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| Can we know what these dudes doing the reaping and wine-pressing in the foreground really believed in? We're back with the Utrecht Psalter (c.825) here |
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| Today's big question: are conspiracy theories really a modern phenomenon? |
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| The power of conspiracy theories today experienced first hand: a protest against the "Great Reset" I saw in Vienna on 28 May 2022 |
So, having looked at the polyptychs and seen how differentrural society could be in different regions of the Carolingian Empire, we’re going to return to the theme of peasant life in the early ninth century. Now, as illuminating as the polyptychs can be, there are some big draw backs. The first and most important one is that these are documents written for landlords by their agents who did the surveying. Everything they tell us is based on the questions the landlords told their agents to enquire into with each peasant household. So, they tell us what each peasant householder owed in rent/ tax/ tribute/ labour services (which tells us a lot about what they farmed and how much access they had to cash), their legal status (free or unfree), how many children and other dependents he (more rarely she) had under his roof and their names (sometimes ages as well as we saw with the Marseille polyptych). Occasionally they might give us some super-interesting incidental information i.e., peasant boys away at school in the Marseille polyptych. But those are the limits of what landlords and their agents were interested in – other aspects of peasant life just weren’t of interest to them and weren’t worth enquiring into and recording.
So, what other sources do we have for the lives of
Carolingian peasants. Archaeology is obviously one of them but that can only
tell us about the material side of things. But what about the more intimate,
interior, human side of things. What did Carolingian peasants think about day
to day – what were their opinions about what was going in the world, their
attitudes, anxieties, fears, dreams and aspirations? What were their beliefs
about the cosmos and how well did they match up with official Christian teaching
on this? What were their relationships with their neighbours and other figures
in their communities like? And what did they do for fun (and all the other
stuff near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)?
Unfortunately, we cannot get ready answers to these
questions. We have nothing like the diaries, memoirs and other personal
writings we have for the working classes in the late Georgian and
Victorian eras – after 1760, more than half of the adult population of Great Britain was functionally literate. Pigs will fly if a
Carolingian equivalent of this early nineteenth century Yorkshire farmer’s diary that made a bit of a media sensation a few years ago is found. Nor do we
even have the kind of resources that are available to historians of late
medieval and early modern Europe. We don’t have anything like the inquisition
trial testimonies for the village of Montaillou in Southern France from 1294 –
1324 that enabled Emmanuel Le Roy Laudrie in his eponymous 1975 classic to look
at the heretical beliefs and community conflicts among the villagers there (as
well as discovering that Mountaillou’s village priest Pierre Clergue, from a
local family of rich peasants, was a serial-philanderer who seduced a married
countess no less). It was similarly inquisition trial testimonies that enabled
Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976) to discover Menocchio
the Miller (1533 – 1599), a freethinking peasant intellectual and avid bookworm
from Friuli in Italy. Or the witchcraft trial records from Essex that allowed
Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane to do similar stuff to Montaillou for Elizabethan and
Jacobean England. God the eighth and ninth centuries really were the dark ages! Unlike the more enlightened
folks of Renaissance Europe, the Carolingians didn’t have the inquisition and
witch burnings, and modern historians are all the more worse off for it because persecution generates documents that we can read against the grain to find out about the lives of the persecuted. Thus,
most historians would argue that microhistory – the use of a small set of
really intimate, localised documentation to recover the perspectives of ordinary people in the past – is redundant for the
Carolingian era or any time before about 1250. Charles West, a historian whose
work I really admire, disagrees, and has recently produced a very illuminating study ‘Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: an Early Medieval Microhistory’, History
Workshop Journal (2016). Using a very different piece of evidence, I’ll
attempt a sort of early medieval microhistory myself.
