From the sources 4: Carolingian peasants and their conspiracy theories

 

Can we know what these dudes doing the reaping and wine-pressing in the foreground really believed in? We're back with the Utrecht Psalter (c.825) here

Today's big question: are conspiracy theories really a modern phenomenon?

The power of conspiracy theories today experienced first hand: a protest against the "Great Reset" I saw in Vienna on 28 May 2022

So, having looked at the polyptychs and seen how differentrural society could be in different regions of the Carolingian Empire, we’re going to return to the theme of peasant life in the early ninth century. Now, as illuminating as the polyptychs can be, there are some big draw backs. The first and most important one is that these are documents written for landlords by their agents who did the surveying. Everything they tell us is based on the questions the landlords told their agents to enquire into with each peasant household. So, they tell us what each peasant householder owed in rent/ tax/ tribute/ labour services (which tells us a lot about what they farmed and how much access they had to cash), their legal status (free or unfree), how many children and other dependents he (more rarely she) had under his roof and their names (sometimes ages as well as we saw with the Marseille polyptych). Occasionally they might give us some super-interesting incidental information i.e., peasant boys away at school in the Marseille polyptych. But those are the limits of what landlords and their agents were interested in – other aspects of peasant life just weren’t of interest to them and weren’t worth enquiring into and recording.

So, what other sources do we have for the lives of Carolingian peasants. Archaeology is obviously one of them but that can only tell us about the material side of things. But what about the more intimate, interior, human side of things. What did Carolingian peasants think about day to day – what were their opinions about what was going in the world, their attitudes, anxieties, fears, dreams and aspirations? What were their beliefs about the cosmos and how well did they match up with official Christian teaching on this? What were their relationships with their neighbours and other figures in their communities like? And what did they do for fun (and all the other stuff near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)?

Unfortunately, we cannot get ready answers to these questions. We have nothing like the diaries, memoirs and other personal writings we have for the working classes in the late Georgian and Victorian eras – after 1760, more than half of the adult population of Great Britain was functionally literate. Pigs will fly if a Carolingian equivalent of this early nineteenth century Yorkshire farmer’s diary that made a bit of a media sensation a few years ago is found. Nor do we even have the kind of resources that are available to historians of late medieval and early modern Europe. We don’t have anything like the inquisition trial testimonies for the village of Montaillou in Southern France from 1294 – 1324 that enabled Emmanuel Le Roy Laudrie in his eponymous 1975 classic to look at the heretical beliefs and community conflicts among the villagers there (as well as discovering that Mountaillou’s village priest Pierre Clergue, from a local family of rich peasants, was a serial-philanderer who seduced a married countess no less). It was similarly inquisition trial testimonies that enabled Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976) to discover Menocchio the Miller (1533 – 1599), a freethinking peasant intellectual and avid bookworm from Friuli in Italy. Or the witchcraft trial records from Essex that allowed Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane to do similar stuff to Montaillou for Elizabethan and Jacobean England. God the eighth and ninth centuries really were the dark ages! Unlike the more enlightened folks of Renaissance Europe, the Carolingians didn’t have the inquisition and witch burnings, and modern historians are all the more worse off for it because persecution generates documents that we can read against the grain to find out about the lives of the persecuted. Thus, most historians would argue that microhistory – the use of a small set of really intimate, localised documentation to recover the perspectives of ordinary people in the past – is redundant for the Carolingian era or any time before about 1250. Charles West, a historian whose work I really admire, disagrees, and has recently produced a very illuminating study ‘Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: an Early Medieval Microhistory’, History Workshop Journal (2016). Using a very different piece of evidence, I’ll attempt a sort of early medieval microhistory myself.

First, let’s meet Agobard of Lyon (779 – 840). His origins are obscure – he may have Visigoth refugee from Islamic Spain, like his compatriot Theodulf of Orleans, whom we’ve met before, as suggested by a brief passage in the Annals of Lyon, but some scholars dispute this. He came bishop of Lyon in 814, though because the previous office-holder, Leidrad, was still alive and in retirement in monastery, Agobard wasn’t universally recognised as bishop until the Council of Aachen in 816. Thereafter, he gained something of a reputation as a controversialist. He offered scathing critiques of Louis the Pious’ policy of guaranteeing religious freedom for Jews in the Carolingian Empire, and wrote five polemics in the 820s against Jews and Judaism, in one of them calling Jews “the devil’s spawn.” He also rushed eagerly into theological controversies about the use of icons in churches and the nature of the Trinity (where have we seen them before!) and wrote tracts on those. He dismissed the practice of allowing accused felons to clear their innocence through trial by combat, enshrined in the law of the Burgundians (the local law in Lyon), as irrational. He even criticised Louis the Pious for not following his initial royal/ imperial succession policy of 817, and supported Louis’ eldest son, Lothar in rebellion against him in 830. And he wrote a tract against popular superstitions called On Hail and Thunder (815), and it is to that we shall now turn:

The first printed edition of Agobard of Lyon's works, including the treatise we'll be discussing here, produced in Paris in 1605

In these regions [Burgundy] almost everyone – nobles and common folk, city folk and country folk, the old and the young – believe that hail and thunder can be caused by the will of humans. For as soon as they have heard thunder or seen lightning, they say “the wind has been raised.” When asked why it is [called] a raised wind, some with shame, their consciences troubling them a little, others boldly, as is the way of the ignorant, answer that the wind was raised by the incantations of people who are called storm-makers [tempestarii]. Hence it is called a raised wind.

Whether it is true, as is popularly believed, should be verified by the authority of Holy Scripture. If, however, it is false, as we believe without doubt, it ought to be emphasised just how great the crime is of him who attributes to humans the work of God …

We have seen and heard of many overcome by such great madness and deranged by such great foolishness that they believe and claim that there is a certain region called Magonia [Magic Land] from which ships travel in the clouds. These ships, [so they believe], carry crops that were knocked down by hail and perished in storms back to that same region. Those cloud-sailors [are thought to] give a fee to the storm-makers and to take back grain and other crops. So blinded are some by this great and foolish belief that they believe that these things can [actually] be done.

We [once] saw many people gathered together in a crowd who were showing off four captives, three men and a woman, as though they had fallen out of some such ships. These people had been held for some time in chains. But at last, as I said, they were exhibited to that crowd of people in our presence as [criminals] fit to be stoned to death. Nevertheless, the truth did come out. After much argument, those who exhibited those captives were, as the Prophet says, “confused, just as the thief is confused when apprehended [Jeremiah 2:26].”

Because of this error, which in the area possess the minds of almost everyone, ought to be judged by reason, let us offer up the witness of Scripture through which the matter can be judged. After inspecting those witnesses, it will not be us, but truth itself that will overcome this stupid error and everyone who recognises the truth will denounce the instruments of error and say with the Apostle “no lie is of the truth [1 John 2:21].” What is not from the truth is especially not from God, and because it is not from God, he hears not its words …

If therefore the almighty God through the power of his arm whips the wicked with new waters, hail, and rains and whose hand it is impossible to flee, then those people who are entirely ignorant of God who believe that humans can do these things. For if people can send hail, then they can make it rain anywhere, for no one ever sees hail without rain. They could also protect themselves from their enemies, not only by the theft of crops, but also by taking away a life. For when it happens that the enemies of the storm-makers are in a road or field, they could kill them; they could send down an entire hail-storm down upon them in one mass and bury them. Some claim that they themselves know some storm-makers who can make a diffuse pattern of hail that is falling throughout a region fall instead in a heap upon a river or a useless forest or on a tub under which the storm-maker himself is hiding.

