting that it was a slow percolation of change rather than a top-down imposition, probably done by introducing new training methods at certain centres. Of course, that would only get at the people being trained by what Bernard Gowers had earlier separated as ‘education’, not those who learned by ‘apprenticeship’, so change would be slower in areas where structures like those delineated by Dr Combalbert in Normandy were stronger. I didn’t see these links between the sessions’ papers this clearly at the time so it’s a benefit to me to write them up, thankfully…

^5. I find while checking references just now that there is a very neat, paragraphs-long summary of this correspondence in Karl Leyser, “Ritual, Ceremony and Gesture: the case of Ottonian Germany”, in Leyser, Communications and Power in medieval Europe: the Carolingian and Ottonian centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter (London 1994), pp. 189-213 at pp. 192-194. As for my gripe, it is mainly that there is good evidence for a Hungarian attack that made it all the way to Spain in 942, but also one on Provence in 937, and while the former is only known through Arabic sources that I can at least understand Latinist historians not knowing about, the latter is not. References for anyone working on the Hungarians who does not wish me to point this out to them in seminar questions would include: G. Fasoli, “Points de vue sur les incursions hongroises en Europe au Xe siècle” in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Vol. 2 (Toulouse 1959), pp. 17-36; Josep Millàs Vallicrosa, “Sobre las incursiones húngaras en la Cataluña condal” in Homenaje a Johannes Vincke para el 11 de Mayo 1962. Festschrift für Johannes Vincke zum 11. Mai 1962 (Madrid 1962-1964), 2 vols, I, pp. 73-80; with great care, Albert Benet i Clarà, “La incursió d’hongaresos a Catalunya l’any 942” in Quaderns d’Estudis Medievals Vol. 3 (Barcelona 1981), pp. 568-573 and “La batalla de Balltarga. Epilèg a la incursió d’hungaresos a Catalunya” in Quaderns d’Estudis Medievals Vol. 4 (Barcelona 1982), pp. 639-640; and Jonathan Jarrett, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: Organisation of Society in the pre-Catalan ‘Terra de Ningú'” in †Alan Deyermond & Martin Ryan (edd.), Early Medieval Spain: a symposium, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 63 (London 2010), pp. 97-127 at pp. 115-119, which collects these references.

Occasionally I work with manuscripts

I realise that all the cool kids are writing their Kalamazoo reports, and I will also get on to that some day soon. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I hadn’t put six hours in today, on jetlag amounts of sleep, on the notes of the book whilst being harassed by editors who’ve missed their deadlines. No, sorry: nothing beats the book at this stage. Except perhaps some blog. I had about seven posts I wanted to write as well as the K’zoo report and now as a result of web-crawling for footnotes I have another. So I will do the first, which is, coincidentally, about where chasing a footnote can take you.

Pope John X, from Wikimedia Commons (though where before that, I have no clue)

In the early Middle Ages, or indeed any of the other Middle Ages, communications were less than instant. Sometimes we have letters left to us that testify to this problem, reporting that information has reached the writer too late and now they want to change whatever they just said. Pope John X has one of my favourites, because it directly touches something I recently finished working on. I’ll translate:

Bishop John, servant of the servants of God, to Reginald of Béziers, Ariman of Toulouse, Riculf of Elna, Guimarà of Carcassonne, Guiu of Girona, Gerard of Agde, Teuderic of Lodève, Hubert of Nîmes, another Teuderic, of Barcelona, Jordi of Osona, Radulf of Urgell, most reverend and holy bishops of the Church of Christ. Receiving letters from your sanctity about your metropolitan, Agius, and the insidious frauds against him by the most nefarious Gerald, and acknowledging them we grieved greatly, and we faltered as if we felt the news in our body. Wherefore, we wished it to be known to your sanctity that the aforesaid falsehood-spinner Gerald, coming to this holy Roman and Apostolic Church that by God’s design we serve to rob us like an innocent, wanted the bishopric, and we, not recognising the cunning of his surpassing iniquity, wished to accommodate him, if there might be no canonical censure therefrom. He indeed, we have now found out from the truthful report of many, proferring under false pretences I know not what spurious letters purporting to bear our name, came and raided the bishopric of Narbonne in armed force on this basis, having captured the venerable metropolitan Agius by his fraud, and previously we had come to know very many other things about him through your letters. On account of which, we have sent to you through Archbishop Ermino our Apostolic letters, so that you shall not receive the selfsame oft-named Gerald, held a liar by all, among the bishops, and now moreover that we have discovered from your fraternity and fully recognise the malice and deceptions of his iniquity, we wish and we order by Apostolic authority that, just as we have already written to you and the sacred canons testify, you shall not have him among the bishops, as he was not requested by the clerics and the people of the city, nor was he ordained in the customary manner by you, his coprovincials. We have sent, as your concern sought, a privilege, a pallium and the use of the pallium to your metropolitan Agius so that we deny to no Church this that he justly sought. BENE VALETE!

