Seminar CCXLV: me judging judges in Sheffield

We are living in interesting times, and the last few weeks have been extremely busy for a whole bunch of reasons no-one wanted. I came back off strike, had one day in the office and then had to move all my teaching online, then reinvent it again for different patterns of online delivery as instructions changed, and I was also behind with quite a lot of other things but still on action short of strike, and in general it’s been a complex time and I couldn’t make blogging a priority. So far me and mine are still well, or at least, only ill with things other than the novel coronavirus, and I hope that you can all say as much or better, but please look after yourselves anyway. I did wonder whether it was really important to blog about old stuff already backdated at the moment, but if it’s ever important, I suppose that that hasn’t changed much, and it’s Sunday and I’m not legally allowed to work, so why not, eh?¹

So we go back, then, to December 2016, when as you may recall I saw a paper that I’d promised to give becoming less and less possible to write under my workload, grimly ignored that workload for a weekend and wrote anyway, the result being called, “Judging the Judges in the Frankish March of Spain before the Year 1000” and presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Seminar in the University of Sheffield on the 7th of the 12th. I’d been meaning to do something about judges in Borrell II’s Barcelona for many years, it was now part of the work for the book I still thought I was writing, and although I had no time to do the kind of reading in the recent historiography that I’d have liked, really long-term readers may remember that Dr Theo Riches once kindly described me as being different from other historians because I can count, and so I sat down with the Catalunya Carolíngia and my notes and I counted judges until the numbers started telling me things. I will, some day, do something with this work, but at the moment it’s one of a number of things I’ve been told by my management not to pursue, so there seems not much more to do with it than to bank a couple of its conclusions here and hope some day for different instructions.

Signature of the judge Dacó, highlighted on Vic, Arxiu Capitular, calaix 6, núm. 882, my photo

So what the paper did was firstly to introduce late-Carolingian Catalonia to the audience, and then to introduce within it the concept that the historiography has developed of a super-learned clerical judicial cadre working around tenth- and eleventh-century Barcelona making impartial judgements on the basis of written law, a picture that once caused Roger Collins, no less, to ask, “whether anything better could be found anywhere else in Europe in the earlier Middle Ages?”² We’re talking people like the man I have often named here as Ervigi Marc the Wonder Judge, who wound up as a bishop without portfolio because of his great importance.³ So far my sole contribution to this scholarship has been a footnote pointing out that these people don’t really appear before the 970s, and wondering, of course, if they might be Count-Marquis Borrell II‘s fault. Jeffrey Bowman‘s work has done something to add variegation to that picture by suggesting that there were other judges not quite so impressively trained, more like the Carolingian (or Lombard) idea of people who know the law whom you get to come and hear disputes rather than professionals, and Josep María Salrach‘s recent book does a lot to show that even the ‘professional’ judges were sometimes fallible or corruptible, as indeed we’ve seen here too.⁴ There’s also now a good bit of prosopographical work on these super-judges to work out who they were, and I’m not as aware of that as I’d like to be, but by repeating some of that work with the indices of the Catalunya Carolíngia I did work out at least two things that I, at least, hadn’t previously noticed or read, and so I’ll tell you about them.⁵

Graph of judicial actions over time in Catalan charters pre-1000

So here’s a graph, because we know that works, and also because as Wendy Davies says in her own study of judges a bit west from here, “Firstly numbers.”⁶ The yellow background trace is the overall number of documents preserved over time, from about 880 up to 1000; it’s missing a lot, because I didn’t then have the Catalunya Carolíngia volumes covering Barcelona, and if I ever return to this adding them will be the first thing to do, but I hope it gives the overall trends, which is to say that we have a better chance of observing anything as time goes on because there’re more documents in which one might find it.⁷ The purple foreground signal is the number of dispute cases, which as you can see is neither very much of the evidence nor that continuous, at least until it gets late enough. Then the blue signal between the two is the total number of judges active in the documents for that year, counting each individual judge as many times as there are occasions when he appears.

There’s a lot one can take from this, but I choose two things: firstly, even when you have thousands of documents to work with, subsets of them can be so tiny that small numbers look more significant than maybe they are. The big spike in 842 is one case that generated lots of documents which were preserved; the 870s/880s peak is a lot of documents and meetings, but almost all coming from the hearings arranged by the monastic community of Sant Andreu d’Eixalada after their place was flooded and they had to reconstitute their holdings, so in some ways a single event.⁸ Even the spike in the 910s, while it is several events, is one person, Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de Ripoll, suing a succession of people for rights over lands, and when she stopped the sample drops right off again, and only really picks up with the activity of our learned college of judges in the 970s.⁹ But there is another change over time visible here, all the same, which is that in the early documents there are lots of people called judges (iudices) per ceremony, eight or ten at once quite often, which is why those blue spikes are so high in the 840s, whereas by the 970s one to three is more usual, and one not unusual.

Not Sant Andreu d’Eixalada, because obviously that was destroyed, but one of the churches the displaced monks claimed, Sant Pere d’Eixalada, or what is now left of it. Photo by Jack ma – Treball propi, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The other change I’ll point out now, which is only just evident from the graph, is that in the ninth century, you only get people called judges recorded in actual court hearings. There’s a formula that introduces them in the case records, ‘judges who were ordered to judge’, and then a list of people follows.¹⁰ But the people who are named there very often don’t use the word iudex or anything like it in their signatures, and they don’t show up with the title outside court. In this respect, the title ‘judge’ is like the title ‘worthy man’ (bonus homo) that also appears in these contexts, and I think it has something do with standing in the court, and so is contextual, not fixed; on this occasion, these people served as judges, with those people recognised as worthy men who could approve a judgement.¹¹ Presumably the judges knew a bit of what the law was understood to be, but they might be a lot more like Frankish scabini than Ervigi Marc, people whose knowledge could be called on for judging but whose usual rôle was not that of judge.¹² This changes in 943, when a guy called Sunyer the Judge is seen as a neighbour of some property out at Manresa, but it’s really not till the 970s that we start to see people who sign as judges even when they’re not actually judging, usually because they were being called upon to act as witnesses but sometimes in their own property dealings.¹³ These people must have had some independent standing as judges even when they were not actually doing it, and people other than them knew they were judges all the time. And, predictably, our special learned judges are in this group, although that group is a lot bigger than just the really flash ones who show up a lot quoting law, as if I ever write this up I will show.

That’s enough for a blog post, except only that I’ll say that I was obviously wrong about Borrell II being responsible for this new class of judge; all the ones I could track seem to have started in Besalú, in fact, and be associated at least for a short while with Count-Bishop Miró Bonfill and his family, though Borrell seems to have managed to poach some of them pretty quickly… I think other people must already have realised that, but I’m not so sure that the other trends above have been spotted before. It shows what even a Saturday spent frantically dumping data into a spreadsheet can produce by way of historical insight, and also that you don’t need a born-digital corpus to do that kind of work. It went well, too, and Sheffield were excellent hosts and I was glad that I had managed to remain a researcher and not pull out despite the difficulties. Still, it’s not ideal, is it? I hope for better.

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1. Because it’s not in my contract that I have to, it has to be there if my employers want me to and I’m working to contract.

2. Roger Collins, “‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet’: Law and Charters in Ninth- and Tenth-Century León and Catalonia” in English Historical Review Vol. 100 (Oxford 1985), pp. 489–512 at p. 512.

3. On Ervigi see now Josep Maria Font i Rius, “L’Escola jurídica de Barcelona” in Jesús Alturo, Joan Bellès, Font, Yolanda García & Anscarí M. Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis, ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos jurídics catalans: Lleis i costums I/1 (Barcelona 2003), pp. 67-100 at pp. 82-87, though I would now be sceptical about the idea of the ‘Barcelona school’ in which he is set.

4. My sally is in Jonathan Jarrett, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: Organisation of Society in the pre-Catalan ‘Terra de Ningú'” in †Alan Deyermond & Martin J. Ryan (edd.), Early Medieval Spain: A Symposium (London: Queen Mary University of London, 2010), pp. 89–128 at p. 105 n. 6. The other works just mentioned are Jeffrey Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca NY 2004) and Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013).

5. The prosopographical work I mean is in Font, “L’Escola jurídica”, and Anscarí M. Mundó, “El jutge Bonsom” in Alturo, Bellès, Font, Garcí & Mundó, Liber iudicum popularis, pp. 101-118.

6. Wendy Davies, “Judges and Judging: truth and justice in northern Iberia on the eve of the millennium” in Journal of Medieval History Vol. 36 (Amsterdam 2010), pp. 193–203 at p. 199.

7. The Barcelona volumes are now out, and I have them, which is a separate and bloggable story by itself, but their citation is Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols.

8. I think there is still no better study of this event than Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, “Com neix i creix un gran monestir pirinenc abans de l’any mil: Eixalada-Cuixà” in Analecta Montserratensia Vol. 8 (Montserrat 1954), pp. 125–337, repr. without the documentary appendix in Abadal, Dels Visigots als Catalans, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Estudis i documents 13-14 (Barcelona 1969), 2 vols, I, pp. 377–484. Everyone I’ve found who’s written about Cuixà since has just pointed back to it, and not without justification.

9. On this see, of course, 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.

10. For example, Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Sebastià Riera i Viader & Manuel Rovirà i Sola (edd), Catalunya carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, rev. by Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 61 (Barcelona 2009), 2 vols, I, doc. no. 19: “iudices qui iussi sunt causas audire vel dirimere“, ‘judges who were ordered to hear and determine cases’.

