Seminar CCXLIV: an East vs. West clerical normality contest

Today I am not on strike, because it is a Sunday, and thanks to the Working Time Directive I can blog if I like and no-one can tell me not to. I promised a few posts ago that I would do a proper write-up on a paper which Dr Maroula Perisanidi gave at the University of Leeds a long time ago, 16th November 2016 in fact, at the outset of what has proved to be a quite durable association with us, and before that association lapses I should at least manage to give m’colleague some blog space; besides which, it was an interesting paper. I think, in fact, it was a presentation of a topic which Maroula was even then moving away from—the book of it came out in 2019, but I have the impression that that was a long process—and this can serve as a plug for the book, therefore.¹ Her title was “Clerical Marriage in A Comparative Perspective”.

Now a title like that raises one reaction that is perhaps natural to any enquiring mind, and another that is maybe only natural to a modern Catholic audience, which such an audience may indeed not realise is not natural to others. The first reaction would be, “where are we comparing?” and the second reaction would be, “but clergymen aren’t supposed to marry!” And this was exactly the point of the paper. Since the Church trying to prohibit clerical marriage is one of those things like monastic reform or plague outbreaks that can easily seem to have come round in a fairly frequent cycle during the Middle Ages, one could be forgiven for accepting a narrative that says it was always technically prohibited but that blind eyes were turned for long periods and then occasionally there was a back-to-basics campaign that got people into trouble.² Thing is, that would be very much a Western narrative, which becomes very obvious when, as Maroula was doing, you compare somewhere like medieval England with Byzantium. There aren’t many people who can do that, but Maroula had spent some time becoming one of them, and what we got now was the fruits of that learning.

The famous unexplained scene from the Bayeux Tapestry “where a cleric and Æfgyva…” We have no idea who either were or whether the suggestive figure in the lower margin relates to them and their story. It’s actually quite hard to find pictures of medieval priests and their wives, but it’s probably easier than trying to find pictures of Byzantine and English churches meeting. Maroula’s poster for the seminar also opted for this image, which tells you that perhaps no search would find what I was looking for…

As my students often find, it’s very hard to know when the Greek Christian Church and the Latin one finally parted ways and became Orthodox and Catholic (rather than both being both); there’s about six different definitive dates of separation depending on what you count, but relatively few people would put them before, say, the mid-9th century, not least because not long before that you have Charlemagne trying to interfere in the imperial theological wrangling over icons, which you’d think he wouldn’t have bothered to do if he’d thought they weren’t the same Church over there.³ But still, there were divisions between Latin and Greek Christianities that went a way back even then, and this was then; from the 4th century onwards, about as early as organised Christianity can be called a single body (albeit by ignoring those groups already splintered), the Latin Church has either objected to the marriage of priests or been quiet about it, whereas the Greek one is basically cool with it. That is, of course, a massive over-simplification: both sides had variant views in play, many of which Maroula has found. But that general picture might still be fair.

What was it that the Western Church couldn’t take about clerical marriage? Interestingly, it shifted over time. To start with, the places we find rulings about this are mainly concerned with Church property falling into lay hands, either because of a priest having children to whom he wanted, naturally, to leave some kind of inheritance, or for some more immediately offended people, because of him supporting his wife on the offerings of the faithful. The Byzantine perspective was much more that the revenue from offerings was disposable, as long as the offerings themselves remained with the Church, and this meant that priests could, for example, be salaried; in the West, whether because of a later-developing cash economy or for some other reason, that wasn’t a popular solution. Byzantium was not blind to these concerns, but it kept them to bishops, who were supposed to be unmarried; a priest hoping for promotion needed either to be single and celibate or to agree on celibate separation from his wife. (Indeed, as became clear in questions, while priests could be married, they were not allowed to marry once priests, or even deacons, so marriage was a decision one presumably made very early in a Byzantine Church career.) Here, the different economic bases of the two societies do seem likely to be a major part of the reason for the differences, and there was probably more similarity than at first appears, especially in practice, but a difference does remain.

John Chrysostom, salary-man? Perhaps the Patriarch of Constantinople isn’t the ideal example. This is the mosaic of him from inside Hagia Sofia, of which we have heard; image Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

However, the property concern died down over time in the West, and mainly because it was replaced by a growing concern about clerical purity and pollution.⁴ Now this was not a new concern either—you can find it in that translation of Bede’s Letter to Egbert I did ages back, and indeed in everyone else’s, and that’s eighth-century, but it seems to have taken a more popular root during the so-called Gregorian Reform, at the extreme points of which you had papally-supported mobs in Milan throwing priests and whoever they found them in bed with out of upstairs windows and so on.⁵ The concern seems to have been that anyone having sex might, you know, enjoy it, thus committing fornication, or just not be virginally pure, and thus perhaps not be in a very close relationship with God, in which case, what assurance had anyone that that person could truly be possessed with the Holy Spirit, Whom one would expect not to hang about in such dirty premises? I trivialise, but if what this meant was that maybe all your absolutions were invalid so your sins were still unforgiven, or that your marriage wasn’t valid so your children were the product of adultery and you a damned fornicator, you can see how it could start to have major implications for both this world and the next. The weird thing is that all these hang-ups seem to be basically Western; as close as Byzantine legislation gets is to ask for abstinence from sex with their wives for a certain time before and after performing the liturgy, so that the priest’s mind would be fully on God and his intercession would thus reach its intended recipient. There was in fact more Byzantine concern about this in the fifth than the twelfth century, whereas the West seems to have gone the other way.

Now, if Maroula offered any explanation of this, my notes don’t record it, but just to observe the fact is to raise not just the question “why”, but even the very fact of difference. Whose was the ‘normal’ position? (Erm, as it were.) Well, neither side’s, presumably, however natural they may have felt their own position was. (It would be interesting to get a third point of comparison in, of course: does or did the Church of the East require clerical celibacy? Wikipedia suggests not. The modern Anglican one of course does not, even of bishops. If that’s the game we’re playing, the Catholics look like the odd ones out now, but of course it was not so obviously so in the Middle Ages, before Anglicans…) This is the great value of comparative history, anyway; if done right, it makes one look at what one thinks is usual differently and question it.⁶ This paper was an example of it done right.

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1. It is Maroula Perisanidi, Clerical Continence in Twelfth-Century England and Byzantium: Property, Family, and Purity (London 2019), and what I don’t provide cites for in what follows I am guessing you will find in there.

2. Some kind of prize for anyone who can tell me where, long ago, I read some historian glibly referring to some phenomenon which, “like the rise of the middle class, seems to have begun in every period”, which I presumably assumed I would never forget so didn’t record…

3. See now Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia, PA, 2009).

4. I feel as if I should mention Albrecht Diem’s Das monastische Experiment: die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster 2005) here, but to do more than mention it would require me actually to have read it, which I confess I have not, as yet.

5. See H. E. J. Cowdrey, “The Papacy, the Patarenes and the Church of Milan” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 18 (London 1968), pp. 25-48, reprinted in idem, Popes, Monks and Crusaders (London 1984), chapter V.

6. Impossible to say such a thing, of course, without citing Chris Wickham, Problems in Doing Comparative History, Reuter Lecture 2004 (Southampton 2005), repr. in Patricia Skinner (ed.), Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: the legacy of Timothy Reuter (Turnhout 2009), pp. 5–28.

Leeds International Medieval Congress 2016, reflected upon from a distance

Somehow Action Short of a Strike still looks a lot like a really hard week—the contract I’m working to doesn’t have fixed hours—so I find myself blogging very late on a Sunday. Both because of that and because of the topic, I don’t want to write a long post (though when I say that it never works, not least because of parentheses like these…): what can there be to say about a conference three years ago? On the other hand, in so far as this blog is my academic record, I don’t want to miss it out: I was there, I did things I hope will matter, and I was for the first time able to host friends for it at the house then ours in Leeds, so it was a sociable occasion worth remembering. Indeed, I made quite a few new friends at Leeds 2016, looking back, so some sort of record is needed. I’ll restrict it, however, to a list of the papers I went to and limited commentary where I have some memory or good notes, and I’ll put it behind a cut so as not to bore those who think this a touch too obsessional. If I don’t feature your paper, please blame my memory, not your content; it was a long and tiring conference, as it always is. But I will take the last day in a separate post, because it was sort of a conference within a conference for me, for reasons that will become obvious in that other post. So this is 4th to 6th July 2016 in my world, as it unfolded…

Leeds 2014 Report III: priests, charters and finally Hungarians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seminar CLXXXII: the return (and beginning) of the intermittent monks of Sant Benet de Bages

I find myself, with some relief, advancing into June 2013 with my seminar report backlog, because on the 5th of that month I was at the Medieval Social and Economic History Seminar in Oxford and I was in fact there as the speaker, with the title “Two men and a monastery: clerical involvements in Manresa before 1000”. This was the first piece of work coming out of what then seemed like my new project, and since I am still trying to work out what to do with its findings, it may be worth explaining here what I thought I was doing.

