From the sources 8: Guibert de Nogent’s schooldays and timeless insights into good pedagogy

 

A much later (early fourteenth century?) satirical image of a medieval schoolroom featuring monkeys!

So when we last left Guibert, he was seven-years-old or thereabouts (he doesn’t specify his age) and struggling to learn the basics of Latin grammar – all those declensions and conjugations back in the days before you had all those handy noun and verb tables to memorise and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, the Cambridge Latin Course or whatever textbook you think is best for beginners (though nowadays very few people start learning as young as Guibert did). Now Guibert seems to have reflected a lot on what his education was like and the difficulties that came with learning and memorising a new language. In the process he came up with some ideas that felt uncannily familiar when I was reading just a few weeks ago – like the theories of cognitive neuroscience we covered as part of our learning and memory sessions in September for the PGCE.

Now I must admit here that I will be engaging in a certain degree of anachronism in my reading of Guibert, which some medievalist scholars would find immediately off-putting. Obviously, psychology as an academic discipline didn’t exist in the early twelfth century, nor would it until more than 750 years after Guibert’s death, and so Guibert would not have used the terms I will be using to refer to what he was describing. If a time-travelling cognitive neuroscientist were able to have a conversation with Guibert, it would take a long time before they could reach some mutual comprehension, since all the technical language of modern psychology would be completely alien to him. Even then, this hinges on the whole meta-question of how mentally similar were medieval people to us. This is an issue that is super-divisive to medievalists, who basically fall somewhere along a spectrum on this. At one end of the spectrum, you have those who think medieval people were basically people exactly like us – they just had swords, horses, heavy-ploughs, parchment and candles rather than automatic firearms, cars, combine-harvesters, laptops and electrical lighting. At the other end of the spectrum, you have medievalists who argue that medieval people were so mentally different from us that they might as well be Martian visitors – according to them, medieval people were incapable of thinking rationally like we do except according to their own weird logic, and their worldview is incomprehensible unless understood completely in its own terms. Both extremes in my view are unhelpful – the first is essentially the costume drama version of history. The latter is basically a postmodern repackaging of old stereotypes about medieval people as violent, uncouth, superstitious, prejudiced and lacking in individuality. Most medievalists, including myself, however, sensibly fall somewhere in the middle. And Guibert I feel nicely illustrates that. All his talk of sin, demons and God’s providence feels very alien to us and very evocative of the culture of twelfth century France, which was indeed very different to that of twenty-first century Britain. But strip those layers of paint away, and one can see a deeply insecure but highly intelligent mind trying to make sense of his own abnormal life experiences and the rapidly changing world around him.

But let’s get back to the classroom with Guibert. Guibert was, as we established in the previous post, in a class all by himself. He was taught by a private tutor called Solomon who, as we saw last time, had received his own education quite late in life (how late exactly we don’t know) and was probably not a very competent teacher – Guibert perhaps exaggerates this somewhat; indeed, as both Paul Archambault and Jay Rubinstein note, Solomon is deliberately made out by Guibert to be a negative inversion of the ideal schoolmaster described by the first century AD Roman educator Quintilian. Guibert makes it very clear to his readers that his school days were an unhappy time for him.

For starters, Guibert was placed under the complete authority of his tutor, who essentially controlled his upbringing and daily schedule from then on. This was not uncommon for that time. Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) was given the same kind of power over Heloise when her uncle, Fulbert, hired him to be her private tutor and, because he already had a crush on her, he accepted the contract for this very reason. This one of the reasons why a lot of twenty-first century readers of Abelard and Heloise’s story find it less romantic and more creepy. What this kind of arrangement meant for Guibert was that he couldn’t live the same lifestyle as the other children growing up at his family castle. Guibert recounts that:

I wasn’t even allowed to play the usual games. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, couldn’t eat outside the house, couldn’t accept a gift from anybody without his consent. I couldn’t do anything “intemperate”, whether in thought, word, or deed. He seemed to expect me to behave more like a monk than a cleric. The other boys of my age could come and go as they pleased and, at times, with no constraints at all. I, on the other hand, was scrupulously guarded from such behaviour. I would sit in my cleric’s garb and watch the squads of players like a trained animal. Even on Sundays and saints’ feast days I had to put up with the constraints of this scholastic system. There was not a day, not a moment, when I was allowed a holiday. It was study, study, study all the time. Besides, when he had accepted my tutorship, my master was not allowed to take on any other student.