11. On the ‘worthy men’ in this context, a quick reference is Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 35-36 & n. 55.

12. On Carolingian practice I think we can still rely on Janet L. Nelson, “Dispute Settlement in Carolingian West Francia” in Wendy Davies & Paul Fouracre (edd.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1986), pp. 45-63, reprinted in Janet L. Nelson, The Frankish World, 750-900 (London 1996), pp. 51-74. On the Lombard one, I admit that I’m thinking back as far as D. A. Bullough, “Europae Pater: Charlemagne and his achievement in the light of recent scholarship” in English Historical Review Vol. 85 (Oxford 1970), pp. 59–105 at pp. 91-96, but I suppose an update, perhaps in the form of Marios Costambeys, “Disputes and Courts in Lombard and Carolingian Central Italy” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 15 (Oxford 2007), pp. 265–289, would be wise to get.

13. The judge Sunyer turns up actually judging in 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, I, doc. no. 443, but then again just as a neighbour ibid. doc. no. 532.

Chronicle VI: October-December 2016

University and College Union pickets at the University of Leeds

Well, just as with the last time I wrote one of these, we are still on strike again, so there is now time to write it. With the trip to Istanbul that immediately preceded the start of term now finally dealt with, it’s time again to look at my life academic as it stood at the current date of my backlog, sadly the end of 2016 but for once I am catching up, and take stock of what was going on and, of course, what of it still merits blogging about!

Society for the Medieval Mediterranean 2015 (in Lincoln), parts 2 & 3

[Context: this post was half-written before I ground to a complete halt in hiatus last year. It’s clear that I can’t continue this scale of write-up, but because it was part-done, and because it involves the recently-lamented Simon Barton, I want to do this last one as it was meant to be done. I am, however, combining what would originally have been two posts, because this is an indulgence I can’t go on permitting myself. After this, we can talk about what happens next but I am hoping, hoping that this is the cough of the blogger’s virtual throat being cleared before saying something in a more regular fashion. We’ll see, but I have hopes and reasons to do it and that’s a powerful combination. This post’s still a composite hodge-podge, though, so I’ve added headings to show where its layers separate.]

The Voice of October 2016

This is, as grimly predicted, the busiest term ever in my life so far, and at some point in it I’m moving house! Yay! Before that point, I can at least crunch out a few more posts, though, I hope [Edit: ha!], and the next in the queue is a report on the second day of the conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, which as you will recall was in Lincoln in mid-July 2015. This post deals with the papers and so on from the 14th July, and then we’ll talk about something completely different before returning for the third and final day. [Edit: no we won’t, it’s all happening here.]

The Brayford Campus of Lincoln University, just for context

There were up to five parallel sessions running at all times except during the keynotes in this conference and so there was always plenty to choose from, including plenty of early medieval. As it happens, I underestimated the time it would take me to get from my (rather good) bed and breakfast to the university and so missed the first paper I’d chosen to see, which was a shame but at least, as its presenter told me, it was substantially the paper I’d seen him give in Leeds. Nonetheless, the questions seemed to reach to different things and I was sorry I hadn’t seen this version. The session as it happened, even where I didn’t see, was like this.

Law in the Post-Roman West

• Graham Barrett, “Legislation and Codification after Rome”
• Michael Kelly, “Transhistoricality in Early Medieval Hispania: Law as Narrative and Cultural Episteme”
• Thomas Gobbitt, “Framing the Laws: prologues, epilogues and peritext. The Liber Leges Langobardorum in the Eleventh and Twelfth Century”

So as said, I missed Graham pronouncing his wisdom, but it got a better hearing here than it had at the slightly odd session in which it had been aired at Leeds, and his paper dominated discussion, so it’s worth reprising its central point, that law after the end of Empire in the West was probably mostly used in small bits, which were occasionally recombined into codes but used quite differently in the field (or in court). Questions focused on issues of formality of, well, issue, and the audiences for the different sorts of law people were detecting bundled into codes like the Salic Law, and this discussion also included Graham asking what the difference is between a ‘capitulary’ and a ‘novel’, a question that could only matter to a legal historian you’d think but has everything to do with our confused relationship with the Roman Empire, both imitative and successive.

I didn’t really understand Michael Kelly’s paper, I will confess. It may, from my notes, have been intended to argue that all our sources were constructed by their authors to convey a particular version of the past, not reality, and that our sources therefore are really only sources for their context, the Visigothic Law being no exception and very full of contemporary bias that belies its deliberate impression of antiquity, in which case OK, but phrases like, “transhistoricality must be a purely discursive phenomenon,” meant that I’m not sure.

Lastly Dr Gobbitt gave us a spirited run-through of the survival of Lombard laws in the eleventh century in the form of a text known as the Liber leges langobardorum [sic], which gathered up the Edict of Rothari and various other bits of genuinely Lombardic legislation along with some laws of Charlemagne and a reasonable salting of historical material (much of it already travelling with Rothari), apparently all for study at or around Pavia in a kind of pre-Bologna legal college. He too emphasised variation: no two of the seven eleventh-century manuscripts gather quite the same materials or lay them out in the same way. This stuff was of interest to a range of people but their purposes were not all the same. Quite what those purposes were was work still to be done but the evidence base seemed well established.

Justice and Judicial Practices in Early Medieval North-Western Iberia (II): punishment and justice in Castile and León

• Julio Escalona, “Follow the Money? Justice and Authority in the Sanction Clauses of Tenth-Century Castilian Charters”
• Álvaro Carvajal Castro, “Authority and Liability in Ninth- and Tenth-Century North-Western Iberia: the evidence from the sanction clauses”
• Igor Santos Salazar, “Rule Through Courts: the settlement of disputes in Castile and Tuscany during the tenth-century”

It would probably be hard to pick three Iberian-peninsula scholars who have worked harder to link up with other areas and fields, and especially the English-speaking world, than these three, but because of the occasion they had a substantially Iberian-peninsula audience too and this was probably as close as I shall get to attending a seminar in Spain until I can take a year out to improve my spoken languages or something, which is to say, valuable. Not least, of course, because this was effectively a charters session! Julio’s was illuminating: doing more or less the exercise I had done the previous year with Vic’s charters by going through the clauses in which they lay down what will happen to those who infringe the charter’s provisions, he noted that alongside the threats of excommunication, less common in sales than in donations as I too had found, there are many fines, levied largely in the name of the king. This being tenth-century Castile, however, the king was far away, and the count doesn’t turn up as much as you’d expect and was not clearly a royal delegate for these purposes. Instead, the money seems to have gone to local lords whom we otherwise struggle to identify, those much-vaunted ‘local élites’, domini, whom Julio argued should be the focus of our questions about community formation in these areas rather than the traditional village grouping of the alfoz. This paper had some seriously subversive connotations bubbling up out of those sanction clauses.

Álvaro had meanwhile done something similar with charters from further west, in Asturias-León, and found a judicial system anchored in the same ideas but based very much on guarantee and surety, whether explicit or implicit; instructions on who was to pay if something went wrong show no particular regularity over whether actor or recipient, or either of their families, was expected to be liable. Instead, we have to assume that these situations were being judged, negotiated and arranged according to how people felt the various options which the traditional legal library gave them were best deployed in each case. Igor, meanwhile, lacking a precisely comparable charter base in Tuscany, looked instead at the actual trials there and in Castile, which was valuable because unlike in Julio’s documents, the counts of Castile rarely appear in actual court cases; instead, again, their roles were delegated down to locals, this presumably being one way in which the counts attached themselves to such communities via the local headmen whose station they thus enhanced.

I am absolutely fine with this, but what was interesting was the comparison with Italy, where Igor saw the same trick being played with a different deck of cards, a working system of public courts becoming less effective in the face of decentralising power and being met with a recentralisation via an overhaul of that system that linked local ‘judges’ to the kingship. There is here a bigger dynamic about what failing states do to regain traction in their localities, I think, and it’s one we could probably do with taking out and showing people. The role of the king was quite different in the two cases, being distant in Asturias and active in Tuscany, but then, the kings in Italy were already a local response to detachment from the bigger system of the Carolingian Empire to which, in its Ottonian form, attachment would soon resume… I think it works! And I’m also not sure I realised this at the time… That may of course have been because I had other things on my mind right then, not just lunch though that did indeed come next, but my own paper, because I was in fact up next, in this august company.

Medieval Iberia

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Ceremonies of Property Transfer in Carolingian Catalonia: a model of documented transaction”
• James d’Emilio, “The Formulaic Clauses of Charters: tradition, variation and originality”
• Laura Cayrol Bernando, “« Hermana del emperador »: (re)constructing the memory of the Infanta Sancha Raimundez (d. 1159)”

The voice of January 2018 now takes up the story…

Predictably, my own paper in this session is the hardest for me to remember because I wasn’t making notes, but I’ve just re-read it and gosh-darn if it isn’t actually one of my better ones and I should probably send it out. What I was doing was something I’ve stabbed at here already, gathering up all the various testimonies I know from Catalan documents to the phenomenon specialists call reparatio scripturae, the replacement of documents that had been lost, and arguing that there is here evidence that not just churches but lay people went to some effort to get their friends and neighbours to remember not just the existence of charters but their actual textual content, and wondering what those efforts might have looked like. Josep María Salrach has already thrown a sentence or two away on this, but in the words of the late Captain Beefheart, “there’s more.” As I say, I should do something with this. Any suggestions?