Often, we have heard it said by many, that they knew such things were certainly done in [specific] places, but we have never heard yet anyone claim that they themselves had seen these things. Once it was reported to me that someone said that he himself had heard such things. With great interest I myself set out to see him, and I did. But when I was speaking with him and encouraging him, with many prayers and entreaties, to say whether he had seen such things, I [nevertheless] pressed him with divine threats not to say anything unless it were true. Then he declared that what he said was indeed true and he named the person, the time, and place, but nevertheless confessed that he himself had not been present at that time …

… Terrified by the sound of thunder and by flashes of lightning, the faithful, although sinners, call for the intercession of the holy prophet, but not our half-faithful people. Who, as soon as they hear thunder or feel a light puff of wind, say that “the wind has been raised,” and then issue a curse: “Let that cursing tongue be parched. May the tongue that makes [this storm] now be cut off.” Tell me, I beg you, whom do you curse, a just person or a sinner? For a sinner, cannot, as you often say out of your own infidelity, raise up the wind, because he has no power, nor can he command evil angels …

Also in our times we sometimes see that, with the crops and grapes harvested, farmers cannot sow [the next crop] on account of the dryness of the land. Why do you not ask your storm-makers to send their raised winds to wet the land so that you might sow them then? But because you do not do that, nor did you ever see or hear of anyone doing it, listen to what the Lord himself, the creator of all things, the ruler, governor, arranger, and provider says to his blessed servant Job about things of this sort …

Look at the great works of God, the existence of which the blessed Job himself was not able to admire fully and loftily. If the Lord has a treasure-trove of hail that He alone sees, and which even the blessed Job never saw, where do the storm-makers discover what the blessed Job never found? Neither can we find it nor can anyone guess where it is. The Lord inquires of his faithful servant if he knows who gave a path to the most violent rains and a passage to the resounding thunder. Those against whom this is directed show themselves to be puny men, devoid of holiness, justice, and wisdom, lacking in faith and truth, hateful even to their neighbours. [Yet] they say that is by the storm-makers that violent winds, crashing thunder, and raised winds are made …

This stupidity is not the least part of this unfaithfulness, for it has now grown into such a great evil, that in many places there are wretched people who say indeed that they do not know how to send storms, but nevertheless know how to defend the inhabitants of a place against storms. They have determined how much of a crop they should be given and call this a regular tribute [canonicum]. There are many people who never freely give tithes to priests, nor give alms to widows, orphans, and other poor people. Though the importance of alms-giving is preached to them, is repeatedly read out and encouraged, they still do not give any. They pay the canonicum, however, voluntarily to their defenders, by whom they are protected from storms. And all of this is accomplished without any preaching, any admonishment, any exhortation, except by the seduction of the Devil …

A few years ago [that is, in 810] a certain foolish story spread. Since at that time cattle were dying off, people said that Duke Grimoald of Benevento had sent people with a dust which they were to spread on the fields, mountains, meadows, and wells and that it was because of the dust they spread that the cattle died. He did this [they say] because he was an enemy of our most Christian Emperor Charles. For this reason we heard and saw that many people were captured and killed. Most of them, with plaques attached, were cast into the river and drowned. And, what is truly remarkable, those captured gave testimony against themselves, admitting that they had such dust and had spread it. For so the Devil, by the secret and just judgement of God, having received power over them, was able to succeed over them that they gave false witness against themselves and died. Neither learning, nor torture, nor death itself deterred them from daring to give false witness against themselves. This story was so widely believed that there were very few to whom it seemed absurd. They did not rationally consider how such dust could be made, how it could only kill cattle and not other animals, how could it be carried and spread over such a vast territory by humans. Nor did they consider whether there were enough Beneventan men and women, old and young, to go out from their region in wheeled carts loaded with dust. Such is the great foolishness that oppresses the wretched world …

Source: "Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition)" edited by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 220 - 223

Clearly there were some cultural parallels to these tempestarii in Sweden and they was some interest in them in the early modern period. An engraving from Olaus Magnus' A History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Indeed, learned early moderns were a lot less sceptical of this stuff than Agobard. In 1591, King James VI of Scotland had 70 people, including the midwife Agnes Sampson, the schoolmaster John Fian and Francis Stuart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, put on trial in North Berwick for trying to sink his ship on Halloween night 1590 as he sailed home from Copenhagen with his newlywed wife. Yet no one would suggest that James VI of Scotland and I of England was a rustic crypto-pagan.

Now in this source we two systems of thought/ mentalities at play. That of Agobard and that of the peasants. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby at the Historians’ Sketchpad has done a brilliant blogpost on Agobard’s mode of thinking and I don’t think I’ll do it more justice than he does, so rather than covering the same ground I highly recommend you read his blogpost. Instead, I’ll focus on the perspectives of these Burgundian countryfolks. First it must be said that we have absolutely no good reason, given the nature of the source, as a reform minded polemical treatise, to think Agobard made this all up. At the same time, we should bear in mind that this isn't written with the voices of these Burgundian peasants, and that Agobard may have ventriloquised them just as a lot of writers of saints' lives did when writing about the humble-born witnesses of miracles i.e., whether the miracle stories recorded in Gregory of Tours' Ten Books of Histories, Glory of the Confessors, Glory of the Martyrs and Lives of the Fathers can be used to create Merovingian microhistories, or simply reflect the preoccupations of their author and the ecclesiastical elite culture in sixth century Gaul to which he belonged, is debated.

Now a major undercurrent behind this, which should not be overlooked, is that life for a Carolingian peasant was, in a word, harsh. Their belief in these storm-making wizards and sky pirates is described by Agobard as appearing in the context of crop failure caused by bad weather. Likewise, the conspiracy theory about foreign agents spreading dust to kill cattle was provoked by a cattle plague (most likely an outbreak of rinderpest) in Burgundy in 810. Although Agobard doesn’t mention this, for perspective it is worth noting there had been three major famines in Francia in living memory – one in 779, another in 792 and another still in 805. The COVID-19 pandemic and this year’s extreme heatwave and drought have given us a small taste of something that a Carolingian peasant would have experienced all the time – feeling at the mercy of natural forces beyond your control. It is worth saying that there were some organised forms of relief available for the most vulnerable in the Carolingian empire. The statutes of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie (751 - 826) reveal the role of monasteries in providing food for the poor and needy through large scale charity, and some parish churches in Francia kept matricula, lists of needy people to be given assistance with daily living, a system perhaps not wholly dissimilar to the systems of parish poor relief in seventeenth century England. None of these are in evidence here and the churches in Burgundy seem to have been unremitting in their collection of tithes, hence why some of the wealthier members of the community seem to have turned away from tithe-payment and charity towards paying the canonicum (an evil twin of the tithe) to good wizards believed to be able to stop the tempestarii from destroying crops.

Sky pirates? You mean like these guys?