Modern Manresa somewhat drowns out its medieval components, but they’re there, even if not of the tenth century.

At a late stage of my Ph. D. research, when I started having access to the volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia covering Osona and Manresa and thus basically to more than five documents covering Manresa at all, I noticed that there seemed to have been an awful lot of priests around the town, and that at least some of them seemed to write transaction charters involving land in many places around it, which suggested to me that they were in fact working in the town for anyone who wanted a charter written. At that point, all I could really do was bookmark this thought for future reference, but when I started to meet Wendy Davies’s and Carine van Rhijn’s and others’ new work on identifying and characterising the early medieval rural priesthood, I began to think that the Manresa stuff was the contribution I could make to such an endeavour and so when I shook off the slough of 2012 and tried to start doing something new, that’s what I did.¹

Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, from Wikimedia Commons

Armed then with my own copy of Catalunya Carolíngia IV at last, I started pulling together the relevant documentation and the first thing that became very clear was that almost all of it came originally from the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages. That presented two problems: firstly, it probably meant that where the monastery didn’t eventually get property I had no information (and this was what the third paper out of the project came to be about) and secondly, because Sant Benet itself had priests on staff, I needed to be sure that I was able to distinguish them from priests actually based in the city. And as you have already heard complications arose with that very quickly that made this hard-to-impossible to resolve without access to the original documents, which even at this late stage (and still now) I had not been able to persuade the monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat, where they now largely reside, to give me. So this paper was largely about trying to deal with this complication.

An effective set of defences: Santa Maria de Montserrat

I had started by focusing on two particular men whose names I kept seeing in the documents, Baldemar and Badeleu, and they turned out to have oddly parallel career trajectories that both told me a lot about the situation I was looking at. Baldemar seems to have been the better-connected of the two; he first turns up in Balsareny to the north of Manresa, where he had family property, as a deacon in 961. He was at both the endowment, in 966, and the consecration, in 972, of the then-new monastery of Sant Benet, wrote a lot of documents for them during the 970s and steadily acquired property in two areas near the house (as well as from Count-Marquis Borrell II once); it’s not a complete surprise when in his penultimate appearance in 985 he signs as a monk, and in the ultimate one, a strange kind of Gesta abbatum-type charter from 1002, he is explicitly named among the congregation of Sant Benet. So we have a well-connected local priest who had long dealings with the monastery, probably knew the monks well and eventually joined them to live the life contemplative till his surprisingly late death (given he must have been at least 76 at his last appearance).² This one is fairly easy to understand, although it is worth noting that we have no record of him ever having given any property to the monastery.

Baldemar is one of the few of these guys whose signature I do have, in pretty much the middle of the penultimate line of this charter, which is Biblioteca de Catalunya, pergamins 3096.

Badeleu is a bit less obvious. We see him as a cleric in 952 then as a priest in 961, in fact writing a sale of Baldemar’s to the founder of Sant Benet, the vicar Sal·la. Thereafter he appears about as much as scribe as anything else, often for property transfers very close to Sant Benet at Montpeità, and himself bought up quite a lot of land in two Manresa settlements called Vilapicina and la Celada, this going on till 995. In 982, apparently in fear of death, he made a big donation to Sant Benet, but reserved the property till he died, a wise move as it turned out. But he also bought land from Abbot Cesari of Montserrat, who was at this point insisting he was Archbishop of Tarragona and wasn’t entirely an establishment figure, and Badeleu also appeared as witness against Sant Benet de Bages in a court case of 1000. Despite that he also entered the monastery the next year, with a compensatory gift made to a son who doesn’t appear mentioned in any of his other documents, and appears among the monks—but still only as priest—in Baldemar’s final document, and probably his own, in 1002.³ Again it seems clear he would have known the monks for a long time but it’s less clear that he was probably always going to join them.

Another view of Sant Benet. «Sant Benet de Bages – General» per Josep Renalias – Lohen11 – Treball propi. Disponible sota la llicència CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This got me looking harder at the rest of the monks, because both of these two suggested in their different ways that one could have been a member of Sant Benet in some sense without fully becoming a monk. And that is where the whole question of intermittent monks discussed in a post of last year came up: I’m not sure any of the first monks of Sant Benet actually consistently operated as such in their documents. They all seem to have continued to buy and hold property outside common and often to have written many non-monastic documents. I think, therefore, that the general conclusion of this paper was not about Manresa but about Sant Benet: just because the vicar Sal·la had founded the place, given it lands and so forth in 966, and even though his children then got its church consecrated in 972 did not make it a going monastery.⁴ Its monks took a long time to turn up. The first ones seem to do so in 979, but even then they seem to have kept their day jobs, being largely people like Baldemar and Badeleu who had important community rôles they presumably didn’t want to leave behind. This is not the stereotype of monastic foundation in this area, a stereotype which crazy Abbot Cesari had actually lived, of first getting your monks together then moving into the wasteland and building your new home yourself as soon as you had a gift of land on which to do it.⁵ Nonetheless, this one seems more understandable to me, building and building and not quite being sure whether it was time finally to leave the world or if there was still work to be done in it. But the result is that although I can probably identify 25 people who became monks of Sant Benet from my documents, I’m not sure whether they can or should therefore be excluded from the pool of priests working in or out of Manresa in the pastoral clergy!

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1 The first of Wendy’s contributions on this score is now out, I believe, it being W. Davies, “Local priests and the writing of charters in northern Iberia in the tenth century” in Julio Escalona & H. Sirantoine (edd.), Documentos y cartularios como instrumentos de poder. España y el occidente cristiano (ss. viii–xii) (Toulouse 2014), pp. 29-43; Carine’s have already produced at least A. C. van Rhijn, “Priests and the Carolingian reforms: the bottle-necks of local correctio” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel & Philip Shaw (edd.), Texts and identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12 (Wien 2006), pp. 219-237, but I believe that there is an actual volume of essays in process too.

2. His appearances are 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. nos 881, 975, 977, 985, 995B, 997, 1006, 1014, 1032, 1043, 1057, 1059, 1108, 1114, 1115, 1139, 1143, 1154, 1158, 1160, 1165, 1171, 1187, 1193, 1224, 1225, 1236, 1279, 1280, 1281, 1305, 1316, 1320, 1348, 1405 & 1489 & Jaime Villanueva, Viage Literario a las Iglesias de España tomo VII: viage a la iglesia de Vique. Año 1806 (Valencia 1821), ap. XIII.

3. Badeleu appears in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 692, 881, 884, 939, 1021, 1109, 1156, 1164, 1181, 1183, 1223, 1225, 1267, 1270, 1278, 1286, 1297, 1299, 1335, 1346, 1360, 1401, 1422, 1432, 1448, 1456, 1487, 1514, 1516, 1527, 1544, 1551, 1554, 1603, 1604, 1701, 1702, 1713, 1750, 1777, 1814, 1840 & 1864 & Villanueva, Viage Literario VII, ap. XIII and at least one other document, his entry to the monastery, mentioned but not cited in Jordi Bolòs & Victor Hurtado, Atles del Comtat de Manresa (798-993) (Barcelona 2004), which I don’t have to consult right now and thus can’t give a page number from, sorry, making me just as bad as them…

4. The most recent version of this story is told in Francesc Junyent i Mayou, Alexandre Mazcuñan i Boix, Albert Benet i Clarà, Joan-Andreu Adell i Gisbert, Jordi Vigué i Viñas & Xavier Barral i Altet, “Sant Benet de Bages” in Vigué (ed.), Catalunya Romànica XI: el Bages, ed. Antoni Pladevall (Barcelona n. d.), pp. 408-438.

5. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 543.

Rereading for improbable heretics

[The first draft of this was written on the train towards an IHR Earlier Middle Ages seminar, 7th March 2012. Yeah, I know, sorry.]

Approximately the first real charters I read for my work on Catalonia were the church consecration acts from the diocese of Urgell, well up in the Catalan Pyrenees.¹ They are fantastically interesting documents, but I always go back to them with a certain trepidation because what I thought was significant then often wasn’t, and I missed quite a lot of stuff that should have leapt out at me. I just didn’t have a sense of what was usual and what wasn’t in this material then, basically. The continuing effort to read Michel Zimmermann’s Écrire et lire en Catalogne has brought me up against one of these hidden significances, but it is honestly one I would never have thought of and it’s fantastic, as well as being unique, I think, if he’s right.²

A sale document of 839 from the Urgell archive. A consecration act would be bigger and have more capitals in it but wouldn’t necessarily be any tidier…

The situation as Zimmermann tells it is this. Some time before 901, Bishop Nantigis of Urgell, who was a busy man during his time in office, as we have eighteen church consecrations by him and one set of council acta where he signed, as opposed to only six charters of any other sort, came out to Guils del Cantó in Alt Urgell to consecrate the church of Sant Fruitós there. A guy called Adeudat features quite large in the document, which stresses his many sins and his need to atone with alms. He and his parents had more or less set up this church, and now he wanted to finish the job. There had been one before, but it was “tiny and rustic”, and so Adeudat did “whatever I could to make it great and installed a peal of bells there” and got the bishop to come along and consecrate the new building. So, fairly obviously Adeudat and his parentes, which might mean only kinsmen, rather than his father and mother, were big people in this little place. There are no other donors mentioned, and his family kept the lands round the church; the document that tells us all this is Adeudat’s will, in which he bequeathed the church, its property and liturgical tackle and the lands around the church to his nephews.

