Adding to the Law of the Goths once the Goths were gone

Joan Vilaseca has just mentioned, in comments on the post before last, an instance from Carolingian Catalonia where the pope was called on to amend the Visigothic Law. I had seen this before, at the beginning of my Ph. D., and been reminded of it occasionally since, but while I was looking at the lack of evidence for Carolingian-era liturgical enforcement I had come across it again, and it’s such a peculiar episode it’s worth writing about as an instance of the way that early medieval law was often much more about satisfying competing requirements from those demanding settlement than about following what a lawyer might now say should have applied.¹

It’s time for the most available image of a Catalan copy of the Law again! Abadia de Montserrat ([1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

If you’ve been reading a while you’ll probably by now remember that as far as we can see, when the area that’s now Catalonia was adopted into the Frankish empire in the ninth century, it was allowed to continue using the Visigothic law that was still running in the area despite its originating kingdom having ceased to exist in the early eighth century.² It is much cited and quoted in local documents and it covers most eventualities, but apparently not all, which left the governors of the late-ninth-century province with the question: what do you do when the law of the Goths needs modifying and there’re no Gothic legislators left to do it?

A fourteenth-century depiction of King Louis II of France, missing star of this story; as far as I know there is no earlier picture of him surviving. By Anonymous [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We know that this problem arose because it was brought before the council of Troyes in 878. This was a tense time for the kingdom of the Western Franks under which what is now Catalonia then fell: Emperor Charles the Bald had died in Italy in 877 leaving his eldest, but deeply mistrusted, son Louis II, the ‘Stammerer’, to succeed not just to the kingdom but to the major revolt that Charles had been moving to suppress.³ By the time of the Council of Troyes much of this was quieted but the result was that major reassignments of offices had to be carried out; importantly for Catalonia, this seems to be when Count Guifré the Hairy was given Barcelona to run, because the previous incumbent, Marquis Bernard of Gothia, had been one of the rebels.⁴ Guifré himself wasn’t apparently present, but others were, including Archbishop Sigebod of Narbonne, who had a while before failed to find the relics of Saint Eulalie in Barcelona, and no less a figure than Pope John VIII. And it was Sigebod who brought up the problem of the law.

Pope John VIII, actual star of the story, in a no less anachronistic portrait

As the papal bull that records this tells it, Sigebod showed the pope a copy of ‘the book of Gothic law’, and stressed that there was nothing in it about sacrilege and that the book explicitly prohibited its judges from hearing cases about things that it didn’t cover (which indeed it does). We don’t know why Sigebod had brought this up now, but his complaint is clear: “thus the right of the holy Church was being suffocated by the provincial inhabitants of Gaul and Spain”. So they went to look for other law. First up, presumably because they were asking the pope, Bishop of Rome after all, was the “law of the emperor Justinian”, which laid down a penalty of five pounds of the best gold for sacrilege, but they found a more lenient prescription “that was constituted by the pious prince Charles”, a fine of thirty pounds of silver, “that is, 600 solidi of the purest silver”. There’s a range of reasons that’s odd, not the least of which is that that conversion is two-and-a-half times the usual reckoning of twenty solidi to the pound, but anyway, the pope preferred the lighter penalty, and further ordained that anyone not paying this fine will be excommunicated until they do. John concludes: “And we ordered that this law should be written at the end of the book of worldly law.”⁵

Actual Carolingian legislation from Catalonia, the Ripoll copy of Ansegis’s collection of capitularies, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón MS Ripoll 40, fo. 9r, from the PARES portal

A theoretically-minded lawyer would quite possibly find this very frustrating. Firstly, Catalonia is under a Carolingian king at this point, and as this council reveals there is Carolingian legislation that covers this, to which surely this area was theoretically subject. It’s not as if Carolingian legislation wasn’t known and used in the area, or known at least; we have copies of it from this era, as you see at right.⁶ All the same, that apparently didn’t work for Sigebod; he needed to be able to cite the Visigothic Law. Now, that confines the right to make legislation to ‘the prince’, which term surely encompasses whoever is in charge of the secular government.⁷ That, at this point, was surely King Louis, in whose very court they now stand, but it is not him they consult. And when the pope is consulted instead, his first port of call is not any local law, but the law of a man who had never ruled this area, Justinian I (though it is interesting to see Justinianic law in use here so early rather than the Codex Theodosianus or its derivatives). Admittedly, what they wind up with in the end is Carolingian law, all the same, so you could if you wanted to squint see this as an elaborate confirmation that the Carolingians have indeed replaced the old rulers of the Roman Empire, and if so then there’s no-one more fitting than the pope, whose predecessors had crowned the first Carolingian and raised Charlemagne to the rank of emperor, to make it apparent. But I don’t think that’s what was happening here, because Louis didn’t get to occupy that rôle; it wasn’t he who issued the new decree. He was thus neither emperor-substitute, even though he was son of the last emperor of the West, nor ‘prince’ of what his son would later call ‘our Gothic kingdom’.⁸