[Edit: adjustments to the translation here after the typically learned suggestions of Clemens Radl in comments; anyone wanting to pick up this text for their own purposes should also check that comment for a bunch of useful references.]

In short, Gerald comes to Rome asking to be made Bishop of Narbonne; John is prepared to hear him kindly but the next thing he knows, he’s getting letters from the bishops of the Narbonensis saying that Gerald’s got letters from the pope that he’s using to throw Agius, whom they’ve already got, in jail and demand election and quite frankly Pope, WTS etc. John therefore expresses his frustration and distress via a mutually-trusted intermediary and sends Agius documentary and vestimentary confirmation of John’s backing for the rightful candidate, though you’ll notice that John apparently didn’t know this rightful candidate was in place before. This is in 914, should you be wondering.

A tenth-century illustration of Pope Gregory the Great wearing a pallium, from the Antiphonary of Hartker of St-Gall via Wikimedia Commons

This text is not new or unknown, but it’s only known from a fairly late preservation. Narbonne, which was once an incredible archive for all things historical and Pyrenean, lost its early documents only in the last few centuries, so the edition of this text with which I’m familiar was done from a 1664 edition from what we suppose to have been the original.¹ However, there is also a manuscript copy of it in the British Library. Now, that copy was made in the eighteenth century, so it’s actually more recent than the oldest editions, but all the same, I thought I’d like to go and look, because it bothered me that the text should only be known via Narbonne and I wondered if this might be a different version. I don’t have a picture, because the BL doesn’t like cameras, and in any case it’s an eighteenth-century manuscript, it doesn’t look that old.² But I have been and looked, and what do you know, it is different.

We are talking about here

It’s tempting to transcribe, but this is long enough already. Suffice to say that most of the personal names are spelt differently, Riculpho not Riculfo, Gimara for Guimara and so on, and that although some of its variants are tending to gibberish (“acknowledging in the side”) some actually make more sense (“wept greatly” instead of “faltered”, defleuimus not defecimus). At the very least it becomes clear that Catel, who edited the 1664 text, modernised the spelling in a fair few places, and may have misread it in others, though the copyist here also mangled a few things. Anyway, up to this point they could be working from the same text. But actually the manuscript omits the “Bene Valete” and goes off on a whole new tangent. There is in fact a better edition that used this manuscript too, and it registers the variants that I noticed and agrees that some of them are good;³ but even that doesn’t include the following bit, which is to my mind almost as interesting, because it tells us what Agius did next. The copyist doesn’t seem to been following his text, at some remove or other, because with no break it just runs straight on as follows:

Venerabilis Agamberto, nec non et Elefonso Epsicopis. Agio Narbonæ sedis Episcopus multimodas orationes. Audiuimus quod vos curtim pergere his diebus debetis. Idcirco ad deprecandum comites nostros perreximus. Ermengaudem et Raymundum quatinus vos deprecarent, ut præceptum apud Regem impetrare nobis non dedignemini. Itaque nos præcamur et supplicamus, ut relatum quod superius scriptum est sic apud Regem impetrare non vos pigeat, bene valete [ruche]

Or, in English, more or less:

To the venerable bishops Agambert and also Eldefonsus, Agius bishop of the see of Narbonne, many sorts of prayer. We have heard that you ought some day soon to be attending court. On that account we have managed to beg our counts Ermengaud and Raymond that they would beseech you so that you will not decline to get a precept from the king for us. We therefore pray and beg that it may fail you not to obtain the account that is written above thus from the king, go you well [signature]