So, it seems inarguable that Adeudat had been the priest of the villa up to this point. He stresses, furthermore, that Nantigis had appointed him priest at the cathedral of Urgell, and that he carried out the rebuild project at Nantigis’s orders, but equally, he and his family were pretty clearly rooted in the area. They had presumably gone to Nantigis to get their status quite literally enshrined in the wider hierarchy. That to me is fascinating, and I didn’t see it first time round, but this isn’t where Zimmermann goes with it, because he instead concentrates on the unusual levels of guilt about sin that Adeudat expresses (“I Adeudat the priest, an unhappy sinner, and as I may truly say a sinner above other men”—super, does he mean that he is superior in sin, or that he is a sinner and is also in authority over other men, eh?) and on the liturgical gear that Adeudat leaves to the church.³ The explanation for Zimmermann is in two of the books Adeudat gave, which are quite unusual. As well as “the better antiphonary in the church, the missal which is the new mystery, the conspectus of the Evangelists, a sermonary” and a hymnal, there is a “chronicle” and a “Toledan service-book”. The Latin is “ordo toletanum”.

Adeudat’s books are unlikely to have been quite this snazzy, but you know, worth bequeathing apparently…

Now, this I did notice when I first read it, indeed I eagerly mailed both Rosamond McKitterick and Jinty Nelson to ask what they thought, partly because I thought they might know but also because I was keen to let them know I was doing work and finding stuff. It could be said that my impostor syndrome takes odd forms. Anyway, I was then interested in the ‘chronicle’, which we can’t really guess at although my guess if I had to would be Isidore of Seville’s Greater Chronicle.⁴ Perhaps, however, I should have picked up on the Toledan ordo, because actually this is the kind of time that the old ‘Mozarabic’ liturgy was being phased out in this area in the general Carolingian spirit of correctio, being replaced with a new Gallo-Roman hybrid that the Carolingian court felt was the ‘real thing’.⁵ That, in turn, is presumably what is represented by the “missal which is the new mystery”, missalem qui est novo mistico, and later in the book Zimmermann cites work that identifies these texts, which turn up more widely too, as a codex mixtus, a miscellany of liturgical bits much like the later breviaries, by which your Visigothic Church priest might have carried round all he needed for an average year’s work.⁶ So OK, he has Visigothic liturgical books, that’s interesting but, out in the wilds like this, maybe not so odd, and perhaps they belonged to his parents, who knows?

This is, however, also not just the time but the area where the Carolingians had had to come down quite heavily on the heresy known as Adoptionism, the idea that Christ was not of his physical self divine but chosen to house divinity by God.⁷ The chief proponent of this locally had been none other than Bishop Felix of Urgell, Nantigis’s predecessor-but-three-or-four, and of course the other big figure in it had been Bishop Elipand of Toledo. So, carrying round a Toledan service book may have some awkward implications at this exact spot and time.

The Romanesque church of Guils de Cantó that presumably replaced Adeudat’s work… BURYING WHO KNOWS WHAT SCANDAL! Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Zimmermann goes all the way with this, in a couple of elegant sentences. Many a church in this area was founded by immigrant Hispani clerics, presumably fleeing from the darkening situation for Christian clergy in al-Andalus. For Zimmermann, Adeudat is best seen as one of them, Toledo-trained (which his library does seem to suggest) and quite possibly heretical, and Nantigis made him pretty clear that that was not the way. His sins that provoked his donation, though this was a topos used by almost all donors to the Church, especially churchmen, may therefore have been quite specific, preaching what he hadn’t realised was held to be heresy to his flock, and his efforts to atone sincere, even if calculated to retain his local status.

I’m not quite sure about a couple of aspects of this. The biggest of these is that if the books in question were heretical, they surely would have been destroyed. If they weren’t, however, there’s no reason to suppose that Adeudat was. After all, they were apparently still suitable gifts for the church in 901, and Nantigis was still around then because Adeudat commended all his property to the bishop to make sure that the church got what it needed to continue in his family’s management. It seems more likely to me, therefore, that the ordo was just a regulation ‘Mozarabic’ liturgy. In that case, the effort to replace the Mozarabic liturgy clearly wasn’t very sincere or thorough here yet. The other thing is that Adeudat’s family were all here too. I don’t really see how we can imagine that these Toledan fugitives came north carrying a rook of books, liturgical even though the main man wasn’t yet a priest, and somehow became the dominant interest in a whole village. Although it must be said that that might be what they were doing by setting up the church with the bishop’s backing, it seems a lot more likely to me that they were locals. In which case, the books don’t tell us about an Andalusi training and the whole thing comes to bits. So I’m not sure that it’s methodologically sound, at all, but I like the story it tells so much that I’m reluctant to abandon the chance of placing a recanting Toledan Adoptionist high and rich in the Pyrenees.

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1. Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Les actes de consagracions d’esglesies del bisbat d’Urgell (segles IX-XII)” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis històrics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 1 (Montserrat 1978), pp. 11-182, and idem (ed.), “Set actes més de consagracions d’esglésies del bisbat d’Urgell (segles IX-XII)” in Urgellia Vol. 2 (Montserrat 1979), pp. 481-488, now united with new numeration as Les actes de consagracions d’esglésies de l’antic Bisbat d’Urgell: segles IX-XII (Urgell 1986).

2. M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècles), Biblioteca de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), pp. 496-497.

3. Please don’t ask me what a villa was at this time; there’s a reason I haven’t translated it…. Some kind of rural circumscription of which the church might be the only focal point, how’s that?

4. This text has been re-edited since I first had to wonder about its presence in Urgell: for a translation and more details see Sam Kanto & Jamie Wood, “The Chronica Maiora of Isidore of Seville: an introduction and translation” in E-Spania Vol. 6 (Paris 2008), DOI: 10.4000/e-spania.15552, online at http://e-spania.revues.org/15552, last modified 15th December 2008 as 0f 15th June 2013.

5. On the problems with the word ‘Mozarab’ and its derivatives, see Richard Hitchcock, Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: identities and influences (Aldershot 2008). For the correctio ideology I suppose most influential on me is probably Karl-Ferdinand Werner, “‘Hludowicus Augustus’. Gouverner l’empire chrétien : idées et réalités”, in Peter Godman & Roger Collins (edd.), Charlemagne’s Heir: new perspectives on the reign of Louis the Pious (Oxford 1990), pp. 3-123. I should note, though, that the Catalan scholarship tends to blame the final push on the liturgical front on Bishop Frodoí of Barcelona (862-890, not known to have been a hobbit), canonically said to be a Frank pushing Charles the Bald’s agenda; I know of no evidence for either of these things. On the evidence that there is, see Gaspar Feliu, “Els inicis del domini territorial de la seu de Barcelona”, in Cuadernos de historia económica de Cataluña Vol. 14 (Barcelona 1976), pp. 45-61 at pp. 46-48.

6. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, I pp. 526-530.

7. See John C. Cavadini, The Last Christology of the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul, 785-820 (Philadelphia 1993).

Strange deals by intermittent monks

Last April, for heavens’ sake, more than a year ago, I saved a stub of a blog post here with the intent of working it up into a post later. The post was going to be about the genesis of a new project, one of the things that had come out of properly working through Catalunya Carolíngia IV, the source edition I make the most use of for my particular patch.¹ And now I’m not much more than a month away from giving the first paper out of the project and I still haven’t posted the appetiser for it. So, perhaps I should get round to that. The stub had the title above and consisted only of these words: “What is going with CC4 1265/1409/1410 and why are half its participants only monks sometimes eh I think I have a new paper under work”. So, let me tell you how these things get started.

Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, from Wikimedia Commons; not the first time I’ve used this image and I’m sure it won’t be the last

To be honest, it’s a version of the old line of Isaac Asimov, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny…'”. In this instance, what was funny was three charters, so I’d better tell you about the charters. The first supposedly dated from 18th January 979 when it existed, but there now exists only a regestum in the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, which records that for the benefit of their souls Dagild and his wife Sabrosa gave the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages a property at el Carner in Castellterçol, though they arranged to hold on to it for the duration of their lives, during which time they would pay an annual levy of the produce of it to the monks. The property, as recorded by a monk called Savaric, was distinguished by having on its eastern side a torrent, on its southern one some houses belonging to one Oliba and a ridge of rock that led up to a prominence called Coll d’Asines (Asses Hill), on its western one the Riu Granera, and along its northern edge the torrent again, running back to the Granera.²

Church of Sant Miquel del Castell de Castellterçol, from Wikimedia Commons, the Riu Granera apparently being unphotographed

So, this is not too funny by itself, but then we have two original documents dated from the 13th January 983 where all this seems to happen again.³ The donors are the same in both cases, though since this time we have a full text we can see that the scribe had them voice the common formula that it is “good and licit enough to build the House of God everywhere, hearing the preaching of the Holy Fathers that alms may free the soul from death, and being stained with the marks of sin and compunctious for mercy” by way of explaining just what they thought they were doing,⁴ and it is also specified in the first document (as they’re edited) that Sant Benet enjoys the special honour of being subject to the Holy See, so this is really a gift to Rome.⁵ This time the boundaries are slightly better organised, with the torrent only on the northern side, and Oliba’s homesteads (Latin casales, as opposed to Castilian ‘casas’ in the regestum counted on the east instead; it looks as if the regestum was mis-copied). This time we also have the full sanction, specifying that people who break in on this gift will share Judas’s fate in the Inferno and have to pay everything back twice over, more or less usual, and we have signatures. And that’s where it gets odd.

I think, from the boundaries that we're about here, but there's a lot of torrents round here...

The latter of the two documents Ramon Ordeig edits here was written, as in the regestum, by Savaric the monk, and the witnesses were a priest called Baldemar and a couple of chaps called Durabiles and Seguin. It would seem that this is the document from which the regestum was made, and one of the mis-copyings must have been the date, the 29th year of the reign of King Lothar winding up as the 25th, XXIX to XXV, it’s not hard to understand. But in the other version, in which the exact same lands are transferred by the same people on the same day, the scribe is a deacon called Athanagild and Baldemar is gone, to be replaced by one Oliba, presumably him with the houses on the boundary. Furthermore, Athanagild’s signature confesses to a number of erasures and superscript additions. Now, I haven’t yet seen the original of this, which is in the monastic archive of Santa Maria de Montserrat. Being a functioning monastery, they don’t have to let me in, which makes the job of access for unknown foreigners a bit tricky. I hope to solve it soon, but till then I can’t contradict Ordeig’s edition, all I can say is that he records no such alterations in the actual text, and that is something his edition usually tries to notice. So although Athanagild’s document was obviously needed straight away, and couldn’t be rewritten, what we have may still only be a close-to-contemporary copy of it. And then someone felt another one was necessary too, at at least enough of an interval to necessitate a different scribe being called on to do it. Somehow both these copies wound up with Sant Benet, but I bet they weren’t originally destined for that fate, because only one of them was registered in the eighteenth century, and that was Savaric’s. Who owned all these separate documents when they were first made, I wonder?

Aerial view of Santa Maria de Montserrat, from Wikimedia Commons

So, yes, this is odd, not least in any kind of traditional diplomatic paradigm that thinks there’s such a thing as ‘the’ original document, but it’s not a kind of odd I’ve never seen before.⁶ On the other hand, this guy Athanagild. And, indeed, this guy Savaric and indeed this guy Baldemar. By the time I got to these documents I was already suspicious about these people. Even beginning to sort it out, however, requires a huge long table, so I will put it behind a cut and you can, if you choose, avoid the prosopography and end here with just the diplomatic curiosity. Otherwise,

What makes a priest write a charter?

Looking at the next week, I can already see that there will be no time for reading or writing or anything but marking, teaching and form-filling. Let me just first write some more about what I was working on over the summer, then, and then I’ll admit I’m too busy to blog for a short while. You’ve heard how I had something of an achievement blank patch and then got a hold of myself and read a lot of charters and came away with a new project (to add to all the old ones). This post is going to take one example of the kind of question that I found myself asking, robbed freely from my crazy notes files described in this earlier post. The questions that it raises, for me, are not maybe that new, but answering them would be, especially for this area, and I may have a way in.¹ For now, however, the set-up.

Most of the tenth-century charters of the Arxiu Capitular de Vic, on a table in front of me in 2007.

There was a priest called Joan who appears in documents now at the cathedral of Vic dating from 951 to 962, and perhaps later though I doubt it. He always appears there as scribe. He does not appear with the cathedral chapter when they transacted, and I haven’t found him with any degree of certainty I’m willing to trust in any other archive’s documents from the county concerned.² There were plenty of other scribes active in the cathedral at this time, and even more in the wider area, and so the first question that arises from this for me is what it was about these transactions that meant that Joan was called on to write them. What I really want to know, of course, is for whom he wrote, but I’m prepared to take any kind of association that will help explain how he got chosen.

Firstly I should admit that I haven’t actually seen all the originals of these documents and so I can’t be sure that all the Joans featured are in fact the same guy, but I have some hope, for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute.³ Secondly, I have to put aside the obvious association that these documents do have, which is that they’re all in the Arxiu Capitular de Vic; firstly, as I say above, there’s the problem that Joan seems not to have appeared with the chapter of Vic, but secondly and more seriously, not all of these transactions passed land to the cathedral, so there is some other motive for the association and also, presumably, some other step before they came to the archive, dictated perhaps by that as-yet-uncaught common factor.

Ruins of Sant Martí de Sentfores, one of the places in the county of Osona where Bishop Guisad bought land in a charter that Joan wrote

Now a common factor does leap out at one quite quickly, and that is Bishop Guisad II of Urgell. For complex genealogical reasons Guisad turns up in the Vic archive quite a lot, and still more so in that of the abbey of Sant Benet de Bages which a cousin of his had founded (that being the complex genealogical reason, the complexity lying in proving it, which I won’t do here).⁴ His bishopric may have been up in the Pyrenees but his heart, or at least his property, was in the lowlands too. Three of the transactions Joan wrote were actually purchases by Guisad, and indeed if one goes and pokes at the Urgell cathedral documents there is a priest Joan who turns up there at least once during Guisad’s pontificate.⁵ But he doesn’t turn up with the chapter either, he’s not associated with Guisad in that document and though it only exists in a later copy, I bet that if we had it and I’d looked at that as well we’d find that the handwriting doesn’t match; I think that is likely to be a different guy, because after all it’s only three times he appears with Guisad; there are five and maybe six more to explain. So, OK, now we get serious and make a table. Just for completeness I’ll put the Urgell one in too. Dates are UK-style, months in the middle.

Date	Charter	Place concerned	Actors	Witnesses	Notes
951.i.20	CC4 668	Sentfores (Moià)	Guibert Sunifred to Bishop Guisad	Adulf, Ingilbert, Savaric	Church of Santa Eulàlia appears on boundary
951.ii.28	CC4 670	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Belasquina and son Bradilà to Bishop Guisad	Sendred, Ennegó, Ermeniscle pr[esbiter]., Ennegó pr.
951.v.12	CC4 674	Sant Julià de Sassorba	Lleopard, Belascuda, Bonefaci & Medira to Samuel	Sthetulf, Savaric, Bellelo	Samuel is a big-deal local notable6
951.v.24	CC4 675	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Ramio to Bishop Guisad	Ennegó, Asner, Ermeniscle pr.
959.iv.2	Urgell 132	Ennegó to Urgell cathedral	Mesla, Seu d’Urgell	Bellelo, Nemvolendo, Joan pr.	A priest Ramio wrote
960.i.20	CC4 837	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Miró to Vic cathedral	Donat, Sesgut, Franco
960.ii.15	CC4 840	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Agobard and wife Sàlvia to Langovard	Igilà, Pere, Ennego lev[ita].
960.iv.3	CC4 849	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Bella, Galí, Tensemon, Sunifred & Borrell with Bishop Ató of Vic	Teudefred, Sunyer, Dacó	Not that Borrell, though weirdly he is a neighbour
960.v.31	CC4 863	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Vidal with Bishop Ató	Asner, Eico, Ennegó lev.
962.ii.9	CC4 897	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Ennegó and wife Adalvira with Bishop Ató	Guisad, Oriol, Guifré	Presumably not that Guisad
962.iii.23	CC4 899	Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer	Godmar and wife Faquilo with Bishop Ató	Guifré, Sunifred, […]
954×867	CC4 1499	[…]	Esteve with […]	[…], […], Guitizà	No scribal signature survives here, but its editors were happy that the scribal hand is the same

With this done, we have some kind of an answer: the obvious common thread is the term of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer, one of the odd areas of this county which were centred not on a castle although several fortifications and a comital estate were nearby, but on a church.⁸ Of the documents here that don’t involve land there, we might guess that the last one did if we only had the place-name, and Sassorba is only a few miles more or less due north, though in country like this that’s still a tough climb and they probably went round the valley ends to get there (if indeed the transaction wasn’t done at Santa Eulàlia for some reason we’re not going to be able to recover). The Urgell one is interesting: one would assume it’s a different guy, as I did above, except that the transactor and one of the witnesses, as well as a priest Joan of course, can all be paralleled in the Riuprimer documents. Could this be a guy who knew Joan and had some land two counties away (an inheritance? the copy doesn’t say) that he didn’t want to keep and was therefore giving to God for his soul’s sake, and he brought along his local priest as a witness? Given that Joan presumably knew some of the Urgell chapter from the sales to Guisad, and that the Urgell crowd probably frequently had people in the Riuprimer area to pick up renders and so on, this doesn’t seem too improbable. So OK, then, this Joan was presumably a priest at Riuprimer and when the locals wanted a charter written, they come to him. It’s not to do with whom he knew, but where he was. Case closed?

