On this day in history 1: Carloman the short-lived and why Charlemagne and Richard III might have one more thing in common than you think?

So today I'm taking a break from my series on Guibert de Nogent to return to some Carolingian content, this time bringing royal politics back to into view again.

On this day in 771 died Carloman, king of the Franks. He had reigned for only three years.

Carloman was born on 28 June 751. His father was Pippin the Short (714 - 768). A few months before Carloman's birth, Pippin the Short, then the Mayor of the Palace (prime minister) of the Frankish kingdom, led a swift, bloodless and successful coup d'etat against the last Merovingian king Childeric III, deposing and imprisoning him and his son in a monastery. Pippin the Short was then elected king by the Frankish magnates and crowned at Soissons. The Royal Frankish Annals, written early in the ninth century, claim that Pippin was crowned by the great Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Boniface, but Boniface's own letters and the other contemporary sources for his life do not mention that he did.

Certainly, contrary to how most of the early ninth century sources - the Royal Frankish Annals, the Earlier Annals of Metz and Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" - present it, the position of the Carolingians was actually quite precarious after they usurped the throne from the Merovingians. You see, the Merovingians had been in charge ever since Clovis (466 - 511) had eliminated all the other Frankish petty kings and conquered what remained of Roman Gaul and the Visigothic kingdom of Aquitaine. They had thus been in charge of all of what would later become France for a period longer than the United States has been existence as of today. While all historians would agree that for at least a generation before Pippin's coup d'etat, the Merovingian kings had wielded no effective political power, this was still an earth-shattering event. And Pippin had undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent. If he could usurp the throne, then why couldn't any other Frankish aristocrat do the same - with the Merovingians gone, the throne was basically an open goal. Long term readers of this blog will know that I've written about this at greater length before.

Carloman was thus from only the second generation of Carolingian monarchs, but unlike his elder brother Charlemagne, born in either 742 or 748, he was actually born into royalty.

When Carloman was only three, an extroardinary event happened. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to visit Gaul, the first time a pope had ever travelled north of the Alps on an official visit. At the church of Saint Denis near Paris, Pope Stephen II had Pippin the Short reanointed as king and granted him the title of "Patrician of the Romans." He then gave that title to the two young sons of the Frankish king, and had both of them anointed as Pippin's successors as well. As the "Short Chapter on the Anointing of Pippin" (written in 767) recounts, Stephen then made all the Frankish nobles assembled there swear on pain of excommunication never to elect a king again unless he was a male-line descendant of Pippin the Short. This text really highlights just how precarious the position of the first Carolingian monarchs really was, and the importance of their alliance with the papacy.

We otherwise know very little of Carloman's early life and upbringing. He would have certainly been taught how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court, as would befit a highborn Frank, as well as receiving instruction in the doctrines of the Christian faith. Given that Pippin himself had been educated by the monks of Saint Denis, it is very likely that Carloman was literate in the sense he could read Latin. But whether he could write is less certain - his brother Charlemagne, according to his biographer Einhard, tried to learn how to write late in life and never quite succeeded. Carloman was present at the assembly in 757 in which Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria swore an oath of vassalage to Pippin. But other than that, his childhood and adolescence, like that of most early medieval rulers, receives scant attention from the sources and so we know almost nothing about it.

In August 768, Pippin the Short died and his sons Charlemagne and Carloman were both anointed and crowned as kings of the Franks as per his succession plan. The kingdom was also split into halves between them, so as to defuse fraternal rivalry. The following year, Charlemagne led a successful campaign against the rebellious Gallo-Romans of Aquitaine and defeated and captured their last semi-independent duke, Hunoald II, with the help of Duke Lupus of Gascony. Carloman promised to lead his troops in support of this campaign, but never showed up. Charlemagne was not at all impressed by this.

A nineteenth century map of the division of the Frankish kingdom in 768. Territories in yellow are Charlemagne's, territories in pink are Carloman's.