We are able to see a certain parallel between Carolingian peasants reacting to crop failure and cattle plagues and twenty-first century citizen’s reacting to COVID-19. This is the tendency to assign blame to something that’s not a part of the natural order of things as the authorities, be they clerics or scientists, would have them believe but instead blame them on malevolent human forces that we can combat using our own willpower and agency. Hence Agobard tells us of cases in which supposed sky pirates and Beneventan agents were lynched or narrowly saved from being so by his interventions as a result of these paranoid beliefs – where have we seen that kind of thing again? Of course we should apply some caution here before drawing parallels between Carolingian peasants and modern day conspiracy theorists. Modern day devotees of conspiracy theories, or as they would call themselves “sceptics” or “truth-seekers” mostly acquire knowledge of and develop belief in such theories through their dissemination in books, alternative media and on the internet, especially social media. Carolingian peasants, however, were overwhelmingly illiterate and lived in an age before print culture, rapid communications and modern mass media. Furthermore, modern conspiracy theories are often seen as a product of a culture of distrust in authority, which likely had no parallel in the Carolingian era. Thus, it might be possible to argue that these peasants were not dabbling in conspiracy theories at all. Instead, some might argue that with all this talk of weather magicians, what we’re seeing is ancient Indo-European folkloric beliefs, untouched by Christian teaching, in action. As this school of historical thought, which you can find most clearly expressed in Jean Delumeau’s “Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire” (1977), would have it, Agobard inveighing against here is inveighing against peasants who were “Christians in name only”, and that paganism had basically survived unscathed in the countryside. And its easy to find a few sources that appear to support this view. The Anglo-Saxon monk, missionary and church reformer St Boniface when he came to Francia in the time of Charles Martel was horrified at the pagan superstitions he found there, and in the 740s a church official in his service condemned, amongst other things, performing sacred rites to Mercury and Jupiter, auguries of the dung of horses and cattle, diviners and sorcerers, celebrating undetermined places as holy, offering sacrifices to saints and making idols out of dough and rags. And Rabanus Maurus (780 – 856), in a very similar fashion to Agobard, debunked the widely held popular belief (first attested by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD) that lunar eclipses were a result of monsters trying to gobble up the moon and could be stopped by throwing stones and javelins at them. What the true religious beliefs of Carolingian peasants generally were we can never truly know, not least because when we do get to hear about (certain aspects of) them it’s coming from hostile religious reformers like Boniface, Agobard and Rabanus. But there are plenty of problems with the view of medieval popular Christianity as essentially being a crypto-pagan folk religion, though that’s too big a topic in itself to go into here. It will suffice for now for me to point you to this excellent article by Dr Francis Young.

And we can find in Agobard’s text evidence to suggest that this wasn’t all the product of ancient and static beliefs, namely that the cattle plague was blamed of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento – a Lombard principality in Southern Italy, which Charlemagne and the Franks were at war with at the time of the plague in 810. Beyond its obvious parallels with COVID-19 conspiracy theories – Americans and Chinese accusing each other of creating the pandemic with a bioweapon – it shows that Carolingian peasants were actually quite well aware of the affairs of the world beyond their village or home region. Indeed, it even shows that they had some interest in Frankish foreign policy – there’s a lot of good work by historians of early modern England about how rumour should be seen as a sign of political consciousness among the politically disenfranchised i.e. Ethan Shagan’s essay on rumour in the reign of Henry VIII in “The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500 – 1850” (2001), edited by Tim Harris. And it of course goes almost without saying that it shows that medieval peasants could be, by our standards, extremely xenophobic. We can see parallels in the treatment of these suspected Beneventan agents with the attacks on Flemings and Italians in London during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.

A denarius of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento (assassinated in 817) from the British Museum Coin Collection

So perhaps its not the best approach to see the beliefs of these Burgundian peasants in light of static pagan mentalities but instead to see them as more dynamic and akin to modern conspiracy theories. This ties into one of the greatest meta-debates in early medieval history: should we see early medieval people as essentially people just like us but with swords, horses, parchment, very slow communications, poor healthcare and no electricity, or as these strange people completely remote from ourselves whose ways of thinking can only be understood on their own terms. Some, influenced by postmodernism, would go even further the other way and argue that the past is not simply “another country” (to give that much quoted phrase from LP Hartley’s “The Go-between”) but another planet and that we basically can’t really hope to understand why medieval people thought and acted the way they did at all. Both extremes of thinking can lead to us misunderstanding medieval people and falling back into old, condescending stereotypes of them as stupid, primitive or incapable of rational thinking. Agobard’s own thought very clearly disproves notions of medieval people being incapable of rational thinking, even if his kind of rationality is in many ways different from that of post-enlightenment thought and could sometimes be deployed for very disturbing purposes that marked him out as unusual at the time, like his diatribes against Judaism. Like with a lot of medieval people who seem to hold at once enlightened and unenlightened attitudes to us twenty-first century people, these were not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin. And through comparisons between the beliefs of early medieval peasants and modern conspiracy theorists we can see that the twenty-first century is far from being a supremely rational age. Just take a look at one of the most influential, most dangerous (not to mention most unintentionally hilarious) conspiracy theorists of our times, Alex Jones. This man believes that the US government can create tornadoes and other natural disasters at will and is putting chemicals in the water that “turn the frickin’ frogs gay”, that Hillary Clinton is a sulphur-smelling demon in disguise who runs elite paedophile rings and that all the global elite are in thrall to these interdimensional elvesthey see when they take hallucinogenic drugs who promise them immortality ifthey enslave and exterminate the majority of humanity after creating a globaltotalitarian dictatorship. And this man is a highly successful multi-media pundit, has made millions of dollars and fuelled the rise of Donald Trump. We can only guess at what Agobard and other Carolingian intellectuals would make of the phenomenal influence of crackpot conspiracy theorists in the present.

Alex Jones just minding his business as usual

From the sources 3: Living in the Carolingian Countryside II

This illustration of Psalm 103 from the Harley Psalter, a meticulous Anglo-Saxon copy dating between 1000 and 1050 of the Utrecht Psalter, a famous Carolingian manuscript produced around 825 by the monks of Hautvilliers in Champagne. It shows the world in its right order - the angels attend on God, a peasant ploughs in the fields with his oxen while a rich man wines and dines at table and the animals engage in their natural behaviours. British Library, London, Harley MS 603, f. 51v

So, we’re back with the polyptychs as promised. As I’ve said before, there was no default set up in the Carolingian countryside, and the polyptychs actually show a lot of regional and even local diversity in how things worked. Therefore, let’s take a look at a polyptych that isn’t from Northern France, like the previous one. Let’s instead go down to the sunny Mediterranean coast, to Provence no less. From here survives a ninth century polyptych preserved in a cartulary (collection of documents recording institutional land ownership) created c.1100 for the Abbey of St Victor de Marseilles – an incredibly wealthy institution founded in 415 by John Cassian, a Church Father and one of the first pioneers of western monasticism, which at one time owned properties as far afield as Spain, Sardinia and even Syria. It was created around the time of the death of Charlemagne and the accession of his sole surviving son, Emperor Louis the Pious, so its roughly contemporary to the polyptych of Saint-Germain des Pres we explored last time. Let’s take a look at it.

