Some reflections on violence, reconciliation and the “feudal revolution.

Fredric L. Cheyette

[Published in Conflict in Medieval Europe, ed. Piotr Gorecki and Warren Brown pp. 243-64

(Ashgate, 2003) Pagination inserted in this .pdf.]

When Georges Duby died, I was moved to read once again the book that first made his

reputation and that for many medievalists represents his masterpiece, La société aux XIe et XIIe

siècles dans la région mâconnaise .1 This book was in many ways the fons et origo of two

generations of French medieval social history, the model for untold numbers of theses on “la terre et

les hommes” in one region or another of Europe, many published and many more that will probably

never be completed.2 For the social and political history of the tenth and eleventh centuries in France,

the Mâconnais created what we may call the “standard model.” Although Duby himself was very

cautious about using the word “feudal,” out of his description of the transformation of Burgundian

society around the year 1000 eventually came the dominating picture of the mutation féodale,

Englished as the “feudal revolution.”3

Violence and the social means by which it was controlled, if not a major topic in the pages

Duby devoted to the tenth and eleventh centuries, figure prominently among the assumptions that

guide his argument. They continue to lurk — quietly or not — on the fringes or at the heart of many

discussions of the “feudal revolution.” The path from the Mâconnais to the [244] subject of this

conference, therefore, inevitably leads to a detour through the terminology and definition of

“feudalism.” In following this side road, I do not intend to go back over the ground long ago plowed

by Elizabeth A.R. Brown and more recently by Susan Reynolds concerning the use of the words

“feudal” and “feudalism” and the concepts they refer to.4 But before I turn to the large question of

how our developing understanding of the processes of violence and reconciliation in the eleventh and
 2

twelfth centuries destabilizes what has been for over a generation the “standard model,” I want to

reflect for a moment on why we have so long bothered with ‘feudalism,’ the mutation féodale or

‘feudal revolution,’ and why we should stop doing so.

It is now a commonplace to recognize that the concept of ‘feudalism,’ if not the word itself,

gradually emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth century and was given a major impulse in the

writings of eighteenth-century lawyers. The particular form that has so long afflicted historical

studies, however, is the child of the intellectual and particularly the scientific world of the nineteenth

century. The model of scientific rigor and intellectual progress was then biology (or “natural history,”

as its practitioners usually called it), an endeavor then dominated by the concept of species. The task

of the naturalist was to define the characteristics and particular structures of individual species, class

them in relation to each other, and then describe their usefulness to man. Adam and Eve naming the

plants and animals in the Garden of Eden were the model of the scientist at work. Typologies, in

consequence, were the preeminent form of scientific thought. As geology and its sister science

paleontology slowly opened up a world of vanished species, naturalists had to face the question of

how and why some disappeared, others survived, and new species came into existence. That was

Darwin’s question, and the theory of natural selection with which he eventually answered it

revolutionized Western understanding of the history of living beings on this planet. Only in our own

days, however, has biology gone through the second revolution that allows us to understand the

genetic mechanisms on which natural selection operates and thus explain how evolution occurs.

Taxonomy still thrives, but in the course of this second revolution in the biological sciences, the

concept of species has been transformed; species have lost their fixity. No longer is a species

considered a group whose similarities can be precisely defined and measured; no longer can one
 3

imagine finding a perfect specimen of a species. For a species is now thought of as a population, one

[245] that is reproductively isolated and inhabits a specific ecological niche.5 We now know that if

we wish to explain the dynamics of biological populations, if we want to understand evolutionary

processes, it is the variability of the genome within a given population that we have to comprehend,

not the fixity of form. Genetic variability is what makes evolution possible.

For nineteenth-century historians and sociologists, biology was the scientific model to follow:

to be scientific one had to define the species of social organisms and eventually trace the succession

or transformations through which one turned into another. For the historian as for his scientific

colleagues, to define these sociological species meant above all to specify their structures, their

fundamental characteristics, the sociological equivalent of the beaks of birds or the bone structures

of mammals. And of these species, feudalism and capitalism were among the most important.6

Species taxonomy preoccupied our illustrious predecessors. Marc Bloch was working within

the direct line of this tradition when in his Feudal Society he defined the classic feudalism of the lands

between the Loire and the Rhine, and the curious “variants” that appeared in Occitania, Spain, and

Germany. So was Georges Duby when he set about defining the essential characteristics of late-

Carolingian society in the Mâconnais whose disappearance led to the rise of castellans, the emergence

of the knightly class, and the development of banal lordship over the peasantry. Both would have

learned from Durkheim to think of social history as a sequence of species,7 defined as structures or

types in which economies, family organization, and “collective sentiments” (the mentalités of the later

Annales school) were all functionally related. Whether directly from Durkheim or Marx or under the

influence of these French masters, the habit continued in the next generation. I recall with wry

amusement how much time I spent as a graduate student fathoming the complex typologies of
 4

feudalism and manorialism and, as a teaching assistant, trying to convince my students of these

typologies’ importance. Among some of my colleagues as among [246] those of an older generation,

Marxism only increased the grip of this preoccupation. It too was a product of nineteenth-century

science, and Marx and Engels had learned their sociological anthropology from the same masters as

Durkheim: from Henry Maine, Lewis Henry Morgan, J.M. McLennan, and their supporters and

opponents.8 The proponents of mutationisme — whether in its soixante-huitarde, its royalist, or its

liberal form — are only the most recent practitioners of this type of historical sociology, little touched

by the transformation of the science that their distant predecessors once imitated.

Should historians care about that transformation? Now that biologists have replaced the old

taxonomic methods of natural history with the study of population genetics, should we abandon the

old taxonomies of social species? That is a question that surely deserves extended consideration,

though this is not the place for it. One aspect, however, is directly relevant to the story of a “feudal

revolution.” Nineteenth-century naturalists, strong in their belief in the fixity of species, were hard

put to explain the appearance of new species in the geological record. Some, eager to retain their

belief in the truth of the Genesis story of creation, asserted that these new species were evidence for

God’s continuous presence in the world: each was an individual act of divine creation. Others,

following Lamarck (and ignoring the work of Mendel), believed that acquired characteristics could

be inherited, and in this way species adapt themselves to changes in their environment. Either way

the change was abrupt: an old species vanished and was replaced by a new one or turned into a new

one.

