Download PDF | (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 16) Inger Larsson - Pragmatic Literacy and the Medieval Use of the Vernacular_ The Swedish Example-Brepols (2009).
266 Pages
Preface
England 1066-1307' inspired worldwide interest in the field of literacy
studies, and the 1990s saw a blossoming of literacy studies in Sweden. At the Institute for Scandinavian Languages at Stockholm University, Professor Barbro Séderberg initiated and led a research programme entitled Medieval Nordic Literacy in a Diglossic and Digraphic Perspective (Medeltida nordisk literacy i ett diglossiskt och digrafiskt perspektiv). This programme, in turn, encouraged a comparatively large number of Swedish philologists and historians to devote their efforts to Swedish literacy studies. Today, however, literacy has not remained a flourishing field of research in Sweden, and not much has been published since 2000. There is one important exception, a programme studying different aspects of literacy at Vadstena monastery (1384-) led by Professor Lars-Erik Edlund of Umea University: Vadstenaklostret som textoch handskriftsproducerande miljé — produktion, tradition och reception.
The present work was originally written in Swedish as a report from the Medieval Nordic Literacy programme. The questions discussed all relate to the pragmatic use of written communication and the development which in Sweden led to a shift from Latin to the vernacular as a language of administration. Using evidence from charters and laws, I trace the development of a specific vocabulary for the charters. These elements feed into a discussion of the introduction and use of writing in the growing Swedish administration and the forces behind it, and the development of administrative Swedish.
In publishing the book in English, I hope to shed some light on conditions in Sweden for the benefit of the growing number of medievalists interested in the spread of literacy throughout medieval Europe and for all those who are interested in the history of writing and the development of the Swedish vernac I have not updated the original research presented in the book or added to the bibliography. This is mainly because little has been added in Sweden to this very particular field of research since the book was first published. Moreover, following up the international research on literacy is far beyond the scope of this book.
Translating a work such as this into English, one runs into various obstacles. To begin with, there are Swedish cultural phenomena which have no direct equivalents in the English-speaking world, so the English terms often used to translate them do not always correspond precisely in meaning. At the end of the book I have provided a glossary of the original Swedish terms and the translations used in this book. Secondly, there is no such thing as a common international or English vocabulary for the charters, deeds, letters, etc. and their various properties. As I am investigating the development of a specific Swedish vocabulary for various types of deeds I have chosen to translate the Swedish terms word for word whenever possible, so as to give the reader a better understanding of the way new designations were created. The same principle has been used, as far as possible, when translating the deeds from Old Swedish into modern English.
Finally, I would like to thank Betsy van der Hoek for translating the book into English. I also wish to thank Granholmska stiftelsen at Stockholm University, Gunvor och Josef Anérs stiftelse and Ake Wibergs stiftelse for financing the translation and, of course, the editors of the Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy for publishing it in their series.
Stockholm, November 2008
Introduction
Pope Gregory Vi in Rome. The first letter was to welcome Sweden (Sveari-
ket) into the Christian community. The pope exhorted the nation to send clerics and other suitable persons to the Holy See for further instruction and education.' The other letter was to request that kings Inge and Halstan, among others, should send a bishop or suitable cleric to the Holy See to provide information on Swedish manners and customs, and return from there with complete instructions on the papal decree. The new and foreign Latin writing culture thus made its entrance into a society which had, up till then, been overwhelmingly oral but not necessarily illiterate: it had its own traditional native writing system in the form of runes.
The first written contact of an administrative type that we know of between a Swedish ruler and the outside world took place as early as the ninth century. In Rimbert’s account of the life of Ansgar, Vita Anskarii, there is a passage describing how Ansgar and his men returned to Louis the Pious after having lived among the Swedes from 829 to 831. According to the account they went back “cum litteris regia manu more ipsorum deformatis” (“with letters from the king’s hand which the king himself had written, as is the custom of that country”).” Over the years, much scholarly effort has been devoted to speculation on what the letter said and what language it was written in. Some argued that it would have been written in runes in Swedish, others that it was written in Latin and that the content would have been approved by King Bjérn’s translators and by the king himself putting some kind of signature to
I: the early 1080s, two letters were sent to the Swedish royal house from the document. The most recent scholar to come to the latter conclusion is Alf Uddholm in his article “Sveakungen Bjérns brev till kejsar Ludvig den Fromme ar 831’? who also presents an attempt to reconstruct the letter’s content by, among other things, building on what we know as the ars dictandi - the art of formulating documents.