So look, if this is a copy of what Catel was using, that wasn’t a papal document, it’s not John’s letter, even though that’s what he represented it as. The whole thing is actually a letter from Agius, asking his colleagues with business at court to get a letter to this effect from the king, and enclosing the text of a papal letter to explain what’s been going down in Narbonne and to serve as template. This is important for two reasons at least, and maybe more. Firstly, it means that we have no good proof that this actually came from the pope, though it would be a bit cheeky for a false letter from the pope itself to reference the possibility of people bearing false letters from the pope, and it doesn’t reflect well on anyone telling this story so I’m not that worried about it. All the same, this is the sort of thing I was wondering when I realised that the preservation was all via Narbonne. We have some evidence for this rival Gerald elsewhere at least, but all that really tells us is that there’s a dispute into which a papal bull, especially one that could be used to get a royal precept, would fit nicely.

A Romantic depiction of Charles the Simple borrowed from Wikipedia

And that’s the other thing. What does a bishop of Narbonne do in strife, even in 915? He writes to the king! Yes, the pope, all very well, but Agius didn’t write to him, his suffragans did; Agius wants a document from the king. This whole area of the West Frankish kingdom is supposed to have fallen off by now, you realise, no Carolingian king has been this far south for seventy years, and Charles the Simple (for it is he on the throne in 915) is, as we’ve said although I now realise that others would argue otherwise, the king under whom it all really goes to pot for the Carolingians. But in time of trouble, who rules and protects the Church? It’s not the pope… (That said, it’s worth noting that Charles actually appointed one of the bishops who write to the pope, Guiu of Girona, so Agius’s sense of the political weather is obviously not universally shared.) And since all of this work ultimately comes to nothing more than a footnote in a paper of which the final copy went off just before I flew America-wards, and which ought to be out in December,⁴ I thought it could go here in case anyone else can use it. I have reason to suspect there are those reading who can…

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1. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1998), doc. no. 139.

2. London, British Library, MS Harley 3570 (1), “Bulls relating to the Archbishopric of Narbonne etc.”, fos 12v-13v (N. B. the document is part of a separate binding within the manuscript and with far older parchment covers I didn’t have time to parse, Gothic; this section is also independently foliated and in its own terms the foliation of this document is fos 7v-8v.)

3. Harald Zimmermann (ed.), Papsturkunden 896-1046. Erster Band: 896-996, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften 174, Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission III (Wien 1984), doc. no. 39.

4. Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München forthcoming).

A retraction: last angry nun neither so angry nor as last as advertised

I suppose it’s a good day when you go to two libraries and come home with not just most of the work for one’s next paper done, but also with ideas for three different blog posts. However, I could wish the first one didn’t have to be “I was wrong”. Thank goodness, however, that I caught it in time to alter that bit of the book. What am I on about? Back on 13 October 2008 I posted a post called “The last angry nun in Sant Joan de Ripoll“. (If anyone reading knows what song I riffed the title out of, you have unusual but good taste sir or madam.) It talks about one particular nun at Sant Joan de Ripoll, Elo, whose signature we had and who from her subsequent appearances could be shown to have been scarcely a teenager when she signed that document, in 948, and to go on to be a probably nonagenarian exile from the nunnery after it was shut down in 1017, who would have remembered almost all its history and would doubtless have had strong and bitter views about the shut-down.¹ It’s a great story, but it’s wrong, as a pingback there from this post now sadly declares. I’m pretty sure I’ve got it right this time, mind, but after this why would I believe me?

A scan, better than I last had, of the 948 document signd by Elo, among others, Arxiu de la Corona d'Aragó, Cancilleria, pergamins Sunifred 39, full-size linked beneath (large!)

You see, the day before I wrote this I went back through the relevant charters trying to count the nuns of Sant Joan of whom we know for a new paper about them specifically. I found three documents in this search that I’d seen before, but before I took this interest, and then I seem to have assumed that my files were complete enough to make assertions like those in the post in question. Now, I could explain at length—by now I’m sure you believe me about that—but I’ll be short about it this once; there were at least two women called Elo at that nunnery. One was placed there by her parents in 926, and she was of important ancestry: her mother, who was called Guinedilda and made the donation, was one of those semi-independent religious women called deo votae, and her late husband, Elo’s father, Teudemon, had held the land that was now being given to the abbey direct from the king.² (That in itself is fascinating: Elo was presumably quite young at this point, and obviously not of legal age, so at most 13? so her father can only have died in 913, which suggests that he got his land from Odo or Charles the Simple, which is after the Frankish kings supposedly stopped having much influence here.) So they had connections.

