Early Medieval Europe - Volume 13, Issue 4 - February 2005

Editorial announcement The Blackwell Prize for the first article published in a refereed journal has been awarded to Sve...

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Editorial announcement The Blackwell Prize for the first article published in a refereed journal has been awarded to Sven Meeder for ‘The early Irish Stowe Missal’s destination and function’, which appeared in Early Medieval Europe 13:2.

Early medieval port customs, tolls and controls on foreign trade N  M 

The objective of this paper is to offer a fresh perspective on the nature and organization of international trade in early medieval ports from the evidence of documentary sources on tolls and customs, trading practices and controls on foreign merchants. In particular, the paper considers the evidence for continuities and borrowings from the Roman and Byzantine worlds and the extent to which they influenced trading practices in the west and especially in Anglo-Saxon England.

Introduction Knowledge about early medieval ports and trade comes mainly from the pioneering work of archaeologists and numismatists. 1 From the late sixth and seventh century onwards, large-scale trading settlements, sometimes occupying areas in excess of forty hectares, were beginning to develop along the coasts of southern and eastern England and of northern Europe and Scandinavia.2 These ports, now commonly called wics (or emporia), were markets and centres for international exchange on the frontiers of kingdoms (Fig. 1). Written sources, some later, indicate that wics were located at places under the influence or control of kings and other rulers. Wics were actively involved in international trade and clearly on a scale implying much more than the provision of small luxuries for elites. There is evidence * 1

2

I would like to take this opportunity to thank James Campbell, Paul Fouracre, Ally Jones, Ken Lawson, John Maddicott and the editors of Early Medieval Europe for much helpful advice and encouragement. The views expressed here and any remaining errors are my own. For general reviews see A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge and Paris, 1999); R. Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade AD 600–1000 (London, 2001); R. Hodges, Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (London, 2000); D. Russo, Town Origins and Development in Early England, c.400–950 A.D. (Westport, CT and London, 1998); C. Scull, ‘Urban Centres in Pre-Viking England?’, in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons: From the Migration Period to the Eighth Century (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 268–98 and the related discussion at pp. 298–310. J. Haslam (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England (Chichester, 1984). D. Hill and R. Cowie, Wics: The Early Medieval Trading Centres of Northern Europe (Sheffield, 2001).

Early Medieval Europe   () 313–358 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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Fig. 1 Early medieval wics in the North Sea trading area (7/8th centuries)

of planning in the internal organization of roads and plots within the wics, and the scale and complexity of those three or four sites which have been excavated to any degree in England (i.e. London, Ipswich, Southampton and York) suggests that by the eighth century they were towns by any reasonable definition.3 A related development saw the minting of a silver coinage in the late seventh century, and by the eighth, it may have circulated on a scale not seen again before the eleventh. 4 Coin evidence and other finds also point to a network of markets and other 3

4

For convenient summaries see Hill and Cowie, Wics and Scull, ‘Urban Centres’ and the articles on London (B. Hobley, A. Vince); Ipswich (K. Wade); Southampton (M. Brisbane); and York (R.A. Hall) in R. Hodges and B. Hobley (eds), The Rebirth of Towns in the West AD 700–1050 (London, 1988). For the purposes of this article, I have adopted the convention of using the modern name for both the later medieval town and the related early medieval wic. For example, London represents both the Strand settlement (which is generally assumed to be Lundenwic) and the later settlement within the City walls. It is a central theme of this paper that continuity of tax and trading customs in ‘London’ is independent of the continuity of archaeological finds on any given site. D.M. Metcalf, ‘How Large was the Anglo-Saxon Currency?’, Economic History Review 18 (1965), pp. 475–82; D.M. Metcalf, ‘The Prosperity of North-Western Europe in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries’, Economic History Review 20 (1967), pp. 344–57; P. Grierson, ‘The Volume of AngloSaxon Coinage’, Economic History Review 20 (1967), pp. 153 – 60; P. Grierson, ‘Numismatics’, in J.M. Powell (ed.), Medieval Studies: An Introduction (Syracuse, NY, 1976), p. 128 ff.; P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum: The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th centuries) (Cambridge, 1986), I, p. 155 ff.

Early Medieval Europe   ()

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

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‘productive’ sites along important communication routes which facilitated the movement of goods to and from the coasts. 5 Early written sources about medieval ports and international trade are few in number and widely dispersed over time and place. There are fewer than one hundred direct or indirect documentary references of any kind relating to trade in Anglo-Saxon England before 900. It is not very much to go on and it goes a long way towards explaining why the relative importance of trade has been the subject of some debate amongst historians.6 The sources are primarily concerned with the royal administration of trade, and ports and tolls figure prominently amongst them. References to ports and trade in continental sources are more numerous but hardly abundant. It is a tribute to the diligence and ingenuity of historians like Stéphane Lebecq on the Frisians that so much information on trade has been recovered from such limited source materials. 7 Controlling the activities of local and foreign merchants in the interests of collecting tolls, maintaining law and order, and gaining privileged access to imported goods was a central concern of medieval rulers. 8 They were also important matters of state in the Roman and Byzantine empires. Port tolls and controls on foreign merchants go back a long way and there are questions about whether they survived from the period of Roman rule in Britain or were adopted and adapted later from continental European practices. The history of medieval English sea ports is inseparably linked to the general development of markets and trade around the coasts of northern Europe which formed a common international trading environment. It is therefore important to understand in particular the nature and management of tolls and trade in Frankish ports to aid understanding of the English evidence. One can also demonstrate that port tolls and controls on foreign merchants sometimes survived for centuries. Later medieval records from early ports like London, Southampton and Ipswich arguably provide additional valuable information. While there is always a risk that these later sources are not relevant to the period in question, they can, if handled with care, teach us much about trade which is otherwise inaccessible. When the few early English sources are placed in the context of earlier Roman, contemporary Frankish and Byzantine, and later medieval evidence, 5

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T. Pestell and K. Ulmschneider (eds), Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites 650 – 850 (Bollington, 2003). P. Grierson, ‘Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1959), pp. 123–40; J.R. Maddicott, ‘Trade, Industry and the Wealth of King Alfred’, Past and Present 123 (1989), pp. 3–51 and the debate on this article between R. Balzaretti, J.L. Nelson and J.R. Maddicott in Past and Present 135 (1992), pp. 142 – 88. S. Lebecq, Marchands et Navigateurs Frisons du haut moyen âge (Lille, 1983). P.H. Sawyer, ‘Kings and Merchants’, in P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (eds), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds, 1977), pp. 139 –58.



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then they can become a rich source of information about trade in early medieval England. This broad-based approach forms the groundwork of the present paper and helps us explain the function of wics and the nature and organization of foreign merchants and international trade.

The Roman and Byzantine background One useful starting point is the Roman system for collecting taxes on trade (i.e. tolls or customs).9 It was a key reason why foreign merchants were subject to controls in the first place and strongly influenced the management of local and international trade in the successor states of early medieval Europe. The Roman imperial customs system had a number of distinctive features which one can recognize, sometimes in a modified form, in the early medieval toll system. Customs were imperial taxes and formed part of the revenues of the treasury ( fiscus). The portorium and its apparent successors (e.g. quadragesima, quinquagesima, octava, siliquaticum, etc.) were the most important customs and represent payments for the licence to trade in a customs jurisdiction. They manifest themselves in the sources as, firstly, taxes on sales transactions, and secondly, as taxes on goods in transit (i.e. on merchandise in circulation). Taxes on trade were collected in cash and in kind, and seem to have been a mix of fixed payments and ad valorem rates (i.e. percentages of the value of the goods). Provincial rates of taxation typically varied between 2% and 5%, though they may have reached as high as 25% in parts of the eastern Roman empire.10 Customs jurisdictions were territorial. Taxes were collected within defined geographical areas coterminous with Roman provincial and other administrative boundaries. The customs administration was organized around a central place, usually the caput of the district, with dependent toll stations at appropriate locations throughout the customs territory. Customs jurisdictions included municipalities and their dependent territories. In the fifth century, Theodosius and Valentinian decreed that two-thirds of the revenue from local municipal tolls were in future to be diverted to the imperial treasury, while the other one-third share remained with the 9

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This summary is primarily based on S.J. De Laet, Portorium: Études sur L’Organisation Douanière chez les Romains, surtout à L’Époque du Haut-Empire (Bruges, 1949) and H. AntoniadisBibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, Cahiers de Annales 20 (Paris, 1963). See also J. Danstrup, ‘Indirect Taxation at Byzantium’, Classica et Mediaevalia 8 (1946), pp. 139– 67; H. Ahrweiler, ‘Fonctionnaires et Bureaux Maritimes à Byzance’, Revue des Études Byzantines 19 (1961), pp. 239–52; G. Millet, ‘L’Octava, impôt sur les ventes dans le Bas-Empire’, in Mélanges Gustave Glotz, 2 vols (Paris, 1932), II, pp. 615–43; A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 2 vols (Oxford, 1964), s.v. ‘taxation’; K. Hopkins, ‘Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, 200 BC–AD 400’, Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), pp. 245– 64; R. Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 187– 98. De Laet, Portorium, pp. 297–310, but cf. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, p. 71 and n. 3.




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municipalities.11 The army and civil administration cooperated closely in ensuring customs were levied from traders. Provinces were often grouped together for the purposes of customs collection and controlled by senior imperial officials, indicating the value and importance placed on customs by the state. The key customs jurisdictions were those on the borders of the empire where the rates of taxation were highest. The Roman authorities were maximizing customs revenues on imports and exports, and regulations controlling foreign traders formed an intrinsic part of that process. Later Roman emperors began to impose ever tighter controls on the activities of foreign traders in response to the increasing external threats to the empire.12 In 297, Diocletian restricted all trade between Persia and the empire to the town of Nisibis on the Tigris. By 408 – 9 trade with Persia was permitted in Callinicum and Artaxata as well as at Nisibis, but by 562, because of changing frontiers, the controlled trading towns were Nisibis and Darai. Frontier trading towns in the eastern empire figure in numerous treaties with foreign states in the following centuries.13 On the northern borders, Emperor Valens limited all trade between the Goths and the empire in 369 to two unnamed towns on the Danubian frontier; and in 371 Valentinian established a special trading town known as Commercium (Gran) on the Pannonian border. As far as the western empire is concerned, although there is no record of it, similar controls must have applied across all the frontiers including those of Germania, Belgica and Britannia. The close management of shipping and therefore of international trade around the Channel and the Rhine delta is implicit in the organization of the Saxon Shore forts and their associated areas of jurisdiction. Although the Saxon Shore forts were once viewed mainly as a defensive system to deal with Germanic raiders, it is now considered more likely that they were primarily fortified supply depots, an integral part of the later Roman army’s logistics and communications system, which also probably served as ports of trade. 14 11

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De Laet, Portorium, p. 462; P. Krueger (ed.), Codex Iustinianus (Berolini, 1915), Corpus iuris civilis, IIII, c. 61, 13: De Vectigalibis e Commissis. This legislation may well be the ultimate origin or model for the Earl’s third penny share of the royal tolls and other dues recorded for the first time in later Anglo-Saxon England. For what follows see De Laet, Portorium, pp. 456 – 60 and R.S. Lopez, ‘Du marché temporaire à la colonie permanente: l’évolution de la politique commerciale au moyen âge,’ Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 4 (1949), pp. 391–3. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 193– 6. J. Cotterill, ‘Saxon Raiding and the Role of the Late Roman Coastal Forts of Britain’, Britannia 24 (1993), pp. 227–39; G. Milne, ‘Maritime Traffic between the Rhine and Roman Britain: A Preliminary Note’, in S. McGrail (ed.), Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons, CBA Research Report 71 (London, 1990), pp. 82–4 and in the same volume, I. Wood, ‘The Channel from the 4th to the 7th Centuries AD’, at pp. 93–7; C. Seillier, ‘Rome et L’Océan Brittanique de César aux Invasions du Ve Siècle’, in S. Curveiller (ed.), Les Champs Relationnels en Europe du Nord et du Nord-Ouest des Origines à la fin du Premier Empire, 1er Colloque historique de Calais (Calais, 1993), pp. 19–27; S. Johnson, The Roman Forts of the Saxon Shore (London, 1976).



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By the late fourth century, the comites commerciorum had overall responsibility for the collection of customs and for commercial relations with foreigners at least in the frontier provinces of the eastern empire including Illyricum.15 There is no comparable information on the situation in the western provinces though the highest provincial customs official in the early empire was called procurator. The comes commerciorum controlled the importation and sale of luxury goods like silk, and key categories of goods like weapons, wheat, salt, iron, gold, wine and olive oil were forbidden from export. Foreign merchants could not leave the controlled towns without permission. Anyone who offered them lodging without the knowledge of the comes risked exile and the confiscation of their goods. This rule suggests that foreign traders were probably formally registered and their hostels or lodging places known to the local representatives of the comes. The tight restrictions placed on foreign traders were an integral part of the customs system from at least the third century and remained a feature of the Byzantine empire. During the sixth century, and especially under Justinian, the Byzantine customs system seems to have been overhauled and local comerciarii begin to appear and effectively take over a central role in the management of foreign traders.16 It is likely that their predecessors (who may have had different titles) were previously under the control of the comes commerciorum. The comerciarii were responsible for the customs houses (often called apotheke in the late seventh and eighth centuries) in major ports and markets. The apotheke and similar institutions in fact combined several functions and are perhaps better described for convenience as ‘customs depots’ or ‘commercial hostels’.17 They served as warehouses and presumably lodging houses for foreign travellers and traders who stayed with their goods in the interests of security and protection. More importantly, the commercial hostels were the places where imported goods were bought and sold and taxes collected under the control of the commerciarii. Seals bearing the names of the commerciarii and/or the district or location of the commercial hostel were attached to packs and bundles of merchandise as proof that the appropriate customs procedures had been followed and the taxes collected. In the ports, the commercial hostels were often located on the quays, and foreign traders were probably restricted from

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De Laet, Portorium, pp. 457–9 and 477– 8. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 157–64; R.S. Lopez, ‘The Silk Industry in the Byzantine Empire’, Speculum 20 (1945), pp. 26 –7; G. Millet, ‘Sur les sceaux des comerciaires byzantins’, in Mélanges M. Gustave Schlumberger (Paris, 1924), pp. 303–27. The apotheke began as some form of state customs depot but over time the term also applied to a rather more complex institution on which see M.F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300–1450 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 626 –34, 654– 69.




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leaving the port zone or jurisdiction until the correct taxes had been paid and express permission had been granted by state customs officials.18 Olivia Constable’s comprehensive survey of the role of hostels and the management and treatment of strangers and foreigners shows how widespread commercial hostels were in the Byzantine and the Islamic world.19 Constable comments that, ‘Muslim rulers and administrators used funduqs [a standard term for hostels] as loci for taxing mercantile transactions, controlling the storage and distribution of certain goods and, in some cases, regulating the movement of particular groups of merchants.’20 Funduqs like the apothekai were also in effect markets or trading exchanges where buying and selling took place. Commercial hostels were common in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and similar institutions are found in the Far East. 21 It was a universally effective way in conjunction with toll regulations for states to manage foreign traders in the late Roman and early medieval periods.

Frankish tolls and controls on foreign traders Robert Lopez has argued that in Frankish and later English sources, there is evidence – albeit thin – of Byzantine (i.e. Roman) controls on trade and foreign merchants.22 He plausibly suggested that the Franks were influenced both by direct contacts with the Byzantine empire and indirectly through their experience of the Lombard successor state in Italy. In 750 the Lombard king, Aistulf, insisted that no one could travel by land or ship for business without a written safe conduct (epistola) or authorization from a royal official.23 In a similar vein, when restoring the border toll stations in the Alpine passes (the clusae), the king ordered foreign and local merchants not to enter or leave his territory without royal permission. The clusae came under Frankish control some twenty-five years later following Charlemagne’s conquest of Lombardy. The reference to safe conducts reminds us of the permission granted by the maior Ebroin to allow Raedfrid to accompany Theodore of Tarsus to England via Quentovic in 668, and the letters of introduction carried by Abbot Ceolfrith of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow to facilitate travel 18 19 20 21

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Lopez, ‘Du marché temporaire à la colonie permanente’, p. 392. O.R. Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, 2004). Constable, Housing the Stranger, p. 64. Lopez, ‘Du marché temporaire à la colonie permanente’, pp. 403–5. Constable, Housing the Stranger, pp. 1–10 and p. 110, n. 4, does not think there is a direct link between funduqs and their Far Eastern counterparts or the later medieval commercial hostels like those of the Hanseatic league in northern Europe. Lopez, ‘Du marché temporaire à la colonie permanente’, pp. 397–402. F. Beyerle (ed.), Die Gesetze der Langobarden (Witzenhausen, 1947), Leges Ahistulfi c. 5 and 6, translated in R.S. Lopez and I.W. Raymond (eds), Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York, 1955), p. 38.



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across Francia in 716.24 It was common practice for long-distance ambassadors, merchants and other high-ranking visitors in the Byzantine and Islamic world to carry letters of introduction or to obtain written authority for travel.25 The prime Frankish example of Roman and Byzantine style border controls on merchants is to be found in the Capitulary of Thionville (805).26 Charlemagne placed restrictions on the sale and smuggling of arms and coats of chain mail (brunia) across the eastern borders of the Frankish kingdom. Trade was limited to named places including Bardowick, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Hallstadt, Forcheim, Regensburg and Lorch. Confiscation of goods was the penalty for disobeying these regulations. The merchants who bought and sold in these market towns would have paid tolls for the privilege to the royal officials (missi ) in charge. Such public markets were known by the term legitimus mercatus which means that they operated with royal consent, or at least acquiescence, and at fixed times and places according to custom. 27 Louis the Pious attempted to restrict trade to public markets to protect revenues from tolls, though the legislation itself is indicative of failure in this respect.28 It was not much different in England judging by tenth-century royal legislation which parallels, and is probably based on, Carolingian models.29 Restricting trade to public markets for the purpose of tax collection and public witnessing of sales is a concept which dates back at the very least to the Roman period and is described in some detail in the Theodosian Code.30 It is probably older since it is arguably an essential requirement of any state with a claim to tax trade and maintain public order. Ports were by definition markets and one would expect that similar rules applied to them. In 823, Lothar I forbade merchants from trading 24

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I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London, 1994), p. 295; C. Plummer (ed.), Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica (Oxford, 1896), IV, c. 2; C. Plummer (ed.), Historia Abbatum auctore anonymo (Oxford, 1896), c. 32. M. McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge, 2001), s.v. ‘Letters’. For safe conducts (‘aman) in Muslim Spain and elsewhere see O.R. Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge, repr. 1996), pp. 64–6. Capitularia Regum Francorum, eds A. Boretius and V. Krause, MGH (Hanover, 1883–97), I, no. 44. King Athelstan forbade the export of horses from England unless they were intended as gifts, F.L. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge, 1922), p. 136: II Athelstan, c. 18. A.J. Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo (Turnhout, 1999), p. 241. Boretius and Krause, Capitularia Regum Francorum, I, no. 143, c. 1: ‘Volumus . . . ut nullus teloneum exigat nisi mercatibus ubi communia commertia emuntur ac venundantur . . . Quod si aliquis constituta mercata fugiens, ne teloneum solvere cogatur.’ R.H. Britnell, ‘English Markets and Royal Administration before 1200’, Economic History Review 31:2 (1978), p. 187. Anglo-Saxon law codes: I Edward I; II Athelstan (Grately) 12 and 13.1. C. Pharr (trans.), The Theodosian Code (Princeton, 1952), pp. 529–30: Novellae Valentiniani 15: De Siliquarum Exactionibus.




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outside public or officially recognized sea ports (portura legitima) in Frankish Italy because of problems caused by toll evasion. 31 Lothar I described the rule as an ancient custom. The coasts and river systems elsewhere in Francia were divided up into toll or customs territories just as they probably had been in the Roman empire. A sure sign of a port customs territory is the existence of an administrative centre (usually a port itself ) with jurisdiction over dependent ports. Dorestad, the great Frisian trading town (wic or emporium) on the Kromme Rhine, was dependent on Utrecht and most likely there were others. The collectors of royal tolls in the area of Dorestad and Utrecht are called procuratores rei publice in an important charter of 815 of Louis the Pious for the church of Utrecht.32 At this time, the Frisian frontier province, or perhaps the whole Rhine Delta, may have constituted a single customs jurisdiction.33 The Channel coast probably formed a separate customs jurisdiction under the control of the abbots of St Wandrille; an arrangement which may go back to Pippin II or more likely Charles Martel early in the eighth century.34 In the ninth-century Gesta of St Wandrille, Abbot Gervold, who sometimes acted for Charlemagne in his dealings with English kings, is described as ‘procurator of the kingdom’s trade, collecting the tolls and tributes (exigens tributa et vectigalia) in various ports and cities but especially in Quentovic’. 35 The role of procurator here is analogous to, and may be modelled on, the contemporary Byzantine official, the commerciarius, or perhaps it is a survival from the older procurator of the early Roman empire. 36 The term procurator is used for reeves in early English sources, though whether any had similar powers to Gervold is not known although a late source may provide 31

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Boretius and Krause, Capitularia Regum Francorum, no. 158: ‘Ut nullus negotium suum infra mare exercere presumat, nisi ad portura legitima, secundum more antique, propter iustitiam domni imperatoris et nostrum; si quis aliter fecerit, omnem negotium suum perdat.’ McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, p. 909, R381. M. Gysseling and A.C.F. Kock (eds), Diplomata Belgica ante annum Millesimum Centesimum Scripta (Tongeren, 1950), no. 179. S. Lebecq, ‘Pour une Histoire Parallèle De Quentovic et Dorestad’, in J.-M. Devosquel and A. Dierkens (eds), Villes et Campagnes au Moyen Age, Mélanges Georges Despy (Liège, 1991), p. 423; A. Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002), p. 92. Hugo, a relative of Charles Martel and his key agent in Neustria, may have been the first procurator in the area. In 723–5 Hugo became abbot of St Wandrille and later became bishop of the sees of Rouen, Bayeux and Paris (and possibly of Avranches and Lisieux) as well as abbot of the monastery of Jumièges. The wider significance of this pluralism has received less attention. It was an act of deliberate policy for Charles Martel to promote Hugo in this way and the abbot of St Wandrille was now the dominant power on the Channel coast. On Hugo see P. Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel (Harlow, 2000), pp. 71–4. F. Lohier and J. Laporte (eds), Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensis coenobii (Rouen and Paris, 1936) p. 86, Book 12, c. 2: ‘procurator per diversos portus ac civitates exigens tributa atque vectigalia, maxime in Quentawic’. De Laet, Portorium, s.v. procurateur and procurator. For its use in the later empire see Pharr, Theodosian Code, s.v. procurator.



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some indication.37 The dependent ports and cities mentioned in the Gesta probably included Rouen whose mint is described in Charles the Bald’s Edict of Pîtres from 864 as pertaining to Quentovic by ancient custom.38 Royal charters of the twelfth century relating to Normandy clearly distinguish between the sea ports and the Seine river ports (in portibus maris et in portibus Secanae).39 This is almost certainly a late reference to once separate maritime and riverine customs jurisdictions. Such jurisdictions are also evident in Frankish royal charters of exemption from toll for religious houses. 40 Immunities from toll on ships were frequently limited to specific river systems or basins of the Seine, the Loire, the Rhône, the Meuse, the Rhine and the Danube. It is clear from the wording of the charters that the exemptions applied to both road and river traffic which implies that the customs jurisdictions extended to the public highways which ran alongside the rivers. This right is also implicit in the early tenth-century Inquisitio Raffelstettensis in relation to the Danube and its tributaries.41 The customs jurisdiction would naturally extend to any river crossings whether bridges, ferries or fords. Lucien Musset has pointed out in relation to later Norman port jurisdictions that they are usually linked to tolls, the associated profits of justice and fishing rights. 42 One might add that such jurisdictions probably also included the closely related rights of flotsam and jetsam and wreck. The same type of coastal and riverine port jurisdictions are found in England, but the evidence tends to be later in date because relatively few sources survive from the early Anglo-Saxon period. Some examples will suffice to illustrate the point though it would pay a more detailed study in its own right. In 1023 Cnut allegedly granted Christ Church, Canterbury, the tolls of the port of Sandwich and all the landing places 37

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P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968) e.g. nos 8, 30 and 167–8. Interestingly, in the early thirteenth century, the Lord of Bayard’s castle had his claim to control the River Thames as far as the Middlesex border upheld as the King’s signifer (banner bearer) and procurator of the whole city of London. These rights may be of some antiquity, see M. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection of the Reign of John’, English Historical Review 17 (1902), pp. 485–6. Boretius and Krause, Capitularia Regum Francorum, II, p. 315, c. 12: ‘ad Quantovicum ex antiquo consuetudine pertinet’. See further Lebecq, ‘Pour une Histoire Parallèle’, p. 423. L. Musset, ‘Les Ports en Normandie du XI au XIII siècle: Esquisse d’histoire institutionelle’, in Autour Du Pouvoir Ducal Normand X–XII Siècles, Cahier des Annales de Normandie 17 (Caen, 1985), no. 17, pp. 113–28, esp. p. 114. On these exemptions see Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, esp. pp. 189–98; F.L. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’époque Carolingienne’, Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi dell’ altro medioevo 6 (1959), pp. 485–508; F.L. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu sous les Merovingians’, in G. Barbieri (ed.), Studi in onore di Amintori Fanfani 1 (Milan, 1962), pp. 293–315. F.L. Ganshof, ‘Note sur l’Inquisitio de theloneis Raffelstettensis’, Le Moyen Age 72 (1966), pp. 197–223. Musset, ‘Les Ports en Normandie’, p. 121 ff.