Guibert was thus, from the age of seven or possibly even six, allowed no school holidays, no play-time and no friends. For the time, that was weird enough, and nowadays child protection agencies would doubtless get involved. And in Guibert’s estimation, all of this relentless studying was all for naught, because Solomon was an awful teacher – a stern disciplinarian, yet completely incompetent when it came to his own subject knowledge (Latin language and literature). Guibert relates:

Because he worked me so hard everybody who watched us was convinced that with so much perseverance he would considerably sharpen my fledgling mind. Alas! This didn’t happen. My master was completely ignorant of the techniques of composition or metrics. Meanwhile I was deluged everyday with a hail of blows and whippings. This man was trying to force me to learn what he couldn’t teach!

Guibert’s brilliant sense of irony really does become apparent here! Now, if we measure Solomon up to the areas of professional learning used by my PGCE programme to assess student teachers like myself, Solomon would be strong (indeed, too strong) on behaviour management, but incredibly weak on pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours. Back in the eleventh century there weren’t really any teacher training programmes, but today Solomon definitely wouldn’t be awarded Qualified Teacher Status. And his use of punishments, seen as unnecessarily severe by eleventh century standards, would be regarded today as professional misconduct/ child abuse. So, by the standards of the time, Solomon was frankly not worth the money, and by the standards of the present, he would be barred from the teaching profession.

This being said, Guibert’s view of Solomon isn’t entirely negative. On the contrary, he says that he taught him “everything pertaining to modesty, chastity and good manners.” So at least he got something out of his education, but not what his mother paid for.

Guibert reflects quite deeply on this, and in the process comes up with some theories of how the education of children should work.

Any person’s nature, let alone a child’s, ends up being blunted if it has to submit to too much intellectual work. The more a mind is fired up by extended study, the more the spirit cools as the energies become overexerted. Energy dissolves into apathy.

How cognitive neuroscientists think memory works

What Guibert is describing here sounds a lot like what neuroscientists and educational theorists call “cognitive overload.” The theory of cognitive overload is essentially that new information has to be processed through the brain’s working memory before it can be committed to the long-term memory. The working memory can typically only process seven things at a time. Giving too much information to students at any one stage in the lesson, or getting them to do too many tasks, leads to cognitive overload as there’s just too much information for them to process. Therefore, what’s recommended to trainee teachers like myself is to chunk knowledge and tasks between different stages of the lesson/ different lessons to make it more manageable and easier to take in. Unnecessary or distracting information, meanwhile, gets cut out and scaffolds for complex tasks like prompts, instructions broken down into stages, templates, tables and other tools are provided so that not too much mental effort has to be made at any one time. Most people see cognitive load as cutting-edge educational theory, but Guibert was already thinking about this in the early twelfth century. Guibert then writes:

If, as Scripture puts it, “there was silence in heaven for half an hour [Revelation 8:1],” even the gift of contemplation cannot be sustained unceasingly. It is the same thing for any activity of the mind: it cannot be maintained without interruption. It is my belief, then, that any mind concentrating on a specific object should use varying degrees of attention. Alternately thinking about one thing, then another, we should be able to come back to the one that our mind is most interested in, as if renewed by the recreation we have given ourselves. Nature, too, tends to get tired and should find its remedy in a variety of activities. We must remember that God did not create a uniform world but allowed us to enjoy time changes – days and nights, spring and summer, autumn and winter. People who call themselves schoolteachers should find ways of varying the education of children and young people. Even students who have the seriousness of old people about them should not be treated any differently, in my opinion.

In a sense, what Guibert is recommending here is now enshrined in the modern school day timetable. In mainstream English schools, you will typically have five to eight lessons a day, each of them typically between 40 and 60 minutes in length. Normally, you will have all these lessons in different subjects – at most, you will have two in the same subject in the same day. You will also have an approximately 20-minute morning breaktime and a 40-to-60-minute lunch period. But many educational theorists see that as not providing enough variety, rest and focus in itself. Instead, they have argued for things like spaced learning and interleaving. Spaced learning is when a topic is spread out over a long period of time – rather than learning it all in one lesson, you instead spread it out over several lessons or even several weeks while mixing it in with unrelated stuff. As Guibert might have been hinting at here, it requires students to immediately commit things to their long term memory rather than try and hold them in their working memory and then retrieve them as and when required – its quite good for retrieval practice (being tested on previously learned content – something I try and do a lot in my lessons) and revision. Interleaving is when, during a lesson, you take a break from the current content to look at a slightly different but related topic within the same subject area, before coming back to the topic you’re currently studying. Both the structure of the modern school day, interleaving and spaced learning sound very similar to what Guibert was recommending, and are based on the same logic.

