From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation part 1

 Last time we were with Guibert, he was complaining about his miserable days being homeschooled in Latin from his private tutor Solomon, who was completely incompetent when it came to the subject he actually taught, but enforced strict discipline and denied Guibert all the pleasures of a regular medieval childhood. While it was Guibert’s mother who had got him into this in the first place by hiring Solomon, after some time she started to sense that something was very wrong, that her son’s education wasn’t quite turning out how she’d hoped and that Solomon wasn’t exactly who he'd cranked himself out to be in the job interview (I say this with deliberate anachronism). Guibert tells us how it happened:

She started asking me, as she usually did, whether I had been beaten that day. So as not to appear to denounce my tutor, I said no outright. Some call it a tunic, others an undershirt. She saw that my little arms were black and blue, and that the skin on my poor back was swollen all over from the canings I had received. My mother groaned when she saw how cruelly I had been treated at such a tender age. She was disturbed and quite agitated, and her eyes filled up with tears as she said: “If that’s the way it’s going to be, you will not become a cleric! You will not put with this kind of punishment just to learn Latin!” I looked at her, summoning as much indignation as I could, and cried out: “even if I die, I will not give up my lessons! And I will be a cleric!” I should add here that she had already promised me, when I came of age, to provide me with arms and equipment if I wanted to be knighted.

So, by his own recollection (we have no good reason to think he made this up), Guibert says that his mother actually considered abandoning the promise she and her late husband had made to God and the Virgin Mary to have her son pursue a clerical career. That a pious woman like her, who would otherwise take a promise to God and His mother very seriously, would say such things after seeing how badly her son had been beaten by his Latin tutor is significant.

You see, back in the 1960s and 1970s, many early historians of childhood and the family, such as Lawrence Stone in “The Family, Sex and Marriage in England” (1977), thought that medieval and early modern parents typically felt little to no love or affection for their children. He also supposed that once they had passed infancy, children were treated like little adults and were subjected to harsh discipline, and that parents only really began to nurture and dote on their children and recognise childhood as a separate stage of existence from the eighteenth century onwards.

Very few scholars, either medievalists or early modernists, would take these kinds of views seriously now. Stone’s work rested on some very selective readings of the early modern English evidence, and his attempts to marshal the social sciences in support of his arguments failed to convince historians who actually had received training in anthropology, like Alan MacFarlane. Meanwhile, the work of historians like Nicholas Orme has shown that medieval people did have a concept of childhood as a separate stage of human existence, and medieval parents did love their children, did show affection to them (and even spoil them in some cases) and did genuinely grieve when they died prematurely. Its society and culture that changes, not human emotions!

Guibert’s mother exemplifies how medieval parents cared deeply for their children’s physical and emotional well-being, as well as wanting them to pursue the best paths for them in life. And as I said earlier, even if Guibert is taking some literary licence here, and we have no good reason to think that he is, he expected this story to be believed by his readers. They would have only thought it remotely plausible if indeed they believed that a mother would typically be loving and caring for her son, and would therefore be concerned to see him subjected to excessive corporal punishment that would leave serious physical and emotional scars.

But as we can also see, Guibert himself was insistent that he carry on with his studies with Solomon. His mother accepted his wishes and Guibert continued to learn Latin, Bible-reading and hymn-singing with whatever enthusiasm was left in him. When Guibert, now in his sixties, reminisced on those times while writing the Monodies, he really had to make a great deal of effort to comprehend how he was so fired up about education and performing his religious duties as a 7 – 12-year-old child, and why that enthusiasm completely evaporated when he was an adolescent. Putting his proto-psychologist’s hat on, he wrote:

I was quick to pursue my lessons, however badly they were taught; and I did not shun my churchly duties. On the contrary, when came time for them, or when some obligation came up, there was nothing I preferred to these duties, not even meals. That is how it was then. But alas! Dear Lord, you know how much I shunned those duties later on, and how reluctantly I would go about the Divine Office! There came a time when even the compulsion of blows could hardly get me to perform them. Clearly my earlier motivation had not been religious. It was not a product of mature thought but of childish impulse. But when adolescence came and my instinctive perversity bloomed, I began to reject every form of outward restraint, and all my earlier devotion vanished. Oh my God! For a time there had been good will, or some semblance of good will, aglow within me, but soon it was snuffed out by a black deluge of perverse fantasies.

To which a cynic might quip – “teenagers, in all times and places, are the same!”

As Guibert entered adolescence, his mother started hunting out for church positions for him in hope that her son would one day fly the nest and become the priest he was always meant to be. This appeared to be quite straightforward. This was an age in which family connections could get you quite far in the church – think of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the half-brother of William the Conqueror.

Now, as I’ve said before, Guibert’s family really were as low level aristocratic as you could get. They had a family castle, effectively the bare minimum needed to make a knight an aristocrat as opposed to just a peasant or manservant with a mail hauberk, an iron helmet, a sword and a horse (and really, most eleventh century knights were the latter), and that was it. They weren’t rich, their local power probably didn’t extend beyond a one-mile radius of their castle keep, and they had no noteworthy ancestors to boast of. But, as you did back then, anyone who was vaguely a somebody had links of some sort to someone who was a bigger, more important somebody who could give favours to advance you and your friends and relatives.

This, of course, is what we call patronage, and it was fundamental feature not just of medieval society but of all pre-industrial societies. Indeed, our very word patron is derived from the Latin word patronus which describes guess what? A more important person who gives favours to you, in return for you, a cliens (client), performing various services for them. And it was these kinds of relationships that were the glue that held ancient Roman society together. Same goes for the artists of the Italian renaissance – they couldn’t produce their great masterpieces without wealthy patrons to fund them, be they city communes, churches, cardinals, patricians, princes or popes, and in some cases also protect them from accusations of criminal behaviour (some of them, like Benevenuto Cellini, were thugs who got away with a lot). Likewise, you can’t understand early modern politics, be it at the absolutist court of Louis XIV at Versailles or the eighteenth-century British parliament, without patronage.

Patronage of course continues to exist today, even though it’s frowned upon in modern society. Most of us at least claim to support selection for top jobs and commissions based on merit and open competition, but in practice it definitely happens. Patronage comes up a lot in politics, as anyone who pays attention to the news knows – Matt Hancock’s awarding of contracts to his matesduring the COVID-19 pandemic or Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list are probably the most salient examples. The Media is full of it too, and arguably there it gets even greasier. As Peep Show’s Super Hans, always unhinged but often very insightful, says in the first episode, about the music industry, “its not who you know, its who you blow.”

Academia is also full of patronage, and that may be one of the reasons for why patronage became an incredibly fashionable thing for academic historians in the mid-twentieth century to look at. For some, it became an obsession to the point that they saw it as the true substance of politics and political ideas and principles as virtually irrelevant, a “screen and a sham” for the real workings of power. The best examples of this are Lewis Namier’s “The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III” (1928), Ronald Syme’s “The Roman Revolution” (1939) and K.B McFarlane’s “The Nobility of Late Medieval England” (published posthumously in 1973, but based on his 1953 Ford Lectures at Oxford). Since the 1980s and 1990s there’s been a pushback against this kind of thinking about political history, what I call the “political cultural turn” in history, but patronage is resurfacing as a major area of interest again through the current fashion among academic medievalists for looking at networks, which sound a bit less elitist and a bit more inclusive. Indeed, “Networks and Entanglements” is going to be the theme for the 2023 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, which I won’t be attending because I’ve basically left the academic network and I don’t have a patron (i.e., a doctoral supervisor) to introduce me to all the luminaries. Of course, networking is a big part of modern professional life in general – the teaching world is full of it and I’m going to have to do some of it myself next Wednesday at the PGCE employment fair.

But enough tangential rambling and back to Guibert. He says:

My mother was determined to obtain for me some ecclesiastical title, whatever the cost. The first opportunity proved not only bad but harmful. It involved one of my adolescent brothers, who was a young knight living in the town of Clermont (that is, the one situated between Compiegne and Beauvais). He was expecting some money from the lord of this place – whether it was a loan or some kind of feudal obligation I don’t know. When the lord proved slow in paying his debt (from lack of funds, presumably), one of my relatives suggested he give me a canonicate or, as they call it, a “prebend,” in the church of that town. (Contrary to all church regulations, this church was under his authority). In exchange for this prebend my brother would cease pestering him about repayment.

Clermont, Picardy, with the castle of the lord whom Guibert's brother served and the church where Guibert was going to be given a prebend pictured. By Guillaume de clermont 60 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11505039

The patronage relationship here is of course a feudal one between lord and vassal, with Guibert’s brother being a vassal of the lord of the castle at Clermont in Picardy. That’s the thing about feudalism – we often make it out like its this weird, distinctively medieval thing but really its just a patronage relationship but with land (held on condition of service) involved. But feudalism didn’t just involve land and military service. It could involve money too i.e., among the complaints of the barons against King John when they forced him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 was that he charged extortionate amounts of money for them to inherit their lands or get married, both of which were in themselves standard feudal obligations which the barons expected of their own knightly subtenants. Guibert is unsure whether his brother owed his feudal lord one of those, or whether it was a financial loan – if the latter, then we could interpret as a sign of the increasingly commercial world of the high Middle Ages (1000 – 1350). But what’s most interesting to us here is that in lieu of paying this debt to Guibert’s brother, the feudal lord was going to offer Guibert a prebend. A prebend is a portion of the revenues of a cathedral or collegiate church (church run by a group of lesser clerics) to a canon or other cleric who hasn’t been ordained as a priest.

Now why would a feudal lord have the authority to do this. Well, you see, private individuals had always been founding churches. Back in the Roman Empire, when Christianity was a small persecuted, breakaway sect of Judaism, a church had typically been inside someone’s house. and the church as an institution didn’t really exist, being instead a loose grouping of local Christian communities without much overarching leadership and organisational structures. In this period, bishops, priests and deacons were basically just part-time local community volunteers – their names in Greek, the main language of the early Christians, are episkopoi, presbyteroi and diakonoi, which literally mean “managers”, “elders” and “sponsors” respectively. I’ve found Kate Cooper’s work incredibly helpful in realising this, and her husband Conrad Leyser taught me at Worcester College – I always found it kind of cute how much the two of them share historical theories and ideas. This changed somewhat in the fourth century with Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, which saw the church being constituted as an empire-wide corporate organisation with bishops becoming quasi-civil servants and a definite formal hierarchy of clerics emerging. Churches became important urban civic buildings which bishops had responsibility over, repairing them if they became rundown and providing them with clergy, though most of the churches were founded by private individuals as a public demonstration of their religious faith and generosity to the community just as earlier Roman aristocrats had done with temples, bathhouses, theatres, amphitheatres and the like. Even churches built on the estates of aristocratic landowners were under the control of bishops, and indeed the estates of Roman senators in fourth century Africa were so massive that many of them needed not just their own churches but their own bishops too.

