Download PDF | (The Middle Ages Series) Robert F. Berkhofer III - Day of Reckoning_ Power and Accountability in Medieval France-University of Pennsylvania Press (2004).
280 Pages
Introduction
SINCE ENDINGS ARE OFTEN AS IMPORTANT
as beginnings, let me begin with a story from near the year 1200, the end of the period covered by this book. This story concerns the Abbot Hugh of the monastery of SaintGermain-des-Prés and the troubled career of one of his men, named Guy.
Abbot Hugh was stirring up a lot of trouble. The new abbot of SaintGermain-des-Prés was the fifth to use the name Hugh, but the first to be so insistent about his lordship. At least, that was how it must have seemed to Guy, the mayor of the monastery’s estate at Suresnes on the opposite bank of the Seine. Abbot Hugh was asking Guy to renew his oath of loyalty and acknowledge his dependent status as a serf. At first, Guy refused to do so, according to a note that recorded the affair.1 Why did he refuse? Guy was an important man, charged with running the considerable estate at Suresnes (essentially a small village) and had power equivalent to that of many knights. To be reminded of his dependence and his low origins would have been uncomfortable and publicly humiliating at the least. But Abbot Hugh was not interested in refusals. He exercised his abbatial authority through his court, formally summoning Mayor Guy and his relations to appear.
The matter had now grown very serious. Guy knew he would be defending not just himself but his whole family at the court. In consequence, he brought fifty of his relations with him when he finally appeared.? Abbot Hugh was not alone either. He had gathered his monks and his other servitors. The names of forty witnesses were recorded, thirty-eight on the Abbot’s side and two on Guy’s. In addition to the officers of the monastery and simple brother monks, Hugh’s witnesses included knights, artisans, and other mayors. It was a large, public assembly consisting of the most important members of the community. Thus, the stage was set for a showdown between Hugh and Guy.
In the end, Abbot Hugh forced Mayor Guy to submit to his authority. Guy was confronted with both verbal and written proof of his status.
Guy’s own peers affirmed that he was a dependent man (/omo de corpore) of the abbot, just as they were.* Abbot Hugh also had a secret weapon: an extensive written genealogy of Guy’s family, tracing his descent from homines de corpore.* Although Guy was reluctant, he had little choice but to reaffirm his homage and fidelity as a homo de corpore. As a final piece of insurance, Abbot Hugh also made sure that the whole matter was written down in detail (from his perspective, naturally) so that his successors would remember his victory.
The submission of Guy of Suresnes to Abbot Hugh V of SaintGermain-des-Prés was recorded in unusual detail. But how unusual was their meeting? The records surviving from Hugh V’s abbacy (1162-82) indicate that Guy was not the only mayor to be summoned to renew his oath of loyalty and acknowledge his dependence. Such meetings were becoming more frequent at the monastery.’ Hugh V was beginning to check up on all of his men—both his monks and his lay servitors. More important, he was not the only twelfth-century abbot to do so. His peers also felt the need to exercise better control over their men to insure that they behaved responsibly. They had found ways of making their men accountable to them.
What was new about this late twelfth-century event was that it combined several hitherto separate behaviors with some new ones. There are two important aspects of the story: (1) holding an agent personally responsible, or accountable, for his actions in performing the duties of an office, and (2) using written records created in monastic archives to make, justify, and record the case. Less obvious but also significant are (3) the use of records to manage the secular side of monastic estates, (4) increased attention of the religious to how the administration of monastic estates was conducted, (5) Hugh’s active administration of the patrimony as part of a broader notion of ministering to his brothers, and (6) the fact that custom was no longer sufficient to manage monastic lands and income.
The humbling of Guy of Suresnes, therefore, was a complex affair, the end result of long-term strands, which had diverse centuries-old beginnings. This book explores those strands and how they became woven together toward the end of the twelfth century. The argument of the book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter looks at the period before the rise of routine practices of accountability, from Carolingian times to the mid-eleventh century, tracing strands of monastic thought and behavior in regard to reform, land, and archives. This chapter is the essential background for later chapters, which explore new ideas and practices of power and the beginnings of accountability.