Guibert sums up thus how shambolic the education he received was, and in doing so imparts some truly timeless wisdom:

While my master was taking it out on me for not knowing what he himself did not know, he might have been well advised to consider the harm he had done by squeezing out of my frail little head what he had never put there in the first place. Lunatics’ words can be barely understood by the sane, if at all; similarly the utterances of people who are ignorant but pretend to know something, and who pass on their “knowledge” to others, become even murkier when they attempt to explain what they are saying. There is nothing harder than trying to hold forth on something you cannot understand. It is obscure for the speaker, and even more so for the hearer; it is really as if both were being turned to stone. I’m saying this, O Lord, not because I want to stigmatise this man who, all things considered, was a good friend, but in order to let the readers know, whoever they might be, that we must not be entitled to teach as truth anything that crosses our minds. Let us not lose other people in the clouds of our own theories.

Sources cited:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated and with an introduction by Pail J Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996), pp 16 – 19

Jay Rubinstein, Guibert de Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind, Routledge (2013), p 13

Education Endowment Foundation, Cognitive Neuroscience in the Classroom: A Review of the Evidence (2021)

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 6: why write an autobiography in the twelfth century?

 

Meet Guibert de Nogent (1053 – 1125), the abbot of a monastery in Picardy, northern France. Guibert’s seventy years of life coincided with some pretty tumultuous and exciting events – the Norman Conquest of England, the ideological struggle between the German emperors and the popes that is somewhat misleadingly called the Investiture Controversy (the right to invest bishops was part of it, but far from the whole story), the First Crusade, the explosion of new monastic movements like the Carthusians and Cistercians, a campaign across the whole of Catholic Christendom to reform clerical morality and the emergence of urban self-government in the West for the first time since classical antiquity.

A self-portrait of Guibert de Nogent from his Tropologies of the Prophets shows Guibert (in his black Benedictine robes) offering his book up to Christ enthroned, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Lat 2502, folio 1

 Guibert had opinions on all of these things going on in the world, despite never leaving his corner of northeast-France save for one brief trip to Burgundy, as is attested in his writings, even if some of them are written from a quite parochial angle. He wrote a treatise on saints and relics, a history of the First Crusade called The Deeds of God through the Franks and an autobiography called the Monodies, which includes within it a history of his abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy and an account of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Laon against their bishop in 1112 which resulted in a short-lived urban republic called the Laon commune. Guibert is quite a household name among crusades historians, but arguably he’s most significant as the author of the Monodies, written between 1108 and 1115. Guibert called them the Monodies (Latin: Monodiae) because that term meant a song sung by one person. As Isidore of Seville (560 – 636) explained in his early seventh century encyclopaedia Etymologies:

Original Latin: Cum autem unus canit, Graece monodia, Latine sincinnium dicitur; cum vero duo canunt, bicinium appellatur: cum multi, chorus.

My translation: When one person sings, while in Greek it is said to be a monodia, in Latin it is said to be a sincinnium; indeed, when two people sing, they call it bicinium, and when many people sing, they call it a chorus.

The Monodies were the first complete autobiography to have been written in the West since St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c.400). Indeed, it is the shadow of St Augustine that lurks behind Guibert de Nogent’s work. Like St Augustine, who was hugely influential, Guibert believed that the human mind and soul were locked in a constant struggle against their own pride and the various corrupting forces present in the material world and this is the central theme that runs throughout his autobiography. He also believed that demons could assist in leading humans down the path of pride, temptation and corruption, and this will essentially be the focus of this series. And like Augustine in the Confessions, Guibert’s story is that of a boy who starts out with promise, goes down the path of sin in adolescence but later relents thanks to God’s boundless compassion and patience – indeed, both deliberately echo the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 431): Guibert de Nogent's personal hero and inspiration

One could also say that Guibert was to some degree writing in an established genre of religious writing, one which revolved around using “experiences (experimenta)” as “examples (exempla)” to teach good or bad morals. Many monks had written works in this vein, which could get quite intimate and personal, such as Otloh of St Emmeram (1010 – 1072) in his letter to his friend, William of Hirsau. Indeed, beyond Guibert’s youth, his autobiography essentially reads like a collection of anecdotes with moral lessons, in many of which Guibert himself is just a side-character.