And so with social species, for Durkheim as well as Marx. Here is Durkheim on the passage

from “mechanical solidarity” to “organic solidarity”:

 5

[Organic solidarity] rests on principles so different from [mechanical solidarity] that

it can develop only in proportion to the effacement of that preceding type. ... No

doubt, when this new organization begins to appear, it tries to utilize the existing

organization and assimilate it. ... But this mixed arrangement cannot long endure, for

between the two states that it attempts to reconcile, there is an antagonism which

necessarily ends in a break. [Organic solidarity] can grow only by freeing itself from

the framework which encloses it. ... The social material must enter into entirely new

combinations in order to organize itself upon completely different foundations. But

the old structure, so far as its persists, is opposed to this. That is why it must

disappear.9

The argument is not only totally a priori, it stems from Durkheim’s reification of his two analytical

constructs. The need for a sudden, [247] revolutionary, alteration comes not from an observation

of any phenomena in the real world, but from the manner in which he has constructed his social

species, from the internal logic of his categories. The similarity between this passage and the

Communist Manifesto could reflect Durkheim’s reading of Marx, but could just as easily derive from

their use of identical intellectual methods. Like the concept of “social structure” to which it is closely

tied, any notion of a social “species” in this nineteenth-century manner must inevitably have recourse

to a sudden break, a “revolution,” or a “mutation” (in the nineteenth-century naturalist rather than

the late-twentieth-century geneticist sense), in order to explain how a new social species replaces an

old one. It is inherent in the conceptual logic of the old notion of species. It is there before the

historian reads a single charter.

This may be one of the reasons that “feudalism” and the various narratives of the mutation
 6

or transformation that brought it into being have over the years been unable to accommodate the

discoveries of detailed research in the sources. For me to catalogue all these moments would be a

work of supererogation. I will recall only a few. The identification of ‘feudal society’ — whatever

dates we want to put on it — with fief-holding among the elite was called into question by Duby

himself, when he showed in the Mâconnais that until the thirteenth century most elite property in the

region was alodial. That phenomenon has now been confirmed in many regions. Among many other

achievements, it was a first step towards understanding that the land-holding arrangements of post-

Conquest England — or at least a certain image of post-Conquest England — were not the model

for all of Europe. Duby also helped to dismantle an alternative definition of “feudalism” when he

showed that peasants in the Mâconnais also had alodial property and owed few if any labor services,

a fact noted here and there over the years by a number of cartulary editors but rarely if ever

mentioned in general histories. If the Mâconnais in the eleventh- and twelfth-century was a “feudal

society,” located between the Loire and the Rhine and thus within Marc Bloch’s core area of classic

“feudalism,” then this particular social species could not be identified with serfdom and labor services

either.

More recent attempts to single out the fundamental characteristics of “feudal” society have

also foundered on more exhaustive examination of the evidence. The process of incastellamento and

the rise of castellans, the building of castles and the grouping of new village centers with subject

populations around them, is one of the more recent alternative narratives for the birth of feudal

society. Investigations on the ground, however, has shown that while some villages did gather

around castles between 1000 and 1200, far more seem to have gathered around churches. A recent

survey of the villages of the Mediterranean plain between the Rhone and Roussillon, has shown that
 7

the flood plains of the Hérault and Orb rivers where Monique [248] Bourin traced the process of

village incastellation, are the only areas in this region where it occurred widely. What we might call

inchiesamento is the predominant pattern elsewhere on this part of the Mediterranean plain.10

Meanwhile — based on her work in southern Scandinavia, where compact villages also developed

during the same period without any castles being present — one student of the subject11 has

suggested that the primary push towards village formation was a change in the organization of

peasant agriculture, having little or nothing to do with lordly constraint. As for the identification of

‘feudal society’ with banal lordship, that may have a longer shelf life, though we may be sure that the

standard interpretation of this phenomenon as well will eventually come under scrutiny.

* * *

How have studies of violence and dispute-processing entered into this unfolding critique of the

concept of “feudalism” and the “feudal revolution”?

It seems to me that what lies behind much of the “problem of violence” in the eleventh and

twelfth centuries is the profound belief, shared by many historians as well as sociologists and political

scientists, in the ideology of state sovereignty, an ideology with strong Hobbesian coloration. This

belief may have been fostered in our own age by the absence of an international authority capable of

preventing two world wars, but its academic roots lie deep in the early history of the social sciences.

It is the belief that, without constraint from above, society will fall into anarchy, without constraint

from above the strong will do what they wish and the weak will suffer what they must, a belief

explicitly propounded by Durkheim, from whose pages the founding generation of Annales social

history absorbed it. Duby in the early chapters of the Mâconnais is quite explicit; it is a proposition

that, for him, needs no demonstration, a simple assumption that underlies his description of the first
 8

emergence of “feudal society,” of the world of the castellans.

After the weakening of comital authority in the eleventh century, the aristocracy, now

bound only by feudal institutions, finds itself freed from all real constraints. The most

powerful enjoy total independence. The lesser nobility, though constrained by the

services due from their fiefs, are also largely free to do what they wish. If they commit

a wrong, there is no precise tribunal to judge [249] them, none to punish them. For

the upper class, feudalism is a step on the way to anarchy.12

Without this belief the standard model of the “castellan revolution” and the mutation féodale, derived

from Duby’s Mâconnais, would have a shaky foundation indeed.

Added to this are the presuppositions of what Herbert Butterfield long ago called “Whig

history,” and its equivalents in the historiography of non-English-speaking countries, presuppositions

that are deeply imbedded in what has long been the standard textbook narrative of the Middle Ages.

If one projects the teleology of the nation-state backwards in time as well as forward, the eleventh and

early twelfth centuries, the centuries “without a state,” have to be centuries of violence, not because

the state-builders of the twelfth century, people like Henry II and his sons, or Alfons “the Battler,” or

the emperor Frederick I, were such a violent crowd, but because of the violence perpetrated by the

unrestrained masters of castles and by all those unruly barons and rebellious cities the aggrandizing

kings had to put down.

The research that led to my 1970 article on arbitrating disputes13 came directly out of a subset

of the Whig narrative, which along the way had become fused with what [250] we might call the pre-

Mâconnais feudal narrative. The standard model of the development of medieval royal government

that held sway fifty years ago assured us that royal justice had made its way as a rival to baronial
 9

justice, which had long preceded it. This baronial justice, of course, was exercised in “feudal” courts,

attended by the barons’ vassals. In the mid-1960s I headed off to Narbonne, which has a rich

thirteenth-century archive, to investigate the means and methods of this royal takeover. What I

discovered was that the standard model had nothing to do with what was in the archives. It was a

figment of the imagination of several generations of medievalists. I really should not have been

surprised. Duby had in fact discovered the same thing in the Mâconnais, though he labeled what he

had found — dispute resolution by arbitration and compromise — “private justice” and placed his

description of it in the uneasy neighborhood of “feudal anarchy.” That, I suppose, blinded me at the

time to what he was in fact talking about.

We now know far more about the processes of dispute resolution before the advent of royal

justice, before the imposition of sovereign control. We also know that those old processes did not

easily disappear even after the advent of royal justice.14 Thanks to this work it is now hard to

remember what the standard model of the history of judicial institutions once was. One part of the old

Whig narrative, the old feudal narrative of baronial courts, has largely vanished. It has been replaced

with an ever more complex understanding of the slow imposition of royal and great princely power

on the emerging kingdoms and great principalities of western Europe, and — even more importantly

— with a more complex understanding of the societies on which that power was imposed.