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and water dues on both sides of the Wantsum channel along with half of any clothes, nets, weapons, iron, gold or silver found on the western shore of the Wantsum.43 The Domesday entry for Nottinghamshire records that if anyone impeded ships on the River Trent or ploughed within two perches of the royal road (via regis) towards York, they had to pay an £8 fine.44 Control of the river further downstream was divided up between the royal boroughs of Newark and Torksey. An inquest of 1238 (1228) records that the lord of Torksey was entitled to tolls on traffic crossing the River Trent within its jurisdiction and on traffic using the road from Newark to Gainsborough which passed through Torksey.45 Coastal and riverine port toll jurisdictions are routinely recorded in post-Conquest documentary sources. 46 The practical control exercised by English and Frankish kings over ports and the activities of foreign traders is graphically illustrated by a dispute between Charlemagne and Offa which began around 790. 47 According to the Gesta of St Wandrille, Charlemagne had imposed an embargo on traders from Britain apparently in a fit of pique over Offa’s request to marry his son, Ecgfrith, to Charlemagne’s daughter, Bertha. 48 The Gesta claims that Charlemagne ‘gave the command that no-one from the island of Britain or the people of the Angles was to set foot 43

44

45

46

47

48

Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, no. 959; for the Anglo-Saxon text, translation and commentary see A.J. Robertson (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge, 1956), no. LXXXII and pp. 406– 7. Brooks doubts its authenticity as it stands and links it to a continuing dispute with the abbey of St Augustines, Canterbury over rights at Sandwich and in the Wantsum channel, see N.P. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church 597 to 1066 (Leicester, 1984), pp. 292–4. Whatever specific rights Christ Church did or did not have, there seems little reason to doubt that port jurisdictions themselves existed at this time. See also T. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Towns of Kent’, in Haslam, (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Towns, pp. 16–21. J. Morris (ed.), Domesday Book: Nottinghamshire 28 (Chichester, 1977), fol. 280; J.H. Round, Victoria County History of Nottinghamshire, 2 vols (London, 1906), I, pp. 238–9. N.S.B. Gras, The Early English Customs System (Cambridge, MA, 1918), pp. 155–8. On the corrected date see R.E.G. Cole, ‘The Royal Burgh of Torksey’, Associated Architectural Societies Reports and Papers 28 (1906), pp. 451–530. R.H. Britnell, ‘English Markets and Royal Administration before 1200’, pp. 194–5. Cambridge: F.W. Maitland, The Charters of the Borough of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1901), no. 1. King’s Lynn: C. Johnson and H.A. Cronne (eds), Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum (Oxford, 1956), II, no. 911. Hertford: W. Page (ed.), Victoria County History of Hertfordshire (London, 1902–23), III, p. 501; H. Chauncy, The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire, 2 vols (repr. Dorking, 1975), I, pp. 467– 8. Southampton: H.S. Cobb, The Local Port Book of Southampton 1439– 40, Southampton Record Series (Southampton, 1961), pp. L–Lii and Lxv. Exeter: A.M. Jackson, ‘Medieval Exeter, The Exe and the Earldom of Devon’, Transactions of the Devon Association 103– 4 (1971–2), pp. 59 – 61. Totnes: Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. W. Illingworth, Record Commission (London, 1818), p. 179; Rotuli Hundredorum, ed. W. Illingworth, Record Commission (London, 1812–18), I, p. 90. For the diplomatic context of this dispute, see Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: AngloSaxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750–870 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 184–7; J.L. Nelson, ‘Carolingian Contacts’, in M.P. Brown and C.A. Farr (eds), Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe (London, 2001), pp. 132–5. Lohier and Laporte (eds), Gesta . . . Fontanellensis, p. 86, Book 12, c. 2.



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on the shores of Gaul for the purposes of trade’. The existence of the trade embargo is confirmed in letters of Alcuin. 49 In 790 Alcuin wrote to the Irish monk Colcu explaining that Offa had also imposed his own embargo on traders from Francia and now ‘on both sides the passage of ships has been forbidden to merchants and is now ceasing’. Later that year, Alcuin was in Northumbria and wrote about the dispute to Abbot Adalard of Corbie (who was Charlemagne’s cousin) asking him if he knew the reasons for the dispute and urging him to assist in the process of finding a resolution since ‘we must be peacemakers between Christian peoples’. One can readily imagine the panic caused by the embargo amongst traders and local toll-collectors alike; there was a lot of revenue and peoples’ livelihoods at stake. The full impact of the dispute is unknown, though its political and commercial consequences may have been far-reaching. Besides the disruption to trade, it may have been a factor in, for example, the introduction of the Offan Group 2 coinage and the reform of the Carolingian coinage which have both been dated to around 790.50 Whilst we do not know how or when the embargo ended, though it must have been before 796 when Charlemagne sent his famous letter to Offa, St Wandrille somewhat predictably claimed that Abbot Gervold was instrumental in its resolution. The coasts were just as much frontiers as any other borderland, and questions arise about the nature of the tolls levied from foreign and other traders. François-Louis Ganshof suggested that there was a ten per cent ad valorem toll on merchandise at frontier toll stations, because of references to something called the decima in Frankish toll sources.51 The decima is mentioned in the Praeceptum Negotiatorum of Louis the Pious dated 828 which records the grant of royal protection and extensive trading privileges to royal officials and merchants working for the king.52 Recipients of the grant are given freedom from toll throughout the kingdom except at the northern and southern frontier toll stations 49

50

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Alcuin, Epistolae Alcuini, in ed. E. Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini Aevi II, MGH (Berlin, 1895), nos 7, 9, 82; translated by S. Allott, Alcuin of York c. A.D. 732 to 804: His Life and Letters (York, 1974), nos 10, 31 and 39 respectively. C.E. Blunt, ‘The Coinage of Offa’, in R.H.M. Dolley (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Coins Studies Presented to F.M. Stenton (London, 1961), pp. 39 – 62; S. Suchodolski, ‘La date de la grande réforme monétaire de Charlemagne’, Quaderni Ticinesi di Numismaticae Antichità Classiche 10 (1981), pp. 399– 409. P. Grierson, ‘Money and Coinage under Charlemagne’, in W. Braunfels (ed.), Karl der Grosse (Dusseldorf, 1965), I, pp. 501–36 favours a later date, probably 793/4. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’epoque Carolingienne’, pp. 492–3. Formulae Merovingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH (Hanover, 1886), no. 37: ‘teloneum, excepto ad opus nostrum inter Quentovico et Dorestado vel ad clusas, ubi ad opus nostrum decima exigitur, aliubi eis non requiratur’; F.L. Ganshof, ‘Note sur le “praeceptum negotiatorum” de Louis le Pieux’, in G. Barbieri (ed.), Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milan, 1957), I, pp. 101–12. A similar exemption was granted to the church of Strasbourg in 831, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straszburg, ed. W. Wiegand (Strasbourg, 1879), I, no. 23; see Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’epoque Carolingienne’, p. 492 and n. 16.




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at Quentovic, Dorestad and the Alpine passes (clusae) where the decima is collected for the king’s benefit (ubi ad opus nostrum decima exigitur). The nature of the decima levied at the Alpine passes is explained in the Honorantie civitatis Papie, an early eleventh-century compilation which incorporates tenth-century material including a record of rights attached to the old Frankish and Lombard royal treasury at Pavia in Italy.53 The Honorantie explains that merchants coming across the mountain passes into Lombardy had to pay the decima on all their merchandise to representatives of the treasury at the royal toll stations. It is specifically mentioned as applying to horses, male and female slaves, wool, linen, canvas textiles, tin and swords. The use of the phrase debent esse adecimate leaves little doubt that a ten per cent ad valorem rate of tax is meant, though whether this was paid in cash and/or in kind is unclear. The decima of the Honorantie is surely the same as the decima of the Praeceptum Negotiatorum. Besides sharing a common name, they are royal tolls levied by the treasury from merchants crossing the Alpine passes (clusae). Anglo-Saxon merchants are recorded as having secured an exemption from the decima in exchange for paying 50lbs of refined silver and providing a range of gifts and other goods to the royal treasury and its key officials every three years. The date of this remarkable agreement is not known, but it followed a violent dispute with local customs officials and was settled through the intervention of unnamed Anglo-Saxon and Lombard kings.54 Since a ten per cent toll rate on merchandise certainly applied at the Alpine toll stations, it is a reasonably safe conclusion that it was also levied at Dorestad and Quentovic as indicated in the Praeceptum Negotiatorum. However, one cannot be sure that in the sources decima always (or only) means a ten per cent tax rate on trade. A royal charter of Louis the Pious from 815 for the Episcopal church of Utrecht in 53

54

Die Honorantie Civitatis Papie, ed. C. Brühl and C. Violante (Cologne, 1983), p. 17: ‘Intrantes negotiatores in Regnum solvebant decimam de omni negotio ad clusas et ad vias, que sunt regi pertinentes . . . Omnes gentes, que veniunt de ultra montes in Lombardiam, debent esse adecimate de caballis, servis, ancillis, pannis laneis et lineis [et] canevaciis, stagno misso camerarii.’ Brühl and Violante, Die Honorantie Civitatis Papie, p. 37 suggest the unnamed Anglo-Saxon king is either Alfred or Edward the Elder based on the use of the title rex Anglorum et Saxonum, but earlier or later kings are also possible. McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy, pp. 679–80 and p. 958, R694 prefers Alfred because of toll agreements he is known to have concluded in relation to pilgrims and merchants in Rome; but one should also point out that Offa also concluded toll and trade agreements with Charlemagne regarding merchants and pilgrims (who would have been bound mainly for Rome), and he was active in Italy with the Papacy in pursuit of his objective to establish an archbishopric at Lichfield. Cnut is also a possibility, though this seems less likely because the Honorantie evidence seems to pre-date his reign, see M.K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London, 1993), pp. 202–4.



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connection with Dorestad is a case in point. 55 The charter grants the church of Utrecht the decima levied at Dorestad by the royal treasury from their lands and serfs (slaves?) and from the tolls from merchandise and other things. The decima here is not limited to taxes on trade (i.e. tolls) but also applied to the income or production of the church’s lands and serfs. It may be related in some way to the agrarium (a ten per cent tax found on estates belonging to St Martin of Tours in the Auvergne in the eighth century), and other similar taxes in Visigothic Spain mentioned in records of the seventh century onwards and the canonical ‘ushr of Islamic Spain, which like the decima were imposed on trade as well as production.56 Admittedly, the wording of the Utrecht charter (and earlier related grants) is ambiguous and capable of various different interpretations, but the references in the text to the tenth part (decima parte) and nine other parts (novem partibus) make it clear that ten per cent of something is meant.57 Ganshof interpreted this charter as meaning a grant of a ten per cent share of royal tax revenue rather than a ten per cent tax rate, and this is entirely possible. 58 If Ganshof is right, and the church of Utrecht received a tenth share, who received the other nine parts of the royal taxes? The answer is likely to be the local royal officials and delegated authorities (called procuratores as on the Channel coast) responsible for controlling tolls in the frontier districts. This allocation of taxes may once have been widespread in Frankish border provinces. The region which later became Normandy would 55

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Gysseling and Kock, Diplomata Belgica, no. 179: ‘. . . ad ipsam Ecclesiam concessissent omnem decimam de mancipiis, terris et de teloneis vel de negotio vel de omni re, undecumque ad partem regiam fiscus teloneum accipere aut exigere videbatur, et ut homines eiusdem ecclesiE sub mundeburdo et tuitione ipsius aecclesiE existerent; necnon et in ripis in Dorestado, ut nec bannum nec fredum aut coniectum quE ab ipsis giscot vocatur contingere aut exactare presumeret, et quisquis ex negotiatoribus in eorum ripas intrare voluissent, nullam contentionem ex hoc eis fecisset, nec mansiones in eorum domibus sine permissu eorum accipere auderent, nec eorum res dum aduixerint auferre, aut post mortem eorum contingere, nec ullo modo eis in aliqua re calumpniam generare quis presumeret, qui in illa decima parte vel sub mundeburdo aecclesiE sancti Martini consistunt; videlicet ut sicut illi de illis novem partibus aliquid accipere aut usurpare nec velint nec possunt, ita et procuratores rei publicE de eadem decima parte accipere aut usurpare ad fiscum non presumant’. On the agrarium see S. Sato, ‘L’Agrarium: La charge paysanne avant le regime domanial, Vie–VIIIe siècles’, Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998), pp. 103 –25; A. Verhulst, ‘Economic Organisation’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History c.700 – c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), II, p. 98; and G. Depeyrot, Richesse et Société chez les Mérovingiens et Carolingiens (Paris, 1994), pp. 78–9. See Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, p. 127 for the ‘ushr. The related charters are Gysseling and Kock, Diplomata Belgica, no. 175, Pippin III dated 753: ‘. . . ut omnem decimam de terra seu de mancipia aut de teloneo vel de negotio aut undecumque ad partibus fisci census sperare videbatur, sicut diximus’; and ibid. no. 177. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’epoque Carolingienne’, p. 496. See also the important commentary by C.L. Verkerk, ‘Les tonlieux carolingiens et ottoniens aux Pays-Bas septentrionaux, au bouches des grandes rivières’, Publications de la Section Historique de L’Institut Grand-Ducal de Luxembourg 104 (Luxembourg, 1988), pp. 165–8.




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probably have been included in the Channel coast toll jurisdiction centred on Quentovic. Lucien Musset has drawn attention in Norman sources of the late tenth through to the end of the twelfth century to grants of the decima of the tolls deriving from local toll jurisdictions including Avranches, Pont Audemer, Arques-la-Bataille, Evreux, Bayeux and Sées amongst others.59 In 1028 –35, for example, the Cathedral of Avranches received the decima of all the tolls collected in the pagus of Avranches (decimam totius telonei Abrincensis pagi) from Duke Robert.60 Musset translated it as a grant of a ten per cent share of the tolls, though it could be a late reference to the income deriving from the Carolingian decima, a ten per cent royal tax on trade and production. In either case, it is probable that the Dukes of Normandy inherited the decima as a ducal right from their Carolingian predecessors. 61 A decima paid by Slavs and Germans also appears in tenth-century Ottonian charters in connection with former Frankish frontier districts in Germany. Karl Leyser described this decima as a tributary tithe (i.e. a ten per cent rate of tax or tribute), but there is little in the sources to support this view beyond the name itself, and his distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ tithes seems an artificial one. 62 There is evidence, however, that the decima in Germany was a ten per cent share of royal tax revenues just as it was in Frisia and the area which later became Normandy. In 965, Otto I granted the abbey of St Michael at Lüneburg the tenth part of all the tolls at Bardowick, one of Charlemagne’s frontier toll stations (decimam partem totius thelonei ad nostrum ius pertinentis in Bardewic concessimus).63 Although this charter is solely concerned with tolls, Ottonian charters for St Maurice of Magdeburg are not limited in the same way. In 965, for example, Otto I granted the monastery the tenth (part) of all the tax paid in silver to the royal treasury from several Slav districts (in argento ad publicum nostrE maiestatis fiscum persolvitur . . . decimam tocius census illius).64 Otto I’s charter for Reichenau is of particular interest since it makes reference 59

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61 62 63

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L. Musset, ‘Recherches sur le tonlieu en Normandie’, in L. Musset, J.M. Bouvris and J.-M. Maillefer (eds), Autour du Pouvoir Ducal Normand Xe-XIIe Siècles, Cahiers des Annales de Normandie 17 (Caen, 1985), pp. 68–75. M. Farroux (ed.), Receuil des Actes des Ducs de Normandie 911–1066 (Caen, 1961), p. 26, n. 29; cf. ibid. nos 5, 36 and 52. L. Musset, ‘Recherches sur le tonlieu en Normandie’, pp. 64–5. K.J. Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 84–90. T. Sickel (ed.), Die Urkunden Konrad I, Heinrich, und Otto I, MGH (Hanover, 1879–84), I, no. 309; cf. no. 308 (965) a grant of the fifth part of the toll of the market at Lüneburg: ‘quintam partem tocius telonei ad nostrum ius pertinentem de mercato concessimus in Liuniburch’. Sickel, Die Urkunden Konrad, I, no. 295. Otto I also for Magdeburg, cf. nos 222 (961); 231 (961): ‘decimam de omni censu’; 303 (961): ‘omnem censum mellis . . . totam decimam mellis’; and 118 (975). Also Otto II, T. Sickel (ed.), Die Urkunden des Ottos II, MGH (Hanover, 1888), II, nos 31 (973): ‘omnemque decimam census argenti’; 140 (976): ‘cum abbaciis aecclesiis decimationibus monetis theloneis mundis’.



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to the annual levies of tribute in Germany and the allocation to the monastery of various ninth and tenth parts of the royal taxes from certain named districts.65 These arrangements may go back to the eighth century when Frisia and eastern parts of Germany were being conquered and pacified by Frankish kings. As for trade, a ten per cent rate of toll on merchandise crossing the Frankish frontiers is not that surprising given the extent to which it applied across the Byzantine and Arab world from the sixth century onwards.66 Although there is little evidence of a ten per cent toll rate in western Roman provinces, it had a long history in Byzantium and other Greek cities and Hellenistic states, and may have survived into the period of Roman rule.67 A tithe or ten per cent tax is of course well known from references in the Bible. However, under the Roman empire, the principal tax (and tax rate) on trade in the eastern provinces was the octava (meaning an eighth, or 12.5 per cent). It was only in the sixth century that the deketeia (meaning a tenth or 10 per cent) began to replace the octava across the Byzantine empire.68 The deketeia like its predecessors was levied on imports and exports in designated ports, markets and frontier toll stations. Hélène Antoniadis-Bibicou has rightly pointed out how much the principles of reciprocity applied in treaties and trade relations between the Byzantine empire and its neighbours. 69 Rules in one state were often matched by similar regulations in another. Byzantine practice certainly influenced other states, and there is evidence of a ten per cent duty in the ninth century in the Khazar state on the borders of the Byzantine Chersonese and what became Kievan Rus and also amongst the Volga Bulgars.70 Constable makes the same point about reciprocity in relation to Spain when looking at tax and trading relationships between Christians, Muslims and the Byzantines.71 The eighth-century commentator, AbU YUsuf, claimed that the earliest Islamic tariffs were in fact a response to Byzantine taxes on trade.72 A canonical tithe (the ‘ushr) or ten per cent 65

66 67 68 69 70

71 72

Sickel, Die Urkunden Konrad, I, no. 277 from 965: ‘. . . eidem monasterio concederent quandam partem census seu tributi quae eis annuatim ex Alemannia solvebantur, videlicet ex centena Erihgeuue et Apphon nuncupata, nec non et decimam de portione quae in Albegeuue iacet, seu et nonam ex fisco cuius vocabulum est Sahsbach, atque etiam et nonam partem tributi quae ex Prisegouue ad nostrum exigitur opus’. See Schmid’s comments in Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’epoque Carolingienne’, pp. 511–14. De Laet, Portorium, pp. 47–8 and p. 66. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 39, 75–95. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 99–101. S. Franklin and J. Shepherd, The Emergence of Rus 750 –1200 (London, 1996), pp. 42–3, 63. For the extent of Byzantine influence in this area see T. Noonan, ‘Byzantium and the Khazars: A Special Relationship?’, in J. Shepard and S. Franklin (eds), Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 109–32. Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, pp. 130 –2. Quoted in Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, p. 131 and referenced in n. 77.




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Fig. 2 Evidence of 10% toll rates on foreign merchants by early 9th century

duty on the goods of foreign traders was common in Islamic states from the seventh century onwards and can be found as far west as Muslim Spain by the eighth century.73 Is it an accident that a ten per cent tax was imposed on foreign merchants importing (and exporting?) goods across the frontiers of all the major medieval states in Europe by the early ninth century (see Fig. 2)? It is of course possible, but seems unlikely. The evidence points to the existence and diffusion of similar administrative practices and institutions across the Mediterranean world and continental Europe. Reciprocity in interstate trade relations may have provided the impetus, but the spread of common rules also helped facilitate the development of international trade by providing merchants with some certainty and security. Although essentially Roman in origin, one can trace at least some of these rules with confidence to Byzantine antecedents which post-date the end of the western empire. The introduction of the deketeia and the customs reforms of Justinian in the Byzantine empire in the sixth century evidently influenced the organization of taxation and trade in early medieval Europe. The common tax arrangements on trade may have been short-lived in many areas, but it is still an impressive demonstration of the centralizing power of Frankish kings. Although the decima (as a ten per cent toll rate) first appears under the Carolingians, it is probable that its history begins with the Merovingians. A ten per cent tax on production in Merovingian Gaul and in Visigothic and 73

Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 97–102; Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, pp. 126–9.



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Islamic Spain from the seventh century onwards has already been mentioned above. Moreover, the Merovingians also had close links with Byzantine and Lombard Italy. In the sixth and seventh centuries, Marseille was the main Frankish port for trade and contacts with North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. 74 It was Henri Pirenne who first pointed out similarities between the essential functions of the Byzantine apotheke and the seventh-century cellarium ( fisci or telonei) of Fos and Marseille.75 For Merovingian kings, Marseille was the great port, and it might well have exercised a profound influence on the royal administration of developing ports elsewhere in Frankish territories such as Quentovic and Rouen, and even perhaps Dorestad. 76

Anglo-Saxon tolls, pre-emption and hosting On the basis of reciprocity alone one might expect to find the same tolls and customs in English and Frankish ports. We have already seen similar types of customs jurisdiction on both sides of the Channel. Susan Kelly suggests a ten per cent tax on merchandise may have applied in England primarily because of the Carolingian evidence. 77 Anglo-Saxon rulers, ecclesiastics, merchants and other travellers had first-hand experience of the decima across Francia from Quentovic and Dorestad to northern Italy and would have come across the deketeia in Byzantine territory. Knowledge of these Frankish and Byzantine customs would also have been brought by overseas visitors like Theodore of Tarsus. It is reasonable to suppose that it was a matter of common knowledge and everyday experience. Dorestad and Quentovic seem to have been the main Frankish ports serving England in the seventh and eighth centuries. 78 Abbot Gervold 74

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S.T. Loseby, ‘Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis, I: Gregory of Tours, The Merovingian Kings, and “Un Grand Port” ’, in R. Hodges and W. Bowden (eds), The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand (Leiden, 1998), pp. 203–29. H. Pirenne, ‘Le Cellarium Fisci’, in idem, Histoire Économique de L’Occident Médiéval (Bruges, 1951), pp. 110–11; cf. F.L. Ganshof, ‘Les Bureaux du Tonlieu de Marseille et de Fos’, in Études Historiques à la mémoire de Noël Didier (Paris, 1960), pp. 125–33. See also the commentary and notes in Loseby, ‘Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis’, pp. 221–3. A decima appears in a record of 1228 for Marseille (and in twelfth-century records for Genoa); see Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, pp. 132–3. Loseby, ‘Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis’, pp. 223–9. S. Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, EME 1 (1992), p. 20 and n. 44. Kelly suggests that the ninth-century King Aethelwulf of Wessex’s ‘decimations’ also have some relevance, though this seems very doubtful; see H.P.R. Finberg, Early Charters of Wessex (Leicester, 1964), pp. 187–213. Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, pp. 314–15, no. 37. For the importance of Quentovic and Dorestad as ports of arrival and departure for cross-Channel travellers see I. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (Harlow, 1994), pp. 295–7; Lebecq, ‘Pour une Histoire Parallèle’, pp. 415–28. The fortunes of both ports fluctuated over time if the coin evidence is any guide: S. Coupland, ‘Trading Places: Quentovic and Dorestad Reassessed’, EME 11:3 (2002), pp. 209–27.




