Two Big Noises Sadly Quieted

The winter holiday always makes posting difficult, and, as darkly implied last post, I have to shunt my next planned post because of people whom I can’t ignore making their final departures from among us. One was an academic contact, the other, as sometimes happens on this blog, a musician I cared about (I suppose I still do; tenses are weird around the deceased). I thought for a few minutes about some way I could combine reflections on them, but to be honest, other than that neither of them minded causing a bit of trouble when they thought they were in the right, that both were 82 when they died, and that I imagine if they caught the same bus to the beyond they got on fine, it didn’t seem like a respectful way to salute either of them. So I’ll record them separately and hope that, if you’re here for historical content, you can hang on a moment.

Photo from Nik Turner’s final Facebook post, here borrowed from the The Isle of Thanet News, recording the death of a son of Margate

So, Nicholas Turner, known to one and all as Nik, saxophonist, flautist and hippy to the end, the so-called ‘Spirit of Hawkwind’ and the man after whose features that legendary band was legendarily named, was one of the musicians I’ve probably seen most often on a stage. I saw him with Hawkwind, in a couple of the ten-minute slots he and the main band were talking again in the 1990s, with his punk outfit Inner City Unit, under his own name, with his various post-Hawkwind revivals like Space Ritual, and with several combinations of the above. He was capable of stealing most shows, even when he himself was woefully under-rehearsed; he seemed to have played withb everyone in the rock world; and he was unfailingly cheerful and polite to anyone who’d come out to see him. His retirement plan seemed to be to record a new album every year until he no longer needed to, and I’m not going to say they were all fantastic, but he did write and record some of the most iconic space-rock ever and at least one of the very weirdest albums I ever heard, and if you’ve seen my music collection you’ll know that neither of those are minor honours.

I got into much of that weird music via an ancient listserv mailing list which closed, finally, earlier this year. Up till then, more or less all news about Hawkwind and its friends and relations had reached me by that list. Thus, five weeks or so ago when I had Nik’s Space Gypsy on the stereo, I suddenly thought, ‘Christ, if he’d died I wouldn’t know.’ And of course, as almost has to be true when one of those forebodings strikes you, he’d moved on to the next phase of his cosmic journey, as his closest are choosing to put it, eleven days before. I’m not sure how comfortable a life he’d led, but it does seem reasonable to say that he spent it doing pretty much what he wanted and that lots of people were always glad to see him, and I personally would settle for such an epitaph, no problem.

Professor Paul Hyams presiding over a brunch debate at Cornell University in 2005, photo from the Cornell Chronicle, linked through

Then a few days later I got a text message, itself not untraumatic as my phone was slowly ceasing to work and has now had to be replaced with something more like a phone as others recognise them, recording the second departure. It took me a little while to confirm that Professor Paul Hyams had in fact gone, as new phone or not I’m still not doing Facebook and, as with Nik, that seemed to be where the news broke, but eventually his erstwhile employer and in some sense also mine, Pembroke College Oxford, posted an obituary, and I had to believe it. Cornell, his more recent posting, followed up a few days later.

Cover of Paul Hyams’ Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca NY 2003)

I don’t think anyone would say anything against Paul’s scholarship; his work focused primarily on justice and dispute resolution in high medieval England and the things they revealed about that society, and his book Rancor and Reconciliation is probably still the go-to treatment of feud-like dispute settlement by violence and the attempts by government either to stop or to manage it for post-conquest England. He also wrote on the origins of the common law, a field in which from what I see from the outside agreement is basically impossible but where his contributions were well respected. However, that tendency to cause trouble I mentioned meant that opinion was probably more divided on him as personality; even I saw him launch quite aggressive questions into a seminar discussion, as if scholarship was a gladiatorial arena and the contest won by making everyone else feel awkward (some gentle examples at the Cornell article which provided the photo above give an impression). I have to say that I never found him anything other than sympathetic, witty and kind in actual conversation, however. There might be reasons for that, one being that my father also used to play social engagement like that sometimes and it’s remained a habit among some of my family, so that I was just used to deflecting it; but actually, I don’t remember ever having to do that with Paul myself. And I think that the softer and odder reason is that I first actually met him in the company of Another Damned Medievalist, who knew his wife and could thus threaten him with unspecified social sanction when he played up, as a consequence of which he ruefully didn’t bother when he was around her and a more human Hyams came out instead. And because I connected to that network somehow, I always got the human Hyams. I may have been quite lucky in that; but still, as both scholar and raconteur, wit and good company, I shall miss him. There were many good reasons to do so.

So there is the sad news of the end of 2022, perhaps not all of it but I hope so, and soon, very soon I hope, I can try to prevent the blog falling further behind than the three-and-a-bit year mark I’ve been holding this year. But for now, I hope you’ll forgive me saying goodbye to these two gents, both big noises in their fields whose sound we shan’t hear again.

Scribes who knew more

Moving forward definitively at last into 2019 in my backlog, in February of that year I was mainly reading Wendy Davies‘s then relatively new book Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia 800–1000. I got two posts out of this, but it turns out on reviewing the drafts now that the first one I had kind of already written in two places. Therefore, here is just the second one, on the second part of the book, which is substantially about scribes and what they knew, especially in terms of formulae. It is great, obviously, because Wendy Davies. But there is one conclusion she has that stuck out at me and now that I look at it I have objections, but I also have examples that may mean I have to swallow those objections. Tricky, huh? So I invite you to read on…

Cover of Wendy Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800-1000 (London 2016)

Wendy starts by categorising her documentary sample, and while I suspect she goes too far with this—I always suspect this with efforts of categorisation, I guess—there is a distinctive category she sets apart, which is big documents that narrate a judicial dispute and then have the outcome confirmed by important people.¹ This is, she thinks, basically a monastic habit (um, as it were; I don’t appear to have meant the pun when I drafted this) and with her favourite example it’s clear firstly that other documents from earlier in the process were used (and reported slightly differently each time they were used), and secondly that there were several distinct episodes of confirmation some years apart, as if San Vicente de Oviedo‘s monks had a ceremony every now and then when the king was hosted at their place and got him to sign things (or, I suppose, when they solemnly trooped to the palace chanting and got him to do so, or whatever).² There are a few documents in my sample with extra, later, confirmations on so I can imagine that happening in my world too.³

However, the bit that I baulked at was towards the end where she suggests that these documents required special knowledge to write, and that unlike the average sale or dispute document, whose structures the local priest of wherever knew and could write you more or less as per standard—and Wendy’s sense of the variations in that standard is acute and fascinating⁴—these ones have language in that would have been the preserve of only a few highly-educated clerics.⁵ Something socialist in me doesn’t like that; I think a number of local priests came from cathedral chapters and might have been as highly trained as the next man, but they didn’t get to write one of these big things every day, or possibly at all unless they happened to work for a monastery. The hearing over the abbacy of Sant Benet de Bages that I wrote about years ago might even be an example of someone we otherwise think was a local priest finding himself in that context and having to step up to the formulaic plate.⁶ But then I thought back and remembered my best example of such a document from Catalonia, which is of course the Sant Joan de Ripoll hearing of 913.⁷

Low-quality facsimile of the charter of the Vall de Sant Joan hearing, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Seniofredo 32

Now I’ve written a lot about this document here and elsewhere and I won’t trouble you with it all again, but thre are several things about this huge hearing that gel with Wendy’s analysis here. Firstly, it’s a substantially fictive narrative designed to represent only one side of a dispute.⁸ Secondly, it is confirmed or at least witnessed anew on two occasions at least, though not by anyone much as far as I could discern; Sant Joan seems quickly to have lacked powerful supporters in its area.⁹ But thirdly, I have repeatedly observed that its scribe, one Garsies, is not attested anywhere else ever. I have in the past suggested that that was because he was needed to mobilise or silence the otherwise scarcely visible community of old settlers who predated Sant Joan’s tenure of the area under dispute.¹⁰ I sort of picture him as being in charge of some crumbling church from long before far out in the wilds, or possibly I suppose even at Santa Leocàdia in Vic, the once-and-by-then-replaced cathedral, in general being an older authority not necessarily well integrated into the new church structure, and that because of this he was who was needed to write this document, as a person everybody could accept would be trustworthy.¹¹ The other possibility I’ve never been able to rule out, of course, is that he was a scribe of Count Sunyer who came along for the day, but I’ll ignore that for now. Wendy now opens up a third possibility, which is that he was just called upon because he had some sense how this should be done that other less experienced or learned priests might not have had. We don’t have another such document, at least not for twenty years or so not very close by, so we don’t see Garsies again. She could be right. In which case I don’t have as many frontiersmen, but I wonder where on earth he would have learnt this stuff? Santa Leocàdia might just still be the answer, but I will have to rethink…¹²

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1. Wendy Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800-1000 (Abingdon 2016), pp. 35-39.

2. Her specific worked example, of many, is Pedro Floriano Llorente (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de San Vicente de Oviedo (años 781-1200): Estudio y transcripción (Oviedo 1968), doc. no. 26, discussed Davies, Windows on Justice, pp. 1-5 & 146-147, with text pp. 60-3 and photo p. 2.

3. Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic: segles IX-X, Documents 1 (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascs, doc. no. 594, also printed as Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum IV: Els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1712, actually tells us that this happened to it, which is nice but of course raises questions of which bits were written when. In some ways more interesting is Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 995A, because there are two copies, the former of which was already witnessed by Count Borrell II but the later of which us confirmed additionally by Viscount Guadall II of Osona. More would not be hard to find.