In contrast, the earlier part of the Whig narrative, the one projected backwards from the

thirteenth century (I am tempted to say, “from the eighteenth century”) is still — at least in some

quarters — solidly in place, despite the siren voice of Dominique Barthélemy and despite Duby’s own

rejection of some of its more dogmatic assertions late in his career.15 The narrative is familiar to all

of us. First comes the breakdown of royal power in the tenth-century wars of rival claimants to
 10

Carolingian legitimacy and the renewed incursions of Vikings, Saracens, and Magyars. The old public

order, however, remains alive under the rule of the counts. Then, in the decades around the year 1000,

the last vestiges of that public order collapse, and in its absence, power falls into the hands of those

strong and rich enough to build castles and dominate the population roundabout. The age of the

castellans, the age of evil customs and the seigneurie banale is upon us. The old unfree of the

Carolingian world are replaced by a new subject population, those subject to banal lordship, while

those who escape this new subjection become the seed of the new warrior elite.

Duby’s manner of telling this story was deeply seductive and eventually swept the previous

standard narrative into the dust bin. It was indeed so seductive that no one, to my knowledge, ever

checked out Duby’s database, the early volumes of the Cluny charter collection and the cartulary of

[251] St-Vincent of Mâcon, to see how he had read the documents, though it would have been easy

to do so, as François Ganshof had surveyed the same materials twenty-five years earlier.16 What one

finds in those volumes is that the documentary basis for his description of the tenth century world —

the world that was transformed in the decades around the year 1000 — is very thin indeed. Duby went

to these documents with a picture already set in his mind of what the late Carolingian world had to

look like, including the still functioning public institutions, notably the public court whose viability

maintained the clear distinction between the free and the unfree. Because he went looking for this,

this is what he found. The evidence for such a picture, however, amounts to little more than the use

of the expression “in mallo publico” in nine tenth-century documents that record dispute settlements,

and the settlement of disputes in the presence of the count or a viscount in eighteen other tenth-

century documents and two from the early eleventh century, some of them recorded following the

standard Carolingian placitum formulae. (As far as I have been able to determine, only fifteen of these
 11

documents are actually cited by Duby in his footnotes, though the others may be cited in other

contexts.17) I say ‘dispute settlements’ rather than court judgments because the vast majority of these

documents are quitclaims (notitiae guarpitiones) as they will continue to be in the eleventh and twelfth

centuries. In the small number of cases where a trial is actually described, it is on one occasion a trial

by battle followed by a quitclaim,18 in another all that is reported is that the count, the bishop and all

their fideles declare that the cathedral of Mâcon is in the right,19 and in almost all the others the proof

is by oath on relics. These are not the only dispute settlements among the more than 2400 tenth-

century documents in these two collections. I have found thirty-eight others, in the presence of the

bishop, the abbot of Cluny, or other monastic officials. Except for the reference to the public mallus,

usually in the context of the standard Carolingian placitum form, and the occasional mention of

scabini, little distinguishes the texts that mention the mallus from the records of dispute settlements

that do not mention it, and little distinguishes the corpus of tenth-century dispute settlement as a whole

from the equivalent records I am familiar with in eleventh- and twelfth-century Languedoc or those

contained in later volumes of the Cluny charter collection. When Ganshof [252] looked at these same

texts in 1928 he concluded that they showed Carolingian institutions “in full decay.”20

The membership of these tenth-century courts also differs little from that of the eleventh- and

twelfth-century gatherings to settle disputes that I am familiar with elsewhere. Far from being “all free

men” as Duby insisted, those who man the courts in the Mâconnais can easily be identified as the

count’s and bishop’s friends, their entourage. On occasion, some of them are specifically named their

fideles.21 They appear in the company of the count not just in the public mallus, but when he is giving

lands to the church; and he sometimes appears as witness when one of them is a donor. On occasion,

and probably more often than my limited means allow me to tell, the witnesses to quitclaims that are
 12

not made in the count’s presence are members of the same small group of fideles.22 Duby, in other

parts of his discussion, in fact identifies many of these men as the ancestors of those who will be the

great castellans of the eleventh century. Already around 920 some of these fideles are called miles,

a half century earlier than Duby thought the term first appeared.23 Should they not be considered the

powerful men of the city and countryside?24 The documents tell us little about what gifts these faithful

may have received from the count, but there is plentiful evidence for the precaria they received from

the bishop of Mâcon and the abbot of Cluny. For donors of land to the church the practice was

already a sufficient problem in the mid-tenth century for some of them to specify that their donations

could not be alienated in that manner and to call down the curse of God on anyone who did so.25

[253] A few of these tenth-century precarial grants are quite explicit about the reasons for giving

them. Here is one from the quill of abbot Mayeul in 974: “Spiritual men should treat their fideles well

(fidelibus in posterum consulere) in order that they be more prompt in their deference and that their

services not be made use of without temporal compensation.” Four years later the abbot gave land

to the bishop of Lyon, “that he may be our aid and defender, our guardian and most faithful hope.”26

The first text echoes a standard phrase in imperial grants of benefices.27 In the second, we

immediately recognizes the biblical language. Gift and companionship, gift and service, gift and

protection: the familiar combinations are already there in the tenth century. They are the actions and

values that already hold these communities of great lords and powerful followers together. They are

projected onto the next world, as well, when St Vincent of Mâcon and the abbey of Fleury establish

their brotherhood through an exchange of land, “that by enriching with earthly goods they may enjoy

heavenly companionship.”28 These values are at the heart of what we might call the “culture of

fidelity.”
 13

Powerful men surrounded by their fideles, who are well compensated with grants of land;

powerful miles among the followers of bishops (and doubtless also of the much less well documented

counts); an ideology of deference, service, and largesse binding lords to lords and lords to followers:

we expect to find practices and sentiments like this in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The

“standard model” of the mutation féodale, however, assumes a very different picture of the tenth

century. Should we then simply move the date for the mutation upstream to 900 or earlier? I don’t

think that would be a good idea.

As starting point for my argument I will take a placitum, an account of a dispute involving the

monastery of Nouaillé, not far from Poitiers, heard and resolved by a judicial assembly in 834. The

text as it has come down to us follows a standardized form that was employed throughout the

Carolingian world from Bavaria to the Pyrenees.29 It tells how the [254] monastery’s advocatus

complained that a man named Agnaldus had come with his slaves, tenants, and free men to a village

belonging to the monastery, violently beaten the monastery’s men, forced them to leave, and taken

their goods. King Peppin, it goes on, sent a missus to hear the complaint, and Agnaldus, unable to

deny that he had committed these wrongs, gave security to return the goods he had seized and do

whatever else that justice required.30 What makes this event pre-mutation? There is a king, we might

respond, and he has sent his agent to hear the complaint. After the mutation there would be no king

active in Poitou. Or, we might say, because Agnaldus has slaves. Each answer would match a well-

known definition of the mutation féodale. Yet what the monastery is complaining about looks very

much like what post-mutation monks complain about: the depredations of the strongmen in their

neighborhoods. Agnaldus himself looks very much like Duby’s description of an eleventh-century

castellan, except that no castle is mentioned. He is clearly a local potentate. He commands not only
 14

slaves and tenants but free men as well. Furthermore, the document carefully specifies that the king’s

missus is Agnaldus’s brother. What better indication of Agnaldus’s status? The family connection, and

the fact that the document takes care to mention it, suggests that some social processes are taking

place behind the scenes that the placitum is not talking about, processes that may be similar to those

that Warren Brown has described in ninth-century Bavaria or those we know so well from eleventh-

and twelfth-century documents.31 Perhaps there was a disputed inheritance, a dispute in which the

monastery had become involved, but whose resolution the placitum does not mention because it was

irrelevant to the monastery’s rights; perhaps the village was this brother’s, or another’s, gift to the

monastery, and Agnaldus claimed it as his own: we might imagine any number of scenarios in any

number of permutations.