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of St Wandrille, we may recall, is described in the Gesta as ‘procurator of the kingdom’s trade, collecting the tributes and tolls (exigens tributa et vectigalia) in various ports and cities but especially in Quentovic’. 79 The phrase vectigalia et tributa was also in common use in the early Roman empire. Vectigalia were the tolls (i.e. the portoria, and later the telonea) which were normally farmed out to contractors, but the meaning of the tributa is less certain though it may have referred to tax assessments collected via local communities. 80 In the early medieval period, vectigal and tributum, and also census, were often used as generic synonyms for tolls (teloneum) and other royal taxes, so it is often difficult to be precise about their meaning in a given context. 81 In the Gesta, however, the vectigalia are surely the tolls: the payments for permission to trade. The tributa may refer to royal rights of pre-emption, which themselves are in effect tribute payments by merchants for royal protection, and the involvement of local communities in the process as in the Roman period may lend some weight to the suggestion. 82 The terminology used for tolls in Channel ports certainly suggests some common customs. Whatever the precise meaning of the phrase in the Gesta, the coupling of vectigal and tributum is in itself significant. The same phrase appears in eighth-century Anglo-Saxon toll exemptions of Aethelbald of Mercia and Eadberht II of Kent relating to London and the Kentish ports of Sarre and Fordwich.83 In these charters, the terminology for tolls is inconsistent and confusing and probably reflects the fact that vernacular words for tolls were the norm and that a specialized Latin vocabulary was still developing in England during this period. 84 Nevertheless, it would be a remarkable coincidence indeed if the use of the same phrase on both sides of the Channel was unconnected given the close association of kings, tolls and ports in a common trading area. One wonders whether claims by Merovingian kings to exercise some form of lordship in England in the sixth century has any relevance in this context. 85 The Mercian and Kentish royal charters of exemption provide important evidence about tolls and shipping customs including pre-emption 79

80

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82 83

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Lohier and Laporte, Gesta . . . Fontanellensis, p. 86, Book 12, c. 2: ‘procurator per diversos portus ac civitates exigens tributa atque vectigalia, maxime in Quentawic’. Rouen and probably Amiens were included within the Channel toll jurisdiction centred on Quentovic; see Lebecq, ‘Pour une Histoire Parallèle’, p. 423. De Laet, Portorium, pp. 45–53; W. Goffart, Caput and Colonate: Towards a History of Late Roman Taxation (Toronto, 1974), pp. 16–21. J.F. Niermeyer and C. Van Kieft (eds), Mediae Latinitas Lexicon Minus (Leiden, 2002), s.v. census, tributum and vectigal; Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu sous les Merovingians’, pp. 293–4. See the text associated with nn. 109–11 and 116 below. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, nos 29, 91, 1612 and 1788; see Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 3–28. Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 20 –1; Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 129–71 and esp. pp. 137 – 9. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751, pp. 176 – 8.



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in early eighth-century London and Kentish ports. Alain Stoclet has convincingly demonstrated that the exemptions are based on Byzantine models and suggests they were introduced into England by Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and Abbot Hadrian in the late seventh century. 86 Byzantine influence was not limited to the style and terminology of the charters but also to the trading practices themselves. King Eadberht II of Kent’s grant of 763–4 to Sigeburga, abbess of Minster, is of particular interest in this connection.87 The king granted Sigeburga freedom from toll on two ships at the port of Sarre just as Aethelbald and Offa of Mercia had previously done so at London. Sarre on the Wantsum channel was a Kentish port located at the point where the double tides from the Thames estuary and the Channel met. 88 In respect of a ship recently built at Minster, the king granted the abbey the right to replace it if it was lost through old age, shipwreck or damage. Stoclet has shown that this and similar clauses mirror later Byzantine practice and are not found as one might expect in contemporary Frankish charters of exemption.89 King Eadberht II also ordered Minster Abbey to bring any new replacement ship to Fordwich along with its goods. One likely explanation is that it allowed the king to exercise his pre-emptive rights, but it may also have served another purpose which is explained in later Byzantine administrative practice. The Byzantine state had an elaborate process for measuring and registering the cargo-carrying capacity of ships to ensure that any new ship conformed to the terms of the original exemption.90 It mattered because measuring a ship’s capacity was one of the keys to assessing the amount of tax due: the larger the ship and therefore the greater the volume of goods carried, the higher the rate of toll levied. Although Eadberht II’s charter does not specifically mention capacity, one can see an example of this in later London records. The law code IV Aethelred records that larger ships (Keels and Hulks) paid 4d. while smaller boats paid 1d. or a halfpenny at Billingsgate in London.91 86 87

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Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 87–92. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, no. 29; W. de G. Birch (ed.), Cartularium Saxonicum (London, 1885 –93), no. 189. Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 9–10; S.C. Hawkes, ‘Early Anglo-Saxon Kent’, Archaeological Journal 126 (1969), pp. 186–92; Tatton-Brown, ‘The Towns of Kent’, pp. 1–36. Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 87–113. P. Lemerle, ‘Notes sur l’administration Byzantine à la veille de la IVe croisade d’après deux documents inédits des archives de Lavra’, in Revue des Études Byzantines 19 (1961), pp. 258– 72. On Byzantine ship measures and capacity see H. Antoniadis-Bibicou, Études d’Histoire Maritime de Byzance (Paris, 1966), pp. 129–33 and A. Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire 900–1200 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 238–41. F. Liebermann (ed.), Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16), I, p. 232, IV Aethelred, c. 2 and 2.1: ‘Ad Billingesgate si advenisset una navicula, I obolus tolonei dabatur, si maior et haberet siglas, I d. Si adveniat ceol vel hulcus et ibi iaceat, quatuor d. ad teloneum.’




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There is evidence that ships were also assessed for tolls according to their carrying capacity in Frankish territory. 92 Eadberht II’s charter is also of interest for the special condition attached to the privilege of replacing any lost ship: whatever merchandise the abbey acquired or carried in the ship had to be offered to the king at Fordwich.93 Kelly identifies this as a reference to a royal right of pre-emption which makes sense of an otherwise obscure passage. 94 The charters of exemption demonstrate that tolls levied in Kentish ports were also collected in London, and we may reasonably assume that Mercian kings also enjoyed rights of pre-emption there in the eighth century. London has the largest collection of records on pre-emption, tolls and regulations governing foreign merchants of any port in northwest Europe. These records, mainly dating from the eleventh century onwards, arguably broaden our understanding of trading practices in seventh- and eighth-century London. The fact that the main trading settlement appears to have moved from the Aldwych (literally ‘the old wic’) area to within the old Roman walls sometime during the ninth century need not have altered the substance of those trading customs. 95 Administrative continuity is not necessarily dependent on archaeological continuity. Central features of the pre-emption and hosting rules appear repeatedly in sources relating to London from the seventh to the fifteenth century and beyond. Our starting point is IV Aethelred which is usually dated to about 1000 though it may be as late as 1035, and there is a good case for dating it to the reign of Cnut (1016–35).96 It is traditionally referred to as a law code but in many ways it has the feel of an inquest or an early town custumal. IV Aethelred is a record of tolls collected at Billingsgate and 92

93

94 95

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Boretius and Krause, Capitularia Regum Francorum, II, no. 253: Inquisitio de theloneis Raffelstettensis, c. 7: ‘. . . Ibi de unaqueque navi legittima, id est quam tres homines navigant, exsolvant de sale scafil III, nichilque amplius ex eis exigatur’. F.L. Ganshof, ‘Note sur l’Inquisitio de theloneis Raffelstettensis’, Le Moyen Âge 72 (1966), pp. 218–19. See further Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 204–11. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, no. 29; Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, no. 189: ‘Si autem contigerit, ut navis ista rupta et confracta sit, vel nimia vetustate consumpta, sive etiam, quod absit, naufragio perdita, ut alia in loco illius ad utilitatem ibidem Deo servientium famulorum Christi et faularum construatur; ad hanc videlicet conditionem, ut quicquid in suis mercimoniis in diversis speciebus adquirere possint nobis fideliter inoffense offere debeant, simul cum ipsa navi, ad locum qui appellatur Fordewik.’ Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 13–14. A. Vince, Saxon London: An Archaeological Investigation (London, 1990); B. Hobley, ‘Lundenwic and Lundenburh: Two Cities Rediscovered’, in R. Hodges and B. Hobley, The Rebirth of Towns, pp. 69–82. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, pp. 232–7: IV Aethelred. On possible dates see also H.R. Loyn, AngloSaxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962), pp. 93– 4; Lawson, Cnut, pp. 204– 6; D. Keene, ‘London in the Early Middle Ages’, London Journal 20 –22 (1995), p. 11. For a recent commentary on Aethelred’s early legislation see P. Wormald, The Making of English Law (Oxford, 1999), pp. 320 –30.



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of the customs governing the conduct of foreign merchants as they applied in London in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. Nothing in IV Aethelred suggests these were new tolls and customs. On arrival at port, traders took part in a formal customs process so that royal officials could exercise the king’s right of pre-emption to purchase goods at a beneficial price. At Billingsate, according to IV Aethelred, the men of Flanders, Poitou, Normandy and France had to display their goods for pre-emption and pay toll (monstrabant res suas et extolneabant), but men from the Lotharingian towns of Huy, Liège and Nivelles who travelled inland paid ostensio as well as toll (qui pertransibant ostensionem dabant et telon).97 Ostensio is a direct Latin translation of scavage which derives from the Old English sceawung meaning ‘a showing or a display’.98 It also appears in some later documents as ‘shewage’ or ‘shewite’. The tax was evidently paid by the Lotharingians when they travelled inland, but not by the other merchants who remained and displayed their goods at the port where pre-emptive rights were exercised. The meaning of scavage is not certainly known, but it is defined in a thirteenth-century glossary as a ‘quittance from the display of merchandise’ (quite de moustrance de marchandise).99 This suggests that scavage was a payment made to waive the king’s right of pre-emption at the port. Further details about the pre-emption process and the payment of scavage are found in a section of an early thirteenth-century London custumal known as the Ley as Lorengs, the Law of the Lotharingians (or ‘Lorrainers’), which probably dates back to the eleventh century. 100 According to the Ley, the Lotharingians paid scavage (with one notable exception which is discussed below) if they travelled beyond the wharves and Thames Street and took up lodgings in London. The port 97

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Liebermann, Gesetze, I, IV Aethelred, c. 2.6: ‘Flandrenses et Ponteienses et Normannia et Francia monstrabant res suas et extolneabant’; c. 2,7: ‘Hogge et Leodium et Nivella, qui pertransibant (per terras ibant), ostensionem dabant et telon’. Gras, Early English Customs System, pp. 33–5; J. Bosworth and N. Toller (eds), An AngloSaxon Dictionary (London, 1898), s.v. sceawung. The term also has a judicial meaning in the sense of proving (i.e. providing proof ), and its origins may perhaps be found in the Roman professio, the process whereby tax collectors inspected goods to ensure that the correct tax was levied, De Laet, Portorium, pp. 438–9. Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, Roll Series (London, 1896), III, p. 1033, s.v. shewite ; cf. Placita de Quo Warranto, p. 275, s.v. shewyngge, and Liber Monasterii de Hyda, ed. E. Edwards (London, 1866), p. 43, s.v. scheauwyng. See also Liber Albus: The White Book of the City of London, ed. H.T. Riley, Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis (London, 1861), p. 223. The best edition remains M. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection of the Reign of John’, English Historical Review 17 (1902), pp. 495–502; see also pp. 480 –3 for the introduction. K. Höhlbaum, Hansisches Urkundenbuch (Halle, 1876 – 86), III, pp. 388– 92. A translation may be found in Liber Custumarum, ed. H.T. Riley, Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis (London, 1860), vol. II, pt. II, pp. 528 –30. The London custumal or municipal collection dates from 1210 –16, but the Ley section, written in Norman French, is considered to be much older. Although previously dated to around 1130, an eleventh-century date seems much more likely, on which see further C. Brooke and G. Keir, London 800–1216: The Shaping of a City (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), p. 267 and n. 2.




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clearly operated under different rules from the town, and Thames Street probably served as the boundary line of the port jurisdiction along the shore. It helps explain the meaning of the word pertransibant in IV Aethelred; the Lotharingians were crossing the boundary of the port jurisdiction and travelling into the town. This distinction between port and town is apparent in ninth-century charters relating to the activities of the bishops of Worcester in London who were already involved in trade there as early as the eighth century, according to the evidence of one of the toll exemptions. In the ninth century they are found collecting tolls from traders and exercising rights to profit from the control of weights and measures within their property in London. There is no reference to them having hosting or pre-emption rights there, but this is possible.101 In 857 King Burgred granted a profitable plot of land called Ceolmundinghaga in London (in vicu Londoniae) to Bishop Alhhun who was allowed to use weights and measures following the customs of the port (sicut in porto mos est).102 On the basis of the reference to the wic and the comparative lack of archaeological evidence for intramural settlement prior to the tenth century, it is generally assumed that Ceolmundinghaga was located in the Strand settlement though clearly it was outside the area designated as the ‘port’. But Ceolmundinghaga is not certainly located in the Strand, and one should not make too much of the negative archaeological evidence for lack of intramural habitation. In 889 King Alfred granted Bishop Waerferth of Worcester a curtis known as aet Hwaetmundes stane in London, which has been identified as the same property as the one granted some ten years later to Bishop Waermund of Worcester at Queenhithe within the walls.103 Bishop Waerferth was entitled to collect tolls within the curtis, but tolls collected on the public road (in strata publica) running up from the Thames, or on the shore (in ripa emtorali), belonged to the king as of right ( juxta quod rectum sit thelon ad manum regis). These were not new royal toll rights and the strata publica evidently pre-dates the grant (or confirmation) of the property which pushes intramural 101

102 103

It is worth noting that Westminster Abbey claimed the right to collect scavage (sceawung) within their sokes in London in spurious eleventh-century grants which were subsequently confirmed in the twelfth century: Anglo-Saxon Writs ed. F.E. Harmer (Stamford, 1952), nos 105 and 106, and see pp. 83, 334. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. H.W.C. Davis (Oxford, 1913), I, no. 216, cf. ibid. no. 141 for St Peter of Ghent; Regesta Regum AngloNormannorum, eds C. Johnson and H.A. Cronne (Oxford, 1956), II, nos 1247, 1248 and 1249; Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, eds H.A. Cronne and R.H.C. Davis (Oxford, 1968), III, no. 928. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, no. 208. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, nos 346 and 1628. T. Dyson, ‘Two Saxon Land Grants for Queenhithe’, in J. Bird, H. Chapman and J. Clark (eds), Collecteanea Londoniensis, London Middlesex Archaeology Society Special Paper 2 (1978), pp. 200 –15. See also Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 12–13.



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settlement back well into the ninth century. Dyson has convincingly identified the location and boundaries of this intramural property. It was bounded on the south by a wall identified as the Roman riverside wall which ran along or close to what later became known as Thames Street. The ripa emtorali was thus the shore south of the line of the later Thames Street and the area where tolls were reserved to the king. It is the same street, and doubtless the same boundary line, as that indicated for the port jurisdiction in the Ley, which by the eleventh century the Lotharingians were allowed to cross. A distinction between port and town is also indicated in postConquest sources relating to other former Anglo-Saxon royal ports such as Southampton, Chester and Ipswich. 104 Carolingian evidence suggests the same thing in Francia. In Adrevald’s ninth-century life of St Benedict, a boat belonging to the monastery of Fleury is seized by royal officials at Orleans for alleged toll evasion and held in the royal port (portus fiscali).105 The existence of separate jurisdictions within towns (both secular and ecclesiastical) is well attested in later medieval records of towns in both Francia and England. 106 In Muslim Spain, similar jurisdictions in major ports are found at Seville, and probably at Almeria, which allowed the authorities to control foreign merchants in return for protection.107 In London, the Lotharingian wine merchants were limited to stays of forty days (and forty nights). A forty-day rule was evidently common in London and applied to other groups of foreign merchants. 108 This fixed period probably derives, some foreign visitors may have felt rather aptly, from the biblical stories of Jesus’ and Moses’ sojourns in the wilderness. At any rate, the Lotharingians had to notify the sheriff of the location of their lodgings (i.e. hostels) and wait for three days before unpacking their goods for sale. Anyone disobeying this regulation risked forfeiting their goods. The waiting period provided an opportunity for the sheriff to visit the hostels to assess and collect the scavage due. 104

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Southampton: Cobb, The Local Port Book of Southampton, p. xii. Chester: K.P. Wilson, Chester Customs Accounts 1301–1566 (1969), p. 12. Ipswich: The Black Book of the Admiralty, vol. II: ‘Le Domesday de Gipewyz’, ed. T. Twiss, Rolls Series 55 (London, 1873), I, pp. 184–206. Adrevald of Fleury, Ex Adrevaldi Floriacensis Miraculis Sancti Benedicti, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores 15.1 (Hanover, 1887), p. 487; Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu a l’époque Carolingienne’, pp. 485–91. R.H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 25–52. Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain, pp. 115–16. The rule applied to foreign woad merchants, Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 725; Gascon wine merchants are also recorded in 1280 as previously limited to stays of forty days in London, T.H. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (Sussex, 1982), pp. 24–6. The rule evidently spread to other towns as one can see for example in a record of 1309 for King’s Lynn, accessible at S. Alford’s website , s.v. ‘Aliens’.




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According to the fifteenth-century Liber Albus, the profits of scavage were divided equally between the sheriff of London and the hosts (i.e. owners or landlords) of the hostels.109 The hosts were either merchants themselves or normally involved in trade on their own account or through agents. As was the case elsewhere, hosts probably exercised some right of pre-emption on the foreigners’ goods and actively traded on their own and the foreigners’ behalf. 110 Profits from scavage and preemption helped to incentivize hosts to assist royal officials in controlling the activities and behaviour of foreign merchants. Scavage may thus have been not simply a commutation of the king’s right of pre-emption (and that of delegated authorities like the merchants of London) at the port, but a payment for permission to lodge with, and receive protection from, hosts in the town. If this is the case, then scavage may be related to the skaliatikon (i.e. scaliatico which also appears in the west as scalaticum or scalagium), a tax collected in ports of the Byzantine empire apparently for permission to use commercial hostels. 111 Pre-emptive rights (and related commuted dues like scavage) may be interpreted as tribute payments by foreign merchants to kings and other hosts in return for their protection. The hosting rules mentioned in the Ley are obviously not new regulations and almost certainly represent ancient practices. Their prime purpose was probably to find someone to take responsibility for foreign merchants who were operating outside their normal kinship groups while overseas. In the late seventh century, the law code of King Ine of Wessex makes implicit reference to hosts and what happens to the wergilds of foreigners who are killed while under their protection. 112 Hosts had legal status and were responsible for the merchants and travellers who lodged with them. In cases where a foreigner had no kin then the wergild was shared equally between the host and the king; it may be purely coincidental but one should note that the proceeds of scavage at London were shared in the same proportions. King Ine may not have controlled London directly, but it is probable he exercised some kind of influence there because Bishop Earconwald of London is 109

110

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Riley, Liber Albus, p. 223. For the background to this text see W. Kellaway, ‘John Carpenter’s Liber Albus’, Guildhall Studies in London History 3:2 (1978). See n. 154 below. For London see Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, pp. 23–4. Note also the rules in the London woad trade, Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, pp. 724 – 6. G. Rouillard, ‘Les taxes maritimes et commerciales d’après des actes de Patmos et de Lavra’, in Mélanges Charles Diehl (Paris, 1930), pp. 282–3; Antoniadis-Bibicou, Recherches sur les Douanes à Byzances, pp. 134–5; C. du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium . . . Latinitas (Niort, 1883–7), s.v. scalagium. Gras, Early English Customs System, p. 33, n. 1 also suggested a connection, though on doubtful etymological grounds. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, pp. 88–123, c. 23; translated Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, pp. 36–61, c. 23, and D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents c.500–1042 (London, 1955), I, pp. 364–72, c. 23.



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mentioned in his law code.113 At any rate, Ine’s law would certainly have applied in Wessex, and later records show that Southampton (Hamwic’s successor) had hosting rules (on which see further below). The late seventh-century law code of the Kentish kings, Hlothere and Eadric, which makes specific reference to London, is more explicit on the subject of the involvement of hosts with foreign traders as opposed to travellers in general. It states that ‘if anyone harbours a stranger (i.e. a foreigner), a trader or any other man who has come across the frontier, for three nights in his own home, and then supplies him with his food, and he does any injury to any man, the man is to bring the other to justice or to discharge the obligations for him’.114 It would be surprising indeed if the three-nights rule for hosting foreigners in the late seventh century is unrelated to the three-days rule for hosting foreigners and collecting scavage in London recorded for the first time in the eleventh-century Ley and implied in IV Aethelred.115 Although we lack conclusive proof, it seems reasonable to suggest that pre-emption (which is first recorded in passing in an eighth-century toll exemption) and even perhaps scavage, just like the related hosting rules, go back at least to the late seventh century.116 The hosting regulations were not merely old customs surviving in antiquarian collections. As late as 1364, almost 700 years later, the king instructed London sheriffs to advise hosts ‘not to take in any stranger unless they can be ready to answer for the conduct of those they harbour for the preservation of the peace’. 117 For centuries it was a live public order issue as well as a matter of taxation and trade. The hosts are identified in one clause of Ine’s law code as abbots and abbesses, and in another as gesiths, a high-status group with a 1200 shilling wergild like the thegns of later Anglo-Saxon England with whom they are often identified.118 If we assume that the hosts in Hlothere and 113

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B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1995), p. 62; and B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1990), p. 56, on the limits of West Saxon territory towards London in the early medieval period. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, pp. 9 –11, c. 15; translated here by Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 361, c. 15, and cf. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, pp. 18–23, c. 15. It is worth noting that Christian merchants were forbidden from staying longer than three days in the ports and markets of the Hejaz region of Arabia in the early medieval period, see Lopez, ‘Du marché temporaire à la colonie permanente’, p. 397 and the references cited there. One wonders whether the phrase vectigal et tributum in eighth-century toll exemptions is related to the telon’ et ostensio of IV Aethelred. In this case, tributum may refer to the preemption process rather than necessarily scavage itself. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London G, ed. R.R. Sharpe (London, 1906), p. 182; cf. ‘The Oath of the Hostellers’, in Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London D, ed. R.R. Sharpe (London, 1902), p. 194 and Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London H, ed. R.R. Sharpe (London, 1907), p. 167. On gesiths see Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 362, n. 3; F. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971), pp. 302–4; H.R. Loyn, ‘Kings, Gesiths and Thegns’, in M.O.H. Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 75–9.