Let’s be as clear as we can: the king still ruled the area, or the relevant people wouldn’t have been asking about this at his council. At this same council, indeed, he would issue a precept to Bishop Frodoí of Barcelona, who was apparently there and whom you might think would be concerned with this legislation given the problems he apparently faced, confirming the rights of Barcelona’s cathedral, that same text which is first to mention the relics of Saint Eulalie being there.⁹ So the royal word and ruling was worth something still! Apparently not enough, though, for the king to be allowed to add to the Law of the Goths like the real princes of yesteryear. Instead, the pope, whom no-one would yet call a princeps, and the assembled churchmen in council with him, got to add to the “codex legis mundanae”. It seems then that royal authority in Catalonia was already fading into the half-light it occupied for the next century-plus here: it was useful, prestigious and traditional, but passive; it could not now do anything new any more, so for that new solutions were required. The one that was improvised here was not decisive, but it’s surprising. It surprises me not least because apparently Louis accepted this replacement of what we might think should have been his authority; only four years before, after all, his father was still dispatching missi to the Spanish March to check up on the misuse of royally-granted privileges.¹⁰ Louis’s position was weaker, but would Archbishop Sigebod really have dismissed it if Louis had issued a capitulary enforcing his great-grandfather’s rules once more? I don’t understand why it was the pope who got to do this, but I think that that fact shows us that something crucial had changed here, very recently.

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1. The classic exposition of this view of early medieval law is Patrick Wormald, “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: legislation and Germanic kingship, from Euric to Cnut” in Peter Sawyer & Ian N. Wood (edd.), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds 1977), pp. 105-138.

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

3. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians (London 1983), pp. 258-259; cf. Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), pp. 250-255 for a more positive reading of the sources.

4. Ramon d’Abadal in de Vinyals, Els Primers Comtes de Catalunya, Biografies Catalanes: sèrie hist&oagrave;rica 1 (Barcelona 1958, repr. 1980), pp. 53-72; cf. now Joan Vilaseca, “Onze de setembre de 878” in idem, Recerques en la Alta Edat Mitjana Catalana (II) (Terrassa 2013), pp. 97-118; I haven’t made up my mind about this yet!

5. Ramond d’Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 2 & 3 (Barcelona 1926-1952), 2 vols, ap. IX:

“… venit ante praesentiam nostram filius noster Sigebodus primae sedis Narbonensis episcopus cum suis suffraganeis episcopis, & detulit nobis librum Gothicae legis, ubi nihil habebatur de sacrilegiis; & in eisdem legibus scriptum erat ut causae quas illae leges non habent, non audirentur a judicibus illius patriae. Atque ita jus sanctae Ecclesiae suffocabatur ab incolis Galliae & Hispaniae provinciis. Unde nostra serenitas cum praescriptis episcopis, inespectus legibus Romanis, ubi habebatur de sacriliegiis, invenimus ibi a Justininiano imperatore legem compositionis sacrilegii constitutam, scilicet in quinque libras auri optimi. Sec nos leniorem legem praecipimus esse tenendam qua a Karolo est constituta pio principe de compositione sacrilegii, videlicet in triginta libras examinati argenti, id est, secxentorum [sic] solidorum argenti purissimi. Ideoque quisquis inventus fuerit reus sacrilegii, istam leviorem compositionem emendet ipsis episcopis vel abbatibis sive personis ad quos sacrilegii querimonia juste pertinuerit. Et si ipse reus sacrilegii facere noluerit, tamdiu excommunicationi subjaceat usquequo praedictam compositionem sexcentorum solidorum persolvat. Et si in hac obstinatione mortuus fuerit, corpus ejus cum psalmis et hymnis non deferatur ad sepulturam. Et praecipimus ut in fine codicis legis mundanae scribatur haec lex.”

6. Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Manuscrits Ripoll 40, on which see M. E. Ibarbaru Asurmendi, “Translatio Sancti Stephani ab Hierosolymis Constantinopolim. Capitularia Regum Francorum (Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó: Ms. Ripoll 40)” in Antoni Pladevall (ed.), Catalunya Romànica X: el Ripollès (Barcelona 1987), pp. 291-292.

7. Karl Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) I (Hannover 1902, repr. 2005), transl. S. P. Scott as The Visigothic Code (Boston 1922), II.1.XII.

9. Charles the Simple, in Abadal, Catalunya Carolíngia II, Elna IV.

9. Ibid., Barcelona: Esglesia Catedral de Santa Creu II.

10. Ibid., ap. VII.

Even the Bishop of Girona doesn’t always win

[This was mostly drafted offline on a train from London to Leeds on the 10th of July.]

Modern-day Ullà, Empúries, Catalunya

The Bishop of Girona doesn’t always win. I know that by now, you might have reason to think otherwise. This was, after all, the place in Catalonia that took the most trouble to ensure that it had up-to-date royal charters for all its properties at all times and persistently brought them forward in court to others’ detriment; this we have seen.¹ But of course it’s what we would see, because as I mentioned last time but one, Girona does seem to actually have sorted through what documents it wanted copied up, so even if it did have documents in which it lost its cases, it probably got rid of them after a while, and it is more likely that those cases only gave documents to the winners who were, it’s more or less safe to guess, not going subsequently to donate their property to the cathedral thus getting their documents archived. So we’d have to be extremely lucky to see anything other than resounding victories in their cartularies, no? Well, lucky us: look at this.²

When in God’s name the illustrious man Teuter, bishop of the See of Girona, was staying in the village of Ports, which is in Empúries territory, along with the illustrious men Delà and Sunyer, counts, in the public court for the hearing of many cases and the definition of right and just judgements, and also in the presence of Viscount Petroni and the judges who were ordered to judge or determine the cases, that is, Ferriol, Undilà, Godmar, Teudard, Manuel, Frugell, Lentio and Roderic, Ardovast the saio, Esperandéu, Hostal, also Junià, Trastildo, Benet, Ferriol, Blanderic, Eldegot, Guifré, Eripio, Esclúa, Untril·la, Comparat, Lleopard, Daniel, Undiscle, Armentary, Miró, Petroni, Adalà, Fluiter, Galí, Castí, Agelà, Adilo, Sendred, Perell, Truiter, Salomó, Lleo, Elanç, Pasqual, Revell, Segobran and the other priests, clerics, a great multitude of lay and other worthy men who were there present.

The grammar in this next paragraph is completely out to lunch as copied, so I’ve emended freely towards what the sense appears to be.

Thus there came into their presence the Archpriest Estremir, who is the mandatory of the abovesaid bishop, and he said, «Hear me, because that there Andreu’s houses, courts, orchards and fruit-trees and lands that are in the term of the villa of Ullà, which is in Empúries territory, those ought to be the aforesaid bishop’s on account of the claim of Santa Maria and Sant Feliu, which are sited in Girona and next to the selfsame city, by a precept of the lord king, which those men made of the aforementioned Santa Maria and Sant Feliu for their own. That Andreu holds them unjustly as an aprisio as part of the villa that is called Quarto, which they call Bellcaire. That same Andreu holds them unjustly and against the law.»
Then the aforesaid counts, bishops, viscounts and judges demanded of the aforesaid Andreu what he said to this. That man then said in his responses: «Because those houses, courts, fruit orchards and lands aforesaid which that same priest Estremir, who is mandatory of the aforesaid bishop, demands, I do not hold them unjustly but I hold them legally, by aprisio and by a precept of the king and as part of the aforesaid villa of Bellcaire, just as the other Hispani do».

There now follows a long paragraph in which the whole court slogs out to this place, details one of their number to measure the land in question and then divide it in half, and they give the measurements in great detail including specifying how long the perch they’re using as a unit is (8½ feet, since you ask). But we don’t need that much detail here, really. On with the rest of the text!

