I am back!!! After almost two months of inactivity (54 days to be precise), the longest in the history of this blog, I am now active again. Those of you who have been actively following may have been wondering what happened to Charles Martel part four - he'll be with you very soon, I promise. But I thought I'd give you an explanation as to what has been going on in the time in between. From 3 May to 17 June I have been on a long-anticipated journey round Europe to see some of the best late antique and early medieval stuff out there, as well as things from other historical periods. A kind of Grand Tour for the twenty-first century, if you will, but orientated completely towards my personal interests rather than a canonical selection of cities and Classical sites (mostly in France and Italy) believed to be essential to the education of any young gentleman. In the course of those 46 days I travelled a minimum of 4849.1 km by train (excluding day trips to outlying places) and walked 610.9 km (13.2 km a day on average) through five Continental European countries - France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria and Italy. That number could be increased to seven if you include changing trains in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Basically covered a good whack of Charlemagne's Empire, and with all that near-constant travelling, one got some sense of what it must have been like to have been like to have been a highly itinerant ruler like Otto the Great, Conrad II or Frederick Barbarossa - above all, how exhausting it must have been.
As you might suspect, the many great and wonderful things I saw on my travels will be the subject of many a blog post. But for the moment, in order to prepare you for the first blog post, I am going to do one on the Edict of Pitres, arguably one of the most important documents in early medieval history, as it gives us unparalleled insights into how an early medieval government was at least supposed to have worked.
Who, what, where, when and Why?
The Road to Pitres
Charles the Bald's reign up until this point had been quite
a bumpy ride. He had won his kingdom through an extremely bloody and brutal three-year civil war, in which he and his brother, Louis the German, fought
against their other brother, Lothar, and their nephew, Pepin II of Aquitaine,
following the death of their father, Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840). I have covered this and the treaty of Verdun that followed in a previous post (see hyperlink above).
No sooner had Charles secured his kingdom, he found himself
faced with revolts from prominent nobles from the western regions of his
kingdom, like Lambert of Nantes, who were still loyal to Lothar and his cause
for a unified Frankish Empire. These threats were however eliminated fairly
quickly. But in order to make sure that he political community as a whole in
West Francia stayed loyal to him, Charles had to accept various constraints and
limitations on his royal authority in a legislative act called the Capitulary
of Coulaines - a kind of forerunner to Magna Carta. For the next five years,
Aquitaine (the entire southern half of his kingdom) had tried to secede and
become its own independent kingdom ruled by Charles' nephews. By 848 the nobles
in Aquitaine and the Spanish March (Catalonia) had come to realise that all the
advantages of having a local king were offset by said local king being a total
car crash. Yet it was only in 864, a few months prior to the issuing of the
edict, that Pepin II was finally pacified once and for all. Worse was to come
in 858 when the West Frankish nobles, highly dissatisfied with Charles' rule,
offered the crown to his brother, Louis the German. Charles was unable to raise
an army to resist Louis and hid himself away in Burgundy. Only by rallying the
support of the West Frankish bishops, led by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806
- 882), combined with desertions in Louis' army was Charles able to keep his
throne. In 862, Charles had even faced-down a short-lived rebellion of magnates
from the northern and western regions of his kingdom led by his own 16-year-old
son, Louis the Stammerer.
But by the summer of 864, the situation had changed and Charles was now in a much stronger position politically, with his royal authority unchallenged. Therefore, Charles needed to make a statement that would proclaim his might as a ruler and the newfound confidence in his kingship. He also had some pressing concerns. Viking attacks down the riverine waterways of the Frankish kingdoms had been escalating. Trade with the east via Russia was becoming less profitable for the Scandinavians, as the Abbasid Caliphate was starting to politically fragment (a classic “centre can no longer hold” type situation) and its silver mines in the Middle East were drying up. Meanwhile, Britain and Mainland Europe still made rich pickings – we’re only three years off from the Great Heathen Army landing in Northumbria. Charles therefore needed to ramp up the Frankish state structures to prepare them for the worst to come. What was to happen at Pitres was going to be the defining moment of Charles the Bald’s kingship, a chance to put the last two decades behind him.
