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