Nonetheless, while this is a carefully curated autobiography, Guibert de Nogent as a teenager had been taught by Anslem of Bec, the great theologian and future archbishop of Canterbury, and had fully internalised his trademark saying “If I look within myself, I cannot bear myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself.” Also, if this was all just a moralistic exercise, or a story of faith and devotion to God being tested, why did Guibert focus on himself? Surely, he could have just focused on Bible stories for his experimenta, as Otloh had done, or the lives of the saints in providing instruction on how to live a good life and avoid evil, as these were more than sufficient for that purpose. There’s little doubt that Guibert saw himself as a unique somebody with distinctly personal challenges to overcome as well as ones that spoke to the experiences of your regular medieval monk. But note that he did not see himself as a unique somebody in a positive, celebratory way. This was a man who never learned to be happy with himself, and while a moderate amount of self-deprecation was de rigueur for a medieval monk or cleric (there’s plenty of that in the writings of Guibert’s mentor, St Anselm of Canterbury) Guibert takes it to excessive levels in the Monodies. Yet despite his crippling insecurities and anxieties was able to accomplish all that could have been expected of him and more in life and was not driven to depression and suicide.

Now, to get a sense of the general tone of the text, lets see first how Guibert begins his autobiography:

I confess to your majesty, O God, the innumerable times I have strayed from your paths, and the innumerable times you inspired me to return to you. I confess the iniquity of my childhood and my youth, still boiling within me as an adult. I confess my deep-seated penchant for depravity, which has not ceased in spite of my declining strength. Lord, every time I recall my persistence in self-defilement and remember how you have always given me the means of regretting it, I can only marvel at your infinite patience. It truly defies the imagination. If repentance and the urge to pray never occur without the outpouring of your spirit, how do you manage to fill the hearts of sinners so liberally and grant so many graces to those who have turned from you and who even provoked you?

Now, in a sense, Guibert is following St Augustine’s Confessions, by giving a meditation on the nature of God and his relationships with humans. His theological training from St Anselm of Canterbury is also much in evidence here – two of St Anselm’s great specialisms were in ontology (the study of the nature of God as a cosmic being) and moral theology or, in GCSE RS/ A Level Philosophy terms, “the problem of evil” (why does God allow bad things to happen in the natural world and humans to sin). But even if a lot of the language, very eloquent nonetheless, is quite generic, Guibert unlike Augustine in the first five chapters of the Confessions, makes it explicit that this isn’t about God and man generally, its about God and him. Right from the start, Guibert is making it clear that this is about him as a unique somebody, and a uniquely wretched and sinful somebody, who God with his infinite power and goodness somehow manages to redeem. To while Guibert is undoubtedly taking his lead from one of the greatest of the Church Fathers of ancient Christianity, and one of the most prominent Catholic theologians of his own day, he is from the start writing something original.

Later on in the first chapter, Guibert says:

O good God, when I come back to you after my binges of inner drunkenness, I don’t turn back from knowledge of myself, even though I don’t otherwise make any progress either. If I am blind in knowing myself, how could I possibly have any spark of knowledge for you? If, as Jeremiah says, “I am the man who has seen affliction” [Lamentations 3:1], it follows that I must look very carefully for the things that compensate for that poverty. To put that differently, if I don’t know what is good, how am I to know what is bad, let alone hateful? Unless I know what beauty is I can never loathe what is ugly. It follows from this that I try to know you insofar as I can know myself; and enjoying the knowledge of you does not mean that I lack self-knowledge. It is a good thing, then, and singularly beneficial for my soul, that confessions of this sort allow my persistent search for your light to dispel the darkness of my reason. With steady lighting my reason will no longer be in the dark about itself.

This beautifully written passage neatly expresses Guibert’s purpose in writing the book – to try and understand himself in order to be able to understand God. Right from the outset this is a deeply religious exercise, but Guibert doesn’t want a generic understanding of what God is like and what he does? He wants to understand him through his own personal experiences.

In the second chapter, Guibert goes on to think about the gifts God has given him in life. This is echoing St Augustine, who in Confessions 9.6 says:

Original Latin: Munera tua tibi confiteor, domine deus meus, creator omnium et multum potens formare nostra deformia.

My translation (bit ropey, but here goes): I demonstrate many of your gifts to me to you, my lord God, creator of all and with much power to shape our many deformities.