Description of the Dependents of St-Mary of Marseilles from the Villa Domado of that Third Part, Made in the Time of the lord bishop Vualdus [814 – 818], from the seventh indiction [814]

1. Holding of a colonus at Nemphas. Martinus, colonus. Wife Dominica. Bertemarus, an adult son. Desideria, an adult daughter. It pays the tax: 1 pig; 1 suckling [pig]; 2 fattened hens; 10 chickens; 40 eggs. Savarildis, an adult woman. Olisirga, a daughter 10 years old. Rica, a daughter 9 years old.
2. Holding of a colonus in vineyards. Ingoaldus, a dependent. Wife Unuldis. Martinus, a son; wife Magna. Onoria, daughter, with a foreign husband. Deda, a daughter. Danobertus, an adult son. Ingolbertus, an adult son. Arubertus, an adult son.
3. Holding of a colonus at Corde: 1 lot without tenant.
4. Holding of colonus at Ruinoloas: 1 lot without tenant.
5. In total these make 4 holdings of coloni.
6. Holding of a colonus at Ursiniangas: 1 lot without tenant.

Description of the Dependents of St-Mary of Marseilles, from the Villa of Lambsico. Made in the time of the lord bishop Vualdus, from the seventh indiction

1. Holding of a colonus in Siverianis. Valerius, colonus. Wife Dominica. Ducsana, a daughter 5 years old. An infant at the breast. It pays in tax: 1 pig; 1 suckling [pig]; 2 fattened hens; 10 chickens; 20 eggs.
2. In Siverianis. Valerianus, a colonus. Wife Desiderata. Anastasia, a daughter 5 years old. Stephanus, a son 4 years old. Martinus, a son 3 years old. An infant at the breast. It pays the same in taxes.
3. Holding of a colonus in Marte. Adjutor, a colonus. Wife Natalia. Justa a daughter 1 year old. [It pays:] 1 pig; 1 fattened hen; 5 chickens; 20 eggs.
4. Holding of a colonus in the Campo Miliario. The colonus Sidonius. Wife Lia. It pays tax similarly; [plus] 1 castrated ram.
5. Holding of a colonus in Roveredo: 1 lot without tenant.
6. Holding of a colonus in Dominicio. Guntardus with his infants: information required.
7. Holding of a colonus in Siverianis. Mercorinus, a colonus. Wife Vina, with their infants: information required. It pays tax similarly: [plus] 1 castrated ram.
8. Holding of a colonus in Rovereto: 1 lot without tenant.
9. Holding of a colonus in Burbuliana: 1 lot without tenant.
10. Holding of a colonus in Campo Macuni: 1 lot without tenant.
11. Holding of a colonus in Plama. Maria, a female [serf]. Maria, a widow. Anastasia, an adult daughter. Eligia, a daughter 5 years old. An infant at the breast.
12. Holding of a colonus in Maurisca: 1 lot without tenant.
13. Holding of a colonus at Marcella, which Landefredus holds for 1 solidus.
14. Therein the holding of a colonus [at Marcella]: 1 lot without tenant.
15. In Argentia: 1 lot without tenant.
16. Holding of a colonus in Valle Quinana: 1 lot without tenant.
17. Holding of a colonus in Armellaria: 1 lot without tenant.
18. Likewise the holding of a colonus in Burbuliana: 1 lot without tenant.
19. Holdings of coloni in Seucia: 5 lots without tenants.
20. In total there are 22 holdings of coloni.
21. Juvinus and wife, with their infants; information required.
22. The wife of Julianus, with their infants: information required.

Description of the Dependents of St-Mary of Marseilles from the Villa of Betorrida. Made in the time of the lord bishop Vualdus, from the seventh indiction

1. Holding of a colonus in Cenazello. Dructaldus, tenant (accola); with his foreign wife. Dructomus, a son. Dutberta, an adult daughter. Drueterigus, a son at school. Sinderaldus, a son at school. Joannis. For pasturage: 1 denarius.
2. Holding of a colonus in Albiosco. Teodorus, colonus. Wife Eugenia. Marius, a deacon. Teobaldus, an adult son. Teodericus, a cleric. Ing … dus, a son 7 years old. Teodosia, a daughter 7 years old. For pasturage: 1 denarius.
3. Therein the holding of a colonus. 1 lot without tenant. 2 denarii.
4. Holding of a colonus in Asaler. Candidus, colonus. Wife, Dominica. Celsus, a son: information required. It pays in tax: 1 pig, 1 suckling [pig]; 2 fattened hens; 10 chickens; 40 eggs; for pasturage: 1 castrated ram; in tribute: 1 denarius.
5. Holding of a colonus without tenant in Nonticlo, which Bertarius, priest holds in benefice. It pays tax and tribute similarly; for pasturage: 1 castrated ram.
6. Holding of a colonus therein: 1 lot without tenant. Paulus and Valeriana with their infants: information required. It pays tax and tribute similarly; for pasturage: 1 castrated ram.
7. Holding of a colonus in Albiosco: information required.
8. Holding of a colonus in Curia. Calumniosus, colonus, with a foreign wife. It pays tax: 1 denarius and similarly in tribute. Saumo, with his infants: information required.
9. Holding of a colonus therein. Colonus Martinus. Wife Primovera. Felicis, an adult son. Deidonus, an adult son. Leobertga, an adult daughter. Martina, a daughter, 6 years old. An infant at the breast. It pays tax and tribute similarly; for pasturage: 1 denarius.
10. Holding of a colonus [in] Cusanulas, which Nectardus holds in benefice. It pays tax and tribute similarly.
11. Holding of a colonus in Carmillo Sancto Promacio, held by the priest of the local church. It pays for pasturage: 1 denarius.
12. Holding of a colonus in Cumbis: 1 lot without tenant, which Dructebertus has. For pasturage: 2 denarii.
13. Holding of a colonus in Massimana. Donaldus, dependent. Wife Dominica. Domnildis, daughter. Bertarius, an adult son. Saisa, an adult daughter. It pays for pasturage: 2 denarii.
14. Holding of a colonus in Asinarius: 1 lot without tenant. For pasturage: 1 castrated ram.
15. Holding of a colonus in Terciago, which Martinus holds in benefice. For pasturage: 2 denarii.
16. Holdings of coloni in Cenzellis: 2 lots without tenants. For pasturage: 1 castrated ram.
17. Holding of a colonus in Tullo: 1 lot without tenant. For pasturage: 1 castrated ram. Vuarmetrudis, with her infants: information required.
18. Holding of a colonus in Galiana. Cannidus, colonus. Wife Ingildis. An infant at the breast. It pays tax and tribute similarly. For pasturage: 2 denarii.
19. Holding of a colonus in Cleo. Aquilo, an equitarius [a serf performing messenger duty on horseback]. Wife Vumiberga. Candidus, a son 6 years old. An infant at the breast. For pasturage: 1 denarius.
20. Holding of a colonus in Gencianicus. Ursius, cleric. The dependent Lubus, son, who ought to manage that holding of a colonus … Gencuonca, an adult daughter. Teodo, an adult son.
21. Holding of a colonus in Nidis: 1 lot without tenant. Benarius, cotidianus [owing daily service to the lord]. Wife Dominica. Magnildis, daughter: information required. Dominico, son. Bernardus, son. Teodranus, son: information required. In tribute: 1 denarius. Montigla, a female [serf], with foreign husband. Cenazello, son: information required.
22. Holding of a colonus in Vencione. Ildebertus, a dependent. Wife, Luborofolia. It pays tax: 2 denarii.
23. Holding of a colonus in Cumbis: 1 without tenant. It pays for pasturage: 2 denarii.
24. Holding of a colonus in Tasseriolas: 1 lot without tenant. For pasturage: 1 denarius.
25. Holding of a colonus in Massimiana Sancto Promacio: from the charge of the local priest. Donobertus, Babilda: information required.
26. Holding of a colonus in Camarjas, which Bertaldus, priest, holds.
27. We have a holding of a colonus in Sugnone, a third part of that small village, and there are 10 holdings of coloni [there].
28. Holding of a colonus in Camarja: 1 lot without tenant.
29. We have in Salo a third part of that small village, and there are three holdings of coloni there without tenants.
30. Holding of a colonus in Puncianicus: 1 lot without tenant.
31. Holding of a colonus in Campellis: 1 lot without tenant.
32. Holding of a colonus in Rosolanis: 1 lot without tenant.
33. Holding of a colonus in Specula: 1 lot without tenant.
34. Vualdebertus, Guirbertus, Ragnebertus: information required.
35. In total that makes 49 holdings of coloni.