It’s hard to think of images for a lot of these papers, given how much they were about concepts, but Professor D’Emilio’s one was at least partly located here at the monastery of San Julián de Samos, so here’s a picture! By José Antonio Gil Martínez from Vigo, Galicia – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Link

As to the other two speakers, James D’Emilio was on similar turf, but much later and in Castile; I was concerned about the apparent use of written formulae in my texts, but he can place some of his, from the Bible and Isidore of Seville. As that implies, his texts usually had grander aspirations and participants than mine, kings and bishops, but it’s still something to watch out for: who says charter formulae have to start in charters? Then Laura Cayrol Bernando looked at a different kind of creation of memory, using the vexed question of just what the infantado that royal heiresses in high medieval Castile held was, to expose quite late medieval processes of sanctification of female royal donors by their commemorating churches that have, basically, created the problems with that question. In the process, however, it showed how some family ties were remembered much longer than others because things like this hung upon them and so had active memorialisers. Because I was facing them, I don’t have much of a record of the questions from this session, and so without further ado I move on, as did we, to the second keynote address of the conference.

Keynote 2

Andrew Marsham, “Rituals of Accession in Early Islam: a comparative perspective”
With us all gathered in the same room again, Simon, may he rest well, introduced Andrew Marsham, who somewhat cautiously introduced his own attempt to imitate Jinty Nelson‘s early work on rituals of royal inauguration.¹ Resting explicitly on that, he set out to try and compare her early medieval West to both Byzantium and Islam, using the moments at which a king, emperor or caliph assumed power to expose what people thought was most important about that office. He argued that all three political zones shared the Judæo-Christian inheritance of a conviction that power ultimately came from God, making the ruler in some way the representative of God on earth. In the West, this became a link that was mediated through the Church, by coronation and unction, even to the point where without the cooperation of churchmen kings could not in fact assume power sometimes; the same struggles do occur in Byzantium but the Church was never so clearly separate from the ruler’s control, and in Islam of course there is no Church, no liturgy as such, making other rituals like handclasping and popular acceptance much more significant, though they did operate in other areas too. Dr Marsham argued that what the caliphs lost, or saved themselves from, by not having that apparatus of religion to serve or obstruct them they however compensated for somewhat by also being the heirs of the Sasanian Persian monarchy, from which they could draw the representations of higher and divine power without which their office might have struggled to be free of direct interference from the ‘umma. I make this sound less tentative than I remember it being, but I didn’t think there was much wrong with it; Dr Marsham had been careful in stepping outside his own area and it was a thought-provoking lecture.

The Old Palace Hotel, Lincoln

With that complete, we then wandered at varying length to the Old Palace, where a rather splendid dinner was set before us. I can remember thinking at point of registration that the cost of the dinner was fairly high, but the setting alone quickly explained why, and the food didn’t fall short either; looking back, I think that was probably money well spent. There were two sessions the next morning before we all dispersed, with hard choices to make about what to go to, but you’ll quickly see why I chose as I did. First up!

Justice and Judicial Practices in Early Medieval North-Western Iberia

• Iñaki Martín Viso, “Authority and Justice in the Shaping of Asturleonese Monarchy”
• Robert Portass, “Levels of Justice in Tenth-Century Northern Spain”
• Fernando Luis-Corral & María Pérez Rodríguez, “Local Communities and the Uses of Justice in the Kingdom of León”

These are, as you can tell, my kind of questions and being asked of my period in a neighbouring area by some of the hot names in the field, so my choice was clear. Iñaki was looking at Asturias in its ninth-century expansion, and observing that while the kings are a big part of that so are counts and other nobles; he saw a difference between them in that the kings were always the highest court of judicial appeal, and managed often to claim overall hegemony in areas of new settlement even if they didn’t orchestrate it, but that even out there there were still areas where the kings held and could grant no lands because a count or a bishop had got there first; he pointed at Astorga and Coimbra for this. The following, and interesting, process, would thus be the one by which the various non-royal officers of justice in these areas were brought to recognise the king as their superior… Rob then brought out the judicial hearings from his pet area of Liébana, and argued that although office-holders like counts were visible in them they were often not the ones holding the court, which could be done by various individuals who had no ‘official’ right we can recognise except that they owned a lot of the local land; the local monastery was only one of these. Categories like ‘public’ and ‘private’ are really no use here, therefore. The paper involved a guy called Bagauda about whom I’ve written here before; I then thought that the obvious explanation of his position was that he owned the land the victims lived on, but Rob says that ain’t necessarily so. I need to read his book!² And the last paper was a study of the enigmatic figures known as ‘worthy men’, boni homines, in the Iberian Peninsula’s charters, asking whether they were the tools of local communities or the means by which aristocrats asserted power over those communities. They concluded the latter, but without much attention to who the people in question actually were and how their position was manifested, and I felt quietly that if the speaker and his co-author had read, well, me, they’d have a more useful way of approaching this question.³

But the real worth of this session was the discussion, which was lengthy and erudite. I started by raising the point that power in Rob’s area need not have been solely economic, which Rob answered with a reflection about what actually made power here, and whether the ability to coordinate process or the ability to defy it was more ‘powerful’. I don’t think question an answer linked but both were good points if I do say so myself. Igor Santos asked if the fact that the winners write history means that we can’t see the weak in these trials, only the strong, but Iñaki asked if the Church, which is our source of record, must always be the strong party, and here again (as you may know) I agree. There then followed a lengthy tangle over what constituted the ‘public sphere’ in this area in this period, and specifically how the written law fitted into this, which was certainly not everywhere, and whether there was one ‘public sphere’ or many local senses of public practice, both questions raised by Julio Escalona. I suggested, as had Graham Barrett earlier, that law and custom were not necessarily separate either; the written law could be invoked as custom. But especially, because at this point I was still tangling with the questions about how someone powerful on the outside manoeuvered themselves into a local position of power in the frontier zones here at which I wrote at such length here a few years ago, I was interested in who set the limits of public office, and here Iñaki made a useful differentiation between sorts of royal property and rights that got me thinking, which Julio followed with the idea that kings and counts together tended to limit the number of people who could claim comital status. In both cases, it seemed to me (and seems) the crucial operation is to get other people recognising the rights you claim in your office. Afterwards, over coffee, Julio, Rob and I all agreed that this can be seen as convincing people that the public sphere you claim is the same one that they recognise. This is what the Asturian kings, and also the counts of Barcelona, achieved in the ninth and tenth centuries and I still want to know how. Then, onwards to the last session!

‘Del tuerto al dretto’: bridging the gap between lawcodes and society in the medieval Mediterranean world

• Jeffrey Bowman, “Women Administering Justice in the High Middle Ages: a divergence of rule and practice”
• Rodrigo García-Velasco, “Municipal Law at the Iberian frontier: the evidence of the fueros and cartas de población during the Iberian Reconquista, c. 1050-c.&nbsp:1150″
• Belen Vicens, “Infançones, franchos, and Wannabees: rethinking status and identity in late medieval Aragón”

Here, of course, I had to be because I have learnt a lot from one of the participants, taught another and knew nothing of the third, all good reasons and the more so once combined. Professor Bowman was pointing out an obvious but neglected thing, that though as far as most of the rules on the subject we have from the Middle Ages say that women could not sit in judgement over men, they did nevertheless sometimes do so in the persons of countesses and viscountesses and probably more. Sometimes people argued about this: a legal specialist dealing with Matilda of Canossa wisely decided that her office carried the jurisdiction but in a case involving Ermengarde of Narbonne it went all the way to the king of France, who used it as a way to claim Narbonne as part of the French crown! There was, basically, usually a way to make it work whatever the rules said and fighting it as illegitimate doesn’t usually seem to have worked, which is worth keeping around to think with.



I like this picture of Narbonne Cathedral so much that even this weak excuse will do to use it again. By Benh LIEU SONG (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Rodrigo was looking at the various concessions of rights and local jurisdiction by kings that we group as fueros, a term that has come simply to mean ‘laws’ so commonly were these issued, and asking where the balance of power lay between the locals whose rights were here asserted and the kings who apparently granted them. He argued, however, that the texts we have represent a step after the balance had been found and agreed, and that the real processes of power lay in the circumstances that had led to the text’s issue. Again, the question of how to convince a potential subject you and they shared a sphere of power arises, which is of course why I cite Rodrigo’s work sometimes, but there was argument in questions about whether the fueros were somehow a bridge between the two public spheres or just an incentive dangled before the ungoverned by those who would govern them.⁴ Then the last paper looked at an episode of 1248 in which a number of people claiming free status were reduced to serfdom by royal judgement; the speaker argued that this was an exercise of consolidation of definitions of freedom which had previously been vague, imposing rules which left some people on the wrong side, and that trying to read the rules back from such cases was a mistake. That was why there needed to be a hearing! Well, maybe, but it was a good place to end.

And since thereafter we all said our goodbyes and dispersed, me towards the rather splendid cathedral—possibly the most impressive in the UK, but I sadly without my camera—and then the railway station, it’s where I have to end too, closing an era of far-too-intensive reporting in the hope that you can see why I found it all worthwhile to do. Next post: the new régime!

Likewise this one! Lincoln Cathedral’s west front, by Anthony Shreeve public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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1. Collected in Janet L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London 1986).

