Download PDF | Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, Adam Kosto (eds. - Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
408 Pages
Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages
Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape. warren c. brown is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. marios costambeys is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. matthew innes is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. adam j. kosto is Professor of History at Columbia University.
Introduction
In 1928, archaeologists working along the Tunisian-Algerian border uncovered an earthenware jar containing forty-five wooden panels. When deciphered, the scraps were found to contain the texts of thirty-four Latin documents from the last decade of the fifth century: tables of calculations, a record of a dowry and several documents of sale. Most of the latter concern small plots of olive, fig and nut trees; one deals with a slave. The properties and individuals involved appear to have been associated with a single rural estate, the Fundus Tuletianos.1
The episcopal archive in Pisa preserves a simple list of eighty-eight documents given by Teuspert to Ghittia and her daughters. No reason can be given for its composition, but it can be dated to between 768 and 774. It inventories different kinds of documents, many of them rare among the large numbers of complete documents that survive in Italian ecclesiastical archives, but here catalogued and classified with care. In over half of the various charters (cartae), notes (breves), judgements (iudicati), letters (epistolae) and precepts (praecepta), neither party to the transaction was expressly associated with the Church. Ghittia herself was a nun, but her collection includes documents from a wide variety of her kin and contacts in which she is not implicated; forty-four of the documents in her list, for example, concern the layman Alahis.2 A formula collection from Gaul compiled towards the end of the seventh century contains a model letter from a king to an unfortunate who has had his house destroyed by fire. Among the things he lost were all of his documents, particularly those that recorded his title to property.
According to the text, the man provides written testimony to the king verifying his property claims; the king then issues this letter confirming his property rights. Late in the ninth century – two centuries later – a Bavarian formula collection includes the same text word-forword, save that the house in which the documents had been stored is now a monastery.3 A monk at the monastery of Sahagun in Le ´ on in the early twelfth ´ century, transcribing charters into a codex for his institution, copied a document that listed in abbreviated form twelve sales of land concerning a property called Melgar de Foracasas. These transactions, which did not involve the monastery, dated from between 945 and 954. In 959 Melgar de Foracasas was donated to the monastery by its peasant proprietors, Iscam and Filaura, along with the document.
The total value of the twelve parcels was 133 solidi, 22 measures of wheat, a small plot and a red cow.4 For much of the modern period, a deeply embedded commonplace held that in Europe and the Mediterranean world in the early Middle Ages (AD 400–1000) documents were produced, used and preserved primarily by, and according to the needs and interests of, churchmen and monks. A corollary belief maintained that the surviving evidence for early medieval society so completely depended on the Church for its production and preservation that the investigation of such things as secular practices of landowning and conflict resolution, as opposed to the strategies used by the Church to pursue its interests, was impossible. Any effort to look beyond the confines of ecclesiastical institutions and reconstruct the workings of society as a whole would necessarily be indirect because of the nature of the surviving evidence.5 Yet, each of the examples given above shows laypeople using and storing documents. Many other examples like these survive, mostly – though not exclusively – scattered among and embedded in ecclesiastical and monastic archives. In the last several decades, early medievalists interested in how the written word was used in their period have begun to explore the implications of this evidence, namely that the early medieval laity may in fact have used and relied on writing to carry on the business of their lives to a considerable degree. Their efforts have begun to transform dramatically our understanding of writing practices in the period.
This transformation has not, however, taken hold in the non-specialist literature, either in the work of early medievalists not themselves directly concerned with writing practices or in the assumptions about the early Middle Ages perpetuated by those working on the high and late medieval periods. The reason, we think, has to do with scale. Each specialist working on document use among the early medieval laity has tended to focus on the examples with which he or she is familiar. Their insights have, therefore, been restricted to particular times and particular regions. This may well have created or reinforced an impression in the wider scholarly world that their examples were exceptional rather than typical.