4. Davies, Windows on Justice, pp. 95-120, which is kind of a kingdom-wide application of my technique in Jonathan Jarrett, “Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Carolingian Catalonia” in Jarrett and Allan Scott McKinley (edd.), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, International Medieval Research 19 (Turnhout 2013), pp. 89–126, DOI:10.1484/M.IMR-EB.1.101679, which is rather flattering.

5. Davies, Windows on Justice, pp. 141-143.

6. Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, tomo VII: Viage á la Iglesia de Vique, año 1806 (Valencia 1821), online here, ap. XIII.

7. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 119.

8. Jonathan Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2003), pp. 229–258 at pp. 241-248 and Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 35-42.

9. Ibid., pp. 46-49.

10. Ibid., pp. 42-46.

11. The identification is argued in Ramon Ordeig i Mata, “Santa Eulàlia i Santa Leocàdia, una església altmedieval de Vic” in Ausa Vol. 25 no. 168 (Vic 2011), pp. 323–332. .

12. It is arguable, of course, that I should have maybe done that rethinking in the three years since writing this post. One thing that should have occurred to me then but didn’t, and does now, is that the possible link to Santa Leocàdia has the additional strength that by 913 the church was actually held by Sant Joan de Ripoll, having been granted to them in Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya carol&iacutelngia volum II: Els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 2 & 3 (Barcelona 1926-1952), repr. in facsimile as Memòries… 75 (Barcelona 2007), Sant Joan de les Abadesses I. So I might still think that the most plausible answer. An outside possibility might be that Garsies had come from some Andalusi intellectual centre such as Toledo which might be thought to have given him special knowledge of charters and the like; but if that were the case, I’d expect him to have been widely sought out as scribe, and in any case Toledo diplomatic wouldn’t necessarily have been what was wanted in Osona (see my “Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture” as in n. 8 above). Maybe he just refused any lesser client than two counts, a viscount and an abbess, but still, I think more or less on-site but normally disregarded is a more plausible and interesting possibility…

It’s not adultery, but…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Sources XI: wets and measures

This is a leftover from my reading of the Wendy Davies lecture that I already blogged about while just about still in Birmingham, but I felt it was worth a post of its own, because it is (as so often in this series) about something I thought was a really interesting charter. Without further ado, I’ll give you the translation (Latin is in the reference footnote) and then try and explain why I think so, if I haven’t already convinced you!

“In the name of the Lord. This is a charter of recognition that was written and corroborated by the order of the most serene lord Prince Ramiro and of all the bishops and the crowd of catholic persons about to corroborate below, so that it should have binding character throughout the ages. Therefore: a quarrel arose between Abbot Baldered and his brothers and men of the tithing of Saint John in Vega, Gondemar and his heirs, about the aqueduct whence the mills of the brothers were powered and which they were holding in lordship. And afterwards, downstream from their mills, they were holding lordship over the water for the mills belonging to the selfsame Gondemar and his heirs, as per what they were holding as heredity from long ago, since their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had taken over that stream and held lordship over it; and their milling mills a flood of the rivers Bernesga and Torio together removed, and they built other mills further down that stream, next to the aforesaid river. When they had completed that work, maliciously, the same Abbot Baldered and his brothers rose up against them. Wherefore, with both parties laying claims in our presence and that of the bishops and judges, we sent faithful men from our council, they being: Recemir Decembriz, Abbot Vidal, the priest Pelagio and the priest Apsidio and many others who were there. And they orderd collectors to be set up in the flow of that water to measure the height of it, and below they broke down that construction which the brothers said was impeding their mills and starving them of water. And afterwards, the water flowed until the ninth hour, standing at just the same level, so showed the markers, just as they had been set up, the same amount of water and not diminished a bit, wherefore we ordered Gundemar and his heirs to have those mills and that water as they were holding it previously. Truly, another year, the brothers again raised a plea against those men, maliciously, wherefore we again sent the following faithful men so that they might determine whether they were presenting any impediment to the mills of the brothers: the judges Abaiub, Leander, Maurello and many others. And the already-said faithful men found, just as on the first occasion, that the brothers were acting maliciously against those men, and that nothing was presenting an impediment to them. Now, in the third year in which this quarrel has arisen between those people, we, with all the gathering corroborated below, have assigned to Gundemar, with his heirs, the selfsame water from the mills of the brothers as far as their mills. Thus, when the brothers shall warn them about their restoration of that upper construction or their direction of the water, they may avoid it without any excuse of a survey; and let them together have that water, for their use, without any molestation. For if now or from now on anyone shall raise any quarrel or attempt to bring any accusation, just so much shall he pay to the royal purse 500 solidi, just as he shall lose his right and property in the selfsame water.
“Recorded on the 7th day of the Kalends of July, in the era 976 [25th June 938 A. D.]
“Under Christ’s name, Quixila, by the Grace of God bishop. Under Christ’s name, Bishop Frunimio. Under Christ’s name, Ovecco, by the Grace of God bishop. Recemir Decembriz.
“Abaiub, judge, confirms; Maurello, judge, confirms; Leander, judge, confirms. Monio Nuniz confirms; Vermudo Nuniz confirms; Diaz, archdeacon, confirms; Gundisalvo, deacon, confirms. Assur, deacon, confirms; Piloto, Abbot, confirms; Fredenando confirms; Olemundo confirms.
“Fortis, scribe, recorded. ()

This is a fairly tangly story, so it may be worth breaking it down a bit. If I read it right, these are the stages:

1. In the distant past, Gundemaro’s ancestors cleared the land around a stretch of the river Bernesga in Vega and thus laid claim to the use of the water there, and set up mills on it.
2. Either previously or later, the monastery of Valdevimbre (as it happens, the text doesn’t identify it) acquired rights to the water higher up the river and had mills of their own up there.²
3. Next, a flood of the Bernesga and its tributary the Torio wiped out Gundemaro’s family’s mills, so they built more in a safer place downstream of the monastery’s mills, and put in an aqueduct that diverted water from the river to their mills.
4. The monastery didn’t like this, and Abbot Baldered and his monks raised a suit against Gundemaro and family claiming that the new construction was interfering with the monastery’s mills, apparently despite the fact that those were above it on the river.
5. So King Ramiro sent a team of enquiry who set up markers in the river, presumably near the monastery’s mills, and gauged the water level before and after destroying Gundemaro’s family’s new aqueduct, and they found that it changed not at all, as one might have expected, whereupon King Ramiro found in favour of Gundemaro and said that he and his heirs could carry on as before.
6. So one assumes that they rebuilt, whereupon the monastery raised suit again, and another team, this time of judges, went out to Vega again and found that there was still no interference going on with the monastery’s mills and told them to shut up.
7. The document we have dates from the third year in which the monastery had raised this claim, and this time King Ramiro has had enough, and says that there will be no further survey, that Gundemaro and co. are to have the river between the monastery’s mills and their own without any possibility of further dispute and that anyone who raises such a dispute will pay a 500-solidi fine and lose any claim they may have to the river.

There’s loads to interest me here, from the purely diplomatic to the deeply personal. In the former category, I like the way that the scribe Fortis makes the document refer to what will be written on it later; if that’s straightforward, it implies that he was drafting it at the gathering in response to the royal verdict, but it seems to have been a full formal document anyway; we only have it through Valdevimbre’s cartulary, now in the Archivo de la Catedral de León, but the fact that the witnesses are roughly, but not perfectly, divided into columns by category even in the copy implies that some such arrangement was also present in the original, otherwise I’d expect the first column to have four and the last three, not the other way around. I also note, just in passing, that one of the judges has an Arabic name, and that we know that another witness, Recemir Decembriz, was son of another such person, December iben Abolfeta, even though his own name is unfaultably Gothic.³ Read me an ethnicity from those if you dare!

The monastery of Valdevimbre's buildings seem to be long gone, but for orientation, I think we're here, not at the main confluence of the rivers but slightly further up the Bernesga where the artificial channels cross the fields from the Presa to drain into it. People are still doing the same thing here...

More interesting, perhaps, but less resolvable: why did the monastery keep raising this spurious suit? It seems clear that they thought that Gundemaro was a problem for their water rights, and in most of the medieval Iberian peninsula—not Catalonia so much, which is a lot wetter than the rest of the peninsula, Galicia excepted—rights to the use of water and irrigation are a big deal so this is understandable in principle.⁴ But even if there was initially some reason to believe that Gundemaro and co. were dipping into water in the monastery’s stretch of the river, they choose a stupid way to contest this, saying that their mills are affected by a structure that must, surely, have been below those mills in the river and so tapping only water that the monastery’s mills had already spent. But they manage to get this checked twice, and try again, so presumably they thought there was some chance that the royal inquest might find in their favour, despite the first one having used Science! to prove them wrong. (Because that is, is it not, testing of a hypothesis by experiment.) I don’t understand why.