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| Charles the Bald appears enthroned in the Vivian Bible (846), BNF Lat 1 folio 423r |
Charles the Bald's political style
Any royal assembly was a chance for a king to give
charismatic displays of his royal authority. For example, we know that
Carolingian Frankish kings wore their crowns at royal assemblies, as would the
West Saxon kings of England from the tenth century onwards in emulation of
Frankish practice. Processions, litanies and other ritual elements could be
expected to happen, and its beyond reasonable doubt that these were quite
theatrical occasions, even if no set of stage directions survives for a
Carolingian assembly. Assemblies were also an opportunity for the king’s
subjects who didn’t have the privilege of regularly attending on him at court
to get close to their ruler – impress him with gifts, give him news of what was
going on in their corner of the kingdom, petition him to give them favours or
redress any grievances. Furthermore, they allowed members of the political
community to socialise with each other – hunting and feasting would almost
always be on the agenda in organising these assemblies. And most importantly,
they were a forum for a king to receive formal advice from his subjects on matters
of state and build consensus in support of his policies. Royal assemblies,
which happened annually, were thus the key mechanism for kings to get anything
done on a kingdom-wide level, and they were what held the kingdom together as a
single unified entity in the absence of large, administrative bureaucracies
like the Western Roman Empire had had western European monarchs from the
twelfth century onwards would do.
Despite the importance of the event, we don’t know the
actual proceedings of the assembly at Pitres. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims was
an eyewitness, yet in the Annals of Saint Bertin, which he
authored, he only tells us what was accomplished there. Annual tribute was
received from the Bretons, who had from 845 to 851 successfully fought to free
themselves from direct Frankish rule and had become a tribute-paying client
state. New fortifications were to be built on the Seine to defend against
Viking attacks. Finally, “with the advice of his faithful men and following the
custom of his predecessors and forefathers, he [Charles] drew up capitula
to the number of thirty-seven, and he gave orders for them to be observed as
laws throughout his realm.” That this is an allusion to the Edict of Pitres,
there can be no doubt.
Hincmar’s statement highlights one of multiple purposes of
the Edict – as royal-image making/ public relations/ propaganda (whatever you
wanna call it). As Janet Nelson has demonstrated, Imperial Roman legislation in
the form of the Theodosian Code of 438 and the Novels of Emperor Valentinian
III (r.425 – 455) is cited, sometimes verbatim, as being the inspiration behind
thirty-three of the provisions of the Edict. The number of chapters of the
edict (37), mentioned by Hincmar, was very deliberately chosen, as the Novels
of Valentinian III were 36 in number. None of this would have been lost on the
Edict’s audience. Roman law in one form or another was still the legal system
in the southern half of Charles’ kingdom (Aquitaine and the Spanish March). And
churchmen from the northern half of the kingdom like Hincmar had extensively
studied the Theodosian Code even though where they lived the Law of the Salian
Franks, which had its roots in ancient Germanic custom, held sway. Charles
himself appears to have claimed to have studied Roman law as a boy in a letter
he sent to Pope Hadrian II in 870. And more than thirty years ago, Freculf of
Lisieux had written for the instruction of the young Charles of how Theodosius
I, “a man necessary for restoring the state” had “corrected many laws, added to
them and issued them in his own name. Whatever laws he saw in the city to be
pernicious and redundant in terms of ancient custom, he authorised them to be
removed; and he saw to it that whatever laws were necessary to help the state
were added.” The Edict also cites in various places earlier legislative
directives (capitularies) from Charles’ father, Emperor Louis the Pious, and
his grandfather, Charlemagne. And as Charles would have been aware, his
grandfather had all the law codes of the different peoples living within his
Empire written down, and had tried to reconcile the differences between the two
legal systems operating in the heartlands of his empire (the Law of the Salian
Franks and the Law of the Ripaurian Franks) but in the end had only added a few
chapters to them to bring them somewhat up-to-date. Despite the fact that
Charles the Bald, unlike his two elder brothers, had never met his grandfather,
he was held up as a role model for him from boyhood and Einhard’s Life of
Charlemagne was prescribed as a text for him to study in the schoolroom.
