Leeds 2014 Report IV and Final

The 2014 bookfair, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds

I should, given that I’d missed the dance the previous night, have been up bright and early on the following and final day of the 2014 International Medieval Congress, but I confess I was not. I had had a couple of sessions in mind to go to, but in fact by the time I was fully operational it was just too late gracefully to get in, and so I gave into temptation and went to the bookfair to check along a few final stalls I hadn’t yet reached. With that achieved, and coffee consumed, I threw myself back into academia for the last two sessions.

1607. Law and Empire: editing the Carolingian capitularies, II

The earlier one of these sessions was one of those I had been thinking of going to, and once I’d been to the second I regretted my failure, as it was very much on my interests. It was, I gathered, part of a thread coming out of the ongoing work to re-edit the disparate body of texts emanating from the Carolingian empire which we call ‘capitularies‘, because they are arranged by capitula, headings or articles. This covers everything from programmatic law through sermons to meeting agendas and so many problems arise, which the speakers were variously facing. This was the running order:

• Jennifer R. Davis, “Manuscript Evidence of the Use of Capitularies”.
• Matthias Tischler, “Changing Perceptions of a Carolingian Constitution: the legal and historiographical contexts of the ‘Divisio regnorum’ in the early 9th century”.
• Karl Ubl, “Editing the Capitula legibus addenda, 818-819, of Louis the Pious: text and transmission”.

The first problem tackled was : did anyone ever actually use the legislation that the Carolingian kings issued like this? Doubts have been raised, even though they were later compiled into something like a new lawcode for Emperor Louis the Pious (814-840), because however interested the court may have been in them, only one citation of them is court has so far been located, making them vulnerable to an old argument by the late Patrick Wormald that early medieval law-making was about performance, not about actually trying to govern people’s behaviour.¹ Professor Davis had however found a private manuscript that collects capitulary legislation, perhaps, given its contents, made for a courtier bound for Italy who needed to know about the laws there, and she argued that this was the tip of a lost iceberg of people making their own legal handbooks of the bits they needed from the central law-bank at the court.




Part of Charlemagne’s789 capitulary, the Admonitio Generalis, in St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 733, DOI: 10.5076/e-codices-csg-0733, f. 13r. (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0733), Professor Davis’s chosen manuscript.

This was in part supported by Dr Tischler’s paper, which found several manuscripts collecting one capitulary in particular, that by which Charlemagne promulgated the division of his empire which he planned in 806, before the death of his two elder sons. Since Louis the Pious, the remaining son, had three sons of his own, this text retained a worrying relevance and Dr Tischler thought he could identify several of the people worrying from the provenance and contents of the manuscripts; they too went back to these texts for models of how things might be done even after the moment of the text itself had passed. Lastly Professor Ubl spoke of the difficulty of categorising his chosen text, the Capitula legibus addenda, ‘articles for adding to the laws’. If lawcode and capitulary were really separate categories, as their initial editor believed, what are we to do with a capitulary that updates the lawcodes? And again, the manuscripts show us that this is indeed how it was used: of 32 surviving copies, two-thirds also contain one of the Frankish law-codes, the Lex Salica and an overlapping third contain the other, the Lex Ribuaria. The people writing these manuscripts didn’t necessarily know which king had issued the capitulary but they knew what it was for and wanted it available.

There was heated discussion after this, because who loves categories more than legal historians? And who loves questioning them more than modern social historians? But one of the questions that was being asked throughout, but especially by Professor Ubl, was just what kind of an edition one can make of a text like the Capitula legibus addenda, of which there are thirty-two different versions none of which are evidently definitive and all of whose constructions are, as these papers had shown, potentially informative. Professor Ubl wanted a born-digital edition but it wasn’t quite clear how it would work yet. I thought that a kind of database of clauses, from which a website could cook you up any given manuscript, would still actually give you a form of text to print, but there were reasons my notes don’t let me recall why this wouldn’t answer. I still like it, though. Anyway, then there was lunch and then it was the final straight.