The subsequent argument considers the transformation of monastic tule in the high middle ages and how the lands, texts, and ideas from the past were used for new ends. This part of the work treats three important and related changes: the use of new written aids to help administer lands; the treatment of land as an economic (not sacred) resource; and the rise of new disciplinary measures to make agents more accountable in practice. In each of these areas, substantial departures from traditional patterns of thought and behavior occurred in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. The second chapter explores the changes in the written comprehension of monastic lands. Closely linked to changes in scribal culture, new ways of composing and storing documents demonstrate a growing concern to comprehend the patrimony in writing, not just in communal memory. The organizational structure of the new means of archival storage, the cartulary or book of charters, reveals the new concerns of their organizers and a turn to administrative thinking.
Throughout this period, the leadership of the monks—the abbot and his main officers—would be crucial as catalysts of change. Chapter 3 investigates the attempts of monastic leaders to balance ministering to their brothers with administering the monastery’s resources. In particular, the chapter explores a new mode of monastic thought and behavior, which considered land as an economic resource to be exploited. The primary view of the monastic patrimony inherited from earlier generations of monks had not been economic. Religious, political, and social necessities remained extremely important in shaping monastic land; however, economic concerns began to have greater influence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Abbots and their closest confidantes initiated this turn to administration and fostered innovation under the guise of reform.
The most difficult obstacle faced by monastic leaders was implementation of their program. One key problem, as suggested at the outset, was accountability. In the monastic context, this meant controlling both monks to whom tasks were delegated within the cloister and lay agents who ran the monastery’s estates outside it. Chapter 4. examines how abbots attempted to insist on responsible behavior from these men. Monastic tradition provided a means to discipline monks, but abbots also wanted good service from their lay servitors, who were harder to rule. Eventually, a desire for competent as well as faithful service made abbots seek more specific accountability from their men. In consequence, abbots adopted new techniques to discipline and punish them.
It was just such an attempt to insist on better service by Abbot Hugh V of Saint-Germain-des-Prés that led him to gather a public assembly to humble Mayor Guy of Suresnes. We should try to imagine the scene: Hugh was in the great hall of the monastery or on its steps under the portal, which may have depicted the Last Judgment. The abbot was surrounded by his monks, knights, and servants, as well as the holy relics of Saint-Germain. He was holding a formal audience, or to be more technical, an “audit,” or hearing. Hugh also had documents with him, composed in the scriptorium for this occasion. Guy, faced by such an imposing array, accepted the judgment of the Abbot. He was made to profess his homage openly and swear eternal fidelity to the abbot and monks. This hearing was the sort of ritual by which agents were disciplined and accountability eventually achieved. Thus, “days of reckoning” were created as traditional days of meeting began to be used to hold agents specifically accountable for their conduct. Not surprisingly, abbots used pre-existing customary symbols and rituals to reinforce the new accountability, mixing audits with religious threats of eternal damnation and the Last Judgment. Collectively, these events show a turn to behaviors and ideas, which, while still lordly, also had recognizably fiscal, legal, or governmental elements.
* * *
In events such as the humbling of Guy of Suresnes, one can see the beginnings of what medieval historians call accountability, and what some historians see as the origins of modern government. Of course, modern notions of accountability do not seem to obtain in the rough and ready medieval world. Historians of modern government have not associated efficient, impersonal, and responsible behavior with medieval mayors or knights, who tend instead to be cast as the guy with the longest sword. Nevertheless, by 1250, other medieval overlords (bishops, kings, and even counts) had found ways to secure better service, ways of making their men accountable for their actions. This broader notion of accountability, of responsible behavior, is one focus of this study.
But what did accountability mean in the twelfth century? For the Middle Ages, the importance of accountability has much to do with the significance of lordship. Lordship was the dominant form of social and political organization throughout the history of medieval Europe. But lordship meant nothing without service, preferably faithful, competent service. Overlords could not realize wealth and power unless others would agree to serve them. Yet as lords tried to delegate power, especially over large areas, they discovered they could only share it. While seeking to allow their men to prosecute justice or raise money legitimately in their name, paradoxically, they often gave them free rein to extort and pillage. Overlords did not want licensed robbers (who behaved as thieves and bullies), but rather officials, who were accountable to them. Authority could not rest solely on force. Thus, disciplining and controlling agents became the great problem for lords of all ranks.