2. It being Robert Portass, The Village World of Early Medieval Northern Spain: local community and the land market, Royal Historical Society Studies in History: New Series (Woodbridge 2017). In fact, two different journals have asked me if I wanted to review this, and I said no, partly because I know Rob too well, partly because I didn’t have time and mainly because I had already got myself a copy when I finally got round to paying my first subscription to the Royal Historical Society, which published it. Of course that still doesn’t mean I’ve read it, but I do intend to!

3. Specifically, if they’d read Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power, Royal Historical Society Studies in History: New Series (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 35-36 & n. 55.

4. The work of Rodrigo’s that I cite is his “Legislation and Resistance: limitations of royal power on the Catalan and Aragonese frontiers, 986–1134”, M.St. dissertation (University of Oxford 2013), which I had the fun of supervising, but I think he would say that his thinking has moved on a bit now and I await the completion of his doctoral thesis keenly! No pressure, Rodrigo…

From the Sources XII: successful crime and vicarious enforcement

Just when you thought it was safe to assume this blog would all be science, numismatics and seminar reports for the foreseeable future, let me surprise you all with something from that corner of tenth-century Europe on which I actually work, or on this occasion actually just about eleventh-century Europe, to wit the year 1003, from which while researching the book I mentioned a while ago (and which, I have to confess, has advanced not at all since then what with endless teaching prep) I found an interesting trial, in the manner of the best scholarship on the area just now. It looks like this!

Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, pergamins 2079, recto

Now, you can probably see that this is a charter which has suffered somewhat, from damp where it’s been folded, from moth or mouse in several places and from the outright loss of its left-hand lower corner, and therefore the scribal signature, but quite enough remains to identify it as an act of the man I have previously called Ervigi Marc the Wonder Judge, and thanks to the good efforts of Pere Puig i Ustrell I don’t have to try and work out what it says, because I spent part of yesterday in the IHR transcribing his edition of it.¹ That is why this has taken a few days to appear, but also means that I can now also offer you this translation:

“Let it fall upon the ears of all the faithful that I, in the name of God Bishop Marc, also judge, came into the county of Manresa in the Vall de Nèspola and heard the petition by which the judge Borrell summoned Olibà, who was the surety of Delà, so that he might present himself in his court and settle everything according to the laws, and he did not want to and in no way did he come there. And afterwards he went into the mountains and in no way either inclined or acquiesced to my orders. And this is the case for which he sought the aforesaid surety in the presence of Baró, Godmar, Sunyer, Baió, Adroer, another Godmar, Gondeví, Adalbert, Guadamir, Salomó, the priest Miró, Tered, Marco and a great many other, namely that Delà proclaimed that the alod of Sant Llorenç was his own free property, that of which Sant Llorenç had had 30 years’ possession in their own right through a charter that the late Count Borrell made to the aforesaid house of Sant Llorenç. And the same Delà has himself worked it for 30 years for the house of Sant Llorenç and given taschas and labour services and special offerings, just as the other men of the selfsame alod hold, give and perform. And the officers of Sant Llorenç distrained him for his excess just like the others of his sort. And afterwards he got away and broke from the power of Sant Llorenç and he set another lord up there and made to attack Borrell the aforesaid officer of Sant Llorenç and managed to kill his mule. On this account was the aforesaid surety laid open.
“Wherefore I in the name of God Marc do consign and hand over the aforesaid alod into the power and lordship of Sant Llorenç and I order the aforesaid surety to compound with another such alod of his own, and all the movable property which be possible to find are to be handed over into the power of the aforesaid Borrell on account of his mule which he should have compounded to him fourfold, for that which the selfsame… and on account of what the late Count Borrell laid down in that same document, who should wish to interfere let compound twofold.
“Therefore I the abovewritten Marc, as I knew this authority to have been heard by him… that the aforesaid Delà gave taschas, and that he made another lord which he was not permitted to do, therefore I have consigned and I do consign, have handed over and do hand over the aforesaid alod into the power and authority of Sant Llorenç, as has been said. And all the movable property into the power of the aforesaid Borrell.
“The recognition and consignment or handover and removal from lordship done on the 2nd Ides of October, […] reign of King Robert.
“Sig+ned Olibà, who made this extraction and consignment and confirmed and asked for it to be confirmed. Sig+ned Baró. Sig+ned Baió. Sig+ned Adroer. […] Sig+ned Guadamir. These same men were witnesses and present in a solemn capacity. Ma+rk of Gondeví. Ma+rk of Adalbert. Ma+rk of Salomó. Ma+rk of Marco. Ma+rk of, again, another Godmar.
“[…]gi, by the grace of God Bishop, also known as Marco, also judge.
“[…] priest and he wrote with scratched-out letters in the third line where it says ‘supra’, SSS, the above-set day and year.”

There’s lots of little cool things about this for the charter geek with which I probably shouldn’t bore you. I will, though, obviously. Had you noticed that the solemn witnesses all sign in the nominative, which I’ve rendered ‘signed X’, whereas the witnesses of the current ceremony sign in the genitive, so, ‘mark of X’? I’ve never seen that so clearly separated before and at first I thought that it was probably something to do with the fact that the second set of signatures are in darker ink. On inspection, though, you can see that actually the ink is darker all the way down the old fold, and the hand looks the same to me so I think that’s just coincidence in the form of moisture damage. Then I note the kind of half-quote of Borrell’s charter by Ervigi Marc, which he had clearly seen, and that needn’t surprise us since not only was at least one of its witnesses present, it also still exists and therefore so can we (below).² Lastly, also, I feel it’s worth mentioning that although Ervigi was, apparently, a bishop, he wasn’t actually bishop of anywhere: we know who all the bishops of the Catalan sees were at this time. The Church or the count of Barcelona (at this time Ramon Borrell, who did in one charter call himself ‘inspector of bishops’) seem to have decided that Ervigi was just that great and promoted him to bishop without portfolio.³

Borrell’s original grant of the property, Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, pergamins 3766

More obviously, though, this being just over the line of the year 1000 has escaped Josep María Salrach’s recent excellent book but suddenly exposes to us a judicial mechanism well known from elsewhere in Spain, if not very common, but possibly not previously attested in Catalonia, the surety.⁴ In case it’s not clear how this worked I’ll break down the narrative of the case in the way I usually do; it’s not actually quite obvious until one does and several important bits are skipped over in the actual text.

1. We begin, of course, with Count Borrell, who in 973 as we know from the previous charter gave an estate in the Vall de Nèspola to the monastery of Sant Llorenç del Munt, in Terrassa, as part of a general bolstering of monastic commitments to putting the frontier to work with which we’ve seen him busy before. The monastery then put in charge of it this man Delà, who rendered labour services and an annual levy of produce to them that signified their lordship over him as well as constituting monastery revenue.
2. Subsequently and presumably much more recently as of 1003, the monastery decided that Delà and a number of their other farm managers were being ‘excessive’ in some way and removed him, indeed, arrested him, presumably with intent to hold him responsible for whatever losses he’d caused them. It must have been at this point that Delà was made to name a surety for his actions, Olibà, a man who would have to make good if Delà failed to. The idea of this is that social obligation of the kind that the surety can exercise is strong enough that rather than offend his supporter in court the guilty party will pay up. As we can see here, this doesn’t always work.
3. Because, indeed, Delà escaped the monastery’s custody! Neither did he stop there: recognising that his previous bridges were now burnt, he handed the estate and his loyalty over to another lord, which as Ervigi says “he was not permitted to do”, though you’ll note that the lord is never named here and so was presumably someone too well-placed for the monastery to embarrass and also apparently sufficient to keep Delà out of the grip of justice, unfortunately for Olibà…
4. Sant Llorenç now got one of their enforcers, the judge Borrell, who was a patron of theirs, out onto the case and he must have got close to Delà because Delà apparently attacked him, and managed to kill his mule, which you know, suggests quite a serious assault as well as telling us that Borrell was not quite horse-riding levels of gentry.
5. So at that point the somewhat ineffective wheels of justice really began to spin, and Borrell called in the surety Olibà to do what he was supposed to do, which Borrell seems to have decided included paying for the mule fourfold. Olibà, however, not liking the look of things and presumably actually having no more suasion over Delà than anyone else, legged it to the mountains and defied both Borrell’s summons and that which Ervigi, called in from Barcelona with extra authority (not least because as bishop, presumably he could excommunicate) then sent next.
6. Somehow, however, Olibà got caught, because here after all he is being made to sign this document which no-one could classify, though I say that but it’s obviously the scribal hand still. Anyway, that is the point at which all this angry procedure is rolled out against him, Ervigi repeatedly states (as if Olibà could do anything about it!) that the estate should go back to Sant Llorenç and Olibà was actually made to fulfil a charter’s sanction, paying double the amount that someone had tried to steal from the monastery, and also all the movable property in that estate to make up for the missed payments on the mule. And there the matter rested, which is to say not so much that we don’t know if Olibà actually paid up but that I didn’t think to look onwards in the charter edition while I was still in the IHR, sorry, I’m a bad researcher.

There’s lots to think about here, though. In the first place, while he may indeed have been excessive, one can see why Delà and then Olibà tried to run for it or get powerful help; what chance did they have in the court, if it was going to be run by Sant Llorenç’s tame judge? Delà, in particular, was obviously what we once called a desperate man, and was at the point of trial presumably still with his new lord safe from justice. That may then explain why Sant Llorenç actually insisted on the penalty clause in their charter being enacted; they weren’t going to get control of their estate back, so could only grab at Olibà’s instead. One does wonder how much choice Olibà had about being Delà’s surety… As I have many times before observed, it’s tough to be up against The Man in first-millennial Catalonia.