First, let’s meet Agobard of Lyon (779 – 840). His origins
are obscure – he may have Visigoth refugee from Islamic Spain, like his
compatriot Theodulf of Orleans, whom we’ve met before, as suggested by a brief
passage in the Annals of Lyon, but some scholars dispute this. He came
bishop of Lyon in 814, though because the previous office-holder, Leidrad, was
still alive and in retirement in monastery, Agobard wasn’t universally
recognised as bishop until the Council of Aachen in 816. Thereafter, he gained
something of a reputation as a controversialist. He offered scathing critiques
of Louis the Pious’ policy of guaranteeing religious freedom for Jews in the
Carolingian Empire, and wrote five polemics in the 820s against Jews and
Judaism, in one of them calling Jews “the devil’s spawn.” He also rushed
eagerly into theological controversies about the use of icons in churches and
the nature of the Trinity (where have we seen them before!) and wrote tracts on
those. He dismissed the practice of allowing accused felons to clear their
innocence through trial by combat, enshrined in the law of the Burgundians (the
local law in Lyon), as irrational. He even criticised Louis the Pious for not
following his initial royal/ imperial succession policy of 817, and supported
Louis’ eldest son, Lothar in rebellion against him in 830. And he wrote a tract
against popular superstitions called On Hail and Thunder (815), and it
is to that we shall now turn:
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| The first printed edition of Agobard of Lyon's works, including the treatise we'll be discussing here, produced in Paris in 1605 |
In these regions [Burgundy] almost everyone – nobles and
common folk, city folk and country folk, the old and the young – believe that
hail and thunder can be caused by the will of humans. For as soon as they have
heard thunder or seen lightning, they say “the wind has been raised.” When
asked why it is [called] a raised wind, some with shame, their consciences
troubling them a little, others boldly, as is the way of the ignorant, answer
that the wind was raised by the incantations of people who are called
storm-makers [tempestarii]. Hence it is called a raised wind.
Whether it is true, as is popularly believed, should be
verified by the authority of Holy Scripture. If, however, it is false, as we
believe without doubt, it ought to be emphasised just how great the crime is of
him who attributes to humans the work of God …
We have seen and heard of many overcome by such great
madness and deranged by such great foolishness that they believe and claim that
there is a certain region called Magonia [Magic Land] from which ships travel
in the clouds. These ships, [so they believe], carry crops that were knocked
down by hail and perished in storms back to that same region. Those
cloud-sailors [are thought to] give a fee to the storm-makers and to take back
grain and other crops. So blinded are some by this great and foolish belief
that they believe that these things can [actually] be done.
We [once] saw many people gathered together in a crowd
who were showing off four captives, three men and a woman, as though they had
fallen out of some such ships. These people had been held for some time in chains.
But at last, as I said, they were exhibited to that crowd of people in our
presence as [criminals] fit to be stoned to death. Nevertheless, the truth did
come out. After much argument, those who exhibited those captives were, as the
Prophet says, “confused, just as the thief is confused when apprehended
[Jeremiah 2:26].”
Because of this error, which in the area possess the
minds of almost everyone, ought to be judged by reason, let us offer up the
witness of Scripture through which the matter can be judged. After inspecting
those witnesses, it will not be us, but truth itself that will overcome this
stupid error and everyone who recognises the truth will denounce the
instruments of error and say with the Apostle “no lie is of the truth [1 John
2:21].” What is not from the truth is especially not from God, and because it
is not from God, he hears not its words …
If therefore the almighty God through the power of his
arm whips the wicked with new waters, hail, and rains and whose hand it is
impossible to flee, then those people who are entirely ignorant of God who
believe that humans can do these things. For if people can send hail, then they
can make it rain anywhere, for no one ever sees hail without rain. They could
also protect themselves from their enemies, not only by the theft of crops, but
also by taking away a life. For when it happens that the enemies of the
storm-makers are in a road or field, they could kill them; they could send down
an entire hail-storm down upon them in one mass and bury them. Some claim that
they themselves know some storm-makers who can make a diffuse pattern of hail
that is falling throughout a region fall instead in a heap upon a river or a
useless forest or on a tub under which the storm-maker himself is hiding.
