Download PDF | (The Middle Ages Series) Theodore Evergates - Feudal Society in Medieval France_ Documents from the County of Champagne-University of Pennsylvania Press (1993).
197 Pages
Preface
Anthologies of medieval texts, ranging widely in time and place, accord scant attention to the practices of feudal society in the High Middle Ages. Beyond the frequently reprinted descriptions of fealty by Fulcher of Chartres (ca. 1020) and of homage by Galbert of Bruges (1127)—both highly simplistic representations—few nonliterary texts are available to the English reader. This collection attempts to redress that omission. In drawing from the abundant sources available within a single French province, it seeks to present a coherent picture of a complex and evolving society at the very time when fundamental social, economic, and administrative institutions were being formed.
In the translations, I have tried to facilitate comprehension by modern general readers. Several texts already available in translation have been modified slightly to that end; the rest are translated here for the first time. A few technical terms are retained in parentheses, while explanatory comments are given in brackets. All dates are converted to modern style (in Champagne the new year was reckoned from Easter). Personal names are rendered in English except where the French forms seem familiar (for example, Henry the Liberal, but Jean of Joinville).
I thank R. C. Famiglietti for a critical reading and many suggestions that materially improved this collection.
Introduction , Feudal Society
In France the term “feudal” has served two quite distinct historiographical traditions. The more recent descends from the eighteenth century when it was employed, notably by Montesquieu, to characterize a type of society. That broad conception of “feudal” has been recast and popularized in our own time by Marc Bloch’s Feudal Soctety (1939-1940), the most influential synthesis of medieval social history in this century.! Bloch used the term to encompass the fundamental traits of post-Carolingian society, which he conceived primarily in terms of the French experience before the rise of the Capetian monarchy in the thirteenth century. It was a society characterized by political fragmentation (from the monarch’s point of view), a ruling warrior aristocracy, and a subject peasantry. Lordship and the extrafamilial bonds forged between men mattered as much, if not more, than the ties of kinship. But fiefs and feudal tenure figured almost incidentally in Bloch’s “feudal” society. More important for that period, as French scholarship has since demonstrated, was the emergence of castles as the pivot of social organization and the development of new forms of lordship by the aristocratic families. That restructuring, however, can be understood without recourse to “feudal,” a term which in fact most researchers have shunned.” For how can a society in which fiefs played a relatively minor role be termed feudal?
Had Bloch focused less on the formation of medieval society and more on the mature period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—in which fiefs are abundantly evident—he might not have so easily discarded an earlier historiographical tradition that employed “feudal” in a more restrictive manner. For the sixteenth-century humanists like Dumoulin and Pithou, among others, and later Chantereau-Lefebvre and Brussel, “feudal” described a type of tenure and the laws governing it.* That usage is much closer to the medieval than is Bloch’s, for it links a complex of terms like homage, fidelity, and liegeance (which related to persons) with mouvance, escheat, and relief (which related to property). These were not abstract concepts; they described specific practices and relationships deriving from feudal tenure. It is in this sense that “feudal” is used here: as an attribute of fief, the form of tenure that became the defining feature of French society in the High Middle Ages.
Fiefs were created in a number of ways. Some were carved out of great private estates and granted to knights in return for military service. Others were assigned by powerful laymen from appropriated church land, often in cooperation with ecclesiastical authorities. Feudal tenure also was created when lords imposed their control over allodial property (land which was held in outright ownership): that land was then said to “move” or be in the mouvance of the superior lord. The widespread feudalization of land, and with it the extension of feudal customs, had repercussions in virtually every sphere of life of the landholding families. Although the pace of feudalization varied by region, as did the specific feudal customs, three general characteristics of mature feudal society will be evident in this collection.
First, it was the territorial princes, in the absence of a direct royal presence, who shaped the character and institutions of the French provinces. Their policies regarding castle-building, the disposition of fiefs, and the rights of widows and younger sons profoundly influenced both the nature and the fortunes of the fief-holding families. The feudal customs that coalesced under the aegis of the princes in the twelfth century produced quite diverse regional societies, to the extent that in the thirteenth century the Parlement of Paris recognized discordant definitions of what constituted nobility (one noble parent or two).