And in this instance The Man’s House looks like this, though probably didn’t yet in 1003, lots of this being twelfth-century. It’s still pretty imposing though, and must have been then too. I’m not sure whether it would comfort Delà and Olibà to know that it is now “the highest restaurant in the Vallès“. «Sant Llorenç del Munt 2» per Mikipons – Treball propi. Disponible sota la llicència CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The trouble with only having one of these cases is that one doesn’t know if it’s something new. You’ll notice that this is not a system of reparation that the charter penalty implies: it should have been the infringer who paid up according to that, with the original and the same again. Neither, as far as I remember, is there any provision for sureties in the Visigothic Law, which duly never gets cited by this famously learned judge. And the fact of the violent self-defence, the adoption of non-legal means of enforcement, the apparent irreducibility of the fugitive criminal and the implication of an untouchable lord keeping him safe could all easily be used as evidence for a so-called ‘feudal anarchy’, were it not about thirty years early for that here by most accepted schemes.⁵ But we are, remember, on the frontier here, and close to the mountains to boot, and as I have said in many a call for papers and research proposal, that gives people choices they don’t have elsewhere, places to run where The Man actually can’t yet follow you and alternative lords who are considerably more alternative than just the count’s cousins in Berguedà (or wherever the mountains that failed to hide Olibà were).

The Serra de l’Obac, which lies between Terrassa and la Nèspola, is an obvious candidate where it is, you know, possible to imagine there being some good hiding-places… By Fugi-bis (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

OK, that’s obviously my favourite point but there are others, which make the monastery look even muddier. Note first of all the chronology. Borrell seems to have given Sant Llorenç this alod in 973. Here we are in 1003, therefore, thirty years later, which timespan grants the monastery unassailable legal right which is why they make sure to say that, right? Well, but hang on. Had this situation all blown up, every step there from (2) to (5) happened in the four months since the monastery crossed that line? Or had Delà rather seen that line coming and reckoned his chances of claiming thirty years’ possession were as good as his bosses’, if he made his move now? Worse, did the monastery fear that and boot him and his ‘consimiles’ out before they could claim they’d been in post that long like universities booting out their temporary staff at the four-year limit whereafter they are entitled to permanent contracts? Well, we can’t know, but one thing we can is that someone’s rights had been trodden on, because Borrell’s original grant had included life reservation to two of his followers, a priest Constabile and one Ervigi (presumably no relation?) and his children. So in 973 Sant Llorenç didn’t even own the estate, just the promise of it! Unless they just flat ignored those terms or Constabile and Ervigi and his kids almost immediately died, it’s a very special definition of thirty years that Sant Llorenç were claiming in 1003, therefore, and one that has no good implications either for their management strategies or for the truth of what they were claiming. So Delà and Olibà may have had better reason even than just the tame judge to know there was no point coming to court. The monastery wrote its own charters and it could ignore them too, with the right backers. But as Delà showed, out here that was a game that two could play.

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1. P. Puig i Ustrell (ed.), El monestir de Sant Llorenç del Munt sobre Terrassa: Diplomatari dels segles X i XI, Diplomataris 8-10 (Barcelona 1995), 3 vols, doc. no. 110:

Pateant aures fideles qualiter ego in Dei nomine Marcus episcopus qui et iudex accessi in comitatu Minorisa in ualle Nespula et audiui peticionem qua Borrellus iudex apetituit Olibane, qui fuit fideiussorem de Dela, ut in placito suo se presentasset et iuxta leges omnia difinisset, et noluit et extraxit se de ipso placito et non ibi ullo modo accessi. [sic] Et postquam accessit montus et iussionibus meis nullo modo obtempeauit nec adquieuit. Et hec est causa unde apetiuit fidemiussorem supradictum in presencia Baroni, Gondemari, Suniari, Baioni, Adroari, alio Gondemari, Gondeuini, Adalberti, Guadamiri, Salomoni, Mironi sacerdoti, Teredi, Marchoni et alii quamplures, scilicet quale Dela proclamauit alaudem Sancto Laurenti suum esse proprium et franchum, quem Sanctus Laurencius xxxta annos abebat possessum iure proprio per cartam quem condam comes Borrellus fecit ad predicta domum Sancti Laurenti. Et idem ipse Dela per hos supradictos xxxta annos seruiuit illum ad predicta domum Sancti Laurenti et donauit taschas et oblias et eceptiones, sicut ceteri omines de ipsum alaudem tenent, donant et seruiunt. Et distrincxerunt eum ministri Sancti Laurenti pro suo excessu sicut alii sui consimiles. Et postea ille exuasit et disrumpit de potestate Sancti Laurenti et fecit ibi alium senioraticum et fecit assalire ministrum Sancti Laurenti supradictum Borrellum et fecit ei tollere suum mulum. Propter ea fuit apertus istum fideiussorem.
Idcirco ego in De nomine Marcus consigno et contrado predictum alaudem in potestate et dicione Sancti Laurenti et iubeo componere supradicto fideissore aliut tantum alaude de suo, et omnibus mobilibus rebus quod ibi inueni tradidi in potestate predicti Borrelli propter suum mulum quod in quadruplum ei conponere debuerat, eo quod ipse […………..], et in propter quod condam comes Borrellus instituit in isto scriptura, qui hinrumpere uoluerit componat in duplo.
Igitur ego pretextus Marcus, ut agnoui istum directum ei audii [………… quo]d predictum Delanem dedisse tascas, et quia fecit alium seniorem que non licebat ei facere, ideo consignaui et consigno, [….]tradidi ac trado predictum alaudem in potestate et di[rectum Sancti Laurent]i, ut dictum est. Et omnes mobiles res in potestate predicti Borrelli.
Facta recognicione et consignacione uel tradiccione et extradiccione II idus octuber […………… reg]nante Roberto rege.
Sig+num Oliba, qui ista extraccione et consignacione fecit et firmauit et firmare rogaui. Sig+num Barone. Sig+num Baio. Sig+num Adroario. […………….] Sig+num Guadamir. Isti testes et presenciales fuerint. Sig+num Gondeuini. Sig+num Adalberti. Sig+num Salamoni. Sig+num Marchoni. Sig+num item alium Godmar. [……………..]
[……………. Erui]gius Dei gracia episcopus cognomento Marcho qui et iudex.
[………………] sacer et scripsit cum literas fusas in uerso III ubi dicit «supra», SSS die et anno prefixo.

2. Ibid. doc. no. 89.

3. For Ervigi, see Josep M. Font i Rius, “L’escola jurídica de Barcelona” in Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Font, Yolanda García & Anscari Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis. Ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos jurídics catalans 23 (Barcelona 2003), pp. 67-100 at pp. 82-87. Ramon Borrell is “inspector episcopiis dante Deo nostræ ditioni pertinentibus” in Petrus de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniæ, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; repr. Barcelona 1972, 1989), ap. CLXXII.

4. There is no mention of sureties in Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), which is of course the book to which I refer; see instead Wendy Davies, “On Suretyship in Tenth-Century Northern Iberia” in Julio Escalona & Andrew Reynolds (edd.), Scale and Scale Change in Early Medieval Europe, The Medieval Countryside 6 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 133-152.

5. Classically written up of course in Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du X^e à la fin du XI^e siècle : croissance et mutations d’une société, Publications de l’Université Toulouse-le-Mirail 23 & 29 (Toulouse 1975-1976), 2 vols, II pp. 539-574, and followed in Josep María Salrach i Marès, El Procés de Feudalització (segles III-XII), Història de Catalunya 2 (Barcelona 1987), pp. 291-324, and see also idem, Justícia i poder, pp. 213-234 for examples from the judicial sphere specifically. He doesn’t use this one, but he obviously could have.

The making of judges in tenth-century Northern Iberia

In 2009 Wendy Davies, of whom I so often write here, gave the annual lecture in memory of the late Timothy Reuter in Southampton. I could not go, but it was published in 2010 and some time in early 2011, Wendy kindly gave me an offprint, and I’d already downloaded it by then, knowing that I very much needed to read it.¹ Somehow, it was not till late 2014 that a combination of interest and shame found me resorting my to-read shelves in such a way as to bring it to the top, though, and then of course I found it really interesting. There’s two things in particular I thought made for blog material, and this is the former of them.