Here, Guibert remarks that all the things we have materially in life are gifts from God and thus we shouldn’t boast of them because whatever they might do for us in this world, they’ll do nothing for us in the next:

The more fleeting they are, the more their very transitoriness makes them suspect. If one can find no other argument to despise them, it is enough to point out that one’s genealogy, or physical appearance, are not of one’s choosing.

Some things can sometimes be acquired through effort: wealth, for example, or talent … But the truth of my assertion here is only relative. If the light, which “enlightens the way for every man coming into the world” [John 1.9] fails to enlighten reason – and if Christ, the key to all science, fails to open the doors of right doctrine – then, surely, teachers are fighting a losing battle against clogged ears. Any person, then, is unwise to lay claim to anything except sin. But let me drop this and get on with my subject.

Guibert then goes on name the first and foremost of those gifts God has given him, namely his mother “who is beautiful yet chaste and modest and filled with the fear of the Lord”, which nicely summarises Guibert’s view of what womanhood should be (he most certainly wasn’t alone in it!). Guibert’s mother is a very important recurring character in the Monodies, as we’ll see, and it is she who plays the most important role, after God of course, in steering him down the right path and away from sin and ruin. It becomes quite clear from the Monodies that Guibert was very close to his mother (even after he become a cloistered novice monk, she lived as a hermit in the monastery grounds and he would visit her), and that she had a very important influence on his personality, both positive and negative. It was no doubt his recollections of his mother that led to Guibert identifying a lot with St Augustine, who also had a mother (Monica) who was devout and modest, whom he was very fond of and who did a lot to try and steer him down the right path, in Augustine’s case towards Christianity (Augustine’s father was a pagan and in youth Augustine became firstly a Manichaean and then a Neoplatonist sceptic).  

Guibert uses his mother to illustrate the points he’s just made earlier:

Mentioning her beauty alone would have been profane and foolish if I didn’t add (to show the vanity of the word “beauty), that the severity of her look was sure proof of her chastity. For poverty-ridden people, who have no choice about their food, fasting is really a form of torture and is therefore less praiseworthy; whereas if rich people abstain from food, their merit is derived from its abundance. So it is with beauty, which is all the more praiseworthy if it resists flattery while knowing itself to be desirable.

Sallust was able to consider beauty praiseworthy independent of moral considerations. Otherwise, he would have never said about Aurelia Orestilla that “good men never praised anything in her except her beauty. Sallust seems to have meant that Aurelia’s beauty, considered in isolation, could still be praised by good people, while admitting how corrupt she was in everything else. Speaking for Sallust, I think he might as well have said that Aurelia deserved to be praised for a natural God-given gift, defiled though she was by the other impurities that made up her being. Likewise, a statue can be praised for the harmony of its parts, no matter what material it is made of. Saint Paul may call an idol “unreal” from the point of view of faith, and indeed nothing is more profane than an idol, but one can still admire the harmony of its limbs …

… If everything that has been designed in the eternal plan of God is good, every particular instance of beauty in the temporal order is, one might say, a mirror of that eternal beauty. It is created things that make the eternal things of God intelligible,” [Romans 1:20] says Saint Paul …

In his book entitled On Christian Doctrine (If I am not mistaken) Saint Augustine wrote something like this: “a person with a beautiful body and a corrupt soul is to be more pitied than one whose body is also ugly.” If therefore we lament beauty that is blemished, it is unquestionably a good thing when beauty, though depraved, is improved through perseverance in goodness.

Thank you God, for instilling virtue in my mother’s beauty. The seriousness of her whole bearing was enough to show her contempt for all vanity. A sober look, measured words, modest facial expressions hardly lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors. O God of power, you know what fame your name had inspired in her from earliest years, and how she rebelled against every form of allurement. Incidentally, one rarely, if ever, finds comparable self-control among women of her social rank, or a comparable reluctance to denigrate those who lack self-control. Whenever anyone, whether from within our outside her household, began this sort of gossip, she would turn away and go, looking as irritated as if she were the one being attacked. What compels me to relate these facts, O God of truth, is not a private affection, even for my mother, but the facts themselves, which are far more eloquent than my words could ever be. Besides, the rest of my family are fierce, brutish warriors and murderers. They have no idea of God and would surely live far from your sight unless you were willing to show them your boundless mercy as you so often do.