Basilica of San Clemente, Rome, a quintessential ancient Roman house church traditionally believed to have been that of the first century Pope Clement himself. The current building is mostly twelfth century with some even later additions. 

By Sixtus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=707711

After the Western Roman Empire had fallen and Christianity continued to spread, both within the former empire and outside it, two trends came about. One was that more churches were being built in rural areas by private landowners. Another was that the slow weakening of state power meant that local custom could increasingly take hold. By the eleventh century both of these processes were complete, and so throughout a lot of Europe, especially northern Europe, private landowners had the right to appoint priests to their local churches, along with the responsibility to maintain them. Various attempts had been tried to combat this situation, like the Synod of Trosly in 909 said that churches were under the gubernatio (governance) of the bishop and the dominium (ownership or lordship) of the lord. Confusing isn’t it. But clearly by Guibert’s day, some people were aware that there was something illegal about a lord appointing a priest or awarding a prebend, as Guibert’s own account would seem to indicate. But it was common all the same, and most could get away with it. Indeed, there’s a scholarly German word for this practice, as there so often is – eigenkirche. From the late eleventh century, church reformers led by the papacy tried to combat powerful lay landowners having control over churches, but elements of it still lingered on. Exemplary of this is the late medieval English legal principle of advowson which allowed local landowners the right to appoint parish priests, which wasn’t phased out until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – thus, you’ll often find as a plot-point in a Victorian novel a country squire trying to give a plum vicarage to a family friend.

The quintessential example of a proprietary church. Lorsch Abbey in the Middle Rhine Valley in Germany, founded in 764 by Count Cancor and his mother Willeswind on their estates. Charlemagne took it over in 774 as a royal foundation and the remarkable, and very classical-looking Carolingian gatehouse (c.850 - 900) dates from that period of royal ownership hence why its called the Konigshalle. I visited it in May this year. 

Another good example of a proprietary church. Einhard's basilica at Michelstadt in Hesse, Germany, built by Charlemagne's friend and biographer, Einhard, in 828 to house the relics of Saint Marcellinus and Peter that he had brought all the way from the catacombs in Rome. Einhard intended it to be part of his retirement home in the Odenwald. I had the pleasure of visiting this place back in May, and I wish my retirement home will be as grand as this, which it almost certainly won't.

The parish church of St Mary's Stanwell, formerly Middlesex now Surrey, founded in 1204 as the local parish church by the knight William Windsor after King John confirmed a grant of land made by William to the parson of Stanwell. William Windsor's descendants kept the advowson until 1415, when Richard Windsor gave the right to nominate the parish priest to Chertsey Abbey. After the abbey was dissolved in 1537, the crown took over that right. I visited here on an epic walk two weeks ago.

So, it all seemed like a brilliant plan to kickstart young Guibert’s career as a priest. But, as with a lot of things in Guibert’s life, things didn’t turn out as hoped. How and why this happened, we’ll see next time.

Works cited:

A Monk's Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996)

Edward Powell, "After after McFarlane: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History" in Dorothy J Clayton and Peter McNiven (eds), Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval English History, Sutton Publishing Ltd (1994)

Kate Cooper, Property, power, and conflict: re-thinking the Constantinian revolution, in Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser, Making Early Medieval Societies, Cambridge University Press (2016)

'Stanwell: Church', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 3, Shepperton, Staines, Stanwell, Sunbury, Teddington, Heston and Isleworth, Twickenham, Cowley, Cranford, West Drayton, Greenford, Hanwell, Harefield and Harlington, ed. Susan Reynolds, London (1962)

From the sources 7: childhood and going to school in the 1060s

 I can’t tell you how great it feels to be writing a blogpost now. The last two weeks have been absolutely hectic for me with the PGCE and my mental health has taken a toll for the worse. But now I’m ahead with my lesson planning and have realised that I’m doing very well in the taught part of the course, I can sit down and write a blogpost. Given my current focus in life is “education, education, education” to quote Tony Blair (honestly though, with the possible exception of last year, when has it ever been otherwise), lets return to Guibert and have look at his education

But first, lets hear a bit about his birth and early upbringing. As I said in the previous post, Guibert’s parents were from the lower rungs of the Northern French warrior aristocracy. I also mentioned that Guibert and his mother were very close, if not in an entirely healthy way and that he struggled to relate or sympathise with his father, who was a knight. Guibert remarks eloquently in his autobiography that “in two sense of the word I was the last of her children” – Guibert was the youngest out of his several brothers and sisters, and by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1110s, when he was in his sixties, he was the only one of them left alive. Guibert also says that he was his mother’s favourite child, though he doesn’t try and make himself out as special for it – “aren’t mothers usually more affectionate with their last born.” Guibert also imagines his mother watching over him lovingly in Heaven, as well as sighing with despair whenever he strays from the path of virtue that she set out for him.

Guibert’s mother had gone through a terrifying experience to give birth to him. The perils of premodern childbirth are often exaggerated in popular history. While concrete statistics from the Middle Ages can’t be obtained, from the much better sixteenth and seventeenth century parish register evidence it seems more likely to have been in the realm of 2 - 3 in 100 women dying in childbirth rather than 33 in 100, as some people might imagine it to be so when they think of “ye olden days.” In other words, you were more likely to have a couple of women in your village or neighbourhood die in childbirth than close family members. Still, let’s not downplay it. Death from childbirth was a real enough and accepted possibility before modern medicine that, as we know from, again, early modern sources, women would make plans for how their husbands would honour their memory and their surviving children’s upbringing if something did go horribly wrong either when they went into labour or immediately after delivery, to say nothing of the extreme pain that would have been felt in any case in an age before modern anaesthetics. And in the case of Guibert’s mother things almost did go horribly wrong for her. Guibert relates them in chapter 3:

As she approached the end of her pregnancy my mother had been in the most intense pain throughout the season of Lent. How often she reproached me in later years for those pangs of childbirth when she saw me straying and following the slippery downhill path! Finally Holy Saturday, the solemn vigil of Easter, dawned. My mother was wracked with continuous pain. As the hour of delivery approached, the pains increased, but they were presumed to lead to a natural delivery. Then I turned around in her womb, with my head upward. My father, his friends, members of the family, all feared for both our lives. The child, they thought, was hastening the mother’s death; and the offspring’s exit from the world at the very moment he was being denied an entrance to it added to their sense of pity. On that day, except for the solemn liturgy that is celebrated at a certain hour, the offices usually sung for members of the household were not scheduled. The family held an urgent meeting. They rushed to the altar of the Mother of God. To the one who was, and ever will be, the only Virgin to give birth, they made the following vow and left it as an offering at our Lady’s altar: if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in God’s service and hers; if the child were of the lesser sex, it would be given over to a corresponding religious vocation.

At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking almost like an aborted fetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a most miserable being, and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had been saved. The tiny human being that had just seen the light was so lamentably frail that it looked like the corpse of a stillborn baby. The little reeds that sprout in mid-April in this part of the country are fuller by comparison than were my little fingers. On the same day, as I was brought to the baptismal font – this was often related to me as a joke when I was a child, and even during my adolescence – a woman kept rolling me from one hand to the other and saying “Do you think this little creature is going to live? I guess mother nature never quite finished this one. She gave him an outline more than a body.” All of these things foreshadowed the way I am living own.

(Source: “A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul J Archambault, Pennsylvania University Press (1996), pp 10 – 11)

This is all trademark Guibert de Nogent – gloomy and self-deprecating, yet lively and well-written. And sure enough, the circumstances of Guibert’s birth did set him on his general trajectory in life. Because of that vow made when his mother was in labour, Guibert was destined for a career in the church. Had he been a girl, he would have had to become a nun. Because he was a boy, he therefore had to be trained up to become a priest or a monk. This wasn’t altogether unusual in a medieval aristocratic family. Normally, though depending on how many children there were in the family, at least one child, male or female, would be given a religious vocation. Having one of your children serve in a church or monastery dedicated to a powerful saint would enable them to pray for their patron saint to petition God to have mercy on your family’s souls and grant them a place in Heaven. In a way it was a kind of insurance. Also, to have a relative occupy a high-enough position in the church (a deacon, an abbot/ abbess or bishop) was always advantageous given the wealth, authority and connections that came with those offices. A mixture of piety and family strategies were always in the equation.

Guibert claims that his mother was most committed to this plan for Guibert, while his father had doubts about whether a religious vocation was the best plan for him when, as it turned out, baby Guibert wasn’t so sickly after all. But fate intervened to keep Guibert on the path that had been set out for him before his birth:

I was hardly born, I had scarcely learned to grasp my rattles, when you made me an orphan, dear God, you who were my father-to-be. Yes I was just eight months old when my physical father died: thank you so much for having permitted this man to die in a Christian state of mind. Had he lived he unquestionably would have tried to block the providential design you had for me. My physical build, combined with an alacrity of spirit natural for my age, seemed, in fact to direct me towards a worldly vocation; so nobody doubted that my father would break the vow he had made when it came time for me to begin my education. O good provider, you have managed a resolution that worked well for the well-being of both of us: I was never deprived of the rudiments of your teachings, and he never broke the oath to you.

 (Source: Ibid, p 14)

Once again, we have to be careful as to whether Guibert is being strictly truthful about all this. Not only is there the obviously parallel with Augustine, but also it was a hugely common trope in early medieval saints’ lives, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, to claim that the mother was always supportive of their child’s religious vocation, whereas the father was sceptical or outright opposed to it. The Life of St Gertrude of Nivelles, an early Carolingian hagiography of a Merovingian-era saint, is a case in point, and given that Guibert wrote about saints he was probably familiar with this literature. At the same time, there’s no good reason to be dismissive of his testimony. But anyway, Guibert’s father died in 1056 when he was only eight months old, and so his mother, who did not remarry, was left in complete charge of his upbringing. To give due thanks to Jesus and the Virgin Mary for saving her life, she was insistent that her son grow up to be a monk or a priest.