From “Carolingian Civilisation: A reader”, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press, 2009 pp 214 – 218

The fortified tower of the abbey of Saint Victor de Marseilles. It would not have been recognisable to the Carolingians - the abbey was completely rebuilt after 1020 so all of the present structure is eleventh century and later. By Hagen de Merak - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1287830

Now, we can see a lot of differences between this and the survey of Villeneuve in the polyptych of Saint Germain des Pres we saw last time. First up is of course the style – it’s a lot terser and more formulaic, and does not begin with any detailed description of the layout of the villas in question. Second up is the kind of agriculture practiced on these estates. From the payments rendered by the peasants, which unlike in the polyptych of Saint Germain des Pres are ambiguously called “tax” or “tribute” (the only specific, named type of payment here is “for pasturage”), we can tell that these villas were overwhelmingly given over to the raising of livestock. All of these “taxes”, “tributes” and payments “for pasturage” are paid in pigs, sheep, chickens and eggs i.e., a typical “tax” for the peasant couple at Nemphas reads: “1 pig; 1 suckling [pig]; 2 fattened hens; 10 chickens; 40 eggs.” The exact nature of the renders the peasants are expected to provide appears to be quite variable despite the fact they’re almost all the same status (coloni), which would seem to indicate that their renders were determined according to the value of the land and livestock showing that some kind of sophisticated assessment mechanism for tax/ rent appears to be in place. For example, on the villa of Betorrida, Candidus and Dominica pay in tax: 1 pig, 1 suckling [pig]; 2 fattened hens; 10 chickens; 40 eggs; for pasturage: 1 castrated ram, while Martinus and Primovera pay 1 denarius in tax, 1 denarius in tribute and 1 denarius for pasturage. The references to denarii here indicate that like the peasants at Villeneuve in the Seine basin, these Provencal peasants also had access to cash, presumably by selling some of their surplus produce in markets which would suggest that it was the more prosperous peasants being paying taxes and tribute in cash and the less prosperous ones making payments in live animals and eggs. There is one isolated mention of “vineyards”, but unlike at Villeneuve there is no indication of any arable farming going on at all – it must have been going on somewhere in the local area, since I struggle to believe these peasants were living off the early medieval equivalent of the keto diet. And the landlords do not seem to have been practicing any kind of demesne or plantation agriculture/ There are no mentions of peasants or slaves being obliged to plough the fields or perform any other kind of labour services on units of land owned directly by the landlord, unlike at Villeneuve. Indeed, it appears that the landlords have leased all the land in these villas out to tenants.

One of the things that’s so striking about this polyptych is that there are so many plots of land that appear to be without tenants and therefore vacant. Three out of five of the land holdings at the Villa Domado do not have tenants. Likewise, half of the 22 holdings of coloni at the villa of Lambisco are untenanted. And 19 out of 49 holdings at the villa of Betorrida lack occupants. Vacant holdings do not appear in the polyptych of Saint Germain des Pres. So, by comparison with that, it seems that in the early ninth century this was a phenomenon localised to Provence. Why might this have been? I’m veryunsure about this myself, but perhaps the long-term effects of the devastatingwarfare between the Franks and the Muslims/ native Gallo-Roman leaders likeDuke Maurontus in the 730s which we’ve talked about here before on this blog. The fairly standard business of marauding armies raiding the countryside and living off the land, combined with perhaps some more calculated devastation to bring the area into submission – coastal Provence, including Marseille, was the last to hold out against Charles Martel – might have led to long-lasting depopulation in the region as large numbers of peasants starved or became refugees elsewhere. Perhaps then church of Saint Victor in Marseilles was trying to get peasants to resettle on its lands, but three generations after this warfare still hadn’t managed to with all the peasant holdings on its rural villas.

The names we encounter among the tenants are super-interesting. Most of the tenants on the villa Domado appear to have very Frankish or more broadly Germanic sounding names like Unulda, Bertemar, Olisirga, Ingoald, Ingobert, Arubert and Danobert. In Lambisco, we see a lot more classically Roman names – Valerius, Valerianus, Desiderata, Anastasia, Sidonius etc. Likewise, at Betorrida 22 out of 61 named individuals have Roman names, very often being in the same families as people with Frankish-sounding names. This is very different to what we saw at Villeneuve in the polyptych of Saint Germain des Pres, where the names were overwhelmingly Germanic. Roman names clearly held out in the more firmly Gallo-Roman south, but clearly Frankish naming conventions had spread here too either by migration and settlement from the north following Charles Martel’s conquest of Provence or a changing sense of identity among the locals.

There are a lot of quite unique details here. It is rich in its Latin terminology – for example, it mentions Dructald as an accola, which in Classical Latin would mean neighbour but here seems to denote some kind of tenant. It actually mentions Aquilo as an equitarius, a slave/ serf who performs courier services on horseback, and Bernar as a cotidianus – literally meaning someone who owes daily service, either as a domestic or as a priest. It mentions that two of Dructald’s young sons, Dueterig and Sinderald, are at school, indicating that the attempts of Carolingian reformers to make formal schooling more accessible and increase literacy were making headway, if two peasant boys have been able to leave their village to attend school (where exactly we don’t know). It also mentions some clerics living in peasant families, indicating that the clergy here weren’t very wealthy and from humble backgrounds, and the cleric Ursius has three adult children. While there is debate as to what extent celibacy was required of the clergy in Western Europe before the eleventh century Gregorian reform movement, it clearly was not observed here. Perhaps most unique, and most exciting, this polyptych gives the ages of the children. The term baccalarius/ baccalaria, translated by Dutton as adult, probably might actually mean something more like teenaged or adolescent. The cut-off point for being designated as a baccalarius was likely at eleven, since no child older than ten has their age given.

Finally, lets turn to peasant households. Out of 33 households, 7 appear to not have children in them. In those that did, the average number was 2, but that if anything demonstrates that one should only take averages for what they are – some of these Provencal peasant parents had as many as five or six children, others just one. There are also some holdings in which there are two families, which might suggest in some cases that brothers and sisters shared households and raised their kids together. We also find not only a few single mums but also some single dads i.e. the peasant Guntardus in the hamlet of Dominico with “his infants” or Saumo with “his infants” in the hamlet of Curia, who may be the brother of Calumniosus, the other peasant listed in that holding. We also find married couples still living with their parents i.e., Martinus, husband of Magna, and Onoria, whose husband is foreign, still live with their parents Ingoald and Unulda. This is all a very far cry from the nuclear families we saw at Villeneuve in the polyptych of Saint Germain des Pres. Could this point to regional differences in family structure between northern and southern Gaul?