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Eadric’s law code were of similar status, and there seems no good reason not to do so in the absence of an alternative explanation, then it raises important questions about the involvement of secular and ecclesiastical landowners in trade. Members of the highest-status groups in the late seventh century, at least in London, Kent and Wessex, owned or controlled the hostels where foreigners lodged during visits and would have participated in pre-emption and trading with merchants under authority delegated by kings. It is not much of a leap of faith to include churchmen in this group since we know from the eighth-century toll exemptions that bishops and abbesses were actively participating in trade by operating cargo ships along the Wantsum and the Thames to London. 119 These ships were presumably involved not only in coastal trading but also bringing goods from across the Channel and many were no doubt carrying wine. Anglo-Saxon merchants were notable buyers of wine at the fair of St Denis and in the Paris region during the eighth century. 120 The abbey of St Denis itself may have been trading wine in London, for it operated a port (probably Sandvic) at the mouth of the River Seine, and an admittedly doubtful charter of Offa’s suggests the abbey owned property and privileges in Lundenwic.121 The monastery of St Germain-des-Prés produced a vast surplus of wine and much of it went to the fair at St Denis.122 Some of this wine was probably for direct export since the abbey had secured a royal exemption from tolls throughout Francia including the major ports of Rouen, Quentovic, Maastricht and Dorestad and, perhaps more significantly, their tenants owed carrying services to Quentovic.123 The wine trade was at the heart of cross-Channel traffic throughout the Middle Ages. English kings were primarily interested in securing supplies of wine and profiting from the wine trade above any other commodity judging by the elaborate pre-emption rules applied to 119 120

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Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’. Diplomata Karolinorum, ed. E. Mühlbacher, MGH (Hanover, 1906), I, no. 6 (753) and no. 12 (759); cf. Les diplômes originaux des mérovingiennes, eds P. Lauer and C. Samaran (Paris, 1908), no. 31. L. Levillain, ‘Études sur L’Abbaye de Saint-Denis à l’époque Mérovingienne’, in Bibliothèque de L’École Des Chartres 91 (1930), pp. 5–65. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, pp. 647–53. J. Le Maho, ‘The Fate of Ports of the Lower Seine Valley at the End of the Ninth Century’, in Pestell and Ulmschneider, Markets in Early Medieval Europe, pp. 234–6. Sawyer, AngloSaxon Charters, no. 133: although there are concerns about the charter’s authenticity, it seems unlikely that St Denis would lay claim to specific rights overseas in London if it had none; Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 23–4. K. Elmshäuser and A. Hedwig, Studien zum Polyptychon von Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Cologne, 1993), pp. 365–99; Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy, pp. 101–2. J.-P. Devroey, ‘Un monastère dans l’économie d’échanges: les services de transport à l’abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés au IXe siècle’, in Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 39 (1984), pp. 573–7. Charlemagne’s original confirmation of 779: Diplomata Karolinorum, ed. Muhlbacher, I, no. 122.



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foreign traders and the trade in London. Royal officials like moneyers and wic-reeves benefited from their close association with kings and trade. Studies of London’s ruling class in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, when detailed records are more readily available, demonstrate that royal and town officials were themselves often important landowners and that trade in luxury goods, notably wine, was of some significance amongst them.124 The hosting rules suggest, albeit indirectly, that it may not have been essentially any different in the seventh and eighth centuries. The Ley rules on pre-emption may also be revealing about London’s early merchant community. When the Lotharingian wine fleet docked in London, no merchant of London was allowed aboard ship to trade for two ebbs and a flood tide except to buy the customary sample of ‘tap-wine’ for a penny. Anyone who ignored this rule risked paying a forty-shilling fine to the king. The same fine is found in other former Anglo-Saxon royal ports.125 It was intended to ensure that goods were not concealed from the king’s officers so that the correct tolls and customs were levied. The Lotharingians only paid the scavage on wine (which was also known as cornage) at London if the royal officials did not come within the allotted time.126 If the royal officials arrived at the wharves within the waiting period, then if the ship was a keel, they were entitled to buy two tuns behind the mast and one before: ‘the best for the same price as that at which the mean quality is sold, and the mean quality for the price at which the lowest is sold’. If the ship was a hulk, then one tun was taken before the mast and one tun after. Good quality wine was normally stored behind the ship’s mast to minimize the risk of water damage during the voyage.127 On the basis of two tuns for hulks, pre-emption applied to approximately ten per cent of the hulk’s wine cargo.128 It may not have been much less for a keel. After the royal officials had finished, the Lotharingians were obliged to sell their goods 124

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127 128

S. Reynolds, ‘The Rulers of London in the Twelfth Century’, History 57 (1972), pp. 337–57; G. Williams, Medieval London, from Commune to Capital (London, 1963), pp. 63–5; see Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society, pp. 87–104 for a more general survey of urban rulers in medieval France and England. For Chester see J. Tait, The Domesday Survey of Cheshire (Manchester, 1916), p. 85; J. Morris (ed.), Domesday Book: Cheshire 26 (Chichester, 1978), fol. 262b: ‘The king’s reeve ordered those who had marten pelts not to sell to anyone until they had first been shown ( prius ostensas) to him, anyone who neglected this paid a fine of 40s.’ Norwich: The Records of the City of Norwich, ed. J.C. Tingey (1906), I, pp. 187–8, c. 41. Maldon: S. Alsford , s.v. ‘c. 26’. A similar fine may also have applied at Ipswich, cf. Twiss, The Black Book of the Admiralty, c. 66. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, pp. 497–8. Cornage, the scavage on wine (levied at so many pennies on the tun), is the origin of what later became known more generally as the wine custom; Gras, Early English Customs System, pp. 35–6 appears to have missed the wine custom’s connection to scavage. Gras, Early English Customs System, pp. 39–40; Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, pp. 87–8. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, p. 87. It is probably only a coincidence, but in the Hittite empire, pre-emption was limited to ten per cent on textiles; see the references in n. 180.




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first to the merchants of London, and then, according to one manuscript version of the Ley, the merchants of Oxford, and finally those of Winchester.129 This pecking order of pre-emptive rights for merchants of particular Anglo-Saxon towns is significant and may reflect longstanding arrangements. The important point to emphasize here, however, is that the royal right of pre-emption did not entitle the king to free wine, and it was the merchants of London who were responsible for setting the price. Was their role in price setting an innovation, and if so, why and when did it happen, or was it always an intrinsic part of the pre-emption process? If it was the latter, then some group or community of Londoners involved in trade was setting market prices and discounts for the king in the seventh and eighth centuries. Pre-emption and hosting rules were not limited to wine. According to the Ley, the royal officials were also interested in silver and gold cups, gemstones, cloth and linen from Constantinople, furs from Regensburg and coats of mail from Mainz.130 There was probably a limit on the amount of these luxury goods available for pre-emption though the Ley does not mention it. The Ley does imply, however, that these luxury goods were not expected on every shipment. Pre-emption and hosting rules also appear in connection with woad merchants (wesdarii ) in an unnamed section of the same early thirteenthcentury London custumal in which the Ley is recorded.131 This section on the wesdarii, which may date back to the eleventh century because of possible links with IV Aethelred which are noted below, has not received the attention it deserves. A history of the woad trade in London shows that these unnamed merchants were almost certainly primarily from Picardy (Ponthieu), the most famous centre for the production of woad in Europe.132 According to the custumal, merchants were not allowed to store their woad in houses or cellars, but were forced to display their goods on the quay at London and only sell or exchange them with London merchants (under delegated rights of pre-emption). References to the open display of woad strongly suggest, and later sources confirm, that it was being shipped in barrels (probably as balled woad in bulk rather than finished dry powder).133 At the quay, the woad merchants also paid 129

130 131 132

133

Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 497. Interestingly, merchants from Winchester and Oxford played an important role in the coronation rituals of English kings, which says a lot about their relative status amongst English towns; J.H. Round, The King’s Serjeants and Officers of State with their Coronation Services (London, 1911), pp. 165–72. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, pp. 496 and 499. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, pp. 724 –6. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, esp. pp. 73–83. E.M. Carus-Wilson, ‘La Guède Française en Angleterre: une grand commerce du moyen âge’, Revue du Nord 35 (1953), pp. 89 –105. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, p. 78; C.H. Plowright, ‘On the Archaeology of Woad’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, ns 9 (1903), pp. 95–100.



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one halfpenny to the king in toll. They were not allowed to travel into the city or sell their goods anywhere else and were only permitted to stay for a period of forty days in order to sell or exchange their goods. In 1237 the guild merchant of Amiens, Corbie and Nesle (towns of Ponthieu which dominated the woad trade) received a grant of privileges in return for a fifty-mark annual contribution to the farm of London.134 The merchants were now able to take up lodgings in the city like the Lotharingian wine merchants before them, and hosts could act as brokers though not sellers of woad. The merchants were free to sell woad to non-citizens and to transport the goods elsewhere within the country. Imported garlic and onions, which rode piggyback on the woad trade, were also free from customs, but wine and corn were still subject to pre-emption by Londoners at the port. In fourteenth-century sources, woad merchants are recorded as paying 3d. per tun in scavage, which was divided equally between their hosts and the sheriff of London.135 The regulations on woad parallel, and were probably strongly influenced by, those of the wine trade. At London and Ipswich, wine and woad are mentioned together in the same pre-emption and hosting regulations. We may reasonably suppose the rules on woad described in the early thirteenth-century London custumal are very much older, since they confirm, and expand upon, the brief mention in IV Aethelred where the men of Ponthieu (amongst others) are similarly described as displaying their goods for pre-emption and paying toll (monstrabant res suas et extolneabant).136 Unlike the privileged Lotharingians, the men of Ponthieu were evidently confined to the port jurisdiction around 1000 and remained so until the agreement in the early thirteenth century. The history of these arrangements is lost, but it may be significant that Corbie features amongst the towns of Ponthieu included in the thirteenth-century guild merchant. The famous abbey of Corbie which gave rise to the town dates back to the seventh century and notably (and unusually) secured a royal exemption from toll throughout the kingdom from Clothar III in 661. 137 The abbey was thus well placed to benefit from trade, and we know there was an early demand for Frankish dyestuffs like madder in England. 138 In 790, Alcuin may have 134

135

136

137

138

Riley, Liber Albus, I, pp. 228, 418 –24; Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, p. 74; Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 86. Calendar of Letter-Books, G, p. 67; A. Beardwood, Alien Merchants in England 1350 to 1377, The Medieval Academy of America (Cambridge, MA, 1931), p. 34. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, IV Aethelred, c. 2.6: ‘Flandrenses et Ponteienses et Normannia et Francia monstrabant res suas et extolneabant.’ D. Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance (Sigmaringen, 1990); on the toll exemption and Corbie’s rental income from the toll station at Fos, see Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu sous les Merovingians’, pp. 305–10. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, pp. 651–2.




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approached Abbot Adalard of Corbie to assist in settling the dispute between Charlemagne and Offa not simply because he was Charlemagne’s cousin, but because the abbey was a major player in the English wine and woad trade. This is of course all very speculative, but such a combined trade may go some way towards explaining the early importance of Quentovic which is situated conveniently close to Amiens and Corbie on a short and direct route to England. It may also have played a role in the distribution of northern French wares found at Ipswich and elsewhere in eastern England in the middle Saxon period. 139 It is interesting to note that in the thirteenth century, when detailed records appear, Southampton (Hamwic), Sandwich (Sandwic), London (Lundenwic), Ipswich (Gipeswic), Yarmouth, King’s Lynn (previously Bawsey?), and Hull (formerly Wyke = wic) were the main ports of trade for woad and that successive generations of family traders tended to use the same specific ports.140 Some patterns of trade may be very old indeed. Speculation about the possible early role of Corbie in the London woad trade raises questions about the other trade agreements with groups of foreign merchants recorded implicitly for the first time in IV Aethelred. Do they also go back several centuries just like the hosting regulations themselves? The trading privileges of the Lotharingian merchants from Huy, Liège and Nivelles are a case in point. How and when were these relatively minor places able to win from Anglo-Saxon kings such extraordinary rights in London? There is a case for believing that these privileges may have been granted by kings of Kent or Mercia as early as the late seventh or more probably the first half of the eighth century as part of the process of developing closer ties with the rising power of the Pippinids in Francia. Nivelles is a small rural market town today, but is best known as one of two early family monasteries of the Pippinids. Its nunnery was founded sometime in the mid-seventh century by Pippin I’s daughter Geretrud, who died in 659 and was subsequently promoted as a saint. The near contemporary Vita Geretrudis which survives in an eighthcentury manuscript mentions a ship ‘sailing over the sea on the monastery’s business’, probably to England. 141 Huy is called a castrum and 139

140

141

R. Hodges, ‘Some Early Medieval French Wares in the British Isles: An Archaeological Assessment of the Early French Wine Trade with Britain’, in D.P.S. Peacock, Pottery and Early Commerce: Characterization and Trade in Roman and Later Ceramics (London, 1977), pp. 245–7; K. Wade, ‘Ipswich’, in R. Hodges and Hobley, The Rebirth of Towns, p. 96. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, pp. 73–83. On a possible precursor middle Saxon port for King’s Lynn at Bawsey, see Pestell and Ulmschneider, Markets in Early Medieval Europe, pp. 112–14 and 124–6. Life of St Gertrude, Vita Geretrudis, c. 5, ed. B. Krusch, MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, II (Hanover, 1884–1951); translated in P. Fouracre and R.A. Gerberding, Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography 640–720 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 301–26, esp. p. 323. See also Story, Carolingian Connections, p. 38 and n. 88 on manuscripts received by Nivelles from across the sea (transmarinas) and relations between Francia and England.



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had an important mint in the seventh century which strongly suggests an active involvement in trade at that time. 142 In the eighth century the double monastery of Stablo-Malmedy claimed the right to collect tolls at Huy and Dinant on the River Meuse, a sure sign of a controlling interest in the ports.143 Stablo-Malmedy was another family monastery of the Pippinids and was founded in the mid-seventh century by Grimoald, Pippin I’s son, and later received extensive lands and privileges from Pippin II.144 Liège first rose to prominence as the location of the church of St Lambert and it was here that Pippin II’s son, Grimoald, was murdered while praying at the shrine shortly before his father’s own death in 714. The region around Liège is closely associated with Alpaida, Plectrude and other prominent members of the Pippinids. 145 In the crisis of 715–17, following Pippin II’s death, the Austrasians rallied round Charles Martel in the face of aggression from the Neustrians, Frisians and Saxons. Charles’s victory over the Neustrians at Amblève in 716 probably largely depended on the key support of the Pippinid family lands, monasteries and supporters in the area around Liège and the valley of the River Meuse. He may subsequently have rewarded the church of St Lambert and the family monasteries for their support when he became the dominant power in Francia from 723 onwards. Following the death of Charles Martel in 741, neither Pippin III nor Charlemagne showed the same level of interest in the old family monasteries; they had moved on to bigger things. The church of Liège and the family monasteries of Nivelles and Stablo-Malmedy were never again simultaneously to enjoy such a central role in Pippinid and Carolingian affairs. If, as seems likely, the churches received their privileges in London at the same time, then one may tentatively suggest it was some time during the later 720s or the 730s when King Aethelbald of Mercia was in control of London. The trading privileges would presumably have been inherited at some later stage by the associated merchant communities of Huy, Liège and Nivelles. Another possible early trade agreement recorded in IV Aethelred concerns a group of merchants known as the ‘men of the emperor’ (homines imperatoris) who are said to enjoy the same privileges as ‘our (i.e. the English king’s) men’ (sicut et nos).146 Who these merchants were has been the subject of much speculation. The weight of scholarly opinion 142 143 144

145

146

A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe, pp. 5–7, 26–30, 48–9 and 72–5 on Huy. Ganshof, ‘A propos du tonlieu sous les Merovingians’, pp. 308–9. J. Halkin and C. Roland, Receuil des Chartes de l’Abbaye de Stavelot-Malmedy (Brussels, 1909); Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, pp. 38–40. R. Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Oxford, 1987), pp. 120–30, but see also Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, p. 34 and n. 4. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, IV Aethelred, c. 2.8: ‘Et homines imperatoris, qui veniebant in navibus suis, bonarum legum digni tenebantur, sicut et nos.’




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favours identifying the homines imperatoris as German merchants, primarily from Cologne, who are known to have played a prominent role in Anglo-German trade relations in better-documented times. 147 By the twelfth century, Cologne dominated trade in Germany and together with Aachen was the main centre for the production and sale of Rhenish textiles made from English and German wool. 148 Merchants from Cologne exported Rhenish wine and luxury goods to London and elsewhere in England, and returned with cargoes of wool. The wording of IV Aethelred, and especially the phrase sicut et nos, finds a striking echo in a later charter of privileges for the merchants of Cologne in London. Henry II’s charter dating from 1173–5 orders royal officials to protect the men and citizens of Cologne just like his own men and associates (sicut homines meos et amicos).149 If the two passages are related, then the Cologne merchants may be synonymous with the homines imperatoris of IV Aethelred. Moreover, the wording of Henry II’s charter implies that we are dealing with a narrower group of English merchants and royal officials closely associated with the king, rather than a blanket reference to all the citizens of London which is the traditional explanation of the phrase sicut et nos in IV Aethelred. These documents provide evidence for a reciprocal trading agreement of some antiquity between the English king and the German emperor to protect what are probably their own palace or ‘royal-appointed’ merchants and agents. The agreement itself is certainly older than IV Aethelred and may go back to the eighth century. The Praeceptum Negotiatorum of 828 describes the extensive trading privileges enjoyed by the Frankish royal palace merchants who probably came from, or were at least mainly based at that time in, the Aachen–Cologne area. 150 They were trading with England then, since we may recall that they had to pay the decima at Quentovic and Dorestad which was due on imports (and probably exports as well). The Utrecht charter of 815 denies unnamed persons (most likely royal merchants and officials) the right to any compulsory accommodation in properties belonging to the church of Utrecht in Dorestad, and this may be a reference to the same people. 151 Frankish traders were certainly active around this time in England as we know from Charlemagne’s famous letter of 796 to King Offa. 152 Charlemagne 147 148 149

150 151 152

J.P. Huffman, Family, Commerce and Religion in London and Cologne (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 9 –10. Huffman, Family, Commerce and Religion in London and Cologne, p. 10 ff. Receuils des actes de Henri II roi d’Angleterre et Duc de Normandie, concernant Les Provinces de France et Les Affaires de France, eds L. Delisle and E. Berger (Paris, 1909), II, no. 540, pp. 116–17. See n. 52 above See n. 55 above. Letters of Alcuin, Alcuini Epistolae, ed. E. Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, II (Berlin, 1895), no. 85; Whitelock, English Historical Documents, no. 197, pp. 781–2 for the translation.



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granted English merchants ‘protection and support in our kingdom, lawfully, according to the ancient custom of trading’, in return for similar protection for his own merchants in England. Though the letter seems to refer to merchants in general, just as it does in the case of pilgrims, palace merchants on both sides would no doubt have ranked higher in status and priority as far as royal protection is concerned. Originally, the ‘German’ merchants (homines imperatoris) of IV Aethelred may well have been the Frankish palace merchants based in the Aachen– Cologne area. Since this area once formed part of Lotharingia, it would explain why the Ley as Lorengs implicitly identifies the homines imperatoris as Lotharingians.153 The special privileges of the merchants associated with the palace probably set them apart from other Lotharingian merchants but, by the eleventh century, those privileges had been acquired by a wider community of merchants led by Cologne itself. One may tentatively suggest that Frankish palace merchants were trading in London in wine, wool, cloth and luxury goods in the eighth century, just as their successors were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Hosting rules and rights of pre-emption were probably once widespread in major English ports. It is of particular interest to note in later medieval town records that hosting and pre-emption rights are found primarily in early Anglo-Saxon royal ports including Ipswich, Norwich and Yarmouth in East Anglia, Southampton in Wessex, Sandwich and Dover in Kent, and Chester and Torksey in Mercia. 154 At Ipswich, hosts were entitled to a pre-emptive option to buy one-quarter of the foreigners’ goods in exchange for acting as their advisers in the selling process to fellow merchants of the town. This rule did not however apply to wine and woad merchants who sold their goods from warehouses (presumably on the quays), which may imply that there were once separate port and town jurisdictions in Ipswich as in London. At Dover, hosts had a pre-emptive right on half of the goods of foreigners when they assisted them in selling to townsmen. In fourteenth-century Torksey, a rural backwater by this period, an even higher pre-emptive share is recorded in the event that the goods were sold within the house of the host. This rule is perhaps a late reminder of the time when Torksey was an important 153 154

Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 498, c. 10 and 12. M. Bateson (ed.), ‘Borough Customs’, Selden Society (1906), I, 21, p. 177: Torksey; pp. 178–9: Sandwich and Dover; p. 181: Ipswich, but see also Twiss, The Black Book of the Admiralty, Custumal, c. 38 and c. 60 for the full record. Norwich: The Records of the City of Norwich, ed. J.C. Tingey (Norwich, 1906), I, pp. 188–9, c. 42. Yarmouth: Book of Oaths and Ordinances (Yarmouth C18/1) includes hosting rules recorded in 1300, translated by S. Alsford at . Southampton: C. Platt, Medieval Southampton: The Port and Trading Community, A.D. 1000–1600 (London, 1973), pp. 69 –70 and 152–3 and Bateson, ibid. p. 181, n. 2. Chester: see n. 125 above. See also Kings Lynn in 1363, S. Alsford .




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Mercian frontier port and international trading centre controlling the movement of ships up the River Trent to the Mercian heartlands, and a crossroad on key communications routes between London, Lincoln, York and the kingdom of Northumbria. 155 There is also evidence for pre-emption, scavage (the wine custom) and residence rights for foreigners at Bristol. 156 This may suggest an early foundation date, but there is little corroborative evidence and what information there is about town origins suggests that Bristol only took off in the tenth century.157 Pre-emption rules in London are matched by similar rules across the Channel. Merchants of Rouen are noted in IV Aethelred as importers of wine and whales (or large fish = craspisce) at Billingsgate in London.158 In 1150 –1, Duke Henry confirmed the privileges of the Rouen merchants in London, but reserved his customs on wine and whales. 159 King John’s charter of 1199 confirms that pre-emption applied in London for the king specifically reserved his right to take for his own use one tun before the mast and one tun after on unspecified payment terms (which may be the same as those of the Lotharingians).160 The right of pre-emption on wine and other goods at Rouen and ports like Pont Audemer was known as the modiatio, which derives from the word modius which probably in this context means a hogshead. 161 The modiatio appears as early as 1055 and therefore pre-dates the Conquest. 162 This payment of wine was collected and stored by the Duke of Normandy presumably in his own premises, which may effectively be the northern equivalent of the cellarium ( fisci or telonei ) of Fos and Marseille. In the twelfth century, religious houses in Normandy sometimes secured exemption from the modiatio on their own wine.163 Henry II’s exemption for Montebourg Abbey has a curious passage which reminds one of IV

155

156

157 158 159

160

161

162

163

M. Barley, ‘The Medieval Borough of Torksey: Excavations, 1960 –2’, Antiquaries Journal 44 (1964), pp. 166–8. F.B. Bickley, The Little Red Book of Bristol (Bristol, 1900) , vol. I, p. 29, c. 3; vol. II, p. 231, c. 39–40. E.W.W. Veale, The Great Red Book of Bristol, Bristol Record Society (Bristol, 1953), part IV, pp. 13–16. M.D. Lobel and E.M. Carus-Wilson, Historic Towns: Bristol (1975), pp. 2–3. Liebermann, Gesetze, I, p. 232: IV Aethelred, c. 2.5. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, III, no. 729; Brooke and Keir, London 800–1216, p. 265. J.H. Round, Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, Illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland A.D. 918–1206 (London, 1899), no. 112. Gras, Early English Customs System, pp. 13–14. The term modius is also used in the Ley in connection with wine, Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 497. C.H. Haskins, ‘Normandy under William the Conqueror’, American Historical Review 14 (1909), p. 468 and n. 94. Recueil des Actes, vol. I, pp. 21, 297, 563 and vol. II, pp. 105–7, 150 –2, 167, 194.



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Aethelred.164 The king grants the monks exemption from the modiatio on their own wine and the right to take the right flipper from all whales or large fish (crassis piscibus) caught or beached within the diocese of Coutances. Hosting rules appear elsewhere in Francia though more generally in the context of royal rights to compulsory accommodation for royal officials rather than the management of foreign traders in commercial hostels. An exception may be the royal tax called giscot which appears in the Utrecht charter of 815.165 In the Roman empire, the cursus publicus was an arm of government providing an express postal service and lodging and land transport for officials on state business. 166 It was an expensive system to maintain and was open to regular abuse by highranking persons and their dependants. The larger posting stations, generally located at regular intervals along major routes, were known as mansiones and provided accommodation and other facilities to assist travellers. The system survived in an attenuated form under Byzantine and Islamic rulers and there are indications that it also remained a feature of government in the Successor states. 167 In Frankish sources, mansio, and the derivative mansionaticus, were the main terms used for the right to demand compulsory lodging and overnight stays. 168 There is some evidence that Anglo-Saxon kings also demanded accommodation and assistance for royal officials and privileged guests on royal business. 169 The use of the term mansio in connection with hostels and compulsory accommodation rights may have some relevance to the history of wic place names. Mansio is a synonym for metatus (from which the Byzantine mitaton derives, on which see below) and can be translated 164

165

166 167 168 169

Recueil des Actes, vol. II, p. 150: ‘et quod habeant modiationem suam quietam de proprio vino suo, et dextrum cutellum caude de omnibus crassis piscibus qui capti fuerint vel applicuerint infra fines episcopatus Constanciencis’. For whaling in Normandy, see L. Musset, ‘Quelques notes sur les baliniers normands du Xe au XIIIe siècle’, Revue D’histoire, économie et société 42 (1964), pp. 147–61. For whale rights in England and Scotland see S.A. Moore, A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto (London, 1888), pp. 18 and 23. Niermeyer and van Kieft, Mediae Latinitas, s.v. conjectum and gista. The meaning of giscot is uncertain, but interestingly it combines gista (Mfr. gîte: lodging, shelter) and scot (OE. sceat: payment). Is it a local vernacular synonym for the mansionaticus, or perhaps Dorestad’s equivalent of scavage collected from the trade with England? Giscot may also be the same as the later huslatha described as a tributum in a tenth-century Utrecht charter of Otto I’s: Sickel, Die Urkunden Konrad I, I, no. 98; see also Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 136–7, n. 28. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, pp. 830 –4. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, p. 474 and n. 12. Niermeyer and van Kieft, Mediae Latinitas, s.v. mansio and mansionaticus. J. Campbell, ‘Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State’, in his The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000), pp. 217–18. There is an interesting record in a fourteenth-century source of houses at Billingsgate ‘chalked up’ to identify them as accommodation requisitioned for favoured royal visitors: Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London E, ed. R.R. Sharpe (London, 1903), pp. 206–7. For mansiones in Roman Britain see Guy de la Bédoyère, Roman Towns in Britain (Stroud, 2003), pp. 74–6.




