Doublepoints

Just a short note to let you know that I have a new post up at Cliopatria discussing objectivity, peasants, ghosts and memory apropos of an article of Simon Doubleday’s I was reading on my way up to Leeds. Some of the themes are old ones here and some are new material. You may like to have a look…

Feudal Transformations X: Stephen White vs. Thomas Bisson, 2nd round

It’s both good and bad to come back to an older post and revise it: good because it means I’m learning something, bad because I was wrong about being up to speed with it. But, I’ve never claimed to have the feudal transformation worked out, only that I might be getting closer to it, so here is another step closer, a post which engages with two of the previous ones from the Spoleto series (whose seed articles the seed of this one cites) and maybe even gets us further on.

The article this time is by Stephen White, who has featured here before and is with Dominique Barthélemy one of the more implacable opponents of the ‘feudal revolution’ theory or theories. Here, in a short and pithy article, he takes on Thomas Bisson’s ideas about violence and the importance of feudo-vassalic relations in the rearrangement of society that is held by many to have taken place around the year 1000 in Western Europe.¹ Many might think this is greedy, as Professor White had already had a go at that thesis in 1996 as part of a debate in which Bisson was given a fairly thorough historiographic kicking by a selection of people who usually work earlier than him, White being the signal traitor from his own period.² However, as discussed here Bisson went on with his theory after that, contending perhaps that no-one had really taken his point, which I might manage some sympathy with as White doesn’t necessarily seem to have taken it here either.³ What he does do however is remove an awful lot of the stuff that Bisson built up from his basic point, so it’s worth discussing here very briefly and then giving my own impression of the debate.

By his work shall ye know him (I can't find a picture of Bisson)

Professor Stephen White

The late Professor Georges Duby

(Those images won’t lay out as I want them, but it’s more fun than not trying at all.)

White points out that Georges Duby, who largely started this whole debate off, didn’t think that fiefs, and therefore agreements over them, feudal relations as most properly understood, were very important where he studied, whereas Bonnassie saw them all over Catalonia and thought their repurposing crucial to the changes in society that took place.⁴ Bisson, argues White, tries to have it both ways by stressing that society in the wake of the transformation is entirely based around such pacts, and that they are clearly a very poor and ineffective substitute for the public government through courts and officials that had gone before. This is why Bisson got a kicking, and White proceeds to repeat it by arming himself with the work of Jinty Nelson and pointing out that the Carolingian state absolutely operated in such bases of patronage, agreements of service, and most crucially of all oaths of fidelity, whose language, White argues, is repeated almost word-for-word in the texts that Bisson uses, chief among them the Conventum Hugonis about which we were talking here not so long ago, to demonstrate the new era.⁵ Neither old nor new orders actually existed as Bisson conceives them, White argues, and the feudo-vassalic agreements that Bisson sees as a novel symptom of a new kind of society are in fact traditional texts taken, in the instance of Hugh the Chiliarch’s plaint and the letters of Fulbert of Chartres, to previously unpreserved lengths of detailed application which could nonetheless all have been sourced from Cicero, Carolingian capitularies, and ordinary oaths of the previous centuries.

Fair? Well, only partly. I too see problems with Bisson’s arguments about fiefs, seeing them where others do not, and I’ve discussed that already. On the other hand, though, I don’t read Bisson’s 1994 article the way that White seems to. White sees Bisson as arguing for a crisis of fidelity c. 1000, whence his article’s title; I find that Bisson argues for a rather broader change of political culture, in which an élite previously trammelled by a royal system of regulation is now set free to exercise its increasing monopoly on violence to its own advantage. This is a failure of the ‘public order’ in two senses, firstly that it doesn’t stop them, and secondly that it’s no longer a source for the lands and honores for which these lords now fight each other. I stress that I don’t necessarily agree with this in toto, but it is broader than White makes it.