By 770, it was abundantly clear that the two brothers hated each other. What was exactly at fault for this is debated. Historians generally agree that Charlemagne was the favourite son of their mother, Bertrada. Bertrada managed to broker an alliance between Charlemagne and Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, and she arranged a marriage between him and Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius. This meant than Carloman's kingdom was now encircled by a triple alliance. However, in 771 Charlemagne divorced Desiderata so he could marry Hildegard of Vinzgouw (his favourite queen) instead. Desiderata escaped to Carloman's kingdom and brokered an alliance between Carloman and Desiderius instead. It even seemed likely that Carloman was going to join forces with Desiderius and attack the Lombards' long-standing enemy, the papacy. This escalated the situation almost to the point of war between the two brothers.

A silver coin (Denier) of King Carloman

Yet on 4 December 771, Carloman suddenly died, apparently of a nosebleed (the same cause of death traditionally attributed to Attila the Hun), at the royal villa of Samoucy. While it was almost certainly a natural death, not an assassination, Charlemagne was able to quickly annex his brother's kingdom - Carloman's chief advisers, Adalhard and Abbot Fulrad of Saint Denis, soon went over to his brother. Carloman's wife, Queen Gerberga, fled with her two sons and the faithful Count Autchar to the Lombard court at Pavia. The Lombard king Desiderius then insisted that Charlemagne allow his two nephews to be crowned as co-kings of the Franks with him. Charlemagne then brokered an alliance with the pope, and in 773 - 774 he invaded and rapidly conquered the highly centralised Lombard kingdom after taking control of the capital, Pavia, and imprisoning Desiderius and his family.

Carloman's sons are mentioned in the papal correspondance with the Carolingian court in 774. But they vanish from history immediately after. How? Traditionally, its thought that the boys were tonsured and sent to a monastery - the Carolingians, unlike their Merovingian predecessors, generally refrained from murdering their rivals. But twenty-first century historians are more sceptical. If the boys had indeed been sent to a monastery, then as happened with Childeric III in 751 or indeed with Duke Tassilo of Bavaria after Charlemagne deposed him in a show trial in 788, they would have likely been remembered by the monastery they were sent for centuries to come or even become local saints. Therefore, foul play is suspected. Jennifer Davis in "Charlemagne's Practice of Empire" (2012) says outright that Charlemagne had his nephews murdered. Janet Nelson in "King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne" (2018) says that the accusation is not proven, but maintains that there is a high possibility that Charlemagne was indeed guilty of kin-slaying.

There is indeed some tentative and tenuous evidence to suggest he was guilty, besides the obvious fact that the boys after 774 simply vanish from history.

Clause 37 of the capitulary of the Missi, a lengthy piece of legislation concerning the administration of justice in the Carolingian Empire which Charlemagne issued in 802, reads:

That those who shall have been guilty of patricide or fratricide, or who shall have killed a maternal or paternal uncle or any other relative, and shall have been unwilling to obey and consent to the judgement of the bishops, priests and other judges, our missi and counts, for the safety of their own souls and in order to bring about a just judgement, shall be kept in custody that they may not infect other people until they are led into our presence; and from their own property in the meantime they will have nothing.

This indicates that Charlemagne himself, and Frankish society generally, saw the killing of one's own blood relatives as a heinous crime. At the same time, that doesn't mean he didn't do it, and some might even attempt a crude psychoanalytical reading and use this as evidence of the Frankish king, now emperor's guilty conscience for what happened almost thirty years ago.

Four years later, when Charlemagne drew up a plan for the division of the empire between his three surviving sons (Charles, Pippin and Louis) in 806, he include the following clause:

Concerning our grandsons, the sons of our aforesaid sons, already born or who shall be born hereafter, we command that none of our sons, for any reason whatsoever, shall cause any of our grandsons who has been accused before him to be put to death or mutilated or blinded or forcibly tonsured without a just trial or examination. We desire that [these grandsons] be honoured by their fathers and uncles and that they be obedient to them in proper subjection, as is fitting of a familial relationship.