Thus, through the Edict, Charles was very consciously casting himself in the
mould of the Christian Roman emperors, especially Theodosius I (r.379 – 395)
and Theodosius II (r.408 – 450), and of his immediate predecessors, who had
always been held up to him as exemplary rulers.
What is the edict actually all about?
Even more interesting is what the Chapters of the Edict
themselves entail. The Edict has been described by the great Anglo-Saxon
historian Patrick Wormald as being the greatest single legislative act issued
by a north European king before Edward I. Janet Nelson, whose biography of
Charles the Bald is still the definitive work on the Carolingian monarch
despite it being over thirty-years-old, describes the Edict as the most
remarkable piece of public legislation between Justinian’s Novels (sixth
century) and the twelfth century. And such assessments by modern academics
really do bear out. The scope of the edict is huge in terms of all the
different areas of government policy-making it covers, and the provisions it
makes are incredibly ambitious.
The structure of the edict goes:'
The structure of the edict goes:
·
Preamble
·
Chapters 1 – 7: provisions concerning public
order and the keeping of the peace.
·
Chapters 8 – 24: provisions concerning the
reform of the coinage.
·
Chapters 25 – 27: provisions concerning the
defence of the realm and the reform of conscription and military service.
·
Chapters 28 – 31: provisions concerning the
regulation of the rural economy – taxation, rent, labour services, the land
market and peasant migration.
·
Chapters 32 – 34: provisions concerning specific
issues that were brought up in the royal assembly at Pitres.
·
Chapters 35 – 36: provisions concerning the
communication and enforcement of the Edict in the localities.
·
Chapter 37: provision concerning the royal lodge
by the Seine and final exhortation for the king’s subjects to defend the realm
against the Viking threat.
A short(ish) chapter-by-chapter paraphrase of the provisions
of the edict now follows:
1. Counts
and other lay men may not appropriate church property for themselves – it’s the
job of bishops and abbots to police the counts on this while the counts police
other lay men; for offenders a policy of two strikes and then you’re out
applies.
2. Anyone
who assaults widows, orphans, priests, monks and nuns, and any landowner who
tries to evict a priest, charge rent on a holiday or on church properties
granted exemption from it or refuses to pay rent on lands held from churches,
will be thoroughly investigated by the counts and other royal officials and
will have harsh justice served to them according to legislation issued in the
reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Likewise, bishops can prescribe
penance or excommunication to lawbreakers.
3. All
free men in the kingdom are obliged by sacred oath to maintain the public
peace, and it’s the job of bishops, counts and other royal officials in the
localities to police them and bring offenders to the king’s attention.
4. The
vassals of the king and queen shall be treated with all due respect by the
counts, just as they would expect not to be mistreated by the king and his
entourage.
5. Counts
must ensure that royal estates and monastic lands under royal protection that
lie within their administrative districts are treated as inviolate. They also
must respect the king’s choices of estate managers and guarantee their safety.
6. Free
men living in lands ravaged by the Vikings, who have thus turned to banditry to
make up for their loss of homes, farmland, slaves and moveable wealth, shall be
summoned to the public law courts by a local count. If they refuse then
whatever remains of their property in their home county shall be seized by the
state and they shall be outlawed.
7. Men
who operate as bandits outside their administrative district from which they
hail shall be reported by the count responsible for the county in which they
are operating to the count responsible for their home county. They shall then
work together to track down and arrest the criminals in question.
8. Unadulterated
denarii (silver coins) of the correct weight from any mint are legal
tender in every part of the kingdom until St Martin’s Day (11 November). All
towns and villages across the kingdom, even if they are ecclesiastical properties
that are legally immune from the normal jurisdiction of the king’s officials,
will have local residents appointed as judges. Together they will work with the
counts, other royal officers and major landowners in the area to ensure that
good denarii are not rejected in financial transactions, and that denarii
that are of incorrect weight/ are not of pure silver are prohibited.