The problem of accountability is especially important in the field of medieval history because much attention has been focused on the nature of power. The recent debate began with the assertion by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel that a “mutation féodale” took place in high medieval France, a dramatic shift in political, social, and economic arrangements toward what appeared to be feudal relations.® This idea was built upon classic views of feudalism expressed most forcefully by Georges Duby.” Some agreed that a feudal transformation took place, though on a different chronology, preferring to emphasize the sudden changes around the year 1000, a “mutation de Pan mil.”® Still others argued for a chronology of “feudal revolution” varying by region both within and outside France and also of varying degrees of effectiveness.
They argued that a new and relatively pervasive type of lordship (often called feudal) was created after tooo. At the same time, some bold scholars suggested that there was nothing feudal about medieval lordship, that there was no feudal system or feudalism because some of its cherished institutions, the fief and vassal, did not exist in the language of contemporary documents.'? This controversy over the existence of feudalism, a concept that had been used by generations of historians, has created a bizarre situation in which some scholars completely avoided using the term. Still others insisted that such a transformation was an illusion of the evidence, not a “mutation de l’an mil” but rather a “mutation documentaire?”!! It was the sources, not the landscape of power, which shifted in the eleventh century and, thus, the argument was moot.
Naturally, a furious terminological debate ensued. Despite this debate, historians still do not understand medieval power relations very clearly. In the rush to discuss bad lordship (often equated with “feudalism”), medievalists have temporarily lost sight of its opposite: good lordship or governance.!? Rather than focus on personal, arbitrary, or informal styles of rule (which may or may not be called feudal), one should instead consider how it was that by the end of the Middle Ages medieval lords had found ways to govern. That is, lords found official and accepted ways to tax, to mete out justice, and to administer, rather than rely upon mere force to rule. Such governance required rulers to insist on good and faithful service; assuring such responsible service was the goal of accountability.
Another aspect of the humbling of Guy of Suresnes that attracts the medievalist’s attention is the prominent use of written records to reinforce communal memory and oral testimony. Not only did Abbot Hugh produce the written genealogy of Guy’s family to help make his case, he also had the results of the meeting written down and kept for the future. These instances of writing naturally provoke the historian to consider the relation between oral culture and scribal culture. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her classic work The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change, described the shift from a medieval scribal culture to what she called book culture, after the rise of printing.!? The second focus of this book is a similar but earlier problem: the relation of oral culture, a culture of memory, to scribal culture, a culture of written records.!4
Medieval monks had long memories. Monasteries are ideal for studying memory because they were perpetual institutions, persisting over generations of monks. Monks had a communal memory of events that informed their daily behavior (indeed, a memorial litany). They could and did remember offenses against them. When local ruffians pillaged their lands or stole from their estates, knowledge of the crime would be told to the youngest novices so they could remind future generations. In short, they knew their history.
The early monastic obsession with memory and history had a lot to do with their later attitudes toward wealth and rule. For example, early monks considered their estates to be both sacred and inalienable—they should not be diminished, bought, sold, or exchanged. So they actively remembered those who altered their lands as violators. Furthermore, before 1000, monks viewed their land as part of their sacred trust from God, rather than as an economic resource to be exploited. In consequence, they became obsessed with written claims to land. Thus, many early documents were intended to describe the patrimony, to fix its contours in writing, but not, at that time, to manage it.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, monastic history and archives were reordered as monks sought to create a useable past out of documents and communal memories from Carolingian times. Brian Stock has emphasized the increasing importance of literacy and pointed out the consequent rise of so-called “textual communities” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.!5 Others have chosen to emphasize the importance of memory (and forgetting) in the creation and destruction of monastic documents and histories.!° Whether the cause was the growth of literacy or the malleability of memory (or both), monastic archives, particularly in northern France, were significantly reorganized in the period before and after 1000.!” The written remnants of the Carolingian patrimony were thus altered.