Could Charlemagne, now repentant for what he had done to his nephews, have been trying to warn his sons not to do the same to theirs for fear of the wrath of the Lord? That might be overanalysing it, but its possible.

There's also this question that remains unanswered. If Charlemagne really did murder his nephews, how would our views of the "Father of Europe" change? Its tempting to make comparisons with Richard III of England, who has long been infamous for what happened to the Princes in the Tower. But whereas Richard III had recently seen attempts to rehabilitate him, and for the last century has had a devoted fan-club on both sides of the Atlantic who maintain that he was the greatest King that England never knew it had and that Shakespeare had it all wrong.

Monstrous hunchback who usurped the throne and murdered his nephews, or a good king who cared about justice and the welfare of the common man and never did anything wrong? Richard III's reputation is so controversial today

But for Charlemagne, long celebrated as a heroic figure, it would be a shift in the other direction towards a more jaundiced view. I think its fair to say that Charlemagne could be ruthless when he chose to, like most people who have held supreme political power in any age. He was after all, lets not forget, the king who massacred 4500 Saxon prisoners of war at Verden in 785 and pursued a policy of conversions at the point of a sword, forced migration and draconian punishments for relapsing into old superstitions in order to subject the pagan Saxons to Frankish rule and the Christian faith. Nor did he himself follow Christian moral strictures to the letter - he had four wives and several concubines, from whom he had more than half a dozen illegitimate children. At the same time, he was undoubtedly a king and emperor who cared about uprightness and accountability of his government officials and the welfare of his people, and sponsored a great educational and cultural revival which we continue to benefit from to this day - without the Carolingian Renaissance, most of the Roman classics would no longer be with us today! So I think its still possible to say that while Charlemagne wasn't a saint we can still celebrate him as a great ruler. I must be frank (no pun intended here) and disclose that I am indeed something of a Charlemagne fanboy, though I try to be as scholarly and objective about it as possible. Meanwhile, poor Carloman has and shall remain largely forgotten except among academic early medievalist circles. History does not take kindly to short-lived rulers who go out in a manner neither glorious nor dignified, as will no doubt become abundantly clear when histories of British politics post-June 2016 start being written.

I guess we can wonder though as to how history would have been different had Carloman lived longer. Would the Carolingian Empire, at least in the form that we know it, have come about? Perhaps Carloman and Desiderius would have successfully resisted Charlemagne's attempts to conquer the southern realms. And how would Charlemagne's kingship have been different had he not ruled over a unified Frankish realm and definitely not murdered his nephews. A letter of Cathwulf, an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar (Joanna Story thinks he was Charlemagne and Carloman's private tutor), to Charlemagne in 775 is perhaps indicative of this. Unfortunately the letter is untranslated and I can't have it to hand to translate for you because it hasn't been published since 1885 - and in a German edition to boot. But from the summaries I have been able to access elsewhere, Cathwulf recounts the events of the past 25 years in his letter and tells Charlemagne that there are eight pillars of a just king and that Charlemagne has "few firm pillars to stand on." This letter may well have had a huge impact on Charlemagne as three years later he and Hildegard named their son Louis, which is really a variant on the name Clovis, the first great king of the Merovingian dynasty, a clear acknowledgement that the Carolingians needed to bolster their legitimacy by linking themselves to the previous dynasty they had usurped. And in the 780s, Charlemagne's kingship became a lot more moralising and preoccupied with justice and reforming the governance of the Frankish kingdom, culminating in the General Admonition of 789 - the program statement/ manifesto for the Carolingian Renaissance if there ever was one! It would definitely be too reductive to suggest that the hypothetical guilt for the equally hypothetical killing of his nephews, and Cathwulf's firm letter that followed, was what caused Charlemagne to begin the Carolingian renaissance. I think that, truth be told, Charlemagne's heart was mostly in the right place and that he genuinely believed in promoting education, church reform, governmental accountability and other good causes. But the quest for greater legitimacy really does lie at the heart of most of Carolingian politics. Furthermore, other great periods of cultural and intellectual accomplishment have followed dubious seizures of power and dynastic intrigue, be it Ptolemaic Egypt, Augustan Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Ming China, Medici Florence or Tudor England.