Then there’s the document above. There’s more than one signature there for Elo, but that’s the case with several of the nuns; the neat black signatures are all but one signatures of nuns by the scribe (though apparently in a different ink to the rest of the charter? this is a complicated document) and in some cases the nuns appear to have signed as well, the scribe perhaps not expecting women to be able to write and they happy to prove him wrong. So I hadn’t thought about it much; but actually there are two scribal signatures in the name of Elo so there must have been two there then, of whom one could write and one couldn’t. One was probably the royal vassal’s daughter, but the other one, well, she might be our girl, or she might be someone else of the same name. There are two signatures by women called Elo in an exchange of 964 as well, and the same is true there.³ But in 1002 a man called Asner gave some land at Torrent in the Vall de Ripoll to a nun called Elo at Sant Joan who was his daughter, and her focus in that same area means that we know that she is the one who goes on till 1032.⁴ And that 1032 appearance makes it clear that my claim about her being the last nun is also rubbish.

That takes a bit of explaining (and then a sanctemonialis ex machina ending). The 1032 document is Elo’s last appearance, but not just hers. It’s the publication of a will and Elo was one of the executors.⁵ The deceased, however, was another deo sacrata, which is the title Elo also used after her expulsion in 1017, and she was called Guinedilda. This woman also appears in the 964 exchange so if there were only two Elos she and Guinedilda had known each other a long long time, fifty-five years at least and Guinedilda was at least 69. Though, even if Elo de Torrent was a new girl in 1002, it had still been at least thirty years since then, let’s not forget.

The thing here is, Guinedilda bequeathed most of her belongings, which were reasonably numerous, to Sant Joan, which by now was a canonry tied to a new and ephemeral bishopric at Besalú, occupied by the son of the count who got the abbey closed down, though it was already by then being called Sant Joan de les Abadesses. Yes, it stinks doesn’t it? But apparently Bishop Oliba of Vic, whom we’ve met before, made sure that all the nuns were provided with a living from the nunnery’s lands at the expulsion, and probably therefore those lands had to come back to the house when they died. It just took these two a long time to do that.

So, to reprise the earlier post’s assertions. If there were two, rather than three, nuns called Elo, and Elo de Torrent is one of those named in 948, she must still have been pretty gosh-darned old at final appearance: legal age was 14, so she must have been at least 14 in 948, therefore 83 or older at the expulsion and at least 98 when she had to see her old cloistermate to the grave! But it might be that Guinedilda, about whose uncommon name I’m more confident, was seen to the grave not by so venerable a fellow nun-in-exile but by a younger amanuensis who might only have been, er, first appearance and therefore at least legal age 1002? Last appearance 1032 so, 44 or older then.

However, neither of these venerable ladies can have been the last nun of the abbey. Why not? Because the ousted abbess, Ingilberga, reported to the somewhat incredulous Pope Benedict VII as a meretrix veneri but installed in the episcopal palace at Vic and remembered there as a venerable and pious woman, was only remembered as such after 1055. Till then she was still alive, being venerable and pious in real time. And she was oblated in 987 and took the abbacy before 995, so she must have been at least 14 then and therefore at least 74 at her death. Guinedilda was older. But Ingilberga was the last, outliving all those who’d deposed her, including the half-brother who’d installed her remorsefully in his palace. She was the last angry nun. And she probably had the best right to be, as well.⁶

The nave and apse of the abbey church of Sant Joan de les Abadesses

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1.The document is, as well as at the shelf-mark in the picture caption, edited in Federico Udina Martorell (ed.), El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18/Publicaciones de le Sección de Barcelona 15 (Madrid 1951), doc. 128, and also edited and translated into Catalan in Antoni Pladevall i Font, Nuria Peirís i Pujolar, Joan-Albert Adell i Gisbert, Xavier Barral i Altet, R. Bastardes i Parera & R. M. Martín i Ros, “Sant Joan de les Abadesses”, in Pladevall (ed.), Catalunya romànica X: el Ripollès (Barcelona 1987), pp. 354-410, whence this facsimile.