There are individuals who act like Agnaldus in the early-tenth-century Mâconnais as well,

strongmen whose behavior cannot be distinguished from [255] that of later castellans (and who are

probably their ancestors), though the age of the castellans had supposedly not yet arrived. Among the

charters of Cluny we can spot a Humbert, probably of Beaujeu, who sometime in the 920s or 30s

became a monk and quit “the evil customs and unjust demands” that he had been making. Sometime

around 960 there is another Humbert, probably his nephew, to whom abbot Mayeul granted the

protection of four priories. The good abbot states that he is doing this “in place of the satisfaction and

repayment we demanded for the innumerable evils that you did to us and for which we wanted to

excommunicate you, and in return for your giving up what you took from us.” Humbert agrees not

take any “customs” from the priories. If invited to do so by a monk, he may dine there with ten

fighting men and then go his way.32

Is the presence of the king and of slaves in that text from Nouaillé sufficient to make the
 15

Carolingian world another species of society? Does the mention of the royal agent and the mallus

publicus over which he presides, whether in Aquitaine, in Burgundy, or in Bavaria, necessarily conjure

up a generically different institutional world, as Duby in the Mâconnais and the mutationistes would

have us believe?33 We must take this as a methodological problem before we turn it into an historical

problem. To what extent can we safely read tenth- and eleventh-century documents literally, as

transparent representations of contemporary realities? And what kind of realities to they tell us

about? Specifically, to what extent should we conceive what appear to be technical terms in these

texts as having institutional or legal referents, in this case using “mallus publicus” or the presence of

“scabini,” to construct in our minds an abstract locus of power and authority distinct from the personal

power and authority of the individuals who composed it? Answering these questions requires in turn

that we first answer two other quite different questions, one concerning the practices of the clerical

scribes who recorded the documents we read, the other concerning the relevance of our own

conceptual vocabulary to the society of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The scribes who produced the early medieval documents were notoriously conservative in the

words they chose to pen on parchment. Copying Merovingian and Visigothic formularies or

documents that were ultimately dependent on those formularies, they carried late Roman legal

formulae along through the centuries like flotsam on a stagnant pond. The mallus as the name for a

court goes back to the early Frankish kingdom.34 Its appearance in tenth-century documents may be

a conscious archaism, like the [256] mentions in the guarantee clauses at the end of sale and gift

contracts of fines to be paid in gold, or the references to legal rituals that were already archaic in the

later Roman world.35 The mentions of the mallus in tenth-century Burgundian texts, the use of the

centuries-old placitum formulary, may have been nothing more than the way monastic or capitular
 16

scribes or the scribe employed by the count36 gave greater weight to the dispute settlements they were

recording; there may have been no difference between the dispute-processing assemblies where the

term was used and those where it was not. Indeed, the fact that scribes recording twenty such

Mâconnais assemblies where a count or viscount presided did not use the phrase in mallo publico (as

against nine where they did use it) suggests that its presence or absence does not mark a legal or

institutional distinction but rather a rhetorical choice.37 Sometimes the bishop was present at these

judicial gatherings alongside the count. Did the presence of the bishop without the count place the

gathering in a different category?38 And if the bishop presiding does not put the gathering into a

different category, why should the presence of the abbot of Cluny or another monastic official?

This brings us to the critical distinction that Duby and, after him, the mutationistes make

between “private” and “public” dispute settlement. Warren Brown’s description of the judicial

activities of archbishop Arn of Salzburg early in the ninth century suggests that the reality of power

and authority in these judicial assemblies, even in those recorded as a public mallus, resided in the

individuals who composed them and those individuals’ connections with other power centers, the

Carolingian court and the local aristocracy. To argue thus is not to argue that Arn’s activities, or the

activities of others like him, were “private” as distinct from “public,” nor does it turn all judicial

assemblies, even those called “mallus publicus” into “private courts.” It simply recognizes that in the

Frankish world as in the Late Roman world, all power was personal (as Karl Ferdinand Werner has

[257] so cogently argued).39 The spread of placitum procedures may have cloaked older “informal”

methods of dispute settlement with more formal procedures, but, as Brown has demonstrated in

Bavaria, those informal procedures were never suppressed and soon enough began to contaminate the

placitum itself.40 This could happen easily, because the reality of power was not in the abstract
 17

“institutions” described by so many generations of legal historians and historians of social “structures,”

but in personal status, networks, and relationships and the familiar practices that embodied them. To

borrow the words of General DeGaulle, “Institutions? Men first of all.”

Duby’s account of the Carolingian public institutions that gave way with the demise of royal

and then of comital power depended entirely on his reading of the handful of placitum texts in the

Cluny and St-Vincent charter collections and his assumption that the use of the term mallus publicus

in the tenth century demonstrated the continued unaltered existence of an impersonal institutional locus

of power and authority. We now see that this is an account built on sand. Some features of the world

that supposedly only came into existence after the year 1000 were already present a century earlier;

others, and in particular the most widespread form of aristocratic dispute settlement, were present

even in the age of Charlemagne himself, with all the social rituals and values that they imply. The

powers of counts and bishops were not dependent on their offices but on their connections upward

to the royal court, outward to their fellow high aristocrats and downward to their networks of fideles.