Often, we have heard it said by many, that they knew such
things were certainly done in [specific] places, but we have never heard yet
anyone claim that they themselves had seen these things. Once it was reported
to me that someone said that he himself had heard such things. With great
interest I myself set out to see him, and I did. But when I was speaking with
him and encouraging him, with many prayers and entreaties, to say whether he
had seen such things, I [nevertheless] pressed him with divine threats not to say
anything unless it were true. Then he declared that what he said was indeed
true and he named the person, the time, and place, but nevertheless confessed
that he himself had not been present at that time …
… Terrified by the sound of thunder and by flashes of
lightning, the faithful, although sinners, call for the intercession of the
holy prophet, but not our half-faithful people. Who, as soon as they hear
thunder or feel a light puff of wind, say that “the wind has been raised,” and
then issue a curse: “Let that cursing tongue be parched. May the tongue that
makes [this storm] now be cut off.” Tell me, I beg you, whom do you curse, a
just person or a sinner? For a sinner, cannot, as you often say out of your own
infidelity, raise up the wind, because he has no power, nor can he command evil
angels …
Also in our times we sometimes see that, with the crops
and grapes harvested, farmers cannot sow [the next crop] on account of the
dryness of the land. Why do you not ask your storm-makers to send their raised
winds to wet the land so that you might sow them then? But because you do not
do that, nor did you ever see or hear of anyone doing it, listen to what the
Lord himself, the creator of all things, the ruler, governor, arranger, and
provider says to his blessed servant Job about things of this sort …
Look at the great works of God, the existence of which
the blessed Job himself was not able to admire fully and loftily. If the Lord
has a treasure-trove of hail that He alone sees, and which even the blessed Job
never saw, where do the storm-makers discover what the blessed Job never found?
Neither can we find it nor can anyone guess where it is. The Lord inquires of
his faithful servant if he knows who gave a path to the most violent rains and
a passage to the resounding thunder. Those against whom this is directed show
themselves to be puny men, devoid of holiness, justice, and wisdom, lacking in
faith and truth, hateful even to their neighbours. [Yet] they say that is by
the storm-makers that violent winds, crashing thunder, and raised winds are
made …
This stupidity is not the least part of this
unfaithfulness, for it has now grown into such a great evil, that in many
places there are wretched people who say indeed that they do not know how to
send storms, but nevertheless know how to defend the inhabitants of a place
against storms. They have determined how much of a crop they should be given
and call this a regular tribute [canonicum]. There are many people who never
freely give tithes to priests, nor give alms to widows, orphans, and other poor
people. Though the importance of alms-giving is preached to them, is repeatedly
read out and encouraged, they still do not give any. They pay the canonicum,
however, voluntarily to their defenders, by whom they are protected from
storms. And all of this is accomplished without any preaching, any
admonishment, any exhortation, except by the seduction of the Devil …
A few years ago [that is, in 810] a certain foolish story
spread. Since at that time cattle were dying off, people said that Duke
Grimoald of Benevento had sent people with a dust which they were to spread on
the fields, mountains, meadows, and wells and that it was because of the dust
they spread that the cattle died. He did this [they say] because he was an
enemy of our most Christian Emperor Charles. For this reason we heard and saw
that many people were captured and killed. Most of them, with plaques attached,
were cast into the river and drowned. And, what is truly remarkable, those
captured gave testimony against themselves, admitting that they had such dust
and had spread it. For so the Devil, by the secret and just judgement of God,
having received power over them, was able to succeed over them that they gave
false witness against themselves and died. Neither learning, nor torture, nor
death itself deterred them from daring to give false witness against
themselves. This story was so widely believed that there were very few to whom
it seemed absurd. They did not rationally consider how such dust could be made,
how it could only kill cattle and not other animals, how could it be carried
and spread over such a vast territory by humans. Nor did they consider whether
there were enough Beneventan men and women, old and young, to go out from their
region in wheeled carts loaded with dust. Such is the great foolishness that
oppresses the wretched world …
Source: "Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition)" edited by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 220 - 223
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| Clearly there were some cultural parallels to these tempestarii in Sweden and they was some interest in them in the early modern period. An engraving from Olaus Magnus' A History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Indeed, learned early moderns were a lot less sceptical of this stuff than Agobard. In 1591, King James VI of Scotland had 70 people, including the midwife Agnes Sampson, the schoolmaster John Fian and Francis Stuart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, put on trial in North Berwick for trying to sink his ship on Halloween night 1590 as he sailed home from Copenhagen with his newlywed wife. Yet no one would suggest that James VI of Scotland and I of England was a rustic crypto-pagan. |
Now in this source we two systems of thought/ mentalities at
play. That of Agobard and that of the peasants. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby at the Historians’ Sketchpad has done a brilliant blogpost on Agobard’s mode of thinking and I
don’t think I’ll do it more justice than he does, so rather than covering the
same ground I highly recommend you read his blogpost. Instead, I’ll focus on
the perspectives of these Burgundian countryfolks. First it must be said that we have absolutely no good reason, given the nature of the source, as a reform minded polemical treatise, to think Agobard made this all up. At the same time, we should bear in mind that this isn't written with the voices of these Burgundian peasants, and that Agobard may have ventriloquised them just as a lot of writers of saints' lives did when writing about the humble-born witnesses of miracles i.e., whether the miracle stories recorded in Gregory of Tours' Ten Books of Histories, Glory of the Confessors, Glory of the Martyrs and Lives of the Fathers can be used to create Merovingian microhistories, or simply reflect the preoccupations of their author and the ecclesiastical elite culture in sixth century Gaul to which he belonged, is debated.
