I've just read yet another article from the interminable German/Austrian scholarly argument on the constitutional history of the early medieval count. This time it was Erwin Kupfer, 'Karolingische Grafschaftsstrukturen im bayrisch-österreichischen Raum', Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 111 (2003), 1-17. This started out promisingly by arguing that you had to see some spatial element to counties (they weren't purely created by 'personal' ties) and that via charters you can map centres and areas of influence of counts. I thought this might be leading towards a more useful sense of counties as spatially-imagined areas/networks, rather than either as discreet dots of influence (as in the 'scattered county' theory) or a simple map of 'flat' areas (as in the 'administrative district' theory); the sort of thing that Elizabeth Zadora-Rio is arguing for parishes. Unfortunately, rather than developing this, Kupfer then started using Freising charters in which counts are clearly making judgements outside their areas of influence to create a new more complicated idea of how the 'system' worked. He thinks counts have personal jurisdiction over cases concerning the nobles in their county community (which he calls a Gefolgschaft = 'military following' at one point) wherever their property is, while they have a separate jurisdiction over their territorial county, including the clerics, women and children. This is all deduced from 4 Freising charters, which say nothing about women and children, and don't specifically say that those involved were in any kind of relationship to the count (or at least Kupfer doesn't mention it if they do say that). It all once again proves that even when German-speaking scholars talk about 'Personenverband' and a state based on personal relationships, they want to lay down the rules on exactly how these worked, as if it's really a system after all.

This got me thinking more generally about the problems with looking at/for political/legal/administrative 'systems' in the early Middle Ages and what they might actually involve. And I think one key difficulty is that often there are two underlying assumptions about what a system involves. One is that it is comprehensive and the other is that it is consistent. In other words, it deals with every case and every case fits into one category for which there is then an appropriate action. In particular, for legal systems, precedence plays a key role here. Precedence means that when you find your system is not actually comprehensive (a new case comes along which doesn't fit your categories), you use that to create a new category/rule for action, which is then incorporated into the system, from henceforth. With that, a system can in theory expand as necessary almost indefinitely from a few basic rules (as for example with US constitutional law).

Since such rules of precedence have been basic to legal and administrative systems for centuries, it has always seemed logical to reconstruct previous legal/administrative practice based on them. But supposing they don't actually correspond to circumstances in the early Middle Ages? Supposing in fact we have a ‘system’ where a) the rules aren't intended to apply to all circumstances, but only the most 'common' events and b) there is no automatic feedback loop of precedents into the machinery (so a lot of things stay undecided)? Is such a world possible?

What I'm wondering is whether we possibly have what I would jokingly called Schrödinger counties – a situation where some places are not actually 'in' any county until there is a dispute about them? And which, because decisions about them may not be fed back to the centre, may revert to an indeterminate status after the judgement again, only to be redetermined when there is another dispute (and not necessarily in the same way)? And similarly, what if there are equally Schrödinger land-rights, which do not in some sense really exist except when they are being claimed, as I once suggested?

I don't know whether there is any way to 'prove' my suggestion, or if there is any plausible evidence against it: I can see you might well have a solid core of places that are definitely in some county, but the lack of references in Carolingian sources to county borders does suggest that there is some haziness there. The one obvious argument against my suggestion is that it would be a pointless/daft system to have: why would anyone want to have that kind of haziness and allow it to continue, given the obvious inefficiency? To which my reply would be, that we need to think carefully about who legal precedents, routinisation and bureaucracy benefits. I once read a very interesting article by Chris Kelly (I don’t unfortunately have the reference to hand), in which he argued that the later Roman emperors deliberately sabotaged their administrative system at times. Their aim was to ensure that gaining office and other privileges remained arbitrary and thus under their personal control. If you look at it like that, a 'system' without precedents, in which no decision can therefore ever be regarded as truly final (because it can be decided differently a second time round even if the facts haven't changed), is a very useful tool of patronage for whoever does the deciding, whether it's the king or a count. Of course there are problems of getting the balance right, so you can have some routine, fixed decisions and the higher courts don’t get completely clogged up (as happened to the palace court under Charlemagne), but such a pattern does at least seem possible, and would explain the paradox of a Carolingian legal landscape that looks both to be a 'system' (if looking at a centre creating rules) and intensely dependent on personal relationships (if you look at practice on the ground). If I am by any chance right (and this may be a fairly flimsy hypothesis), it makes a lot of our research look even dicier than it did before, but I think it would be useful to have at least some definite evidence of why I am wrong on this.