Those faithful men were already important landholders, and — as the example of Agnaldus suggests

— they doubtless commanded their own troops of faithful armed men and rewarded them well for their

service and the “promptness of their deference.” And they were as liable as their eleventh-century

descendants to use an iron fist to assert their rights. For the militarization of society was already an

established fact in the sixth century, as is abundantly evident in the titles of magister militum, vir

spectabilis, and vir illustrissimus proudly borne by so many “barbarian” warlords in the fifth- and

sixth-century Roman court, evident in the archaeological record as well, in the “privileged burials,”

the reoccupation of iron-age hill forts, and the creation of new ones in the sixth century.41 The Franks,

like the Goths and other [258] competitors, could not have built their kingdoms and their Empire
 18

without those aristocratic military forces, and along with the profits they brought Carolingian rulers

they also fomented endless troubles.42

Thus, the “stateless” society of the eleventh century did not suddenly appear around the year

1000; it had already existed for half a millennium. For a brief time it was overlaid with the powers and

the wealth-redistribution networks of the Carolingian court and the imaginings of public authority that

Carolingian intellectuals produced, but that overlay was thin and fragile.43 The most visible long-term

effect may have been the creation of a new aristocratic class, but there is no evidence that the values

or practices of that class were new.44 Carolingian practices neither suppressed pre-Carolingian

practices nor, in all likelihood, seriously modified them. This “stateless” society was not, however,

a state of anarchy, for it had its own ways of maintaining a modicum of order. The spread of castles

in the tenth and eleventh centuries introduced a new form of military technology, but was that enough

to create a new type of society? I find this no more convincing than Lynn White Jr.’s old argument

that the invention of the stirrup caused the rise of feudalism.

To me, all these arguments seem cause enough to abandon “feudalism,” the “mutation

féodale,” the “feudal revolution,” and all their works and blandishments.

What shall we replace them with? That has always been the medieval historian’s cry of alarm.

It is hard to abandon old habits and even harder to throw away old lecture notes. My answer will not

be a miraculous cure. It may, in fact, suit no one but me. If that is the case, it will be all to the good

as long as the search for replacements goes on. For it may be time to abandon the very idea of a

standard narrative, to recognize that the sources allow a multiplicity of possible narratives, any of

which may be capable of illuminating in a new and interesting way a past that will never be fully known

or fully explained.
 19

[259] “Feudalism,” like all other “-isms,” asks us to define a particular distribution of power, a

particular social “structure.” I suggest that instead of looking for structures or species with all their

implied fixity we look at particular ways of doing things: social habits, practices, processes, each of

which may have a multiplicity of meanings and a multiplicity of effects, and each of which may follow

its own time-line, have its own particular history. We might think of these processes and practices as

forming a “population” of behaviors, functionally connected, perhaps, but never stable, always variable

in time and place, presenting to us an image in a kaleidoscope rather than an engineering blueprint or

a succession of blueprints. At the risk of returning to bad nineteenth-century habits, I suggest we

might think of these behaviors as capable of varying like the beaks of Darwin’s finches.

* * *

As an example of such practices I will take one that all medievalists are familiar with — oath-

taking. Narratives such as Galbert’s account of the murder of Charles the Good are filled with them,

and when teaching this text I have often urged my students to think of the society he describes not as

“feudal” but as “oath-taking.” My examples, however, will not come from northern Francia but from

Occitania.

Modern commentaries on medieval oaths have often turned them into contracts — especially

the oath of fidelity, which generations of textbook writers have turned into the “feudal contract.” Out

of that notion has come the standard question to ask about them: what specific obligations and

responsibilities do they place on each of the parties? The textbook answer is usually taken from the

well known letter from Fulbert of Chartres to the duke of Aquitaine. Anyone who has read through

medieval charter collections knows, however, that oaths of fidelity were not contracts. They have not

the slightest verbal similarity to the contracts that fill our cartularies. The contexts in which oaths were
 20

taken, the physical actions surrounding them, the high solemnity added by the relics that guaranteed

them, the fixity of their language — unchanged over 200 years in the collections of oaths that survive

from what is now southern France, and doubtless already fixed long before those first survivors — the

forceful rhythms of the vernacular texts, like proto-poetry or chant, all mark them as rituals, more akin

to traditional baptism or wedding ceremonies than to buying a house or hiring an employee; or to use

medieval comparisons, more like the daily round of the canonical hours, or the processions and

ceremonies that marked the passage of the year, or the sacraments that marked the major passages in

life.45

[260] The oaths of fidelity — known to those who swore them as oaths “of life and limbs” — were

highly formulaic. Historians have long focused on their wording.46 What might the occasions on

which they were sworn tell us about what they meant to contemporaries? Almost all those that

survive from Languedoc (and there are many hundreds of them) concern castles or cities. They were

sworn every time one of the partners — the one taking the oath or the one to whom it was given —

changed. For the young castellan taking the oath as successor to his or her parent (for women were

also castellans) it was thus a political coming of age, a highly charged and doubtless highly emotional

moment. For the overlord receiving the oaths on her or his succession to power it was also highly

charged, for this was the moment when ongoing relationships with followers or fellow lords would

have to be renegotiated. And what one side in these negotiations may have thought were legitimate

claims, the other side might call usurpations. The actions one side took to assert those claims the

other would call violence and evil deeds.

Here is one such story. When Richard of Millau became archbishop of Narbonne early in the

twelfth century, the first reforming bishop to take the see, such renegotiations were much in order, for
 21

the see had been in dispute for over 20 years. According to Richard, after the death of his predecessor

Guifred, three bishops back, the lord of Termes joined forces with the simoniacal archbishop Peter of

Rodez and invaded the church of Narbonne, usurping the castle of Villerouge. He then mortgaged

it to the lord of Peyrepertuse. To recover the castle, Richard excommunicated both lords, but only

when the lord of Termes died did he succeed. That was Richard’s version. From other sources we

know that both lords supported Peter of Rodez in his attempt to take over the archbishopric. We also

know that the lord of Peyrepertuse swore fidelity for Villerouge to archbishop Richard’s immediate

predecessor, as had another man who can’t be identified. Usurpation and violence were thus in

Richard’s eyes but not necessarily in the eyes of others. We need to ask ourselves how many stories

of evil deeds, usurpations, and evil customs come from just such moments of succession and

renegotiation.

How often did such moments occur? Far more often than I think we normally imagine. As

the story of Villerouge already indicates, in Languedoc, at least, castles often, and perhaps always, had

multiple castellans. And these castellans were also castellans in many castles. One example. At the

border town of Mirepoix, where the interests of the counts of Foix encountered [261] those of the

family that held Carcassonne, five men at least (three of them brothers) swore fidelity to the widowed

Ermengard of the Trencavel clan in the late 1070s; some eighty years later, in 1159, eleven lords of

Mirepoix swore fidelity to the count of Foix. One of those in the 1070s was William of Alaigne, a

potentate from the high Corbière hills south of Carcassonne towards Roussillon who took the title

“viscount.” He was also castellan at four other castles in that mountainous region. At Mirepoix, the

other castellans also swore oaths of fidelity to him, and doubtless he to them, though the records no

longer survive. Fragmentary evidence for the same multiple holdings and multiple oaths can be found
 22

all over the region. Each time there was a succession to one of those positions of castellan the ritual

would have been repeated. Each time a holding changed, through succession, gift, sale, confiscation,

or grant, each time a dispute was negotiated and an agreement drawn up to end it, there would have

been a new round of oath-taking. It is a simple exercise in permutation to calculate how many are

represented by the one document that records the oath of eighteen "knights of Montreal" to Raymond

Trencavel and his son Roger in August, 1162; if each of these knights at some moment had sworn his

fidelity to each of the others it would have been 306. Each oath taking could have been a focus for

claim and counter-claim: among those who shared the lordship of the castle, an argument over how

large a share each should have; among those who might have been excluded, such as married sisters,

what their share might be.