9. These
ordinary free men chosen as local judges for the coinage, must swear an oath
that they will perform the duties that the role entails to the best of their
knowledge and abilities, and in good faith. Any man they know to have refused
an adulterated denarius of correct weight, they must bring to the
attention of the count and other officers of the state in the localities. If
they fail to do this and are convicted, they will be punished as a perjurer
under secular law and will also be prescribed an appropriate penance under
ecclesiastical law.
10. After
St Martin’s Day (11 November 864), only the new, reformed silver coinage will
be accepted. Anyone who tries trading with an old denarius will have the
coins will have it confiscated from him by the count and his subordinate
officials.
11. Coins
of the new, reformed type will look like this: on one side they will have the
king’s name written in a circle and the monogram of the Carolingian dynasty in
the middle; on the other side, they will have the name of the place where the
coin was minted written in the circle and in the middle the symbol of the
cross.
12. Coins
may only be minted at ten sites in the kingdom, all under the tight supervision
of the king’s officials – Quentovic, Compiegne, Rouen, Paris, Rheims, Sens,
Orleans, Chalon-sur-Saone, Melle and Narbonne.
13. In
each of these ten royally-approved sites for mints, the locals shall choose an
honest and reliable moneyer. Moneyers shall swear an oath to do their duty to
the best of their knowledge and ability and in good faith. If a moneyer is
believed to have minted adulterated or underweight denarii, or to have
engaged in fraudulent practices in the weighing or purifying of the silver, he
will be subjected to trial by ordeal. If thereby found guilty, he will have one
of his hands amputated and will be prescribed the penance appropriate for
blasphemers and robbers of the poor by the local bishop. Those living in
Aquitaine will be sentenced according to Roman law.
14. On
1 July, every count from each of the ten districts allowed to have mints will
come to the town of Senlis with his viscount, two substantial landowners/ slave
masters from the region and the resident moneyer. There, they will be given
five pounds of pure silver from the royal treasury so that they can begin
minting coins. And on the Saturday before the beginning of Lent the next year,
they shall bring five pounds of denarii to the king’s officers at
Senlis.
15. All
men in the kingdom will be able to have their old denarii exchanged for
the new coinage after 1 July, having been informed that after 11 November only
the new coinage will be legal tender. Any man who rejects an unadulterated denarius
of the new coinage of the new coinage after 1 July will have to pay a fine
of sixty solidi (720 denarii or three pounds of silver), and any
slave/ serf who rejects it will be given sixty lashes with a birch. The local
bishop and the officers of the state will ensure that the punishment is not
excessive. Any landlord or slave master who doesn’t let his slaves or serfs be
punished for the aforementioned offence will be obliged to pay a fine of sixty solidi.
16. After
1 July, if any man discovers a denarius of the new coinage that has been
adulterated, he must perform a citizen’s arrest on the man who offered it to
him during trading and interrogate him as to who he got it from, and this shall
then pass from hand to hand until the original moneyer has been traced. As
before, any moneyer who mints underweight or adulterated coinage will in
Aquitaine be punished according to Roman law, and in the northern half of the
kingdom and Burgundy will be punished by having his hand amputated. Anyone
caught accepting an underweight or unadulterated denarius will pay a fine of
sixty solidi if he is a free man, or given sixty lashes with a birch if
he is a slave or a serf.
17. Counts
and other officers of the state will ensure that no one in their administrative
districts tries forging coins or setting up their own private mints. Anyone
caught doing this will have his hand amputated.
18. If
a forger flees to a royal estate, he will be searched for and arrested by the
officers of the state. If he hides in lands belonging to churches or magnates
that are protected by a legal immunity, the landowner is obliged to hand him
over to the officers of the state for punishment as they would do for robbers
and murderers. Any landowner who harbours a forger shall be fined 15 solidi if
he refuses to hand him over at the first request, 30 solidi at the
second, and full compensation for all the damages (600 solidi) combined with
the count and his men coming over and forcing him to hand over the fugitive at
the third. Any landowner who resists the count coming to arrest the forger will
be fined 600 solidi.