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by wic in Old English.170 Although wic has many meanings, often associated with towns and trade, it seems to be most commonly used for specialized buildings in farming, trade and manufacture. 171 It was Eilert Ekwall who pointed out that wic place names in connection with harbours like Swanage (Swanic) and Harwich could signify by development ‘a temporary place of shelter for a ship and its crew’. 172 The related Old English verb wician can refer to a sailor landing and spending a night on shore. Could wic refer to a hostel for overseas travellers? If this is the case, then in the context of ports and markets, wic may have acquired the meaning of ‘a place where hostels for foreign traders (and other visitors) are located’. The wic-reeve, like his counterparts in the Islamic and Byzantine world, would have served as the collector of the king’s tolls and customs and controller of foreign traders and hostels in royal ports and markets. These functions were certainly held by later sheriffs of London and, given the evidence on tolls, pre-emption and hosting, this was also likely to have been the case with their predecessors in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Major royal ports in the eighth century Around 730, Bede famously remarked that London (Lundenwic) was a ‘market for many nations coming to it by land and sea’ and it finds an echo in Alcuin’s description of York (Eorforwic) some sixty years later.173 The rules on tolls, pre-emption and hosting amply justify these descriptions and help us to understand something about how major ports (wics) may have functioned in the eighth century. Although our sources are naturally biased towards London, and much of the evidence is late from Ipswich, Southampton, Sandwich, Chester, Yarmouth and Norwich, I suggest that they are representative of general rules in royal ports. It is a matter of possibilities and probabilities rather than certainties. Kings probably developed wics under royal patronage to control an increasing volume of international trade. Foreign traders were restricted to specific royal ports which allowed their activities to be monitored and toll and pre-emption rights to be exercised. Often the traders were employed by monasteries and episcopal churches who were actively involved in stimulating demand and profiting from cross-Channel 170 171

172 173

Bosworth and Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. wic. L. Schütte, Wik: Eine Siedlungsbezeichnung in historischen und sprachlichen Bezügen (Cologne, 1976); A.R. Rumble, ‘Notes on the Linguistic and Onomastic Characteristics of Old English Wic’, in Hill and Cowie, Wics, pp. 1–2. E. Ekwall, ‘Old English wic in Place-Names’, Nomina Germanica 13 (1964), pp. 14–21. Bede, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896), Book 2, c. 3; Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 609; P. Godman, The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York (Oxford, 1982), pp. 4–5.



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trade. The ships, perhaps sometimes in convoy for self-protection, arrived in the ports flying flags and singing songs to indicate their owners’ peaceful intentions.174 They were beached on the strand or tied up by the shore to await the arrival of the wic-reeve and other royal officials to undergo the customs process in the royal port jurisdiction. The cargoes were unloaded and displayed on the shore, and local merchants took an active part in assisting the royal officials in assessing their value. Tolls were paid, and pre-emption rights were exercised if officials of the king’s household arrived within the allotted time. Merchandise acquired on behalf of the king may have been stored in royal halls or warehouses which also served as market places and where sales transactions were witnessed in public. 175 The right to buy the cargoes in bulk rested with local merchants acting collectively to share in the bargains. In London, merchants from other privileged royal towns may have taken their turn in the pre-emption queue at the port. Foreign merchants were not all treated in the same way. Specific groups enjoyed special privileges granted by the king, presumably in return for reciprocal trading privileges, benefits in cash or in kind, and as part of wider diplomatic initiatives with their places or countries of origin. Foreign merchants were originally restricted to stays of forty days, and some were kept at the shore in the port jurisdiction, while others, like the Lotharingians, could take up residence with hosts in town districts beyond the shore. The hosts were secular and ecclesiastical landowners and their agents who themselves were actively involved in trade. During this period London merchants were probably drawn from amongst the elite of the landowning classes and royal officials. In return for taking responsibility for foreign merchants and giving them protection, hosts profited from pre-emption, possibly scavage, providing warehousing and accommodation facilities and selling agency services during their stays. Foreign merchants were identified and their names and locations made known to royal officials with overall responsibility for their activities.176 The hostels provided storage and accommodation, selling and other support services, and acted as market places and centres for the collection of royal dues. It is in such early commercial hostels, seemingly organized by place or country of origin as in the Byzantine empire, that the later Steelyard complex of the German merchants and similar institutions like the Dowgate premises of the Rouen merchants, surely originate. 174

175 176

Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection’, p. 496; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, s.v. convoy. Hlothere and Eadric, c. 16: Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 361. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London, H, p. 167.




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The wics were importing bulk commodities like fish, wine and woad (which served the wool and cloth-making industries of England). 177 Wool, cloth and hides probably formed the bulk of exported cargoes on the return journeys, just as they did in the later Middle Ages. Such commodities generally leave little trace in the archaeological record, though one should perhaps note that the high volume of mature animal bones found at Southampton may be related to an export trade in hides as much as providing meat for local consumption. The major wics which have so far been identified like London, Ipswich and Southampton, and perhaps Sandwich and maybe even Yarmouth, were trading in some at least of the same goods as in the later Middle Ages. 178 Luxury goods like gold, silver and jewellery, which are intrinsically small items, rode piggyback on a volume trade which underpinned the economy of the wics. Gift exchanges between ruling elites helped oil the wheels of trade and diplomacy, but were insufficient in their own right to sustain the economy of growing towns. Wics functioned as centres of exchange for imports and exports of bulk commodities and were linked to networks of inland markets. It is clear from royal legislation that by the late seventh century foreign merchants routinely travelled up country and were not limited to coastal markets any more than they were in Francia.179 The major wics (or emporia) were towns with elaborate trading rules and customs developed under royal control over centuries. The regulations, practices and organization of foreign trade in eighth-century London and other major Anglo-Saxon ports do not look so very different from those one finds in eleventh-century and later sources. That said, I do not mean to imply that there were no differences in towns in the eighth century compared with those of the eleventh century. Practices change with new political, social and economic circumstances, but one should also recognize that the origins of many port customs go back over many hundreds of years. There is an innate conservatism to many commercial practices and for good reasons. The existence of consistent rules under the protection of powerful rulers provides the necessary pre-conditions for commerce to develop and for foreign and local traders to operate in confidence across the seas. Reciprocity in administrative practices under the control of rulers is the essential feature of ports and trade in northwest Europe.

177

178 179

Cf. J. Campbell, ‘Production and Distribution in Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon England’, in Pestell and Ulmschneider, Markets in Early Medieval Europe, pp. 12–14. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England, esp. pp. 57–9, 73–83, 86 – 92. Ine, c. 20 and Whitred, c. 28: Whitelock, English Historical Documents, pp. 364 and 365.



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Continuity Before turning to Roman and Byzantine influences on Anglo-Saxon England, some general comments are called for in relation to the continuity of tolls and administrative practices in the field of trade and taxation. In a paper of this kind, with such limited contemporary information to rely on, there is a real risk of developing an inaccurate picture of the early medieval period based on the use of anachronistic sources which some may judge are of doubtful relevance. It is a legitimate concern. The picture presented here of major English ports in the eighth century is speculative. The later medieval sources which record trading agreements and customs in London for Lotharingian and other Frankish merchants may not date back to the eighth century as I have suggested. They could, for example, be explained by the political and economic conditions prevailing in the ninth, tenth or eleventh centuries without reference to an earlier age. However, my point is that such agreements and regulations do not look out of place in an eighth-century context, and there are some good reasons for thinking that they may well have applied at that time. It is perhaps only the degree of complexity rather than the substance of the rules which is at issue. The mounting archaeological and numismatic evidence points strongly to significant levels of international trade rather than simply gift exchange between elites during this period. Kings were regulating international trade and collecting tolls in records of the sixth century onwards in Francia, and from the seventh and eighth centuries in England. They legislated on the behaviour and activities of local and foreign traders, granted toll exemptions and trading privileges to individuals and groups, and concluded interstate trading agreements before the end of the eighth century. Toll rights and toll exemptions for the likes of the bishops of Worcester, London and Utrecht and religious houses such as St Denis, St Germaindes-Prés, Stablo-Malmedy, Corbie, Reculver and Minster demonstrate how actively the church was involved in trade during the seventh and eighth centuries in England and Francia. The terms of some charters and references to major Channel ports imply that their trade was international as well as local. The hosting regulations in early Anglo-Saxon law codes involved churchmen and secular lords who played a part in the royal regulation of trade. The hosting regulations and related practices like pre-emption which appear in post-Conquest records for early former Anglo-Saxon royal ports like London, Sandwich, Ipswich and Southampton may be later inventions, but one can prove that some such rules existed by the eighth century. In this respect, the three-night hosting rule recorded in Hlothere and Eadric’s seventh-century law code relating to London, which is arguably essentially the same as the Early Medieval Europe   ()



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three-day hosting rule found in an eleventh-century London custumal, is particularly worthy of note. Trading tolls and customs can and do survive for centuries. One should also consider the issue from a broader perspective. Trading tolls and customs are very much older than is commonly appreciated and pre-date the Romans. It is arguable that tax collection by rulers and controls on imported goods were already ‘hard-wired’ into the economy and society of Iron Age Europe. Evidence of royal pre-emption rights, ad valorem tolls, toll exemptions and trade embargoes is found in Near Eastern sources as early as the Middle Bronze Age. 180 Greek colonies on the western Mediterranean littoral may have played an intermediary role in spreading toll collection into northern Europe.181 Tolls were certainly collected by Celtic tribes at ports and river crossings in Gaul and in the Alpine passes even before the Romans conquered these territories, and evidence suggests such taxes may also have been levied in Britain. 182 By the first century BC, the imposition of tolls and administrative controls on trade through the process of reciprocity between states and other political entities may have been the norm in western Europe. The survival of these types of general administrative rules and customs is not dependent either on the survival of individual ports or even of particular states. They were part of the ‘ancient custom of trading’ (iuxta antiquam consuetudinem negotiandi ) to borrow an apt phrase from Charlemagne’s letter to Offa. Archaeology and history demonstrate that international trade and its regulation are remarkably resilient, and adapt even to major disruptions in society and the economy. The volume of trade may decline, sometimes drastically so, but how often is it eliminated altogether in all places for any length of time, and to such a degree that trade regulations are forgotten and cease to apply? Where trade exists, state controls and taxes follow. The fact that related taxes and similar controls on foreign trade and merchants existed in the Roman and later medieval periods make it inherently likely that similar regulations continued to apply during the early medieval period. As far as continuity from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England is concerned, it is an open question since early sources are silent on the matter.183 My own view is that, on the balance of probabilities, the fundamental principles underpinning the Roman customs system did 180

181 182

183

T. Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford, 1998), p. 21 ff. (esp. pp. 31–2); T. Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2002), p. 89; V. La Rosa, ‘The Prehistoric Background: the Minoan-Mycenaean Civilisation’, in G.P. Carratelli (ed.), The Western Greeks (London, 1996), pp. 33–4. De Laet, Portorium, p. 76. De Laet, Portorium, p. 77 and pp. 127–9 on Celtic tolls and the taxes imposed on trade with Britain at ports controlled by the Veneti in Gaul. Kelly, ‘Trading Privileges from Eighth-Century England’, pp. 18–19.



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survive in Britain, especially in coastal areas of the south and east. Peter Sawyer also makes a strong case for continuity of toll collection at Roman salt production centres such as Droitwich in Worcestershire and he may well be right.184 On a cautionary note, however, it is important not to exaggerate or overstate the case for continuity in relation to trade on which the taxation system necessarily depends. Post-Roman Britain was not simply a scaled-down version of the Roman empire, but a profoundly different political, social and economic environment. Germanic tribes had regular contacts with the Roman empire long before any major immigration or invasion, and would have experienced these controls at first hand as ambassadors and visitors, merchants, foederati and so on. Why would the new rulers, whether RomanoBritish or Anglo-Saxon, wish to give up such an obvious and lucrative source of wealth and influence in the form of goods or cash, any more than they gave up renders from the land? Continuity may simply mean the survival of a few essential taxation ideas or regulations, rather than the complex bureaucratic system and institutions which supported tax collection in the Roman empire. The continuity of taxation rights could have been achieved by rulers simply adhering to three basic principles. First, rulers collect taxes on imported trade goods in return for protection and permission to trade. Second, foreign trade is restricted to specific ports under a ruler’s control to facilitate the payment of taxes, secure access to scarce commodities, and maintain law and order amongst foreigners unsupported by local kinship groups. Third, failure to observe the rules results in punishment by rulers in the form of the confiscation of goods and the payment of fines. Early Anglo-Saxon and Frankish ports under the control of local rulers may well have taken over from the riverine and coastal jurisdictions once associated with the Roman Saxon Shore forts. Even if there had been no continuity, then the principle of reciprocity would surely have applied at some stage as a result of international trade. It is inconceivable that Anglo-Saxon rulers would not impose taxes on imports from Francia, when Frankish rulers were imposing such taxes on traders using their own ports. Few, if any historians, doubt there was continuity of toll collection in Gaul from the period of Roman rule. It is evident in the terminology, the nature of the taxes and methods of collection, if not always in the location of the toll stations themselves. As we have seen, the same type of toll jurisdictions 184

P. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England (London, 1978), pp. 87– 8. See also Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, pp. 14–16. On the continuity of salt production at Droitwich see J.D. Hurst, ‘The Extent and Development of the Worcestershire Medieval Salt Industry and its Impact on the Regional Economy’, in G. De Boe and F. Verhaeghe (eds), Papers of the Medieval Brugge Conference 1997 (Zellik, 1997), pp. 139 –46 and references cited there.




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existed on both sides of the Channel. It may well be that there was considerable Frankish influence on toll regulations in England as in other matters, especially in Kent and the south-east, but one doubts that all the rules were imports. It was a common trading area with the same Roman administrative and institutional background. The controls on foreign traders in London and other early AngloSaxon royal ports, which are evident in the special hosting and preemption regulations, bear witness to a much more complex society and a more elaborate administrative regime. One is less confident that continuity of the kind described above applies here, although one cannot discount it. There are features of these regulations which suggest that contemporary controls on foreign merchants in the Byzantine empire, and perhaps Constantinople and the management of the silk trade in particular, may have inspired them. In this connection, one should note especially the following five points of similarity: the restriction on the number of days foreign merchants were allowed to stay in London; the existence of commercial hostels where sales took place and taxes were collected by royal officials; the hierarchies of pre-emption and the sharing in sales transactions by merchants and hosts; the formal registering or public acknowledgement of where traders lodged; port (shore or quay) toll jurisdictions and the penalties for tax evasion. Scavage may itself derive from the Byzantine skaliatikon. A Syrian silk merchant with experience of trading in Constantinople would have had no difficulty in recognizing the substance of these regulations from London and other major English royal ports, because very similar regulations existed in the Byzantine empire. A detailed description of Byzantine commercial hostels is recorded in the Book of the Prefect, which probably dates mainly from the reign of Emperor Leo VI (886– 912) but is clearly describing long-standing arrangements.185 It deals amongst other things with the rules for foreign traders operating in Constantinople under the control of Imperial officials, the eparch and his deputy, the legatarios. High-quality silk garments of a certain size and colour were forbidden from export (along with other unnamed products), and traders who ignored this regulation risked a flogging and the confiscation of their goods. Syrian silk merchants were required to stay in officially recognized commercial hostels (pl. mitata; s. mitaton). The Syrian silk merchants, like foreign perfume importers, had to limit their stays in the city to normally no more than three months, and if any of their goods were unsold during this period 185

J. Koder (ed.), Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 33 (Vienna, 1991); A.E.R. Boak, ‘Notes and Documents: The Book of the Prefect’, Journal of Economic and Business History 1:4 (1929), pp. 597–619.



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the eparch became responsible for their disposal. Failure to observe these rules resulted in the same penalties as for exporters of prohibited goods. The mitaton was probably the place where imperial rights of preemption were exercised by the eparch. Certainly, local Constantinopolitan silk dealers had rights of pre-emption there, along with long-resident Syrian merchants. The silk dealers were instructed to collect the imported Syrian silks in one of the hostels so that they could each have a share in the pre-emption. The eparch was responsible for ensuring that the shares were allocated at the mitaton according to the contribution made by each silk dealer. Although the Book of the Prefect is concerned primarily with Syrian silk merchants, it is known that other groups of foreign traders, like the Bulgarians, had their own mitata by the tenth century.186 The Greek word mitaton derives from the Latin metatus which means a dwelling or lodgings and was also, significantly, applied to the border posts used for collecting tolls and managing traders on the Persian frontier in the late empire.187 The metatus also served as lodging houses for ambassadors and officials on state business.188 These terminological and functional links between the mitaton and the metatus are unlikely to be coincidental. The late ninth-century hostel rules in Constantinople resemble, and may be much the same as, those applying more generally in designated Roman frontier towns and ports from the late third century onwards. As we have seen, some of these rules were common in the Islamic world as well, and may indeed have drawn influence from there, but we should nonetheless give due weight to the much greater evidence for Byzantine influence on English administrative practices. 189 The eighthcentury Mercian and Kentish toll exemptions are themselves, as Stoclet argued, based on Byzantine models. While it is tempting to point to Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and Abbot Hadrian in the late seventh century as the likely source for such administrative reforms, it is probable that some practices are very much older. The rules on hosting recorded in the law codes of Ine and Hlothere and Eadric look like comments on existing institutions rather than the establishment of new 186 187

188 189

Constable, Housing the Stranger, p. 149 and n. 135. R.S. Lopez, ‘The Silk Industry in the Byzantine Empire’, Speculum 20 (1945), pp. 25–8; Constable, Housing the Stranger, pp. 147–50. Millet, ‘L’Octava’, p. 321. N.P. Brooks, ‘The Development of Military Obligations in Eighth and Ninth Century England’, in P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (eds), England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 69– 84; Stoclet, Immunes Ab Omni Teloneo, pp. 87–113; L. Zylbergeld, ‘Les regulations du marché au pain au xiii siècle en Occident et l’ “Assize of Bread” de 1266 – 67 pour l’Angleterre’, in J.M. Duvosquel and A. Dierkens (eds), Villes et Campagnes au Moyen Age: Melanges Georges Despy (Liège, 1991), p. 791 ff. See also R.S. Lopez, ‘Le problème des relations anglo-byzantines du septième au dixième siècle’, Byzantion 18 (1948), pp. 139 – 62 and K.S. Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2003).




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arrangements. When and how might such institutions arise if – and this is by no means certain – they do not derive from the period of Roman rule in Britain? The Byzantine state actively pursued a policy of diplomatic and commercial engagement with the rulers of the Successor states from the late fifth century onwards.190 Contacts with western Britain in particular were wide-ranging. The ceramics dating mainly from c.475 to c.550 from the eastern Mediterranean which are found at sites like Bantham and Tintagel (implying imports of wine and oil) are well known. A persuasive case has been made that these were probably transported in the first place on state-controlled ships in connection with Byzantine diplomatic initiatives, rather than through trade alone. 191 ‘Byzantine’ finds in eastern Britain are very much fewer in number, sometimes later in date, and may reflect both changing Byzantine political priorities and Frankish diplomatic and commercial activity. Certainly, Frankish kings were in regular receipt of Byzantine gifts and subsidies, sometimes in coin.192 Although finds of Byzantine coins are rare in eastern Britain, one should note the coin balances and weights for weighing Byzantine tremisses found mainly in Kent and the Thames Valley, which implies that the volume of such coins was sufficient to warrant their use. 193 There are indications of trade or exchange involving ‘Byzantine’ goods in south-east England, and the discovery of a sixth-century Byzantine port tax seal by the River Thames at Putney is intriguing. 194 Anthea Harris has pointed out that one cannot yet prove the existence of Byzantine merchants in eastern Britain in this period, and of course none of the ‘Byzantine’ links noted above requires merchants to be present but, as she acknowledges, it must remain a possibility. 195 Significantly, we know 190

191

192

193

194

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A. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West: The Archaeology of Cultural Identity AD 400 – 650 (Stroud, 2003), esp. chs. 2, 3 and 6; K. Dark, Britain and the End of The Roman Empire (Stroud, 2000), pp. 125–35. M. Fulford, ‘Byzantium and Britain: A Mediterranean Perspective on Post-Roman Mediterranean Imports in Western Britain and Ireland’, Medieval Archaeology 33 (1989), pp. 1–6; D. Griffiths, ‘Markets and “Productive” Sites: A View from Western Britain’, in Pestell and Ulmschneider, Markets in Early Medieval Europe, pp. 62–72; Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 41–60 and pp. 143–52. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 21–40; Depeyrot, Richesse et Société chez les Mérovingiens et Carolingiens, pp. 105–7. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 163–4; C.J. Arnold, An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 2nd edn (London, 1997), pp. 110 –14; C. Scull, ‘Scales and Weights in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Archaeological Journal 147 (1990), pp. 183–215. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 175–88; P.M. Richards, ‘Byzantine Bronze Vessels in England and Europe: The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Trade’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1980), pp. 138 – 41 and pp. 210 –26; J. Campbell, ‘The Impact of the Sutton Hoo Discovery’, in Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, pp. 75–8; Martin Biddle, ‘A City in Transition, 400 –800’, in M.D. Lobel (ed.), The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c.1520 (Oxford, 1989), p. 21. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 175–6; Dark, Britain and the End of The Roman Empire, pp. 130 –1 and 230.



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Fig. 3 Byzantine merchants in the west (5th/6th centuries)

from fifth- and sixth-century sources that there were substantial numbers of Byzantine merchants, some identified as Syrians, in Italy, Spain and Gaul (see Fig. 3).196 They were present in many major Frankish centres including Orleans, Paris, Tours and Trier in the north. Some of these places had Byzantine merchant colonies with elaborate social organizations which supported their own churches and guilds. If Byzantine merchant groups with imperial diplomatic support were also active in London and southern England, then it would help explain the development of local commercial hostels and royal administrative and trading practices similar to those operating in Constantinople. Thus, some of the controls on foreign merchants in Anglo-Saxon England may have come about through direct as well as indirect contact with the Byzantine state from the late fifth century onwards. Bedford

196

L. Bréhier, ‘Les Colonies d’Orientaux en Occident au commencement du moyen-âge’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 12 (1903), pp. 1–39; K. Dark, ‘Early Byzantine Mercantile Communities in the West’, in C. Entwistle (ed.), Through a Glass Brightly: Studies in Byzantine and Medieval Art and Archaeology Presented to David Buckton (Oxford, 2003), pp. 76– 81; Harris, Byzantium, Britain and The West, pp. 60 –4.