If Guibert was going to be a monk or a priest, he would need to be able to read and write, and of course that meant reading and writing in Latin. Latin was of course not Guibert’s mother tongue, which would have been the Picard dialect of Old French. By Guibert’s day, learning Latin wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire evolved into the earliest versions of the modern Romance languages. But everyone would more or less agree that this had happened everywhere by about 900, so more than a century and half before Guibert was born. Arguably, Latin would have been in some respects easier to grasp for Guibert as Frenchman than if he were a Dane, an Irishman or an Anglo-Saxon, given the similarity of most of the vocabulary, but the grammar, spelling and pronunciation wouldn’t have come naturally at all. Indeed, about 100 years before Guibert was born, an Italian cleric and grammarian called Gunzo got mightily offended when he visited the monastery of St Gall (in modern Switzerland) and the German monks there corrected him for using a noun in the accusative case instead of the ablative after a particular preposition like he was some ignoramus. Learning Latin in the eleventh century was thus something that didn’t come naturally to anyone (other than linguistic geniuses), just as is very much the case today. Since this was an age before printing, it was very hard to produce large numbers of standardised Latin textbooks, dictionaries and other indispensable teaching tools. How much Latin anyone was able to learn, and to what standard, thus varied a lot in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, you could find plenty of priests and monks who only really knew enough Latin to recite prayers and hymns, draft basic legal and administrative documents like charters and read bits of the Vulgate Bible. On the other hand, a sizeable minority had an almost perfect knowledge of Classical Latin and were well-versed in ancient Roman literature. Guibert was closer to that end. He quotes Sallust and Virgil on a number of occasions in his autobiography and he was clearly comfortable with writing in it about deeply personal subjects. But that doesn’t mean he found learning Latin easy:

I began to study Latin. Some of the basics I learned as best as I could, but I could hardly make sense of it. My dear mother, who really wanted me to be a scholar, decided to turn me over to a private tutor. In the recent past, and even during my childhood, there had been such a shortage of teachers that you could find hardly any in the towns and really any in the cities. When one did happen to find some, they knew so little that they couldn’t even be compared to the wandering scholars of the present day. The man that my mother decided to send me to had been studying grammar late in life, and he was all the more incompetent in his art for having absorbed so little of it in his youth. He was a very modest man, though, and he made up in honesty for what he lacked in literary knowledge.

(Source: Ibid, p 14)

Guibert leaves it quite ambiguous as to how he received his earliest schooling. But clearly it didn’t work very well and so he required a private tutor if he was to get to grips with Latin grammar. Guibert speaking about the shortage of teachers in his childhood (the 1060s) compared to at the time of writing (the 1110s) shows just how aware he was of the huge social changes taking place in his lifetime. This period saw a massive expansion of secondary and higher education in Western Europe as new urban schools, typically based in cathedrals, took shape. Some cathedral schools had existed since the mid-ninth century, but their number greatly increased in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and they marked a significant change from the school system of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, based around royal courts and monasteries. Why so many sprung up in this period cannot be answered here, because it would basically mean tapping into all the major changes (political, economic, social and cultural) taking place in the period 1060 – 1215. But its effect was that there were more graduates around who were in need of employment. And like with the great expansion of secondary and higher education in Britain in the period 1945 – 1970, but unlike with the post-1997 expansion, this was easily found. That was in part because the number of local churches, which needed priests, was growing across western Europe, but also because landed aristocracies were growing in size across Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries alongside the proliferation of castles, which we talked about before. It’s likely that Guibert’s family had only been part of the knightly class for a couple of generations before him. These aristocrats needed educated men to act as their personal secretaries and administrators on their estates – written documents were a much more powerful tool for squeezing higher rents out of peasant tenants than just sending a bunch of men on horses with iron helmets and swords into the village at harvest-time, which was why bishops and monasteries were always the most ruthlessly efficient landlords. They also needed private tutors to educate their children, as was the case for Guibert’s mother who was quite ahead of the curve for the 1060s.

Chartres Cathedral, home of one of the most famous schools in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

How Guibert’s mother found his tutor is a very interesting story in itself. Of course, she didn’t leave an advert of Gumtree or visit an online agency. Instead, having consulted her household chaplains, she headhunted the private tutor of Guibert’s cousin. He was quite comfortable in his job – the boy’s parents got on well with him and gave him room and board (pretty good employment benefits). But his pedagogy, whatever its virtues, was wasted on Guibert’s cousin:

The boy for whom he was responsible for was handsome and aristocratic-looking, but allergic to the liberal arts, recalcitrant to any form of discipline, and for his age quite a liar and a stealer. He could put up with no form of supervision, seldom came to school, and could be found hiding in the vineyard just about every day.

(Source: Ibid, p 15)

Every secondary school teacher will have encountered someone like this boy. I have yet to personally encounter anyone like that, as someone who is only one term into a PGCE, but at my first placement school I have regularly heard my colleagues talking about such individuals with despair. Mutatis Mutandis. Thus, Guibert’s mother was able to snap him up, admittedly after the teacher had a strange dream. How did young Guibert find his new teacher? We’ll hear more about that next time.

From the sources 5: Peasants and power

Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel (770 – 840), a Visigothic immigrant from Spain (like Theodulf of Orleans, friend of this blog, whom he knew personally) that became abbot of a monastery in what is now Lorraine in eastern France, wrote a commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict. If an elite man (potens) were to approach the monastery gate, he should pound on the gate with his fist or staff, and the gatekeeper would greet him humbly and ask for a blessing. But if a poor or low status man (pauper) approached, he should cry out humbly and the monastery gatekeeper would respond with a reassuring “Thanks be to God.” This should not be news, but Carolingian Francia was not a democracy, nor did it make any claim to being egalitarian. It was clear to everyone that kings, bishops and a landowning aristocratic elite, some of whom were tonsured and some of whom wore sword-belts, were in charge and that it was the duty of the common people to respect and obey them. The same principle of course applied for husbands and wives, fathers and sons and masters and slaves. Only the spiritual sphere did egalitarianism apply – the Bible had made it clear everyone had an equal chance of getting into Heaven.

Sourced from Chris Wickham "The Inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 - 1000." The hierarchical, walled structure of this ninth century Tuscan peasant village encapsulates the direction of travel of social change in the ninth century - the upper walled enclosure is probably an estate centre occupied by the landlord's agents.

This was however, not a caste society. People could and did rise above their station. As we saw in the Marseille polyptych, a few peasant boys left their homes to attend school. Those who did could join the clergy and rise high in society. The best example of this phenomenon is Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, the son of an unfree goatherd from northern Germany, who gained the favour of Charlemagne and was educated at his court. Yet the likes of Ebbo could not leave their backgrounds completely behind and faced snobbery at court – an official once said to Ebbo “[the emperor] made you free, not noble, which is impossible.” 

St Mark from the Gospel Book of Ebbo of Rheims (now kept in the municipal library of Epernay in Champagne, France), one of the most beautiful examples of Carolingian painting out there

Likewise, peasants could still serve in the royal army and win lands and other riches on the expanding frontier, at least until the end of Charlemagne’s reign, and as we saw in the Edict of Pitres, kings doubled down on their right to have all free men provide military service during the Viking invasions. And peasants (including the unfree) could also become warriors in the retinues of churchmen and aristocrats. Nonetheless, warfare was becoming an increasingly elite occupation in the ninth century, especially with the slow shift towards heavy cavalry warfare, which was expensive to equip oneself for. The idea that it was the right and duty of all free Frankish men to carry weapons and serve king and country in war was slowly dying out, as this repugnant incident (infamous amongst Carolingianists) from the Annals of Saint Bertin recounts:

859. The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people [vulgus] living between the Seine and Loire formed a sworn association [coniuratio] amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had not been made without due consideration [incaute], they were easily slain by our more powerful people.

(The Annals of Saint Bertin, edited and translated by Janet Nelson, Manchester University Press (1992), quoted in Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009) p 529)

In the modern historiography, the ninth century is seen as a crucial period in the growth of aristocratic power in the Frankish lands, which meant the ebbing away of the relative freedom and autonomy that the peasantry had enjoyed in the three centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The work of Chris Wickham, who I’ve just cited, and “Reframing the Feudal Revolution” by Charles West are instructive here. To what extent were the peasantry completely passive players in all of this? And could the church and the state be of any avail to them. This is what we will investigate in the final part of our “from the sources” mini-series on Carolingian peasants.

Our first source takes the form of a record of a judgement issued in 828 by the royal court of King Pippin I of Aquitaine, one of the middle sons of Emperor Louis the Pious who was given a sub-kingdom to rule in his father’s lifetime. It concerns a dispute between the Abbey of Saint-Paul de Cormery in the Loire Valley and some of its free tenants from an estate in Poitou. Let’s have a read:

A silver denarius of Pippin I of Aquitaine (d.838)

Pepin by the Grace of God king of Aquitaine. When we in God’s name, on a Tuesday, in our palace at the villa of Chasseneuil in the county of Poitou near the River Clain, were sitting to hear the cases of many persons and to determine just judgements, there came certain men, named Aganbert, Aganfred, Frotfar, and Martin, they as well as their fellows (pares) being coloni of Saint Paul from the villa of Antoigne belonging to the monastery of Cormery and its abbot Jacob. There they brought a complaint against the abbot and his advocate, named Agenus, on the grounds that the abbot and his officers had demanded and exacted from them more in rent and renders than they ought to pay and hand over, and more than their predecessors for a long time before them had handed over, and that they [the abbot and his officers] were not keeping for them such law as their predecessors had had.

Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost of the monastery were present, and made a statement rebutting that claim as follows: neither the abbot nor themselves had exacted, or ordered to be exacted, any dues or renders other than those their predecessors had paid to the monastery’s representatives for thirty years. They forthwith presented an estate survey (descriptio) to be read out, wherein it was detailed how, in the time of Alcuin’s abbacy, the coloni of that villa who were there present, and also their fellows, had declared on oath that what they owed in renders, and what was still to pay, for each manse on that estate. That survey was dated to the thirty-fourth year of Charles’ reign [802].

The coloni there present were then asked if they had declared [the statements in] that survey and actually paid the renders stated in that survey for a period of years, and if that survey had been true and good, or did they wish to say anything against it or object to it, or not? They said and acknowledged that the survey was true and good, and they were quite unable to deny that they had paid the render for a period of years, or that they themselves, or their predecessors, had declared [the statements in] that survey.

Therefore we, together with our faithful men, namely Count Haimo [and twenty-three named men ending with John, count of the palace] and many others, have seen fit to judge that, since those coloni themselves gave the acknowledgement as stated above that the survey was as they had declared it, and as it was written down in that document there before them, and that they had paid the said renders for a period of years, so also must they pay and hand over the same each year and every year to the representatives of that house of God.

Therefore we order that, since we have seen the case thus heard and concluded, the above Agenus the advocate and Magenar [sic] the provost should on behalf of the house of God receive a record of it, showing that it has been done in this way and at this time.

I Deotimus, deputising for John count of the palace, have recognised and subscribed.

Given on 9 June in the fifteenth year of our lord Louis the serene emperor. Nectarius wrote out and subscribed it.