Jon Jarrett has been doing some more reporting on IHR seminars, including a rather sceptical discussion of a recent paper by Stephen White looking at legal disputes and Arthurian romance. In this Jon asks the question:

‘But is gutting literature for use as a context-less data-bank ever really sound history?’

I’ll start by saying that I didn’t hear Stephen’s paper, so I don’t know the details of what he was trying to do. But if gutting literature is now an unacceptable historical tactic, I’m in big trouble. Because I’m a historian of mentalities and that’s what I do: gut literature (and history and anything else I can lay my metaphorical knife on) in search of attitudes.

If I’m trying to defend myself I might say, oh, but I’m not really taking things out of context, but that can’t be terribly convincing. Most of the time for medieval literature (and a surprising amount of medieval history) we don’t actually have an independently verifiable context, in the basic sense of knowing a) who wrote the work, b) when and c) what were their affiliations (class, religious, political)? Most of what we know about authors and their context is deduced from the sources themselves and thus prone to all kinds of circular reasoning. In fact, what medieval literary authors are there that we know much about (with a few exceptions like Dante and Chaucer)? The Gawain-poet and the Beowulf-poet and ‘Turoldus’ and ‘Marie de France’ are all shadows and we’re frequently reduced to speculating about contexts. I argue in an article that I’m currently trying to get published that the Latin poem Waltharius fits very well into a Carolingian context, but I’m sure someone else could see things in it that make it look Ottonian to them.

So why do I rip anecdotal gobbets from inoffensive works of fiction and try to arrange them in new and pretty patterns? Because I don’t know another way to study the kind of things that interest me. For example, I want to know about acceptable behaviour in warfare, but until men start writing treatises on chivalry (in fact arguably till something like Honoré Bouvet’s Tree of Battles), no-one writes down the kind of details I want. So instead I sidle up to the topic via poetry and annals, in the hope that even if they don’t actually tell me what actually happened, they can give me ideas about what ought to have happened or what men dreamed and hoped would happen. Otherwise, the range of topics on which we early medieval historians cannot speak becomes even wider.

It’s not just military ethics you may have to sneak up on like this, but also gender, the discovery of the individual, images of peasants and lots of other curious abstractions like those. And I mosaic together fragments from many different sources into what I hope is a convincing whole because fragments are what I have to work with. Yes, it would be nice to work with a sizeable coherent corpus of literary material that is all firmly locatable in the same time and place and deals with common issues, but then I’d be talking about gender and morality in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, not the ninth. That doesn’t mean we can simply ignore methodological problems about using literary sources (whether it’s how close in time and place our examples need to be to be comparable or the role of irony and fantasy and literary conventions), but after the ‘linguistic turn’, historians need almost equal caution in reading narrative historical sources and even charters.

So it doesn’t seem to me, in theory, unjustified in making something of the frequent use of trial by combat scenes in Arthurian romance. There are obvious questions, of course, which need to be asked: is this motif particular to this genre? Is this a new pattern or just the side-effect of a ‘literary-documentary mutation’? I’m sceptical about stories of weak and treacherous kings having a particular political context: that seems a perennial problem of monarchies, old and new (and it’s a frequent theme in the chansons de geste, for example). But the emphasis on trial by combat, in contrast, is intriguing, if this motif can be successfully pinned down to a specific period.

To me it automatically brings thoughts about the twelfth-century rise of legal professionalism as against the ‘good old law’ of the nobility. (It’s all too easy to presume that this more ‘rational’ law must have seemed preferable to everyone: but as Tim Reuter once memorably remarked (The medieval German Sonderweg? p 200): 'In general I suspect it is an error to assume as a working maxim for the study of medieval government that we needs must love the highest when we see it.') We have historical evidence of the importance nobles attached to rights to trial by combat; if there are literary parallels, that may help confirm the significance of this preference. It also suggests that gutting literature, however aesthetically unsatisfying, can sometimes be a useful tool for a historian.

...if he hadn’t been dead for 1100 years. Now, I know there are long-dead people with blogs, like Antoninus Pius and Geoffrey Chaucer, but to arrange that for Hincmar someone would have to metaphorically channel his spirit. And I really wouldn’t advise that with Hincmar.