1715. Networks and Neighbours, VII: relationships of power in the Early Middle Ages

I have a certain loyalty to the Networks and Neighbours strand at Leeds, mainly out of self-interest since I am in the journal, or will be, but also because the organisation behind it is quite the creation for a then-bunch of postgraduates, and it is doing several quite important things in terms both of methods and of subject of publication. This session was no longer being organised by the same crew as are behind the journal, however, and I should have realised that. The order of ceremonies was this:

• Paulo Henrique de Carvalho Pachá, “The Visigothic State and the Relations of Personal Dependence: transition, transformation, and domination”.
• Michael Burrows, “Lower Class Violence and the End of the Roman Empire”.
• Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, “Donation of Land and State Building in 7th- and 8th-century Northumbria”.

Senhor de Carvalho set up for us a separation of aristocracy and state in Visigothic Spain: he argued that king Wamba had tried to bring it about and that Ervig, his successor, was able to gain power by conceding a rôle in government to part of the aristocracy, thus splitting them while still looking conciliatory. This is certainly one way to read the texts, but not perhaps a new one, and was reacting to a book published in 1978, what may no longer need doing.² Mr Burrows picked up the terms of his sources in distinguishing a ‘more humble’, lower class from a ‘more honest’, upper class in the late Roman Empire, and asked what our sources, written largely by the latter, thought of the former resorting to violence. You would think the answer obvious but Christianity, because of its founder’s interest in the poor and because of the way that mob action sometimes brought about what seemed to our writers like the will of God, made some of those writers find a space for rightly-guided popular violence, thus making some of it seem legitimate in the terms of the time. Lastly Senhor Rodrigues tried to put the limited evidence that donations of land were made in pre-Viking Northumbria (we don’t have any charters, but we have some sources that talk about them existing) into the context of political turmoil in that kimgdom in the eighth century. Since we don’t have any of the relevant donations, the links between them and events never really crystallised for me here, and I was left wondering how Senhor Rodrigues thought it all joined up.

Any unsympathetic feelings I had for the panellists, however, evaporated in horror during a five-minute mini-lecture that a commentator delivered to Senhor de Carvalho, condemning him for not having read many things which got listed and bombarding his argument with a supposedly-revisionist view of the development of Spain that was clearly based on the even older work of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. Senhor de Carvalho had spine enough to point this out, whereupon the commnetator, who was from Valladolid as he told us although I never identified him, dismissed Senhor de Carvalho contemptuously as a Marxist. This was quite the rudest attack I’ve seen an academic deliver upon a junior scholar, and I felt I had to go and reassure Senhor de Carvalho afterwards that we had all met such people and that they should not be allowed to triumph. I had had my own reservations about the paper, yes, but this was a whole circle of Hell below anything I would ever say, or mean, in a postgraduate session or indeed elsewhere. Professor Ian Wood exemplified how this could be done by also offering Senhor Rodrigues a reading list, but one couched as possibly-helpful suggestions, and the other questions were also, I think, intended to guide and suggest rather than demolish. I understand rage at wrongness as much as anyone, but I also regard such anger as a sign that it’s not views of the early Middle Ages that are threatened… To remember that was, alas, and through no fault of the panellists, the most striking lesson of this final panel, and pondering it I departed southwards, many books the richer and another International Medieval Congress down.

The Leeds 2014 bookhaul, reconstructed for this post. What is now mainly evident is how very sure I was that I would still be teaching Anglo-Saxon England whatever happened, which I shall somehow have to contrive to do even now, because the sunk costs of my library are just awful otherwise!

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1. An eloquent statement of doubt on this score, and the lone legal citation, can be found in Christina Pössel, “Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies, 775-829” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Pössel & Peter Shaw (edd.), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12, Denkschriften der phil.-hist. Klasse 344 (Wien 2008), pp. 253-274, online here. The work of Wormald referred to is “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: legislation and Germanic kingship, from Euric to Cnut” in Peter Sawyer & Ian N. Wood (edd.), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds 1977), pp. 105-138.