Moreover, the authentic materials left over from the Carolingian past (lands, texts, or ideas) did not constrain monastic invention. Monks forged charters to assure landholding and invented house traditions to explain the difference between their real holdings and their ideal (or desired) holdings. Besides informing the reader of monastic ideas, these inventions also demonstrate an acceptance of written documents as authoritative. Simply put, there was no need to forge documents unless the forgery served a purpose: if it could convince others about a claim or be used in place of, or to complement, oral testimony or sworn oaths.
Forgery, therefore, provides a valuable clue about the importance of written records and the emergence of monastic scribal culture.1’ Monks often used forged charters in conjunction with saints’ lives or narrative history in order to create myths and stories about their house. These monastic stories constitute some of the earliest revisionist history known and provide one motive driving the creation and reorganization of monastic archives, which would be inherited by later generations of monks. Monks were keenly aware of their history and, therefore, monastic historians must be aware of it as well to understand how monks used their archives to clothe innovation in the habit of tradition. Memory, writing, and authority were inextricably joined.'?
By the twelfth century, writing and rule had become closely linked—scribal culture and accountability became mutually supporting. Investigating the relationship of memory to writing is important to accountability for a simple reason: before one could hold someone accountable, one first had to remember what had been done and be able to prove it. Written records offered an aide-mémoire that reinforced rituals of accountability.
I argue that the idea and practice of accountability is fundamental to the transformation from bad lordship to good, since being accountable was what separated the thug from the tax collector, the extortionist from the lawyer, the murderer from the judge. This behavioral transformation included new documentary practices. Even so, no modern scholar of the middle ages has dealt with either the actions or the records of this process directly. Filling this gap in the history of medieval power is the overall goal of this work. Accountability—be it fiscal, judicial, or moral—was the glue that would hold later systems of governance together. Archival transformations both reflected and resulted from such new patterns of thought and behavior.
This study seeks to explain therefore how both rule and writing were conceived, defined, and practiced in medieval France leading up to the rule of Philip Augustus (1180-1223). In doing so, it attempts to avoid introducing artificial modern categories. On the one hand, the subject of power is often regarded as a secular subject. Indeed, many medievalists treat the history of lordship solely as a “secular” subject, considering only sources like royal records, which seem to lie behind the development of the nation-state. But explaining power only through such records has concealed important aspects of the shift toward governance. Few scholars have appreciated the ecclesiastical, and especially the monastic contribution to this medieval transformation of power.
Yet secular and ecclesiastical power were closely linked, if not largely overlapping in this period.?° Or put another way, the Church had a lot of influence in determining what accountability meant. On the other hand, studies of documents and their organization have tended to examine only one type of document or one archive. My study exploits the most abundant sources available for eleventh- and twelfth-century northern France, the archives of Benedictine monasteries. It uses the archives of five of the greatest houses (SaintBertin, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Pére-de-Chartres, and Saint-Vaast-d’Arras) and materials from others in the region comparatively.
These sources encompass a wide range of materials, including charters of donation, chronicles, saints’ lives, land surveys, marginal notations, and even scraps of grocery lists. These monasteries also shared certain important features. All of them were touched by similar currents of religious reform from 800 to 1200. In consequence, they were part of a learned community with shared ideas about writing, religion, and power. All of them were absorbed into the kingdom of France by 1200 and were old foundations with enormous political, economic, and religious influence. Also, despite the obvious importance of these houses, their archives are surprisingly unexplored. Even the greatest, Saint-Denis, the royal mausoleum for the French kings, has archives that remain uncatalogued today. For this reason, independent of its findings, this research is significant because it uncovers basic sources for medieval French history.
In the end, this study uses many approaches to understand problems of power in medieval monasteries. Although it examines the realities of monastic estates, it does not privilege economic explanation. While it emphasizes the use of writing to construct a usable past, it does not assume that ideas or symbols are separate from actions and behavior. Even though it takes power and rule as its focus, it does not presume that power is divorced from a social or cultural context. In short, it attempts to resist being a purely political, severely social, or contested cultural history because to do so would impose anachronistic modern divisions on both the sources and subject. Rather than attempting to pull one strand out of the medieval monastic tapestry, thus unraveling it, this study attempts instead to understand how the strands were woven into a single fabric.
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