And then the already-said bishop, counts, and judges ordained that within those villae of Ullà and Quarto, which is called Bellcaire, they would set up five fixed stones as landmarks or boundaries, and so indeed they did. And the already-said Andreu received the half of those perches nearest the well on the northern side and Archpriest Estremir similarly the other half nearest the villa Ullà on the southern side.
And then it was agreed between the aforesaid bishop and the already-said Andreu that each one of them would hold as far as those fixed stones as a division of those villae, so that whoever [meaning `both’?] might judge and defend and securely possess forever in peaceful fashion.
Then it was set down that each one of them should have a notice from this about the selfsame aforesaid properties, signed and confirmed, just as it is, and let each one of them rejoice to see his justice in our court.
Notice given the 16th day of the Kalends of June, in the third year that King Louis was dead.
+Riquer, archpriest, SSS. +Guiscafred, archpriest, SSS. + Pere, priest, SSS. Reccared, priest, SSS. Teudegild, priest, SSS.

This document is quite important. The cathedral gets something out of it, and the boundaries set will have prevented Andreu or his family ever taking any more out of the cathedral’s land, so it’s understandable that Santa Maria kept it. All the same, this obviously wasn’t the result they were after, and thus what it shows us is, firstly that Girona wasn’t the only entity in the area who could get royal charters for their lands – it would seem that in this respect Louis the Stammerer was more sympathetic to those willing to come to his court than his father had been, and furthermore possibly keeping better track of what had been given out since he also awarded a precept to Girona cathedral that doesn’t cover this land³ – and that people still thought it was worth having one; secondly, that those people were right as even though Girona cathedral was often able to sway cases with such evidence as we’ve seen, it would seem to have been the evidence, not the cathedral, that impressed the court in this case. And thirdly of course it shows us that, since therefore the kind of claims that people have been known to make that the Church always won trials because it was literate and made the records don’t work here, we are probably missing an unguessable amount of material where the cathedral’s case didn’t come off. You win some, you lose some, as they say; but if they didn’t win, we’ve lost it. This does not mean it wasn’t there. That is all.⁴

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1. It’s taken me until a few weeks ago, would you believe, to wonder if this regular replacement of documents at Girona might be to do with the Visigothic law’s `thirty-year rule’, which was a kind of statute of limitations that prevented claims on land or property being pursued after thirty, or fifty, lands (and it’s unclear in the surviving texts which interval would apply to what, as they just say, `thirty or fifty’: the chapter and verse, or rather, book and title, is to be found in Karl Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) I (Hannover 1902, repr. 2005), transl. S. P. Scott as The Visigothic Code, 2nd edn. (Boston 1922), Book X Title II. However, even if that was what was going on, Girona got two precepts for their stuff from Charles the Fat alone, who didn’t exactly last thirty years, so even if I had thought it before now it still wouldn’t have worked. There are even more of these documents than people realise, and were once more: the standard edition, R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Catalunya Carolíngia II: els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-arqueològica 2 & 3 (Barcelona 1926-1952), 2 vols, where see Girona I-IX, is now supplemented by S. Sobrequés i Vidal, S. Riera i Viader, M. Rovira i Solà, (edd.) Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, rev. R. Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica 61 (Barcelona 2003), 2 vols, doc. nos 56, 70, 73 & 78. Ibid. doc. no. 288 also makes clear, as we’ve seen, that the cathedral at one point had a precept from King Louis IV as well, though this has not survived.

2. Sobrequés et al., Catalunya Carolíngia V, doc. no. 53, the latest of five editions of which the one that most people could get at would be Giovanni-Domenico Mansi (ed.), Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio Vol. XVIII (Venetia 1773), ap. CXVIII. The difficult paragraph of reported speech goes like this: “Sic in eorum presentia veniens Stremirus archipresbiter, mandatarius, qui est de suporadicto episcopo, et dixit: «Iubete me audire cum isto presente Andreo domos, curtes, ortos et pomiferos et terras qui sunt infra termines de villa Uliano, qui est in territorio Impuritano, illas debent esse supradicto episcopo pro partibus ipsa causa de Sancta Maria et Sancto Felice, quod sita est in Gerunda vel iusta ipsa civitate, per preceptum dompni regis, quod illi fecerunt ad iamdicta Sancta Maria et Sancto Felici ad proprio. Iste Andreas eas retinet ad aprisione pro partibus de villa que dicitur Quartu, que vocant Bedenga. Iste Andreas eos retinet iniuxte et contra lege»“.