Second, written records came into general use by laymen for both administrative and personal needs. By the end of the twelfth century, the chanceries of the most powerful princes were keeping internal administrative records on fiefs, homages, and military service, as well as financial accounts. At the same time, laymen increasingly resorted to written records for their own personal affairs. Those administrative and private documents involving only laymen permit us to view the secular affairs of feudal tenants directly, without having to pass through the filter of ecclesiastical documents drawn up for quite different purposes.
Third, women became active participants in the world of feudal matters that had been created by and for men. As they acquired fiefs by inheritance, dowry, and dower, women assumed the obligations (including homage) and rights (such as feudal lordship) hitherto reserved for men. Although the rights of women varied widely by region, the codification of feudal practices and the survival of court decisions in the thirteenth century allow us to examine in some detail the role of women in feudal society.
The County of Champagne
The broad open country (campania) east of Paris was known as Champagne long before it acquired political cohesion. Unlike Normandy and Flanders, which had early acquired strong territorial identities, Champagne remained a highly fragmented frontier zone between the royal domain and the German Empire; it was dominated by powerful prelates (of Reims, Chalons-sur-Marne, Langres, Sens, and Meaux), as well as a large number of virtually independent local counts and barons. Only in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did the counts of Troyes, who assumed the title “count of Champagne,” tame those barons, create a sophisticated and well-run government, and make their principality one of the wealthiest and most powerful of the realm.*
The counts stimulated the economic development of their lands by encouraging rural immigration, founding new villages, and enfranchising their most populous towns. They sponsored trade fairs that made Champagne the center of international trade and finance for over a century. They supported the reformed monasteries, most notably the Cistercians who became omnipresent in the county, and they patronized writers, of whom Chrétien of Troyes was the most illustrious and the very symbol of the region’s cultural achievements. Finally, the comital family established intimate, though not always amicable, ties with the Capetian royal family, ties that led ultimately to the county’s attachment to the royal domain and to its inevitable economic and political decline by the fourteenth century.
Beyond its courtly culture and its fairs, Champagne is best known as a classic example of a feudal society in the strictest sense of the term “feudal.” The county itself consisted of an assortment of lands that the counts held in fief from a dozen lay and ecclesiastical lords (only one-quarter of the county was held directly from the king in the twelfth century). Over these disparate lands the counts imposed a uniform administration, ruling some areas (domain) directly through their own officials, while granting the rest as fiefs to barons and knights in return for homage, loyalty, and service. The barons, bishops, and some monasteries likewise created fiefs on their own lands. In all, the fief-holding class in Champagne comprised between 3,500 and 4,000 tenants 1n 1200.
The counts, with the greatest number of direct feudal tenants, generated a large volume of records on feudal matters. In about 1178 and seven times during the next century, they ordered countywide inquests to verify the names, obligations, and holdings of their feudal tenants. Information obtained by sworn testimony was recorded on parchment rolls that became known collectively as the “Fiefs of Champagne” (Feoda Campanie). The count’s officials also kept annual accounts for the disbursement of money-fiefs or fief-rents which they paid out from the rents, taxes, and duties collected during the trade fairs. Indeed, fiefs consisting of revenue rather than revenue-producing land were common in Champagne.
In addition to generating those internal records, the comital chancery processed thousands of letters it received from the count’s vassals dealing with their fiefs. The letters range from simple requests, declarations of homage, and receipts of fiefs to proposed marriage contracts and dower assignments (in which fiefs were involved). These feudal letters were stored with internal copies of the count’s own letters in the chancery archives, where on several occasions between 1211 and 1271 they were systematically copied into codex volumes (cartularies) for ease of consultation. The best known of the cartulary-registers was the last, the “Book of Princes” (Liber Principum), which contained about one thousand letters from laymen.® It was precisely that volume which the early historians of feudal institutions, particularly Chantereau-Lefebvre and Brussel, scrutinized most carefully in seeking to understand the feudal practices of medieval France.°
Another body of evidence pertaining to feudal customs was produced by the High Court of Champagne. From the mid-twelfth century it decided questions of feudal law in sessions known as the “Days” of Troyes, although most of its decisions come to us from 1270 to 1290, when they were routinely registered. They survive in two forms: as extracts which give the particulars of the cases, and as summaries which simply state the relevant customs. Although we lack a theoretical presentation of the customs in Champagne like the one written by Beaumanoir for the nearby Beauvaisis,” the High Court’s decisions are invaluable because they are grounded in actual cases brought to it, and thus reveal the questions at issue in the last three decades of the thirteenth century.