(Adapted from Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 229 – 230)

What we can see here is a case of Frankish free peasants, albeit ones in a dependent relationship to a monastic landlord, using their right as free men to use the public law courts. In their case, they chose not to go through the local county court (placitum or mallum publicum) but go instead to the second highest court in the land, that of their regional sub-king. The only one higher than that would be the emperor’s court, and they weren’t exactly going to trek all the way to Aachen or Ingelheim. As the source subsequently recounts, they lost the case. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. The peasants were at a huge disadvantage. The text tells us quite clearly that they didn’t have the written records to back up their claims. Meanwhile the monastery had its survey (descriptio) from a generation earlier (the time of Charlemagne and Alcuin), which it was able to use to demonstrate that the rents and other exactions it imposed on the peasantry weren’t any more burdensome than in the time of their fathers. Linking back to earlier posts, this reminds us why the polyptychs were created – they were documents designed to defend the rights of landlords in disputes with their tenants just like this by carefully recording what each peasant family owed in rents and services. This very document would give them more archival ammunition. The peasants themselves, however, could only rely on the vagueness of individual/ collective memory and testifying in good faith. The fact that the jury of Pippin of Aquitaine’s palace officials were all landlords themselves probably didn’t work in the peasants’ favour either. Finally, though we have no indication of this, Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost were almost certainly better public speakers than the peasants, and as had been well-known in the Roman Empire, the better rhetoricians always won the case.

At the same time, the fact the peasants still bothered to argue their case in the law courts is still significant. And they weren’t alone in this. We have similar cases from northern Francia, Septimania (Languedoc) and Italy in the ninth century, in which peasants appealed to public law courts at county or kingdom level over personal legal status, rent or seized lands. In most, but not all, cases they lost. But it didn’t matter. Even if the judicial system was run by the aristocracy, to a greater extent than it had been in the seventh and early eighth centuries, when the county court had been a bottom-up assembly of local free men, the peasants still believed that it worked for them and that they could get justice like anyone else. After 900, peasants attending public law courts become much rarer, and by the mid-eleventh century local justice had become completely privatised by territorial lords in most of the former Carolingian Empire – Germany differed somewhat.

But now on to our next source. It takes the form of an extract from a collection of miracle stories written in 878 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, who I’ve mentioned here many times before. Hincmar was a very enthusiastic promoter of the cult of his see’s patron saint, Remigius (who we’ve also met before), And he wasn’t afraid to make a few things up to that end – his claim that Clovis was anointed with a chalice of holy oils carried down to Saint Remigius from by a dove heaven had no pre-existing foundation (Merovingian kings were notanointed, remember!) Thus, some might want to approach the following story with extreme scepticism as just a bishop doing some PR. Traditionally, that’s how historians saw miracle stories and saint’s lives. But now, historians have come to realise that the stories in this genre (hagiography) does significantly reflect popular culture. While they’re not a direct window on to the peasant world, they do more to tell us about the lives and beliefs of ordinary people than any other kind of narrative source from the early Middle Ages. So, let’s have a read:

Rheims Cathedral (author's own photograph) looking nothing like how Hincmar would have known it, but magnificent all the same - its one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever visited.

The abbey of Saint Remigius of Rheims (author's own photograph). Again, none of the Carolingian building survives - what's there is from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.

In our age a peasant from the village of the episcopate of Rheims which is called Plumbea Fontana lived next to the royal estate which is called Rozoy-[sur-Serre], but he was not able to use his land peacefully either for harvest or for grazing because of the harassment of the residents on the royal estates. He frequently sought justice from the royal officials, but he was not able to obtain it. Then he took for himself some beneficial counsel. He cooked loaves and meat and he placed beer into jars, as much as he was able. All these he placed into a container which is called in the vernacular a benna, and he placed it upon a cart. Hitching up his oxen, he hurried with a candle in his hand to the basilica of Saint Remi. When he arrived, he presently surprised the poor with the bread, meat, and beer; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint and beseeched him for help against the men of the royal estate who were harassing him. He also gathered the dust from the floor of the church, as much as he was able, tied it in a cloth, and placed it in the same container. He placed a shroud above it, as is usually put upon the corpse of a dead person. With his cart he returned home. Persons he met on the way inquired what he was bringing on the cart, and he responded that he was bringing Saint Remi. They all wondered at his words and deed, and thought that he had lost his mind. He called on Saint Remi to help him against his oppressors. The bulls and cows began with the loudest bellows to attack one another with their horns, and the he-goats to attack the she-goats with their horns, the pigs to fight with the pigs, the rams with the ewes, and the herdsmen dealt each other blows with sticks and arms. As the riot grew greater, both the screaming herdsmen and the animals according to their type began to flee towards Rozoy with the loudest noise and racket, as if a huge multitude of pursuers were beating them with sticks. The men of the royal estate, when they saw and heard these things, were struck with great terror and believed that they had no more than an hour to live. Thus reprehended for their arrogance, they abandoned the harassment of this poor man of St-Remi, and thereafter the poor man held his belongings in peace and without disturbance. And since he lived near the Serre River in a muddy place, he put up with a great bother in his dwelling from snakes. Taking the dust, which he had brought with him from the floor of the church of Saint Remi, he sprinkled it throughout his house, and thereafter a snake did not appear in those places, where the dust had been scattered. By the evidence of miracles, we can accept as certainly proved that, if firm in the faith, we ask from the heart for the help of Saint Remi, we shall be freed from the attacks of the angels of Satan, who as a serpent deceived the mother of the human race in addressing her; and by merit and intercession of Saint Remi we shall be freed from the wicked deeds of bad men.

(From Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 484 – 485)

A modern status of Saint Remigius in Rheims (author's own photograph) commemorating the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis in 1996.

Scepticism of the supernatural and Hincmar’s motives aside, this story does nonetheless reflect beliefs and practices that Frankish peasants could have held, and there are plenty of other stories like it. The story reflects a widely held view that if one was pious, charitable and lived a good Christian life, as the peasant in the story was by feeding the beggars at the church with his spare food, and venerated the saints, one could gain their protection against oppression from the powerful. This kind of attitudes would find their ultimate fruition in the post-Carolingian period, with the Peace and Truce of God movement, which we’ll explore another time once I’ve finally translated the relevant bits of Adhemar of Chabannes. Likewise, Hincmar’s sympathetic attitude to the plight of peasants on the lands of Saint-Remi shows that ecclesiastical landlords weren’t always inimical to the interests of their tenants.

To wrap things up, it is worth noting that there were virtually no peasants’ revolts in the Carolingian era. One exception is the Saxon Stellinga of 841, yet there are many reasons why Saxony was atypical of the rest of the Carolingian Empire and some historians doubt whether the Stellingahad a genuinely lower-class character. Now there are many other reasons why peasants’ revolts were almost completely absent from the Carolingian era and were essentially a late medieval/ early modern phenomenon. But we must not ignore the possibility that one of them was that the majority of peasants viewed the social and political system as just and legitimate. Partly that would have been due to lack of alternative set-ups, except in Saxony which had until a time in living memory been a loose confederation of pagan tribal societies. But clearly there were various ways in which the state, as we saw with the first source, and the Church, as we saw in the second, could at least in theory be made to work for them in the face of oppression and exploitation from certain elite individuals and institutions. Frankish peasants were not passive victims and broad acceptance of the status quo didn’t mean constantly tugging the proverbial forelock even in the face of maltreatment.

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.

 

Getting a glimpse of the origins of castles in not quite the middle of nowhere

For the first post on the many amazing things I saw on my continental tour from 3 May to 17 June, I shall be a little unconventional and start near the end. On 15 June, when I was staying in Chalon-sur-Saone in Burgundy, I went for a day trip to see the abbey of Cluny (an incredible place), which will be the subject of a future post. However it was from Cluny itself that I ventured out into the very picturesque countryside in the blazing late afternoon heat to see this place ...

The Chateau de Lourdon viewed from a hill opposite

A view from just below the hill with yours truly

The Chateau de Lourdon had been made known to me when, as a second year undergraduate, I read "The Transformation of the Year 1000: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism" (1991; originally published in French, 1989) by Guy Bois. Its a super-controversial and provocative book that I've pondered and reflected on a lot ever since I first read it. I would never say its a great work of historical scholarship or that its had a big influence on how I do history, but its resonated with me because it asks the questions that many simply take for granted - when, why and how does medieval society, as most of us are familiar with it anyway, come into being? And what immediately came before it? This is part of what ultimately pushed me towards deciding to specialise in pre-1200 medieval history, as late medievalists can essentially take the existence of religious orders, knights, serfs and the like for granted.  The Chateau de Lourdon is mentioned in it several times and indeed features on its front cover. Seeing it in the flesh after all this time, therefore, felt slightly surreal. 

But the Chateau de Lourdon is interesting for more than just that. It is one of the oldest, purpose-built castles in France, being first mentioned in a title deed of 888 as the castrum Lordo. When William the Pious (875 - 918), count of Auvergne and duke of Aquitaine, founded the abbey of Cluny in 910 as a flagship for a new kind of monasticism, he gave the castrum Lordo to the monks of Cluny along with his unfortified villa three miles to the southeast in the valley of the Grosne - the site of the abbey of Cluny itself. The monks maintained it and continued to fortify it, using it to administer and defend their far flung agricultural estates in the surrounding area. It had a somewhat dramatic history, experiencing armed takeovers and sieges in 1166, 1250, 1470, 1471, 1574 and 1593. Finally, in 1632, King Louis XIII of France (r.1610 - 1643) and his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu (1585 - 1642), following the advice of the Bishop of Macon, proclaimed that the Chateau de Lourdon was hazardous to maintaining public order and civil peace in the region and had it demolished. Hence why it survives in the condition it does today, as a gutted ruin. 

But enough with the Chateau de Lourdon itself. Lets move on to a bigger question. Why did the the earliest castles, like the Chateau de Lourdon, emerge when they did? This is obviously not a trivial question. Castles are one of most emblematic features of medieval society, up there with knights in armour with which they are regularly paired with. As that immortal duo, they're often what gets children (especially boys) first interested in the Middle Ages. That's how I started out my trajectory towards becoming a medievalist, as all the castle-themed books, toys and games I owned by the age of six can surely attest. People of all ages love visiting castles. To give one example, Tower of London is the most visited paid-for attraction in the UK which, as of 2019, was attracting more than 2.8 million visitors annually. Edinburgh castle similarly saw 2.2 million visitors that year and Cardiff castle 502,000. In the wake of the post-pandemic rise in domestic tourism, English Heritage, which counts 66 castles among its 400 sites, saw a record-breaking 375,000 new members join in 2021. People undoubtedly visit castles for the sense of adventure, romance and mystery they get from visiting these enduring, imposing and (sometimes) very ruined monuments from 500+ years ago as has been the case since at least the eighteenth century. But we also know all too well their twofold historical importance. Firstly, their use in war, as mechanisms of defence against enemy attack or as tools of conquest and subjugation. Secondly, as the dwellings of the great and the good of medieval society that served as symbols of their power and prestige and from which they (literally) lorded it over the surrounding landscape. But their great importance to medieval society and how we connect with the medieval past today, does not mean that we can take that for granted. When did they come about, and why?