Talking about history in eleventhcentury England: the Encomium Emmae Reginae and the court of Harthacnut E   M. T 

The Encomium Emmae Reginae was written in the early 1040s to support the interests of Queen Emma amidst the factionalism which marked the end of the period of Danish rule in England. This article argues that the Encomium was shaped by its production and reception in the distinctively multilingual environment of King Harthacnut’s court. Attention to Emma’s key role in negotiating the interaction of the English, Norse, French, Flemish and Latin literary and linguistic cultures which were present in the Anglo-Danish court reveals growing lay claims to Latin literary culture in eleventh-century England. Recent scholarship has opened up to view the integral role which Queen Emma played in the production of the Encomium Emmae Reginae (1041–2). What has emerged is a text which was written to support her interests amidst the factionalism of the court of her son, King Harthacnut (1037–42).1 As a result, the Encomium has become a prime *

1

Versions of the papers which make up this article were read in Oxford and Kalamazoo; this final version benefits from the constructive questions and comments offered in these places. I am also grateful to Stephen Baxter, Katy Cubitt, Matthew Kempshall, Nicola McDonald, Felicity Riddy, Matthew Townend, Elaine Treharne and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne for reading earlier drafts of this article or discussing specific points. For the text: Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (London, 1949). Campbell’s edition has recently been reprinted with a supplementary introduction by Simon Keynes (Cambridge, 1998). Text will be cited as Encomium followed by book and chapter numbers. Throughout, I have used Campbell’s translation of the Encomium, with some emendation. References to Campbell’s introduction and supplementary material will be as Campbell, Encomium, followed by the original page numbers; and references to Keynes’s introduction will be Keynes, Encomium, followed by the page numbers. For the date, author and audience of the Encomium and Emma’s role in its production: Campbell, Encomium, pp. xxi–xxiii; Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 28–40; Keynes, Encomium, pp. xxxv–xxxvi, xxxix–xli, lix and lxix; and Andy Orchard, ‘Literary Background to the Encomium Emmae Reginae’, Journal of Medieval Latin 11 (2001), esp. pp. 158–9, 166 and 169.


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example of a Latin text which was produced in order to have a particular impact on a lay audience. This article will focus accordingly on the social and linguistic contexts of the Encomium in order to consider what strategies were available for communicating a Latin text to lay audiences in the specific context of Anglo-Danish England. 2 In other words, I want to pose the questions of how and why Emma and the Encomiast could conceive of a Latin text as an effective way of protecting her vulnerable position. By exploring both the production and the reception of the Encomium within the distinctively multilingual context of Harthacnut’s court (where English, Danish, French, Flemish and Latin all interacted with each other), my aim is to contribute to our general understanding of how lay people staked claims to Latin literary culture in the Middle Ages, especially in the period just prior to widespread vernacularization. My broader concern lies with the sociology of Latin in the Middle Ages; that is, with how Latin texts structured, and were structured by, the human relationships of those people who made and used them.3

I In his account of the Anglo-Danish period, the Encomiast – probably a monk from the Flemish foundation of Saint-Bertin – smoothes over many problems in order to present a picture of a legitimate and sustainable Anglo-Danish dynasty that had not only an illustrious past but also a future. Emma’s marriage to Cnut is celebrated, for example, while her 2

3

On lay audiences and Latin historiography in the Carolingian period, see for important examples: Janet Nelson, ‘Public Histories and Private History in the Work of Nithard’, Speculum 60 (1985), pp. 251–93 and her ‘History-Writing at the Courts of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald’, in Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna, 1994), pp. 435–42; Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 236–41; and M.J. Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society’, Past and Present 158 (1998), pp. 3–36. For historiography in the post-Carolingian world, see Lars Mortensen, ‘Stylistic Choice in a Reborn Genre: The National Histories of Widukind of Corvey and Dudo of Saint-Quentin’, in P. Gatti and A. Degl’Innocenti (eds), Dudone di San Quintino (Trent, 1995), pp. 77–102. My emphasis on the Encomium as a social text is indebted to Gabrielle Spiegel’s approach to vernacular historiography and Karl Hauck’s work on the literature of the medieval nobility: Spiegel’s Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), and ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text’ in her The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 3–28; and Hauck, ‘Haus- und sippengebundene Literatur mittelalterlicher Adelsgeschlechter von Adelssatiren des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts her erläutert’, in Walter Lammers (ed.), Geschichtsdenken und Geschichtsbild im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1961), pp. 169– 99. Hauck’s essay has been translated as ‘The Literature of House and Kindred Associated with Medieval Noble Families, Illustrated from the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Satires on the Nobility’, in Timothy Reuter (ed. and trans.), The Medieval Nobility: Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries (Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 61–85.



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first marriage to the English king Æthelred II is suppressed. Edward the Confessor and Alfred – Emma’s children by Æthelred II – are presented as Cnut’s own, but Cnut’s paternity of Harold Harefoot (his son by Ælfgifu of Northampton) is flatly denied. Emma is exonerated for any role in Alfred’s murder which is instead blamed on Harold Harefoot. 4 The text ends with an assertion of dynastic power rooted in familial harmony, as Harthacnut shares the kingdom with his half-brother Edward the Confessor and they are joined in rule by their mother, Emma. In sharp contrast to the final image of the text, both the AngloDanish dynasty and Emma’s position were far from secure in the period 1041–2. Indeed, Harthacnut, although a young man, died soon after, and the text’s ending had to be re-written to present Edward as heres . . . legitimus.5 Harthacnut’s short rule was unpopular and his court riven by factionalism. The complex and shifting alliances which resulted both from the Danish conquest and the bitter succession disputes after Cnut’s death left Harthacnut’s court a potentially violent place, since it included men who had been supporters of Harold Harefoot, of Harthacnut and of Edward and Alfred. Harthacnut, branded a pledge-breaker for the murder of Earl Eadwulf and criticized for having Harold Harefoot’s body thrown in the Thames, was himself implicated in this violence. His invitation to Edward the Confessor to reign jointly with him may have been an attempt to quell the disquiet stirred up by his rule. Discord also extended to relations between Emma and Edward which, despite what the Encomiast says, were uneasy. In 1043, after he gained sole rule, Edward stripped his mother of both land and treasure because, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘heo wæs æror pam cynge hire suna swi∂e heard. Pæt heo him læsse dyde ponne he wolde ær pam pe he cyng wære. 7 eac sy∂∂an’ (‘she was earlier too harsh with the king, her son, in that she did less for him than he wanted, before he was king, and also afterwards’).6 The tensions of Harthacnut’s court are very carefully negotiated by the Encomiast, whose expertly delicate treatment of potential sources of division amongst those now loyal to Harthacnut is central to the important arguments put forward by Simon Keynes and developed by Andy Orchard that the Encomium was written both for and from within 4 5 6

Encomium, II. 16–17, II. 18, and III. 1. Encomium, III. 14. Pauline Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989), pp. 77–82 and her Queen Emma, pp. 236 –54; Keynes, Encomium, pp. xxix–xxxviii and lxix–lxxx; and J.R. Maddicott, ‘Edward the Confessor’s Return to England in 1041’, English Historical Review 119 (2004), pp. 650 – 66. For quotation: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, Vol. 6, MS D, ed. G.P. Cubbin (Cambridge, 1996), sub anno 1043.



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Harthacnut’s court.7 Moreover, both the Encomiast’s prefatory letters and his text overtly express his anxiety that his version of events will not be accepted by those around Emma. He writes that either he will have ‘scilicet aut uariis iudiciis hominum subiacere, aut de his, quae mihi a te, domina regina, precepta sunt, precipientem negligendo conticessere’ (‘to submit to a variety of criticisms from men, or to be silent concerning the things enjoined upon me by you, Lady Queen, and to disregard you, who enjoin me’).8 In vindicating Emma for Alfred’s death, he imagines someone hostile to her objecting to his account: ‘Sed fortassis hic mihi quilibet clamabit, quem liuor huiuscae dominae liuidum onerosumque reddit’ (‘But perchance at this point someone, whom ill-will towards this lady has rendered spiteful and odious, will protest to me’).9 The mark which the tensions of Harthacnut’s court left on the Encomium is a strong indication that the text was written as a means of intervening in debates within that court about Emma and, further, heavily underscores the fact that the Encomium was meaningless if it failed in this goal. This understanding of the intentions of Emma and the Encomiast brings us firmly back to the question of how Latin texts were communicated to lay audiences. To begin, we need to establish what kind of a Latin text the Encomium is. The Encomium is a classicizing work whose pages reveal the influence of a range of Latin authors, including Sallust and Lucan, as well as Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius and Vergil. 10 But it is only Vergil whom the Encomiast explicitly acknowledges, both in his second prefatory letter and later, at an important turning point in the narrative (the launching of Svein’s fleet which inaugurates the Danish conquest of England).11 By being so explicit, he signals that it is important to the meaning of his text for his audience to recognize his debt to Vergil. Vergil’s Aeneid shapes both the Encomiast’s narrative and his intellectual conceptualization of the work. On the level of the text’s story and the myth which the Encomiast creates around the beginnings of the Anglo-Danish dynasty, the Encomiast uses allusion to the Aeneid to represent Cnut (the dynasty’s founder) as a second Aeneas, and Svein 7

8 9 10

11

Keynes, Encomium, pp. xxxix–xli, lix, and lxix; Orchard, ‘Literary Background’, esp. p. 158; and my ‘Fictions of Family: The Encomium Emmae Reginae and Vergil’s Aeneid ’, Viator (forthcoming). For other comments on the audience and reception see: Eric John, ‘The Encomium Emmae Reginae : A Riddle and a Solution,’ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 63 (1980–1), pp. 58–94, at p. 63; Felice Lifshitz, ‘The Encomium Emmae Reginae : A “Political Pamphlet” of the Eleventh Century?’, Haskins Society Journal 1 (1989), pp. 39–50; Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London, 1974), p. 75. Encomium, Prologue. Encomium, III. 7. Campbell, Encomium, pp. xxix–xxxiv; and Orchard, ‘Literary Background’, pp. 159–60. On knowledge of Vergil in Anglo-Saxon England, see n. 20 below. Encomium, I. 4.




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(the father whose conquest did not last beyond his death) as Anchises – that is, the father of Aeneas who died just before reaching Italy. This use of Vergil by the Encomiast is an essential aspect of the text’s ideological meaning in that it asserts an imperial and civilized European identity for Cnut.12 Importantly, this meaning could have been appreciated by a lay person who had some exposure to Latin literary culture but who could not read Latin him or herself. In the two prefaces to his text, the Encomiast uses allusions to key passages in Vergil to put forward sophisticated, though incipient, ideas about the fictionality of his work. The terms in which he frames his enquiry into the nature of fiction and historical narrative illustrate that he wrote within an intellectual climate which, in the twelfth century, would subsequently produce powerful conceptual arguments for the truth of made-up fiction. The nature of historical truth and of fiction, and the Encomiast’s engagement with these concepts, is a complex topic and I have set out elsewhere the way that the Encomiast turned to Vergil in order to explore the problematic relationship of his text to the writing of history.13 The Encomiast is deeply interested in the distinction between lies which are told to trick an audience and untruths which both author and audience recognize as such. In the context of the current discussion of the audience of the Encomium, what is most significant here is that, although the Encomiast’s arguments about the nature of historia are highly learned, and would have required an educated reader to be apprehended, they are intimately connected to his concern to sway the opinions of the uneducated members of Harthacnut’s court. That is, the Encomiast’s intellectually sophisticated exploration of the boundary between historical narrative and fiction was a response to a social and political problem: the need to present a version of events which defended Emma to an audience which had participated in those events and which would have had definite views about her reputation. This audience would have recognized that parts of his text were untrue, and obviously so. It would have asked what that fiction was doing, what meaning it created. Thus the least intellectual members of Harthacnut’s court would also have had to ask the same questions about the nature of fiction that the Encomiast posed in his prefaces (if not in the same terms) in order to make sense of the text rather than simply to dismiss it. The Encomiast’s use of Vergil alerts us to the way his text might have appealed to people with different kinds 12

13

Elizabeth Tyler, ‘ “The Eyes of the Beholders were Dazzled”: Treasure and Artifice in Encomium Emmae Reginae’, EME 8 (1999), pp. 247–70, at pp. 257–68; and ‘Fictions of Family’. See Tyler, ‘Fictions of Family’, where references to a full range of scholarship on history writing and fiction in the Middle Ages can be found.



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of, and access to, Latinity and it invites us to look at the interaction of these different Latinities with each other. 14

II An assessment of the central role which talk played in both shaping and disseminating the substance of the Encomium can help us to see how a Latin text could have been envisaged as contributing to political debate in Harthacnut’s court. The language of the two prefaces makes clear, not only that the Encomiast intended his written Latin text to intervene in spoken debate about Emma, but also that this text was given its form in an environment in which the oral and the written interacted. In the Prologue, addressed to Emma, the Encomiast conceives of history as written down in order to be heard: Hoc enim in historia proprium exigitur, ut nullo erroris diuerticulo a recto ueritatis tramite declinetur, quoniam, cum quis alicuius gesta scribens ueritati falsa quaedam . . . interserit . . . auditor facta uelut infecta ducit. This quality, indeed, is required in history, that one should not deviate from the straight path of truth by any divergent straying, for when in writing the deeds of any man one inserts false elements in the truth . . . the hearer assuredly regards events which happened as events which did not happen.15 In the Argument, the Encomiast addresses himself not to the listener, auditor, but to the reader, lector. Back in the Prologue, he associates his muchcriticized loquacity with both the written and the spoken word, and the term he uses for the bitterness with which his enemies assail him, mordaciter, neatly brings to mind the real mouths which argued about Emma in Harthacnut’s court. The Encomiast’s repeated allusions to Vergil’s figure of Fama – who spread rumours, both true and false, about Dido – also indicates his concern for how conversation, counsel, debate and gossip make and break reputations. Alongside various oral and written traditions, these highly social activities were influential factors in shaping the Encomium.16 14

15 16

On different levels of Latinity, see: Michel Banniard, ‘Language and Communication in Carolingian Europe’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History II: c.700– c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 695–708; and Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Latin and Romance: An Historian’s Perspective’, in R. Wright, (ed.), Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1991), pp. 135–7. Encomium, Prologue. For Encomiast’s interest in Vergil’s Fama, see Tyler, ‘Fictions of Family’. On gossip and orality see the articles in the collection edited by Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 2003); Chris Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past and Present 160 (1998), pp. 3– 24; and Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy’, esp. p. 19.




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In looking at the impact of literacy in the Middle Ages, scholars, and most especially Michael Clanchy, Franz Bäuml and Brian Stock, have emphasized that the function of literacy within a society is of greater importance than the ability of the individual to read: thus a few literate people, be they members of the clergy or of the laity, can have a disproportionately significant impact on lay access to written texts, by discussing and explaining the content of those texts to others. 17 Precisely because it is rooted in social relationships, Brian Stock’s influential notion of the ‘textual community’ has been immensely productive in opening up the subject of the ability of the non-learned secular aristocrat to access and make use of Latin literary culture. 18 But, at the same time, Stock’s view of literacy as widening the gap between the literate culture of the learned (who came to see literacy as ‘identical with rationality’) and popular culture (which remained primarily oral and thus of lesser value in the eyes of the learned) entails a situation of ‘cultural diglossia’ (the term is Walter J. Ong’s), which poses problems for understanding the Encomium within Harthacnut’s court.19 The focus on how texts are mediated to the illiterate leads to a view of literacy in which authority accrues to literate writers and interpreters of texts (who are, of course, generally male clerics), and consequently hides from view the ways in which the spoken words of lay people could shape the conception, production, and reception of written Latin texts. In a court context, in which clerical and lay elites, both male and female, mixed, and in which learning conferred authority but in which there were other kinds of power as well, the issue of who had control over the written word is potentially a very complex process with communication and the dissemination of knowledge taking place in many different directions. Functional models of literacy provide a useful starting point for seeing how stories from the Aeneid might have been available to lay aristocrats: an important element for understanding the Encomium in Harthacnut’s court. If a medieval reader’s Latinity extended beyond rudimentary knowledge of the Psalms, he or she is likely to have 17

18 19

Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993); Franz Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), pp. 237–65, esp. pp. 237–49; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983) and Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, 1990). Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 522. Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 31. For ‘cultural diglossia’ see: Walter J. Ong, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization’, New Literary History 16 (1984), pp. 1–12; and Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Cultural Diglossia and the Nature of Medieval Latin Literature’, in Joseph Harris (ed.), The Ballad and Oral Literature, Harvard Studies in English 17 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 193–213.



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been exposed to the Aeneid.20 The basic nature of glosses in many manuscripts suggests that, even within the schoolroom, the Aeneid was surrounded by a developed culture of explanation. 21 This tradition of teaching the Aeneid to the young, would, I think, have made it natural for a figure such as the Encomiast to tell stories from the Aeneid in a court context and to explain the use of a Vergilian framework for the Encomium. Many portions of the Aeneid are, after all, simply good stories whose potential value could be apprehended without ‘direct access’ to the text.22 Moreover, classical and classicizing Latin poetry played a fundamental role, not only in the education of clerics, but also in the way clerics taught and guided secular aristocrats in the eleventh century.23 However, looking at, for example, the desire of many European ruling dynasties for Trojan origins makes the point that, even if the initial impulse may have been clerical, the laity would come to have their own, very secular, stake in the Aeneid and in accounts of Troy and Rome.24 The early leap of the Aeneid from Latin into the vernacular, when it was rendered into Old French as the Roman d’Eneas in the mid 1150s, further illustrates the draw of the Aeneid for lay audiences.25 20

21

22 23

24

25

On the importance of Vergil throughout the Middle Ages and in Anglo-Saxon England, see Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E.F.M. Benecke, with an introduction by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Princeton, 1997 [first published 1885]). For more recent discussion see, among others: Birger Munk Olsen, ‘Virgile et la renaissance du XIIe siècle’, in Jean-Yves Tilliette (ed.), Lectures médiévales de Virgile: actes du colloque organisé par l’école française de Rome (Rome, 1985), pp. 31–48, esp. pp. 31–8; Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 118–61; and Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge, 1995). Despite the scarcity of surviving manuscripts of the Aeneid from this period, texts reveal an intensive knowledge of the poem in late Anglo-Saxon England, see: Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, 2001); Michael Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin Texts in Anglo-Saxon England [1] The Evidence of the Glosses’, in N.P. Brooks (ed.), Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain (Leicester, 1984), p. 101; and Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 36–40. Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 11 and 28–33; Lapidge, ‘Study of Latin Texts’, pp. 99–140; and Gernot F. Wieland, ‘The Glossed Manuscript: Classbook or Library Book?’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), pp. 153–73. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 30–40. C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 139–64. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 2, 7, 10–14, and 40; Richard Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing. 1. The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 20 (1970), pp. 170 and 189–95; Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’occident médiévale (Paris, 1991), pp. 275–9; Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum 69 (1994), pp. 665–704; and Matthew Innes, ‘Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past’, in Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 248–9. Eneas: Roman du XIIe siècle, ed. J.-J. Salverda de Grave, 2 vols (Paris, 1925–29); English translation: Eneas: A Twelfth-Century French Romance, trans. John Yunck (New York, 1974).




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Looking specifically at England in the decades before the Danish conquest, we have, in the figure of Æthelweard, evidence for direct lay knowledge of the Aeneid and, importantly, interest in Trojan legend. Using Vergilian echoes, Æthelweard recalls Aeneas’s momentous arrival in Italy when he recounts the arrival of Hengest and Horsa in England.26 Literate aristocrats such as Æthelweard were the exception rather than the rule; there is no reason to assume, however, that these exceptions were isolated and that they did not speak with other noblemen and women about what they had learned in Latin books. 27 Christopher Baswell’s characterization of the move of the Aeneid into the vernacular as ‘explosive’ alerts us to see, in the Encomium, not just the run-up to that vernacularization, but signs of growing lay claims to the content of the Aeneid in eleventh-century England.28

III In thinking about how the Encomium and the Aeneid might have been known at Harthacnut’s court, we need to remember that the talk which surrounded the Encomium, the Aeneid and other Latin texts in the Anglo-Danish court was not just in the vernacular, or a vernacular, but in several vernaculars: English, Danish, French and Flemish. Looking forward to the complex linguistic situation of post-Conquest England suggests ways of approaching the linguistic consequences of the earlier Danish conquest of England and how this may have shaped the Encomium. The centrality of trilingualism to the vibrancy of the literary culture of Norman England has been highlighted by recent work, especially by Ian Short and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. The long-established use of English as a written language encouraged the flourishing of 26

27

28

The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Alistair Campbell (London, 1962); Michael Winterbottom, ‘The Style of Aethelweard’, Medium Ævum 36 (1967), pp. 109–18; and James Campbell, ‘England, c.991’, in Janet Cooper (ed.), The Battle of Maldon: Fact and Fiction (London, 1993), p. 7. Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England is a large topic, some important discussions of relevance here include: C.P. Wormald, ‘The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 27 (1977), pp. 95–111; Simon Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 226–57; Campbell, ‘England, c.991’, pp. 6–11 and 15–16; Nicholas Howe, ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading In Anglo-Saxon England’, in J. Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 58–79; G.H. Brown, ‘The Dynamics of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England’, repr. in D.G. Scragg (ed.), Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Thomas Northcote Toller and Toller Memorial Lectures (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 183–212; Joyce Hill, ‘Learning Latin in Anglo-Saxon England: Traditions, Texts and Techniques’, in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad (Turnhout: 2003), pp. 7–29. Many of these essays give particular attention to the distinctive interaction of vernacular and Latin literacy in Anglo-Saxon England. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 2, 10–16, 62 and esp. pp. 168–219.



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French as a written language. As a consequence, the first written French historiography and proto-romance were the products of a distinctly insular, Anglo-Norman, literary culture. 29 Scholars have also noted how the growing confidence of written vernaculars in the twelfth century changed the environment of Latin texts. Moreover, in this environment, the interplay of oral and written, Latin and vernacular, played an influential role in the emergence of fiction, as the authority and truthfulness of written narratives was seen to be undermined by their move into the vernacular.30 Ian Short’s insistence that the ‘vernacularisation of culture’ was ‘one of the most important, and one of the least widely recognised, aspects of the new intellectual vitality of the twelfth century’, prompts me to ask if some of the sophistication of the Encomium’s interaction with its audience results from its production in a polyglot context.31 The linguistic and cultural complexity of the Anglo-Danish court, especially in the reign of Harthacnut, far outstrips that of postConquest England. This point is strikingly made if we simply consider the languages spoken by those figures who are pictured in the Encomium’s frontispiece (Fig. 1): Emma, Harthacnut, Edward and the Encomiast. Norman Emma, raised in Rouen and married to Æthelred II, certainly spoke French and English; the daughter of the Danish Gunnor and the wife of Cnut, she may also have spoken Norse. 32 Emma may further have acquired Flemish while in exile in Bruges. Her son Harthacnut, who was raised in England and Denmark, would most likely have spoken both English and Norse. Her son, Edward the Confessor, raised in England and Normandy, would have spoken both English and French. Finally the suppliant Encomiast, obviously literate in Latin, may, even before he came to England, have been familiar with contexts in which two vernacular languages were in contact. The closeness of Saint-Bertin, located in Saint-Omer, to the permeable linguistic frontier between French and Flemish increases the likelihood that he spoke both languages and was aware of the social and political issues involved in negotiating language contact.33 The Anglo-Danish court must have been characterized by much explaining across linguistic boundaries, and 29

30

31 32 33

Ian Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England’, AngloNorman Studies 14 (1991), pp. 229–49 and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), pp. 1–18. See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 197–223. Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences’, pp. 249–65 and D.H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 237– 69. Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’, p. 231. Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 214. On Encomiast as a Flemish speaker, see Campbell, Encomium, pp. xxxv–xxxvi.