King Bjorn of the Swedes was roughly contemporary with the famous R6k runestone in Vasterg6tland, and it is reasonable to assume that he knew runes, although it was hardly common for pagan rulers to exchange written messages in runes. As may well be expected, the first contacts with Latin literacy did not leave any lasting trace in the form of Latin writing in Sweden. That would take almost another two hundred years.
According to legend, Olof Eriksson Skétkonung was baptised in a spring at Husaby in the year 1000 and the Christianisation of the country proceeded over the century that followed. The bishopric of Skara was established during the first half of the eleventh century, but it was not until the early twelfth century that an archbishopric was established in Lund, Denmark. Traces of Latin writing in Sweden for secular purposes may be found in the coinage King Olof had minted at Sigtuna. The coins read “Olafrex an Situn’’, and the people who came in contact with them could also become acquainted with Roman letters. The eleventh century saw a blossoming in the custom of raising runestones, particularly in Uppland and Sddermanland, and no one who lived or travelled there could have avoided seeing a runestone. We do not know just how many people could read runes, but the idea of representing language and thoughts in writing cannot have been strange to the people who lived there. With the text on King Olof’s coinage it must also have been clear, at least for some, that there were different writing systems, runic and Roman script.
Medieval society in the Nordic countries* was multilingual and multi-script to a degree that has seldom been appreciated. In the past is was almost taken for granted that the church and clergy were the arbiters of reading and writing and the spread of a writing-dependent culture, not only in Scandinavia but in all of Western Europe. But is that the whole truth? It is certainly clear that the church played an extremely prominent role. After all, Christianity is a religion in which the written word has a central place, and consequently it was in ecclesiastical institutions that the most advanced competence and use of writing was to be found. With Christianity also came the distribution of liturgical texts. For example, the Swedish provincial laws of Smaland prescribed that every parish church was to have “mdssubok, mdttendbook, saltdre and sangbook’, i.e.
missals and matins-books, psalters and hymn-books”.° The church also led the way in the area of secular writing.° But did it dominate this area throughout the Middle Ages? How did the use of writing for practical secular ends develop? What were the driving forces in a multi-language, multi-script society like that of Sweden which spoke and wrote not only Swedish and Latin, but also a smattering of German, and where runes served as an everyday script?’
There has been considerable interest in the development of a secular European script culture outside of the Nordic countries ever since the publication, at the end of the 1970s, of Michael T. Clanchy’s book From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307. His studies in this field in England demonstrated, among other things, that the royal adminstration there played a decisive role in the advancement of administrative writing in the vernacular. Clanchy’s research was followed by hundreds of studies which gradually exposed the breadth and depth of European medieval literacy,® and when a new edition of his book appeared fifteen years later, its expanded bibliography revealed what a tremendous source of inspiration it had been.
Swedish literacy studies, including those inspired by Clanchy and others, had an upswing at the University of Stockholm in the early 1990s with the formation of the programme entitled Nordic Medieval Literacy in a Diglossic and Digraphic Perspective, led by Professor Barbro Séderberg. The central questions for the programme related to the two language and script systems in the North and the interactions between them, including the social and regional expansion of literacy and quantitative and qualitative causes of the development that was taking place. The questions were also coupled to incentives in social development (e.g. Viking expeditions, trade, politics, missions, establishment of churches and the monarchy, along with the script community’s establishment of norms during different periods).
The programme’s ideas soon began to spread widely, inspiring a significant number of researchers to formulate a perspective on literacy, and when in 1999 a bibliography of current medieval literacy research in Europe was published, we were delighted to see that it contained more than sixty Swedish titles.
My work concerns just a small part of this wide field of research, namely the use of literacy in medieval Swedish charters from the late 1100s to the early 1400s, i.e. the first 250 years in which Swedish was used for practical administrative, government and juridical purposes. The language of the church, after all, was Latin, and Latin in Roman script was also used in practically all documents of a juridical-administrative nature until the beginning of the 1330s, when the first surviving documents in Swedish appear. As early as the thirteenth century, collections of provincial laws were being written in Swedish, not in the indigenous runic script but in the Roman alphabet, and this was followed by the first literature for entertainment in Swedish around 1300, the so-called Eufemiavisorna.'°
The oldest surviving specimens of Roman script in long, coherent samples of text in Sweden are charters or, to give them their contemporary designation, bref.'' The oldest known documents which specifically relate to Sweden are the papal letters mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. The oldest surviving original bref written in Sweden dates to the mid-1160s. It was written in Latin and relates to a legal dispute. The oldest surviving original charter in Swedish is a mortgage deed (pantbrev) from 1330.'”