2. That book being none other than Abilio Barbero & Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica, 2nd edn. (Barcelona 1978), which of course even I thought worth many blog posts, so I am conscious that I would have done little better at that stage. Still, on this subject I’d probably have started with Roger Collins’s Visigothic Spain 489-711 (Oxford 2004) and gone on with the commentary in Joaquín Martínez Pizarro (transl.), The story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis (Washington DC 2005) before I got back to Barbero and Vigil. These were, signally, not among the suggestions made by the commentator mentioned below…

Leeds 2013 report part 2

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

The haul from Leeds 2013

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

803. Defining Kingdoms in 10th-Century Europe

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


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

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



Old map of Lotharingia with some more modern captions

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Referring to Koziol, Politics of Memory, in case that’s not clear, though cf. Mark Mersiowsky, “Towards a Reappraisal of Carolingian Sovereign Charters” in Karl Heidecker (ed.), Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 5 (Turnhout 2000), pp. 15-25!

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

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

Seminar LXXXII: tiny laws and constraining categories

The lecture that had swallowed me is done and so I can tackle some backlog. In order to make some ground I’m going to reluctantly skip over two Oxford papers I went to about which, for one reason or another, I just don’t have anything useful to say,¹ and skip straight on to Tom Faulkner presenting at the Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages Seminar on 26th January 2011, with the title “Peoples and Legal Practice in the Carolingian Minor Law-Codes”. Now, I dithered about skipping this one too, not because it wasn’t fascinating, but because again Magistra et Mater has got in ahead of me and covered it excellently already. But there remain a point or two that it’s still worth drawing out. You may want to read her post first, though, because she’s done a better job of explaining what the paper was actually about than I’m going to have time to do.

Opening of a 793 copy of the Lex Salica, says the originating website

In 802 a couple of Carolingian sources record that Charlemagne had all the ‘laws of the nations’ in his empire written down and thus fixed.² And we have a number of texts of such laws, the most obvious one being the Law of the Salian Franks or Salic Law, but also the Laws of the Burgundians, Laws of the Lombards, Laws of the Bavarians, and so on (and of course the Law of the Goths, which is different, not least because it’s actually called the Forum of the Judges—that is, it’s not ethnic in its presentation).³ Some of these things had been out there for a long time but that endeavour of 802 probably has a lot to do with the state of the current texts, Goths aside, not least because recent work by such as Christina Pössel is emphasising how new some of the apparently ‘ancient’ practices in the Salic Law might have been. But if so, there are some weirdnesses to tackle. There had been no independent Burgundian kingdom for nearly three hundred years by this time. Who called themselves a Burgundian any more and on what could that claim rest? And similar problems arise for texts Tom was talking about, not least the Ripuarian Franks, a group who appear in basically no sources other than this law. Ripuaria as an area does occasionally get mentioned, but it’s a pagus, not a regnum, a district not a kingdom. Tom argued that really, it might be little more than the territory of the see of Cologne. But this lawcode of a basically illusory people is one of the more copied ones of the group, perhaps just because it had useful stuff which could be raided for means with which to make decisions in the very (very!) few cases where we have reasons to suppose such lawcodes were actually used, rather than just stored up as tokens of nationality.

Map showing probable location of Amor

Such dilemmas get even more pronged when dealing with a text called the Ewa ad Amorem. This is a very different sort of law text, though it has been associated with this big endeavour: Tom laid it out for us and it seems pretty clearly like a set of rules being agreed in a community for how they’re going to handle various affairs, like land sales and thefts. It seems to relate to a little place in Frisia called Amor, and it is extensively referential to other codes (which is nice, because, as Tom had pointed out, Lex ribuaria actually quotes modified Salic law quite a lot too) and peoples, so that you get frankly unhelpful statements like: “… about ecclesiastical affairs and about the servants of God who serve there, we have the same, as the Franks have.” Which Franks? Salic, Ribuarian or real? And so on. Although Levi Roach found parallels in Anglo-Saxon laws (some of which are actually usually called treaties) and someone else in Venetian treaties with foreign powers, the whole thing put me in mind of nothing so much as Spanish fueros, which were civil law codes constructed for new towns in the frontier zones, by the locals in agreement with the king. The counts of Catalonia do the same sort of thing sometimes, too. A central authority and its rights are recognised, but the actual day-to-day stuff is left local, and the implication there is that that’s because they’re rather on their own and central help and involvement will be hard to come by. In that last respect, though, Ewa ad Amorem is different; it’s clear from a reading that this code has become necessary precisely because king’s officers, counts and so on have been in the area a lot and there are problems making this mesh with the local way of doing things, not least because until this was written probably there was limited agreement on what that way was. So, though Tom didn’t really make much of this point, this little code is more interesting to me than the big ones because it seems to have the same sort of ad hoc necessity as some of the capitularies, and may show us how being on the more-or-less-willingly receiving end of Carolingian administrative reform worked out in practice.