The original manuscript of Cathwulf's letter

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 3: Living in the Carolingian Countryside II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the sources 3: living in the Carolingian countryside I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International women's day special: an early medieval mother's advice to her son (back to solid Carolingian content again)

Happy International Women's Day

After my wild excursion into the history of post-Roman Britain, that ended up becoming a monster post that went into some at once very exciting yet uncomfortably speculative territory, I can now say we're back in more familiar territory for me. It is of course, now, International Women's day. It is thus on this day that I want to celebrate and express my gratitude towards all the amazing women in my life, past and present. 

First and foremost among them, however, would be my mother. Besides providing all the parental love one could possibly desire for the past 22 years, it suffices to say that, without her advice, encouragement and support, I would not be the historian I am now and I wouldn't be on such a successful path as I am currently on. As someone who studied Litterae Humaniores at Oxford (1986 - 1990) and has taught Latin and Greek for over thirty years, I owe to her my love of the ancient world, almost as enduring as my (obviously greater) love of the Middle Ages, and if it weren't for that a lot of my interests would be very different. I probably wouldn't be at all fixated on the Carolingians and classical reception in the Middle Ages if I hadn't been so into ancient Rome as a kid, which was very much thanks to my mother introducing me to classical mythology and history and taking me round so many ancient sites from as early as I can remember. Through all the conversations we have had, mostly on our weekend runs together, she has provided me with immeasurable intellectual stimulation, and lots of constructive criticism of my ideas from her learned and intellectually-engaged outsider's perspective. It is also thanks to her that the very idea of this blog came into being, though it would take another year for me to finally get that one going. And without her providing me with lots of informal teaching, I wouldn't be nearly as confident with my Latin.

She's not the only one who has made me the historian I am now, though. I would love to give a shout out to my Granny (on my mum's side), who studied history at Oxford (1956 - 1959) and is a published historian and translator in her own right, though sadly she was never able to have an academic career for two very specific reasons which I shall not go into. I've had many immensely enjoyable historical discussions with her, and she's been very supportive of me going down the medievalist route, which was what she would have taken herself had she been able to do a PhD, and she provides me with an exemplar of how you can remain committed to historical scholarship even if your academic career never takes off - which is the overall likelihood for me. I would also like to thank one of my closest friends (if you're reading this, you'll know who you are) who works on the period just before mine, late antiquity (though I guess we both share the fifth century AD). She's helped me embrace who I am, including all my nerdy eccentricities that do much to fuel my work, more than most people. And our historical conversations are absolutely legendary, being both stimulating and downright hilarious. The one we had back in July about when did the (Western) Roman Empire really fall, is one I always look back on with a smile and a glow of nostalgia. Her influence has also probably been a contributing factor in me making the jump from late medievalist to early medievalist, especially in embracing the fact that less really is more in terms of sources.

Meeting Dhuoda

 It is in honour of my mother and all the amazing advice she has given me, and continues to do so to this day, that I chose to write about Dhuoda and her Liber Manualis. There are so many colourful, courageous and creative women who made history, albeit in circumstances very much not of their choosing, across the period I loosely specialise in (400 - 1200 AD) which I could have chosen from - from Galla Placidia and Clotilda to Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet I chose Dhuoda, a Frankish noblewoman from roughly the very middle of my period. I did so not because she's one of the more famous and consequential figures of this period, but because she's a rare example of an early medieval woman whose own authentic voice survives to us this day, in the form of an advice manual she wrote for her son. Its a very rich and wonderful text, as we'll soon see.