19. To
facilitate the reform and regulation of the coinage as outlined above, every
count shall be obliged to make a survey of all the markets in his county. They
must be able to report back to the king’s court which markets in their county
were created in the time of Charlemagne, which were created in the time of
Louis the Pious with his authorisation, which were created in the time of Louis
the Pious without his authorisation and which came into being during the reign
of the present monarch. They must also find out which markets have moved
location since they were created, and by whose authority this has taken place.
Every count shall bring the surveys to the next annual assembly, and the king and
his advisers shall determine which markets are useful and can remain and which
ones are superfluous and shall be abolished. And no markets may be held on
Sundays.
20. Counts
and other officers of the state must ensure that fixed weights and measures are
used in all transactions, so that landlords may not claim more than they are
rightfully entitled to by custom from their tenants in rent, and traders may
not sell their customers short. Anyone found guilty of this will have the goods
they measured dishonestly confiscated and be fined sixty solidi if they
are a free man, and given sixty lashes with a birch if they are a serf or a
slave, and they will receive appropriate penalties from the bishops as well.
But if any counts or other officers of state unjustly confiscate goods from
free men, serfs or slaves on the false pretence that they had used dishonest
measurements, they shall be punished for miscarriage of justice in the same way
as any official who abuses their powers. Anyone responsible for ensuring that
correct weights and measures are used who fails in this duty will be punished
as a perjurer.
21. The
fine for the rejection of good denarii has been remitted for the last
three years. Now, it will be retroactively reinstated and those who took
advantage of that must now make good, to ensure that no one will ever again
refuse good denarii. Any landlord who tries to rack up rents/ any
merchant who tries to rack up prices in order to fork up the money for the fine
will be made to pay compensation to the poor people they have exploited this
way and will be punished by the officers of the state, so no one will be
tempted to exploit the poor in this way again.
22. Unfree
peasants who have been flogged for refusing good denarii should not be
forced to pay fines, and if they have been fined in the past, they’ll be given
due compensation. Any free man who owns allodial lands or benefices (lands
granted by the crown for life) in multiple counties, but cannot fork out enough
to pay the fine then the officers of the state may exercise discretion as to
what is a fair punishment that will not just unjustly burden him – the aim is
encouraging law-abiding behaviour for the common good, not the state’s
representatives enriching themselves. Likewise, the officers of the state can
be lenient in giving out fines to people who have broken the law
unintentionally/ out of ignorance.
23. Gold
and silver alloys are banned. And after St Remigius’ Day (1 October) no one may
sell gold and silver except for purification – jewellery is included in this
ban. Anyone caught selling alloys or gold and silver jewellery will be
immediately arrested and brought before the king’s representatives if they
don’t own property or slaves in the county. And if they do, they will be
summoned to the law courts. If found guilty, they will be punished accordingly.
However, if any officers of the state arrest people carrying away their alloys
or gold and silver jewellery to the smith for purification, the officers will
be investigated and punished. Any smith caught making gold and silver alloys or
jewellery after 1 October will be punished according to Roman law if he lives
in Aquitaine, or if he lives in other parts of the kingdom, he will have his
hand amputated.
24. The
price of a pound of refined gold is fixed at twelve pounds of pure silver in
the new denarii. A pound of gold that has been refined but not enough to
make gilt shall be fixed at ten pounds of silver. Any counts and officers of
the state must, on pain of being stripped of their offices, ensure that these
prices stay fixed. Any man who tries to fraudulently get round this decree will
be forced to pay a fine of sixty solidi if is a free man, or will be
given sixty lashes if he is an unfree man.
25. From
1 July, any man caught trying to sell weapons and armour to the Vikings will be
executed for treason against the state and betrayal of the Christian faith,
without any hope of royal pardon or redemption.