Now a major
undercurrent behind this, which should not be overlooked, is that life for a
Carolingian peasant was, in a word, harsh. Their belief in these storm-making
wizards and sky pirates is described by Agobard as appearing in the context of
crop failure caused by bad weather. Likewise, the conspiracy theory about
foreign agents spreading dust to kill cattle was provoked by a cattle plague
(most likely an outbreak of rinderpest) in Burgundy in 810. Although Agobard
doesn’t mention this, for perspective it is worth noting there had been three
major famines in Francia in living memory – one in 779, another in 792 and
another still in 805. The COVID-19 pandemic and this year’s extreme heatwave
and drought have given us a small taste of something that a Carolingian peasant
would have experienced all the time – feeling at the mercy of natural forces
beyond your control. It is worth saying that there were some organised forms of
relief available for the most vulnerable in the Carolingian empire. The
statutes of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie (751 - 826) reveal the role of monasteries in
providing food for the poor and needy through large scale charity, and some
parish churches in Francia kept matricula, lists of needy
people to be given assistance with daily living, a system perhaps not wholly
dissimilar to the systems of parish poor relief in seventeenth century England. None
of these are in evidence here and the churches in Burgundy seem to have been
unremitting in their collection of tithes, hence why some of the wealthier
members of the community seem to have turned away from tithe-payment and
charity towards paying the canonicum (an evil twin of the tithe) to good
wizards believed to be able to stop the tempestarii from destroying
crops.
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| Sky pirates? You mean like these guys? |
We are able to see a certain parallel between Carolingian
peasants reacting to crop failure and cattle plagues and twenty-first century
citizen’s reacting to COVID-19. This is the tendency to assign blame to
something that’s not a part of the natural order of things as the authorities,
be they clerics or scientists, would have them believe but instead blame them
on malevolent human forces that we can combat using our own willpower and
agency. Hence Agobard tells us of cases in which supposed sky pirates and
Beneventan agents were lynched or narrowly saved from being so by his
interventions as a result of these paranoid beliefs – where have we seen that kind of thing again? Of course we should apply some caution here before drawing
parallels between Carolingian peasants and modern day conspiracy theorists.
Modern day devotees of conspiracy theories, or as they would call themselves
“sceptics” or “truth-seekers” mostly acquire knowledge of and develop belief in
such theories through their dissemination in books, alternative media and on the internet, especially social media. Carolingian peasants, however, were
overwhelmingly illiterate and lived in an age before print culture, rapid
communications and modern mass media. Furthermore, modern conspiracy theories
are often seen as a product of a culture of distrust in authority, which likely
had no parallel in the Carolingian era. Thus, it might be possible to argue
that these peasants were not dabbling in conspiracy theories at all. Instead,
some might argue that with all this talk of weather magicians, what we’re
seeing is ancient Indo-European folkloric beliefs, untouched by Christian
teaching, in action. As this school of historical thought, which you can find
most clearly expressed in Jean Delumeau’s “Catholicism between Luther and
Voltaire” (1977), would have it, Agobard inveighing against here is inveighing
against peasants who were “Christians in name only”, and that paganism had
basically survived unscathed in the countryside. And its easy to find a few
sources that appear to support this view. The Anglo-Saxon monk, missionary and
church reformer St Boniface when he came to Francia in the time of Charles
Martel was horrified at the pagan superstitions he found there, and in the 740s
a church official in his service condemned, amongst other things, performing
sacred rites to Mercury and Jupiter, auguries of the dung of horses and cattle,
diviners and sorcerers, celebrating undetermined places as holy, offering
sacrifices to saints and making idols out of dough and rags. And Rabanus Maurus
(780 – 856), in a very similar fashion to Agobard, debunked the widely held
popular belief (first attested by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD) that
lunar eclipses were a result of monsters trying to gobble up the moon and could
be stopped by throwing stones and javelins at them. What the true religious
beliefs of Carolingian peasants generally were we can never truly know, not
least because when we do get to hear about (certain aspects of) them it’s
coming from hostile religious reformers like Boniface, Agobard and Rabanus. But
there are plenty of problems with the view of medieval popular Christianity as
essentially being a crypto-pagan folk religion, though that’s too big a topic
in itself to go into here. It will suffice for now for me to point you to this excellent article by Dr Francis Young.