That's all for the polyptychs for now. You can more about them (including translations of other surviving polypychs) on this brilliant website created by the University of Leicester. We'll return to them at a future date to consider a controversial question - were they the inspiration for the Domesday Book of 1086?

From the sources 3: living in the Carolingian countryside I

So far, all my posts on the Carolingian era have been all about kings, aristocrats, intellectuals, clerics and warriors. Obviously, these were all people of no small consequence in early medieval society, but in pure demographic terms, these people were a very small proportion of the population of early medieval Western Europe. And how did these people manage to eat if they didn’t work the land themselves? Therefore, let’s bring the more than ninety percent of the population who weren’t performing liturgies, writing manuscripts or decked out with sword-belts and riding warhorses into the spotlight.

In other words, we're gonna be talking about these sorts of people today. The labours of the months are depicted here in a manuscript produced at the monastery of Salzburg (then in Bavaria) dated to 818,  Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Vienna; Codex 387, fol. 90.

Now it’s in the eighth and ninth centuries, in the age of the Carolingians, that we start to get a growing volume in documentation for rural life in Western Europe – negligible by the standards of modern history (anything post-1300 really), but quite substantial for the early middle ages. We also get a range of different types of documentation about rural life too. The most exciting of these are the polyptychs. These are estate surveys which analyse the constituents’ part of each villa (in the ancient Roman sense), and register what each manse (the unit of landownership and tax assessment) owes the landlord in rent and the state in public duties after recording the tenants. These were produced as property deeds used in lawsuits to defend the rights of landlords. The Carolingian king-emperors encouraged the production of them from the first quarter of the ninth century onwards. Pretty much all the landlords for whom we have surviving polyptychs are monasteries and cathedrals, since their continuity as institutions means that documents in their archives have the best chance of survival. The first polyptych we’ll look at is that of Saint Germain des Pres, a very wealthy and prestigious Parisian abbey founded in the sixth century. It was drawn up between 806 and 829, when Irminon was abbot. We’ll focus on the extract that concerns Villeneuve, a villa located in the wine-growing region of the Seine basin:

There is a master’s manse at Villeneuve with a dwelling and sufficient other buildings. 172 bonniers of arable land which can be sown to produce 800 muids. There are 91 arpents of vineyard where 1,000 muids can be harvested. 166 arpents of meadow from which 166 waggons of hay can be gathered. There are three flour mills the rent of which brings in 450 muids of grain. Another one is not rented out. There is a wood four leagues round where 500 swine can be fattened.

There is a well-constructed church with all its furniture, a dwelling house and sufficient other buildings. Three manses are dependent on it. Divided between the priest and his men, there are 27 bonniers of arable land and one ansange. 17 arpents of vineyards, 25 of meadow. This provides a horse, as a “gift.” In the service of the master, nine perches and an ansange are ploughed, two perches for the spring grain, and four perches of meadow are enclosed.

Actard, villein (colonus), and his wife, also a villein (colona), named Eligilde, ‘men’ of St Germain, have with them six children called Aget, Teudo, Simeon, Adalside, Dieudonnee, Electard. They hold a free manse containing five bonniers of arable land and two ansanges, four arpents of vineyard, four and half arpents of meadow. They provide four silver sous for military service and the other year two sous for the livery of meat, and the third year, for the livery of fodder, a ewe with a lamb. Two muids of wine for the right of pannage, four deniers for the right of wood; for cartage a measure of wood, and 50 shingles. They plough four perches for the winter grain, and two perches for the spring. Manual and animal services, as much as is required of them. Three hens, 15 eggs. They enclose four perches of meadow …

… Adalgarius, slave of St Germain, and his wife, villein (colona), named Hairbolde, “men” of St Germain. This man holds a servile manse. Hadvoud, slave, and his wife, slave, named Guinigilde, “men” of St Germain, have with them five children: Frothard, Girouard, Airole, Advis, Eligilde. These last two hold a free manse containing one and a half bonniers of arable land, three quarters of an arpent of vineyard, five and a half arpents of meadow. They look after four arpents in the vineyard. They deliver for pannage three muids of wine, a setier of mustard, 50 withies, three hens, 15 eggs. Manual service where they are ordered. And the female slave weaves serge with the master’s wool, and feeds the poultry whenever she is ordered to do so.

Ermenold, villein (colonus) of St Germain, and his wife, slave: Foucard, slave, and his wife, slave, named Ragentisme, ‘men’, of St Germain. These last two hold a servile manse containing two bonniers, one and a half ansanges of arable land, an arpent of vineyard, two and a half arpents of meadow. They owe the same as the preceding one. The female slave and her mother weave serge and feed the poultry whenever they are commanded to do so.

(“Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West” by Georges Duby, translated by Cynthia Postan, Edward Arnold, 1968, pp 368 – 369)

The abbey of Saint Germain des Pres, Paris. Of course none of the present building would be recognisable to people from Carolingian times - all of it is rebuilds from the eleventh century and later. It now gives its name to a fashionable quarter of the sixth arrondissement on Left Bank of the Seine in Paris, where there are a lot of famous cafes (Les Deux Magots, le Procope and the Brasserie Lipp) and where, in the 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus came up with existentialism.

Now I am I am not versed in archaic units of measurement and I’ve never been great with numbers (getting an A in Maths GCSE was one of the most satisfying achievements of my life), so while the data given in the first paragraph is fascinating, I am in absolutely no position to use it to calculate the agricultural productivity of Villeneuve. The legendary Georges Duby used polyptychs, including this one, to calculate cereal production in Carolingian Europe and the figures he came up with were depressingly low – two berries of grain reaped for every seed planted, compared to a crop to seed ratio of 6:1 in the thirteenth century and 30:1 for farmers in Europe and North America today. Duby was of course writing in the 1970s and was much more at home in the High Middle Ages (950 – 1350) . Since then, the evidentiary basis for his pessimistic view of Carolingian agriculture has been challenged (see Jonathan Jarrett, ‘Outgrowing the Dark Ages’, Agricultural History Review 67, 2019, pp 1 – 28). And the fact we have these figures to make productivity calculations at all, shows that these people weren’t stupid, primitive or economically illiterate.

There is definitely a hierarchy in this village. Besides the landlord (the abbey of Saint Germain) and the priest (rural parish churches were starting to emerge in what is now France in the Carolingian age), who occupies his own little satellite estate as a quasi-tenant of the abbey, there are clearly two types of social status here.

Firstly, there are the coloni, a class of peasant tenant farmers who are still free men under the law, but are nonetheless dependent clients of their landlords and so are referred to as their “men”, just as the warrior retinue of an aristocrat might be. A clear indication of their legal freedom is that military service is expected of them, as by ancient custom was expected of all free Frankish men including peasants, though in practice, they commute that public duty for a payment to the state – basically a flat-rate tax. These people clearly have to do unpaid labour on the demesne (the land owned directly by the landlord and farmed for his benefit), specifically ploughing it twice a year and performing “manual and animal services as required.” Carting hay and manure is also theoretically expected of them, but in practice they’ve commuted it for payments of chopped wood. Everything else they have to provide for the landlord takes the form of various kinds of rent. Some of the rent they pay in the form of produce from their own plots of arable land, vineyards and animals i.e., “for the livery of fodder, a ewe with a lamb. Two muids of wine for the right of pannage …” But clearly not all them, as for the livery of meat and the right to use the woodlands for fuel and fattening pigs they pay in cash – sous and deniers are the denominations of the silver coinage created by Pippin the Short’s currency reform of 755. That they had access to cash indicates that there was some commerce going on in the ninth century Frankish countryside, and that peasants must have been visiting markets and fairs to sell their surplus produce. It also shows that Carolingian agriculture certainly wasn’t so primitive that the peasants were living at hand-to-mouth subsistence level. Other, more prosperous kinds of free peasant do not feature here because they owned their own land outright as allods, and so owed nothing to landlords.