Firstly, a bit about Dhuoda's life. As is very typical with early medieval people generally, even the most well known ones (historians still argue over whether Charlemagne was born in 742 or 748), we do not know when Dhuoda was born. Most historians think she was born c.803, but that's only a rough guess. We don't actually know her family background, though its generally presumed that they were high nobility. What little we can say about childhood and upbringing is also a matter of educated guesswork. Modern scholars can't make their minds up about which part of the Frankish Empire she grew up in, and whether she spoke a Romance language or some Old High German dialect as her mother tongue - there's tentative evidence for both propositions. She definitely received some kind of literate education as a girl, but whether it was in a convent, from a private tutor or indeed from her own mother, we simply do not know. 

We do know, from Dhuoda's own testimony no less, that on 29 June 824, in the imperial palace chapel at Aachen, she married Bernard of Septimania (795 - 844). Bernard was a prominent courtier and the son of the great William of Gellone (755 - 812), duke of Toulouse, who would later be canonised as a saint by Pope Alexander II in 1066 (the year of Hastings) and become the subject of one of the earliest chivalric romances, the chanson de Guillaume (1140). In 826, her husband was appointed Count of Barcelona and military governor of the Spanish March by Emperor Louis the Pious, and Dhuoda accompanied Bernard on his early campaigns against the Muslims on the frontier. On 29 November 826, again according to Dhuoda's own writings, she gave birth to her son William - the recipient of the Liber Manualis. By 829, Bernard was becoming such a rising star on the Spanish March that Emperor Louis decided to make him the royal chamberlain at Aachen. This led to Bernard sending his wife to stay at Uzes, near Nimes, having assigned the administration of his counties of Barcelona, Toulouse and Carcasonne to his brother Guacelm, who became the new military governor of the Spanish March. Why he decided to do this, rather than taking his wife to court with him, we can only speculate about. Some use this to support the theory that Dhuoda was a native Romance speaker from what is now Southern France - it is thought that Bernard did this so that Dhuoda could use her local connections to help consolidate his political influence in Septimania (the region between the river Rhone and the Pyrenees that includes the southern French cities of Nimes and Narbonne). Others suggest something else was Bernard's mind on the basis of what happened next. 

In 830, Bernard of Septimania was accused of adultery with none other than Empress Judith, the second wife of Emperor Louis. We can only guess how Dhuoda herself felt about these rumours, but we know very well how the imperial court reacted. Thegan the Astronomer, who wrote a biography (Gesta) of Emperor Louis, believed these rumours to be malicious lies. Its quite revealing that when Bernard offered to prove his innocence in the eyes of God through trial by combat, none of his accusers came forward. The consequences of this were nonetheless explosive. Bernard of Septimania was forced to leave the imperial court and had his county of Autun, in Burgundy, confiscated. Emperor Louis' three sons (Pepin, Lothar and Louis) from his first marriage, to Ermengarde, who resented the influence of their stepmother at court anyway, were incited to rebel against their father, and the final decade of Louis' reign was filled with on and off civil wars between him and his sons. 

Almost immediately after Emperor Louis died in June 840, Dhuoda was visited again by Bernard in Uzes and become pregnant with his second child. Bernard took part in the fresh bout of civil war that followed, which I've covered in a previous post, in which he sided with Lothar and Pepin II of Aquitaine (Lothar's nephew and son of the previous Pepin), who wanted to keep the Empire united, against Lothar's brother Louis and half-brother Charles (son of Empress Judith), who wanted it to be divided up. Bernard was present at the extremely bloody and traumatic battle of Fontenoy in 841, on the losing side. As a show of good faith to his new royal master, Bernard sent William as a hostage to Charles. Dhuoda was thus caught up in the high political dramas of the ninth century Carolingian realm, It was in this context that, later on in 841, that Dhuoda sat down to write the Liber Manualis.