26. Any
free man who owns a horse, or has the means to support one, is obliged to serve
in the royal armies. Counts and other officers of the state are thus forbidden
from confiscating a free man’s horses without clear justification, since it
will prevent him from performing the military service he owes to the state. Any
count or other type of royal official caught doing will receive the punishment
befitting all government officials who engage in arbitrary and oppressive
behaviour in the localities.
27. The
counts must make surveys of how many free men in each county can serve as
soldiers in the royal army on their account, how many could serve if a
neighbour helped provide them with supplies and equipment, how many could serve
if two neighbours were ready to help them out and how many could serve if four
neighbours were ready to help them out. The counts should then report back to
the royal court how large a squadron of soldiers their county can send to royal
army. The remainder, consisting of free men to poor to serve in the royal army
even if they clubbed together, should be obliged to build new fortifications,
bridges and swamp crossings and perform guard duty in public fortresses and on
the border if they live in frontier regions, as it is their duty to defend the patria.
Anyone who deserts from the royal army, or fails to show up for muster, shall
be fined.
28. Any
free landholder who owes the king poll tax or rent is forbidden to commend
themselves to the church or any other lord, lest the state loses what it is
rightfully owed. The counts will enforce this. And if the church or any other
lord does take such people on, they will be fined. Any free man is allowed to
sell or gift his property to whoever he pleases, so long as the state still
receives what it is owed by way of rent or tax.
29. Peasants
who live on royal or ecclesiastical estates, who already willingly perform
cartage and manual labour on them as is laid out in the polyptychs (estate
surveys and records of rents and services owed compiled in the time of
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious), must now be willing to cart marl without any
argument, even though this is admittedly a recent innovation rather than an
ancient custom.
30. Peasants
are now forbidden from selling their hereditary lands on the land market, as it
is leading to landlords losing rents and estates becoming fragmented. Counts,
other officers of state and priests will be tasked with enforcing this. Any
subsequent sale of peasant land that takes place will be revoked, and rents
shall be levied on each hereditary holding after the lands belonging to it have
been restored in proportion to the quantity and quality of its fields and
vineyards.
31. Each
count must make a survey of rural migrants living in his county. Rural migrants
who have lived in their new county of residence since the time of Charlemagne
or Louis the Pious are permitted to stay. Those who have fled to live in a new
county because of recent Viking raids must be sent back by the counts, the
bishops and their agents, but they must not blackmail them into doing so.
People who have migrated to other regions for seasonal wage labour in the
vineyards can continue to do so, so long as they return to the home regions to
sow, plough and harvest their landlord’s crops within the allotted times. Any
marriages migrants make outside their home region will be dissolved. Runaway
slaves will be returned to their masters, and any child of a runaway slave will
inherit his mother’s status.
32. Two
counts who share a border must not convene their county courts on the same day,
because free landholders who have lands and interests in both counties cannot
attend both meetings. They must stay in constant communication – if one count
holds the county court on a Monday, the other should hold it on a Thursday, and
to make it fair they must alternate each year between who gets to hold their
court first.
33. Anyone
who witnesses an oath shall swear his oath 42 days thereafter, unless Lent
falls in between, in which case he must wait until eight days after Easter
Sunday. Anyone who fails to heed this decree will be fined sixty solidi.
34. The
counts have asked for advice on how to deal with peasants who have sold
themselves into slavery/ serfdom because they are doubly burdened by the poll
tax and rent to their landlords in times of famine. After further consultation
with the bishops and other members of the Christian faithful, and having looked
through the Salic law, capitularies, the Bible and the works of the Church
Fathers, the king has decreed that throughout the kingdom men should still be
allowed to sell themselves into slavery/ serfdom when they are desperate.
However, their masters are obliged to care for them and cannot sell them to
anyone else. Nor can they claim ownership of any children that the man in
question has had with a free woman.
35. Royal
agents will be sent into every county to make sure that all the provisions of
the Edict, and all previous capitularies, are being implemented by the counts.