A farm in Soutelo, near Braga, like the one with which Wendy’s opening case dealt

Wendy’s aim was to explore what people who went to court in northern Iberia in the ninth and tenth centuries were hoping for: a compromise arrangement that settled all parties’ feelings and healed social rifts, or definitive justice based on rules and a judgement of the true situation? As she explains, scholars of the early Middle Ages have got very used to the idea that almost all justice in them was probably more negotiated than determined, and yet the language of the documents from her area (Northern Iberia from Galicia to Aragón and Navarra) is very much of truth and justice, “veritatem et iustitiam”.² By way of exploring what is up with this, she worked through what we can say about the people who judged these cases and who let them do so, and then what, as far as we can tell, they thought they were supposed to do. This involves pulling together a sample, of course—one of the reasons I love Wendy’s work is that she is someone who can start a section of a paper with the non-sentence, “Firstly numbers.”—and she has 250 records of disputes with 160 people named as judges (iudices), of whom only 15 or so occur more than once.³ Using that, she determines what we usually find judges doing (“… ordering what happens next, making primary investigations, reviewing evidence, and making decisions”) and then, the point I want to pick up here, notes that it is not just people named as judges who do such things in court:

“While the label iudex was attached to some of the judges… it was not applied to all. The group doing the judges, the group of iudices in the plural, might include, or indeed be entirely composed of, indiviudals who carried the label iudex, but it might also include others…. The apparent inconistencies in this usage are quite easily explained: being called a iudex was a marker of status—the label was applied to such people when, for example, they witnessed uncontested sale transactions; to do the judging you did not need to be a iudex, although you might be; in other words, the label iudex and the act of judging are separable. A iudex (in the singular) was a person of special status and skill—a kind of professional; he must usually have been literate (given the number of cases in which a scribe is termed iudex) and he is likely to have known some law. Doing the judging was something in which other leading men of a locality could participate; hence the common references to iudices in the plural, as the people doing the judging….”⁴

This intrigues me a great deal. As long-term readers will know there are plenty of judges in my evidence, and I am particularly grateful to one or two of them for the amount of detail they would cheerfully go into in explaining the cases they oversaw, but many of the others are complete obscurities, never seen in judgement or only once.⁵ These latter are trouble for some of the laudatory things that have been said about judges in early medieval Catalonia, who are famous for having been literate, educated, clerical and publicly-appointed disinterested judicial practitioners guided primarily by the written law.⁶ Jeffrey Bowman, among others, has exposed how carefree they could be about how to use that written law, and I’ve blogged an example here, but the idea that they were educated and publicly appointed has never really been challenged.⁷ Bowman’s work is especially interesting here because he sees a difference between the educated comital judges of Barcelona and the rather more homespun and independent judges of very southern France, and I have suggested that this is a distinction made over space which should actually be made over time, because plenty of the latter seem to me to exist in Catalonia too.⁸

Judges are never depicted in this period and area as far as I know, and i certainly can’t find one from in-area and in-period. On the other hand, this fourteenth-century depiction from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum does also illustrate the word iudex, of which this is the historiated initial… It’s from London, British Library, MS Royal 6.E.vii, fo. 345r.

One way to advance this is to ask who appointed judges. In Catalonia it’s almost always assumed to have been the count, but there is really no evidence of this that I know of. Judges appear with the count, receive gifts from the count, hand out judgement in courts over which he presides, and some of the more outstanding ones do this for several counts.⁹ It’s not even only the educated ones; Borrell II of Barcelona had a castellan called Guifré who was also a iudex, although we have no records of him actually judging, and that is at least a recognition of his title by the count.¹⁰ Still, we don’t have anyone who helpfully calls themselves iudex comitis or comitalis and the actual process of nomination is not recorded. Now, Wendy does have some answers to this question, not least because she does have royal judges, iudices regis.¹¹ But that’s the top of the pile, and the bottom is different. The chunk I’ve quoted above goes on as follows:

“… in [a case previously discussed], the additional three judges were selected from the assembled court to probe the witness evidence. Very occasionally there are references to choosing the judges from assembled boni homines, that is ‘worthies’, although that is rare (and the texts do not specify who made the choice).”¹²

This is practically being made a judge for the day, isn’t it? And it’s a mile away from the idea of such persons as carefully trained and professionally active, even if those chosen would probably have had a lot of relevant knowledge. If we have such cases in Catalonia, I don’t know about them as yet. But the problem is not that we have a different pattern attested there, but that we have no pattern; we have judges with no origin, beyond the fact that we can see that some of the more educated ones were members of the Barcelona chapter.¹³ Given this absence of evidence, the kind of variety that Wendy attests is as plausible as anything else, and then what does that do to the idea of Catalan justice as a model of early medieval statecraft? Well, she has an answer to that too:

“What is interesting, given that the state was undeveloped, is that there was a public system, from east to west, north to south, which had recognised procedures, experts, written law, officers, scales of penalty, counts with potestas (in these contexts, legitimate capacity to hold a court). There was a strong sense of the public, although differently conceptualised from either ancient or modern notions.”¹⁴

It is that difference in conceptualisation I am still struggling with here, I think. But as so often, it is easier if one compares, and Wendy has made that much easier.

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1. W. Davies, “Judges and Judging: truth and justice in northern Iberia on the eve of the millennium”, The Reuter Lecture 2009, in Journal of Medieval History Vol. 36 (Amsterdam 2010), pp. 193-203, DOI: 10.1016/j.jmedhist.2010.07.001.

2. Ibid. pp. 194-195, citing inter alia Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki (edd.), Conflict in Medieval Europe: changing perspectives on society and culture (Aldershot 2003) and various studies now reprinted in Stephen D. White, Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France, Variorum Collected Studies 817 (London 2005); the quote is from a León charter of 952 printed in Ernesto Sáez (ed.), Colección documental de la Catedral de León (775–1230), I (775–952), Fuentes y estudios de historia leonesa 41 (León 1987), doc. no. 256, which it turns out I have cited here before.

3. Davies, “Judges and Judging”, pp. 195-201, quote on p. 199.

4. Quotes ibid., pp. 201 and 200 respectively, punctuation as in the original.

5. See Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 42, 133, 139 & 152, inter alia.

6. The classic statement of this maximum case is Roger Collins, “‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet’: law and charters in ninth- and tenth-century León and Catalonia” in English Historical Review Vol. 100 (London 1985), pp. 489-512, repr. in idem, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain, Variorum Collected Studies 356 (Aldershot 1992), V, to which add his “Literacy and the Laity in Early Medieval Spain” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 109-133, repr. in Collins, Law, Culture and Regionalism, XVI; more nuanced, but still fundamentally affirmative, is Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), pp. 143-178, which does very much the same job as Wendy does in “Judges and Judging” but with different starting questions.

7. Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca 2004), pp. 33-55.

8. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled, p. 133; I go into more detail in the next book, now under work and about which I shall blog ‘ere long honest.

9. Guifré Ausonensis, despite his byname, seems to turn up first of all judging for Count-Marquis Oliba Cabreta of Cerdanya, and only to move into Borrell II of Barcelona’s territory (mainly Osona and Urgell) later in his career. I give some references for him ibid.

10. Ibid., pp. 152 & 153.

11. Davies, “Judges and Judging”, pp. 199-200.

12. Ibid. p. 201.

13. See Josep M. Font i Rius, “L’escola jurídica de Barcelona” in Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Font, Yolanda García & Anscari Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis. Ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona, Textos jurídics catalans 23 (Barcelona 2003), pp. 67-100.

14. Davies, “Judges and Judging”, p. 202.

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.

The Church and doubt, mostly in the Middle Ages

You may, by now, have had enough of my conference reporting from a year ago, and believe you me, by the time summer 2014 ended I had had enough of conferences for a bit. But, there is one more to go, which was the 53rd Summer Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, which took place at the University of Sheffield from 22nd-24th July, and I was there. The EHS publishes most of its proceedings and I liked the theme, which was ‘Doubt’, so I pitched a paper and they accepted it and so there I was. Now, in the event my paper was not sufficiently doubt-full to be accepted for publication, but it was still a good conference and slightly off my usual beat, which is generally good for one. Still, because I have less to say about most of the papers than usual, I’m going to get the three days done in one post, and because that will likely be large, I will just give you the list of what I saw and heard, and then stick my commentary below a cut so that those of you reading the actual front page can choose to skip on by if you like. Here’s that list, then:

Tuesday 22nd July

Plenary Session 1

• Frances Andrews, “Doubting John”.

Session 1.1

• Aideen O’Leary, “Devotion to St Andrew in Scotland and Anglo-Saxon England”.
• Stephen Sharman, “Bede and the Credible Witness: a response to doubt”.
• Christine Walsh, “Faith and Authenticity: eleventh- and twelfth-century concerns about the cult of saints and their relics”.

Session 2.1

• Christine Oakland, “‘A Box Full of Hay?’ Doubt and Truth in the Diocese of Sens”.
• Jan Vandeburie, “When in Doubt, Give Him the Finger: Ugolino di Conti’s loss of faith and Jacques de Vitry’s intervention”.

Wednesday 23rd July

Plenary Session 2

• Janet Nelson, “Carolingian Doubt?”

Session 3.1

• Kimberley-Joy Knight, “Lachrymose Holiness and the Problem of Doubt in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Hagiographies”.
• Anik Laferrière, “Doubting Monica: the deletion of Monica from fourteenth-century Vitae Augustini in the Augustinian Order of Hermits”.
• Steven Watts, “Demons and Doubt: the peculiar account of Brother Bernard’s possession in Jordan of Saxony’s Libellus“.

Plenary Session 3

• Ian Forrest, “Trust and DOubt: the late medieval bishop and local knowledge”

Session 4.2

• Emily Ewing Graham, “Heresy and identity: late medieval friars and the kingdom of Aragón”.
• Patrick Zutshi, “Evidence and Doubt: the beginning of the Great Schism according to the testimony collected at Medina del Campo in 1380-1”.

Thursday 24th July

Session 5.1

• Jonathan Jarrett, “The Anger of St Peter: the effects of spiritual sanctions in early medieval charters of donation”.
• Thomas Smith, “Investigating the Pope’s Doubts: the validity of petitions from thirteenth-century England”.
• Enrico Veneziani, “Doubting the Authority of Peter: the trial of Pontius of Cluny”.