2. The lost documents were inventoried in the Llibre de Canalars, a record of the abbey’s charters by the chatty Abbot Miquel Isalguer (1457-84), which Udina edited in Archivo Condal, pp. 448-499 for the period of his book. This is no. 149 there, and also Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, S. Riera i Viader, Manuel Rovira i Solà (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica LXI (Barcelona 2005), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, 2 vols, doc. no. 201.

3. Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. nos 148 & 163; she’s also in Sobrequés et al., Catalunya carolíngia V, doc. no. 360, which is another part of the same exchange.

4. He appears giving Elo land in Gaspar Feliu & Josep María Salrach (eds), Els Pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I, Diplomataris 19-21 (Barcelona 1998), doc no. 62.

5. Feliu & Salrach, Pergamins, doc. no. 226.

6. If for some reason you wished to follow up the sad history of Ingilberga, the basics are dealt with in R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, L’Abat Oliba, Bisbe de Vic, i la seva època, (Barcelona 1948; 2nd edn. 1948; 3rd edn. 1962), 3rd edn. repr. as “L’Abat Oliba i la seva època” in idem, Dels Visigots als Catalans, ed. J. Sobrequés i Callicó, Estudis i documents XIII-XIV (Barcelona 1969, repr. 1974 & 1989), 2 vols, II pp. 141-277, at pp. 190-200 of the reprint, which is of course about the remorseful half-brother but deals with his family as well, and more personally in Esteve Albert i Corp, Les Abadesses de Sant Joan, Episodis de l’història 69 (Barcelona 1969, 2nd edn. 1999), pp. 43-51, but you would probably also benefit from knowing that the documents of the expulsion are now edited in E. Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari i Escrits Literaris de l’Abat i Bisbe Oliba, ed. A. M. Mundó, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica XLIV (Barcelona 1992), Diplomatari nos. 10 & 49.

Harold, Viking lord of Bayeux, fl. 944-945

I need to spend some quality time with Richer of Rheims’s Historiae. It’s almost the only narrative source that pays any attention to my particular corner of Europe that’s even close to contemporary, though this is mainly because Richer’s teacher, the astronomical researcher, ecclesiastical politician extraordinaire, and eventual pope, Gerbert of Aurillac, or Gerbert of Rheims, or Pope Sylvester II, studied in Catalonia. He did so at such a time as to be taken to Rome by Marquis Borrell II, though, so Richer is practically the only cispyrenean source to even name Borrell (and he calls him Dux citerior hispaniae, which raises a whole bunch of questions about Borrell’s self-presentation). That’s why I should be reading him much more closely. And if not that, it should be because the excellent Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition includes a full facsimile of the autograph manuscript, including Richer’s own annotations, so you can really get to grips with what he was doing.¹

Opening page of the autograph manuscript of Richer's Histories, Bamberg, MS Hist. 5

However, why I currently want to read him is because I’ve just read something about which I had no idea. I was, obviously given my reading, dimly aware that in 945 King Louis IV of the West Franks had the ill luck to be captured by the Normans, whom he’d been using as allies against his nobility, and only rescued by his arch-enemy Hugh the Great, Duke of Francia.² But apparently this is not the whole story, because according to Richer the leader who actually captured Louis was not the Norman Count of Rouen, but someone whom the other contemporary chronicler, Flodoard of Rheims (Rheims was really where history happened those days eh?) called “Hagroldus Nordmannus, qui Baiocis præerat”, `Harold the Norseman who used to lead the people of Bayeux’.³ And although then, and probably in 944 when Duke Hugh had beseiged Bayeux but not taken it, Harold was against the Duke, before very long he was allied with him, that is to say he was not a Norman vassal but another independent leader following his own inclinations.⁴