Three reasons why Hincmar would have blogged:

1) Getting back at enemies

I once had to try and find a picture to illustrate a flyer for an internet project on Hincmar. I couldn’t find one of Hincmar, so ended up using a nice one of Isidore of Seville instead. A colleague commented that this was appropriate, since Isidore is the patron saint of the internet. To which my immediate thought was: in that case shouldn’t Hincmar be the patron saint of the flame war?

When I was trying to get to grips with Hincmar’s political career I found it necessary at an early point to make a brief list of all the significant disputes he was involved in, to keep them straight in my mind. And I needed this because if I wanted to discuss how a pope reacted to a specific decision by Hincmar on a marriage case, I have to remember that that pope was probably simultaneously arguing with Hincmar on three different unrelated cases, and his decision may have been driven by this more than the facts of this particular case.

And Hincmar’s dispute weren’t just numerous and hostile, but often extremely wordy. The MGH has published a whole 600 page volume (Conc 4 Supplement 2) just on his conflict with his nephew Hincmar of Laon. The possibilities for him of daily invective on his own blog would have been irresistible.

2) Forging ahead

The Carolingian period was an age of forgery and misuse of documents and Hincmar was a serial offender, forging privileges, inventing visions and deliberately misquoting patristic texts. The opportunities on the internet for false attributions, easy cut and pastes from Patrologia Latina or simply altering original documents would have given him huge scope. (As for Hincmar given a chance to edit Wikipedia, it doesn’t bear thinking about).

3) More efficient haranguing of rulers

Hincmar’s urge to tell rulers what to do was life-long, but hampered by poor technology. When he decided that the advice he and fellow bishops had given to Louis the German in 858 was also pertinent to Charles the Bald, he would have had to have had an additional copy of the letter made and sent out. With a blog, however, he could simply have posted a short (or more probably long) admonition, and then e-mailed the link simultaneously to ludwig@rex.de, charles@rex.fr, Louis2@imp.it and even Lothar2@rex.lo, thus leaving him extra time to make the lives of his suffragan bishops miserable.

Next week: Lupus of Ferrières meets LibraryThing.

I have recently been tagged with a meme by Jon Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe to give three reasons as to why I blog. So here goes:

1) The personal is political is historical

One of the things I’ve been very interested in for several years is the connections between my political-religious views (liberal Christian feminist), my research (medieval gender and religion) and my personal life (recent mother). This blog provides a way for exploring and sharing views like these which don’t have any other obvious forum, given the normal separation between academic discourse, religious language and personal conversation.

This emphasis on the personal (and particularly references to my child) is why I blog anonymously. I’m not very anonymous, in the sense that anyone who read my blog and really wanted to know who I was could work this out from my research interests and attendance at conferences (and if you have a specific reason for wanting to know who I am, I am normally happy to reveal this via e-mail), but I cannot easily be Googled.

I also think this personal emphasis makes some of my historical writing slightly different from the many other excellent blogs on medieval topics. Often these are particularly interested in how the medieval past affects and shapes the present (or as History Today’s slogan has it: ‘What Happened Then Matters Now’). While some of my posts are also like that, I’m almost equally interested in the other aspect: how our (my) present affects the past, or rather our (my) perceptions of it.

2) Making connections

If you’re reading any good historical work or listening to a paper, or thinking about your own work, there’s often a point at which you see a sudden connection, a pattern that goes beyond an individual historical moment to tell us something wider and more significant. It’s that that makes history more than a record of one damn thing after another. It’s also why, in an ideal world where historians had more time, we’d read and listen to much more that was out of our field, whether in terms of period or theme, because that can be particularly effective at producing sudden unexpected illuminations.

This blog is partly a way of recording some of these ‘aha’ moments, both for myself and for anyone else who might be interested. And it’s particularly useful because I find the act of writing the entry itself clarifies my thought. If I can’t write my thought down coherently, it’s normally because my argument is still confused in my own mind. After all, explaining an idea to someone else, (as far as possible in non-technical language) is one of the key tests of whether you really understand it yourself.