3. It is Abadal, Catalunya Carolíngia II, Girona IV, though it must be admitted that guessing whether it covered these properties or not is tricky since the thing doesn’t survive, and its text is only to be guessed at from later Girona charters that reference it. Abadal also indexed the deperditum held by Andreu as ibid., Particulars XXVII, where he attributed it to Charles the Bald. I don’t see how we know that, and it seems more likely to me that this was from Louis, since Charles was by and large not much of a friend to the Hispani: see J. Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320-342.

4. Well, nearly. I just wanted to add that it also shows that, while there is unusually much to be got of Girona’s royal documents just in themselves, precisely because the bishops took such trouble to get them updated in what appear to be real terms – see R. Martí, “La integració a l’«alou feudal» de la Seu de Girona de les terres beneficiades pel «règim dels hispans». Els Casos de Bàscara i Ullà, segles IX-XI” in J. Portella i Comas (ed.), La Formació i Expansió del Feudalisme Català: actes del col·loqui organitzat pel Col·legi Universitari de Girona (8-11 de gener de 1985). Homenatge a Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Estudi General: revista del Col·legi Universitari de Girona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Nos. 5-6 (Girona 1986), pp. 49-63 with English summary p. 556, and indeed some day I hope, a publication based on J. Jarrett, “Legends in Their Own Lifetime? The Late Carolingians and Catalonia”, paper presented in session ‘Legends of the Carolingians’, Haskins Society Conference, Georgetown University, 7th November 2008 – the real gain is still to be made by seeing how those documents were actually used, as here. If there’s basis to argue with me about the Frankish kings giving up on their tame settlers out here, as I claim happened in my “Settling the Kings’ Lands” as above, then it’s this document, though you would still have to deal with the Martí paper already mentioned which is pretty categorical about the process.

Kalamazoo and Back, IV: in which I am substantially preceded

We apologise for the delay. Trust me, there have been good reasons for this which will be vouchsafed in due course. Anyway, this is about the Saturday of Kalamazoo, in which the weather improved, there was a dance at evening and in which almost everything I went to was from before my period. The result of this is that it has largely been covered by Curt Emanuel, but I’ll add my two penn’orth anyway, because, well, of consistency and self-importance largely I suppose. So then!

Session 409: Early Medieval Europe II

I had been to bed very late the previous night, but somehow found the trick of deep sleep once more. This unfortunately meant that I was late to the first session of the day, largely because I was still dozy and took a stupid route up the hill to where it was. I was however less chagrined about this than I might have been because I heard an earlier version of this paper in a graduate seminar here in Cambridge, and you can be less chagrined about the gappy coverage because as mentioned this one is already written up in detail at Medieval History Geek. It was in fact:

• Margaret McCarthy, “Louis the Stammerer and the Development of a Kingly Identity”. Margaret’s basic contention, and a soundly-founded one, is that Louis should not be seen as a poor successor to Charles the Bald; starting from a very bad situation that Charles had largely engineered, he was as far as we can now tell doing all the sensible things someone in his position could do to garner support and establish himself as an accepted and legitimate Carolingian ruler, and had he not died so soon he might have gone places. Interestingly, the charters he did have time to issue included some not to places not in his own kingdom; whether this says something about territorial ambitions or about pan-Carolingian status, especially at a time when non-Carolingians were raising their neo-royal heads, is something we can probably never resolve, though.
• Margaret was followed by Karl Heidecker, who is rarely less than controversial and was here talking to the title, “Carolingian Government and Social Practice: designs of imperial and Christian reform and their consequences in people’s lives”, which was more specifically, firstly, about how far the reform of marriage under the Carolingian kings actually had an effect on the everyday person. He pointed out that the kings themselves did not define marriage, only ruled certain sorts out as illicit; the definition came out of a subsequent process, almost of exegesis, of the legislation and conciliar rulings, by various clerics across the successor kingdoms. Very often cases were decided on a political basis rather than an ideological basis, and in fact the definitions were probably largely created around these troublesome cases where competing agendas meant that normal practice couldn’t be followed. The second part of the paper examined office-holding in Carolingian-conquered Alemannia and pointed out that there are some zones where a ‘regular’ practice of assimilation was followed, some where locals were left in place and some where all vestiges of the local élite were squashed out. This fit perfectly with my picture of variable pathways of power from élite to ground so I was happy to hear it from another area, an area moreover where very similar techniques to mine are being employed by the researchers.
• Third paper in the session was Justin Lake, speaking to the title “Pompatica scientia in the tenth century”. He was talking about attitudes to learning in the tenth century, which should be bang on my period especially since my particular area in that period is, at its upper levels, keen on Greek and may well have introduced the astrolabe to the west, via a man renowned for his knowledge but also drummed out of every job he held except the last one and later regarded as a Muslim-trained wizard. All the same, in actual historian’s terms I don’t think I’ve much to add to the Medieval History Geek’s coverage for this one so I suggest you go look there.