But to me, given my habitual concerns, the most interesting question of all is: why do we have this document? The monastery lost, repeatedly. What good did preserving that fact in their archive, and indeed copying it up for the cartulary a few centuries later, do them? If they had ever produced this in court it could only have gone badly for them. The only thing I can think of is that they were genuinely concerned that Gundemaro’s family would start tapping the monastery’s water, protected by their apparent good standing with the royal court, and that even this document, which not only set but seemingly shrank the rights they could claim in the river, was better than having no record of their rights at all. In which case, where did they get those rights in the first place, and why was this a better document than nothing? The only answers to these questions I can think of all suggest that the monastery was in fact at a disadvantage here, that despite our usual assumption that he who keeps the record has the power and that the Church always held the whip hand in disputes, Valdevimbre was up against some fairly immovable local bigwigs here and was hoping, somehow, to get the court to stand up for them against their opponents. They seem to have picked a stupid way to do it, but maybe it was the only way they had. In short, though this looks like a rare case in which we have a record of a greedy and assertive ecclesiastical institution being defeated in court, I suspect that the way we have the record may actually imply that they were not the aggressors…

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1. Emilio Sáez (ed.), Colección Documental del Archivo de la Catedral de León (775-1230): I (775-952), Fuentes de la Historia Leonesa 41 (León 1987), doc. no. 128:

KARTULA AGNICIONIS QUOD FECIT RANIMIRI PRINCIPIS DE PLACITUM QUOD ABUIT BALDEREDUS ABBA ET SUOS HEREDES
In nomine Domini. Hec est kartula agnicionis quam iussu serenissma domni Ranimiri principis uel omnium episcoporum ac cetu catholicorum, subter roboraturis, conscripta ac roborata est, ut tenorem iugi abeat per secula. Igitur orta fuit intencio inter Balderedus abba et suis fratribus et homines de collacione Sancti Ihoannis, in Uega, Gondemaro cum suos heredes, propter aqueductum unde molendina fratrum molebant et dominata tenebant. Et post, sub ab eorum molendina, dominabant ipsa aqua ad suos molinis ipso Gondemaro cum suos heredes, secundum eam quam abebant hereditariam ab antiquo, ut abprehenderant eam aquam et dominauerunt eam suis auis et trysauis; et suos molinos molentes, amouit eos inundacio fluminis Uernesga cum Torio mixto, et super ipsam aquam edificauerunt alios molinos subtus, secus flumen predictum. Quum factum hac completum illum abuissent, maliciose, insurrexerunt aduersus eos idem Balderedus abba et sui fratres. Unde, in nostra presencia uel episcoporum et iudicum, asserentes utraque partes, misimus ex concilio fideles, hii sunt: Recemirus Decembri, Uitalis abba, Pelagius presbiter hac Aspidius presbiter et aliorum multorum que interfuerunt. Que preuiderunt in decursione ipsa aqua fieri papillos et metire ipsa altitudinis aqua ac ruperunt subtus illa presa que dicebant quia inpediebat et inaquabat molina fratrum; et postquam, decursa est aqua usque in oram nonam, stantem in ipsa mensura equaliter, sic apparuerunt ipsas stacas, sicut eas perxerant, equale aqua nec in modico minuante, unde iussimus abere ad ipso Gundemaro et suos heredes suos molinos et ipsa aqua ut primitus abebant. Equidem et in altero anno, iterum supposuerunt uocem contra eos homines fratres, maliciose, unde et alios fideles misimus que probarent si eis aliquid inpediebant ad molina fratrum: iudices Abaiub, Leander, Maurellus cum alios multos. Et inuenerunt, sicut et primi, iam dicti fideles, quia maliciosa agebant fratres aduersus eos homines, et nullum eis inferebant inpedimentum. Ad uero, nos, cum omni cetu subter roboratis, anno tercio ex quo orta fuerat inter ipsos ipsa intencio, ordinauimus abere ad ipso Gundemaro, cum suos heredes, ipsa aqua de molina fratrum usque ad suos molinos. Ita quando eos admonuerint fratres pro ipsa superiora presa restaurare uel aquam domare, sine aliqua excusacione mense auertant; et abeant cunctos ipsa aqua, pro sua utilitate, sine ulla molestia. Quod siquis amodo uel deinceps uocem subposuerit aut aliquam calumpniam temptauerit inferre, quomodo pariet post partem regis solidos D, velud kareat uocem et suam proprietatem in illa aqua.
Notum die VII kalendas iulii, era DCCCC^a LXX^a VI^a.
Sub Christi nomine, Cixila Dei gratia episcopus-. Sub Christi nomine, Frunimius episcopus-. Sub Christi nomine, Ouecco, Dei gratia episcopo. Recemirus December.
Abaiub iudex conf. Monio Nuniz conf. Assuri diaconus conf.
Maurellus iudex conf. Vermudo Nuniz conf. Piloti abba conf.
Leander iudex conf. Didacus archidiaconus conf. Fredenandus conf.
Gundisaluus diaconus conf. Olemundus conf.
Fortis scriba NOTUIT (signum).

2. On Valdevimbre you can see César Álvarez Álvarez, “El monasterio de Valdevimbre (siglos IX-XII)” in Manuel Cecilio Díaz y Díaz, Mercedes Díaz de Bustamante & Manuela Domínguez García (edd.), Escritos dedicados a José María Fernández Catón (León 2004), 2 vols, I, pp. 41-64.

3. The December family are tracked in Victor Aguilar Sebastián & Francisco Rodríguez Mediano, “Antroponimia de origen árabe en la documentación leonesa (siglos VIII-XIII)” in Manuel Lucas Álvarez (ed.), El Reino de León en la Alta Edad Media VI, Fuentes de la Historia Leonesa 53 (León 1994), pp. 497-633.

4. See classically Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge MA 1970), still in print.

Name in Lights X

[This post originally went up in September 2014 when its information was fresh and new, and was ‘stuck’ to the front page for ages. Now I’ve got through the backlog to the point where this would properly have been posted, it’s time to let it go into the stream to join its fellows, with more soon to follow. And in the meantime, if you had managed to miss this piece of my writing, I don’t suppose it can hurt to bring it before you again…]

Cover of Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013)

The 2014 outputs have begun to appear at last! Though thankfully this is already not the last of them, it is the first, a review by me of Josep María Salrach’s new book as you see above for The Medieval Review; it is online here. The final version of this went off at the end of June, it was up some time earlier this month, not too bad; sometimes online publishing actually does live up to its promise for quick delivery. The book, by the way, is rather good, but if you want to know why I think so, well, read the review, it’s open-access… Some of the points I make there in a sentence or so will turn up here as worked-up blog posts in due course. Stay tuned also, however, for more publications news!

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Full citation: J. Jarrett, review of Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013) in The Medieval Review 14.09.16, online at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/18731, last modified 15 September 2014 as of 27 September 2014.

Leeds 2013 report part 2

Sorry, this has taken a couple of days to find the time to write. But, as with the conference experience itself, the only way out of the backlog is through! Or something. So, resuming the Leeds 2013 report on Tuesday 2nd July, your blogger found himself breakfast (which was reassuringly, basically the same as it had been at Bodington, which is to say, there were many options healthier than the somewhat limp fry-up but that’s what I always have anyway). Thus fortified, I headed for dispute!

506. Law, Violence, and Social Bonds, I: Power, Conflict, and Dispute Settlement

• Matthew McHaffie, “Warranty of Land in eleventh- and early twelfth-century Anjou”
• Kim Esmark, “Power and Pressure: the micropolitics of 11-century aristocratic networks”
• Warren C. Brown, “Conflict and the Laity in Carolingian Europe”

Mr McHaffie here was looking at at a particular procedure in Angevin charters whereby the actor undertook to stand warranty for the recipient’s onwership of the property, meaning that they would defend it at law and if necessary by force. He emphasised that this was rare (120 cases in the 3000+ documents he’d looked at), that it was by no means always carried out when it should have been (as, as Geoffrey Koziol pointed out in questions, we see in the Conventum Hugonis), and that a lot of what it involved must have been going on outside the courts that provide us with half the relevant records. It very quickly comes down to the micropolitics of who was involved with whom, which meant that Dr Esmark followed on very neatly, especially since he was also talking about Anjou: the thrust of his paper was that lords’ actions were shaped by the pressures of their followings as much as any other factor. Matthew Hammond tried to use this to suggest that Thomas Bisson might exaggerate lords’ freedom of action in the period; Dr Esmark, as my notes have it, thought there was “lots more to do to prove him fully wrong”. Both I and Bob Moore pressured him for more on the ties of the groups involved, whether they were a steady body of people and how they were linked between themselves, but variability over both time and case seems to be the motif, as I reluctantly suppose we’d expect, though core membership of the groups seems to be more identifiable than in my materials till, well, I suppose the mid-eleventh century actually! Hmm…



The donjon of the Château de Loches, originally built by Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou. Probably room for a few amici…

Lastly, Warren Brown, as is his wont, emphasised that for the early Middle Ages, formulae are in some ways a richer source for social practice than land transfer documents and showed it by extracting from them information on judicial process in disputes between laymen, something that given most surviving documents’ involvement of the Church we otherwise hardly see; this shows up, even in Frankish sources, a picture of negotiation, settlements, tactical defaults, oaths and corruption that looks a lot more like the picture we have from the more detailed Italian evidence, although also a significant amount more homicide and highway robbery than we find in any other sources.¹ He also emphasised that women were envisaged as aggressors too, not just by underhand means like sorcery but sometimes by flat-out assault. His conclusion was that the formulae show the patches that had to be applied to a system that often went wrong, which I think is pretty realistic.

I seem now to have skipped a session, which if I remember rightly was simply because I didn’t get the location of the one I had decided to go to worked out in time, realised I would be late and decided I would do better just to get coffee and decompress for a short while. This is probably the point at which most of this happened, too:

The haul from Leeds 2013

I must have slipped! So after that obviously stern strictures were required, in the form of law.