Map of Europe c. 1100 CE (click-through for far better one)

Also White’s argument ultimately leads to a situation where nothing really changed in society over the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas it seems pretty demonstrable that stuff actually did. I mean, at the simplest level, the Carolingian Empire broke up into a welter of smaller states, many of which we now know and love. Even if the basis of political relations at a low level was the same circa 820 and circa 1020, which is the keystone of White’s argument and with which as a statement I don’t have a problem, the fact that the superstructure of 820 had vanished two centuries later must affect the way those people go about their business in each case. In the simplest terms, that development removes the ability to appeal beyond a certain level that had previously been there; so people’s ideas of what’s possible must change and that must affect what they try to do. It can’t just stay the same, even if there are documentary arguments which mean that change may be overstated by the mutationnistes.⁶ And it’s this change in political horizons that Bisson has seen clearly where White’s work seems to blur it, perhaps because his work on the early period is essentially local anyway.⁷ This is what Bisson sees as explaining the wave of violence that he finds in the sources, and it’s perhaps the proliferation of local lordships against which there is no recourse that leads to new kinds of records lamenting violence, whereas beforehand the victims would have gone to the king or his missi or someone, someone who is in many areas no longer available, rather than resorting to local rhetoric and calling on their saints and so forth. And that alteration in horizons and external involvements means that it’s each man for himself on a more local basis than before, however much of that sort of vying there was before the collapse, and we see this, as has also been discussed here, giving rise to a proliferation of local castles and so forth. Some of course see the proliferation of castles as the cause of that change of political targeting, but if so the castles are only happening because of the collapse of that consensus of authority that might prevent their building, so I think it’s all the same but parallel, not series.⁸

So in sum: Bisson has a genuine point but strings impossible derivations from it, White also has a point but fails to recognise Bisson’s and to an extent fails to describe the actual developments of the time, Barthélemy says we’re all misreading the evidence anyway but when pushed seems still to admit that there was change, an impression he can only get from those self-same sources and hey, he wasn’t supposed to be in this post anyway.¹⁰ And I think there genuinely was a change, but I’m not going to say that pulling lots of its parts back to a collapse of royal authority is enough of an explanation, because why does that authority fail hey? So this is not yet my answer, but it is a notice that I still don’t think we have a good enough one yet. By the time this goes up, I shall of course have heard another one, so we’ll see if I still stand by this then…

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1. Stephen White, “A crisis of fidelity in c. 1000″ in Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy & Julio Escalona (edd.), Building Legitimacy: political discourses and forms of legitimation in medieval societies, The Medieval Mediterranean: peoples, economies and societies, 400-1500, 53 (Leiden 2004), pp. 27-48, taking on Thomas N. Bisson, “The Feudal Revolution” in Past and Present no. 142 (Oxford 1994), pp. 6-42.

2. Dominique Barthélemy, “Debate: the feudal revolution. I”, transl. J. Birrell in Past and Present no. 152 (Oxford 1996), pp. 196-205; Stephen D. White, “Debate: the feudal revolution. II” ibid., pp. 205-223, repr. as “The ‘feudal revolution’: comment. II” in idem, Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France, Variorum Collected Studies 817 (London 2005), II; Timothy Reuter, “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution’. III” in Past and Present no. 155 (Oxford 1997), pp. 177-195; Chris Wickham, “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution’. IV” ibid., pp. 197-208.

3. Bisson defends himself in Thomas N. Bisson, “Debate: the `Feudal Revolution’. Reply” ibid., pp. 208-234, and continues in idem, “Lordship and Tenurial Dependence in Flanders, Provence and Occitania (1050-1200)” in Il Feudalesimo nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 47 (Spoleto 2000), I pp. 389-439 with discussion pp. 441-446.

4. Referring to Georges Duby, La Société aux XI^e et XII^e siècles dans le region mâconnaise, Bibliothèque de l’École Pratique des Hauts Études, VI^e section (Paris 1953, 2nd edn. 1971), repr. in Qu’est-ce que c’est la Féodalisme (Paris 2001), of which pp. 155, 170-172, 185-195 & 230-245 transl. Frederick L. Cheyette as “The Nobility in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Mâconnais” in idem (ed.), Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: selected readings (New York 1968), pp. 137-155, and on which see now idem, “Georges Duby’s Mâconnais after fifty years: reading it then and now” in Journal of Medieval History Vol. 28 (Amsterdam 2002), pp. 291-317; and Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du Milieu du X^e à la Fin du XI^e Siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société (Toulouse 1975-1976), 2 vols, II pp. 575-599 & 609-610 transl. in idem, “The Banal Seigneurie and the `Reconditioning’ of the Free Peasantry” in Lester K. Little & Barbara H. Rosenwein (edd.), Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings (Oxford 1998), pp. 114-133, II pp. 781-829 transl. J. Birrell as “The Noble and the Ignoble: a new nobility and a new servitude in Catalonia at the end of the eleventh century” in Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, transl. J. Birrell (Cambridge 1991), pp. 196-242. On the place of such oaths and agreements in Catalan history see now Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: power, order and the written word, 1000-1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 51 (Cambridge 2001).

5. The work in question being Janet L. Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 383-430.

6. Barthélemy so described Poly and Bournazel in his “La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu? (Note critique)” in Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations Vol. 47 (Paris 1992), pp. 767-777; they responded in kind with “Que faut-il préférer au « mutationisme »? ou le problème du changement sociale” in Revue historique de droit français et étranger Vol. 72 No. 3 (Paris 1994), pp. 401-412, with a further round as Barthélemy, “Encore le débat sur l’an mil” ibid. Vol. 74 (1996), pp. 349-360 & Poly & Bournazel, “Post scriptum“, ibid. pp. 361-362. Why have I never written all those down in one place before? That took ages to pin down and then I find François Bougard did it already: “Genèse et réception du Mâconnais de Georges Duby” in Bulletin du Centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre, Hors serie 1 (2008), online here.

7. See for example the papers collected in White, Feuding and Peace-making, and the review by Jonathan Jarrett in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 15 (Oxford 2007). pp. 124-126.

8. Referring to Michel Bur, “Le féodalisme dans le royaume franc jusqu’à l’an mil: la seigneurie” in Feudalesimo, pp. 53-78 with discussion pp. 79-83.

When is a fief not a fief? When it’s a fisc (Feudal Transformations IX)

Bishop Ermengol of Urgell mistrusting a lay magnate doing homage to him, from the Liber Feudorum Maior

If we’re looking at feudalism, and I’m afraid we still are, I think I’ve said by now that the meaning of that term that I find most plausible out of the several possible ones is that one that sticks to the etymology, and deals with the relations of lords and their followers who do service for a temporary grant of land under terms: feudo-vassalic relations, as some call it to disambiguate it from the other senses of ‘feudalism’.¹ Because we’re working, ultimately, from the Latin feodum, or sometimes feudum, which becomes in English ‘fee’ and, via French, ‘fief’. And in the Oxford English Dictionary, firstly those two entries crosslink in the online version, but secondly the definition is:

fief

/feef/

• noun 1 historical an estate of land held on condition of feudal service. 2 a person’s sphere of operation or control.

– DERIVATIVES fiefdom noun.

– ORIGIN Old French, variant of feu “fee”.