And if any counts are found to be negligent or unwilling to implement the royal
will in the localities, they will lose their offices and be replaced by more
reliable candidates.
3 All
archbishops, and the counts of the cities where their metropolitan sees are
based, shall receive copies of the Edict of Pitres and previous capitularies
from the royal chancery. They will then have them transcribed, so that all the
bishops, counts, abbots and royal vassals in their provinces may have a copy of
the Edict of Pitres which they can then have read out publicly in all the
county courts across the kingdom. And lists will be drawn up by the archbishops
and counts of all who have received a copy, which will then be given to the
chancellor, so that no one can claim ignorance in disregarding the Edict’s
provisions.
3 Following
an incident last year, no one may reside in the royal lodge by the Seine
without permission and the guards will ensure that the culprit does not escape
without due punishment. All the king’s subjects must be prepared to defend the
realm and the Holy Church against the Vikings whenever the need arises for them
to do so.
A silver denarius of Charles the Bald minted at Quentovic following the reform of the coinage enacted by the Edict of Pitres What the mounted militias mentioned in the Edict of Pitres would have looked like: cavalry depicted in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, Cod Sang 22 p140
Some analysis of mine
The first thing that is so remarkable about the Edict is the
sheer range of different areas of government its provisions entail. Basically,
you have all the basic functions of a state covered in the provisions here –
justice, law enforcement and the maintenance of public order, national defence
and military organisation and the collection of government revenues; they’re
all there! But not only that, as the Edict attempts to regulate various aspects
of economic and social life, as well as thoroughgoing reform of the
state-backed currency. The Edict itself very frequently uses the Latin term res
publica (normally translated as state, sometimes as commonwealth). It
justifies many of its provisions in terms of the benefit of the state (res
publica), as distinct from that of either the king as a person or the
political community, and regularly appeals to the public good as well, though
who that public was varied a lot. The Carolingians clearly saw themselves as
something more than just holy warlords with an imperial Roman gloss, and they
saw the kingdoms they presided over as something more than just their private
property or a network of personal followers (the semi-mythical personenverbandstaat
of German historiography). It is also clear from the edict that the
Carolingians had a bureaucracy (however skeletal) with defined public duties and
mechanisms for holding them to account over failure to perform those duties and
abusing their public authority. A monopoly on violence was undoubtedly out of
the reach of the Carolingian state – as is explicit from the provisions of the
Edict, the Carolingians had no standing army or professional police forces, and
had to rely on the close co-operation of local landowners for the maintenance
of law and order. And the Edict does also show the importance of the church and
appeals to authority to the successful operation of the Carolingian government.
But if those last two criteria disqualify Carolingian West Francia, or indeed
all other early medieval kingdoms, from being states then very few polities in
the whole of human history have been states. Away with the naysayers! In my not
even vaguely Weberian view, the West Frankish polity under the Carolingians was
a state by any reasonable definition. How powerful and efficient it was is up
for debate, but a state it was nonetheless.
Some of the policies outlined in the Edict, like the first
seven provisions dealing with law and order (which in some places echo the
Edict of Paris issued in 614 by the Merovingian king Chlothar II), are very
basic and one really does wonder about their effectiveness. At the same time,
they reflect the best methods then available. And while it would be wrong to
say that later medieval governments didn’t make improvements on that front, no
quantum leaps were made until long after the conventional endpoint of the
Middle Ages. Indeed, the system of law enforcement in Georgian England (but not
in eighteenth century France, where professional police forces had been
introduced) barely differed in its fundamentals from that described in the
Edict of Pitres – a small number of unpaid officials working together with
local landowners and the wider community.
By contrast, when it comes to the coinage reform, the
intricacy and sophistication of the mechanisms put in place for implementing it
is phenomenal for an early medieval government. Indeed, reform of the coinage
was where the edict was most successful in its impact, setting standards that
would remain in place even after the decline of royal power in West Francia in
the tenth and early eleventh centuries, up until the thirteenth century.