Just as men and women shared their castle lordship with others and did so in several castles,

and at each took oaths of fidelity not just to their overlord but also to their fellow castellans, so

likewise the local fighting men swore oaths in turn to their own castellan. A document from 1203

describes the ceremony in detail. The castellan hands the keys of the castle to his lord’s agent (in this

particular case, it is the vicar of the count of Toulouse), who seals them. This act is recorded as a gift

of the castle in alodem. The castellan swears his oath of fidelity, the keys are returned to him, and he

unlocks the castle gate. This in turn is recorded as a grant of the castle in feudum. Then the fighting

men who serve in the castle take their oaths of fidelity to the castellan. All of this, of course, in the

company of the priest with the relics, the scribe with his parchment, quill and ink, and the friends and

neighbors who are sometimes called upon to put their X on the parchment as witnesses.

In any particular castle, some of those taking oaths will be local toughs — such as the nineteen

"men of Arifat" who, "at the command" of four other "lords of Arifat" swore to guarantee the oaths
 23

of one of the lords to the Trencavel viscount and his wife — others, like William of Alaigne whom I

mentioned a moment ago, belonged to a regional nobility at the very least; and some spent their lives

in the company of the great. Two of the eighteen [262] castellans who swore fidelity for Montréal in

1162 were William of St-Felix, sometime vicar of Carcassonne, and close confidant of the Trencavels

from the 1150s into the 1180s, and another leading member of the Trencavel entourage from the

1160s into the 1190s, Hugh of Roumegoust, who was successively vicar of Carcassonne and vicar of

the Razès (the mountainous region south of Carcassonne). This was one of the ways in which the

ultimate overlords, the counts and viscounts, assured the strict loyalty and subservience of the

strongholds that in turn assured their dominance.

Oaths of fidelity were thus far more than individual "contracts" or even the markers of political

and generational coming of age. They created, repaired, and remade communities.

Among the most obvious of these communities were those formed by brothers, who so often

appear as joint oath-takers as well as actors in disputes and agreements concerning castles; whatever

may have been the division of their father's other properties, brothers held their patrimonial castles in

common, for this was the very stuff of status, and joint holding continued to travel down the

generational tree to succeeding groups of cousins, keeping alive the memory of their common

ancestry; that (as well as donations and dowries) is the most likely explanation for the halves and

quarters of castles that people held, occasionally expressed as occupancy for two, four, or eight

months out of the year. Sometimes the communities included sisters as well when, whether by

testament, dowry, or intestate succession, they too became castellans.

No less visible was the entire community of the castle, the "lords of the castle," such as those

at Arifat and Montreal, whose unity was assumed in all the promises to deliver and defend, a unity that
 24

in time of war was, of course, indispensable. It was a community whose loyalties one great lord could

deliver to another as a dowry, as security, or as a peace offering along with the towers and stone walls

its members protected.

Implicit in the oaths, and perhaps the most basic of all, was the community of those who lived

by their faith, whose only subjection was by their freely given oath, and whose only obligations were

those of honor. Taking the oath permanently separated those who took it from those who would

never take it; the oath drew a line around a consecrated elite. Within this elite there were enormous

differences. The distance between a modest village lord and count of Toulouse, a Trencavel viscount

or an archbishop of Narbonne must have seemed as great and as untraversable as the distance between

themselves and the villagers who respectfully addressed them as "my lord." Some were subservient

to those to whom they swore, many more exchanged oaths with those who were their equals. What

did they share that made it important for them to swear not to harm someone else, which was the

essential content of the oath of fidelity?

[263] For each of them the answer would have been the same. Everyone who swore fidelity

belonged to a community — of siblings or fellow castellans, of followers with their lords, of allies, of

fellow city rulers, or of recent enemies. Most of the time, these were the people one rubbed shoulders

with in camp and in court. In the political world of Languedoc, as, doubtless, everywhere else, these

communities were fundamental. Control of territory and success in warfare depended on their

stability; we might guess (though the documents do not reveal it), that ordinary social life beyond the

household did so as well. Yet, at the same time, these communities were fundamentally fragile.

Brothers and sisters, once they had shared the paternal inheritance might be pulled in different

directions by their marriage partners and their alliances; fellow castellans even more so. Allies might
 25

in time become enemies, depending on the flow of dynastic politics; and enemies even if reconciled

could (and most often did) become enemies again.

The magic of the oath and the aristocratic values it served to internalize worked, however

haltingly, to counteract those threats of disintegration. The oath-taker repeated "non tolrai .. non

decebrai," "I will not take, I will not harm, I will not deceive," because within those communities injury

and deception were what were most feared. They were what would pull those communities asunder.

And pull apart they did, in the sorts of conflicts that have concerned this conference. At such

moments all social and political pressures concentrated on one goal — to recreate the community that

was lost. And in the arguments and complaints, in the bitter words and recriminations, as well as in

the gestures by which friends and lords sought to heal the breach, we can see fidelity not only as

sentiment but as process as well.47 We can see the refined connections it was expected to create

between emotion and cohesion, why violence was equated with anger, and why another word for

fidelity was "love."

That is why to initiates, the songs of the troubadours, whose most memorable theme was love,

invited far more than thoughts of play, erotic or otherwise. They invited their listeners to be attentive,

above all, to the way these songs played upon the deepest issues of the political world in which their

hearers lived.

* * *

These brief notations, drawn from a detailed study of Occitan society, are no more than a

snapshot of aristocratic practices in one area over a span [264] of about two centuries. Given the

variable nature of medieval customs, other regions doubtless would present significant differences, as
 26

indeed does Occitania a century or so later. And surely cultural variability and change over time is

what we should expect. That variability and change should not, however, blind us to long-term

similarities and continuities in social habits, as the vocabulary of “crisis,” “mutation,” or “revolution,”

and the narrative of social “structures” as a succession of “-isms,” have a way of doing. The narratives

that result will surely become more complex, less easy to summarize in the lapidary concluding

sentences of a textbook chapter, but that too is a result we should all applaud. Our all too familiar

chronological landmarks, the legacy of hundreds of years of fascination with “periodization,” may

vanish from our practice, if not from our course titles. Are we capable of keeping change and

continuity simultaneously in view? I would hope so.

 27

Footnotes

1. My references will be to the original edition Paris: Armand Colin, 1953. The work was

reprinted with different pagination: Paris : Editions de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences

sociales, 1982.

2. Thomas N. Bisson has provided a thoughtful and fully annotated survey of this program in “La

terre et les hommes: a Programme Fulfilled?” French History, 14 (2000) 322-45.