3) Writing back

A number of my entries, however, are prompted by a more simple and basic motif for blogging: I’ve read something I disagree with. (I suppose it’s inevitable I write more about these than things I completely agree with. One of the reasons I’ve so far avoided writing book reviews is that the only books I have much to say about are the ones I really disagree with; I haven’t yet worked out how to write an academically rigorous 500 words on why someone’s book is almost exactly correct). My blog posts on these topics are just a distilled version of the angry disagreement that goes on my head for hours (or days sometimes) after I’ve read a biased/stupid/preposterous article. I tend to post such views on my blog rather than use the comments facility on the original article (if that is are available), mainly because it allows me to respond both at length and at leisure (whereas comments normally need near immediate responses). It also means that my friends/relatives get a choice of whether they bother with these rants or not.

At this point I should then pass on the meme to some other poor unsuspecting blogger, but I’m not quite sure who of my friends and acquaintances to inflict this on. So instead, I’m going to tag Hincmar.

The biggest problems with conspiracy theories (ancient or modern) isn’t normally any specific loose-end within the theory: that can usually be explained away somehow. The biggest problem is usually the plausibility of the conspiracy’s success. Beyond all the debate about exactly what planes flying into buildings can do, there is the question: could George W. Bush’s government have organised a plot that was both so successful and so secret? And based on all their other attempts to organise things, the answer must be no. Similarly, Mohamed Al-Fayed’s ideas on the death of Princess Diana need such widening groups of disparate conspirators involved to make it ‘work’ as to become ludicrous.

I ended up thinking the same thing having just read an interesting article on an obscure Carolingian planctus (funeral chant): Fabre, Claudiane, ‘Deux planctus rythmiques en Latin vulgaire du IXe siècle: I. Sur la Bataille de Fontenoy (841), II. Sur le meutre du sénéchal Alard (878)’. In La Chanson de Geste et le mythe Carolingien: Mélanges Réne Louis publiés par ses collègues, ses amis et ses élèves à l'occasion de son 75e anniversaire, 177-252. Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, 1982. Alongside the famous lament on the battle of Fontenoy in 841, Fabre discusses a late ninth century text which laments the murder of a dux Adalard at the instigation of his wife. His ingenious solution is that the Adalard referred to is Adalard the seneschal of Louis the Stammerer and that the murder took place in 878, but was hushed up by the royal circle. All the evidence was destroyed, except for this text (two fragmentary copies of the planctus, apparently written by young pupils at the monastery of St Germain d’Auxerre).

There are problems with some of the details of Fabre’ case, especially his following Ferdinand Lot in the very dubious assumption that the Adalard mentioned as tutor to Louis the Stammerer in 876 is the same one as the seneschal Adalard who fought at the battle of Fontenoy in 841 (most recent scholarship thinks that Adalard died in the 860s and his son is being referred to in the later texts). But the bigger problem is the simple question: could Louis the Stammerer and his supporters have suppressed mention of a death in 878? This strains credulity for several reasons.

First is the obvious point that Louis the Stammerer hardly looks the sort who could successfully carry out any policy: his short reign (877-879) has several humiliating climb-downs by him. Secondly, by the late ninth century ‘history-writing’ was decentralised enough to make control of what was written very hard for rulers. In the late eighth century Charlemagne could mostly control what was written about Tassilo (though even then there are fissures enough for Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Großen (1993) to point out the deceptions in the story). In 878 Hincmar was out of favour (and so not liable to take the party line), there were independent historians in the other kingdoms, lots of reports and letters from the papacy etc. Finally, Fabre never seems to put himself imaginatively in the position of the would-be conspiracy theorist. He argues, for example, that the lack of any mentions of Adalard in obits, necrologies etc, shows the success of the conspiracy. But it’s one thing to conceal a murder, it’s another thing to conceal a death. If you are trying to hide the fact that a 80-year old has been slaughtered in cold blood, then the obvious thing to do is to say: ‘he died of old age, we’ve buried the body respectfully, good old Adalard, let’s move along now’. Similarly, Fabre wants to see the fact that the page with one version of the poem on has been largely cut away as proof of suppression of the text. Unfortunately for him, however, the second version of the poem is on the opposite page and is untouched. So either we have the world’s most hopeless censor, or the damage to the text has nothing to do with its embarrassing subject.