The Stuttgart Psalter (c.820), Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, folio 33v. While this does not depict Dhuoda, Bernard and William, the three figures here from left to right might as well stand in for them, as no contemporary image (or indeed from any subsequent period) of any of them exists. 

The Liber Manualis

Dhuoda begins the preface of the Liber Manualis with an a brief account of her marriage to Bernard of Septimania - this itself is quite remarkable as we otherwise have barely any autobiographical writings by women (however brief) between the late Roman period (Perpetua and Egeria) and the twelfth century (Heloise). She shows a remarkable capacity for remembering precise dates - it is, after all, from her that we know when she married Bernard of Septimania and when William and his unnamed younger brother were born. 

Dhuoda then introduces the purpose of her decision to write the Liber:

But since I have been parted from you for a long time and am living, on the orders of my lord, in this city where I now rejoice in [Bernard's] struggles, I have taken the trouble, because of my love for both of you, to have this little book (its size in keeping with my intelligence) copied and sent to you. Although I am beset with many difficulties, nevertheless let this one thing happen according to the will of God, if he so wishes, that I might look upon your face once. Indeed I would wish for this, if the power [to do so] was given to me by God, but because salvation is far away from me as a sinner, I [can only] wish for it, and in this wishing my determination grows weaker.

I have heard that your father, Bernard, has commended you into the hands of the lord, King Charles [the Bald]. I urge you to do your dignified duty in this business to the best of your will. All the same, as the Scriptures say, "Seek the kingdom of God in all things and other things will then be given" (Matthew 6:33), those things which are necessary for you to enjoy your soul and body.

I don't have access to the whole text, nor can I give you a convenient summary here. Instead I'll take you through some of the highlights. In Book Ten, she provides a poem titled "Concerning your times"

You have finished now four times four years.

If my second child were to reach the same age,

I would copy out another little book for his person.

And if you were to reach the age of 36,

And if I were to see you again,

I would with more words urge upon you even stronger things.

But because the time of my end hastens towards me,

And sickness everywhere wears my body out,

I have rushed to put this book together for the use of you and your brother.

Knowing that I shall not live another twenty years.

I urge you to savour this book as though it were a pleasant drink

And honey-laced food meant for your lips.

For the date when I married your father

And the date you were born occurred on the

[same Kalends] of [different] months, as I told you above.

Know that, from the first verse of this little book,

Until its last syllable,

Everything has been designed for the purpose of your salvation.

That you may more easily follow what is written there,

Read the acrostic verses.

The little verses written above and below, and everything else,

I myself have composed for the benefit of your soul and body,

And I do not cease even now urging you to read them and keep them close to your heart.

A subsequent poem in the Liber, in the original Latin, has the first letters of each of the seventeenth stanzas spell out Versi ad Wilhelmum (verses for William): 

That you might be strong and thrive, O best of sons, 

Do not be reluctant to read the words that I have composed and sent to you and may you effortlessly discover things that please you.

The word of God is alive; look for it diligently and learn its sacred teaching,
For then your mind will be stuffed with
great joy forever.

May the immense and powerful King, be radiant and kind,
Care to cultivate your mind in all things,

Young man, and to guard and defend you
Every minute of every day.

Be humble in mind and chaste in body,
Be ready to give proper service,
Show yourself constantly kind to all people,
Both the great and the not so great.

Above all, fear and love the Lord God,
With your full heart and soul and expend all your strength,

Next fear and love your father in all things.

Do not regret continually serving,
The glorious offspring [Charles the Bald] of [that Carolingian] race,

With its line of ancestors, for he shines,

With the great.

Esteem magnates and respect those of high rank at court;
Be humble with the low;
Associate yourself with the well-intentioned; be sure not to
Submit to the proud and imprudent.

Always honour the true ministers
Of the sacred rites, the worthy bishops,
Always commit yourself simply and with outstretched hands,

To the custodians of the altars.