View of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer

Well, it’s worth checking two more things. Firstly, was he the only priest there? This guy Ermeniscle cropped up twice there… In fact, however, those are his only two certain appearances. (He doesn’t show up at Urgell.) There’s too many possibilities there to make one worth choosing so let’s leave it; we can at least say that Joan seems to have been the obvious writer even when both were there. Nextly, are these all the Santa Eulàlia sales for this period? And that gets funnier, because no, they’re not; in fact they’re not even all the Riuprimer deals with the relevant bishops from the period, there’s a sale to Guisad here from June 959 in which a deacon Ermemir did the scribing and an exchange with Ató from 960 in which a priest called Fruià did.⁹ The people involved here turn up in the witness groups we’ve already seen, so it’s strange that for these ones somehow Joan was unavailable, given that at other times he was deemed worthy even when the recipients were these, well, worthies. Some explanation probably exists that we’ll never recover. There’s also a sale to Guisad where we don’t have a scribal name and a gift to Santa Maria de Ripoll where we do (unusually) and it was Narulf sacer, and the actors were unknowns-to-us living on the edge of the zone at la Guàrdia.¹⁰ I’m slightly happier saying that either they just didn’t know Joan very well or else they went to the monastery to make their gift and he didn’t come with them.

Remember why this Vic charter is tricky? Click through if not

So, at the end of this we have a picture in which when people here had a transaction to make they enlisted their local priest to write it for them. That doesn’t sound terribly surprising in those terms, I know, but it is still slightly strange given two things about these transactions. They are, substantially, with churchmen. That in itself is not surprising, we should expect that simply because of whose archives get preserved as has often been said here, but the churchmen were high-ranking people. They did not travel without other churchmen in support, we might expect, and yet it’s the local guy who writes the documents, even when it’s a donation to the relatively-nearby cathedral. Our usual picture of early medieval diplomatic is one in which the recipients of the gifts usually write the charter, especially when they’re ecclesiastics and when we might expect the donation to have been made actually at the cathedral, and perhaps by placing a document on the altar there.¹¹ But it looks here as if either Joan wrote that document (in which case one assumes he did so beforehand, and in that case how much input into it did the recipients even get?) or else, perhaps even weirder, the transaction was actually done in Santa Eulàlia whoever the recipient was. That’s weird because we’re so often encouraged to see this kind of transaction as a negotiation of a relationship with a saint and his familia; not going to his house to do it seems stand-offish, especially if you’re actually staying in the house of a different saint to do it.¹² And of course, not all these are pious donations, even if they all wound up in cathedral archives. Presumably, at some point, and at different times, the property was passed on and wound up with the cathedral anyway, all relevant charters coming with. I presume this, because the alternative would be that anything Joan wrote was being archived at Santa Eulàlia and that at some point the whole church archive got swooped up into the cathedral one. I’ve posited something like that at Sant Andreu de Gurb, very nearby, but that’s not least because it, unlike Santa Eulàlia, appears to have been staffed by clergy working out of the cathedral (which was even nearer).¹³ I don’t quite like it here: the recipients must have had copies! why do we have Joan’s and not theirs, even when the recipient was usually a bishop or cathedral? But there doesn’t seem to be any way to count up these documents that doesn’t give both Joan and the documents he wrote a considerable importance to the people who wanted them made. It’s that importance I’m now after…

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1. For example, I was just re-reading Rosamond McKitterick’s The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge 1989), and chapter 3 turns out to be one of those things I should have been citing more in almost everything I’ve written but had internalised too deeply to recognise the debt. Other work asking similar questions would be Wendy Davies, “Priests and rural communities in East Brittany in the ninth century” in Études celtiques Vol. 20 (Paris 1983), pp. 177-197, repr. in Davies, Brittany in the Early Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies 924 (Aldershot 2009), V, or Carine van Rhijn, “Priests and the Carolingian reforms: the bottle-necks of local correctio” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel & Philip Shaw (edd.), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 13 (Wien 2006), pp. 219-237. Wendy has similar work forthcoming on the priests in her newer study area of Asturias-León, which is also influential on me.

2. The references are given below in sigillar form, but all but one come from Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, and the numbers in the table below are those in this edition, though the documents are also printed in Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX i X), ed. Ordeig (Vic 1980-1996), nos 265, 267, 269, 270, 318, 320, 325, 329, 342, 344 & 527.

3. It is some comfort to me that Junyent or Ordeig (or both! the way that edition was produced leaves no clarity over whose words were put onto any given page) say in Junyent, Diplomatari, p. 448, that the writer of docs 325, 329, 342 & 344 was the same person.

4. If you need it, it is done in Manuel Rovira i Solà, “Noves dades sobre els vescomtes d’Osona-Cardona” in Ausa Vol. 9 no. 98 (Vic 1981), pp. 249-260.

5. Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels segles IX i X, conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis històrics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 2 (Montserrat 1979), pp. 78-143, doc. no. 132.

6. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 108-109.

7. The left-hand side of this charter is destroyed and all that’s left of the dating clause is that the king was Lothar III, who ruled during these years.

8. Something which is fairly easy to check thanks to the excellent Jordi Bolòs & Victor Hurtado, Atles del comtat d’Osona (798-993), Atles dels comtats de la Catalunya carolíngia (Barcelona 2001), where pp. 28-29, Q9-11 are the most relevant. It’s reference works like this and decent printed editions that make it possible to do a summary like this in the sort of time that’s reasonable to dedicate to a blog post, and of course thus enable far larger projects, I’d make so many mistakes without this volume because of not being able to be in the actual places very much.

9. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 826 & 848 (= Junyent, Diplomatari, nos 314 & 324).

10. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos. 771 & 1813.

11. See e. g. Reinhard Härtel, Notarielle und kirchliche Urkunden im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, Historische Hilfswissenschaften (Wien & München 2011), pp. 212-213.

12. Classically, Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: the social meaning of Cluny’s property, 909-1049 (Ithaca 1989); more local resonances in Wendy Davies, Acts of Giving: individual, community and church in tenth-century Christian Spain (Oxford 2007), esp. pp. 113-134.

13. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled, pp. 122-123.

Leeds 2011 report 1, with bonus apology

I have to start by saying sorry for the long silence here. It’s no shortage of stuff to say, but shortage of time to write. The end of term has been more punishing than it should be, as we gear up for admissions interviews next week as well as trying to get reports done and send everyone off with revision instructions. I drafted this with only one essay left to mark this term and one tutorial to give on it, these now done with great relief and now there’s nothing but hect for a few days and then wondering why nothing is organised for the holiday. (Actually something is, but not all the way.) And as you may have gathered, there’s a paper I’m supposed to have written by now and just had to beg an extension on, albeit from myself and collaborators. Obviously things could be worse; but squeezing in those visits to the library to collect the data I need has resulted in a great many small-hours bedtimes and the pressing need, every time I get as far as the blog editor window, to admit that there just isn’t time today. And this took several goes, too, but it’s done. I am still reporting on Leeds, a mere four months ago, and dammit, I may be briefer than usual but I will do it. So herewith the first day.

The Stables pub, location of the occasional pint during the Congress

Actually I think I ought to start with the previous evening, when I arrived back from Lastingham and very shortly afterwards actually met she who is the Naked Philologist, who was more clothed and less immediately philological than advertised but still a splendid person and one whom it has been great to get to know then and subsequently. She was entirely surrounded by fellow female research students, and when I broke away from this gathering, to go find food or something, I got accused by a senior male colleague at the next table of departing “my harem”. My harem? My harem? Damn heteronormativity everywhere. Anyway; not very academic but it got the drinking started in good order and the academia followed next day. As to that, I skipped on the keynote lecture, which I’d already heard a version of one half of when Robin Fleming gave it at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and in the other half of which I wasn’t for some reason very interested (not sure why, as Sam Cohn is always interesting), but if you are, Magistra was there and wrote a blog post about it. Thus, the day started with this.