703. Origin, Usage, and Functionality of the Frankish Leges

• Magali Coumert, “Isidorus Hispalensis and the Lex Salica“
• Lukas Bothe, “Let ‘Em Pay or Hang ‘Em High?: tackling theft and robbery in Merovingian legal sources”
• Stephan Ridder, “Traces of the Frankish King in the Lex Baiuvariorum“


Start of a copy of the Salic Law in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Latin 4404

Dr Coumert started from the odd fact that although Isidore of Seville would seem to have precious little to do with the supposed codification of old Frankish custom into the Salic Law, nonetheless, a quarter of its manuscripts also contain his work, and from there went into a lengthy but justified plain about how misleading the canonical edition of Lex Salica is in terms of how anyone actually used it, since it raids manuscripts of radically different traditions to construct a ‘pure’ text that it is obvious no-one at the time had or used. “He just didn’t care,” said she of Karl August Eckhardt, and it’s hard to disagree, though as the paper revealed, it’s also very hard not to use his groupings of the manuscripts anyway.² What taking the manuscripts as wholes reveals, however, is that they almost never have only one code in, but are always collections of several laws or sources of law, and Isidore seems to have been an authority that could travel with these too. The users of these manuscripts were not doing with them what the nineteenth-century editors thought they should have been, and it’s probably worth trying to figure out what they were doing rather than seeing that use as something in the way of our scholarship…

Mr Bothe, meanwhile, approached the question of death for thieves, something that is supposed often to be normal ‘barbarian’ practice, especially for those caught in the act, but which is often deprecated in the actual laws in favour of heavy fines, which he suggested were preferred because of not implicating the judiciary in the feud that might result from executing someone. I thought that that, and the idea of a legislating state trying to patch up law, both sat oddly next to the idea we seem otherwise to be developing of Merovingian Frankish law as a more or less decentralised set of ideals, something on which I’ve heard enough since to make it impossible for me to recover what I thought about this session at the time. That picture was much more present in Mr Ridder’s study of the Laws of the Bavarians, though, a text whose origin and issuer is almost perfectly unclear, but which attributed to the king of the Franks considerable connections to and authority over the Agilolfing dukes of the Bavarians. Mr Ridder suggested that here we might even take the text seriously and associate it with a Merovingian move into the duchy to coordinate its defence against the Avars. The questions mainly focused on Mr Bothe’s fines, however, and whether, given their size, even they were supposed to be more than deterrents; he thought that probably was their function, but pointed out that what seems to be an impossibly large amount of gold might still be achievable in cattle, because cows were surprisingly expensive (say two solidi each?), or of course in land, which, as in Spain (why I’d raised the question) was not envisioned in the law but certainly happened here. Here again, therefore, we saw that the actual law texts bear only the sketchiest relation to what was actually done, meaning that they were not the kind of resource we usually think they were. How many other sorts of text does that apply to, we might ask?

Then coffee and then fireworks, at least of an intellectual kind.

803. Defining Kingdoms in 10th-Century Europe

• Geoffrey Koziol, “The (Dark) Matter of France: monasticism and the making of the West Frankish kingdom”
• Simon MacLean, “Who Were the Lotharingians? Defining political belonging after the end of the Carolingian Empire”
• Charles Insley, “Beyond the Charter Horizon: (un)making England in the 10th century”


The eventual home of the monks of St Philibert, at Tournus. “Tournus-StPhilib” by Morburre – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the plethora of brackets, this session was surely my favourite of the conference, probably mainly because it’s so nice to have people other than myself looking at the tenth century as if it might tell us something. Professor Koziol was excited to tell us about about his new theory, which was coming in the wake of the completion of the most substantial work on the Carolingian tenth century for quite a while.³ The problem he was seeking to solve was how the West Frankish kingdom, of which large parts repeatedly rebelled in the ninth century and much of which was beyond the control of its kings for the tenth through to twelfth centuries, held together as any kind of unit. Why did the idea of France even include Aquitaine and Provence by the time the Capetian kings could make that mean anything? For Professor Koziol, the answer is monks, or more specifically, congregations of monasteries or single houses with really wide-ranging property interests, like the familia of Saint Philibert whose sporadic flight from the Vikings took them through four different homes with supporting endowments.⁴ Another obvious one would be Cluny, which though outside Francia proper controlled a network of houses within it and saw the king as their principal defence. Such places relied on the kings’ support, and by doing so gave the kings the framework of a state which kept them present, even when ineffective, in peoples’ schemes of the world. Such at least was the theory, but the fact that such royal documents were rarely brought out of archives, as far as we can tell, and that even allowing for Cluny there’s really no way to show any shared ideology other than Christianity between all Frankish monasteries, gave others pause. For me there’s also the question of why this didn’t work in Catalonia, which even in its parts then north of the Pyrenees stopped asking the kings for such documents quite sharply after 988, yet meets most of the same criteria before then. Nonetheless, Professor Koziol did not seem unconvinced so I guess that we will see further versions of this thought, and even I’m sure it explains something, I’m just not quite sure how much yet…



Old map of Lotharingia with some more modern captions

Simon, meanwhile, was asking a quite similar question but without the surviving monarchy, which makes the old ‘kingdom of Lothar’, Lothari regni, Lotharingia or Lorraine or Löthringen, as an idea even harder to explain. Despite the completely arbitrary origins of the area, evident in its name, Simon cited sources from the 960s talking about the ethnic characteristics of Lotharingians. Of course, as he said, this just goes to show that even when ethnicity is entirely constructed and situational (which is possibly always, I might throw in), it’s still a powerful idea. For this case, Simon thought that its power was being appropriated by the writers who supported local noble groups against a West Frankish crown that returned to the area as a conqueror, not as an heir, in the form of King Charles the Simple in 911, so that what had been ‘Lothar’s kingdom’ became more comfortably separate as an area with a people named after him than as a territory that had clearly belonged to the Carolingian monarchy. In doing so, however, he mentioned various other formulations that didn’t seem to stick, like ‘regnum Gallicanum’, and in questions some of the most interesting points for me were raised about other such ethnicities that fail, for example the Ribuarians, who had a Frankish lawcode but who seem never to have been a people anyone could locate. There are others, and so the question may be why this one stuck and others didn’t, and I suppose that one answer might be, it was not controlled by outside interests for long enough at a time to remove the value of an ‘inside’ identity, in which case I need to look at it rather more closely…



The Abingdon Cartulary, demonstrating its interest in the kingdom by picturing Edward the Confessor, albeit quite a long time after he would have cared. British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B VI, fo. 109v

Lastly, Charles Insley took aim at the developing historiography, of which you’ve had plenty reported here since it’s largely coming from Oxford, that is trying to place the definitive development of an English state in the tenth century. He pointed out that by using Koziol-like tactics of analysing the uptake and issue of royal diplomas, it seems clear that large parts of this supposed kingdom just did not deal with the kings in the way that the south did.⁵ Instead, therefore, he suggested that far less of tenth-century England was governed by consent, as opposed to grudging acceptance of the king’s ability to beat them up with southern armies, and that governmental structures may therefore not be enough to tell us about unity. Most of the questions Charles got were about preservation: there has been so much Anglo-Saxon material lost that arguing from areas of absence is dangerous, but, as he says, there are lots of charters from East Anglia, just no royal ones, and there aren’t no documents from the north (though it’s very close!) so there is still something to explain.⁶ Julie Hofmann suggested that we might be looking less at obedience to royal power projection in the tenth century and more at subservient submission to royal dissolution in the sixteenth, which as Charles said is a possibility that late medieval registers might help eliminate. Work to be done, therefore!

All the same, this session hit a great many of my buttons: three scholars I think are always interesting and argumentative, all pushing more or less big ideas, and happy to let others take shots at them in the cause of testing them out, with plenty of people happy to do so; it may look quite disputational, and I suppose it isn’t for the thin-skinned, but in a session like this one can practically feel the field energise and take shaky steps forward. There was plenty to think about over dinner. But then there was also some more to think about after dinner, in the form of a dessert of databases.

910. ‘Nomen et Gens’ and ‘The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe’: early medieval database projects – a round table discussion

This took the form of two short presentations of the respective projects by their principal investigators, introduced by Jinty Nelson, with a question and answer section for each. I’ve yet to see a round table at Leeds that really is a round table, though I do generally avoid them which is probably why, but nonetheless there was lots of information here. Nomen et Gens is a project that’s been running since the 1970s—as Steffen Patzold who was introducing it said, long enough to have its own Traditionskern—but has lately advanced fully into the database age, and its aim is to amass enough prosopographical data to assess quantitatively what ethnic identifiers actually meant to their early medieval users.⁷ What this means, however, is that it now contains basic biographical and personal information for 10,000-plus people of the seventh and eighth centuries and the easiest way to find out more is to go and look, here. The only real question was why this was only a demo version, but apparently there is much more to check and unify before the full thing can go live to the world. Accounts are available for those who can help, though.


An example of cross-over: screen-capture of Nomen et Gens‘s entry for Charlemagne

Alice Rio spoke for The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe, a project I’ve heard a lot about given its staff’s frequent presence at the Institute of Historical Research. Here the aim has been to database all the charters from the reign of Charlemagne and the territories which he ruled. A lot has been learned from the approaches used at Kings College London, where the project lives, on Prosopography of the Domesday Elite, and its structure is quite sophisticated. Here, again, the best way to find out more is probably to go and play with it: it wasn’t live in July 2013 but now it more or less is, so take your Charlemagne-period enquiries to it and see what it has to tell you! At this point it was still very much in development: I asked, for example, if it could answer stacked queries (a query performed on the results of a previous query) and was told that it had been able to since two o’clock that afternoon… But it was clearly going places at last, after many frustrations, and the two databases were also probably going to be able to talk to each other behind the scenes in productive ways.