A peasant at work with his mouldboard (or heavy) plough pulled by oxen in the Stuttgart Psalter (c.825), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart

The other group present here are the slaves. They’ve clearly evolved a lot from the Classical Roman agricultural slaves familiar to Cato, Cicero, Varro and Columella. Rather than living in barracks and working on the master’s plantations under the close supervision of him and his agents, just as slaves in the Colonial Caribbean, Imperial Brazil and the Antebellum US South would also do, they appear to be hutted out in their own houses and farming the own plots of land. They also seem to be providing rents in produce from their plots of land for the right to use the woodland, showing that they actually have a fair amount of economic autonomy – that is to say they can at least provide for their own food, fuel and clothing, rather than being completely dependent on their master like in those other slave societies I’ve mentioned. However, they are still subject to exploitation at the master’s whim. Here there is a gender division of labour. The boys’ jobs include working in the master’s vineyards and “manual services.” The girls’ jobs include textile work on the looms in the master’s workshops and feeding the poultry. It is also clear that these slaves are allowed to marry and have custody over their children, which are absolutely not a given in slave societies. Not only that, but a slave, Adalgarius, is married to a free woman called Hairbolde, and Ermenold, a colonus, is also married to a slave, which would suggest that these enslaved people aren’t being viewed as subhuman by the free. All of this does bring up the old vexed question of when does slavery become serfdom and does it even matter? I won’t discuss my thoughts on that here – that’s for a Controversies post at a later date.

What’s most distinctive about the polyptychs as documents on the early medieval countryside is that they give the names of people other than heads of household and mention the number of children. Now it seems like the nuclear family was the norm in the Frankish heartlands – certainly in this polyptych no household has more than two generations in it. I must state here I don’t have access to the original text of the polyptych, and that Georges Duby, who edited and translated it, took out a large section in the middle. Thus only five households appear in the extract I’ve given, though there will have been many more. In these five households, three out of five married couples don’t have any children and those which do have five and six respectively. In this polyptych, the ages of the children are not specified. This makes the polyptychs like gold dust for those interested in early medieval demography. From them we can make a stab at the population of any given locality and average family size. The only problem is that, unlike the parish registers we have in England post-1540 and nineteenth and twentieth censuses, these documents do not seem to have been systematically updated and so only offer us snapshots in time. Perhaps in the two households with children, most of them subsequently died of childhood illnesses. And perhaps the apparently childfree families had kids a couple of years down the line. And whether they can be used to generalise for areas not covered by them (most of the Frankish Empire), is also doubtful - even amongst themselves, the polyptychs show a great degree of regional and local variation. Still, they are incredibly rich and fascinating and we will see more of them next time.

From the sources 2: well, how did you become a king, then? Or 751 and all that

 As a kind of natural follow-up to my series about Charles Martel, lets talk about his son, Pippin the Short. Immediately after Charles Martel’s death in 741, the mayoral succession was disputed between Charles’ three sons – Pippin, Carloman (both sons from Charles’ first wife, Rotrude of Hesbaye) and Grifo (the son of Charles’ second wife or concubine, depending on who you ask, Swanahild of Bavaria). Pippin and Carloman quickly agreed to divide the administration of the Frankish kingdom between them and become joint mayors. They also agreed to install Childeric III (the last surviving adult male Merovingian) as king, after four years of the throne being vacant, to give their diarchy some legitimacy and hold it together. They then teamed up against their illegitimate half-brother, Grifo, besieged him in the citadel of Laon and then imprisoned him in a monastery. However, in 747 Grifo escaped and successfully courted the support of his maternal uncle, Duke Odilo of Bavaria. When Odilo died the following year, Grifo tried to take the duchy of Bavaria for himself but Pippin the Short led a successful campaign there and installed Odilo’s seven-year-old son, Tassilo, as duke. Grifo, however, would remain a troublemaker until his death in 753. Meanwhile, Carloman, after executing almost all of the ancient Alemannic tribal nobility in a mass show trial for treason at Cannstatt in 746, which finally pacified the persistently rebellious client realm of Alemannia and brought it under direct Frankish rule, decided to leave secular politics altogether in 747. He went down to Italy on a pilgrimage to Rome, became a hermit at Monte Soratte and then a monk at Monte Cassino. Whether it was the result of a genuine crisis of conscience/ conversion to the religious life or just doing his brother a huge favour, we shall never really know. Now Pippin the Short was sole prime minister and de facto ruler of the Frankish kingdom, but was still feeling somewhat insecure about his position. Being a mayor of the palace, indeed having the office monopolised by his family (the Carolingians), simply wasn’t sufficient anymore. He needed to take that next step which, as we said in a previous post, Tolkien’s stewards of Gondor never dared to make …

Now, as I’ve said in previous posts, while even by the reckoning of the most revisionist historians, the Merovingian kings after 720 were just constitutional figureheads with no political power, they did maintain one trump card until the very end – dynastic loyalty. After Clovis had eliminated all the rival Frankish petty kings at the beginning of the sixth century, the Franks within a couple of decades came to accept the idea that all their kings had to be male-line Merovingians. Thus Gundovald, a late sixth century pretender to the throne backed by the Eastern Roman Empire, had to claim to be the son of King Clothar I and an unnamed concubine. In 656, Grimoald, Pippin the Short’s maternal great-great-great uncle and a mayor of the palace, had exiled the child Merovingian king, Dagobert II, to Ireland and installed his own son on the throne, but that had ended badly for them – Merovingian loyalism was too strong. And when in 737 Theuderic IV died, apparently childless, Charles Martel did not claim the vacant throne for himself, but instead simply carried on as de facto ruler of the kingdom without a king Gondorian style. But Pippin had an ace up his sleeve – the alliance his father had established with the papacy a decade earlier. The Royal Frankish Annals tell us what happened next:

750

Burchard, the bishop of Wurzburg, and the chaplain Fulrad were sent to Pope Zacharias to ask him whether it was good that at that time there were kings in Francia who had no royal power. Pope Zacharias informed Pepin that it was better for him who [really] had the royal power to be called king than the one who remained without [effective] royal power. By means of his apostolic authority, so that order might not be cast into confusion, he decreed that Pepin should be made king.

751

Pepin was, according to the custom of the Franks, chosen king and was anointed by the hand of Archbishop Boniface of blessed memory and was lifted up to the kingship of the Franks in the city of Soissons. Childeric, who was falsely called king, was tonsured and sent to a monastery.