"Fierce and brutish warriors and murderers" with "no idea of God": knights torment the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius in this highly imaginative eleventh century manuscript of the Consolations of Philosophy from France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 6401

There’s so much to talk about here. The first is Guibert’s methods of argumentation. He always starts from his own personal reflections on human character, which he seems to have a keen awareness of, or on God and then elaborates on them with references to revered authorities – a standard method of argumentation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, given how much tradition and ancient wisdom was valued in premodern thought. Most of the intellectual authorities Guibert cites are the Biblical, or else St Augustine, though notably he does cite the first century BC Roman historian Sallust, specifically his discussion of Aurelia Orestilla, the wife of the wicked Catiline, the Roman aristocrat who attempted to overthrow the Republic in 63 BC, in his On the Conspiracy of Catiline. We might assume, based on our preconceived modern stereotypes, that a devout medieval monk would be hysterically opposed to pagan literature, but as I’ve written before such stereotypes are largely unwarranted. Instead, the pagan Romans were regarded by most medieval intellectuals as the best guide to skilled rhetoric and fine writing, and as deeply insightful if sometimes flawed guides to the natural world, the human condition and history. Sallust himself was a standard classroom text in medieval monasteries and cathedral schools, and so many medieval historians roughly contemporary to Guibert including William of Poitiers, Bruno of Merseburg, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon were intimately familiar with both his Catilinarian Conspiracy and his Jugurthine War. In citing Sallust, Guibert was both showing that the ancients had made the similar observations on human character to him, despite their differing religious worldviews, as well as also demonstrating that he was a well-educated man.

We can also see that Guibert wasn’t dogmatic in how he chose to follow authorities. While he agrees with Saint Paul that idols, by which he means physical objects that are worshipped by people presuming them to be living, physical manifestations of deities, are bad, he also says that they can nonetheless be pleasing to look at from an aesthetic standpoint. This also reflects part of his personality – as I’ll show you in a future post, Guibert did have something of a proto-archaeological interest in pagan antiquities, and even excavated a more than one thousand-year-old holy-site in the grounds of his monastery.

The final lines concerning his mother in this chapter really give us a sense of why Guibert wrote the Monodies. These “facts” about his life do more than any abstract theological reasoning or fine rhetoric could do to illustrate his arguments, by showing how it all works out in the here and now.

Guibert also has a very negative attitude towards his own family background and social class. As we’ll see, both his parents came from the lowest echelons of the Northern French warrior aristocracy – his mother was a minor noblewoman and his father a knight who owned his own castle. While undoubtedly this background helped Guibert get to where he was, as abbot of Nogent, Guibert sees it as nothing praiseworthy and disdains what he sees as the highly secular, materialistic and violent culture of this social group. Guibert was not alone here. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot and the most influential religious leader of the twelfth century, was full of denunciations of the vanity, vainglory, lustfulness and violence of nobles and knights – in 1115, a year after Guibert finished the Monodies, Bernard condemned the new craze for mock battles among young knights that were coming to be known as tournaments. And Guibert’s contemporaries, Orderic Vitalis and Abbot Suger, wrote invective-laden narratives about borderline psychopathic feudal lords who habitually terrorised churches and kidnapped and tortured merchants, men like Robert de Belleme and Thomas de Marle (who also appears in Guibert’s Monodies). At the same time, Guibert is a helpful reminder that churchmen and warrior aristocrats weren’t from two different worlds – a lot of the time, they were brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins! And the First Crusade gave Guibert a flicker of optimism for the warrior elite, while his contemporary St Bernard of Clairvaux tried to spiritually reform them and channel their martial energies to higher causes by setting up the Knights Templar with Hugh de Payens between 1118 and 1127.

Finally, Guibert gives us such a brilliant insight into the ascetic mindset, which can be really hard to grasp in twenty-first century Britain where the idea of going off to live in a monastery, giving up all personal property, abstaining from sex and living a life of prayer, hard work, study, contemplation and fasting to get closer to a divine being seems very alien and transgressive to most people. Particularly revealing is that paragraph about poor people fasting as opposed to rich people fasting, the latter deserving more praise than the former for doing so. A recurring theme throughout many medieval hagiographies is the wealth, noble pedigree and physical attractiveness of the saints (male and female) that are their subject matter being stressed – the point being that they could enjoy political power, luxurious living and sexual pleasure, yet they chose to spurn it all to pursue a higher cause. Perhaps then the closest analogues to medieval ascetic saints and monks today would be certain members of the environmental movement, like Greta Thunberg.

From the sources 4: Carolingian peasants and their conspiracy theories

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sky pirates? You mean like these guys?

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

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

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

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

Alex Jones just minding his business as usual

From the sources 3: Living in the Carolingian Countryside II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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