And thus, pretty much ended the second day. [Edit:: I forgot to mention that Magistra also blogged the first and last of these sessions, and particularly in the former her impressions were quite different from mine, so you may like to take a look there as well.] More will follow, after a short digression about a tiny church…

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1. W. C. Brown, “Conflict, letters, and personal relationships in the Carolingian formula collections” in The Law and History Review Vol. 25 (Cambridge 2007), pp. 323-44; cf. Chris Wickham, “Land Disputes and their Social Framework in Lombard-Carolingian Italy, 700-900” in Wendy Davies & Paul Fouracre (edd.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1986), pp. 105-124, rev. in Wickham, Land and Power: studies in Italian and European social history, 400-1200 (London 1994), pp. 229-256.

2. Eckhardt did about a hundred different editions of the Lex Salica but I guess that the definitive ones are the MGH ones, K.-A. Eckhardt (ed.), Pactus Legis Salicae, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) IV.1 (Hannover 1962), online here, and idem (ed.), Lex Salica, MGH Leges IV.2 (Hannover 1969), online here. The problems of assuming an Urtext behind the manuscripts of course also dog attempts to come up with a single translation, such as Katherine Fischer Drew (transl.), The Laws of the Salian Franks (Philadelphia 1991), where pp. 52-55 demonstrate the awkward choices that had to be made.

3. That being none other than Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 19 (Turnhout 2012).

4. The last word on the monks of Saint Philibert appears now to be Isabelle Cartron, Les pérégrinations de Saint-Philibert – Genèse d’un réseau monastique dans la société carolingienne (Rennes 2009), which Professor Koziol cited.

5. Referring to Koziol, Politics of Memory, in case that’s not clear, though cf. 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!

6. What there is from the north is now printed in David Woodman (ed.), Charters of Northern Houses, Anglo-Saxon Charters 16 (Oxford 2012).

7. I had here some acid comment about how it would be normal to look to Germany for a project working to establish ground-base values for ethnicity then realised the problem with making such a generalisation…

Ghost voices in the first person

When I wrote this, in May 2013, I was working my way through Patrick Wormald’s post-mortem Festschrift, which has some excellent stuff in it sharing space with several things that are only just papers.¹ I won’t name any of the latter, but there is among many other good things a new treatment of the Fonthill Letter by Nicholas Brooks which does exactly what I would do when given a tricky and well-known document to squeeze something more from, to wit, look for the participants in other charters, and it works out well.² In the course of doing it he opened one of those problems I hadn’t realised was a problem, though, and I want to turn it round a bit. [Of course, when I wrote this, he wasn’t dead, and I might have hoped to turn it round in conversation with him, but I didn’t, now I can’t, so I can only hope there’s nothing here he would have minded. It seems unlikely that he would have.]

Great Ridge Wood, near Cricklade, which the Wikpiedia entry on the Fonthill Letter reckons part of the estate concerned and therefore uses to illustrate the entry! “Great Ridge wood near Chicklade – geograph.org.uk – 465121” by Andy Gryce – From geograph.org.uk. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

First I should probably explain what the Fonthill Letter actually is, which has not always been certain. It seems safe to say that it is a letter written to intervene with King Edward the Elder of the English (899-924), son of Alfred the Great, over a land dispute of Alfred’s time, which one of the parties was now trying to reopen. The landholder, one Helmstan, had been challenged over it because he’d stolen someone’s belt, and the challenger presumably thought this would weaken his network of support and make him vulnerable to challenges on other grounds. In the event, the author of the letter, Helmstan’s godfather, rallied round and interceded for him, even when Helmstan, having been securely reaffirmed in his rights over the land, then threw it all away by getting caught cattle-rustling some time later. The godfather’s interest in this was that Helmstan had promised him the land in question in exchange for his support, Helmstan to carry on holding it under his lordship. By the time of the letter, this had all taken place, Helmstan was presumably dead and the author had shifted the ‘hot’ property on to the cathedral of Winchester in exchange for other less contentious estates, and really didn’t want the whole thing challenged. He entreats Edward: “Sir, when will any suit be ended if one can close it neither with money nor with oath? Or if one wishes to alter every judgement that King Alfred made, when shall we have finished disputing?” All of which is very true and poignant but fails to hide the fact that Helmstan had been able to get away with theft twice because his godfather was in with the kings. It is, as ever, tough to be up against the Man in the tenth century.³

But who was this godfather? The author of the letter doesn’t explicitly name himself, but in it Helmstan is said to have held land from Ealdorman Ordlaf of Wiltshire, and such a man is also listed as present at the final settlement of the case which is recorded on the dorse of the document, along with a Canterbury scribe’s note that the whole document was useless, ‘inutile‘, and should presumably have been thrown away. Nicholas made a good case, using the charters as said, that Ordlaf is the author, and this has been argued before, but a problem with it is that Ordlaf is referred to in the third person and the letter is written in the first. Split personality? Nicholas thought not, and points out: “Such variation between the first and third persons is in fact a common feature of the most nearly comparable extant documents, namely Anglo-Saxon wills.” Which is where I come in, because in the wills of tenth and eleventh-century Catalonia I occasionally see the same thing, as witness (with my emphasis):

In the name of God. Men of these names, Borrell the priest, Ermegell and Dacó, who are executors of the late Avendi, we together as one are donors to God and to the monastery of Sant Benet, which is sited on the Riu Llobregat. By this same donation we give 1 modiata of vine, which came to me Avendi by purchase…

This is not the best example I could give but it is maybe the shortest and it was certainly the first one I could find.⁴ There are a few of these documents where suddenly the voice of the dead testator comes back to haunt it, and up till now I’d always assumed this was a relic of the elaborate testamentary process used here, where an initial will was sacramentally published before judges or at least churchmen and then individual bequests carried out by the executors, or almsmen, as would be a fairer translation of their title, elemosinarius.⁵ This obviously opens the possibility that people writing up the latter parts of the process would refer to the initial will and quote it direct without adjusting the grammar, and I’m sure that’s what happened in this case of 987.

But can this explain Ordlaf’s elusiveness in the Fonthill letter? Nicholas went a bit round the houses here, suggesting that there might be a distinct semantic register of documents where the use of the third person for oneself was more appropriate than the first, and that such a document may have been involved here, the local reeve’s judgement that the land Helmstan held from Ordlaf wasn’t forfeit because it wasn’t really his. And I can’t work out if this step about the semantic register is necessary. Certainly, in the Catalan cases, if such a respect for the original will is why it’s quoted direct, it’s not done consistently even within documents (though Nicholas referenced an observation of Mechthild Gretsch’s that the same could be said of King Alfred, or at least whoever wrote the Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis in Alfred’s name).⁶ The Fonthill letter is anything but an accomplished piece of writing, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting (and so hard to edit and translate); if there was a written antecessor here I’m not sure that the author would have thought to change the grammar to fit the new context. That such a thing would be in writing to quote is itself slightly surprising but perhaps not impossible. But between mistake and respect, I find it hard to choose, and wonder whether we even need to: to the recipients and audiences, in all cases, the meaning would presumably have been clear anyway. All of these documents are, after all, at some level reported speech anyway, and we’re as happy now to quote direct or to report speech as this would require. That a nobleman would address the king by letter anyway already suggests a familiarity with writing; I’m not suggesting that this should automatically breed contempt, but we could possibly underestimate the readiness of such a writer to adapt texts to his whim, even if he wasn’t Wessex’s top redactor. A charter, yes, is a special piece of writing, a scriptura, Scripture, but this was not, even if it now is to us, and greater freedom may have been available for the author in which to trip up…

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1. Stephen Baxter, Catherine E. Karkov, Janet L. Nelson & David Pelteret (edd.), Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald (Farnham 2009).

2. N. Brooks, “The Fonthill Letter, Ealdorman Ordlaf and Anglo-Saxon Law in Practice”, ibid., pp.301-316.

3. Following Brooks’s translation, ibid. pp. 302-306 with quote p. 304.

4. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1522.

5. The easiest guide to testamentary practice in Catalonia is Nathaniel Taylor, “Testamentary Publication and Proof and the Afterlife of Ancient Probate Procedure in Carolingian Septimania” in K. Pennington, S. Chodorow & K. H. Kendall (edd.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress on Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City 2001), pp. 767-780, online here, last modified 9th December 2006 as of 24th June 2007.

6. M. Gretsch, “The Fonthill Letter: language, law and the discourse of disciplines” in Anglia Vol. 123 (Berlin 2005), pp. 662-686 at p. 669, cit. Brooks, “Fonthill Letter”, p. 313 n. 26. On doubt over the authorship here, see Malcolm Godden, “Did King Alfred Write Anything?” in Medium Ævum Vol. 76 (Oxford 2007), pp. 1-23; cf. Janet Bately, “Did King Alfred Actually Translate Anything: the Integrity of the Alfredian Canon Revisited” in Medium Ævum Vol. 78 (2009), pp. 189–215. Brooks referenced other work on the Letter, but one might add more generally Patrick Wormald, “Charters, Law and the Settlement of Disputes in Anglo-Saxon England” in Wendy Davies & Paul Fouracre (edd.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1986), pp. 149-168 and Simon Keynes, “Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 226-257.