Frequently give assistance to widows and orphans,
Give food and drink to pilgrims;
Offer hospitality; stretch out your hands
With apparel to the naked.

Be a strong and fair judge in legal disputes;
Never take a bribe
Never oppress anyone, for the great Giver will repay you.

Be generous with gifts, but always vigilant and modest,
Make a sincere effort to get along with everyone,
Rejoice in humble things, for the image of this will
Stay with you.

There is One who weighs up everything,
A bestower who grants to each according to merit,
Assigning for [good] words and works the greatest of gifts:
The constellations of the heavenly stars.

Thus, my noble son, you should take care
And seek constantly to obtain
The great advantages [of heaven], and spurn
The fires of pitch-black wood.

Although, at sixteen, you are in the very flower
Of your youth, your delicate limbs
Age [along with you] step by step
As you proceed through life.

I long to see your face,
But the prospect seems distant to me.
Even if the power should be given to me,

Yet I still do not deserve this.

Would that you might live for Him who shaped you,

May you enter into, with gentle spirit, a fitting association
With his servants; may you with joy rise up again when your
Life is done.

My mind surely turns to thoughts of death,
But still I want you to read carefully the pages of this book,
As I have written them [for you], and keep them constantly
Foremost in your mind.

These verses, with the help of God, are now done

As you finish your sixteen years
At the start of December, on the Feast of Saint Andrew [30 November],
And the Advent of the Word.

Christine de Pizan (1364 - 1431) advises her son, Jean, before he goes to live in the Earl of Salisbury's household. British Library, Harley 4431 folio. 261v. Dhuoda was far from unique among medieval mothers in giving her son wise advice and caring for his well-being even when he was going to be absent from her for an indefinite period of time - some would say that motherly instincts never change.

Later on in the text, Dhuoda returns to talking about herself and her personal anxieties and shortcomings. She laments the frailty of her body, her slothfulness in failing to pray the seven canonical hours every day (this would become a major feature of lay piety in the later middle ages with the popularity of Books of Hours), sinning in thought and speech and taking on too many debts from Christian and Jewish creditors. Above all, she is gravely uncertain over whether she merits salvation.  She requests that William, maintain a spiritual link with her even if they can never have a physical one again:

While you see that I am [still] alive in this world, alertly attempt in your heart to exert yourself so that, not only through vigils and prayers, but also by giving charity to the poor, I might deserve, when finally seized from my body and from the chains of my sinning, to be received kindly in every way by our kind Judge.

At the end of the book, Dhuoda composes her own epitaph, in which she reflects on the transience and insignificance of the physical body, and requests that whoever looks upon her tomb pray for her soul.

Source for the text: Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 336 - 343

Thoughts and analysis

The Liber Manualis is a beautiful, intelligently written, moving and deeply humane text, that in itself is a fitting monument to its author and her intellect and personality. A lot of early twentieth scholars, no doubt motivated by sexism to at least some degree, were remarkably rude about it, especially its Latinity. But as Peter Dronke has argued in a highly sympathetic defence of Dhuoda, while her Latin style was orthodox and incorrect, both by Classical or Carolingian standards, and is often difficult to translate, that is because she was trying to express thoughts that were very much her own and which she could only express her own unique way. Unlike a lot of correspondance in this period, there is nothing that could have been ripped straight from, say, Cicero or Ambrose of Milan, and the only literary trope she really uses is that of personal unworthiness, which is to be found in just about every Carolingian writer - Einhard is full of it in his Life of Charlemagne and personal letters. Indeed, like Einhard and a number of other Carolingian authors, Dhuoda really stands out as someone who saw herself as a unique somebody and wanted to express it, which very much goes against what we've been taught to expect of early medieval people, and early medieval women in particular. 