3. The first term popularized by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale: Xe-

XIIe siècles (Nouvelle Clio,16), Paris: P.U.F., 1980; the second by Thomas Bisson, "The 'feudal

revolution,'" Past and Present, no.142 (February 1994), pp. 6-42. A thorough survey of the

debate over mutationisme in France — Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, “Le débat sur la ‘mutation

féodale’: état de la question” — may be found at

http://www-droit.u-clermont1.fr/Recherche/CentresRecherche/Histoire/gerhma/MutFeodebat.pdf

with full references. Stephen White’s elaborate bibliography of the literature on this debate and

on late Carolingian judicial proceedings in his article in this collection absolves me from the need

to reproduce the same references here.

4. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval

Europe,” The American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 1063-1088. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and

vassals : the medieval evidence reinterpreted, Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press,

1994. See, among others, my own review in Speculum, (1996). My early contribution to this

debate may be found in the Introduction to my Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe

(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), PP. 1-10.

 28

5. Edward J. Larson, Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science on the Galápagos Islands (New

York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 168. My thoughts on this subject were inspired by Ernst Mayr,

“Darwin's influence on modern thought,” Scientific American, 283 no.1 (July 2000) 78-83 .

6. Adam Kuper has noted that the founding fathers of anthropology were contented to pick and

choose among the leads that Darwin gave them; they accepted that homo sapiens descended from

an early primate, but showed no interest in natural selection. For them evolution meant

teleological development from primitive foragers to civilization, i.e. nineteenth-century

Europeans. Adam Kuper, “Darwin and the Anthropologists,” in his Among the Anthropologists:

History and Context in Anthropology (London: Athlone, 1999), pp. 59-78 at 60-3.

7. “Since a social fact can be construed as normal or abnormal only relatively to a given social

species, it is implied that one branch of sociology must be devoted to the constitution and

classification of these species.” Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. Sarah

Soloway and John Mueller (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1938), p. 76.

8. Lawrence Krader, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974).

9. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (London:

Macmillan, 1933), pp. 182-83.

10. Laurent Schneider, lecture at CESCM, Poitiers, February 2001. For a detailed discussion of

the evidence and full bibliography, see Aline Durand, Les paysages médiévaux du Languedoc, Xe-

XIIe siècles (Toulouse: Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-le Mirail, 1998)

11. Anne Nissen Jaubert, “Systèmes agraires dans le sud de la Scandinavie entre 200 et 1200, in

Michel Colardelle, ed. L'Homme et la nature au Moyen Age: Actes du Ve Congrès archéologique

médiévale (Paris: Errance,1996) pp. 76-86.

12. “Au XIe siècle, aprés le fléchissement de l’autorité comtale, l’aristocratie, qui n’est plus
 29

encadrée que par les institutions féodales, se trouve en fait libérée de toute véritable contrainte; les

plus puissants jouissent d’une complète indépendance; retenus davantage par le service de leur

fief, les petits nobles sont pourtant très libres d’allure: à vrai dire, s’ils commettent un méfait, il

n’y a pas de tribunal précis pour les juger, ni de puissance pour les punir. Pour la classe

supérieure, le féodalité, c’est un pas vers l’anarchie.” Duby, Sociéte... Mâconnaise, p. 195.

Compare Durkheim’s portrait of his contemporary end-of-the-century industrial economy: “As

nothing restrains the active forces and assigns them limits they are bound to respect they ... come

into collision with one another, battling and weakening themselves. ... The strongest succeed in

completely demolishing the weakest. ... Truces, arrived at after violence, are never anything but

provisional, and satisfy no one. Human passions stop only before a moral power they respect. If

all authority of this kind is wanting, the law of the strongest prevails, and latent or active, the state

of war is necessarily chronic. That such anarchy is an unhealthy phenomenon is evident.”:

Division of Labor, pp. 2-3. Such notions went hand in hand with the belief that development out

of primitive society depended on enlightenment and the existence of an ordered social hierarchy.

Kuper, “Darwin and the Anthropologists” (above n. 6). and idem, The Invention of Primitive

Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

13. "Suum cuique tribuere," French Historical Studies 6 (1970) 287-99.

14. See, for example, Daniel Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late Medieval Society,”

Speculum, 76 (2000) 90–126.

15. Cited by White in his contribution to this volume.

16. François Ganshof, “Contribution à l’étude des origines des cours féodales en France,” Revue

historique de droit français et étranger 4me série, 7 (1928) 644-65

 30

17. Recueil des chartes de l'abbaye de Cluny, ed. Alexandre Bruel (Paris: Imprimerie nationale,

1876-1903) [hereafter “Cluny”], nos. 764, 799, 856, 979, 1037, 1087, 1100, 1179, 1249;

Cartulaire de Saint-Vincent de Mâcon, ed. M.-C. Ragut (Macon: Impr. d'E. Protat, 1864)

[hereafter “Mâcon,”] nos. 156, 186, 376, 409, 420, 426.

18. Mâcon, no. 282.

19. Ibid., no. 409.

20. Ganshof, “Origines des cours féodales,” p. 651. For an exhaustive analysis of the procedures

in the tenth-century placita that Duby cites, see White’s contribution to this volume.

21. Ganshof believed that this meant they were all the count’s or bishop’s vassals: “Origines,” p.

650 and passim. For a demonstration that this is a confusion of terminology, see Charles E.

Odegaard, Vassi and Fideles in the Carolingian Empire [Harvard Historical Monographs, 19]

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), ch. 3.

22. For example, Cluny nos. 911, 1759, 1821, 1842. 1867. I will present a more fully

documented argument about the tenth-century Mâconnais in an article entitled “George Duby’s

Mâconnais: a memoir.”

23. Cluny, no. 224, an exchange of land between two “prudentes viros milites domni A presulis”

of Châlons, the lands being beneficia of the church of Châlons.

24. Even if they are called vassi. A Gundulric vassus of count William investigates a complaint

of the provost of St-Julian of Mâcon between 886 and 927; he holds the church of St-Laurent in

beneficium — a dependent, perhaps, but given his local power what is his status? Mâcon, no.

204. About the status of the fideles there can be no question: note for example the redditio made

between 941 and 960 in the presence of counts Hugh and Leotaldus and eight named fideles “and

other of my nobles,” one of whom Duby identifies as Raterius of Bagé: Mâcon, no. 156. Raterius
 31

appears as a fidelis and/or witness, along with other members of the count’s entourage, in Mâcon,

nos. 71, 76, 103, 155, 157, 420, 486, 488, 496; Cluny, nos. 432, 644, 729, 764, 757, 799, 1037,

1044. In Cluny no. 764 he is called “nobilissimus.”

25. The precarial grants of churches listed in Mâcon no. 465 date from 968 to 1062. Texts of

such grants in the cartulary are particularly frequent during the bishoprics of Milo (981-96) and

Letbaldus (997-1018). Some examples of precarial grants by abbot Maiolus of Cluny: Cluny,

nos. 1064, 1071, 1088 (from the 950s), 1322, 1389, 1423, 1460, 1500, 1501, all from the 970s.