The white tower (completed 1077) in the Tower of London. In  the late eleventh century, it was the largest fortress palace north of the Alps, and is now part of the UK's most visited pay-to-enter historical tourist attraction. A true symbol of William the Conqueror's power and prestige, and a means of keeping the citizens of London in line. Photo Credit: By Panoramic_view_from_Tower_of_London.jpg: MatthiasKabelderivative work: Nev1 (talk) - Panoramic_view_from_Tower_of_London.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10565675

If we're being parochial and thinking about it from an English/ British perspective, the answer will most likely be these three words - "1066, Norman Conquest." Now, as we'll discuss further later, there are some scholars (especially archaeologists) who would argue that both parts of that answer are wrong. But for the time being, lets just assume its correct. After all, this is what historians studying Anglo-Saxon and Norman England and medieval British castles have traditionally thought, and many still do, and it is also what secondary school history textbooks in the UK still present as fact. 

So, if we're going by the traditional view, then anyone who is at all inquisitive or whose historical horizons stretch beyond the English Channel is going to be asking "well then, how did the Normans and their French allies get into this whole castle thing? When did they figure out that building them was a good idea?

Well, as the Chateau de Lourdon demonstrates, castles of a kind had existed in France for more than a century and a half before William the Conqueror set sail for England in September 1066. The exact "when" for the genesis of the castle is, however, murky and controversial, as we'll see. But everyone would agree that by the mid-eleventh century, castles were a well-entrenched and widespread phenomenon in France broadly defined, not to mention also in Italy and Christian Spain - Germany was a different matter. Therefore, we're mainly going to be thinking about France in the broadest sense here, with passing considerations of Italy and Northern Spain and the proviso that England and Germany (so often forgotten in these discussions) show that things can be different. 

So what's behind it all ...

... Not the white heat of technology ...

So what was responsible for this "rise of the castle" in Continental Europe west of the Rhine between c.880 and 1060? Certainly not because of a a revolutionary technological breakthrough, as the technologies used in the building of castles really were ancient. In Northern France and post-1066 England, the most common type of castle was the motte and bailey. The technologies required to build a motte and bailey - defensive ditches, earthen ramparts, timber palisades and artificial mounds - had been around since Prehistory. An Iron Age fortified settlement like Maiden "Castle" in Dorset is testament to this, and there are plenty of sites like it from the middle to late first millennium BC across Western and Central Europe. And lets not get started on the Romans. The durability of Roman masonry meant that it was inside the still intact wall-circuit of the old Roman fort at Pevensey in Sussex that William the Conqueror built his first castle in England immediately after he landed on 25 September 1066. And closer to the period of the emergence of the first castles, both Offa's Dyke and the Danevirke demonstrate that eighth century northern European rulers were able to mobilise the manpower and resources necessary to build timber and earthwork fortifications spanning tens or indeed hundreds of kilometres. And for the ninth century, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annals of Saint Bertin show the West Saxon, Viking and Carolingian Frankish armies hastily throwing up all kinds of fortifications like it were no biggie. So why do things that we can legitimately call castles (fortresses-cum-private residences) appear so late on the scene?

An aerial photograph from the west of the Iron Age hillfort at Maiden Castle in Dorset made shortly after is excavation in 1937 by Major George Allen (1891 - 1940), a hero of the lost age of gentleman amateur archaeologists.

Pevensey Castle, West Sussex. The walls of the Roman fort, built in the 290s under Emperor Diocletian to defend against Saxon pirates, form the outer circuit. In the top right corner of the fort is the medieval castle, which was built in its present form by Peter II of Savoy, the uncle of Eleanor of Provence (Henry III's queen consort). The castle's Roman and medieval defences combined were strong enough to withstand a siege by Montfortian rebels in 1264 - 1265. Photo credit: By Pevensey_Castle_aerial_view.jpg: Lieven Smitsderivative work: Hchc2009 (talk) - Pevensey_Castle_aerial_view.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17155846

The Danevirke. Back in 800, a timber palisade would have stood on its crest, but wood doesn't survive the centuries as well as stone, as anyone vaguely interested in archaeology knows. Photo credit: By Joachim Müllerchen, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2473885 

The military hypothesis 

So why do castles come about when they do if its clearly nothing to do with technological innovation. You might be thinking "well it must have been for military reasons. Fortifications are an essential part of what makes something a castle, aren't they not?" This is essentially taps into one of the biggest controversies in castle studies. Were castles, first and foremost, fortresses designed to protect their occupants and their property from attack? From about 1900 through to 1970, most historians and archaeologists looked at castles in terms of their defensive features and military functions. These were fairly easy to prove for, say, the Norman castles in England, the Crusader castles in Syria and Palestine (studied by Lawrence of Arabia himself, amongst others) or the Welsh castles of Edward I. In the last fifty years, however, the pendulum has swung the other way. Charles Coulson and his archaeologist disciples have argued that the military function of castles has been massively overstated - most European castles built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries never actually experienced a siege - and that they were first and foremost about the display of power and status. Historians, in turn, have argued against this approach, leading to the so-called "battle for Bodiam" in the nineties and noughties. 

Bodiam Castle, East Sussex, built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge after receiving a licence to crenelate from Richard II, looking absolutely stunning. Whether it was built to defend against the threat of French invasion, or so an upwardly mobile old soldier could live out chivalric fantasies and impress the local gentry, is the subject of much debate, and much too late to concern us here. Photo credit: By WyrdLight.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7910287

But for the early history of the castle, there can be little doubt that castles had plenty of military potential in the early period (c.850 - 1150 let's say), in an age when trebuchets and professional military engineers, let alone gunpowder and standing armies, had yet to enter the scene. Conversely, an eleventh century motte and bailey or stone donjon lacked much potential for leisure and courtly display. And nostalgia and the pleasures of the imagination could have no part in the creation of the early castles, for the ideology of chivalry was still in its prehistory.

A well-trodden path for explaining the origins of the castle goes thus: castles emerge on the Continent in the late ninth and early tenth centuries as defensive measures during the chaos wrought by the invasions of non-Christian peoples - the Vikings, the Saracens and the Magyars. People thus put their confidence in local aristocrats for leadership and protection, instead of a royal centre too distant and ineffective to be of much help to them against the invaders. After the invasions stop, castles find a new purpose - protecting these territorial aristocrats from each other. The result is a "fragmentation of powers (fractionnement des pouvoirs as the highly influential French medievalist Marc Bloch wrote it back in 1939), which gives rise to feudalism - a society with a landed warrior aristocracy, a subordinated peasantry and vertical ties, which at once unequal and reciprocal, being the key guiding principle behind everything. 

On the surface of it, this explanation appears to work for France. The Annals of Saint Bertin, written by Prudentius of Troyes (d.861) and Hincmar of Rheims (d.882), don't mention castles at all. Only public fortifications built by kings and their agents feature, and politics revolves around assemblies, episcopal synods and royal visits to palaces and hunting lodges (implied to be unfortified). By contrast, in the Annals of Flodoard, covering the period 919 - 966, these sinister things, variously called castrum, castellum or arx, that barely register in the ninth century Frankish sources, just keep cropping up all the time, often in the context of kings and aristocrats laying siege to each other in them. What explains this, if not an increased sense of insecurity? To give another example, in 820 Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims quarried stone from the old Roman city walls to repair his cathedral. Come 885, as a Viking army laid siege to Paris, Archbishop Fulk of Rheims reinforced those same city walls using stones from a derelict church. The formula is simple - as the world became a scarier place, societal attitudes to fortification changed and people sought protection not by the king's armies but by whatever means they could come up with. 

At a push, this might work for Italy as well. But for England, Germany and Christian Spain, it runs into complications. England is the one most often used as a counter-example. After all, as is well-known, England suffered just as badly from Viking invasions as did West Francia/ France. Yet it did not see any castle-building. Instead, the state kept the initiative and the West Saxon kings from Alfred the Great onwards built a network of fortified towns called burhs across their kingdom, with each burh being within a five mile radius of another burh, and expanded this network as they reconquered the Danelaw. These remained tightly under the control of the king and his officials and so, as the well-hashed comparison goes, while France fragmented over the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries a unified English kingdom was made. Germany provides a fairly similar case to that of England. Ottonian kings of East Francia/ Germany managed to provide a formidable, unified response to the Magyar threat and prevent political fragmentation. There fortress-building remained under royal supervision, exemplified in the so-called burgenordnung King Henry the Fowler issued in 926. The kingdom of Leon-Asturias in Northern Spain is likewise one which didn't follow the French pattern and kings remained much more in control of both defence and reconquest against the Muslims, even if some regions like Castile (coincidentally named for its many border castles) did enjoy a long period of de facto independence in the tenth century. 

A section of the surviving defences of the burh at Wareham in Dorset, built by Alfred the Great (probably in the 880s) to defend against the Vikings. Photo Credit:By Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13443049. Below is a map, created in 1888 by G.T Clark, of the surviving burghal defences, with the Norman castle later built within them dotted in red.

A modern digital reconstruction of the fortified royal palace of Werla in Lower Saxony, built by King Henry the Fowler. In 924 or 926, he and his army hid there during a Magyar invasion, and then as the Magyars retreated, slowed down by all the loot, he led a force of cavalry to ambush the baggage train, and took a Magyar prince called Zoltan prisoner. With his hostage, Henry the Fowler was then able to agree to a nine year truce with Arpad, the Magyar grand prince. Taking advantage of the time this bought him to strengthen the East Frankish/ German kingdom's defences, the Burgenordnung was issued shortly afterwards.

From such comparisons, one has good reason to wonder whether there was anything inevitable about the French situation, given that other Western European kingdoms went down such different trajectories in response to similarly serious threats from non-Christian invading peoples. It also makes one wonder whether military defence was really the reason for the rise of the castle in France. There are, indeed, very few surviving examples of private castles (as opposed to fortifications in general) that were built in greater France between c.880 and 960 with the explicit aim of repelling Viking, Saracen or Maguar attacks. And au contraire, by the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the threats of Viking, Saracen and Magyar invasion had been seen off, yet castles were proliferating at a higher rate than ever before. For example, in Provence a hundred castles were built in the century after 930, and in the Auvergne and Limousin regions more than 150 were erected between 970 and 1020. Anjou experienced its biggest castle-building wave in the first third of the eleventh century under Count Fulk III Nerra (970 - 1040), who had no Viking invaders to fear and was busy expanding his power into Touraine against his archnemesis, Count Odo II of Blois-Champagne. Perhaps, therefore, military defence, at least against heathen invaders, was not the primary factor behind the rise of the castle, but rather power and authority, which brings us to ...