Plenary Session 4

• Kirstie Blair, “Unforming Faith: poetry, doubt and the Church of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

And this is (some of) what I thought about it all…

Sometimes justice really was blind

I work on the Catalan tenth century not least because, while the amount of evidence I have to work with is huge, if I ever step across the line into the eleventh century there’s just so much more that I would never get through it all. Much less of the material from after 1000 is published, too, though that is now improving. For my Ph. D., however, I set a cut-off date at 1030, figuring that a generation’s space after 1000 would let most of the threads I wanted to follow find their ends, and this lets some fun things sneak in that a study of the tenth century only would miss.

Like this, for example, about which I wrote a long time ago. It is Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona, Pergamins, C (Sant Pere de Casserres) núm 20

I think this must be the only reason Josep María Salrach’s study of justice in Catalonia doesn’t mention what I had, when I drafted this, just found in the appendices of Michel Zimmermann’s Écrire et lire en Catalogne, of which I was then in the final pages.¹ Zimmermann is interested in the early part of that book in people who get documents signed with clauses explaining why they couldn’t write themselves, and his Annexe IV is a long list of all the examples he’d found.² Usually the reason given is illness, sometimes people stress that they can read even if they can’t write, and very rarely is it just ‘I can’t’, though despite all of this most signatures, in all documents, are done by the scribe, and it’s almost only ecclesiastics who sign for themselves. There’s an odd case, however, a judge named Guillem who, in Zimmermann’s list, always has his signature done with the same clause:³

“Ego Guillermus judex qui huius edictionis tactu necessitate oculorum signoque impressionis corroboro.”

This is quite tricky to translate, not least because it’s possible that where he used ‘necessitas’ he meant or was riffing on ‘cecitas’, which would be ‘blindness’, much more common in these formulae. And it clearly is a formula here, it is repeated for him pretty much word-for-word over a 28-year period and all that changes is the spelling of his name (Willielmus in the first document), despite a myriad of different scribes, so he must have known this clause and dictated it to the scribes. It’s something like:

“I, the judge Guillem, corroborate, by reason of necessity of the eyes, by touching this edict and with a mark of impression.”

It’s not clear to me for this wording whether he was meant to be holding a pen or not, or just to have put his finger to where his signature had been written for him, but in the only one of these documents of which I have a picture, his is the last witness signature and while it is clearly in the scribal hand, as you’d expect, it is followed, as you can see below, by a cross, set crookedly to the line of writing.⁴ I’d like to think that’s his mark. He presumably would have remembered how it went even if he couldn’t see what he was doing any more, and I do wonder if the odd word choice should be taken to imply that he didn’t think he was blind as such, just, I don’t know, long-sighted or something. He certainly didn’t let it stop him judging for another twenty years! And, as the post title implies, his would have been closer to blind justice than the area sometimes managed…

Black-and-white facsimile of part of a charter of Guillem’s, his signature being the last line and a bit of the body text

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1. J. M. Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013); Michel Zimmermann, Érire et lire en Catalogne (siècles IX-XIII), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols.

2. Ibid., I pp. 81-83 & II pp. 1107-1111.

3. There’s the question of whether he appears before his eye problem developed and signed for himself then, and there is a judge Guillem in Cebrià Baraut (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell’ in Urgellia Vol. 3 (Montserrat 1980), pp. 7-166, doc. no. 252 & Antoni M. Udina i Abelló, La Successió testada a la Catalunya medieval, Textos i Documents 5 (Barcelona 1984), ap. 26, but of course to prove it’s the same guy, you’d need, well, his signature… And there is a judge Guillem working at this same time who could still write, so who knows really. The documents in which Zimmermann finds him professing inability so to do run from 986 to 1015, and were then printed as: Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX i X), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascicules, doc. no. 524; Petrus de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniæ, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; repr. Barcelona 1972, 1989), ap. CLXXIII; Francesc Monsalvatje y Fossas (ed.), Colección Diplomática del Condado de Besalú, Noticias Históricas XI-XIII, XV & XIX (Olot 1901-1909), 5 vols, ap. DLXXIII; & Jaime Villaneuva, Viage Literario a las Iglesias de España tomo XIII: viage á Gerona (Madrid 1850) app. XX & XXII.

4. Miquel dels Sants Gros i Pujol, ‘Lámines’ in Junyent, Diplomatari, pp. 681-808, no. 108 (doc. no. 524).

Settling the sins of your father: when counts lost in court

Work pressure continues to damage my great resolve to reduce backlog here, but here is a thought I first had in June of this year when dealing with Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder (it was a very fruitful read for me), that perhaps addresses that question of why we sometimes see the counts of Barcelona of the tenth century lose court cases in documents that they then preserved, which we lately debated, and which has just come up again in the work I am just about managing to do.¹

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

You see, of late I have trying to get a decent detailed chronology of the reign of Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell (945/947-993) worked out. This is something you would think I had but apparently not quite enough; some interesting things are occurring to me just by realising that, oh, those two things happen sequentially, and so forth. But it has also reminded me of the details of two things that happened when he died: firstly, a number of people made bequests or donations for his soul, usually of lands or properties that they had originally got from him.² Then, after a while, we start to hear about the opposite, people who lost land or property to him. The first of these is Bishop Sal·la of Urgell, in a curious case I discussed here long long ago, but after a few years more follow, indicating that Borrell was not always scrupulous about how he obtained property that he felt he needed. There are six of these cases all told, where despite land having been given somewhere it wound up back in the count’s hands.³ In three of these cases people had gone to law against Borrell for the properties and their right been admitted but somehow the counts never quite handed it back. Once Borrell was dead, these things could be pursued, although one of these cases comes up in 1021, so it took a long while all to work out.⁴ I feel this nuances Salrach’s point about the counts needing to lose some cases to make it clear to people that that could happen; losing might not cost them very much given that they were their own enforcement…

The ruins of the castle after which Castellfollit del Boix, location of the property Borrell had grabbed back, is named. By Elmoianes (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-es], via Wikimedia Commons.

What interests me is the way that Borrell’s heirs handled these cases, however. This is quite different between his two sons, Ramon who succeeded him in Barcelona, Girona and Osona and Ermengol who did so in Urgell. Ramon Borrell is another of Salrach’s rulers who didn’t mind correcting himself, as we’ve seen, but he was also very happy to correct his father: we’ve seen before the case where Sant Benet de Bages took Ajó, widow of the judge Guifré, Vicar of la Néspola, to court for land that had been given to Sant Benet at its endowment (Sant Benet being a foundation of Ajó’s daddy, which also complicates things). Borrell had grabbed the land back and bestowed it upon Guifré by charter, and though Ajó had that charter Ramon Borrell’s court decided that Sant Benet’s title was better and awarded the land to the monastery.⁵ Last time I discussed this it was because that didn’t work, and a second hearing let her have it for life under rent to the monastery, but that hearing did not take place before a count.⁶ Ramon was happy to admit that his father had done wrong. Ermengol was also happy to do this but for a different reason: the two cases of this in his charters both involve fairly substantial payments by the unlucky defendant for their rights: in 1007, for example, Ermengol’s fidelis Sunyer gave him five denarii and a horse so that Ermengol would remit to him an alod in Solsona for part of which Sunyer had already taken Borrell to court and won, for all the good it apparently did him.⁷ Ermengol, who is also the best-documented recipient of a payment for simony I know, seems mainly to have offered justice at a price. Two years later, indeed, Ermengol made his will and there gave back to Santa Maria d’Urgell the villa of Tuixén which Borrell had bequeathed to the cathedral in his will, so the two brothers obviously learnt different things from their father’s examples…⁸

The selfsame villa of Tuixént, as it is now spelt. By Jordi Picart (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

What all this makes me think of is the efforts that Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, the second Holy Roman Emperor, made to demonstrate that his succession in 814 meant a change of régime: most of Charlemagbne’s courtiers were chased out, all Louis’s sisters put into nunneries and some of his male relatives tonsured too, and (we are told, though it was obviously not wholly true) all of Charlemagne’s charters called in and replaced. There was also a set of judicial enquiries set in train to clear up hanging cases like those we just looked at where justice had not in fact been done.⁹ One of the Catalan counts in fact did the charter replacement too, or so we are told, and again the survival makes this look unlikely but the fact that it was said is impressive.¹⁰ I guess that there was some important political capital to be made when a long-lived ruler died in reaching out to the people who had become his enemies and whom he had excluded from access to central power; by calling Daddy’s decisions into question you could tell those people that the situation was up for renegotiation and hope to bring them on board without necessarily having to go quite as far as did Louis in getting rid of the old guard.

Mind you, there were worse places to wind up than where two of Louis’s cousins did, the abbey of Corbie, here delightfully represented by a maquette of the modern church as in 1810 inside the modern church as of this century. By Paulparis2010 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

This model is quite easy to find once you start looking, and I suspect it explains quite a few of Salrach’s cases where the counts let themselves be seen to lose; it was not they who lost, but the grip of their father. And if you think back to the Vallformosa case we discussed a few posts ago and have such trouble explaining, you’ll notice that the same thing is going on there: Borrell was pursuing rights that his father had claimed, exactly thirty years after his father had died when it cannot, legally, have had a chance of working out because of the legal limit on unpursued claims in the local law. Was the point to show that his father’s claims were not always just? I think, in this case, probably not, because Borrell had been willing to outright say as much when it must have counted a good deal more, just after his succession; but the tools he was using could be put to that purpose, and his sons were good learners.¹¹ There is stuff I still have to work out here but I do think that dealing with succession to the successful, and perhaps still more to the unsuccessful (which is arguably more how Borrell was seen, after the sack of Barcelona in 985¹²) is part of what was going on with these cases of comital defeat.