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Fig. 1 Encomium Emmae Reginae, frontispiece. London, British Library, Ms. Additional 33241, fol. 1v (by permission of the British Library).

the Encomium reflects this. In such a multilingual, and also multicultural, context, Latin – associated neither with Anglo-Saxon nor Danish parties nor with the French of Emma and Edward – would have had a political as well as linguistic utility as a suitable medium for a text © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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which sought to transcend factionalism. Precisely because Latin was nobody’s mother tongue, it could circumvent entrenched divisions in Harthacnut’s court which stemmed from the Danish conquest of England over a generation earlier. Such a perspective encourages us to think about the Latin of the Encomium as facilitating rather than hindering communication, and the symbolic value of Latin then becomes part of the text’s social meaning. Each of the vernaculars present in Harthacnut’s court would have interacted differently with Latin literary culture. Both Emma and Edward were francophone and it is likely that the Encomiast was as well – that is, the text’s patron, a key member of its audience, and its author all spoke French. 34 Sandwiched between the Carolingian era, when spoken Latin could be understood by the West Franks, and the emergence of historical writing in French in the twelfth century, the eleventh century would seem to be a low point for lay engagement with historical narrative. But it is likely that facets of the role which Janet Nelson ascribes to historiography in the ninth century were retained. Drawing attention to the social role of history writing and the centrality of the spoken word to that role, she writes: ‘History writing was the special mode in which the learned participated in counsel: it was associated with, not alternative to, speaking, and speaking out.’ 35 Furthermore, the self-presentation, as ‘translators’, of the first generation of historians to write in French suggests that there was a continuity between the Latin historiography of the Carolingian empire and the production of French texts in the twelfth century. We may need to envisage an intervening stage during which history writing aimed at the laity was written in Latin with the understanding that it would be read aloud or explicated in the vernacular, a process made easier by the linguistic proximity of Latin and French. In observing Emma’s choice to commission a Latin text, we need to be aware that the ways in which Latin texts functioned in French-speaking environments may have influenced her expectations.36 34

35 36

On French speakers in late Anglo-Saxon England, see C.P. Lewis, ‘The French in England before the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1995), pp. 123–44. David Porter discusses the interaction of Old French, Old English and Latin at Abingdon in the context of the Anglo-French monastic exchanges which marked the Benedictine Reformed monasticism of the generation before the Danish conquest: D.W. Porter, ‘The Earliest Texts with English and French’, Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), pp. 87–110. Nelson, ‘History-Writing’, at p. 438. See also her ‘Public History and Private History’. On the relationship between Latin and French up to the tenth century: Banniard, ‘Language and Communication’ and his important monograph Viva Voce: Communication écrite et communication orale du iv e au ix e siècle en Occident latin (Paris, 1992). See also the work of Roger Wright: A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin (Turnhout, 2002); Late Latin and Early Romance (Liverpool, 1982); and ‘Translation between Latin and Romance in the Early Middle Ages’, in Jeanette Beer (ed.), Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 1997), pp. 1–32. On twelfth-century French historians as translators, see Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Woodbridge, 1999),




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In contrast to French-speaking areas of the Continent, when we turn to look at England, there is no difficulty identifying a thriving vernacular historiographical culture in the eleventh century – part of the widespread use of the written vernacular in Anglo-Saxon England. From the time of Alfred the Great onwards, Old English was an important vehicle for history writing, to the extent that William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, complained that there had been no history writing in Latin in England since Bede, other than Æthelweard’s translation of the Chronicle from English into Latin. 37 William’s exaggeration draws attention to the unusual role the English vernacular played in preserving a record of the past. Both Bede and Orosius were translated into English during the reign of Alfred, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were first compiled under Alfred and continued to be maintained in the Anglo-Danish period. At least some members of the original audience of the Encomium were accustomed to getting their history, be it about England or the Roman world, in the form of written English texts which could have been easily read aloud. Other aspects of English in the eleventh century also inform the linguistic and social contexts of the Encomium. To begin with, although written English facilitated lay access to texts, there was no direct correspondence between written and spoken forms of English. This is, of course, generally true of languages and is not a specifically English phenomenon. However, the gap between written and spoken English was made greater and more apparent by the development over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries of a standardized form of written English, based on the norms of late West Saxon. This standardized form of English, which was used regardless of the local variety of English spoken, was a consequence of the alliance of clerical efforts

37

pp. 17–18. Roger Wright’s argument that literary translations between Latin and French did not occur before the twelfth-century Renaissance, because they were not needed owing to ‘linguistic versatility and sophistication’ of users of texts, is important in considering the relationship of written Latin historiography to spoken vernacular language; see Wright, ‘Translation between Latin and Romance’, esp. p. 27. Even if we shy away from accepting his very late date for final division between Latin and Romance, his argument does alert us to the strategies which facilitated extemporaneous translation from Latin into the linguistically proximate French spoken vernacular. See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 215–20. The views I have presented of the consequences of the linguistic proximity of Latin and French differ from Shopkow’s emphasis on Latin and the vernacular as ‘linguistically separate’ and in many ways isolated from each other. This view of the relationship of Latin and vernacular is consonant with her view of Norman lay patrons having little influence over the Latin texts which they commissioned. She views the move into the written vernacular as essential for lay control of historiography; see Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC, 1997), pp. 25–9 and 246–75. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1998), I, 14.



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to reform written English with the expansion of West Saxon political power throughout England. Thus, like Latin, written English also had a symbolic value, and was not a neutral means of communication. 38 Moreover, we must also be aware of the symbolic meaning of English to Norse speakers and the practical issues involved in their participation in English written culture. English continued to be a language of governance, the church and literary culture: for example, law codes, charters, homilies, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and poetry all continued to be produced and copied in English. The use of written English during the period of Danish rule would have required strategies for explaining the contents of English texts to Danish speakers and for Danish speakers to influence the content of English texts; law codes provide a particularly good example of the outcome of this sort of dynamic process. After the Danish conquest, Wulfstan produced written English law codes for Cnut just as he had done for Æthelred II, codes which presumably required discussion in Danish as well as English in order to gain a witan’s approval.39 Emma, whose marriage to Æthelred II brought her to his court for over a decade and who played a substantial role alongside Wulfstan in introducing Cnut to the norms of English kingship, may also have contributed to sustaining written English culture during the reigns of her second husband and their son. 40 In Harthacnut’s court, information contained in written English as well as in Latin texts would have had to make the move from the written to the oral realm. Finally, the Danish conquest brought not only Scandinavian language, but also Scandinavian literary culture to the royal court of England. Two aspects of that literary culture are relevant here: first, the place of skaldic verse in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian courts and the issue of its intelligibility; second, the direct influence of Old Norse literary tradition, in the form of oral prose narrative and eddic verse, on 38

39

40

Michael Clanchy discusses the association of standardized English with clerical and royal authority in the England of 1066, but this was also the case for the period following the Danish conquest; see From Memory to Written Record, p. 211. On the development of standard Old English, see: Helmut Gneuss, ‘The Origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold’s School at Winchester’, Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972), pp. 63–83; and Walter Hofstetter, ‘Winchester and the Standardization of Old English Vocabulary’, Anglo-Saxon England 17 (1998), pp. 139–61. On use of written English and the political unity of late Anglo-Saxon England, see Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 6 (1996), pp. 25–49. On the interaction of Danish and English at Cnut’s court and more broadly, see Matthew Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur’: Skaldic Praise-Poetry at the Court of Cnut’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001), esp. pp. 174–5; and idem, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout, 2002). On Emma in the reign of Cnut, see Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 229–33. On Wulfstan, see Patrick Wormald, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan and the Holiness of Society’, in idem, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law and Text, Image and Experience (London, 1999), pp. 225–51, esp. p. 245.




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the Encomium itself. Skaldic verse, an oral genre, was obscure, with even native speakers of Norse requiring it to be interpreted, and yet it clearly flourished in Cnut’s court and other contexts associated with him.41 The poem Li∂smannaflokr, a text linked to Cnut’s garrison in London in the early years of his reign, appears to include a representation of Emma.42 Not only do we need to wonder whether the English in the Anglo-Danish court could have understood skaldic verse but, as Matthew Townend has recently discussed, skaldic verse may also have remained largely incomprehensible to the Danes themselves. The Danes, who spoke East Norse, were notoriously poor audiences for skaldic verse which, besides being highly technical, was a predominately West Norse tradition. Furthermore, it appears that skaldic verse was accompanied by a culture of talking about the text, even in West Norse contexts.43 It seems only reasonable to suggest, then, that strategies for explaining skaldic verse to East Norse and English speakers existed alongside strategies for explaining Latin texts such as the Aeneid and the Encomium. At the very least, we should not imagine that the Latin literary tradition, in its need for explication by a learned professional – in this case a cleric – was in a unique situation in the Anglo-Scandinavian court culture of eleventh-century England. Eddic verse and oral prose narrative, much less difficult genres than skaldic verse, may also have directly influenced the Encomiast. His depictions of the magic raven banner under which the Danes march into battle and of the fabulous animals of Svein’s and Cnut’s ships, both find their analogues in Old Norse literature, as well as drawing on Vergilian models. As such, the account of these ships represents a seamless fusing of Vergil and Old Norse literary tradition which could not have happened without vernacular talk. Indeed, without such vernacular talk, the Encomium is inconceivable. We need to account not only for lay knowledge of the Aeneid but also for a Flemish cleric’s knowledge of the Old Norse literary tradition. Emma, whom we know was among the Encomiast’s informants, appears as a likely source of his knowledge of Old Norse.44 The influence of oral Old Norse traditions on the Encomium is direct evidence of the fluid relationship between Latin and 41 42

43

44

Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur’, pp. 145–79. On the representation of Emma in skaldic verse see Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 22–3. On the Li∂smannaflokr, see Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur’, pp. 151, 162–4 and 166–7; and Russell Poole, ‘Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History: Some Aspects of the Period 1009–1016’, Speculum 62 (1987), pp. 265–98, at p. 286 and Viking Poems on War and Peace: A Study in Skaldic Verse (Toronto, 1991), pp. 86–115. Matthew Townend, ‘Norse Poets and English Kings: Skaldic Performance in Anglo-Saxon England’, Offa 58 (2001), pp. 269–75. I am grateful to Matthew Townend for allowing me to see this article in typescript and for discussing skaldic verse in England with me. Campbell, Encomium, p. xxxvii and pp. 94–7; Tyler, ‘The Eyes of the Beholders were Dazzled’, pp. 263–5; and Orchard, ‘Literary Background’, pp. 164–6 and 173.



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the vernaculars and between the written and the oral at Harthacnut’s court. It is important to emphasize that this fluidity undermines ascribing the power of learning and knowledge solely to a Latinate cleric.

IV The importance of a multilingual environment to the production and reception of the Encomium brings us back, time and time again, to Emma. She takes centre stage, which is just where the Encomiast insisted she belongs, when he wrote: laus reginae claret (in primis), in mediis uiget, in ultimis inuenitur, omnemque prorsus codicis summam complectitur. praise of the Queen is evident at the beginning, thrives in the middle, is present at the end, and embraces absolutely all of what the book amounts to.45 Polyglot Emma, the Encomiast’s patron, informer and audience, emerges as a pivotal figure in understanding the merging of traditions in this text. Emma’s probable knowledge of French, English, Danish and even Flemish, suggests that she may have been a key channel for, and mediator of, the vernacular talk which surrounded and shaped the Encomium. However, what about her experience of Latin literary culture? Looking at Emma in the context of her Norman background suggests that she was a non-literate lay person with an interest in Latin literature and thus she herself becomes an example of how such people were not just the audiences for, but also active participants in, a Latin literary culture. We cannot see Emma, a Norman princess, in the tradition of educated Anglo-Saxon royal women and lay aristocrats, and there are no references to her as either learned or Latinate – this is in contrast, for example, to her successor, Edith, as queen of England. 46 Nonetheless, if Emma had been raised in the Norman court, she would certainly have been exposed to the Latin literary culture which flourished during the rule of her brother, Richard II (996–1026). 47 Emma returned to his court during the period when Svein ruled in England and both she and Æthelred II went into exile. It was during Richard’s 45 46

47

Encomium, Argument. On the upbringing of both women, see Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 211–12 and 255–9. On the role of Anglo-Saxon royal nunneries in educating lay women in the tenth and eleventh centuries, see Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London, 2003), pp. 158–9. On the Latin literary culture of Normandy in the reign of Richard II, see Jan Ziolkowski, Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century (New York, 1989), pp. 37–47.




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reign that Dudo of Saint-Quentin completed his De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum which portrays Rollo, founder of the ducal dynasty, as a second Aeneas and attributes Trojan ancestry to the Normans.48 Not only Richard’s patronage and influence but also that of his uncle Rolf, his brother Robert (archbishop of Rouen) and that of his mother Gunnor, are all acknowledged by Dudo. While it is generally agreed that the Norman court was not the audience for Dudo’s text, the key role played by the ducal family as sources suggests that they had an investment in its representation of the Normans as civilized and Christian leaders.49 Dudo’s text, moreover, like that of the Encomium, also appears to have been influenced by Old Norse oral literature. Like the Encomiast, Dudo was a foreigner at the court from which he wrote; he is thus unlikely to have been himself directly familiar with Old Norse literary tradition or to have had the linguistic skills to access it, but would rather have had to rely on his patrons. As well as sponsoring history writing, the Norman ducal and episcopal court appears to have taken an interest in Latin verse. 50 Of particular interest here are three enigmatic poems, Moriuht, Jezebel and Semiramis which are found together in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Lat. 8121A, all of which show linguistic affinities with Anglo-Latin hermeneutic poetry.51 Moriuht begins and ends with dedications to Archbishop Robert and Gunnor. The other two poems appear to concern Emma directly. Jezebel, a dialogue between a man and a prostitute, is dedicated 48

49

50

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For Dudo’s text: De moribus et actis primorum Normanniæ ducum (Caen, 1865–72); English translation: History of the Normans, trans. Eric Christiansen (Woodbridge, 1998). On Dudo’s use of Vergil: Southern, ‘Classical Tradition’, pp. 186–7 and 192; Eleanor Searle, ‘Fact and Pattern in Heroic History: Dudo of Saint-Quentin’, Viator 15 (1984), pp. 125–9; Pierre Bouet, ‘Dudon de Saint-Quentin et Virgile: L’Énéide au service de la cause normande’, in Recueil d'études en hommage à Lucien Musset, Cahier des Annales de Normandie 23 (Caen, 1990), pp. 215–36; E.A. Hanawalt, ‘Dudo of Saint-Quentin: The Heroic Past Imagined’, Haskins Society Journal 6 (1994), pp. 111–18; Shopkow, History and Community, p. 150; and Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 12–20. On Dudo’s audience: Searle, ‘Fact and Pattern’; Mortensen, ‘Stylistic Choice’, pp. 88–92 and 100 –1; Shopkow, History, pp. 181 – 9 and 216 –22; Christiansen’s introduction to his translation, pp. xxiii–xxix; and Albu, Normans in their Histories, pp. 7–46, esp. p. 40. Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000–1150 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 76–87; Ziolkowski, Jezebel, p. 38; and Elisabeth van Houts, ‘A Note on Jezebel and Semiramis, Two Latin Norman Poems from the Early Eleventh Century’, Journal of Medieval Latin 2 (1992), pp. 18–24. For Moriuht: Warner of Rouen, Moriuht: A Norman Latin poem from the Early Eleventh Century, ed. and trans. Christopher McDonough (Toronto, 1995). Jezebel is edited and translated in Ziolkowski, Jezebel; and Semiramis in Dronke, Poetic Individuality, pp. 66–76. Each edition includes discussion of the style, classical and biblical learning and literary traditions (including Old Norse) of these poems. For discussion of the hermeneutic qualities see Lucien Musset, ‘Rouen et Angleterre vers l’an mil: du nouveau sur le satiriste Garnier et l’école litteraire de Rouen au temps de Richard II’, Annales de Normandie 24 (1974), pp. 287–90; and Andrew Galloway, ‘Word-Play and Political Satire: Solving the Riddle of the Text of Jezebel ’, Medium Ævum 68 (1999), p. 197.



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to Robert. Andrew Galloway reads the poem as a political satire, identifying the prostitute as Ælfgifu, Cnut’s first ‘wife’. 52 Meanwhile, Elisabeth van Houts’s interpretation of Semiramis as a searing commentary on the marriage of Emma to Cnut, presents the poem as engaged with the affairs of the ducal family and as such a contribution to a debate about Emma’s second marriage within the Norman court which may, at this point, have included her sons Alfred and Edward. 53 Like the Encomium, all of these poems combine impressive classical and biblical learning with the influence of the Old Norse literary tradition. Their style is marked by obscurity. Consequently, for these poems to have had an audience among the members of the ducal family, they would have had to have been explained through vernacular talk. The figure of the archbishop of Rouen – dedicatee of Dudo’s work and also of both Moriuht and Jezebel – may be a key to understanding the particular contexts and processes for this culture of explanation in the Norman court. Robert’s position as both archbishop and married count reminds us that the lack of a sharp distinction between lay and ecclesiastical elites could encourage dissemination of Latin texts to those who could not read for themselves.54 Gunnor’s role as patron and informant for Dudo, as well as her support for other Latin poets, may also have provided a powerful model for her daughter’s own patronage of, and engagement with, the Encomiast. Although we do not know anything about Emma’s relationship with her mother or what she learned from her, consideration of the connection between Gunnor and Emma draws important attention to the role of gender in Emma’s decision to commission the Encomiast. 55 In particular, studies of women’s literary patronage, which have identified matrilinear networks and the role of women who married abroad as cultural ambassadors, allow us to see Emma’s decision to commission the Encomium within larger social paradigms. 56 As the first foreign bride of an English king since Æthelwulf married Charles 52 53

54 55

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Galloway, ‘Word-Play and Political Satire’, pp. 202–3. Van Houts, ‘Note on Jezebel and Semiramis’; Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 12 and 34, and Simon Keynes, ‘The Æthelings in Normandy’, Anglo-Norman Studies 13 (1991), pp. 185–6. Ziolkowski, Jezebel, p. 41. Stafford, Queen Emma, pp. 3 and 209–13; van Houts, ‘Note on Jezebel and Semiramis’, p. 20 and eadem, ‘Countess Gunnor of Normandy, c.950–1031’, Collegium Medievale 12 (1999), pp. 18–21; and Ziolkowski, Jezebel, p. 42. Susan Groag Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, in Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens, GA, 1988), pp. 149–87, esp. pp. 173 and 179; June Hall McCash, ‘The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women: An Overview’, pp. 1–49, esp. pp. 14–16 and John Carmi Parsons, ‘Of Queens, Courts, and Books: Reflections on Literary Patronage of ThirteenthCentury Plantagenet Queens’, pp. 175–201, esp. p. 175; both in McCash’s edited collection, The Cultural Production of Medieval Women (Athens, GA, 1996).




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the Bald’s daughter, Judith, in 856, Emma may have played a distinctive and the unprecedented role as a conduit between the literary traditions of the Norman and English courts, thus fostering new literary developments.57 Both her Norman background and her gender had the potential to prepare Emma to take an active part in the production of the Encomium. Looking forward to the generation after Emma, moreover, suggests that she may have established a pattern of literary patronage which her daughter-in-law found useful to follow. Edith, the wife of Emma’s son, Edward the Confessor, commissioned a monk of SaintBertin to write a life of her husband which would support her interests in the uncertain political situation which ran from the end of Edward’s reign through to the aftermath of the Conquest. Like Emma, Edith was closely involved in the production of her text and she too acted as an informant. The text of the Encomium was known to the anonymous author of the Vita Ædwardi. It may be, of course, that his use of the Encomium is attributable to his Saint-Bertin connection. However, the possibility remains that the Encomium was known to Emma’s learned daughter-in-law Edith, and that she was following Emma’s example when she sought to protect her own position by commissioning a life of her husband.58 The links between the texts written for Gunnor, Emma and Edith underscore the agency of those women who chose to use written texts to protect and extend their influence – and reinforces the important role women played as the instigators of the writing of history in Latin throughout the Middle Ages. 59 Turning away from the context of the Encomium to look at the text itself suggests that Emma was not only the text’s patron and informant, but that she influenced its use of Latin literary culture. The text does 57 58

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Stafford, Queen Emma, p. 209. On Edith and the Vita Ædwardi, see the introduction to The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, ed. and trans. Frank Barlow, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), and Stafford, Queen Emma, esp. pp. 40 –8. I am currently preparing an article on Edith and the Vita Ædwardi. For the relationship of the Encomium and the Vita, see my ‘ “When Wings Incarnadine with Gold are Spread”: The Vita Ædwardi Regis and the Display of Treasure at the Court of Edward the Confessor’, pp. 83–107, in my edited collection Treasure in the Medieval West (Woodbridge, 2000). On women’s literacy: H. Grundmann, ‘Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Entstehung des Schrifttums in der Volkssprache’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936), pp. 129–61; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 189–96 and 251–2; and Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Frauen und Schriftlichkeit im Frühmittelalter’, in Hans-Werner Goetz (ed.), Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter (Cologne, 1991), pp. 65–118. There is also an extensive bibliography on manuscripts associated with nuns and nunneries as well as on the literacy of nuns. On women and historical writing: Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), pp. 48–80; Janet Nelson, ‘Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages’, repr. in eadem, The Frankish World: 750– 900 (London, 1996), pp. 183–97; and Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Women and the Writing of History in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of Abbess Matilda of Essen and Æthelweard’, EME 1 (1992), pp. 53 – 68 and eadem, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe: 900–1200 (London, 1999).



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not assign Trojan origins to Cnut’s dynasty, an absence made all the more conspicuous because Dudo had already supplied the Normans with these illustrious ancestors. Although Cnut, like Rollo, is figured as a second Aeneas, unlike Rollo, he is not a portrayed as a descendant of the Trojans.60 Unusually among west European dynasties in this period, the English shunned such origins in favour of biblical and native genealogies.61 A text which sought to present Cnut and his descendants to a mixed English and Danish court audience as the legitimate rulers of England might well have avoided representing Danish origins as distinct from English origins. Indeed, during the reign of Cnut, the Danish dynasty continued to mark their descent from Scyld, who first appeared in West Saxon genealogies during the reign of Æthelwulf (839–58) when he sought to emphasize the shared origins of the incoming Danes and the English.62 Emma’s period as Æthelred II’s queen would have exposed her to the West Saxon dynasty’s views of its origins. The careful representation of Cnut as a second Aeneas, but not as a descendant of Aeneas, suggests that polyglot Emma was a sophisticated mediator between Norman, Danish and English expectations and concerns. More importantly, if Emma was not just a general informant but the source of the Encomiast’s sensitivity to English qualms about Trojan origins, then the Encomium shows, not just a cleric mediating Latin culture to the secular aristocracy, but also a two-way negotiation rooted in face-to-face communication: in other words, vernacular talking. Here we see the importance of identifying a range of Latinities: Emma, who appears not to have had the linguistic skills which would have allowed her direct access to the Latin of the Encomium or the Aeneid, nonetheless exerts some control over the Encomiast’s deployment of Latin culture.

V Emma’s centrality to her text’s negotiation of the multilingual culture of the Anglo-Danish court placed her in an influential position vis-àvis the Encomiast. In this final section, I want to explore the power of that position by examining, in a literary fashion, the Encomiast’s 60

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Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, pp. 682–4 and Francine Mora-Lebrun, L’Énéide médiévale and la naissance du roman (Paris, 1994), pp. 25–40. David Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, in P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Woods (eds), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds, 1977), pp. 72–104, esp. pp. 77–96; and Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, p. 685. Dumville, ‘Kingship Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, p. 95; Alexander Callander Murray, ‘Beowulf, the Danish Invasions, and Royal Geneaology’, pp. 101–11 and Roberta Frank, ‘Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf ’, pp. 123–39; both in Colin Chase (ed.), The Dating of Beowulf (Toronto, 1981); and John Niles, ‘Locating Beowulf in Literary History’, Exemplaria 5 (1993), pp. 79–109, at p. 95.




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representation of his patron as Octavian. I will do this through a comparison of the place of women in the Aeneid, the Encomium and the twelfth-century vernacular Roman d’Eneas. From such a literary contextualization, which attends to style, characterization, allusion, and their impact on the meaning and reception of the text, we can see more clearly just why the commissioning of a Latin text was itself an assertion of authority on the part of Emma, a laywoman. The Aeneid, in its story of Aeneas’s flight from the ruins of Troy and his foundation of Rome, offers a vision of the past which included, and legitimized, secular concern for genealogy and erotic passion, in contrast to clerical preoccupations with salvation history. 63 Many of the stories of the Aeneid are attractive for women, particularly when the limited place assigned to females in Old English and Old Norse texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries is considered. Old English secular poetry from late Anglo-Saxon England (such as the Battle of Brunanburh and the Battle of Maldon) and Old Norse skaldic verse are both preoccupied with martial activity and afford little space to women. 64 Women in the Aeneid can be strong; they take on active, varied and central roles. Not only does Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia bring him Latium; there are also Dido, the warrior Camilla, and the goddesses Venus and Juno. In the context of Emma’s experience, moreover, the Aeneid offers a productive model for complicated step-families. The political world which was created, not just by the Danish conquest of England but also by the multiple marriages of both Emma and Cnut – and their evident fertility – was nothing if not messy. Aeneas, too, had children by more than one wife, although, unlike Cnut, he remarried only after the first wife had died. Vergil finesses it so that Rome is founded by descendants of both Ascanius (Aeneas’s son by Creusa) and Silvius (his son by Lavinia). The Encomiast’s use of a Vergilian paradigm for the Encomium suggests that he and Emma may have found in this particular classical text a way to understand and shape an uncertain present. However, despite its potential attractiveness for women, the Aeneid remains, par excellence, a tale of patriarchy. 65 Women are repeatedly cast aside as Aeneas pursues his imperial destiny: Creusa is lost; Dido is famously abandoned; and, although Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia unites the Trojan and Latin peoples, her characterization is minimal. The most active women of the text, Dido and Camilla, both behave 63 64

65

Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, esp. pp. 670 –81. Women are conspicuously absent from Old English verse which commemorates events of the tenth and eleventh centuries, in contrast to poetry which recounts events from the fourth to the sixth centuries such as Beowulf and Waldere. For women in skaldic verse, see Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 148–68. Marilyn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 1–22.