And we can find in Agobard’s text evidence to suggest that
this wasn’t all the product of ancient and static beliefs, namely that the
cattle plague was blamed of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento – a Lombard
principality in Southern Italy, which Charlemagne and the Franks were at war with
at the time of the plague in 810. Beyond its obvious parallels with COVID-19
conspiracy theories – Americans and Chinese accusing each other of creating the
pandemic with a bioweapon – it shows that Carolingian peasants were actually
quite well aware of the affairs of the world beyond their village or home
region. Indeed, it even shows that they had some interest in Frankish foreign
policy – there’s a lot of good work by historians of early modern England about
how rumour should be seen as a sign of political consciousness among the
politically disenfranchised i.e. Ethan Shagan’s essay on rumour in the reign of
Henry VIII in “The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500 – 1850” (2001), edited by
Tim Harris. And it of course goes almost without saying that it shows that
medieval peasants could be, by our standards, extremely xenophobic. We can see
parallels in the treatment of these suspected Beneventan agents with the
attacks on Flemings and Italians in London during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
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| A denarius of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento (assassinated in 817) from the British Museum Coin Collection |
So perhaps its not the best approach to see the beliefs of
these Burgundian peasants in light of static pagan mentalities but instead to
see them as more dynamic and akin to modern conspiracy theories. This ties into
one of the greatest meta-debates in early medieval history: should we see early
medieval people as essentially people just like us but with swords, horses,
parchment, very slow communications, poor healthcare and no electricity, or as
these strange people completely remote from ourselves whose ways of thinking can
only be understood on their own terms. Some, influenced by postmodernism, would
go even further the other way and argue that the past is not simply “another
country” (to give that much quoted phrase from LP Hartley’s “The Go-between”)
but another planet and that we basically can’t really hope to understand why
medieval people thought and acted the way they did at all. Both extremes of
thinking can lead to us misunderstanding medieval people and falling back into
old, condescending stereotypes of them as stupid, primitive or incapable of
rational thinking. Agobard’s own thought very clearly disproves notions of
medieval people being incapable of rational thinking, even if his kind of
rationality is in many ways different from that of post-enlightenment thought and could sometimes be deployed for very disturbing purposes that marked him out as unusual at the time, like his diatribes against Judaism. Like with a lot of medieval people who seem to hold at once enlightened and unenlightened attitudes to us twenty-first century people, these were not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin.
And through comparisons between the beliefs of early medieval peasants and
modern conspiracy theorists we can see that the twenty-first century is far
from being a supremely rational age. Just take a look at one of the most
influential, most dangerous (not to mention most unintentionally hilarious)
conspiracy theorists of our times, Alex Jones. This man believes that the US
government can create tornadoes and other natural disasters at will and is
putting chemicals in the water that “turn the frickin’ frogs gay”, that Hillary
Clinton is a sulphur-smelling demon in disguise who runs elite paedophile rings
and that all the global elite are in thrall to these interdimensional elvesthey see when they take hallucinogenic drugs who promise them immortality ifthey enslave and exterminate the majority of humanity after creating a globaltotalitarian dictatorship. And this man is a highly successful multi-media
pundit, has made millions of dollars and fuelled the rise of Donald Trump. We
can only guess at what Agobard and other Carolingian intellectuals would make
of the phenomenal influence of crackpot conspiracy theorists in the present.
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| Alex Jones just minding his business as usual |