The problem is, if the poem’s not about a murder in 878, what is it about? I don’t have a good answer to that one. The poem describes the murder of a dux Adalard at the instigation of his wife and that ‘Louis’ knew she had ‘Odo’ as a lover. The manuscript was written at St Germain d’Auxerre at the end of the ninth century and the poem has verbal parallels to Angelbert’s poem on Fontenoy (although whether one can definitely prove the direction of influence is more debatable). I think it’s likely that the poem describes a ‘real’ event rather than an purely imagined story and the reference to Louis strongly suggests a royal connection. The problem is, there are lots of Louis and Adalards and Odos around, who slip in and out of the sources without us knowing their whole careers. Even if the poem is definitely late ninth century, that doesn’t help us much. Fabre assumes that the pupils were simply writing down a freshly composed planctus they’d heard, but earlier on he’d already referred to the song about the seventh-century Bishop Faro of Meaux, which according to Hildegar of Meaux in 869, countrywomen were still singing. So even if the poem in its current form was composed or written down in the late ninth century, it may deal with events hundreds of years earlier. ‘Louis’ could in fact be a Merovingian ‘Clovis’ (in Latin these are the same name).

I don’t have the time or patience to explore all the possible Adalards and I’m not sure whether you could actually learn something definite even if you did. The careers of almost all early medieval noblemen are so obscure that it’s hard to know definitely how or when they met their ends, and anyhow the story may have been so distorted in the process of transmission that the actual facts were completely different (as in the Chanson de Roland’s picture of Roncesvalles). But in the end, it’s still probably better to admit our ignorance then say we know something when we clearly don’t. That way historical fiction lies...

A rather belated report on a recent IHR seminar, when Sarah Foot (now at Oxford) asked rhetorically: 'Should King Æthelstan get a Life?' She is currently writing a biography of him, so perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the meagreness of the sources, she thought this was possible and worth-while to do. Her argument drew on a lot of recent work on medieval biography and how one might write it (see e.g. Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow) and I found it largely convincing, although it does make one realise how much (relatively speaking) we know about Charlemagne and Alfred (and even Charles the Bald).

There did seem to me some problems remaining with the project though: some minor, but some more substantial. One of the minor problems is how difficult is to say that you consider a historical figure was not gay without coming across as mildly homophobic/dismissive. Athelstan did not marry (and as far as we know had no illegitimate children). Sarah argued that that 'we don't need to consider his sexuality' and that a political or religious reason explained his decision better. I think she’s right, but that it was worth adding briefly that until very recently it was normal for gay men to marry for social reasons, irrespective of their own desires, and that *therefore* we don't need to consider/assume etc.

A more substantial problem emerged when Sarah discussed Athelstan's role as a relic collector (and he was obviously a very dedicated one). To her such relics are 'junk', which for a Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History seems a rather big blind spot. I've talked before about the need for empathy with one's historical subjects, and it is surely particularly vital for biographical projects. As Jinty Nelson has shown, this is possible and useful even for those historical figures who are not "nice people", whose values we can't share.

But despite this, I think Sarah is doing a very good job at teasing out bits of information on Athelstan. She talked in terms of theatre and roles, but I found myself thinking (in a slightly peculiar analogy) of carrier waves and demodulation. Much of what the sources tell us about Athelstan is what a generic Anglo-Saxon king does (or even a generic early medieval king). But if we look carefully we can see the subtle differences in him, once we have subtracted Anglo-Saxon Ruler 1.0. He has more sisters than normal, is less often married, is more concerned about theft than usual, etc. As a result we can build up a faint image of someone who has some original features, who does not quite fit the standard picture.

This is an impressive achievement, but it does leaves us with one major problem, from the very success of this practice. Sarah talked at one point about being guided by Anthony Giddens' theory of Structuration, that there is a dialectic between individuals and deep social structures. One of the main reasons that biography has seemed a valid approach to historians is the possibility that an appreciation of a significant individual's psychology will allow you to understand the events with which he/she was connected better. The danger here, of course, is that you get into a circular argument: we argue for an individual's personality, based on their behaviour in some events, but we also argue that the events happened in the way they did, because of that person's personality. In most cases, there is enough evidence that you don't have to become directly circular: for example, you can argue how early experiences shaped someone's later behaviour. For Athelstan, however, you have to use so many scraps of evidence to make up any kind of picture, that there's really nothing left over. The events of the reign can tell you about Athelstan, but Athelstan can't then tell you about events of the reign. Sarah Foot has convinced me that you can do a good biography of Athelstan. What I'm not convinced is that it can be anything more than a historical dead end.