Seminars CXXXV & CXXXVI: characterising some medieval disputants

The need to catch up on the seminar reports is still fairly urgent, so I must do my now-usual filtering of what is in the pile. Out, with reluctance because it was good but with reassurance because as so often Magistra has already covered it, goes the second Clerical Cosmos conference in Oxford, but do go have a look at Magistra’s reports if the subtitle, “Ecclesiastical power, culture and society, c. 900 to c. 1075″, sounds like it should hit your interests. That at last takes me into the Easter term of 2013, and that term was greeted in Oxford by a paper by Mark Whittow to the Medieval History Seminar on the 23rd April entitled, “Territorial Lordship and Regional Power in the Age of Gregorian Reform: Matilda of Canossa and the Matildine lands”.

Countess Matilda of Canossa, enthroned with attendants, manuscript portrait from the Vita Mathildis by Donizone (who may be the cleric at her right)

This paper did the audience the good service of recapitulating Matilda’s career, something it’s quite hard to get in one place from literature outside Italy despite its importance in the politics of Germany and Italy (and especially both) in the time of the eleventh-century dispute of Holy Roman Empire and Papacy, and assessing her landed holdings.¹ Out of this came several observations, one being that little enough of her focus was actually in her marquisate of Tuscany, where competition for power was perhaps not one-sided enough, and another being that while she is often represented as a champion of public office because she held one, her armies were formed of vassals based in castles even if the emperor had approved the grant of the castles. In other words, she was pretty much as feudo-vassalitic in operation as the Dukes of Aquitaine, even if she was more closely involved with a persistent and intermittently-powerful royalty than they were. Nonetheless, there was a difference in the discourse of power Matilda used, with artwork and manuscripts presenting her as imperially-descended and legitimate and traditional in a way the Meridional princes wouldn’t have used unless they went for Roman roots, as Christian Lauranson-Rosaz would argue they did in the Auvergne.² That, at least, would have worked to undermine the claims of a royalty that drew its ancestry back to fairly recent, and certainly post-Roman, times, but Matilda was competing for the same grounds of legitimacy as her German royal opponents (and sometimes allies). So this was all very interesting and fitted Matilda into a different framework than the one where English-language historians usually meet her, but the thing that sticks with me is something that I had to raise in questions, that the pictures we have of her do, yes, twice show her on a throne, but they also consistently show her dwarfed by it, compared to her noble antecessors shown on the same throne in the same manuscript. The author of that manuscript knew the lady personally; it was hard not to conclude that the artist did too, and what he or she knew was that their patron was pretty small.³ This obviously didn’t make her any the less considerable, if so!

15th-century manuscript depiction of the Court of Common Pleas, London

Then the very next day the Medieval Church and Culture Seminar was lucky enough, as we were told at fulsome length, to be host to Professor Paul Hyams, who spoke with the title, “Disputes and How to Avoid Them: charters and custom in England during the long 12th century”.⁴ This appealed to me, predictably perhaps, as it was a paper about what the charters aren’t telling us, the trouble that a dispute settlement charter averts or that preceded its issue but which its scribe thought it impolitic to recount, at least from more than one side. It dealt with the invisible threshold of wealth beyond which written records were even available, specifically, and whether we can see serfdom in medieval England as early as it may start. I wouldn’t like to say that it concluded that we could, but the plea to consider what else was going on around the documents we have – the meetings, to and fro voyages of negotiation, the feast and the talk at dinner when a transaction was concluded, all of which probably explain a lot more about how a given transaction unfolded than does its surviving record – is a plea always worth hearing, especially when loaded with this many interesting examples.

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1. The core text here is a Vita Mathildis by one Donizone of Canossa, whence we get the charming picture, the text most recently edited and translated (into Italian; I’m fairly sure there’s no English translation) by Paolo Golinelli as Vita di Matilde di Canossa (Milano 2008); the secondary work that Mark cited included Golinelli (ed.), I poteri dei Canossa da Reggio Emilia all’Europa. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Reggio Emilia – Carpineti, 29-31 ottobre 1992) (Bologna 1994), especially Guiseppe Sergi’s “I poteri di Canossa: poteri delegati, poteri feudali, poteri signorili”, pp. 29-39, and Sergi, I confini del potere: Marche e signorie fra due regni medievali (Torino 1995); on the dispute between empire and papacy in which Matilda became so involved, I like Ute-Renate Blumenthal’s The Investiture Controversy: Church and monarchy from the ninth to the twelfth century (Philadelphia 1988).

2. For example, C. Lauranson-Rosaz, “La romanité du midi de l’an mil (le point sur les sociétés méridionales)” in Robert Delort (ed.), La France de l’An Mil, Points-Histoires H130 (Paris 1990), pp. 49-74, rev. as “La romanité du midi de l’an mil : le point sur les sociétés méridionales” in Xavier Barral i Altet, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Anscari Mundó, Josep María Salrach & Michel Zimmermann (edd.), Catalunya i França Meridional a l’Entorn de l’Any Mil: la Catalogne et la France méridionale autour de l’an mil. Colloque International D. N. R. S.[sic]/Generalitat de Catalunya « Hugues Capet 987-1987. La France de l’An Mil », Barcelona 2 — 5 juliol 1987, Actes de Congresos 2 (Barcelona 1991), pp. 45-58.

3. The manuscript is Vatican City, Biblioteca vaticana, MS 4922, and is edited in facsimile as Donizone di Canossa, La vita di Matilde di Canossa: Codice Vaticano latino 4922, ed. Golinelli, Codices e Vaticanis selecti 62 (Milano 1984). A few more bits of it are online here.

4. This was work deriving from a project to follow up P. Hyams, Rancor and reconciliation in medieval England (Ithaca 2003), and I guess we can expect it to start some disputes as well as settle some…

Revenge served stone cold? The Santa Maria de Roses inscription

For a brief flickering moment, back to the research. Trying to make things play with the altar slab from Sant Pere de Casserres and all its names has meant following up a lot of similar lumps of marble (and in one case wood) in the hope that they will tell me more about what people were scribbling on altars where and when. In this, advice from Mark Handley has been invaluable and I’d like to thank him for that. An answer of sorts has emerged, and will be in the paper some day when, but for the meantime one of these examples presents a probably insoluble query. But these days, that just means it presents a blog-post, right? So here it is.

The church of Santa Maria de Ciutadella, previously the abbey church of Santa Maria de Roses (from Rosespèdia)

There is not so much left these days of the monastery of Santa Maria de Roses (although Rosespèdia, the excellent community Wiki from which I borrow the above image demonstrates that the church will still hold a concert). It was probably never that huge, although it lasted a long time, till 1592. We first find it mentioned for sure in 944, when it was being handed into the middle of a clanging dispute over the monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes (not Roses).¹ Roses was allotted to Rodes (stay with me) but that didn’t help much as Rodes was itself being claimed by Sant Esteve de Banyoles. It was another four years before all the relevant counts could be brought to agreement and Rodes was allowed to be independent.² But by 960 Santa Maria de Roses was a monastery in its own right (the 944 document calls it a cella) and so it thereafter stayed, Sant Pere de Rodes not withstanding.

Map of the Catalan counties c.950, by Philip Judge and myself, from the book

But this isn’t yet complicated enough. It’s complicated because of where all these places are. Sant Pere de Rodes—which is one of the most gorgeous ruins in Catalonia— was then in the county of Empúries, ruled by one Count Gauzfred along with Rosselló (now Roussillon, in modern France). But Sant Esteve de Banyoles is in Girona, which was ruled in 944 by Count-Marquis Sunyer of Barcelona, Girona and Osona. By the time of the final settlement Sunyer had retired to the monastery of Notre Dame de la Grasse, far to the north in Carcassonne, and his rôle had been taken over by the probably-teenaged Borrell II (natch) and his brother Miró, though Miró, even younger, appears to have played no part in this affair and Sunyer, monk or not, still appears as one of the negotiators in the 948 document. So the dispute between the monasteries is also one about whether the counts of Girona get a dependent church deep in Gauzfred’s territory or not. Where is Santa Maria de Roses in all this, you may ask, and you may then understand Gauzfred’s concern better if you know that Roses is just along the sea-shore from Empúries, Gauzfred’s capital, which the church overlooks. This was presumably not property that he wanted going to someone whom the counts next door could boss around.

Reassembled fragments of the dedicatory inscription from Santa Maria de Roses

All this makes this thing, which was recovered from the site in 1937 and is now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya’s premises in Sant Pere Galligants in Girona, rather hard to explain.³ The inscription transliterates, expands and translates more or less as follows (Latin in the footnote):

The famous Count Sunyer, choosing celibacy and spurning life for the love of Christ, trading perishable things for an eternal body, for his burial ordered the church to be repaired from the foundations by his wife and sons. They, studiously following the precepts, managed to fulfil them, instituting a suitable worthy man for the ministry of Christ, Argibadus, namely, a priest and perfector of these works. By order therefore of the spirit of Prince Sunyer, I who am called Argibadus finished this work.⁴

Right, so, what? When this was put up, apparently the church needed repairs; there is no sign that it was monastic or that it belonged to someone else. These ought all to be good reasons to make this an early early record, from before its acquisition by Sant Pere de Rodes, and you might think that it naming Count Sunyer makes that a problem. In fact, however, though Sunyer of Barcelona seems to have made the name unpopular, it had previously been a common one among the counts of Empúries: Gauzfred had a short-lived brother of the name, his grandfather of the name had ruled fifty years in Empúries (something this family seem to have been good at was living for ages, little Sunyer aside) and supposedly forced Guifré the Hairy into acknowledging King Odo by putting up rival episcopal candidates with Odo’s consent, and his father, also Sunyer, had waged naval war on al-Andalus and been killed by Bernard of Septimania’s son William, who had by then ceased listening to his mother.⁵ It’s a proud lineage. The only wrinkle is the obvious implication of the inscription that the relevant Sunyer became a monk, which is not recorded of any of these Sunyers, only the one of Barcelona.⁶ But if he had been, as he had, Count of Barcelona, why was he not buried in his own territories, or more relevantly, at la Grasse, where he presumably died?