Loches Castle, the classic stone donjon of the eleventh century built by Fulk Nerra. Photo Credit: By Lieven Smits - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8239026

Castles and the Early Medieval State

So now it is apparent to us that the first castles were able to thrive when the central government was not up to its job, that brings us to a question - was there anything that was actively stopping castles from emerging before they did? The answer that seems obvious is the state, by which we mean the royal court and its officers and agents in the localities. For West Francia/ France, it is made even more obvious by the fact that we have the Edict of Pitres of 864, which we explored last time. You may recall (and if you don't, scroll down to the very bottom of the linked post) that the Edict says that anyone who has built "castles (castella), walls (munitiones) or palisades (valla)" without being granted the king's express permission to do so, will have them demolished by the king's officials in the next thirty five days, with loss of office threatened for any count who neglects this command and harsh penalties for anyone trying to obstruct it.

 The thinking goes that under a fairly strong, competent and energetic king like Charles the Bald, this state monopoly on building fortifications that the Edict implies could remain effective. But after the death of Charles the Bald in 877, his successors were less effective. His eldest son, Louis II the Stammerer, lasted only two years, and his younger sons, Louis III and Carloman, together only lasted another five. Then in 884, Charles the Bald's East Frankish nephew, Charles the Fat, took leadership of the kingdom. Yet Charles proved himself to be not quite up to the task of ruling three realms (West Francia, East Francia and Italy) at once, especially when the Viking challenge was entering its most intense phase, and in 888 he died of a (likely) stress-induced stroke after news reached him of the rebellion of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia. The West Frankish nobility then elected, Margrave Odo of Neustria, the first non-Carolingian king in almost 150 years. Odo ended up fighting a civil war from 893 to 897 with Charles the Simple, the son of Louis the Stammerer who had been born one month after his father's death in 879, and died a broken man in 898. Charles the Simple was then deposed in 922 by Odo's brother, Margrave Robert of Neustria. Charles then defeated and killed the usurper, Robert I, at the battle of Soissons on 15 June 923, only to then be betrayed and imprisoned by his cousin, Count Herbert of Vermandois. The West Frankish nobility then elected Duke Raoul of Burgundy as their king, who spent a significant portion of his thirteen year reign in open warfare with that same Herbert of Vermandois because the latter was trying to deprive him of his right to appoint the most important cleric in the realm - the Archbishop of Rheims. 

As the conventional narrative runs, by the time of Raoul's death in 936, there had been a drastic shift in the balance of power between kings and aristocrats. Charles the Simple's son, King Louis IV, who returned that year from living in exile with his maternal uncle, King Athelstan of England, spent more than half of his eighteen year reign in open civil war with his most powerful subject, Hugh the Great, the son of Robert of Neustria. Only with the help of his brother-in-law, King Otto the Great of East Francia/ Germany, was Louis IV able to finally bring Hugh the Great to heel. Louis' son, Lothar (r.954 - 986), and grandson, Louis V, though the latter only lasted a year as king before his premature death, fared somewhat better. After the Carolingian line of West Frankish kings terminated in 987 and nobility elected Hugh Capet, the son of Hugh the Great and grandson of Robert of Neustria, as king. The new king struggled to arbitrate disputes between his magnates like Count Odo II of Blois, who claimed he had no authority to intervene in their private feuds, and a lippy count once said to him "who put you in charge." Hugh's son, King Robert II the Pious (r.996 - 1031) spent most of his reign fighting to assert direct rule in Burgundy. By the time of his death, the kingdom of West Francia/ France was nothing more than a confederacy of semi-independent principalities, many which had themselves fragmented into much smaller autonomous lordships, and the king only exercised direct authority over the Paris region which he seldom left. For almost 150 years, West Frankish/ French royal authority was on a constant downwards spiral until it hit rock bottom, so the traditional way of telling it goes. 

Map of France in 1030 - areas in turquoise are the only ones the king had any direct control over.

It is thus therefore assumed that as royal power became progressively enfeebled grasping magnates took advantage of the growing power vacuum by building castles, which the central government could no longer stop them from doing, thus tipping the balance of power even further towards their end. From these castles, so this school of thought goes, they were able to secure iron control over large hereditary territories, subordinate and exploit the free peasantry, wage endemic warfare against neighbouring magnates and defy royal authority as and when they saw fit. The fact that the subordinates of these magnates were given control over castles and were capable of building their own meant that effective political power was able to devolve down to the level of castellans and simple knights in charge of a few villages. 

The castle of Chateau Doue de la Fontaine in western France, built c.950 on the site of an unfortified Carolingian era aristocratic residence, once owned by King Robert I (d.923), by Count Theobald I of Blois, one of Hugh the Great's vassals.

A remarkable document produced in Aquitaine in c.1020 called the Complaint of Hugh the Chiliarch, exemplifies this well. Almost all the action takes place within the county of Poitou, making it an extremely localised world. The count of Anjou, Fulk III Nerra (970 - 1040), appears to be essentially a foreign power, and the king of France, Robert the Pious, is never mentioned at all. The political actors that feature in it, including the certain Hugh de Lusignan for whom it was written, are almost all minor castle-holding lords constantly locked in disputes and vendettas with each other, which they pursue by building new castles and laying siege to and capturing/ destroying their opponents castles. The Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, William V (d.1030), tries to impose some measure of order over his fractious vassals, but in order to do this he has to essentially play divide and rule with them. Whichever party he sides against has to have their castles demolished or besieged.

The Chateau de Lusignan, first built in the tenth century and the principal residence of Hugh de Lusignan, representing the month of March in the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (c.1414). By the early fifteenth century, the castle had been rebuilt and modernised beyond all recognition from whatever it would have looked like in Hugh de Lusignan's day, though it still occupied the same site, and it was now in the possession of Duke Jean de Berry, uncle of Charles VI of France (r.1380 - 1422), the mad king of Shakespeare's Henry V. In the intervening period, the Lusignans had moved on to bigger and better things, like being one-time kings of Jerusalem (if you've watched Kingdom of Heaven you'll know who I'm referring to), earls of Pembroke and kings and queens of Cyprus. 

Around the same time, the counts of Barcelona, who had managed to keep public order and justice going in their principality and launch successful military expeditions as far as Cordoba, the capital of the Caliphate itself, under Count Ramon Borrell (d.1017), had their power undone by the castle-holding dependents along the Muslim frontier that they themselves had created. While by the 1060s, the counts of Barcelona had recovered some measure of control over their principality under Count Ramon Berenguer I (d.1076), all the old motors of public government they had back in the 1010s were lost. Instead, they derived their power and authority by receiving oath-takings and homage from these castle-holding lords, whose activities they could not police - the lords would be their faithful vassals and give them military service in return for their fiefs and castles. Indeed, it was in Catalonia, in the time of Ramon Berenguer that the first book of "Feudal Law" was created - the Usages of Barcelona. 

The tenth century Castell de Miralles near Barcelona. Photo credit: 

By Antoni Grifol - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18264882

Scene from the Usages of Barcelona showing Count Ramon Berenguer I and his wife Almodis de la Marche counting out 2000 ounces of gold as payment to Count William Raymond of Cerdanya in return for rights over the castle of Carcassonne. Ramon Berenguer's son, Count Berenguer Ramon the Fratricidal (d.1097), notably fought against one of the most famous knights ever, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, also known as El Cid, and was captured twice - indeed, I've known about Berenguer since I was 8, when I played the El Cid campaign in the 2000 Real Time Strategy game Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors where he's one of the major baddies and you have to destroy his castle in one mission.

In the north of France, Duke William the Bastard of Normandy, who famously built a number of castles of his own, spent much of his youth laying siege to rebels' castles, destroying the castles that the Norman barons had built during his troubled years of his minority (1035 - 1047) and attacking, capturing and destroying castles belonging to enemy frontier lords. The first book of the Deeds of William the Conqueror, written by William of Poitiers in the 1070s, is full of this stuff. 

Remains of the early eleventh century stone donjon at Brionne in Normandy, home to William the Bastard's first guardian during his minority, Count Gilbert of Brionne (d.1040). Photo credit: By Eponimm - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51117438

William the Conqueror's forces besiege the Breton border castle of Dinan in the Bayeux Tapestry. The castle appears to have a wooden keep, a motte and an outer rampart connected by a bridge, but apparently no bailey!

And these are all the regions that were still lucky enough to have an overarching leader. In a region like Normandy's near neighbour, Picardy, power went to whoever had the most castles, as Hariulf (1060 - 1143), a monk of the abbey of St Riquier, wrote:

"Because they were not all lords of castles, he [Hugh of Abbeville] became more powerful than the rest of his peers. For he could do what he liked without fear, relying on the protection of the castle, while others, if they tried anything, were easily overcome as they had no refuge."

A similar situation existed in the region of Berry. There the Bishop of Bourges in 1038 had to create a militia of free peasants to go around destroying castles in order to restore peace to the region. In the end it was of no avail, as the local aristocracy retaliated by sending a force of mounted knights, which the peasant militia was no match for and they all ended up slaughtered.

These kinds of anarchic situations are essentially the worst nightmare of Charles the Bald, Hincmar of Rheims and the other leading luminaries of the West Frankish kingdom involved in the making of the Edict of Pitres. Indeed, the Edict itself complains of the "many difficulties and robberies" that these mid-ninth century prototype castles are creating. To many scholars, therefore, the Edict of Pitres seems like a remarkably prescient warning of the storm that was to come, and that had Charles the Bald's successors been stronger kings, maybe the Edict of Pitres would have held, the state would have kept its monopoly on fortifications and all this mess would have been avoided. Simple processes of comparison outside France seem to validate this as well. When kingship (or whatever public power there was in the region) failed, as it did in Italy and Lotharingia at so many different points in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in Germany in the 1070s, in Galicia and Leon in the 1110s and finally in England in the 1140s, the realm would descend into a spiral of unfettered castle-building as aristocrats strove to out-do each other and achieve greater local domination. 

Baronial anarchy in the Home Counties: Abinger Motte, Surrey, first built c.1100 by William FitzAnsculf, rebuilt in the 1140s and abandoned in 1153.