Though as a group the specialists now have a sense that the laity used writing more than was earlier believed, they have not yet put all of their individual pieces together to form a broad picture of how early medieval laypeople used documents or how their use of documents developed over time from the end of the Roman period through the turn of the first millennium. Nor have they been able to describe in anything like a comprehensive fashion exactly how laypeople in the period used writing, how we can discover this from sources whose survival in the main has been mediated by ecclesiastical and monastic archives and interests, or how this information might change our understanding of early medieval history in general. This book represents an effort by a group of scholars who work on late antique and early medieval documentary culture to put their pieces of the puzzle of lay documentary use together and to see what picture emerges. We examine, directly and across a broad range of space and time, the scattered but nevertheless significant evidence for the use of documents by laypeople – that is, men and women who were not officials or functionaries of a church or members of a religious community, in transactions that did not involve ecclesiastical institutions – as well as the factors determining the survival or not of lay documents. We also explore the similar evidence for the existence of what can only be called ‘lay archives’; that is, collections or dossiers of documents kept and used by laypeople.7 In other words, we address the degree to which laypeople were not just using documents, but regarding them as important enough to store and make retrievable. Some of the evidence for these lay practices survives more or less independently of ecclesiastical institutions. However, much of our discussion uses indirect evidence that, for example, ecclesiastical archives took over or incorporated material which originated outside the Church, or that ecclesiastical institutions served as ‘safe deposits’ for the secular records of lay landowners. We thus directly question the premise that patterns of current document survival reflect patterns of early medieval access to and control of written documentation, and that clerics writing charters and ecclesiastical institutions storing them did so only to serve narrow sectional interests which were distinct from those of the wider society.8 Putting all of our pieces together, we will show how laypeople together with clerics and monks participated in what was a common documentary culture, and how we can begin to integrate the experiences they recorded in their documents into our histories of the early Middle Ages.
The laity To begin with our main category of analysis: the laity, as opposed to Christian clergy and monks, is not a group whose existence or characteristics we can take for granted or whose unchanging distinctiveness we can automatically assume. Lay is a relational category that can exist only in dialogue with categories of the clerical. This relationship shifted radically in the course of the first millennium. It is only in the late second and early third centuries, for example, that sources begin to mention laity (laikos/laicus) at all. Laypeople begin then to be identified as such by clerics, even while clerics admitted their own origins in the laity. Fourth- and fifth-century councils insisted on the distinctiveness of the priesthood, to the extent that ascetics who took a monastic vow were classified as laymen.9 In the eighth and ninth centuries, as the Carolingians tried to delineate more sharply the distinctions between lay and clerical, monks came to join the ranks of the ‘clergy’ – the classical tripartite theory of social functions, so very different from earlier patristic models, merged what had previously been two distinct orders into ‘those who pray’.10 By the twelfth century, the reciprocity implicit in such theorizing was contested, as clerics attempted to define themselves as a new and self-conscious power elite; it was precisely in this period that they also attempted to define themselves as literati, the lettered class, thus encouraging the identification of the remainder of society as unlettered, illiterate.11 As our work will make clear, for much of our period the distinction between lay and clerical does not help us understand how documentary culture developed. Nevertheless, it remains necessary for our discussion. The terms ‘lay’ and ‘clerical’, of course, form the frame of reference within which modern discussions of early medieval writing have taken place, and they thus perforce form the framework for our enquiry. More important, however, is the fact that they have real, though changing, referents; our sources use them. In many times and places, people identified by our sources as lay, or not explicitly identified as clerics and monks, can be seen using documents in ways similar to those called clerics or monks and for similar purposes. However, these same sources tell us that laypeople were not the same as clergy. The interests of both were often shaped by the differing contexts in which they lived and acted and by the interests of those for whom they worked; these interests in turn helped determine what documents they used and how and where they stored them. Furthermore, there comes a point towards the end of our period when, as a result of a particular combination of cultural and political circumstances, the distinction between clerical and lay does begin to affect documentary culture in Europe on a large scale.