Thus, apart from the liturgical texts and religious literature, charters are the oldest Swedish genre of writing in Roman script, and this parallels the situation throughout the Northern countries. In the surrounding countries, too, papal writings are the oldest, but the oldest known original charter in Latin written in the North is a Danish royal charter: Erik Lam’s deed of gift to St Peter’s monastery near Nestved dating to 1140.'? The oldest surviving Norwegian original charter was drawn up in Norwegian (!) by the Bagler king Filippus in the early 1200s."*
In Sweden at least 40,000 letters, originals and copies, in abstract or reference form, have been preserved in the Riksarkivet (the National Archives) and elsewhere.’° Not all of these, however, were written in Sweden. A significant number of documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular are correspondence sent to Sweden, mostly papal letters. Moreover, documents such as those drawn up by King Magnus Eriksson for the Norwegian kingdom (other than Jamtland, Harjedalen and Bohuslin), are not usually considered ‘Swedish’. It is therefore difficult to calculate the exact number of surviving ‘Swedish’ letters.'®
My research on the Swedish situation is based on the surviving documents: royal and other writings issued by the secular administration, certain ecclesiastical writings and private documents of a legal nature, e.g. purchase deeds and deeds of gift as they are represented in the volumes of Svenskt diplomatarium published to date.'’ The ideas below are derived from my own research of the published documents, but to a large extent also the research of others. Familiarity with literacy and the development of literacy for administrative and juridical purposes was seldom given specific attention in the past, but by considering research from a new angle, new conclusions are made possible.'®
Central to my research is determining where in society written documents were used, who used them, for what purposes they were used and how their use spread. I also endeavour to find out in more detail what types of business and transactions were committed to writing, what types of letters were written, the contemporary names for them, and how the practice of letter-writing spread over time. My research is primarily quantitative and focuses on the spread of written forms of communication in Swedish society and its significance for the spread of Swedish as a written language. On the other hand, I do not discuss the diplomatic, palaeographic or linguistic form of documents, nor the individual’s competence or literacy whether in Latin or Swedish, Roman or runic script.
A study of the products of a Swedish script culture within this area cannot but observe the fact that medieval Sweden was overwhelmingly a society in which oral agreements had a firm status as the established way of making a contract. How were the people won over to confidence in written agreements? What oral ceremonies subsisted side by side with written documentation, and how did the legal status of written documents change over time?
Nor should we forget that certain parts of the country already had a native tradition of committing transactions and agreements in writing for posterity, though we know nothing of the status of these texts in society. Throughout the North, but especially in Sweden, Viking-Age runic inscriptions on stones survive documenting legal decrees, trade, land ownership, kinship connections, bridge-building and travels to western and eastern Europe, and we have abundant examples of the use of runes as an everyday form of writing even during the Middle Ages. We know little about the significance of this long writing tradition for the acceptance of Latin, the Roman alphabet and Latin forms of expression. When the Roman alphabet was introduced into Sweden, runes had already been in use for almost a thousand years, and they would continue side by side with the Roman alphabet in certain contexts right up until the nineteenth century. When texts in Latin began to spread in Sweden, therefore, there was already a long experience with reading in the vernacular, though one may assume that not everyone was able to read runes. To begin with, the writing of the church was associated with Latin, while runic writing was associated with the vernacular. A slow change took place over time so that the Roman writing system came to be used for the vernacular, Swedish, and there are quite a few examples of runes being used to write in Latin. The significance runic literacy had in preparing the way for the spread of the Roman alphabet in Sweden is an open question that will not be discussed here.
Literacy levels among Swedes of the Middle Ages varied, just as in the case of their modern counterparts, by background and social class. It might be limited to familiarity with a runic inscription or a band of Latin text in the wall-paintings of a medieval church, or it could involve the ability to read and/or write. In a situation with two or even three languages and two writing systems, both skills and familiarity could of course be present in varying combinations.