A bit circular, but clear enough. But is that what it means in the documents? Sometimes, alas, no; it’s not as simple as indexing uses of feodum and seeing how they rise or fall (even if you had the kind of sample or statistical significance measurement that would make such an exercise meaningful). Feodum doesn’t really crop up much before the ninth century, and when it does occur then it actually means ‘a supporting allotment of public land, or the revenues from it’, so for example, a fiscal castle will have an associated feodum which provides its upkeep.² In this element it’s really quite like fiscum, which doesn’t quite mean the institution of the fisc, the landstock of the public power, as we read it now, but its individual portions. So that castle might just as well have a fisc, and some Catalan documents actually use the two words as equivalents, “fiscis sive feodis”.³

Certainly, use of the term feodum goes up and up in the eleventh century. And if you’re Dominique Barthélemy (which, after all I’ve said about him here, I kind of hope you’re not), you emphasise that the two words have been associated for a long long time and that you can’t be sure what’s meant when a fief turns up, and deny the whole transformation because you’ve spent years taking the model apart in detail in different places.⁴ On the other hand, if you’re Thomas Bisson, you perhaps generally prefer not to sacrifice the big picture by getting bogged down in that detail, and like to try and show that big things are genuinely changing, and that does at least make a better story.⁵ But if you do it by simply counting the use of the word feodum without ever considering its ambiguity or the sample size of the documents, you don’t necessarily carry me with you… ⁶

It’s not that his Spoleto article here isn’t interesting, or even valid. The contrast he draws between Flanders, where a public power remains in control of the new feudal arrangements of military service, and where they don’t therefore lead to a total collapse such as Catalonia suffers, between Provence where it does all go a bit wrong because there’s no overall power that can bring it back into order, even a feudal order, and between Occitania where there isn’t even too much trouble but where the feudo-vassalic structure nonetheless becomes the overriding social structure, is interesting, and deserves more investigation, though by someone else as it goes too late for me. But without some deeper investigation of how the words is used in these very different areas, I don’t necessarily think we’re comparing like with like, and we certainly can’t really quantify these supposed fiefs.

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1. You can find this usage defended in Thomas N. Bisson, “The Feudal Revolution” in Past and Present no. 142 (Oxford 1994), pp. 6-42.

2. So, for example, in Federico Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas: Escuela de Estudios Medievales, Textos XVIII, Publicaciones de la Sección de Barcelona no. 15 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 159.

3. Manuel Riu, “Hipòtesi entorn dels orígens del feudalisme a Catalunya” in Quaderns d’Estudis Medievals Vol. 2 no. 4 (Barcelona 1981), pp. 195-208 at pp. 203-204, including a 1003 document from Sant Pere de Besalú which confers revenues, “ex censali publico, quod vulgum feum nominat… “; Dominique Barthélemy, “Autor d’un récit de pactes (« Conventum Hugonis »): La seigneurie châtelaine et le féodalisme, en France au XI^e siècle” in Il Feudalismo nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 47 (Spoleto 2000), I pp. 447-489 with discussion 491-495, at p. 458 where he cites Marc Bloch, “Questions féodales” in Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale Vol. 10 (Paris 1938) at p. 174 & idem, “Histoire d’un mot” in Annales d’Histoire Sociale Vol. 1 (Paris 1939), pp. 187-190.

4 Classically, Dominique Barthélemy, “La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu? (Note critique)” in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 47 (Paris 1992), pp. 767-777; in English, idem “Debate: the feudal revolution. I”, transl. J. Birrell, in Past and Present no. 152 (1996), pp. 196-205; idem, “The Year 1000 Without Abrupt or Radical Transformation”, eds & transl. Lester K. Little & Barbara H. Rosenwein, rev. Barthélemy, in Little & Rosenwein (eds), Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings (Oxford 1998), pp. 134-147; and, most relevantly, Barthélemy, “Autour d’un récit de pactes”.

5 Bisson, “Feudal Revolution”; idem, Tormented Voices: power, crisis, and humanity in rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 (Cambridge MA 1998).

6. Bisson, “Lordship and Tenurial Dependence in Flanders, Provence and Occitania (1050-1200)” in Feudalesimo, I pp. 389-439 with discussion pp. 441-446, including a lengthy critique from Barthélemy which however goes for him on a subjective basis about how serious disorder was, allowing Bisson to simply restate his own view, rather than this point where he’s actually weak.