Laypeople, documents and the Church Direct evidence that laypeople in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages used documents survives in significant amounts: for example, in the 45 per cent of documents from a sample of some 2,000 charters from tenth-century Catalonia that record transactions involving only laymen and laywomen; in discrete groups of lay documents from the eighth- and ninth-century Frankish and Lombard worlds that later found their way into monastic archives; and in collections of documents that have survived on unusual (to us) material, such as the wooden tablets from fifthcentury North Africa, or slates from seventh-century Iberia.12 Because this evidence is scattered in time and place and often embedded in complex ways in the ecclesiastical sources, its extent and importance has been easy to overlook. It is important because it allows us to confront pressing issues in the history of medieval writing from a new perspective. Chief among these is the question of institutional change: the effect of the end of Roman rule on ways of structuring and recording landholding; the fate of late Roman strategies of record-keeping in the successor states; the development of post-Roman institutions and their demands; and the methods whereby ecclesiastical institutions in particular attempted to control time and space through documents and archives. These changes in the institutional landscape and in documentary practices prompted broader transformations in the relationships between those who produced documents, the places in which documents were preserved and the uses to which documents were put. One aspect of this process of change turns on the development of the early medieval Church and in particular of ecclesiastical archives. Specifically ecclesiastical archives cannot be taken as given. It is necessary to ask when and why churches and monasteries felt it necessary to store and organize their documents in a manner distinct and separate from other social actors and institutions. The balance between churches and other loci of documentary production, preservation and archival activities is historically contingent and tied to specific political contexts as well as to long-term developments. There may also be a problem of historical perspective. Did churches and monasteries ever in general come to dominate the preservation and production of documents for everyone, and, if so, when, where and why? Or, rather, have we privileged certain ecclesiastical institutions whose impact on document preservation has been especially durable? How did the practices of churches relate to other forms of record-keeping, which in some areas predated the dominance of the Church but in others piggybacked on ecclesiastical institutions? When, where and why did ecclesiastical documentary practice become qualitatively different from those of other social institutions and groups, and what implications did this have for cultural and social practice? The documentary and archival practices of churches and monasteries were influenced by those of the laypeople with whom they were intimately connected. As a rich seam of recent work has emphasized, the connection between churches and monasteries and the families that founded and patronized them was a two-way street.13 The needs and interests of patron families shaped the formation and organization of churches and monasteries, and vice versa. Documentary and archival practice was as crucial to the formation of both institutional and family identity as was the movement of property. How did the inclusion of a core set of documents concerning the family of a monastery’s founder affect the formation and future development of that monastery’s archive? Why do so many of the documents contained in these embedded lay archives structure transfers of property within families? What role did women play in the ownership and transmission of property beyond making the donations to churches and monasteries that dominate the ecclesiastical records in which they appear as primary actors? Asking these questions forces us to recognize that documents themselves played a role in social and institutional development rather than simply bearing witness to them. Early medieval archival documents are not always routine and descriptive; they can themselves be narratives subject to the same instrumental or strategic manipulation as texts more traditionally called ‘narrative’.14 The archives in which they were stored also reflect the differing interests and needs of the individuals, families or institutions that created them. Documents and archives, therefore, must themselves be treated as subjects of theoretical and historical enquiry, and must be understood in their specific historical contexts. A proper understanding of the ways in which the documentary record has been filtered, by the creation of the documents themselves and by historically contingent processes of archive formation, is necessary to understand the relationship of the surviving source material to the society it records. When seen in this full context, our material shows that laypeople were full and conscious participants in early medieval societies that regarded documents as important. As a rule, we have been unable to identify consistent formal differences – in script, layout or formula – between documents used by laypeople and those written by and for clerics in any of our samples, although patterns of preservation are in places distinct. The comparisons we draw between the patterns of document use and storage by laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions dissolve the picture of an impermeable divide between a literate clerical and an illiterate/oral lay culture.15 Breaking down this divide opens up a new line of questions that can only be answered by analysing ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘lay’ documents together, in the context of what was a common documentary culture.
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