If you zoom in on the centre, the monastery site is flagged, but note Castelló d'Empúries just down the coast (and ignore the modern marina development between the two)

Well, the easiest solution seems to be that one of the counts of Empúries had a late and otherwise unattested conversion, really, doesn’t it? Not only is, in my fairly untutored opinion, this stone’s script earlier than Sunyer of Barcelona (compare his elder brother’s stone from 911, which might be nearer the mark), but there is the problem of the intermittent and intermittently subject monastic cell to explain otherwise and I simply cannot imagine Gauzfred allowing his principal rival to be buried over-looking him and his city.⁷ And it is very clear that Gauzfred controlled the whole site by 976, if not well before, and was claiming to have repopulated it from scratch after it was desolated by the pagans, which is chronologically very unlikely and which this stone more or less proves false, but which indicates a fair degree of control.⁸ But might it also indicate an alternative story that needed to be squashed? There was after all a dispute over this house that involved all our parties. Could our one known monastic Sunyer actually have managed to be buried in his rival’s back yard, by way of having the last word after being forced to back down? I can’t, quite, credit it, but the sheer petty commitment to superiority it implies is quite impressive to imagine even if it can’t be true.

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1. That document printed in Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica II & III (Barcelona 1926-1952), 2 vols, Sant Pere de Rodes I.

2. Ibid., Sant Pere de Rodes II.

3. I learnt about this from P. de Palol Salellas, “Una lápida medieval de Santa Maria de Rosas” in Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia Vol. 19 (Barcelona 1946), pp. 273-278, but in the web-searching for this post also came across the more recent Hug Palou i Miquel, “El temple de Santa Maria de Roses. Noves aportacions als primers documents” in Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Empordanesos Vol. 24 (Empúries 1991), pp. 32-53; both of these include a facsimile and a transcription of the slab, and it’s the latter’s image I’ve borrowed here. The latter paper is online through Revistes d’ACcès Obert, here. In attempting to find this paper just now, moreover, I also found J.—M. Nolla, “Roses a l’antiguitat tardana. El cementiri de Santa Maria”, ibid. Vol. 30 (1997), pp. 107-146, which reveals that here as in so many places there was a late antique burial ground here before there was a church, but I haven’t yet had time to soak this one up.

4. Palou, “Temple de Santa Maria”, p. 58, expansions in round brackets, editorial insertions in square ones: “CELEB(RI)S COM(ES) SVNIARIVS CELIBE(M) / ELIGENS VITA(M) SP(ER)N[EN]Sq(VE) XP(IST)I P(RO) AMORE CADVCA P(RO)PRIO / MERCATVS E(ST) CO[R]PORE EETERNA NA(M) SVO TV(MVLA)TV IVSSIT RE / PARARI A FVNDAMENTIS ECCL(ESI)A CONIVSq(VE) EI(VS) CV(M) / FILIIS EI(VS) SEqVENTES P(RE)CEPTA STVDIOSE HOC ADIMPLE / RE CVRAVERV(NT) STATVENTES QVE(N)DA(M) P(RO)bV(M) DIGNVMq(VE) XP(IST)I / MINISTRV(M) ARGIBADV(M) VIDELICET SACER(DOS) ET / [OPER]IIS HVIVS P(ER)FECTOR • IVSSV IGITVR / SVNIARII PRINCIPIS ALMI QVI VOCOR • / HOC OPVS EXPLEVIT ARGIBADVS“.

5. The ecclesiastical controversies covered to a good extent in J. Morera Sabater, “Un conato de secesión eclesiástica en la marca hispánica en el siglo IX” in Anales del Instituto de Estudios Gerundenses Vol. 15 (Girona 1962), pp. 293-315 and now J. Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona: false metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1-41 at pp. 9-12; for Sunyer II’s naval career you would probably need to go back to Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans, Biografies Catalanes: sèrie històrica 1 (Barcelona 1958; 1980). The genealogies of all this lot are more or less sorted out by Martin Aurell, “Jalons pour une enquête sur les stratégies matrimoniales des comtes catalans (IXe-XIe s.)” in Federico Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991-1992), also published as Memorias de le Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Vols. 23 & 24 (Barcelona 1991 & 1992), I pp. 281-364.

6. In Federico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 148, about which you have heard before, as well as in a welter of forged la Grasse documents that are much too tricky to go into here. It should however be noted that it is only those documents which tell us where Sunyer became a monk.

7. I’m pleased to see that the same has also apparently occurred to our quasi-resident sage of the databases, Joan Vilaseca, whose Cathalaunia.org page for this inscription tentatively suggests a redating after 913, after Antoni Cobos Fajardo, Joaquim Tremoleda Trilla and Salvador Vega Ferrer, L’Epigrafia medieval dels comtats gironins (Girona 2009-2010) (non vidi) who suggest 909; as Joan says, Count Sunyer II was active till at least 913 so this cannot easily be right.

8. In Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Sebastià Riera i Viader & Manuel Rovira i Solà (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LXI (Barcelona 2003), 2 vols, doc. no. 434, on which see J. Jarrett, “Caliph, King or Grandfather: strategies of legitimisation on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar III” in The Mediaeval Journal Vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols forthcoming).

That Bonnassie story in full, or, psst! wanna buy a tower?

The monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès

I said I would tell you Pierre Bonnassie’s story that I used, with caution, in the Oxford seminar paper just gone, and so I will. It’s about a man called Hisnabert and a tower scam. No, not a pyramid scam: read on. Here’s how Bonnassie put it, in my own rough translation.¹ He was writing of the wild lands beyond the organised frontier, and said:

This extreme march was really a terra incognita, except to a few specialists. How can one not, in dealing with this, cite the enormous mistake committed in 1012 by the monks of Sant Cugat concerning their territory of Calders? At that date, a certain Hisnabert, pretending to be descended from a very noble line, presented himself to them and claimed that he had, with great effort and at great expense, installed his household, his peasants and livestock there, cleared the territory there and built a tower fifteen cubits in height. The monks, taking him at his word, saw in him ‘an envoy of God and of Saint Cucuphat’ and conceded the domain to him under very advantageous conditions. It would only be five years later, in 1017, that they discovered the imposture (nothing had been done and Calders was in the same state ‘of desert and of solitude’ as in the past!) and they delayed no longer in getting the donation anulled by the judges of the count, Ramon Borrell.

Zing! How could this come about, you may ask, and there the answer is a bit more complex. Sant Cugat is one of the older monasteries in Catalonia: it later claimed to have been founded by Charlemagne (of course) but at the very least it was operational by the 850s, and in 878 it obtained a precept from King Louis II, the Stammerer as he is known to us, confirming all its properties.² This was, shall we say, aimed at the future, in as much as it included a huge swathe of frontier land at that point well beyond any organised control.³ But, by the approach of the year 1000 that had changed; continuous creeping frontier clearance had advanced the line of organised settlement well into these “extreme furthest ultimate marches” and Sant Cugat was now facing the possibility of being able to claim its rights in these lands, for which reason in 982 it had had them freshly royally confirmed so as to deal with any possibility of people claiming reversion under the Visigothic thirty-year rule and so on.⁴ The territory was still far from them and difficult to control, of course, so this was why someone like Hisnabert would have seemed so heaven-sent to them; a powerful man who could perhaps reduce some of it to order and get them something out of it. (And if he couldn’t, of course, well, nothing much lost, something that Bonnassie’s version chooses not to consider.)

A tower in Calders (probably not the right one but not far off the right height)

But is this really what was happening? If so, it seems very odd that we get to hear about it. That the story was written down once in the grant to Hisnabert is probably explicable: this was an unusual situation and probably demurring voices were raised at the monastery, so the story functions here as a kind of insurance, saying why this odd thing made sense to do. But why do we have it? Once the old grant had been proved worthless, would you keep the original? and would you then, as Sant Cugat did, copy it up later into your cartulary? Okay, maybe their copying endeavour was that attention-less and their archiving that shoddy, but it’s a problem, enough of one to make the original text worth hunting down, and happily for us all, Josep Rius Serra’s edition of Sant Cugat’s cartulary is online. So, what does that say? Well, this is a long document, by the should-be-legendary super-scribe, Bonhom.⁵ It begins with an account of the capture of Barcelona by Louis the Pious that brought these lands into royal control, the fact that they then remained unused,

because of the incursion and persistent siege by a multitude of the depraved and most savage Ishmaelite race with their troops which raised battles and raids without intermission against the fortifications and castles of the Christians which were founded in the marches of the aforesaid Barcelona

all of which made it a bit unsafe, if you see what he means, and so for more than thirty years, do you see what he did there (and Bonhom is a judge, his own copy of the Visigothic law survives, we know he knew what that implied) it was left for pasturing beasts and nothing more.⁶ He then sets out the bounds of the property, and there’s quite a lot. But, he adds, after many years of this ceaseless plunder and demolition by the Muslims, Ramon Borrell and his brother Count Ermengol (the First of Urgell) raided through to Córdoba itself, guided by the Hand of God, and:

they put all the Saracens and Berbers to flight, with the help of God, and the king of the Muslims [Mucelemiticum], who had fled to them, they placed in the royal seat at Córdoba. Then God gave tranquillity unto the Christians, and they went out and walked everywhere around the aforesaid Marches [presumably thereby setting boundaries…] and they built many fortifications and castles which had once been destroyed by the aforesaid power of the pagans.