Likewise the reform of the military provides a fairly robust plan for
conscripting the yeomanry and other types of modest freeholders into the royal
armies – the only alternative to having to rely on the private retinues of
landed aristocrats, given that the Carolingian state did not have the resources
to maintain a regular army, and one which gives the state direct access to
military manpower. The provisions for reforming the military, along with others
like the provisions on markets and rural migration, show the extensive use of
written surveys and inquiries by the Carolingian state – the Domesday Book of
1086 had a long heritage, and I would argue that the Edict of Pitres and the
legacy of Carolingian government more generally is part of it. In addition,
provisions attempting to curb peasant migration and rural land markets
demonstrate that an economically and socially interventionist state was not a
novelty in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth century or the nineteenth
century. Furthermore, all the considerations given towards the communication of
the Edict down to the localities and the mechanisms for enforcing it/ holding
the officers of the state to account show that this wasn’t just the Carolingian
court having big ideas that had no real potential to actually change things on
the ground. This goes in the face of the more pessimistic interpretations of
the Carolingian reforms, based around the work of Francois Louis Ganshof, Louis
Halphen, Heinrich Fichtenau and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, that dominated
the scholarly landscape from the 1940s to the 1980s. Finally, the fact that all
of this was introduced in the wake of the Viking threat, invites comparison
between Charles the Bald’s administrative reforms and those that Alfred the Great
and his successors introduced in Wessex/ England in the struggle against the
Scandinavians. After all, lets not forget that Judith, the second wife of
Aethelwulf of Wessex and stepmother to Alfred the Great, was the daughter of
Charles the Bald. So comparisons between Francia and Anglo-Saxon England are
more than appropriate considering their contacts with each other.
 |
| The standards set by the Edict of Pitres really did endure for centuries. Here is a silver denarius of Count Fulk V of Anjou, the grandfather of Henry II, minted sometime between 1109 and 1129, when he left his county to become King of Jerusalem. The only difference between this coin and the coins of Charles the Bald post-864 is that the monogram in the middle of the obverse side is no longer recognisably that of the Carolingians (who had gone extinct by that point), and it definitely can't have been minted at one of the ten approved and centrally controlled royal mints mentioned in the Edict. |
The most famous bit (among medievalists anyway) at the very end
In the appendix, one of the three provisions there reads
(all credit must be given to Simon Coupland, whose translation of the Edict I have
used and which you can read in full here
https://www.academia.edu/6680741/The_Edict_of_P%C3%AEtres_translation):
“And it is our wish and express command that if anyone has
built castles (castella), fortifications or palisades at this time
without our permission, such fortifications shall be demolished by the
beginning of August, since those who live nearby have been suffering many
difficulties and robberies as a result. And if anyone is unwilling to demolish
them, then the counts in whose districts they have been built shall destroy
them. And if anyone tries to stop them, they shall be sure to let us know at
once. And if they neglect to implement this our command, they shall know that,
as it is written in these chapters and in the capitularies of our predecessors,
we shall look for counts who are willing and able to obey our orders, and
appoint them in our districts.”
This is probably the most famous provision of the Edict,
despite only being in the Appendix. It is one of the very earliest written
sources to mention castles in France or anywhere else in Western Europe – ninth
century Carolingian Frankish sources rarely ever speak of them, unlike tenth
century ones where they’re much more common and twelfth century ones where
they’re completely ubiquitous. It also appears, on the surface at least, that
the Carolingians banned the construction of private fortifications and saw them
as a nuisance to public order. The Edict of Pitres is thus undoubtedly part of
the early history of the European castle. But what part of it? That is
something to be explored in another post, so please stay tuned for more.
Images of Carolingian castles are extremely hard to come by (but not completely non-existent, as we'll see in a subsequent post), which may say something about the Edict's general effectiveness. This is pushing into what we'd normally consider to be post-Carolingian, but here's one of the earliest artistic depictions of castle-based warfare from the Leiden Maccabees, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Codex Per F 17 folio 24v.
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