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1. J. M. Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), pp. 109-118.

2. For example, Argemir and Major giving land they had from him at Castelltallat to Sant Benet de Bages in 995 (Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1705, or no less than Count Bernat Tallaferro of Besalú and his wife Tota giving with the church of Santa Maria de Merlès, built on land he got from Borrell, to Santa Maria de Ripoll in 997 (Petrus de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniae, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; repr. Barcelona 1972, 1989), ap. CXLV.

3. In order, Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis hist&orave;rics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 3 (Montserrat 1980), pp. 7-166, doc. no. 239; Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 1840 & 1864; Baraut, “Documents, dels anys 981-1010”, doc. no. 286; Baraut (ed.), “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles (segles IX-XIII)” in Urgellia Vol. 12 (1995), pp. 7-414, doc. no. 35; José Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés Vol. II (Barcelona 1946), doc. no. 454; Gaspar Feliu & Salrach (edd.), Els Pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I, Diplomataris 18-20 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 154.

4. The law cases are Baraut, “Tavèrnoles”, no. 35, Rius, Sant Cugat doc. no. 454 and Feliu & Salrach, Pergamins, doc. no. 154, the last being the 1021 one.

5. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1840.

6. Ibid. doc. no. 1864.

7. Baraut, “Tavèrnoles”, doc. no. 35.

8. Baraut, “Documents”, doc. no. 300. Even then, Ermengol I still forgot to actually get the bequest carried out and Bishop Ermengol (no relation) had to take Ermengol I’s son Ermengol II (obviously more related) to court for it in Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 1010-1035, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia Vol. 4 (Montserrat 1981), pp. 7-186, doc. no. 528. Nor was that the first time the comital family had grabbed back Tuixén just after it had been given away; I’m not quite sure why they kept letting it go…

9. Recorded in Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. E. Tremp in idem (ed.), Thegan, Die Taten Kaiser Ludwigs (Gesta Hludowici imperatoris). Astronomus, Das Leben Kaiser Ludwigs (Vita Hludowici imperatoris), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi) LXIV (Hannover 1995), online here, last modified 8 November 2004 as of 30 May 2008, pp. 167-277 with commentary pp. 1-52, cap. X.

10. Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, S. Riera i Viader & Manuel Rovira i Solà (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LXI (Barcelona 2005), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, 2 vols, doc. no. 288.

11. That more extreme case is the appointment of a replacement for his father Sunyer’s nominee as abbess of Sant Joan de Ripoll, recounted in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 645.

12. Gaspar Feliu, La Presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007), online here, last modified 15 September 2008 as of 3 November 2008.

‘We saw with our eyes and heard with our ears…’

I’m sorry for the unintended hiatus here over the last few days. It turns out that a week in which you start teaching a new hitherto-unfamiliar primary text in two volumes and initiate work on two separate projects outside your main job as well as going to three seminars and a football match (but a football match with medievalists, I should insist) just isn’t very compatible with blogging. Who knew? You will, of course, hear about not just the projects but also the primary text and what I read round it at least a little bit, but the post I have been meaning to finish, and now do, is one more about the gift that keeps on giving, Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil.¹

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

The last one of these posts, you may recall, involved the process for replacing lost documents under Visigothic law, reparatio scripturae, as applied in Catalonia. As I said then, the documents that record such events involve quite detailed reprises of documents sometimes from many years before, and this has led to scepticism that such details could in fact have been genuinely present in the old documents, rather than recovered from the contemporary situation and artifically gilded with the antiquity of presumed memory.² But as with other such questions, while he doesn’t obviously know that it’s being asked, Salrach has an answer to this, at least potentially. Picking up on the Cuixà hearing I quoted last time and the way its witnesses say that they had read and re-read the missing documents when they existed (quite recently), he argues that probably anyone who had charters got them read out to audiences every now and then so that they would be remembered.³

I don’t have a picture of the actual document so that you can read it, alas, but it is physically within one of these volumes

Now this obviously makes sense in some ways: it would explain the level of recall that Bowman finds implausible, and certainly this is not the only place where witnesses say such a thing, though the usual phrase is less literate, “we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears”. And there is, as you may just recall, one case where this process is actually documented, at the cathedral of Vic in the year 898. There, one Boso himself took an oath as to the content of several charters he’d lost involving land sold him by two couples, Ermoarí and Farelda and Domènec and Guisilda, and then got five witnesses to testify under oath that they had seen this done. And so they duly say:

“We the above-written witnesses know, and well recall in truth, and saw with our eyes and our ears heard, or we were also present at that hour while those two people, by name the late Domènec and his wife Guisilda and Ermoarí and his wife Farelda, were in the county of Osona, in the term of Taradell, in the hamlet of Gaudilà. And thus made the late Domènec a little charter or sale to the man by the name of Boso, of all his heredity which he had in the county of Osona within the limits of the castle of Taradell or in the hamlet of Gaudilà, and Ermoarí with his wife Farelda sold all their lands or a house, all their heredity in Gaudilà’s hamlet to that same Boso. And we witnesses saw the selfsame documents confirmed and impressed with the sign of the man by the name of Domènec and his wife…”

… and it goes on into what I tend to call non-exclusion clauses, in which every sort of property that the estates concerned might have included is named so that nothing can be claimed as omitted.⁴ But what’s interesting here is where it goes next, which is to what happened to the documents:

“And we witnesses were signatories making marks in the little charter of Ermoarí, and there was recorded there the notary Joan the priest. We witnesses saw the selfsame documents confirmed and corroborated and impressed with the sign of the sellers, Domènec and his wife and of Ermoarí and his wife, and of the audience and of the chancellor just as is inserted above. And we saw the selfsame documents handed over into the power of that same Boso and I the already-said Domènec and his wife and Ermoarí and his wife handed them over of their own spontaneous will into the power of the selfsame Boso. And we witnesses saw and heard the selfsame documents read and re-read one and another and a third time in the hamlet of Gaudilà. And that same Boso had the selfsame lost documents, and it was evident.”

What Salrach of course picks up on is the reference to a repeated reading. Again this makes perfect sense as a way that things could have been done, and as I’ve said elsewhere it’s a real pity that we can’t trust it…⁵ The reason that we can’t is the notary and the chancellor; these are the only documents in the whole of Carolingian Catalonia as far as I know, and certainly in this county, that mention such officers. Obviously the documents had a scribe, but neither of these is likely to be a title they used. That means that the scribe of these documents, a priest by the name of Ademir, had another model in use from somewhere, and that no procedural detail included in these documents can be proven to come from life rather than the model. And this is the only text we have that mentions this re-reading on site…

The cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic, from the Riu Gurri, where with a rather different and presumably smaller building on site this all took place. By Enfo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Of course this doesn’t take away Salrach’s point. If the recall (which sometimes goes well beyond the likely: we have the name of one of the Muslim governors operating in Catalonia before the Muslim conquest from one of the Cuixà document replacements, whose forty-year-old original had apparently recorded a century of tenure history!⁶) is to be accepted, it needs explaining; here is a perfectly good explanation, even if it probably isn’t what actually happened here. So when would this hypothetical reading have taken place? There is a contention made by people who work on monastic cartularies that these, functioning as memorials of donors, would have been read out on solemn occasions in the monastery, such as particular feast days, and the same could just about be true of secular churches, if they picked a day when a good crowd would be there.⁷ But should we imagine similar opportunities being taken in the lay world? There would be no fixed points of the calendar outwith the liturgy for the lay population, so the occasion would have to be generated, either by the agricultural year or by one-off events, which it seems odd to picture being co-opted for this purpose. Everyone’s here for the wedding or whatever, let’s quickly get the charters out and run through ’em? And who could run through formulaic Latin documents for such an audience anyway? There is, most likely, an evidentially silent practice of public land-speaking here that these procedures imply, but do not prove. The case is not made by Salrach, but it seems to me that the combination of these various cases does make it stronger. I would have liked more from him on this!

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1. J. M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013).

2. Jeffrey Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: property, proof and dispute in Catalonia around the year 1000 (Ithaca 2004), pp. 151-161.

3. Salrach, Justícia i poder, p. 195, referring to Pierre Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia VI: els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, rev. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LXX (Barcelona 2006), 2 vols, doc. no. 121.

4. The two documents from the hearing are edited as Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. nos 33 & 34, the latter here quoted in my translation. The cataloguic property listings are discussed by Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IX^e-XII^e siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, I pp. 208-217.

5. J. Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (University of London 2005), online here, pp. 49-53.

6. Salrach, Justícia i poder, 195, without further reference, but the document is Ponsich, Catalunya Carolíngia VI, doc. no. 120, with the actual content here referred to printed as its own entry as no. 23.

7. Patrick Geary, “Entre gestion et gesta” in Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle & Michel Parisse (edd.), Les Cartulaires : Actes de la Table Ronde organisée par l’École Nationale des Chartes et le G. D. R. 121 du C. N. R. S. (Paris, 5-7 décembre 1991), Mémoires et Documents de l’École des Chartes 39 (Paris 1993), pp. 13-26; see also Geary, “Land, Language and Memory in Europe 700-1100” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series Vol. 9 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 169-184.