And, you see, this is why I don’t mind so much that there are no chronicles from this area so early, because that’s most of one for 1010 right there. There’s even truth behind the Biblical triumphalism: it seems that a number of frontier fortresses were demolished as part of the peace terms between Borrell II (because he had to come into this somewhere) and his brother Miró III and the Caliph al-Hakam II after he came to power in 961, so these places would have been vacant for most people’s memory by this time.⁷ And this is the context into which Hisnabert arrives, after a full page of the printed edition gone on historical preamble. Bonhom goes on:

Meanwhile there came forth a certain noble man, Hisnabert, of the nobler sort of origin, who predestined by God and Saint Cucuphat had taken over much of the aforesaid place and sought it from us to live in, he having come there with all his household… [and the rest as in Bonnassie]. For this place, heavy experience tells, was placed in great terror and trembling, so that anyone who should live there from day to day would not escape being himself often subject to danger on account of his or others’ possessions or money. On account of which it pleased us [Abbot Guitard of Sant Cugat, in whose voice the document is phrased] and all the congregation of monks subject to the aforesaid martyr, with the consent of the lord Count Ramon, his wife Countess Ermessenda acquiescing, Borrell Bishop of Osona assenting, Pere Bishop of Girona and Ermengol Bishop of Urgell agreeing, we unanimously with good heart and prompt will give and concede the aforesaid town and its church of Santa Oliva with the money or offerings of first fruits or other gifts of the faithful, and of these tithes we dedicate two whole parts [presumably of three]… to you the aforesaid Hisnabert.

There then follows a long precision of the terms under which he holds, which are basically that his family may inherit it but that neither he nor they may bestow this property or its proceeds anywhere other than Sant Cugat, that Sant Cugat will still be able to pasture their animals there and they retain rights of access and can remove him if necessary. And the abbot and fifteen monks sign along with six untitled laymen and the count and countess. So okay, let me just pull out some things there:

1. If Hisnabert is actually a fraudster, it’s not just the monks and abbot he’s fooling here; he’s also fooled the count and countess and every bishop in Catalonia, some of whom know this area as only frontier landgrabbers could (that’s Saint Ermengol to you);⁸
2. the specification of the property’s bounds calls it Santa Oliva, “as it was called in antiquity”; I don’t quite know if they’re anticipating him restoring the church, they don’t say so explicitly, but they do appear to anticipate it rendering tithe (or rather money: denaria not decima), which in turn implies a reasonable population base and it’s hard not to imagine the church is already up and running;
3. it seems to be implied that Sant Cugat’s contact with this area has been, and will remain, running herds of animals through it; at that rate, they ought to be passing through the area probably twice a year if not more, and should also have known there was no tower if tower there wasn’t, not just far quicker than five years later but even before this was being granted, which is also implied by the gravis experientia of its vulnerability that they report; it all reads as if this was familiar territory to them, even if still wild.

All of which then makes me want to look at the five-years-later charter, also available online.⁹ And, lo, it is a bit complicated, but basically what happens here is that a woman called Adelaide comes to court at Barcelona, on behalf of her infant son by her late husband Guillem del Castell Sant Martí, whose father Galí had cleared some frontier territory at Calders, and she says Sant Cugat are moving in on her land and what’s the count going to do about it? So the abbot rocks up with his papal privilege and royal precepts and so forth and sets them all down, but the array of judges present, including Ponç Bonfill Marc, Son of Ervigi Marc the Wonder Judge, look them over and find there’s nothing in them covering this property. Red faces for Sant Cugat’s men! But it’s no better for Adelaide, who also can’t prove any right to the land. “On which account,” intones young Ponç, “it was judged in the same court to be better and more true that this land should be princely land just like the other spaces of waste land,” or to put it another way, the count gets to swipe it. It seems to be at this point that the abbot produced the grant to Hisnabert, or Isimbert as Ponç prefers to spell it, which is the first point at which it becomes clear we’re talking about the same property or properties, but the judges decided that since Sant Cugat had held no right to the land, they could not rightfully have granted it to Hisnabert. The count, however, so careless about his property, decided that probably Sant Cugat should have it after all, now, and granted it there anyway, aww, whereafter,

since it is necessary to build castles and fortifications in the waste marches and in solitary places against the attacks of the pagans, and since Isimbert himself did not develop this land, which instead remains a waste and solitude, the above-noted Guitard, abbot, and his monastic brothers were advised and ordered, on the instruction of Countess Ermessenda and by her son Count Berengar, and by the men written below, that they should seek out such a man as would build and develop this waste land in the service of God and Sant Cugat, just as they should require, and they give it to that man by this precarial charter of donation for management together.

By this stage I’ve already lost track of just whom Hisnabert even would have ripped off: Galí and son, the monks, the count? But what is clear is that no-one is here saying he wasn’t a nobleman or had lied or whatever, or that there was no tower. That would have been at Santa Oliva, presumably; the land here is at Calders, and the problem seems to be that he hadn’t developed that, in other words, that his tenure had resulted in insufficient value added. The count, or rather the countess—this case, despite its date of 1017, seems to have dragged on past Roman Borrell’s death in 1018, take note—weren’t happy with that, but the implication seems pretty strong that if the monastery had not been told to do otherwise, they’d have given the lands straight back into Hisnabert’s hands. Instead, the document as we have it has the whole hearing copied out merely as a precursor to the new grant to one Bonet Bernat. And then, right at the end, in a fit of afterthought worthy of his learned father, Ponç adds, along with his own signature and that of the other judges, this codocil:

we the judges who edited this, and by the ordination of our competence gave a term to the waste land at Torre, the tower that Isimbert made in the lands of Sant Cugat by the ordination of the above-noted donation that Abbot Guitard made to that Isimbert, and we reserved all the lands brought under cultivation, and all the buildings and workings that are in the circuit of the already-said tower to that term. The rest however, we ordain just as is written here. Signed Ponç, also known as Bonfill, cleric and judge, who have written these things….

And that, I think, changes everything. Because look, a tower! It was there all along! And cleared lands and buildings and stuff! Hisnabert had done his stuff! Instead, what seems to have happened is that Adelaide’s suit, far from the only one that Sant Cugat’s efforts to make its privileges and precepts count in these lands kicked off, had started an enquiry no-one wanted, not even her at the end, leading to Ramon Borrell being able to assert fiscal control of the area and thus retaining the ability to direct it, via Sant Cugat. That this is so, even though the terms on which it was given back to the monastery grant them full right, is clear from Ermessenda’s later order to change its manager; Bonet Bernat was presumably one of her people she wanted in instead. Or, indeed, maybe Hisnabert just hadn’t done enough. But either way, Sant Cugat weren’t, to their credit, about to turf him and his familia out on their collective ear; his tower was quietly secured as its own term by the judges, quite possibly once the countess (not a woman it was wise to cross) had left, and left “the rest… just as is written here”. So for once, a happy ending, except for Adelaide and her little son Bernat (wait, Bernat? but no, there are probably a dozen Bernats here, it probably isn’t the son being put in charge alas) at least.

A charter of Sant Cugat (not the right one, but probably about the right height...)

Those of you who were at the paper will maybe notice that this isn’t quite how I told the story there: instead, I suggested that the monastery had dispossessed Hisnabert for some reason, and had kept the charter to be able to prove their own title to it and the terms under which they could do that, whereas actually it seems that they probably kept it because they still had him there on the land. I would have to confess that I seem to have relied too heavily on notes and didn’t myself then notice the codocil in the second document, which does rather alter the picture. Still, I take some small solace in the fact that apparently Bonnassie didn’t either and he had it in print for thirty-five years before anyone spotted a problem…

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1. P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse 1975, 1976), I p. 127.

2. R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolíngis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica II & III (Barcelona 1926-1952), Sant Cugat del Vallès I.

3. Not that this area was completely anarchic! I have got so fed up of waiting for my paper on this to come out that it is very tempting just to stick the proof PDF on the web somewhere, but for now, I still hope that you will one day be able to see: J. 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 forthcoming), pp. 83-109, now heading for its fourth third anniversary in process.

4. On the thirty-year rule you can at least see my work, in this case, Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the King’s Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320-342 at pp. 325-327.

5. The document is edited as J. Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés (Barcelona 1946), doc. no. 449.

6. On Bonhom, meanwhile, see Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca 2004), pp. 84-92, where his copy of the Forum Iudicum is briefly described and where references to it are given.

7. See Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona. False metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München forthcoming), pp. 1-42 at pp. 14-15 with references to the Catalan scholarship.

8. On whom see Jeffrey A. Bowman, “The Bishop Builds a Bridge: Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees” in Catholic Historical Review Vol. 88 (Washington DC 2002), pp. 1-16.

9. Rius, Cartulario II, doc. no. 464. This one’s brilliant.