A folio of the Capitulare de Villis, from Wikimedia Commons

More could be done with this, but only if we spread the categories we have for Carolingian law more thoroughly away from the binary of codes and capitularies (or proscriptive and responsive, ethnic and royal, regional and central… always with the diads, as Susan Reynolds has observed, when triads (or arrays!) might be more helpful) into something a bit more slippery. As Susan herself said, it’s not that there are no categories that work for this: all these things are sets of rules, of some sort, but putting them into a particular ‘sort’ has often distorted our subsequent thinking about them. And we have the same problem with a lot of other categories in this area: the capitularies themselves are so-called solely because they are arranged in headings, capitula (chapters, capitals…). They cover an immense range of topics, however, and are in form anything from minutes of meetings or even agendas for meetings that maybe didn’t happen through case-law being worked out into general knowledge to grand-scale moral state-of-the-empire preaching addresses.⁴ Not even the process is the same here and a different word or words for some of them might help us think. And even I could adjust: `charter’ is a good catch-all for the documents I want to study but only with exactly the right definition.⁵ But my category covers sales, donations, wills, securities, homage agreements, pledges, manumissions and basically most stuff, and people have put a lot of work into worrying if these things all work the same way and much of it has made useful distinctions.⁶ So Tom deserves all credit for making what could have been a dry and technical field accessible an of lively interest to an audience many of whom specialise in other things, but he has also given me some useful tools with which to try and enlarge my own, er, toolbox. (Pity he didn’t give me some new metaphors too, right?)

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1. Mark Williams, “Stormy Weather: divine women and the figure of sin in Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca“, Oxford Celtic Seminar, 20th January 2011, was as engaging and entertaining as Mark always is, where I’ve seen: he tells good stories about good stories. But aside from the fact that it is a good story, I really wouldn’t know what to say about the paper: it was all new to me. I probably can’t spell most of it, even. And Richard Allen, “Life before Lanfranc: the careers of three archbishops of Rouen, 942-1054/5”, Oxford Medieval History Seminar, 24th January 2011, was an expansion of the earlier paper of Richard’s I reported on last year and I don’t think I can think of anything extra to say this time round.

2. Specifically Einhard’s Vita Karoli and the Annals of Lorsch, the former of which is edited in the MGH and thus online here and more accessibly to the Anglolexic, at the cost of some appreciation of how cunning his Latin is I am told, and more on that later, by Lewis Thorpe in his Two Lives of Charlemagne: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer (Harmondsworth 1969, many reprints), and the latter edited by Ernst Katz in Georgius Heinricus Pertz (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum: Scriptores tomus I (Hannover 1839), pp. 19-39, and mostly translated by P. D. King in his Charlemagne: translated sources (Lancaster 1987), pp. 137-145.

3. As well as the snippets from the Internet Medieval Sourcebook I’ve linked to above, most of these texts exist in some kind of translation, thus I know of: Katherine Fischer Drew (transl.), The Laws of the Salian Franks (Philadelphia 1991) and eadem (transl.), The Lombard Laws (Philadelphia 1996), though I also know that I somewhere read a review of the former by Patrick Wormald (in English Historical Review or Speculum I think, something I could hit by accident on JSTOR anyway) in which he said, roughly, “well, we’ve been needing a decent translation of the Salic Law for a long time and guess what, we still do”. Not a man to mince his words, dear Mr Wormald. There’s also Theodore John Rivers (transl.), The Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks (New York City 1986), which I guess didn’t meet his exacting taste either. Still plenty more to do though. For the Goths, there’s S. P. Scott (transl.), The Visigothic Code (New York City 1910, 2nd. edn. 1922), online here. The Latin of all these texts and more is edited in the various volumes of the MGH’s Leges series. On how the Visigothic Law survives in this period, you can see Roger Collins, “‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet‘: law and charters in ninth- and tenth-century León and Catalonia” in English Historical Review Vol. 100 (London 1985), pp. 489-512, & idem, “Visigothic Law and Regional Diversity in Disputes in Early Medieval Spain” in Wendy Davies & Paul Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge 1986), pp. 85-104, both of which are reprinted in R. Collins, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain, Variorum Collected Studies 356 (Aldershot 1992), V & VI respectively, but now also Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past (Ithaca 2004), pp. 33-55.