108. Small Worlds, Wide Horizons: local powers in the early Middle Ages

If there was a theme to this Leeds for me, other than always being among friends new and old, which I was and which was great, it was “sessions that felt like part of the Texts and Identities strand but weren’t”. Instead, this session was the extension, I think, of a conversation between Carine van Rhijn, Wendy Davies and myself at Leeds in 2009 about probably actually having the material to say something about local priests and their role in organising their communities in our respective areas. This was not that work, but it was in the same vein, and the people who were participating had all been in Texts and Identities at some point I think, though two also in my charters sessions of yore, so obviously I had to be there. The running order was:

• Steffen Patzold, “Priests and Local Power Brokers, 8th-9th Centuries”
• Bernhard Zeller, “Of the Lives of Centenarii and Related Local Powers in Early Medieval Alemannia, 8th-9th Centuries”
• Wendy Davies, “How Local was the Power of the Saio in Northern Iberia around 1000?”

This was all really interesting regional comparisons. Steffen had several pieces of evidence that appeared to show Bavarian and Italian cases of local communities effectively appointing their priests, and used this to vary the picture of the sorts of priests we could have found in Carolingian localities, appointed by people, princes or several kinds of power in between. Bernhard was looking at a layer of local officials in the St Gallen charters he knows so well who have titles like “centenarius”, “vicarius” and “centurius”, which as you’ll understand from last post interested me considerably. The last he only sees around Zürich, and they seem to be quite junior, whereas vicars were more serious contenders than anything less than the counts; Bernhard figured that these guys’ small range probably suggested they belonged to localities rather than being put there by the counts. This is not much like what I see but then where I see any of these terms but vicarius it’s where there aren’t really counts, and when they’re about to be the last ones using the word, so this may give me some idea of what an early Carolingian local administration looks like before you take its lid off and bake it for a century or so. Wendy, meanwhile, who as usual explicitly excepted Catalonia from her remarks, was looking at the closest early medieval Spain had to policemen, though a more accurate simile might be court bailiffs; she found saiones working for all sorts of judicial officials, from kings downwards, far from the Gothic origins of the title as armed followers, and all over the north of Spain, confined to areas of no more than 40km², or at least, not appearing outside those areas using their title. This gave me a lot of context for my own limited observations about saiones in Vallfogona.¹ All of this was right up my street, down my alley and in my grills, as it were, so I thought I’d started well.

221. Gift-Giving: gift-giving and objects

I then followed a sense of obligation; I used to work with Rory Naismith, and have somehow never managed to catch one of his papers at Leeds, so now that he was on alongside Stuart Airlie I wasn’t going to miss it. Here, however, Magistra has beaten me to the blogging (not hard) so I shall save some catch-up time by referring you to her post again. The running order, though, was:

• Irene Barbiera, “Offering Brooches to the Dead: the changing gendered value of a gift between Antiquity and the early Middle Ages”
• Rory Naismith, “Making the World Go Round? Coinage and Gift in Early Medieval England and Francia (c. 675-900)”
• Stuart Airlie, “The Star Cloak of Henry II”

The only thing I’ll add to what Magistra says is that I was pleased to see Rory finding a way to respectfully step round Philip Grierson’s venerable article, “Commerce in the Dark Ages”, that I love so much, without losing its essential point, which was that coins are not enough to prove trading links because they can travel in other ways too.² Now, as Rory pointed out, we have incredible amounts more finds evidence than Grierson did in 1959, so we have to give more space to trade than he did but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right about the alternatives. Rory then went on to note various coinages and references to coinage that make more sense viewed as gifts than as currency. With the other two papers I think I have nothing to say that Magistra didn’t already so I’ll move on.

308. Beyond the Invasion Narrative: the Roman World and its Neighbours in late Antiquity, II – Changing Minds?

This strand looked, from the outside, like another Texts and Identities strand under new colours, though somehow including Guy Halsall, but a closer look revealed that something more challenging was going on; Guy had organised a strand with some real heavy-hitters on to ask serious and sometimes dangerous questions about how we as historians should deal with the supposed barbarian invasions that have for so long been supposed to bring about the end of the Roman Empire in the West, given the loads of work there has been suggesting that this is too simple, or even outright wrong. So either way it was a must-see, and in the first one I made it to I saw this.

• Walter Pohl, “Ethnicity and its Discontents”

This paper was substantially a pained but wry self-defence against what Professor Pohl felt was misrepresentation of his work by Walter Goffart in a recent publication, and misunderstanding of it in exactly the opposite direction by Marco Valenti; he therefore disclaimed belief in stable ethnic groups, the shared common cores of élite traditions proposed by Reinhard Wenskus, the culturally-constructed imaginary communities that extreme dissolutionists hold to (which Professor Pohl would accept if it were allowed that they can be actively created by people), and groups with no self-identification. Instead he argued for groups of persons that felt and acted with common interests, however recently-created, entry to which was to an extent governed by an in-group and recognised by out-groups, as a necessary basis for a self-identification. I understand how this concept is misunderstood; it kinds of slips from one’s hands when you try to press it to explain historical events, but that isn’t, I think, what Professor Pohl holds it for; he holds it as a working account of ethnicity. That is quite an important thing to have, if we can get one…

• Tommaso Leso, “Shifting Identities and Marriage in Ostrogothic Italy”

This drew out the various categories of marriage choice for the women of the Ostrogothic royal family and went through them in detail. This was one of those ones where if you want to know about it, you want to know more than I can tell you, but if it matters and you can’t get in touch with Signor Leso I’m happy to type out my notes in an e-mail.

• Roland Steinacher, “Response”

In the absence of one of the originally-planned papers, Herr Steinacher gave a response, and observed that political correctness makes the necessary argument difficult to have here; these things still really matter to people, and some writers are selling to those people without due care for the facts or opinions of their peers. He named names but I won’t, not here; he was far from the last to do so in these sessions, and I’ll say more about that in the second day’s report.

It’s hard for me to take a position in these debates that are about both the field and the people in it, especially on the open Internet, but you may deduce something if you choose from the fact that now I knew where the action was I stayed in these sessions till they ran out. More on this, therefore, as soon as I can. Presumably I did something in the evening; I remember that whatever it was kept me away from the Early Medieval Europe reception until all their wine had run out, so it must have been good, and probably involved good people and average alcohol. If you were one of the people, I’m sorry four months have blurred you out of my memory of the day but trust me, I remember you out of context…

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1. J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History (London 2010), pp. 42-43.

2. P. Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 9 (London 1959), pp. 123-40, repr. in idem, Dark Age Numismatics, Collected Studies 96 (Aldershot 1979), II.

3. Here my notes suggest he named Guy, but I don’t think this can be right!

Leeds report 3 (Wednesday 15th July)

By Wednesday I’d managed to get my alarm going again (“have you tried switching it off and switching it on again?”) and thus set out in relatively good order for the following excellent session, albeit conforming to type by opting for Texts and Identities:

1006. Texts and Identities, VIII: Carolingian priests in action

• Carine van Rhijn, “Local Priests, Local Manuscripts: Correctio in action”
• Marco Stoffella, “Carolingian Reform and Local Priests in Early Medieval Tuscany”
• Bernhard Zeller, “Local Priests in Early Medieval Alemannia: the Charter Evidence”

Attentive readers will see here a theme that has interested me both in and of itself and because of the cool things Wendy Davies keeps finding in the kingdoms next door, that of what priests actually did for their communities in the early Middle Ages and how they got the wherewithal, both material and intellectual, to do it. Carine had found some texts that appeared to be lists of exam questions for `priest inspectors’, preserved perhaps as revision aids, ranging from the simply administrative to the tangly Trinitarian; her area is very much the Carolingian heartland, so if you were going to see this anywhere it might be there, but it was still fascinating. Marco was looking at the process of Carolingian takeover in Lombardy, where a network of baptismal churches of mostly private origins was gathered up by rich bishops in the name of hierarchy. Bernhard, who is one of ‘my people’, meanwhile, was looking at the education and employment of the clerics visible in the St Gall evidence, and had some interesting observations about script regions that opened up questions of education outside schools, presumably by forebears.

An original St Gallen transaction charter of 786

I think I will come to look back on this session as the start of a big thing. Wendy Davies and I were talking avidly with Carine and Bernhard for some time afterwards because we felt that, together, we probably had enough evidence (in terms of documents in local priests’ hands over time) to say some genuinely useful things about where these people got their training, what the structures of priestly education were and how they changed. This is a question, in other words, that we may genuinely be able to answer, and I hope some collaboration comes of it. This is one important thing the big conferences can do for one.

Now, next, I probably should have gone to the session in which our occasional commentator Theo was speaking, and looking back at it now I’m not quite sure why that didn’t leap out at me as a necessity given that and the other contents. Sorry Theo! Instead I dithered and finally decided that what I needed more than anything was a rest, so went back to the flat and flopped with a novel for half an hour before going and prowling the book stalls. I bought far too much that I will take years to get round to reading—this is almost pathological and makes me feel guilty every time I see the books so I should stop it—but I also found time that I hadn’t thought I would have to meet up with my publisher and settle a few outstanding questions, and furthermore felt vastly less stressed for not trying to run across campus and keep up with someone else’s thought for a few hours. I possibly should have found the time to do this earlier and not missed Theo’s session but I’m not sure what I would have dropped to do this. Anyway, after lunch, things resumed with a small spot of hero-worship.