For all that many historians may caution us that we cannot access the real thoughts and feelings of medieval people through literary texts, Dhuoda’s here, which were so complex and authentic she struggled to put them into learned Latin,  feel as real as those in any text of any age - her love and concern for her son, her sadness at being parted from him and the uncertainty of whether she’ll ever see him again and her anxiety for the fate of her soul. 

For all that Dhuoda laments her physical and spiritual weakness, things very much associated with femininity, she does manage exert a distinct kind of authority that the patriarchal society of Carolingian Francia can nonetheless afford to her, that of a mother. As Janet Nelson reminds us, Carolingian patriarchy depended on mothers as much as fathers and they were owed respect and obligations. And this is another respect in which Dhuoda nonetheless manages to stand out as a unique individual - while mothers may have advised their sons all the time in this period, none put it down into writing, nor for that matter did fathers. As Nelson points out, Dhuoda is unique among Carolingian moralists in standing on a parental platform - all the others were either celibate monks and clerics (Alcuin, Jonas of Orleans, Hincmar etc) or lay noblemen who, so far as we can tell, had no biological children of their own (Einhard and Nithard). 

The content of what Dhuoda writes reflects a wealth of not only personal wisdom but also knowledge of ancient and contemporary texts, including the Bible, the late Roman grammarian Donatus, the works of the Church Fathers like Augustine and Gregory the Great, the Rule of St Benedict, Charlemagne's General Admonition of 789 and Rabanus Maurus' treatise on Computation. This is testament to the depth and richness of learning that at least certain lay women were capable of achieving in this period.

Given her familiarity with all these texts, it is not surprising that what Dhuoda writes resonates so much with the aims and rhetoric of the Carolingian reform programme, which tried to create a moral lay elite and which concerned itself as much with inward spiritucal disposition as with outward public display of good morals - very apparent from Dhuoda's work. Indeed, her Liber Manualis is demonstrative that this reform effort didn't fall on deaf ears amongst the Carolingian aristocracy, even if the results across the board were very mixed to put it bluntly. It also shows how women could play a role in reinforcing it and not just in a family context - more than three copies of the Liber survive, more than do for a lot of later medieval moralistic texts like the Livre de Chevalerie of the fourteenth century knight Geoffroi de Charny (one of the texts I read for my undergraduate thesis). In a sense, Dhuoda wrote not just as a mother advising her son but as a public intellectual, and it does seem she had a public impact. Whether or not women in general had a Carolingian Renaissance (an inevitable play on feminist historian Joan Kelly’s famous article “did women have a Renaissance?”), and I think they did, if not quite the same as that of men, Dhuoda truly was a Carolingian Renaissance woman. 

As is clear throughout the text, Dhuoda wrote this when she was suffering from some kind of long term illness. If she lived much longer past 841, and we really don’t know if she did, her life, which had already been filled with much drama and misfortune, wasn’t going to get anymore uplifting for her. In 844, Bernard of Septimania was executed by Charles the Bald for switching sides too many times in the various civil wars and most recently having sided with Pepin II of Aquitaine in revolt against Charles the Bald. In 850, William, who managed to get awarded some of his fathers counties after his death, was judicially murdered by Charles’ partisans as part of the ongoing political turmoil in the South - ninth century Carolingian politics is depressing like that!

Dhuoda’s story is demonstrative of why the Carolingian period is so fascinating relevant to us today. It may not quite deliver what we, living in a post-Game of Thrones world, think we want from medieval history - the Carolingians want to limit violence, sex, and political corruption and scheming in favour of high mindedness  and building a better world, yet fail because various reasons and that hits too close to home and leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. Yet it does show us how intellectuals, male and female,  clerical and lay, reflected on themselves as unique individuals and on the human condition, and sought creative solutions to their own personal challenges and those facing society more generally. They remind us how deeply human and indivisible people in the medieval past really were, something that us moderns have often been minded to forget, and how they struggled and did their best to cope with a chaotic world, which is very much what we are confronted with now.