Others dating (according to the editors) to the second half of the tenth century are nos. 912 (to a

fidelis), 917, 919 (to a vir illustrissimus), 920 (to a vassus). An early example of a donor

prohibiting the alienation of his gift by grant of benefice or precaria: Mâcon no. 111 (dated by the

editor 936-41, but from the witness list surely a generation later); another from around the same

time: Cluny no. 1718.

26. Cluny, nos. 1389, 1508.

27. Compare Cluny no. 237.

28. Mâcon, nos. 12, 197.

29. See Ian Wood, “Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems,” and Paul

Fouracre, “‘Placita’ and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia,” both in Wendy

Davies and Paul Fouracre, eds. , The Settlement of Disputes in Medieval Europe (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 7-22 and 23-43. A detailed description of the placitum

formula is given in Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp.

108-12; examples of equivalent documents from Aquitania are Claude Devic and Joseph Vaissete,

Histoire générale de Languedoc (Toulouse: Privat, 16 vols., 1872-96), 3: 332 (862; assembly
 32

called a mallus); 5: 97 (898; assembly not called mallus), 137 (918; called a mallus), all from the

charters of Montolieu. Placita published before the last decade of the nineteenth century are

inventoried in Rudolf Hübner, “Gerichtsurkunden der fränkischen Zeit, “ Zeitschrift der Savigny-

Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte; germanistische Abteilung, 12 (1891) 1-118, 14 (1893) 1-258,

reprinted as a book (Aalen : Scientia, 1971). Later publications such as those of Nouaillé (see

next note) are therefore absent.

30. Chartes de l'abbaye de Nouaillé de 678 à 1200 , ed. P. de Monsabert, (Poitiers : Société des

archives historiques du Poitou, 1936) [Archives historiques du Poitou, 49], doc. no. 14. The

exact date of this placitum is not clear, because the elements of the dating in the text are not in

concordance with each other. L. Lévillain proposes a variety of possible corrections from 826 to

833, most likely the latter: Léon Lévillain, “Des dates dans les chartes de Nouaillé antérieures à

l’an 1000,” Mémoires de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest, 3me série, 6 (1940) 177-263 at

188-89.

31. Brown, Unjust Seizure, chapter 5.

32. Cluny, nos. 317, 889.

33. A striking example of such an argument: Chris Wickham, “Debate: the ‘Feudal Revolution,’

IV,” Past and Present no 155 (1997) 196-208 at pp. 203-4.

34., Fouracre, “Placita,” (above n. 26).

35. Peter Classen, “Fortleben und Wandel spätrömischen Urkundenwesens im frühen

Mittelalter,” in Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. P. Classen [Vorträge und Forschungen, 23]

(Sigmaringen : Thorbecke, 1977), pp. 13-54, covers the early period. He does not mention the

formulary for the placitum. Typical examples of such archaisms are to be found in almost all the

tenth-century charters of Cluny as in those from other regions (“ipse vero coactus cui litem
 33

incusserit auri libras quinque componat” following anathema clause in Cluny no. 909) and are

often garbled (“constibulacione subnixa” in Cluny no. 901, for example).

36. Such as the Berardus who drew up many of the placitum notices under Count Letaldus II: see

the comments of Ganshof, “Contribution à l’étude des origines,” p. 649.

37. Is Mâcon no. 204 (886-927), the record of an inquest “ad placitum constitutum” conducted

by Gundulric, “vassal of lord William the count,” in a dispute over tithes, merely an interim

record? It mentions neither the mallus nor the presiding official. Or does it represent the

flexibility that scribes were already around 900 in recording dispute settlements, here nothing

more than the testimony of witnesses?

38. Count Otto with the bishop, Mâcon, no. 409 (971-86); the bishop without the count, ibid, no.

426 (968-71); Cluny, nos. 1240, 1437 (where the archbishop of Vienne is mentioned before the

royal missus).

39. See Brown’s description of the activities of Arn of Salzburg, Unjust Seizure, especially pp.

102-105, exemplifying in the Carolingian world the argument made by Karl Ferdinand Werner,

Naissance de la noblesse (Paris: Fayard, 1998), pp. 175-86 for the nobility in the earlier

“barbarian” kingdoms.

40. Brown, Unjust Seizure, pp. 113-20 and chapter 4 (where resolution by compromise is rather

oddly called a “subculture”).

41. Werner, Naissance, pp. 193-212; L'Inhumation privilegiee du IVe au VIIIe siecle en

Occident, ed. Y. Duval et J.-Ch. Picard (Paris: Boccard, 1986). It is to be hoped that the sites of

Larina, a reoccupied iron-age hillfort between Grenoble and Lyon, and Pampelune, a newly

established sixth-century hillfort near Montpellier, will soon be published. My thanks to Mlle. G.

Demians d'Archimbaud and to Laurent Schneider for the privilege of visiting these two sites. See
 34

also South Cadbury, the Camelot of Arthurian legend, in Leslie Alcock, Cadbury Castle,

Somerset : the early medieval archaeology (Cardiff : University of Wales, 1995).

42. See the references to comitatus of freebooting warriors in Carolingian capitularies given by

Janet L. Nelson, “Charles le Chauve et les utilisations du savoir,” L’Ecole Carolingienne

d’Auxerre de Murethach à Rémi, 830-908, ed D. Iogna-Prat, C. Jeudy, and G. Lobrichon (Paris:

Beauchesne, 1991), pp. 27-54, note 93.

43. Portrait of Charles the Bald as a Carolingian Renaissance prince in Nelson, “Charles le

Chauve,” (see previous note), but how deeply that ideological structure was rooted in aristocratic

practices remains subject to debate, as Nelson herself admits..

44. This is the essential burden of Werner’s Naissance de la noblesse. Janet Nelson has shown

how much of the ideology as well as some of the social practices we associate with eleventh-

century knighthood were already present in the ninth century in “Ninth-century Knighthood: the

Evidence of Nithard,” Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. C. Harper-

Bill, C. J. Holdworth, and J. L. Nelson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1989), pp. 255-66.

45. What follows is a very brief summary of the third section of my book Ermengard of Narbonne

and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), “The Culture of

Fidelity,” where full documentation can be found.

46. Close reading of the texts and consideration of their earlier history in E. Magnou Nortier,

”Fidélité et féodalité méridionales d’après les serments de fidélité (Xe-début XIIe siècle),” in Les

structures sociales de l’Aquitaine , du Languedoc et de l’Espagne au premier âge féodal (Paris:

CNRS, 1969), pp. 115-42. The earliest oaths have been redated by Hélène Débax, “Les serments

de Lautrec: redatation et réconsidération,” Annales du Midi 109 (1997) 407-80.

47. For a discussion of the way oaths were used rhetorically in disputes, see White, “Stratégie
 35

rhétorique dans la Conventio de Hugues de Lusignan,” in Mélanges offerts à Georges Duby (Aix-

en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1992) 2: 147-57.