1210. The Boundaries of Free Speech, II: silencing the voice, restraining the pen

• Paul Edward Dutton, “Voice over Writing in Eriugena”

Professor Dutton is a hero of mine in a small way, partly for his Carolingian Civilization reader which manages to make a vast range of sources not just accessible but interesting, and partly for the enthusiasm and amusement with which he writes; this was very much in evidence as he in turn dealt with one of his heroes, and perhaps the only Carolingian intellectual I’d like to drink with, John the Scot or Eriugena, asking why, given that he seems to have believed that truth was diminished by writing it down rather than speaking it, he wrote so much. The conclusion was, more or less paradoxically, to stop them relying on a written truth: as Stuart Airlie observed, “Tell Derrida et al. it’s all been done!” I find Eriugena pleasantly modern in this respect, and it’s largely due to Professor Dutton that I ever bothered. Have a go yourself!




Modern cartoon of William of Malmesbury's story about John the Scot and Charles the Bald

• Irene van Renswoude, “‘Writings speak after one’s death when the writer is silent’: on the danger of publication”

An almost inaudible study of psychological and logical reasons why Rather of Verona didn’t dare write more than he did, and that for a very small an audience without whom, however, he couldn’t do.

• Michael Clanchy, “The Right to Speak Out by Publishing: Abelard and his Master, Anselm of Laon”

Michael has, as he said, been talking about Abelard for many years now, and I’m always happy to hear him do it more; he’s a very friendly speaker, both with the audience and with the material, and makes for a very human humanism. Here the main question was why did Abelard publish so much, with such frequently awful consequences, compared to a master who was widely renowned but published one book, if that, which he denied? The quest for fame rather than students was the provisional answer, which sounds obvious if you know Abelard’s writings but Michael can always give one more depth of understanding of these texts and didn’t fail. The discussion that followed was also really lively and interesting, though I confess I remember it mainly for Stuart Airlie suggesting that we read the sources of the Carolingian Renaissance with a closer eye for what they’re not saying: “Big party, Aachen, tonight; don’t tell Theodulf!”

For the last sessions of the day I went back to Texts and Identities for the one paper by a friend I managed to catch the whole conference that I hadn’t squeezed out of them myself.

1306. Texts and Identities, XI: religious alterity and textual control

• Clemens Gantner, “Quae enim societas luci ad tenebras: the papal charge of heresy against others in the 8th and 9th centuries”

A close reading of papal writings about their Arian and Iconoclast opponents shows how very rarely direct assertions of heresy were made from Rome but how frequently the power of insinuation and implication left that impression on the reader.

• Rob Meens, “Thunder over Lyons: Agobard, the tempestarii, and Christianity”

There is a lovely cache of material about rural belief in the letters of Bishop Agobard of Lyons. They include, perhaps most infamously, a report of some locals who believed that weather magicians whom they called tempestarii could be employed to bring storms onto the crops of others or keep them off one’s own, an operation that they were held to perform by means of communication with people in flying ships who lifted away the destroyed crops unless paid not to attack them. That is, the tempestarii were not themselves the stormbringers, but had friends who were, and who apparently operated out of aircraft. This, as you may imagine, has been beloved of UFO conspiracy nuts for a very long time. Now Rob brought a critical eye to it and asked whether these tempestarii were, as they have often been seen, pagan cultists or whether they were Christians who claimed to have some special extra knowledge; Agobard envisages them making confession, which necessitates some rethinking of categories. I had to ask whether Agobard could afford to exclude anyone or whether he had to open his category of Christian out to include them. It seems more likely, though, that Agobard just wasn’t thinking in terms of Christian vs. pagan at all and therefore probably neither should we.¹

• Charles West, “Possessing Power: unauthorised miracles at Dijon, c. 842″


Crypt of St-Bénigne de Dijon

Lastly came Charles, ever bright and interesting with his material, which was in this case a very odd miracle episode in which a saint’s crypt full of people, who may have all been women, were confined inside by invisible forces that buffeted them to the ground if they tried to leave; we know of this from a letter from the local bishop to another asking for advice on how to get them out, so it’s pretty far removed from hagiography. Nonetheless, Charles showed that the account draws quite heavily on Agobard, again, and he took a very careful inventory of the power interests involved and what we could read between the lines of the text. Fascinating, and our speculations were almost certainly more fun than whatever the real situation may turn out to have been alas, but this makes for a good paper.

So that was a good wind-up for the day, and then various factors combined to leave me eating at Weetwood with Another Damned Medievalist and the In The Middle crowd in a rough repeat of the meet-up of the day before. Mary Kate Hurley was amusingly dismayed to hear I might dodge the dance, and when I did in fact turn up insisted I actually dance, which I felt a lot better for doing, though fundamentally the muscles didn’t remember how it go till `Blue Monday’ came over the rattly PA. I had fun anyway, and the music was a lot better than last year.

However, again, the abiding memory is going to be a remark by Stuart Airlie, who was resplendent in a t-shirt reading “I Conquered the Avars and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” among other things, and who was also giving it some on the dancefloor, but who paused briefly to be introduced to me because of this here blog, which he told me, in between flattering people and attacks of Terpsichorean enthusiasm, was an exercise in control, and suggested I was trying to control too many things with it. Now, I accept that a conversation in that forum is not to be taken entirely seriously but I’ve been trying to puzzle out what he meant ever since. The blog was of course created to try and control something, which was and is my online academic footprint, and indeed my academic footprint full stop until actual publication finally burst from the infinitely tapered pipeline, but I don’t know that it’s been very successful; the audience is big but dropping, I don’t get any extra interviews because of it and though many people seem to like it I don’t think it really sells me the way I’d intended, because I talk too much about other people, or indeed just too much. It’s made me some useful contacts but these are things that make my academic profile broader, not deeper. So I don’t know. Either way, power hunger is not, to me, a great part of my make-up or presentation and I’m slightly worried that someone whose gaze is as penetrating as Dr Airlie’s sees it under the surface of my writing. So I went to bed with many a muse on this, and as you can tell am still musing…

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1. I expect you’d like some bibliography on this, or at least that somebody eventually would, and to them I say, aided by Prof Meens’s excellent handout, start with the text, which is online here in Latin and partially translated (of course) in Paul Dutton (ed.), Carolingian Civilization: a reader, 1st edn. (Peterborough ON 1993), pp. 189-191; then for scholarship one must apparently start with Monica Blöcker, “Wetterzauber: Zu einem Glaubenskomplex des frühen Mittelalters” in Francia Vol. 9 (Sigmaringen 1981), pp. 117-131; go on to Paul Dutton, “Thunder and hail over the Carolingian countryside” in idem, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York 2004), pp. 169-188, and finish with the latest word by Jean Jolivet, “Agobard de Lyon et les faiseurs de pluie” in M. Chazan & G. Dahan (edd.), La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, Bibliothèque d’histoire du Moyen Âge 3 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 15-25. Presumably Rob is also working on publication about this and supporting websearches also revealed as forthcoming Mark Gregory Pegg, “Agobard of Lyon, tempestarii, and magic in early medieval Europe” in W. Wunderlich (ed.), Medieval Myths: Magicians, Seducers and Rogues (Kontanz forthcoming). Wow, and people tell me my website picture makes me look like a vampire…

Three sorts of priest, part 3: important men, as long as nobody’s looking

Time at long last for the third and final of these posts about the priesthood in my much-beloved subject area, tenth-century Catalonia. So far we’ve had priests posted to distant areas by enterprising cathedral chapters and loaned books with which to preach to the people, or something like that; and we’ve had priests in hilltop burial centres who look like collegiate and zealous preservers of very old jurisdictions right next to that same pushy cathedral, perhaps explaining why its own men are stationed so far from home. There’s an obvious sort of priest remaining, the little local guy who writes all the documents in his community and farms alongside his congregation, but I’m not going to study them, partly because it’s hard to establish that’s actually whom you’re seeing in the same way as it’s hard to be sure you’re looking at a peasant (have I explained this? Perhaps I should), but mainly because really Wendy Davies’s recent work on this level of pastoral care is much better than mine would be and is still developing, so I don’t want to risk writing something I’ll probably have to rethink a lot in a year’s time.¹

View of Vallfogona, Ripollès, immediately to the south of Sant Joan de les Abadesses, from the Castell de Milany to the south

So, instead, there is a fourth sort of priest we can cover, and these ones are even more mysterious than the last one. We have to start, once again, with a certain super-size hearing in the year 913, at Sant Joan de Ripoll as it then still was.² One of the things one can do with that hearing is distinguish peasants, of course, but that’s not the point today.³ The point is that, as I’ve mentioned before, the document of that hearing was written, in two stages, and then updated twice, by the same guy, a priest called Garsies. I said in the last post I wrote about this document (which explains, you know, what it is) that I couldn’t `describe his status more fully’, and this is both true and false. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can parallel it. The problem is, you see, that Garsies doesn’t appear anywhere else. We now have almost all the charter evidence for these areas in print and indexed, so it’s possible to be reasonably definitive about this.⁴ The charter must have been written and updated over a period of months, if not years, for all of which, the unity of the hand even if not the ink, makes clear, Garsies was able to be found. The nunnery’s usual notary, Gentiles, signed as witness but didn’t himself trifle with this highly unusual document.⁵ Something about Garsies’s status made it important that he be involved in it, but we don’t know what that status was.