Session 457. Early Medieval Europe III

(Also covered at Medieval History Geek here.)

• After lunch, I got to have the particular thrill that is finding someone working on a subject almost but quite one’s own in ways one hadn’t thought of. He was however preceded by none other than Ralph Mathisen, speaking to the title “Desiderius of Cahors and the End of the Ancient World”. This was a light-hearted paper with a serious core; its ostensible purpose was to find a candidate for the last of the Romans, in an intellectual-cultural sense, and justify the choice (which was Desiderius). Of course there’s no way to do this without tackling serious issues of what distinguishes antique from medieval and that was the real point of the paper: Ralph saw in Desiderius and his cronies the last generation of an élite who saw themselves as inheritors of the culture of Virgil, letter-writers and Classicists, who did not however train up a following generation. Of course, the Carolingianists could and did put up arguments for a framing of intellectuals like Einhard (whose letters are really not very different in content) as the same sort of thing, but the absence of a continuity between the 560s and the 780s for this kind of culture of letters does seem to be arguable, albeit necessarily from silence which is the real issue I think. Even Einhard’s letters are something of a lucky survival, alongside Alcuin’s and Theodulf’s poems (which are, indeed, not quite of the same flavour, which is perhaps a good time to remember that unlike those two Einhard was (a) Frankish and (b) a layman…). What else might have been out there that subsequent monastic archives didn’t have a use for?


There are some surprising things to be found on W. Mich's image server if you dig. Here is Ralph Mathisen himself presenting a Kalamazoo paper from I think 2008

• Second up was Graham Barrett (I get this name wrong because of other Barretts more local to me, but have checked it against his handout), who was talking to the title “Literacy, Law and Libido in Early Medieval Spain”. Now, though you might assume that this would be a paper based on Visigothic law and Councils, actually it was a charter paper: Graham was focussing on 30 cases of prosecution for adultery that survive in the archives of non-Catalan Northern Spain from 954-1081. These are preserved because, despite the law that they cite prescribing penance for the crime, they impose fines, which are paid in land that then becomes some preserving institutions. Certain rulers seem to take advantage of the fact that the Visigothic Law saw adultery as a public crime, which could therefore be prosecuted by anyone, not just the other spouse, to extract lands from those unable to keep continent. As you can see Graham is working some very similar veins to mine here, which I hadn’t realised at all when last we’d met, so I was not only extremely interested but rather glad he’d omitted Catalonia, where however we have nothing of the kind that I’ve yet seen.¹
• Last paper in the session was by David Dry, and was entitled, “Episcopal inheritance: replicating power in the Merovingian Gaul”; it was largely a treatment of episcopal election and the interests that governed it in the Merovingian period, primarily from the work of Gregory of Tours because that’s so much of what here is. Particulaly emphasised was the amount of trouble the bishops could make for a king, and the high status they enjoyed, which we somehow have to reconcile with the need they had for royal patronage. I should make more of Merovingian bishops in this way than I do because they illustrate so clearly the power that being a negotiator that both sides need can accrue for a person; Dry brought this out nicely.