In sum, the oversight of feudal affairs consumed a significant administrative effort in Champagne and produced a substantial and varied collection of written records. Together with the private documents exchanged among laymen and the large volume of records retained by religious houses, they represent an exceptionally rich collection of documents for the study of feudal practices.
The Documents
The documents presented here represent a very small sample from one region. They vary in form and origin, and include some texts not directly related to feudal practices, such as personal correspondence, papal bulls, chronicles, inquests, court decisions, and even the constitution of a religious order. Most of the documents pertaining to fiefs fall under the rubric of “charters,” a generic category covering primarily title deeds and sealed letters. Customarily, a donation or property transfer was arranged orally before witnesses and relatives whose consent (/audatio) was required for full title to pass; that legally constitutive act was later commemorated in a document validated by the seal of the initiator—if he had one—or of a recognized officeholder such as the count, a baron, a bishop, or an abbot.’ In the thirteenth century, sealed letters became themselves constitutive acts and often displaced oral transactions altogether, as personal seals replaced living witnesses as legal authenticators.
The largest number of extant charters pertain to church property, since ecclesiastics were most conscientious in recording and preserving the proofs of their privileges and possessions. Although not intended to shed light on lay society, those charters contain irreplaceable information on individual laymen, their families, and activities. Despite the technical difficulties in “reading” charters, their sheer volume makes them an indispensable source for understanding medieval society. Although less voluminous, documents involving only laymen are even more valuable in their explicit depiction of secular affairs. The counts issued a variety of charterlike documents to their feudal tenants and townsmen, while the barons and knights after 1200 put to parchment virtually all of their transactions, including notifications, requests, permissions, dower assignments, marriage contracts, mortgages, sales, donations, and testaments. The barons often had their documents drawn up by their chaplains, while ordinary knights commissioned theirs from monastic scribes, episcopal chanceries, or literate clerics who were being produced in overabundance by the burgeoning schools and universities from the late twelfth century.
Few of the original private documents survive today, as they were either lost or discarded after their purpose had been served. Some survive because they were deposited for safekeeping in local monastic or episcopal archives; others were preserved when ecclesiastical institutions acquired fiefs and took possession of the earlier titles which otherwise would have been destroyed. But the most important repository for feudal documents was the comital chancery archives, where all incoming correspondence was stored and later copied into cartulary-registers; those cartularies remain today, as they did in Brussel’s time, one of the finest collections of texts on the feudal practices of medieval France.
The generalized use of written records for all sorts of feudal matters in the thirteenth century naturally raises the question of whether the lay-men who commissioned, received, and retained the documents could in fact read them. Ralph V. Turner has convincingly argued that in contemporary England “most knights were at least pragmatic readers, functional literates in today’s terms.”° The feudal class in Champagne also seems to have possessed such a “pragmatic” or “practical” literacy,!° which 1s to say a rudimentary knowledge of Latin combined with an understanding of the critical contemporary terminology: fief, allod, homage, liegeance, mouvance, baron, lord, knight, and so on. Like most moderns, who understand the gist but not necessarily the legal locutions of the property deeds and testaments in their possession, members of the feudal class understood the essence of the dower letters, marriage contracts, letters of credit and debt, sales contracts, and various other documents pertaining to fiefs that they routinely handled.
We are fortunate that so many feudal documents survive from the High Middle Ages, for they reveal in detail how a feudal society functioned. Although most texts are official or legal in some sense and composed according to formal conventions, they all—read closely—treveal a human dimension behind their formulaic style.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق