Download PDF | Stephen D. White - Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe (Variorum Collected Studies)-Routledge (2005).
279 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The essays in this volume examine the history of kinship and feudalism in early medieval Europe by focusing on France and England from the Merovingian and early Anglo-Saxon eras up to c.1200, with emphasis on the latter part of this period. Through analysis of Latin, Old French, and Old English texts that represent both associations among nobles and their kin, lords, men, and friends and conflicts between and within aristocratic groups, the essays investigate the political dimensions of such associations, giving particular attention to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, rights in land, competition for honor, and conflicts that can often be understood as feuds. In so doing the essays call into question the longstanding historiographical practice of studying as independent systems both aristocratic kinship and feudalism in F.L. Ganshof’s sense of “the system of feudal and vassal institutions.”!
More importantly they challenge the methodological convention of treating both kinship and feudalism only as institutionalized structures, with little or no reference to political practices and processes or to the discourses that medieval texts deployed for both practical and ideological purposes when representing kinship and feudalism. Many of the essays analyze kinship and/or ties between lords and their fideles, both as cultural constructions and, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, as things that medieval nobles made (though not exactly as they pleased) and with which they did things — or tried to do things.” As for socalled rules of kinship and rules of feudal law, several of the essays treat them, along with cultural models of kinship and lordship, as normative constraints on behavior, as cultural resources that nobles used to legitimate their own conduct and/or to condemn their enemies, and as the media through which the associations already mentioned were invented and re-invented. Several essays argue that it is sometimes productive to abandon the idiom of “rules” or “laws” and, instead, to examine indigenous models that represent, often inconsistently, how various social relationships such as those between lords and men were to be conducted appropriately.
Several of the essays move in the direction of investigating kinship and feudalism as patronage/clientage in Dominique Barthélemy’s terms — that is, as a “double system of solidarity and confrontation” — though they also allow for the importance in the formation of political groups and networks of other kinds of associations, such as the ones that monastic communities and their aristocratic patrons forged through the mediation of exchanges of land for prayers.’
While viewing aristocratic kinship and feudalism as separate subjects of investigation, historians of medieval Europe have commonly used the same type of analysis to study both. This mode of analysis proceeds along the following lines. First, it seeks to identify for a given sub-period of the Middle Ages the legal rules that both organized and regulated relations among kin and affines (including the dead and the unborn) in one case and, in the other, relations between lords and vassals. Second, it attempts to show how each set of rules constituted, respectively, an integrated system of kinship and marriage and a feudal legal system, each of which governed practice during a given sub-period.
Third, it organizes either the kinship systems or the forms of feudalism associated with successive sub-periods of the Middle Ages before c.1200 into “stage-narratives” designed to show, in the ideal case, when, how and why one system of kinship or one form of feudalism changed into its successor.* With only a few exceptions such as Marc Bloch, historians who have considered kinship and/or feudalism in this way have largely limited their attention to law codes and legislation, customals and legal treatises, so-called documents of practice, and as a last resort, political narratives, and have largely ignored literary texts of the kind that several of the following essays treat as significant evidence about aristocratic legal and political culture.
In reading “historical sources” their primary method of interpretation blends the juridical and the philological. Primary attention is given to the meanings of words, which, within any given sub-period of the Middle Ages, have been taken as the fixed products of an official legal consensus about law and power, about the rights and duties of people playing a fixed number of legal “roles,” and thus about legal, political, and social “structure.” To the extent that political practices have been studied at all, historians of both kinship and feudalism have treated them as evidence of the “institutions” or “structures” that supposedly determined them. Practices that deviated from the rules have meanwhile been conveniently explained as violations of the law or as examples of a lamentable gap between ideals and “reality.”
In this type of analysis institutions or structures, as many now call them, are not simply patterns (sometimes represented as statistical patterns); they are patterns that can be explained by positing a rule or structure for which the patterns themselves are the only evidence. Sometimes the patterns seem to have been found for the purpose of giving pre-existing explanations something to explain. In studies of both “feudal institutions” and kinship structures, even societies said to be “lawless” and “anarchic” turn out to have had “structures.” Because the ultimate goal of both kinds of studies has been to show how the earliest “institutions” — familial or feudo-vassalic — gradually evolved through a series of stages into “the modern family” or “the modern state,” their authors have often found it imperative to project back into the past the categories of nineteenth-century European law.
Using the idioms of structuralist history or the history of legal institutions (as distinguished from legal history, as writers on medieval English law have understood the term), scholars have then been able to propose different evolutionary models of kinship structure or feudal institutions without questioning the twin methodological premises that aristocratic societies of the early Middle Ages could be reduced to a small set of legal roles (e.g. father and son, lord and vassal) and role relations (e.g. kinship, marriage, feudal lordship, and vassalage) and that the history of kinship and the history of feudalism should be nothing other than histories of structures.
Whereas early writers on the history of medieval European kinship generally argued that there was an unbroken evolutionary trend toward smaller families and weaker kinship structures from earliest times to the present, Georges Duby developed a more complicated model of how medieval kinship structures evolved by proceeding on the assumption that their strength was inversely correlated with the strength of the structures of public authority.
In his earlier work Duby argued, in effect, that in c.1000 the sudden collapse of Carolingian public institutions, which had previously fostered “individualism” in the control of property, led to a strengthening of family structures around inheritances and an increase in “family solidarity.’ Later he maintained that the same crisis in public institutions led to a sudden change in aristocratic family structure, as families, which had formerly been organized “horizontally” as loosely constituted groups of living kin, assumed the form of lignages controlled by a succession of male heads, whose primary goal was to maximize the property holdings of the /ignage and maintain their integrity by enforcing a system of primogeniture and impartible inheritance.*® Subsequently other historians have argued about whether kinship structures underwent a sudden transformation in around 1000, as Duby had suggested, or whether they evolved more slowly, with some of the changes Duby associated with the year 1000 starting earlier.’
In the same way, different historians of feudalism have taken different positions about how it developed during the period before c.1200. F.L. Ganshof and Marc Bloch argued, albeit in different ways, that feudalism slowly evolved through various stages, which the former identified as Carolingian and classical and which the latter associated loosely with two different “ages” of feudal society.* Subsequently Duby proposed a history of ties between lords and their men that was roughly compatible with an older chronology of feudal development, denied that a feudal system could be found in the eleventhcentury Maconnais, and contended that the “fief” had nothing to do with the transformations he associated with the year 1000.
However, Pierre Bonnassie argued that true feudalism came into existence only after the violent overthrow in 1000 of the “public” political order of the early Middle Ages — a position that some have supported but that others have attacked.® Without deviating from the general view that the key to studying the history of medieval kinship, feudalism, and medieval society generally is to show how one set of institutions or structures slowly evolved or rapidly mutated into another, various scholars have argued, at one time or another, that the earliest medieval societies — which were supposedly “based” on kinship (as so-called “primitive” societies were) — gave way at some point in the early Middle Ages to societies “based” on lordship or proto-feudalism. However, there has also been some disagreement about whether societies based on kinship were more individualistic than those based on lordship. It has even been possible to argue that English society, at least, moved from individualism to collectivism and not the other way around, or that it has been marked by a high degree of individualism from earliest times. !°
In work of this kind, the complex, variable, and risky processes through which specific medieval nobles formulated and justified claims to land, power over people, social identities, and membership in specific political groups have thus frequently been reduced to structural models in which a small number of nameless role-playing representatives of structurally determined interests (“the lord,” “the vassal,” “the lord’s heir and the vassal’s,” “the father,” “the ancestor,” “the heir,” “the wife,” “the affines,” “the matrilateral kin,” etc.) are locked into static role relations with each other. In creating such models, it has been easy for historians to lose sight of such obvious points as that specific individuals may assume several of these roles simultaneously, drop one role and take on another, and step out of character to do something that the models never allowed for. It has also been easy to forget that the models often had little to do with empirical findings about practice.
Although many historians of medieval Europe have continued to write structuralist history of kinship and feudal institutions, others have looked critically at the assumptions underlying these studies and have experimented with alternative approaches.!! Without following those anthropologists who have announced that there is — and, by implication, was — no such thing as kinship, some medieval historians have called into question the structuralist approaches to kinship that have dominated the scholarship in this field.” In addition, Ganshof’s still-influential paradigm for the study of feudalism continues to be the target of criticisms that historians such as Georges Duby began to formulate more than a half-century ago. Susan Reynolds, among others, argues persuasively for simply abandoning “feudalism,” on the grounds that the concept is so poorly grounded empirically and so theoretically vacuous that to write of it with reference to “fiefs” and “vassals” can only perpetuate serious misunderstandings of medieval societies.
Others, including myself, have contended that although “feudalism” needs to be radically re-conceptualized to the point where some might prefer to abandon the term completely, one should not underestimate the importance of studying the practices long associated with it, including giving fiefs and swearing fidelity. One may therefore think of early medieval feudalism in practical terms as a form of patronage/clientage in which land sometimes figures as an item of exchange and in ideological ones as a widely dispersed folk-model of secular politics that represented communities of lay nobles held together partly by kinship and partly by exchanges of fiefs for services and services for fiefs between a king or prince and his men and also between these men and their men. Like the model of the three orders, this folk-model misrepresented and mystified medieval political practice but still had both practical and ideological uses because it provided one set of idioms available for establishing and representing associations between nobles and evaluating them from multiple perspectives.
Although the essays in this collection were not written for the purpose of effecting a reception into medieval European history of “anthropology” in general or of Pierre Bourdieu’s thought in particular, the following passage on the anthropology of kinship from Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (Le sens pratique) articulates several ideas that run through a significant number of the essays in this volume."
To point out that kinship relations are something that people make, and with which they do something, is not simply to substitute a “functionalist” interpretation for a structuralist one, as the prevailing taxonomies might suggest. It is radically to question the implicit theory of practice which leads the anthropological tradition to see kin relationships “in the form of an object or an intuition,” as Marx puts it, rather than in the form of the practices that produce, reproduce or use them by reference to practical functions. '*
These observations are pertinent not just to studies of medieval kinship structure but to the structuralist argument that aristocratic societies in medieval Europe can be reduced to a set of bilateral relations between lords and vassals determined by feudal contracts. Despite the highly scrutinized limitations of Bourdieu’s social theory, his critique of structuralism is valuable for re-thinking the study of kinship and the study of feudalism, as the essays in this volume are intended to do.
The book proceeds from discussions of kinship (Chapters I, II, III) to the examination of kinship and lordship concurrently (Chapters IV, V) to analyses of feudal lordship and fidelity that do not exclude kinship from consideration (Chapters VI-XIII). Chapter I argues that although the “legal individualism” that Frederic William Maitland deployed for the purpose of contesting Sir Henry Maine’s ideas about the history of the family in early medieval Europe led him to underestimate the importance of kinship in various spheres of medieval life, it nevertheless enabled him to raise questions that are still relevant today about whether medieval kinship groups should be seen as corporations or communities, how they formed themselves, and what kind of relationships one should posit between the medieval “family” as a cultural category and the medieval family as a group organized for specific political purposes. Chapter II, written in collaboration with Richard T. Vann, continues the discussion of the opposition that medievalists have commonly posited between “individualism,” on the one hand, and “corporatism,” communitarianism, or “family solidarity,” on the other, by critically examining Alan Macfarlane’s much-debated argument about the intrinsically individualistic character of English society from its earliest origins. Chapter III continues the discussion of kinship in early medieval Europe by arguing, inter alia, that in feuds waged by kings and nobles in Merovingian Francia pre-existing family groups did not spontaneously organize themselves to avenge injuries against one of their members, and that instead, feuds were occasions for constituting groups of kin to achieve multiple political purposes. By re-reading a famous entry for 757 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in which nobles fight their kin in order to support their lord, Chapter IV contests the conventional view of this story as evidence that by the mid-eighth century, loyalties to lords took precedence over loyalties to kin; instead, it argues that it is nonsensical to look for such a shift in medieval societies, where kinship and lordship/clientage provided only a basis for making claims on others for political support and where political groups were constituted in ways that virtually insured conflicts of loyalties. Investigating the interplay of claims based on kinship and/or lordship from a different angle, Chapter V shows how, in the Old French epic Raoul de Cambrai, both the discourse of kinship and that of lordship/fidelity provide the idioms that different characters use to make conflicting claims to a given “fief,” which, depending on the kind of claim made on it, can be represented in accordance with one of several different and conflicting models of what a fief is.
Chapter VI makes a different kind of critique of a conventional model of feudalism. By analyzing a particularly blunt version of the well-known argument that the Norman Conquest brought feudalism to England, the chapter identifies some of the contestable assumptions about medieval societies and feudalism that underlie this thesis, which still haunts work on the early history of the English common law. Chapter IX lauds the brilliant, controversial attack of Susan Reynolds on F.L. Ganshof’s model of “feudalism” in the sense of “the system of feudo-vassalic institutions” but situates it in relation to an older tradition of criticizing juridical models of feudalism and questions Reynolds’s contention that “fiefs” and “vassals” are concepts that historians can entirely do without. Chapters VII-VIII and X—XIH continue this double line of argument, first, by exposing various flaws in the juridical model of feudalism that Ganshof proposed more than a half century ago but that more recent historians have revived and, second, by experimenting with new ways of talking about feudalism through close-readings of various texts, notably the famous letter on fidelity by Fulbert of Chartres to duke William of Aquitaine and the muchdiscussed Agreement (or Conventum or Conventio) of Hugh of Lusignan and the same William. Chapter VII shows how, by invoking the terms of traditional oaths of fidelity, Hugh or someone writing on his behalf represented William as a bad lord and Hugh as a good fidelis. Chapter VIII continues the discussion of the Agreement by arguing that this story shows how, in order to make claims on each other, both Hugh and William invoke several different models of how a lord and a fidelis should treat one another. Citing various literary and historical texts, including the Agreement, Chapter X argues that the giving of fiefs was commonly represented — or misrepresented — as a form of obligatory generosity (largesse) by a lord to his men, who were entitled to a reward (guerredon) for their services to him. After making a similar point about gifts of fiefs through an examination of the “testament” of Alexander the Great in Le roman d’Alexandre by Alexander of Paris, Chapter XI asks why this text and many others besides should have represented gifts of fiefs in terms that are totally incompatible with the way in which gifts of this kind are represented in the juridical model of feudalism. Chapter XII develops this line of discussion by arguing that indigenous models of the good lord who generously rewards his men’s past service and the bad lord who gives stingily and instrumentally and thereby bribes his underlings to serve him in the future provide a better starting-point for understanding the practice of giving fiefs than does the contractual model of feudalism. Contesting the view that the years around 1000 saw a “crisis of fidelity” and the emergence of veritable feudalism, Chapter XIII re-interprets the letter of Fulbert of Chartres, along with the Agreement, so as to bring out the similarities between these two texts and ninth-century Carolingian texts concerning oaths of fidelity and relations between lords and their fideles.
In working on the thirteen chapters just mentioned over a period spanning more than three decades, | have incurred many debts. I gratefully acknowledge fellowship support I have received from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The American Bar Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At Emory University, I have received grants in support of my research from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University Research Committee, and the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, where Martine Watson Brownley, Keith Anthony, and the staff provided the ideal environment for finishing my work on this volume. I am deeply grateful to my present and former students at Emory University and thank Elizabeth Pastan for her colleagueship. Kate McGrath provided indispensable help with the index. I also owe thanks to the editors of the volumes and journals in which these essays first appeared: Isabel Alfonso; Gadi Algazi; Claudie Amado; Esther Cohen; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.; Mayke De Jong; Steven Epstein; Julio Escalona; George Garnett; Valentin Groebner; John Hudson; Bernhard Jussen; Hugh Kennedy; Guy Lobrichon; Donald Maddox; Sara Sturm-Maddox; and the editors of The American Journal of Legal History, Law and History Review, and Viator. | also wish to express my deep appreciation for the help, advice, criticisms, and encouragement that numerous scholars, including several of those just mentioned, have given me over the years and for all they have taught me through their writings. They include: Isabel Alfonso; Gadi Algazi; Dominique Barthélemy; Robert Bartlett; Elizabeth A.R. Brown; Philippe Buc; Caroline Walker Bynum; Fredric L. Cheyette; Patrick Geary; Tom Green; John Hudson; Paul R. Hyams, William Ian Miller; Janet L. Nelson; Susan Reynolds; Barbara H. Rosenwein; and Patrick Wormald. I owe debts of gratitude I shall never be able to repay, first, to the late Samuel E. Thorne, who taught me most of the legal history I know but insisted that I not take any of it for granted and, secondly, to the late Georges Duby, who advised me to steer clear of legal history and study social history and anthropology. My greatest debt, as always, is to Kate Gilbert, an extraordinary editor, who helped me to put my thoughts as well as my writing in order and who told me, when necessary, what I was really thinking or should have been thinking.
STEPHEN D. WHITE Atlanta, Georgia March 2005
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