754

With holy oil Pope Stephen confirmed Pepin as king and joined with him as kings his two sons, the Lord Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman. The archbishop, Lord Boniface, preaching the word of the lord in Frisia was martyred.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, p 12)

Miniature of Pippin the Short from the Anonymous Chronicle of the Emperors (c.1112 - 1114), Corpus Christi College MS 373, folio 14

Now in terms of sketching out the events in chronological order, there is nothing wrong with the Annals – they’re doing what they say on the tin. But because they are annals – brief accounts of the events that took place each year – they also leave much to be desired. They give no account of the causes, motivations or rationale behind the events they tersely describe. Indeed, some of the details of the events they are very vague on. By what “custom of the Franks” was Pippin made king? Nor do they give us a sense of the novelty of it all. The anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks, while it did derive inspiration from the anointing of Solomon in the Old Testament (mentioned in Handel’s Zadok the Priest, played at every British coronation since 1727), had no precedent in Frankish kingship. And why was he anointed twice, the second time with his young sons as well? And of course, the Royal Frankish Annals are written from a pro-Carolingian perspective, though that is the problem with all our sources on Frankish history post-720. Some reading against the grain is therefore essential.

A miniature of the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the Priest from a mid-fourteenth century French manuscript, Royal 17 E VII folio 147v 

Let’s see what another source, possibly written closer in time to the events than the Royal Frankish Annals by a few decades, has to say – namely the so-called Conclusion about the anointing of Pippin, added at the end of an eighth century copy of Gregory of Tours’ Book of Miracles.

If, reader, you wish to know when this little book was written and issued in precious praise of the holy martyrs, you will find that it was in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 767, in the time of the most happy, serene and catholic Pepin, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, son of the late Prince Charles [Martel] of blessed memory, in the sixteenth year of his most happy reign in the name of God, indiction five, and in the thirteenth year of his sons, kings of the same Franks, Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman, who were consecrated kings with holy chrism by the hands of the most blessed lord Pope Stephen of holy memory together with their father, the most glorious lord King Pepin, by the providence of God and by the intercession of the holy apostles Peter and Paul.

This most prosperous lord and pious King Pepin had, three years previously, been raised to the throne of the kingdom by the authority and commandment of the lord Pope Zacharias of holy memory, and by unction with the holy chrism at the hands of the blessed priests of Gaul, and election by all the Franks. Afterwards he was anointed and blessed as king and patrician in the name of the holy Trinity together with his sons Charles and Carloman on the same day by the hands of Pope Stephen, in the church of the blessed martyrs Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius, where, as is well known, the venerable Fulrad is archpriest and abbot. Now, in this very church of the blessed martyrs, on the same day, the venerable pontiff blessed with the grace of the sevenfold Spirit the most noble and devout and most assiduous devotee of the holy martyrs Bertrada, wife of the most prosperous king, clad in her robes. At the same time he strengthened the Frankish princes in grace with the blessing of the holy Spirit and bound all, on pain of interdict and excommunication, never to presume in future to elect a king begotten by any men other than those whom the bounty of God has seen fit to raise up and has decided to confirm and consecrate by the intercession of the holy apostles through the hands of their vicar, the most blessed pontiff.

We have inserted these things briefly, dear reader, on the very last page of this little book so that they may become known by common report to our descendants in subsequent pages.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 13 - 14)

From this source, things start to become clearer. The first anointing in 751, which followed the election of Pippin as king by the Frankish nobility, was clearly done to establish that he was the legitimate ruler in the eyes of God, just as the kings of the Israelites, who were also anointed, had undoubtedly been. While individual Merovingian kings were sometimes seen as having been favoured by God, or were likened to Biblical figures, divine backing was not an essential component of what made a Merovingian king legitimate or not. But the Carolingians made it one in 751, and their precedent was widely followed ever since. The anointing has been an essential step in constituting a new British monarch since the tenth century, when the West Saxon kings of England consciously adopted it from Carolingian precedent, and is to this day still technically meant to symbolise how the monarch derives their right to rule directly from God. Indeed, the anointing was deemed too sensitive to be aired on live television when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was being filmed.

The coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Pippin the Short's legacy was still alive and well in the coronation of his 30x great-granddaughter just over 1200 years after his own.

As for why it was necessary to anoint Pippin a second time, and to anoint his sons as well, despite the fact they weren’t going to rule the Frankish kingdom for some time, the source provides us with some clues. The source says that Pope Stephen made the Frankish magnates “on pain of interdict and excommunication” swear that they would not elect another ruler except male-line Carolingians. He also made it explicit to them that this is so because only male-line Carolingians have God’s approval, manifested in the anointing of Pippin and his sons by the Pope, Christ’s servant and the successor of the Apostle Saint Peter, to become rulers of the Franks. From this, it is clear that Pippin was worried that the events of 751 actually set a dangerous precedent to the Frankish nobility. Pippin would have suspected that some of the Frankish magnates were thinking “if Pippin can do it, who’s to say that one of us can’t have a pop at it either. After all, what was he before he became king and who put him in charge?” Therefore, Pippin needed a second ceremony to say “get in line you cheeky buggers. Us Carolingians are special. God and his servant on earth, the Pope, say so. From now on you can have me and my descendants as your kings, and if you try to have it otherwise you risk exclusion from the church and your immortal soul burning for eternity in hell.”

And this isn’t the only source which suggests that there was some unease immediately after Pippin became king in 751. Notker the Stammerer, writing in 886 under Pippin’s great-great grandson Emperor Charles the Fat, tells us the following story about Pippin:

When he found out that the nobles of his army were accustomed in secret to speak contemptuously of him, he ordered one day a bull, terrible in size, to be brought out, and then a most savage lion to be set loose upon him. The lion rushed with tremendous fury on the bull, seized him by the neck and cast him to the ground. Then the king said to those who stood round him: ‘now drag the lion off the bull, or kill the one on top of the other.’ They looked down on one another, with a chill in their hearts, and could hardly utter these words amid their gasps: ‘Lord, there is no man under heaven, who dare attempt it.’ Then Pippin rose confidently from his throne, drew his sword, and at one blow cut through the neck of the lion and severed the head of the bull from his shoulders. Then he put his sword back in its sheath and said: ‘Well, do you think I am fit to be your lord? Have you not heard what little David did to the giant Goliath, or what tiny Alexander did to his nobles?’ They fell to the ground, as though a thunderbolt had struck them, and cried ‘who but a madman would deny your right to rule over all mankind?’

(Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 106)

Not quite the same but it will have to do. A lion and a stag from an eighth century Lombard-Carolingian tomb I saw in Bologna. Photographed by yours truly

Of course, by Notker’s day, the reign of Pippin the Short was beyond anyone’s living memory, and Notker tells many legends and picturesque, moralising stories in his Deeds of Charlemagne. Any historian who wants to use Notker as a source for Carolingian politics has to do so with extreme care. Yet the fact that Notker chose to tell this anecdote does seem to show, that even after the Carolingians had continuously ruled as kings of the Franks for 135 years and seemed unshakeable (though that was going to change in just a few years), people could remember that there was a time when the position of the Carolingian dynasty had been a lot more unstable and their right to rule the Franks was not taken for granted. And while this incident with the bull and the lion probably never happened, it does nonetheless convey a broader truth – that new and innovative rituals, symbols and charismatic displays were absolutely essential to the establishment and maintenance of Carolingian rule. It was their creativity and dynamism that kept the Carolingians in power for so long, which left many significant and enduring legacies for later periods in the history of European royalty.