A certain amount of confused wandering around the Fetzer building trying to find coffee and get back for the next session left me eventually deciding that the latter would have to take precedence and I snuck in through the introductory remarks of the convenor of…

520. Beyond Bede II: later Anglo-Saxon England

I'm pretty sure this is the same room or one functionally equivalent, but it's probably also from 2008


I am something of a fan of Saint Bede, as the keen reader here may have noticed, and although I have no research contribution to make about Anglo-Saxon England I like to keep my mind in with it, as it were, so for this and other reasons I’d stopped in here to hear what turned out to be two papers about almost exactly the same material, Alice Olson presenting to the title “The Legacy of Bede in the Anglo-Saxon homilies” and Helen Foxhall Forbes to that of “Bede and Goscelin”, with a response by Allen Frantzen. Alice was interested in proving Æfric’s use of Bede by picking on a more or less unique piece of material that he borrows, the fourfold vision of Hell set out in a homily of his known as the vision of Dryhthelm. She mentioned some other possible sources and some theological complications of it but thought that the case for derivation was fairly obvious. Helen then set out the schema in detail, artfully reprising a Powerpoint presentation she’d not been able to use because of an absence of a projector solely with whiteboard markers, and showed how Bede’s version of this is unique, although he has two variants of it: before the Judgement the division is between Heaven, where the saints are already with God; Paradise, a sort of anteroom where those who will be saved at the last Judgement but were not quite express Heaven-goers await; Purgatory, where those sinners who can be saved are punished before their upward passage to Paradise, and Hell where the utterly damned are confined for eternity with no hope of escape. At the Judgement, however, he sees the Perfect, who will judge, the Good, who will be judged and admitted to Heaven, the Wicked, who will be dismissed to hell, and the unbaptised and apostates who receive no judgement. It is this latter bit that is the other sources Alice had mentioned, but the previous interim is all Bede’s own. So these two papers wound up complementing each other rather well, though I think both speakers would have changed their material somewhat if they’d known how close they were working. Frantzen’s response stressed the position of Bede with respect to heresy, which as Bede saw it was in the past, leaving him free to originate interpretation; Frantzen wisely asked whether Æfric would have approved of this schema of Bede’s, which is at the least unusual, if it had been in another writer less revered. He and the convener also reminded us that it is very unusual for theological work of Bede’s to enjoy this kind of reuse; although his impact was huge in historical terms, the other works circulate much less and the homilies hardly at all, at least not under his name. This would all doubtless be a bit abstruse for the general listener, but I think that even that listener would have been temporarily enthralled by a scheme of damnation that you can draw on a board; the power of the visual aid was made very clear by this. I enjoyed the session a lot.

And then it was the evening, and at this point I confess that I briefly ran out of up. I had food in my room to finish so I retired there and nearly didn’t go out again. Eventually, however, I recovered myself and somewhat grimly set out for the dance knowing that I’d regret not going more than I would going, and this was quite right. I don’t know that the dance is better than Leeds’s, now, though that’s only because Leeds’s has got a lot better in the last two years and because good heavens the beer at Kalamazoo’s dance is expensive, but it has a far better space to be in and the music ranges slightly more widely. This suits me because my music taste is largely (like myself) at the fringes of a dancefloor, and at Leeds just gone, despite the encouragement of Stuart Airlie, there was only really one song that got me properly,² whereas at Kalamazoo there were three, and the last of them was the Sex Pistols which I can’t imagine ever being played at Leeds. I suspect a more heavily Anglophone constituency probably partly explains this but it could just be that all British discoes are firmly stuck in the nineties and imagine their entire attendance is hen parties. I may possibly over-generalise.

Headbanging! This man wasn't there so I had to step in

Anyway, I went, I drank lightly, I was dragged onto the floor by three different charming women,³ I threw my hair around and then I quit while I was ahead and went home to bed. In this, I admit, I was disobeying the dictum given me in the very early hours of that morning by Elizabeth MacMahon as we wended our briefly coincidental ways to our separate abodes, so it’s probably now time that was told. I’d complained of being short of sleep, and she wisely responded:

Sleep? There is no sleep. This is the
Bataan death march of scholarly fun!

Even with that statement ringing in my ears, however, I was still presenting early next morning and then flying across the Atlantic, so I disobeyed orders and went and slept, but with a much better day behind me than I’d expected a few hours previously.

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1. He thus joins Eduardo Manzano Moreno and of course Wendy Davies as people who could obviously have done my project and probably faster if they’d been minded to and to whom I am therefore grateful for leaving me space. The difference so far is that Manzano’s two English articles actually started me on the whole project and Wendy’s Small Worlds showed me how I was going to do it; I rather imagine, though, that Graham will start similar fires under people in a few years.

2. ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order, since you ask.

3. All members of the group of women with whom I am most popular, which is, those who are already happily attached to someone else…