Statue of Count Rollo the Ganger of Rouen, in modern-day Rouen, from Wikipedia

What this mainly has me thinking is how we sometimes make Normandy too, well, normative. In too many histories the Viking Age is supposed to end with King Charles the Simple establishing Rollo the Ganger and his men at Rouen and thus stopping attacks everywhere (except places like Brittany that didn’t count as anywhere from Rheims). This is often reckoned as the only thing Charles the Simple got right, though I wonder whether Philip Augustus felt that way as Richard the Lionheart charged out of the Anglo-Norman bridgehead once again. But here is Harold to remind us that Rollo need not have been the only one, just the most successful, whose descendants wound up ruling England and nearly half of France and even in the mid- to late-tenth century clearly being the ones whose story was going to matter.⁵ But there were, apparently others, or at least one other, and we just don’t know where he’d come from. How many “Viking allies” did Louis have? Had he put them there, or was this another bright idea by Charles that a later king came to regret, and that Flodoard, Richer and most of all Dudo of Saint-Quentin already knew, when they wrote, hadn’t lasted? How many Viking princes might Charles have put along that coast, in fact? Harold apparently didn’t enlist the Church structures of his area in his own cause in the way that Duke Richard I of Normandy (I mean Count Richard of Rouen) did, or his local propaganda specialists, and so doesn’t get the same sort of record.⁶ Also, it can’t be denied that the eventually-Norman dukes were particularly successful and so survived to be recorded in more detail; but the fact that Richard was later able to take Bayeux over shouldn’t be allowed to make Harold a priori less significant than the extremely young Richard in the years before then. I wouldn’t want to guess which one King Louis was more scared by in 945. I bet there’s more where this came from too. Maybe after Leeds.

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1. H. Hoffmann (ed.), Richer von Saint-Remi: Historiae, Monumenta Germania Historica (Scriptores) XXXVIII (Hannover 2000); I wonder if there’s a market for an English translation of this? Someone must be doing one.

2. E. g. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London 1983), p. 316:

By 942, peace was restored between the king and all his nobles. The balance of power among the nobility, however, was altered radically with the murder of William Longsword in 942 by henchmen of Count Arnulf of Flanders, and the death of Herbert II of Vermandois the following year. Both left heirs in their minority. Louis quickly made peace with the four sons of Herbert and seized his opportunity to exert an influence in Normandy. In 944 he managed to get himself recognised by the Normandy Vikings as regent for William’s son Richard I (942-96). For a time Louis’ Viking allies proved invaluable in helping to pay back in kind some of the excesses of Hugh the Great’s vassals…. But in 945 Louis was taken prisoner by his Viking allies and only rescued from them, in exchange for Louis IV’s youngest son, by Hugh the Great.

3. Philippe Lauer (ed. & transl.), Les Annales de Flodoard (Paris 1905), s. a. 945, cit. Samantha Kahn Herrick, “Heirs to the Apostles: Saintly Power and Ducal Authority in Hagiography of Early Normandy” in Robert Berkhofer III, Alan Cooper & Adam J. Kosto (edd.), The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350: essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson (Aldershot 2005), pp. 11-24 at p. 19 n. 26.

4. Flodoard & Richer, both s. a. 945, cit. Herrick as above.

5. See for this background Pierre Bauduin, “Chefs normands et élites franques , fin IX^e-début X^e siècle” in idem (ed.), Les fondations scandinaves enOccident et les débuts du duché de Normandie (Caen 2005), pp. 181-194. I ought also to mention, and most of all read, Jason Glenn, Politics and History in the Tenth Century. The Work and World of Richer of Reims, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 60 (Cambridge 2004).

6. This is essentially the process that Herrick covers in “Heirs to the Apostles”, which is the article that sparked this whole post and is really quite sharp.

ZOMG documents

The things I discover while searching for images to support this blog’s posts are often close to being the best excuse for doing the blog in the first place (although the other night I was congratulated on it by David Ganz, which was a little unsteadying). Nonetheless, look. You may just have heard of an initiative called ARTEM, which was a project at Nancy in France to collect and digitize all the original charters preserved in France from before 1121. And this has done grand service by allowing really close palæographical analysis of a large base of charters, pointing out various tricky things about scribes, and compiling huge databases of words and vocabulary that allow some really clever things to be done about testing dubious documents for plausibility, and also studying the development of the language (if you can stop that becoming a circular enterprise, anyway).

But they also made images of all these documents, you see, and it seems that some if not all, and several others, have now made it to the web, by means of a separate initiative of the Ministère de Culture called ARCHIM, ARCHives Nationales, IMages de documents. Now it’s not massively searchable, I have to admit, but, folks, there is magic and gold in there for a diplomatist. If you go in via the guided search form, each field has a link to a list of the available options (this, unlike the access method, is very good practice). And if you for example choose date, you can see that there are twelve seventh-century documents in there, of which several turn out to be papyrus. And it’s not just documents: here, for example, for the enthusiasts of the late Carolingians among us, is a fragmentary seal of King Louis IV of the Western Franks (937-54):

And here is dear Charles the Simple again, confirming an immunity to the canons of Paris:

It’s a pity one has to dig so hard, but there is gold in there all right. I have as usual added it to the sidebar.

Charles the Simple, you are the weakest link

(I was quite right about the readership. Post something and you all disappear. What is up with that? Anyway.)

Forgive something without my usual depth of reference, link and footnote, but this is a post that has been brought about mainly by my awareness that I need to know more, so it seems silly to point you to references that I know aren’t adequate. This is stream-of-consciousness Carolingianist reflection this is, and I shall rely on your ability to Google and Wikisearch if you want or need more.

Map of the Treaty of Verdun scrounged from the defunct MSN Encarta

You probably know that there are a variety of theories about when the Carolingian Empire really failed, but most of them would agree that by the deposition of Charles the Fat (who ruled the whole Empire between 884 and 887), when a non-Carolingian (Eudes, or Odo) ruled in the West and an only-just-Carolingian (Arnulf) in the East, soon to be replaced by an entirely new dynasty, the Ottonians (though they had Carolingian links, but really, everyone in the nobility had those), it was pretty much dead. And that is certainly fair enough but you then have to deal with not just one but two Carolingian restorations in the West, Charles the Simple in 899 and Louis the Foreigner in 936, both of which took territory on the eastern border at various points and in the case of Lothar III (Louis IV’s son) marrying Ottonian daughters and so on. Certainly in my particular corner of tenth-century Europe, they still thought the Carolingians were in charge until 987, and when they weren’t, they dated charters by the years since the last one died, and stuff like that. The Empire may have died, but the Carolingians hung on for a good long while. This is why it always bothers me when people talk about the late Carolingian era and mean, for example, Charles the Fat. There was almost as much Carolingian rule after him as there had been before, in terms of reign length; surely he is mid-Carolingian, because if he’s late, what’s Louis V? So yes: when I say late-Carolingian, as given my thesis and book title I frequently do, I mean later than that.

Now there is certainly an argument that the Empire is gone after Charles the Fat, not just because, well, it is, but also because if you believe Matthew Innes the patronage structures of the Empire survived being split into parts, but one man couldn’t then control all these separate multifocal parts from one throne, so it could never have been reassembled. Certainly not by a man with Charles’s particular defects and beset by Vikings, anyway. But the Carolingian state might have survived longer. There was, admittedly, localisation and break-up all around, and after Louis the Stammerer whole swathes of the south of France were effectively no go for the king, not that either Charles the Simple, or more importantly Lothar III, who was still giving orders to the Spanish March in 986 (albeit mainly because he was asked for them) ever entirely admit that. In the East the nature of politics itself is changing, to a highly ritualised court where the kings deliberately emphasise their theocratic status, because little else differentiates them from their peers except unction. In the West, before very much longer, the Capetians will have succeeded and have to learn to play a game of alliances, friendship, negotiation and temporisation that reflects their far slimmer resources in a world dominated by quasi-independent magnates. And one of the huge questions that has given rise to so much dreadful writing is at what point the grand authority and consensus that someone like Louis the Pious or even Charles the Bald could usually exercise, outside of times of generalised rebellion anyway, something which those two always come through in contradistinction to their successors, fell apart to a situation like Charles the Fat’s or Charles the Simple where their reigns end in ignominous deposition and captivity.

A traditional answer is one in terms of resources. Louis and Charles the Bald had lots to give, but it was easily lost especially in times of disputes when you, as prospective but not effective king, had to buy support with whatever you can. The old theory was that the kings just ran out of land to hold supporters with. Matthew Innes argues more subtly that the connections that the kings needed to pull broke and couldn’t be re-gathered, as I say. But that explains why no Empire, not why no state: Lothar III seems to have done all right at mobilising resources and even at bestowing honours, albeit in a rather changed political landscape. That change is the crucial thing to me. Lothar and his father Louis played a game, more and less successfully respectively, that looks to me from my cursory acquaintance very much like the web of friendships and alliances of magnates against other magnates that the successful Capetians also played. Louis VII and Lothar III make a very powerful comparison, except that actually Lothar was arguably the more important king, meddling in Germany and Spain and sought out by monasteries all over the kingdom still, even those bits where he really couldn’t intervene, for protection. And there was still a certain cachet in his family extraction, and indeed his name, that the Capetians took many more centuries to work up, and this is clearest in Catalonia but if you doubt it you should see how some southern French sources refer to Hugh Capet, the first Capetian, “qui erat dux sed sumpsit regni exordium”… The Carolingians retained legitimacy of a special kind to which later kings appeal again and again, and Lothar had nothing to prove in that respect. It didn’t make his subjects more obedient per se, but in the status game he had an extra card that he knew how to use.

All the same he was playing a different game. So when did the game change? Well, lately as the sidebar proclaims I have been reading a lot about the establishment of Normandy, so my eyes are very much on Charles the Simple. Now Charles is an interesting man who is long overdue a new look, and Geoffrey Koziol is I believe on the way to providing this as recent articles of his have shown, but for the moment no-one has done a proper look at him since 1899, since when for example all his charters have been published and other things that rather change the picture have happened. But one thing is clear: Charles saw himself, or at least presented himself, as an old-school Carolingian. He had the Big Name of Charlemagne himself; in his documents he sometimes had himself called “King of the Frankish and Gothic kingdoms”, “rex in regna francorum et gotorum”, referring to West Francia and the Spanish March. Now no king had been on the March since 829, but it’s not total rubbish: people from there came to get charters from him, and in 908 he appointed one of his courtiers to the bishopric of Girona, albeit only because the local counts had reached deadlock and couldn’t choose a candidate themselves. He even appointed churchmen in Aquitaine, which was closer to home and thus much more worried about him trying to muscle in. He wasn’t completely off the mark to present himself as such a king, is the point. But though he or his chancery talked the talk, could he actually rule like that? His end would suggest not, imprisoned in a castle by Herbert of Vermandois and brought out only to occasionally threaten the Burgundian king who takes his place. So what happened there then?

The stuff I’ve been looking at about the treaty that put Rollo the Ganger, Viking extraordinaire, in charge of the Normandy coasts, and eventually Rouen (one of the interesting things in that book, which I’ll write about separately, is that Charles seems to have held authority in Rouen some time after Rollo was first evident on the political scene), suggests that what had happened is that Charles the Simple didn’t really realise that the game had changed. It may have changed expressly because in the absence of a Carolingian, Eudes and his family, from whom the Capetians eventually stemmed, had had to broker a consensus by agreements, alliance and back-scratching promises, as well as sub-par status play with religious houses and prominent bishops proclaiming them God’s choice, just as the Capetians did in their early stages. They couldn’t match either the Carolingians’ resources or their family status, so they had to build a ruling consensus a different way. But that doesn’t mean that the game was reset as soon as the Carolingians return. Louis IV and Lothar III, as I’ve said, did just this sort of thing but with an extra string to their bow. Their magnates’ opinion was still vital to them. Now Charles the Simple frequently tried to do without it, appointing his choices not theirs: the biggest problem for the writers of the time was his particular insistence on the promotion of a low-born favourite called Hagano, but this seems to be one tip of a far larger iceberg of aloof rule and bungled patronage. Louis and Lothar relied on friends and alliances, but Charles’s presentation seems to have matched his actual actions; he was the Carolingian, king by right restored over the usurper, and specially to be obeyed therefore. Only in the end, that wasn’t how the king had to play the game. Maybe he could have had what his titles suggested, if he’d been a better friend and listener, if he’d treated his most important subjects as allies rather than enemies. Or maybe I just haven’t understood the depth of his situation. But I think that I need to in order to be sure that I know what was happening circa 900. It may be a more important explanation of what happens circa 1000 than people have so far seen.