4. Best now approached via Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written word (Cambridge 1989), pp. 23-37, and now Christina Pössel, “Authors and Recipients of Carolingian Capitularies, 779-829” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Pössel & Peter Shaw (edd.), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12, Denkschriften der phil.-hist. Klasse 344 (Wien 2008), pp. 253-274.

5. And that definition is: “A document constructed as if for public reference, by which one party affirms the rights of another”, for which if you like you can quote J. Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of London 2005), p. 27. I think it’s the only one that works.

6. Not least of course Wendy Davies, Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford 2007), which deliberately covers only one sort of document and is really interesting about it.

Further musings and fine quotation

The last couple of days I have been musing over the various things in the rich stew that is Alice Rio’s 2006 article in Past and Present.¹ Though it’s on the list next to Simon Keynes’s article that provoked the last two posts by complete coincidence, nonetheless it raises some very similar issues, especially about the use of law, and left me remembering that although there are penalties in the Visigothic Law, which is the only one of the so-called ‘barbarian codes’ I know at all well, for crimes, obviously, and for misreporting or distortion of the laws, there aren’t per se penalties for just not doing things as the law dictates.² Alice has an example from a formulary of a charter by which someone would divide his inheritance equally, in plain defiance of the Salic Law that ran in the area whence the example comes; presumably, as with the case in the entry before, the law was rejected because it wouldn’t have seemed fair.³

Anyway, there are also in the article a couple of very useful quotes, and I wanted to put them somewhere and this seemed like the place. One is her own, and the other is a Dominique Barthélemy textbite that I should arguably have seen before.

The Barthélemy one first. Alice is observing that enslavement is frequently supposed to result from debt, and quotes Barthélemy as follows:⁴

D’ailleurs, toutes les formes de seigneurie ne reposent-elles pas sur une idéologie de la dette?

(Besides, don’t all forms of lordship rest on an ideology of debt?)

He may well be right. However, Alice is certainly right, out of context as well as in, when she earlier says:⁵

… the possibility of a discontinuous evolution is worth considering.

Yes. Every time. It doesn’t all happen in order. This is going to get quoted as much as Hubert Mordek’s one about the sources sometimes being right.⁶

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1. A. Rio, “Freedom and Unfreedom in Early Medieval Francia: the evidence of the legal formulae” in Past and Present no. 193 (Oxford 2006), pp. 7-40.

2. The Keynes article mentioned is S. D. Keynes, “Royal government and the use of the written word in late Anglo-Saxon England” in R. McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 226-257. The Visigothic Law, should the link in the post not satisfy, is edited as K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Leges Nationum Germanicum) I (Hannover 1902, repr. 2005), transl. S. P. Scott as The Visigothic Code (Boston 1922).

3. Rio, “Freedom and Unfreedom”, pp. 34-36, saying on p. 36, “Law was therefore more a reference to be customised than an enforceable rule.”

4. Ibid., p. 28 n. 70, citing D. Barthélemy, “Qu’est-ce que le servage, en France, au XI^e siècle?” in Revue Historique no. 287 (Paris 1992), pp. 233-284 at p. 265.

5. Rio, “Freedom and Unfreedom”, p. 19.

6. H. Mordek, “Karolingische Kapitularien” in idem (ed.), Überlieferung und Geltung der normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (Sigmaringen 1986), pp. 25-50 at p. 30: “[M]an muss der Überlieferung immer die Chance geben, recht zu behalten”. I owe this quote to Dr Christina Pössel who uses it in her thesis, “Symbolic communication and the negotiation of power at Carolingian regnal assemblies, 814-840” (Ph. D. thesis, University of Cambridge 2004), and kindly let me see the relevant chapter in draft. She translates the quote as “One must always allow for the possibility that the sources are actually right.”