Its even been argued that the memory of the Edict of Pitres was clung on to in some quarters, and inspired putative various attempts to regulate fortifications. A clause in the Customs and Judgements of the Dukes of Normandy, issued in the 1090s, appears to suggest that the Dukes claimed the right to garrison the castles belonging to their barons. Two clauses in the Laws of King Henry I, issued c.1115, forbid castellatio without licence. However, the text's author mysteriously glossed that word as "fortification of three walls", which would imply not an attempt to regulate fortified dwellings per se, but one to prevent them from being activated for war by building an additional outer rampart or ditch. Nonetheless, both of these have been interpreted as signs of Carolingian nostalgia in the Anglo-Norman realm. The Edict of Pitres is also thought to be the ultimate inspiration behind the systems of royal and princely licencing of fortifications, which first properly appear in the sources for England, France, Germany and the Low Countries in the decades around 1200. Thus, as Simon MacLean puts it, the Edict of Pitres has so often been seen by twentieth and twenty-first century historians as something of a "skeleton key" or "Rosetta Stone" to cracking the early history of the medieval castle.

Attractively simple as all of this might seem, sadly its not. For one, it rests on an incredibly dated, essentially pre-WW1, school of historical thought in which strong kings are inherently a "good thing" and powerful aristocrats are inherently a "bad thing." It is thus presumed that the two were mutually antagonistic - kings strove for a weak and pliant aristocracy so they could bring peace and order to the realm, while aristocrats wanted a weak and distant monarchy if not going it alone all together so they could rule the localities like petty tyrants. Probably the biggest revolution of in our understanding of how medieval politics worked prior to the thirteenth century has been the development, mostly in the last fifty years, of the consensus model. 

Where the traditional approach to medieval political history met its ludicrous parody - in Sellars and Yeatman's tongue-in-cheek humorous narrative, everything was either a "good thing" or a "bad thing", and it was the barons'grand design to revive the "feudal amenities of sackage, carnage and wreckage", which they got in the Wars of the Roses and "staved off the Tudors for a while."

Under this school of thought, rather than being locked in eternal struggle, kings and aristocrats needed each other. Aristocrats needed to kings to provide them with war leadership, justice and dispute arbitration, patronage and the like, while kings needed the local power, knowledge and connections of aristocrats in order to further their state-building activities. Indeed, as we saw in the post on the Edict of Pitres, which was formulated at a royal assembly - the ultimate physical manifestation of consensus politics - Charles needed the advice and close co-operation of his aristocracy for his governmental reforms to succeed, and many of those government reforms provided solutions to the problems aristocrats wanted solved. And as can be argued of both the rebellions and civil conflicts that Charles the Bald himself and his successors experienced, they were not so much because the aristocracy wanted to enfeeble the system but instead have it work better for them. 

There's also the issue of whether the Edict of Pitres has itself been misinterpreted. Nowhere else in the ninth century sources do we find Carolingian kings claiming a monopoly on the right to build fortifications. Nor do any rulers after Charles the Bald claim such a right until towards the end of the twelfth century, by which the dangers of unfettered castle-building really were obvious from centuries of experience. Even then, some historians like Charles Coulson have argued that late medieval English licences to crenellate weren't so much about maintaining public order and civil peace, as they were a form of political patronage granted by the Plantagenet kings to middling landowners and their favoured servants so that they could lay claim to noble status. 

Simon MacLean argues that, in fact, if the edict is read closely and in proper context, its not actually asserting the state's right to a monopoly on fortifications, or warning against impending feudal anarchy if castles continue to be built without royal permission. As he sees it, the Edict reads more like an attempt by the state to build consensus among the aristocracy and mobilise as much manpower and resources as it can towards governmental reform and common defence against the Vikings. Private building projects distracted aristocratic officials and the peasant labour force from what they really should be working on - public fortifications to defend against the Vikings. MacLean points to how Charles the Bald had to threaten to call on divine retribution in order for the fortified bridge at Pont de l'Arche to be completed in 862, and how when he claims that the state has the right to call on peasants to work on public fortifications he has to appeal to "the custom of other nations" and the Theodosian Code, not the capitularies of any previous ruler. What was going on here, MacLean suggests, were extraordinary measures that required a lot of heavy-lifting through appeals to the Roman past and consensus-building.

MacLean's arguments, contained in his very recent article "The Edict of Pitres, Carolingian Defence Against the Vikings and the Origins of the Medieval Castle", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, (2020), might be a little too sceptical and against the grain for some, and we have yet to see how other historians will respond. But he does quite successfully demonstrate how circular much of the reasoning is on this issue. While its true that the written sources from the ninth century, seldom ever mention castles, archaeology gives a different picture. MacLean points to how many fortified sites of varying sizes that can be dated with some precision to the ninth century have been found in northern and western France. However, because of the Edict of Pitres, it is presumed that these must have been public fortifications built by the king and his officials, otherwise they would have been destroyed and left no trace. A classic example to demonstrate the adage, well known among ancient and early medieval historians, about using archaeological evidence: "Texts can lie to you. Spades don't lie, but you have to make them speak."

Similarly, the archaeological evidence tells a different story for Anglo-Saxon England, where it is thought that there were no castles until after the Norman Conquest because the West Saxon kings kept a monopoly on fortifications. This view is reinforced by a small number of canonical written sources. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses Castell (evidently a word of Latin and French import, not an Old English one) to refer to the fortifications on the Welsh borders that were built in the 1040s and 1050s by Earl Ralph the Timid of Hereford, Edward the Confessor's French nephew, and his followers, and generally seems to view them as dangerous foreign innovations. Orderic Vitalis likewise says in a passage famous among Anglo-Normanists that there were "very few" castles in England before 1066. What exactly he meant by these "very few" castles is, however, not entirely certain. Did he just mean the castles that Edward the Confessor's French followers had built in the two decades before the Conquest, in which case there were very few indeed on the eve of the Battle of Hastings. Or was he perhaps alluding, with pardonable exaggeration, to something else. You see, archaeologists in the last fifty years have excavated a number of manor houses with ditches and earthwork ramparts dating to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The most notable examples are those at Goltho in Lincolnshire, Fowlmere in Cambridgeshire and Sulgrave in Northamptonshire. 

The very overgrown earthworks of Richard's Castle in Herefordshire, a motte and bailey built by Richard Scrob, one of the Norman knights that Edward the Confessor had invited over and given lands in England to sometime before 1051. Very much one of those castles you could easily not notice on a country walk in the vicinity, unless you were actively looking for it. Photo Credit: By Raymond Perry, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9179141

Ewyas Harold castle in Herefordshire, a motte and bailey built in 1048 by Osbern Pentecost. Photo Credit:  By Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15194102

A highly imaginative reconstruction of what the late Anglo-Saxon manor house at Goltho looked like, made by Guy Beresford, the archaeologist who excavated it in the 1970s. Photo credit: Jonathan Jarrett. Minus the motte, it would indeed look remarkably like an early Norman castle.

Map of Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, in 1847 showing the ditch and bank enclosure (like that at Goltho), created sometime between c.1000 and 1050, which was excavated in 2002. Image credit: John Blair.

Some might quibble at the interpretation of these sites as proto-castles and question how typical they are. We don't know a great deal amount about pre-conquest English aristocratic residences, as indeed is also the case with ninth century Carolingian Frankish ones. But what we do know is that they were expected to be quite grand indeed. The laws of King Cnut (c.1018), as glossed by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d.1023), say that in order for a ceorl (free peasant) to be considered a thegn (lesser nobleman), he must own five hides of land, a hall, a kitchen, a proprietary church, a bell-house and a burhgeat. The meaning of the latter two is somewhat ambiguous. But Ann Williams has convincingly suggested that the term burhgeat means fortress gate, a pretty solid indication that late Anglo-Saxon manor houses were expected to be fortified by ditches, ramparts and gates, some of which may have been built in stone. And while the number of these early eleventh century Anglo-Saxon fortified manor houses that have been excavated is currently fairly small, more may yet be discovered underneath early Norman castles, as the ones at Goltho, Fowlmere and Sulgrave were. Indeed, as Simon Forder has helpfully suggested, the fact that the Normans were able to put up so many castles in such a short space of time, with such limited manpower during a military conquest means that they must have been making extensive use of pre-existing fortified sites. Some of these obviously included Alfredian burhs (like at Wareham and Oxford), Roman forts (Pevensey) and even Iron Age hillforts (Old Sarum), but they can't have been the only ones. Thus, archaeologists, who tend to be suspicious of grand narratives (except for prehistory, where they're the ones who write them), have argued that there was a steady growth in fortified sites of all kinds in England in the period 900 - 1050, as there was everywhere else in Western and Northern Europe, and that all the Normans did in 1066 was bring in mottes and donjons, which would have made their way over to England anyway if given another generation or two. How much of this tenth and early eleventh century growth of fortifications in England was encouraged or opposed by the late Anglo-Saxon state, we are simply not in a position to know.

The late Anglo-Saxon stone tower of the city defences at Oxford (founded as a royal burh by Edward the Elder sometime before 918) in the background to the left of the Norman motte (constructed in 1071 by Robert d'Oilly, sheriff of Oxfordshire), taken on a November evening back in 2019.

Other regions we haven't spoken of much were also busy building fortified enclosures as the first millennium drew to a close. Above is a reconstructed tenth century Slavic refuge castle at Raddusch in Brandenburg, near the the present day German-Polish border. Photo Credit: By A.Savin (WikiCommons) - Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64118216. Below is a "ring castle (trelleborg)", near Slagelse on the Danish island of Zealand built c.980, possibly at the orders of King Harald Bluetooth though we can't be sure of it. Photo Credit: By Thue C. Leibrandt - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30522746

"Its the economy, stupid", or the culture of power?

So maybe the frontiers of the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon states need to be rolled back a bit. But at the same time, there's no proof that castles were part of any grand conspiracy on the part of the aristocracy to undermine the state, even if castles did ultimately contribute to temporary collapse of all public authority and the emergence of revolutionary, new forms of political organisation (what textbooks still call feudalism) everywhere in Europe by the mid-twelfth century at the latest.