At the same time it is important to bear in mind that reading and writing in those days were often two separate skills, and ability in one area did not imply ability in the other. Throughout the Middle Ages there were professional scribes in the Northern countries, and manual copying was the way every text was reproduced. Results of detailed studies of writing errors and other evidence have shown that some copyists could apparently neither read nor understand the texts they were copying. The act of writing itself required a certain technical competence. To begin with, one would write with ink and quill on parchment, which had to be prepared from hides. Some parchment was imported, but there was also some domestic production. The earliest definite sources naming parchment-makers date to the fifteenth century. The oldest surviving Swedish manuscripts are all written on parchment, but from the middle of the fourteenth century parchment began to be supplanted by paper. The oldest known Swedish documents on paper date to 1345. They are copies of the actions in a debt collection case against Bishop Egisl in Vasteras, and the paper on which they are written could have been procured by the bishop during his ten-year residence with the pope at Avignon.”
Throughout the fourteenth century, the use of paper is apparently mainly associated with the royal chancery, diocesan authorities and the king’s court. It is possible that paper first began to be used for incidental writings, whereas documents such as state treaties continued to be written on the more durable parchment. From the end of the fourteenth century, paper nevertheless appears in more different contexts, and the use of paper is completely established during the course of the fifteenth century. However, it was still presumably a relatively expensive writing material as domestic paper mills did not emerge until after the Reformation. The use of parchment for more formal letters and paper for incidental writings could indicate that parchment was still more expensive or at least was valued more highly than paper. One fact in support of the latter interpretation is the contexts in which writing materials are mentioned in documents. In a vidimus, for instance, there is often a formula guaranteeing the authenticity of the document. A vidimus in Swedish from 1409 states that:
Let it be known by this open letter that we have heard and seen King Albrekt’s and Bo Jonsson’s open letter, written on parchment, with hanging seals, uncut, unscraped and indisputable in all its parts, so reading word for word, as is written below.”
A vidimus on paper from the late fifteenth century reads “... have read and seen a letter in Latin on parchment”, and in a document from 1405 all bonds are cancelled ‘whether written on parchment or paper’. Formulas such as these may indicate that fifteenth-century administrators regarded parchment as a guarantee of a document’s age and therefore its authenticity. The above formula appears when documents on paper had become more common and accordingly, sometimes make reference to earlier documents with some kind of value as legal evidence. For incidental writing which would not be saved for posterity, other materials could be used. We have already mentioned runic inscriptions on stone, but other surfaces were used for runic inscriptions in everyday contexts for incidental use, e.g. bone, birchbark, and sticks of wood. In situations where paper and parchment were too expensive — for incidental messages, for accounts or writing lessons — writing tablets, used since antiquity, may have been most convenient. A writing tablet had a writing surface of wax which could be re-used many times.
They were common on the European continent and were also known in Sweden. Surviving wills mention writing tablets, and both the tablets and styli for writing on the wax have been found in archaeological excavations. But how did people write when they were not carving runes? Writing was taught at cathedral schools, monasteries and city schools modelled on those in other countries. The oldest manuscripts often contain neither capital letters nor punctuation to indicate new sentences. Various abbreviations are used, although they are less common in Swedish-language texts than in Latin, and a variety of abbreviation symbols are used for frequently-appearing syllables and words. The oldest Swedish documents are written in so-called Carolingian minuscule (1150-1250), which is a book script. It gave way to so-called Gothic script. A cursive variant is used in letters, while a more readable hand is used for such purposes as copying laws. We must also bear in mind that different people had different ranges of linguistic competence: Latin in the first instance for clerics and Swedish as well as — later — German for the laity.”
This study is arranged so that in the first section we meet the historical figures who, in my estimation, were the most important in establishing the native use of written expression within administration, government and jurisdiction. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive background but to identify and discuss some of the factors I believe were significant for the development of the use of writing. The second section presents different charters and charter types. In connection with this I discuss the increase in the use of charters, the growing differentiation in charter types and their spread through society — as well as this can be done with the help of the fragmentary material. I also investigate how new, ever more specific terms for various types of letters are developed to meet new demands. I discuss whether and how any lingering orality can be read into charters and whether the phrasing shows growing written standardisation. The conclusion summarises the results of my research and raises new questions.
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