Sant Andreu de Tona and the Castell de Tona

So we have this guy who turns up when a vast number of people are being sworn to lordship, and not otherwise. He is not a scribe of either of the counts who are present, nor is he a cleric of the nunnery whose lordship is at issue; in either of those cases, he surely ought to turn up again, but he doesn’t. He ought, also, given that he is presumably at least fairly local, to turn up in the nunnery’s documents as a neighbour or similar, but no. If he does hold property nearby, he does it somewhere where the nunnery has none and no-one will give or sell them any. But he is presumably not nobody: Gentiles should be doing this job, so if Garsies does it that means he is a better choice in some way that we can’t quite see. Now we have someone else like this, whom like Garsies I’ve mentioned before without expanding on this odd status. This second fellow’s name was Centuri son of Centuri, which is, yes, apparently a hereditary name derived from the Latin for `Centurion’. He was a judge (whatever exactly they mean by that), and he was also at this hearing, and at two others, in both of which, again, large areas were signed out of the fisc and into ecclesiastical hands. He doesn’t appear in any other context.⁶ But when you’re appropriating a lot of ex-fiscal property (and there are various reasons to suppose that what had once been the king’s properties was remembered in this area, though I’m never sure how far to believe them),⁷ apparently these guys have to be involved. I didn’t feel I could justify this in the book, but my feeling about these guys is that they own, somehow, a kind of stewardship of old fiscal lands, to which the claims of the counts, in a time when the kings whose they notionally are still exist but aren’t able to affect them, are dubious.⁸ So when the counts act as if they can alienate them, without consulting the king, Centuri or Garsies (or both!) have to turn up and show that it’s been seen and is happening with approval of those who ought to approve. That makes me wonder where Garsies might have been to oversee all this, and the best answer, I suspect, is the Castell de Milany, the closest castle to Sant Joan, looking at it from the south across the valley of Vallfogona up at the top of the post. There’s not much property held by the nunnery in that area, and I wonder if that’s not because it was owned of old by someone else. Not much to see there now, though.

Ruins of the Castell de Milany

Another possibility is the Castell de Mogrony, out to the north-west, which is a bit more problematic and would make for a blog post in itself. (If you’re interested I’ll write it.) Here early documents do suggest property owned by the nunnery, but I’ve argued that they’re all tampered with in order to claim this.⁹ There are also old stories of a Prince Quintilian who based himself there in the eighth century, but these rest on hearsay reports of documents which were probably also tampered with, since they came from the same house, and which can no longer be found to have the reading checked. But it was certainly there, and it also has a church which could have been a base for someone like Garsies. The current church is from the eleventh century, but the view down towards the abbey’s valley is still pretty dominating.

View from the interior of the hermitage of Sant Pere de Mogrony

So that might be Garsies, although let’s be absolutely clear, there is no evidence for what I’ve just said at all, which is why it isn’t in the book. But he is not the only priest like this. Here we are helped by the fact that Abbess Emma was a very litigious woman, and as well as the big hearing over rights at the abbey itself that brought all these possible fiscal stewards out of the woodwork, there are five others of a smaller size.¹⁰ At one of them, the panel of those judging includes, not any judges, but two priests. Their names are Arià and Daguí, both of which are interesting, because one would not expect a priest to be named `Arian’ in this day and age really but hey, and because Daguí was the name of the abbot of Santa Maria de Ripoll up the road, and before Emma came of age and took over at Sant Joan it is thought that Daguí administered it for her. He is thought to have died in 902; this is 913 so it couldn’t really be him, but he was a priest right enough.<sup>11</sup> And again, these two don’t appear anywhere else; this hearing has brought them to view, presumably because their authority and knowledge was respected by the men of the area, but they didn’t have any visible property or dealings with the nunnery and so don’t make it to record.<sup>12</sup> More like Garsies? Harder to place if so, this isn’t a fiscal hearing in any sense. There is a church in Vallfogona, but it’s in an area where property is sold to the nunnery and they may well have founded the church, so we should see these guys again if they were there.<sup>13</sup> But what they do share with Garsies is that they show us that local authority, in the informal sense, firstly could easily wear the guise of the priest, secondly was apparently affectively felt by the locality’s inhabitants who respected their judgements and were, presumably, swayed by their endorsements of others’ judgements, and thirdly, could almost entirely avoid interacting with the local `official’ power in any way that left any record of their existence for us…

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1. Meaning mainly Wendy Davies, Acts of Giving: individual, church and community in tenth-century Christian Spain (Oxford 2007), pp. 36-65, but also forthcoming work due to be presented at Leeds this year.

2. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i de Manresa, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. nos 119 & 120, on which see J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History (London forthcoming), Chapter 2 part 1.

3. For that, see ibid.

4. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV; 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; P. Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia VI: Els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, ed. R. Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica LXX (Barcelona 2006). We await the volumes for Urgell and Cerdanya, the latter of which remains a possibility, but its record is mostly comprised of the documents from the abbey of Cuixà, ed. R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals as “Com neix i creix un gran monestir pirinenc abans de l’any mil: Eixalada-Cuixà” in Analecta Montserratensia Vol. 8 (Montserrat 1955), pp. 125-337, ap., and he isn’t there either.

5. All of these interpretations hang to a great extent on the palæographical notes made in the earlier edition of these documents by Federico udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18, Publicaciones de la Sección de Barcelona 15 (Madrid 1951), as doc. nos 38 & ap. II A; it is also he who identified the hand of Gentiles in various other documents.

6. J. Jarrett, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: organisation of society in the pre-Catalan ‘terra de ningú'” in Alan Deyermond & Martin Ryan (eds), Early Medieval Spain: a symposium, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 63 (London forthcoming). The other documents are Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV doc nos 182 & 420.

7. Property boundaries generally, Jordi Bolòs i Masclans, “Paisatge, poblament i societat a Catalunya entorn de l’any 1000” in Imma Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés Internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu Temps: Catalunya i Europa a la Fi del 1r Mil·lenni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de Novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 254-283, with English abstract pp. 285-286; on fiscal persistence specifically, see now Ramon Martí, “Del fundus a la parrochia. Transformaciones del pobliamento rural en Cataluña durante la transición medieval”, in Philippe Sénac (ed.), De la Tarraconaise à la Marche Supérieure d’al-Andalus : les habitats ruraux (IV^e-XI^e siècle). Desde la Tarraconense a la Marca Superior de al-Andalus: los asentamientos rurales (siglos IV-XI), Méridiennes : Études Médiévales Ibériques 2 (Toulouse 2006), pp. 145-166.

8. On the persistence of the kings you will I hope some day be able to read a print version of Jonathan Jarrett, “Legends in Their Own Lifetime? The Late Carolingians and Catalonia”, paper presented in session ‘Legends of the Carolingians’, Haskins Society Conference, Georgetown University, 7 November 2008.

9. idem, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the Nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2004), pp. 229-258 at pp. 240-241.

10. The other hearings are Udina, Archivo Condal doc nos. 16, 35 & 53 & ap. II 14 & 58.

11. The two priests turn up ibid., doc. no. 35. On Abbot Daguí see Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, “La fundació del monestir de Ripoll” in Miscel·lània Anselm M. Albareda vol. I, Analecta Montserratensia Vol. 9 (1955-56), pp. 187-97, repr. in Abadal, Dels Visigots als Catalans, ed. Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, Estudis i documents 13-14 (Barcelona 1969, repr. 1974 & 1989), I pp. 485-494, the suggestion of control of Sant Joan being at p. 487 of the reprint.

12. Here and with the claims that Garsies is not seen in other records, there is a big elephant in the room that ought to be identified: the archive of Santa Maria de Ripoll, which was perhaps the richest and most famous monastery in the Tarraconensis at this point, was lost in a fire in 1835. We have a surprising amount of it in regesta and even copies, but a great deal was lost, the regesta are by their nature partial and usually omit witnesses and neighbours, and if Arià, Daguí or Garsies had been based there, we might well have lost the evidence that would tell us so. All the same, I think someone with this importance ought to show up more widely if he was based there; the monks of Ripoll do get recorded elsewhere, e. g. Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. 139 which lists them transacting with the count.

13. On the church, known only as ipsa ecclesia but probably on the site of the tenth-century Sant Julià, see Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled, Chapter 2 parts 1 & 2.