One suggestion is that it comes down to how the economy works really. Under the Roman Empire, the elite prospers from owning vast landed estates worked by hordes of slaves, from holding public office in the provinces and from the patronage of the imperial court. This keeps the aristocracy very much in favour of a strong state. The Western Roman Empire of course falls apart in the fifth century and taxation has largely dried up by the early seventh century (unless you're in Spain) - whatever happens to the slave system in continental western Europe deserves a post in itself. So why aren't castles already a thing in the late Merovingian period, when kings were arguably much weaker than they were in tenth century West Francia and some of their mayors of the palace, like Ebroin, were seriously close to destroying consensus politics. The simple answer is that, after centuries economic and demographic decline arguably going back as far as the Antonine Plague (165 - 180 AD) and the Crisis of the Third Century (235 - 284), the rural economy is too poor and underdeveloped for aristocrats to go it alone. Instead, they need the state, which still has lots by way of land, moveable treasure and offices to give out as patronage. Indeed, most of the factional struggles and civil wars of the period from 656 - 721 in the Merovingian kingdoms can be explained away as different groups of aristocrats trying to gain access/ control of the patronage system. Eventually the Carolingians and their faction completely won out and took over from the Merovingians, and they went about leading the Franks into a series of expansionist wars that would give them a bigger patronage base from plunder and confiscated land. Frisia, Burgundy and Provence are conquered under Charles Martel. Alemannia, Septimania and Aquitaine follow under Pepin the Short. Then Saxony, Italy, Bavaria and the Spanish March under Charlemagne. After 803, however, pretty much all conquests come to a halt, and the Carolingians become faced with the problem of managing increasingly finite resources and the patronage base shrinks. Meanwhile, the rural economy starts to experience an upswing - there's a growth in agricultural production and population, rural and urban markets are proliferating (the Edict of Pitres would support this), there's a lot more cash going around and rural settlements are starting to become less dispersed and more concentrated around nuclei like parish churches. The conditions for building local powerbases are thus set, and there's everything to be gained from subjugating and exploiting the peasantry, which are as it stands legally free and relatively unburdened either by the state or by landlords. The aristocracy thus need the political structures of the kingdom increasingly less to guarantee their wealth and position. Therefore, they can instead start to shift towards becoming territorial princes and local lords, and castles, which they can definitely now afford, are both end and means in this quest for local domination. And so, by the middle of the eleventh century, the rural economy is booming, castles have proliferated and the formerly free peasantry are now serfs. 

Perhaps one could also posit another socio-economic factor behind the rise of castles - the need for upwardly mobile local bigwigs, prospering from economic growth, to demonstrate their status against better established elites. After all, Archbishop Wulfstan made his comments about the "bell-house and burhgeat" in the context of what a prospering free peasant needed to do to claim thegnly (lesser noble) status and perhaps it worked similar on the Continent in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, one of our biggest weaknesses in all of this is that so little is known about elites in the ninth century Carolingian kingdoms below the level of the high aristocracy.

Fresco of a donor from the church of St Benedict at Mals in the South Tyrol region of Italy, dated to c.800. This man was clearly elite, but how elite exactly we can't be sure.

Yet the problem with these kinds of explanations are many. The first, at the most abstract, theoretical level, being accusations of economic determinism. The second is that the data for economic and social change is very localised and fragmentary. For example, rural social structures for northern France very well documented in the early ninth century polyptychs, whereas in Catalonia the evidence for this stuff only really gets going after 880 but then it becomes the most prodigiously documented region of western Europe in the tenth century. With something like early medieval grain yields, our data is so inadequate that all we can really say with confidence that grain yields were higher in the twelfth century than what they'd been in the second century AD, but whatever happened in between is highly disputable. Likewise some people see economic growth and the beginnings of peasant subjection to aristocratic lordship starting as early as the seventh and eighth centuries in some regions, including the Frankish heartlands between the Loire - way too early for them to be connected in any way to the rise of castles. Likewise, we have not much real data to prove the depletion of the Carolingian state's aggregate fiscal resources. And indeed its possible to argue that the Carolingian state was a lot more dynamic in acquiring state resources than we give it credit for. It seems to have been trying to redevelop centralised taxation from the Edict of Pitres, and certainly hard to imagine that the lands a ninth century king like Charles the Bald granted out as patronage were simply the final remnants of the fiscal estates of the Western Roman emperors. Indeed, as the Edict of Pitres' coinage reform and other economic measures show, with the right kinds of mechanisms and regulations in place the Carolingian state could have successfully ridden the tiger of economic growth. And if the drying up of plunder sowed the seeds of the Carolingian state's demise, why did it take multiple generations after militarily expansion ceased at the beginning of the ninth century for it to happen. Undoubtedly local economic growth and changing social structures facilitated the rise of the castle, but fitting it all into a grand narrative creates a great many complications and pitfalls.

Finally, there's culture to consider. The martial self image of the aristocracy itself certainly doesn't explain it, as the aristocracy had been pretty thoroughly militarised since the fifth, sixth or seventh centuries, depending on where in western Europe we're talking about, and yet castles don't appear until the ninth century at the earliest. And while other societies with warrior elites have produced castles, like Feudal Japan, many others have not. 

Himeji Castle in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, built in 1333 by the samurai Akamatsu Norimura. Photo Credit: By Niko Kitsakis - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40135622. I must confess I know absolutely nothing about how Japanese incastellamento worked. But since we're being encouraged global, I thought I'd put this there without even a hint of tokenism.

What's maybe more to the point is specifically a change in political culture. Where do the elites see themselves as getting their power from, where do they think is the appropriate forum for exercising it and to what end? And here we might have something of an answer. The Carolingian, Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon elites (can't claim to know anything about their Asturian, Leonese and Castilian counterparts), I would argue, saw their power as coming from loyal service to kings, public office holding, participating in assemblies and the royal court, ancestry, widely spread landed interests and pushing forward the wider Carolingian project of religious and moral reform. In the case of Carolingian aristocrats, we have good evidence to show that the majority of them were literate - they were definitely not hairy, mead-swilling primitives. And while the aristocracy did often rebel against the Carolingian kings from the reign of Louis the Pious on, it was always done with the aim of either correcting the ruler or replacing him with another member of the Carolingian family. Rebellion was never about trying to weaken the power of/ break away from the royal centre. Similar patterns can also be seen with the various rebellions against the Ottonians, and, for Anglo-Saxon England, with the rebellions of the House of Godwine and the House of Leofric in the reign of Edward the Confessor. Notably, retreating into private fortified sites was an option seldom ever taken in these rebellions. Indeed, as Simon MacLean has pointed out, Carolingian aristocrats seem to have associated hiding away in fortresses with losers and cowards, and Carolingian writers very frequently describe Slavic chieftains and the leaders of other foreign peoples doing this, to contrast them unfavourably with the Franks. 

It is therefore arguable that the rise of castles stemmed from a greater sense of aristocratic independence - that their power came not from the state but from something else, tied to territory, family and their status as warriors, for which the castle was the physical manifestation. Yet what exactly caused this shift in cultural mentalities we have no clear answer yet. Meanwhile, there's another factor we still haven't considered.

Military hypothesis 2.0 

A final suggestion might be that the shift towards castles might have been facilitated by changes in warfare and military organisation. Castles work very well when you're dealing with fairly small enemy forces, as they're not in a good position to besiege and overwhelm you - after ravaging the countryside for a bit, they'll be forced to return home (a classic pattern in high medieval warfare). Larger forces can present more problems if you don't have a strong garrison yourself and depending on the size and defensive structures of the castle. So could armies becoming smaller and more elitist have had something to do with the rise of the castle?

Unfortunately, attempting a solution to the problem like this creates too many of its own. The period in western military history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (c.450) and the High Middle Ages (1000 - 1300) is one of the murkiest and most neglected of them all. Among the most controversial questions in this field are "how big were armies" and "how were they raised?" Obviously the exact nature of the question, and the answers to it, depend on what bit of the period and which part of Europe we're talking about. But for the Carolingian kingdoms, the question is essentially this: "was the  Carolingian army for the most part a militia of yeomen farmers, or was it all leisured landlords and their household goons." These positions are in turn closely linked to views on army size - those who think armies were typically in the low thousands will favour the latter position, while those who think they could reach the tens of thousands will favour the former. The former position would appear to be supported by the Edict of Pitres, and earlier military legislation issued under Charlemagne in the last quarter of his reign and Louis the Pious. The problem is, however, that such legislation only appears at the beginning of the ninth century, and many historians such as Guy Halsall, argue that it cannot be backprojected onto the eighth century and the time of Charlemagne's wars of expansion. They are also sceptical about the legislation's effectiveness. Historians like Matthew Innes and Timothy Reuter see Carolingian armies as small, elitist groups raised through aristocratic patronage networks, while Halsall sees the Carolingians as trying various kinds of experiments to get away from this kind of set-up that ultimately don't succeed. On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum historians like Bernard Bachrach argue that the Carolingians had substantial professional standing forces and even larger ones of free peasant conscripts from a manpower pool of two million able-bodied adult men, and thus he sees the Carolingian kings very regularly commanding military forces of 20,000, 40,000 or even 100,000. Of course, these positions in the debate are highly dependent on how one views how the Carolingian state worked. And the debate can get very nasty and ideological - Bachrach accuses the likes of Innes, Halsall and Reuter of being "Procrustean Marxists" and "doctrinaire slaves to a primitivist agenda", while Halsall accuses Bachrach back of having neoconservative political sympathies and writing speculative fiction, not history. I haven't yet formulated positions of my own on these issues, so I'm not going to pass judgement on whether either side is right or wrong, which gets us nowhere in using trying to use changes in military organisation as an explanation for the rise of the castle. 

All that can be said, is that a large, well-armed free peasant militia could indeed be highly dangerous to early castles. We already mentioned the Peace League of Bourges in 1038. But similarly, when the Saxon nobles rebelled against Emperor Henry IV of Germany in 1073, they attacked his castle of the Harzburg that he had built in 1066 with a very large force of Saxon free peasant militiamen and managed to utterly overrun and destroy it. When Henry IV defeated the Saxon rebels in 1075, his knights and mercenaries terrorised the Saxon peasantry in revenge, and the Saxon nobility became hesitant to raise such militia forces again. 

A reconstruction of one of the towers of the Harzburg. Photo Credit: 

By User Schmull on de.wikipedia - Schmull, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=899439

Conclusion

Overall, after having this long debate with myself, I'm afraid to say that I've come to no firm conclusions about the origins of the castle but exhausted a lot of possibilities. Certainly, the Chateau de Lourdon doesn't appear to fit clearly into any of those theories about the origins of the castle, and itself points to a glaring problem - the scantiness of what the written sources can tell us about when, why and by whom the earliest castles were built. What we can be sure about is how important the Chateau de Lourdon was to the monks of Cluny in the display and exercise of their power and lordship in the Burgundian countryside, as well as defending their estates, a role similar to that which their other fortifications played. It was for those purposes, combined also with the demonstration of aristocratic status, that castles would have such a vital role to play in medieval society right the way through to the end of the Middle Ages. 

The Tour des Fromages (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) in the Bourg de Cluny. Built by the monks to remind the townspeople who was boss around here.

The fortified monastery precinct of Cluny

The Castelvecchio at Verona, Italy - one of my favourite of the castles I saw on my travels. Built by Mastino II della Scala, the lord of Verona, in 1351 when he felt too unsafe to live in an unfortified urban palazzo due to his unpopularity with the citizenry.