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as men – Dido in her governance of Carthage, Camilla on the battlefield – and end up dead. The women of the Aeneid are doubleedged: female agency is presented but it is also conspicuously constrained. The representation of women in the Aeneid is thus potentially problematic for a medieval woman reader whether she identifies with these female figures or alternatively takes the position of the male reader. 66 The growth of vernacular literature, and especially the flourishing of romance, has been associated with female patronage and empowerment. Broadly speaking, romance does give a place to the interests of women – love, marriage, female interiority – which is not seen in either epic or historical writing. The Eneas, which is amongst the earliest vernacular romances, attests to the greater provision made for women in romance. However, as is evident in the Eneas, as the women of the Aeneid moved out of Latin and into the vernacular, and as their lives began to command greater attention in romance, their representation had greater potential to be used to control the behaviour of aristocratic women. Although vernacularization was fostered by women, courtly romance was ultimately a genre devised by clerics in order to regulate aristocratic society, both male and female.67 Emma’s place within the Vergilian framework of the Encomium provides a marked contrast to the situation of the women in both the Aeneid and the Eneas. In reading the Encomiast’s account of the marriage of Cnut and Emma as an imperial union, which brings together the Danish and the English people, the reader cannot help but recall Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia. However, this parallel only lurks; it is invoked neither explicitly nor through allusion. In comparison, Lavinia and Aeneas are much more obviously recalled when Dudo recounts the marriage of Rollo to the Frankish princess Gisla. 68 The Eneas brings Lavinia forward only to place her more firmly within the confines of patriarchy.69 The Encomiast does not leave Emma in such a passive position. Rather, in his second preface, he figures her prominently as Octavian, that is, as Caesar Augustus, first of the Roman emperors. Worried that he will be accused of neglecting Emma because he recounts the deeds of Svein, Cnut and Harthacnut, he insists at the 66

67

68 69

Desmond, Reading Dido, esp. pp. 7–12 and her ‘Dominus/Ancilla: Rhetorical Subjectivity and Sexual Violence in the Letters of Heloise’, in David Townsend and Andrew Taylor (eds), The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 35–54. Krueger, trenchantly exposing the aim of romance to control women’s behaviour, discusses the association of vernacular romance with women’s empowerment and the highly problematic position of women readers of romance: Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge, 1993), esp. Chapter 1. Hanawalt, ‘Dudo of Saint-Quentin’, p. 117; and Shopkow, History and Community, p. 150. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 168–219; and Desmond, Reading Dido, pp. 107–19.




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beginning of his letter that praise of Emma is his theme. He reinforces this by reminding his audience that it was Vergil’s intention to praise Octavian by praising his ancestors: Aeneida conscriptam a Uirgilio quis poterit infitiari ubique laudibus respondere Octouiani, cum pene nihil aut plane parum eius mentio uideatur nominatim interseri? Animaduerte igitur laudem suo generi asscriptam ipsius decori claritudinis claritatisque in omnibus nobilitare gloriam. Quis autem hoc neget, laudibus reginae hunc per omnia respondere codicem, cum non modo ad eius gloriam scribatur, uerum etiam eius maximam uideatur optinere partem? Who can deny that the Aeneid, written by Virgil, is everywhere devoted to the praises of Octavian, although practically no mention of him by name, or clearly very little, is seen to be introduced? Note, therefore, that the praise accorded to his family everywhere celebrates the glory of their fame and renown to his own honour. Who can deny that this book is entirely devoted to the praise of the Queen, since it is not only written to her glory, but since that subject occupies the greatest part of it?70 The Encomiast weaves these lines tightly into the fabric of his preface by returning to them in his closing sentence: ‘His enim animaduersis, o lector . . . intellige, huius libelli seriem per omnia reginae Emmae laudibus respondere.’ (‘Noticing these matters, O Reader . . . understand that the course of this book is devoted entirely to the praise of Queen Emma.’) Lexical repetition emphasizes the importance of the association of queen and emperor. By presenting Emma as Octavian, the Encomiast brings her into the present and portrays her as a powerful force in the contemporary Anglo-Danish political scene. The problematic nature of romance for the woman reader allows us to see just how strong a gesture the allusion to Octavian was. Emma is compared to a Latinate man whose authoritative rule of the Roman Empire was legendary. It is striking as well that it is Emma, rather than Harthacnut, the current ruler of the AngloDanish empire, that is figured as Octavian. In contrast, Harthacnut is left out of a Vergilian framework which encompasses his mother, father and grandfather; he is not even likened to Silvius, son of Aeneas and Lavinia.71 In the present, all the authority of the Vergilian framework belongs to Emma. In romance, as Roberta Krueger shows, references to 70 71

Encomium, Argument. Tyler, ‘Fictions of Family’.



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women as patrons are often undercut by the misogyny of the text itself; this pattern finds no place in the Encomium. Although, within the text, Emma is reliant, first, on Cnut and then, after his death, seeks to wield power through her sons, she is not shown as contained by male dynastic concerns. For example, she is not handed over, Lavinia-like, to Cnut but rather she shrewdly negotiates her marriage so that only his sons by her will be considered eligible for the English throne. 72 The Encomium ends with a compelling depiction of Emma’s authority in which Emma is portrayed as central to the peaceful and strong rule of the kingdom: His ita peractis et omnibus suis in pacis tranquillitate compositis, fraterno correptus amore nuntios mittit ad Eduardum, rogans ut ueniens secum optineret regnum. Qui fratris iussioni obaudiens Anglicas partes aduehitur, et mater amboque filii regni paratis commodis nulla lite intercedente utuntur. Hic fides habetur regni sotiis, hic inuiolabile uiget faedus materni fraternique amoris. After the events described, he arranged all his affairs in the calm of peace, and being gripped by brotherly love, sent messengers to Eadweard and asked him to come and hold the kingdom together with himself. Obeying his brother’s command, he was conveyed to England, and the mother and both sons, having no disagreement between them, enjoy the ready amenities of the kingdom. Here there is loyalty among sharers of rule, here the bond of motherly and brotherly love is of strength indestructible.73 Here, at the end of the text, Emma cannot be consigned to the power behind the throne as she slips out of the bounds that usually circumscribed female agency. These final lines, and the text more generally, are consonant with the paralleling of Emma and Octavian which implies that support for Emma will further the peace and prosperity of the kingdom in troubled times. In this context, the Latin of the text not only projects an image of Cnut, a second Aeneas, as a civilized ruler of an empire rather than as a conquering Dane, it is also part of the social meaning of the text, with the symbolic value of the Latin working with the image of Emma as Octavian-like. Placing the Encomium at the meeting point of Norman, English, Norse and Latin literary cultures underscores Emma’s central and distinctive role in the production of this text. In this environment, Latinity could act, as it did after the Norman Conquest, as a ‘life-line of 72 73

Encomium, II. 16. Encomium, III. 13–14.




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communication’ across a ‘fractured society’ (to use Baswell’s formulation) and as a medium which could address the competing ambitions of communities who lived in a complex political and linguistic situation.74 Latin is not a barrier, but instead ensures the efficacy of the Encomium. The use of this language contributes to, rather than detracts from, Emma’s authority. Polyglot Emma, with her Latinate, but subordinate, cleric, was in a position to play a determining role in the oral culture of explanation which, I have argued, must have surrounded the Encomium. The strategies which were developed for communicating across linguistic and cultural boundaries not only allowed lay access to Latin texts but also allowed lay participation in Latin literary culture. Seen in this light, the idea of a Latin text, which makes sophisticated use of the Aeneid, contributing to political debate ceases to seem absurd. Instead, the Encomium comes to exemplify the vitality of the multilingual court of Harthacnut where Latin literature was only one of many literary traditions talked about across linguistic borders. Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York

74

Baswell, ‘Latinitas’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 122–51.



A panel discussion of Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion Introduction Dominique Iogna-Prat’s book Order and Exclusion was published in French in 1999 and in English in 2002. 1 Catherine Cubitt suggested that a round-table on the English version take place at one of the Early Medieval Europe sessions at Kalamazoo in May, 2003. She, Danuta Shanzer, and Barbara Rosenwein discussed possible participants; the result was a very lively ‘debate’ among Lucy Pick, Isabelle Cochelin, David Nirenberg (who gave formal critiques), Dominique Iogna-Prat, and a large, learned, and enthusiastic audience. What follows are the three critiques and Iogna-Prat’s response to them, slightly revised.

* 1

This debate is introduced and edited by B.H. Rosenwein, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago. Original French edition: Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam (1000–1150) (Paris, 1998); Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. G.R. Edwards, forward by Barbara H. Rosenwien (Ithaca, NY, 2002).

Early Medieval Europe   () 385 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

Engaging Order and Exclusion: reflections on a recent book by Dominique Iogna-Prat D  N 

The invitation to participate in this panel on Dominique Iogna-Prat’s book brought with it the rare pleasure of repetition. Re-reading the book in its English translation transported me from Baltimore to the garret on the Rue du Temple where I first read its Francophone version. Back then its pages made me forget the eternal pianist next door and the damp cold that sometimes passes in Paris for spring. I am happy to report that the English version has the same effect. This is a vast mansion of a book, a ‘wonder-house’ as Kim’s Kipling would have said, but also a ‘Bluebeard’s palace’, with more than a few chambers of terror. How to describe such a book? The task is not easy. The book does not fit into any simple ‘about’: it is not ‘about’ Jews, or Muslims, or heretics; it is not even about Cluniac thinking about these three emerging categories of ‘outsider’. The title already makes clear a greater ambition: ‘To Order and Exclude (if I may conflate the grammar of the French and English): Cluny and Christendom face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam’. The ambition is nothing less than understanding how Christendom creates the classifications and identifications through which it constitutes itself. As the conjunction makes clear, Cluny here stands for and with Christendom. And we may expect, from the confrontation posited in the title, to learn how heresy, Judaism, and Islam prove to be the key antagonists in the Cluniac construction of Christendom. None of the promises implicit in the title are disappointed, though they are not all equally fulfilled. I will anticipate myself: the book is unparalleled in what it teaches us about the rituals, metaphors, and arguments by which Cluny, and particularly its great abbot Peter the Venerable, elaborated a distinctive vision of Christendom, a Cluniac ecclesiology, if you will. It is less concerned with establishing a strong congruence between the particular Cluniac vision that it so brightly illuminates, and that of ‘Christendom’ more generally. Do Cluny and Early Medieval Europe   () 387–394 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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Christendom really stand side by side? Is Cluny really a ‘microcosmos’ of Christendom, or is there something specific to its situation that structures its specific engagement with heretic, Jew, and Muslim? Finally, it leaves almost unexplored the question of why Judaism and Islam play the peculiar role that Peter the Venerable assigns them in his staging of Christian community. The exclusion of Judaism and Islam emerges from these pages as a consequence of a change in Christian thought, but one that is curiously under motivated. What considerations, whether local or structural, made Judaism (for example) so useful a foil in the formation of a Cluniac Christendom? Perhaps the question seems too obvious. But because it is not posed directly enough, IognaPrat’s ‘exclusions’ can still be mistaken for the collateral damage of an ecclesiological and theological turn, rather than understood as targets that are simultaneously strategic and overdetermined. One of the many beauties of this book is the sensitive seriousness with which it approaches the universalist metaphors that structure not just the title, but the book itself. Iogna-Prat is interested in the question of how Christianity, that is, a society of believers, became Christendom, a spatial and social order coterminous with a church that was itself imagined as destined to expand until it filled the entire world. He chooses to approach this question through the Cluniacs at least partly because (as he puts it) they ‘confuse their own Church with the universal Church’. Part I (‘The Monks and the World Order’) studies the history of the Cluniacs’ ‘confusion’. Treating Cluny as a ‘monastic church functionally identified with Rome’, Iogna-Prat demonstrates how Cluny claimed for itself virtual congruence with the Christian ecclesia, characterizing itself as a ‘singular and common refuge for sinners’, as an ‘asylum of piety for all’, and as a leading and representative member of the ‘universal Church’. If the church is a mountain spreading to fill the world, Cluny is a great cedar of God, whose many branches, in the universalizing image of Psalm LXXIX/LXXX:12, ‘stretched as far as the sea, its shoots as far as the River’. The study of the accumulation of corporatist and spatial metaphors, of liturgical, theological and sacramental claims, becomes a subtle and precious demonstration of how the ‘Ecclesia cluniacensis tended to become one with the “republic of the Christian Church” ’.1 Insofar as the Cluniacs were concerned, Cluny really did stand with and for Christendom. The demonstration of the Cluniacs’ ‘confusion’ is beautiful, though the ‘confusion’ itself is a common one: many Christian communities 1

D. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, trans. G.R. Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002), p. 35.



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and even individuals have understood themselves as models for or microcosms of universal Christendom. What is surprising is that Parts II and III of the book seem to adopt the Cluniacs’ ‘confusion’ as their own. Once Cluny’s conflation is demonstrated, it is allowed to stand, and Peter the Venerable becomes a representative of the church universal. Part II (called ‘Christian Society’) studies Peter’s attack on the Petrobrusian heretics in order to provide ‘us with a sociology of Christianity in the twelfth century’. Part III (‘Christian Universality’) extrapolates from his attacks on Jews and Muslims a ‘Christian anthropology’ that removes non-Christians to the boundaries of humanity. Both sections treat Cluny’s exclusive universalism as a representative example of a ‘logic of Christendom’ created by the Gregorian reforms, a logic that ‘drove out to the margins all who did not conform’, and that made persecution a ‘structural necessity’ for Christian society. 2 Iogna-Prat describes Peter’s claims to represent the Christian republic and then accepts them, at least for the purpose of explaining the development of a universalist and therefore exclusionary ‘logic of Christendom’. We should probably ask how we know just what the impact of Peter’s not-so-widely-disseminated treatises was on this unfolding logic. But the questions I would like to focus on have more to do with how we imagine the place of these exclusions in the development of the ‘logic of Christendom’ itself. Were they the unfortunate by-product of the ‘logic of Christendom’, or the tools from which that logic was crafted? If the latter, how should we understand the relationship between the history of these useful exclusions and the history of the uses to which they were put in a particular time and place? Because Iogna-Prat does not ask these questions explicitly, his account of this moment in the history of Christian engagement with Judaism in particular remains somehow under stipulated. (Islam and heresy pose different though related problems, which will only be hinted at here.) According to Iogna-Prat, the Cluniacs are fighting heretics, Muslims, and Jews because the unfolding Gregorian logic of universal ecclesiastical sovereignty demands such a contest. Proudhon once quipped that ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’, and the same could be said of universality. What cheating is here taking place? Carl Schmitt is worth citing, since he puts the question in such exaggerated terms: ‘political concepts . . . have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation . . . and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation 2

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, pp. 21 and 23.



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disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty . . . are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term.’ 3 One way to strengthen the links between Peter’s exclusions, on the one hand, and his universalism, on the other, would be to cast them in these hyper-strategic terms. The move is perhaps implicit in Iogna-Prat’s book, but I would like to draw its outlines in a bolder relief; bolder, that is, than he might approve of. If Peter the Venerable proved the most indefatigable conflator of Cluny and Ecclesia, it is not because Cluniac universalism was increasingly representative of Christendom, but because it was increasingly at odds with it. The pages of Order and Exclusion overflow with evidence of this tension, and nowhere more explicitly than in their discussion of the struggle launched by the reform movement for the separation of ecclesiastical from secular power, and the assertion of the former’s sovereignty over the latter. Cluny’s place in this struggle was ambivalent. From its origins it had been poised between two powers, obliged in profound ways to its aristocratic benefactors but dependent directly on the papacy. Much, perhaps too much, has been made of this foundational equipoise, which (as Cowdrey has argued) was not as rare as we were once taught to believe.4 But what was undoubtedly rare was the use to which that equipoise was put during the Gregorian reform. On the one hand Cluny was an important agent of reform, profiting vastly, for example, from the flow of churches and cloisters being transferred from secular to ecclesiastical control. On the other, Cluny was deeply committed to a variety of liturgical and ritual practices (baptismal, charitable, sacramental, penitential, funerary, and more) that brought the laity within the boundaries of monastic life and space, and arrogated to Cluny a uniquely mediating role between the spiritual and the secular, between clergy and laity, and of course between heaven and earth. That mediating role could be approached from (at least) two directions. Iogna-Prat’s book is primarily concerned with the view from above, that is, with the universalizing ‘ecclesiology’ through which Cluny elevated and justified its involvement in the world. Better than any other work I know, it illuminates Cluny’s creation of an exceptional space ‘free of secular entanglements’, an ‘ever-expanding space withdrawn from the world’, a ‘withdrawal of space “from space” ’.5 Iogna-Prat is of course 3

4 5

Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 7th edn (Berlin, 2002), p. 31; English tr. in idem, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 1996), pp. 30–1. H.E.J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford, 1970). Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 260.




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well aware that the freedom of this Cluniac space (and of ecclesiastical space in general) was often expressed in terms of jurisdictional sovereignty, as in the papal bull issued by Urban II during his preaching of the crusade in 1095, in which he defined the ‘limits of the Cluniac “sacred ban”, the monastic lordship as a sovereign space within which the high justice of St Peter, the patron of the establishment, was exercised’.6 The one, in fact, depended upon the other, in the sense that Cluny’s claims for the expansion of its jurisdictional sovereignty were justified by its claims of withdrawal from the world. It was precisely this dependence that made a different view of Cluny’s claims, the view from below, so politically useful. Perhaps because he is intent on studying the Cluniac language of universalism (rather than the particular and political work such universalism does), Iogna-Prat does not tell us enough about the ‘worldliness’ of Cluny’s mediating role, or about the political risks of its very real ‘secular entanglements’. The implications of these risks were great, particularly for the maintenance of Cluniac sovereignty, by which I mean, among other things, Cluny’s relative autonomy from both papal and secular power. That sovereignty or autonomy was at risk from both papal and princely pretensions. ‘The big problem’, as Iogna-Prat puts it, ‘lay in the “twin-headedness” of the Cluniac body.’ 7 Who, pope in Rome or abbot in Cluny, was the true head of the Cluniac order? The (relative) sovereignty of Cluniac abbots depended at least in part upon their success in maintaining Cluny’s peculiarly interstitial place in the field lying between ecclesiastical and secular communities. As that field became increasingly polarized over the course of the twelfth century, the middle ground began to sink beneath the weight of the religious order Cluny had constructed. In Peter the Venerable’s day Cluniac practice was already under sharp criticism as too much constrained by the demands of donors and the claims of beggars, as too liturgical and ritualized, too busy, too materialistic; in short, as too much of the world. And as we know, in the end its sovereignty was lost, not to princes, but to popes like Gregory IX (in 1231/33) and Nicholas IV (in 1289) who undertook to reform the order. Does viewing Peter’s work through lenses tinted with sovereignty tell us anything about how and why he chose to aim his barbed universalism at particular targets of exclusion? The question may at first seem obtuse, since we know that Cluniac sovereignty was not threatened by heretics, Muslims, or Jews, but rather by lay lords, popes, and powerful

6 7

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 169. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 59.



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movements of reform. Yet we also know, for it is a commonplace of social science and political philosophy, that battles for sovereignty are often waged in dark but ideologically significant corners of society, not at its centre. As Carl Schmitt put it, again with exaggerated finality, ‘he is sovereign who decides the exception’. 8 It seems important to ask what might have made heretics, Jews, and Muslims useful vehicles for the pursuit of sovereign power. As an example of how the question of sovereignty might reorient analysis, consider the case of the Jews. Iogna-Prat is well aware of their importance in ‘power disputes between the king and the seigneurial powers’.9 But he does not emphasize their centrality in the extension of Capetian suzerainty in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 10 Nor does he give them much place in his rich treatment of the contest for supremacy between lay and ecclesiastical powers. He begins his history of that central conflict of sovereignty with Pope Gelasius’s (492–6) admonition to the child emperor Anastasius (Ep. 12), exhorting the monarch to ‘bow his neck to the protectors of divine things’. But he might just as well have begun with an earlier (and braver) confrontation that he does not cite, that of St Ambrose with the mighty Theodosius over the punishment of some Christians who had burned a synagogue. In letter and sermon St Ambrose warned that to apply the protection of law to the Jews was to reverse the proper hierarchy, setting imperial edict above divine law, secular over heavenly order. The king who did such a thing set himself outside the Christian community. If Theodosius upheld imperial law, Ambrose warned, the Roman people would say of him what they had said of his predecessor Maximus when he too punished the destruction of a synagogue: ‘we heard him called a defender of public order, but Christ . . . tested him, [and] that king has become a Jew’.11 I do not mean to imply that Peter understood the relationship between secular and sacred power in the same way as Ambrose. I mean only to suggest that Peter attacked the Jews not because the new reformist ‘logic of Christendom’ abhorred contradiction, but because a 8

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‘Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet’, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre der Souveränitat, 8th edn (Berlin, 2004), p. 13. English translation: Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Boston, 1985), p. 5. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 284. On which see W.C. Jordan’s important article: ‘Jews, Regalian Rights, and the Constitution in Medieval France’, AJS Review 23 (1998), pp. 1–16. Ambrose’s letter is preserved in two versions: the finished form (Ep. 74) and an original or earlier draft. I quote from the latter, Ep. 1a extra collectionem, in Ambrose, Epistulae et acta, ed. O. Faller and M. Zelzer, CSEL 82.1–4, 4 vols (Vienna, 1968–96), III, pp. 162–77. For context see N.B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 298–315.




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long history of Christian ‘thinking with Jews’ made them particularly meaningful and useful tools in struggles over the proper relationship of the secular to the sacred such as those that consumed his age. Cluny’s threatened claims were based on a particular vision of that relationship, and it is in their defence that he deployed his arguments against the Jews in works like his letter to Louis VII and his treatise ‘Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews’. The reference to Ambrose also reminds us, of course, that however ‘strategic’ or ‘political’ Peter’s exclusions may have been, they drew their meaning and utility from a long and complex history. Arguments about the relative exclusion or inclusion of Jews and Judaism from the Christian polity had been a basic discourse with which to debate the proper relationship between material and spiritual power for centuries before Peter the Venerable took them up. Order and Exclusion scarcely touches upon this history. It provides a lovingly textured sense of the evolution of, for example, Christian representations of community in liturgy. But it says very little about earlier Christian uses of Judaism as a way of debating the proper ordering of the material and spiritual world, of the way in which such a discourse may have animated Christian representations of Islam or of heresy, nor of how Peter’s use of these exclusions may have been structured by or transformed their histories and potential meanings. It is for this reason that its history of exclusion sometimes seems under motivated or underdetermined. This silence does not reflect a want of sources or of scholarship. If the author does not cite the considerable bibliography that explores the deployment of Judaism in Christian thought from the Epistles of Paul to the present day, it is because he has other interests and priorities. Order and Exclusion is above all a magnificent exploration of the Cluniac ecclesiological vision of the world, not a study of the role ideas about Judaism and Islam played in the creation of Christian political theology. Iogna-Prat has chosen to structure the articulation of that ecclesiological vision through Peter’s writing on heretics, Jews, and Muslims. The choice is a deeply ethical and humane one, designed to underscore his conviction that the beauty of Cluniac order came at a terrible cost to those placed outside it. (Intus pax, foris terrores, as a near contemporary of Peter’s would put it.) But the important book he has produced is not yet a history of why or how that exclusion was affected, or of what ideological work it did for Cluny or for Christendom more generally. Exclusion is still a consequence rather than a central component of the ecclesiological change that interests Iogna-Prat and is therefore not the principal subject of his history. If we believe that the excluded are indeed ideologically central, we may want to write our histories in such a way as to reflect that centrality. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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Otherwise our historiography will have a tendency to re-enact the exclusion of Jews, Muslims, and heretics from the foundations of Christian order. It is too early to say what such a history would look like, but Order and Exclusion clearly represents an impressive stride toward it. Department of History, John Hopkins University



Orders and exclusions I  C 

Of the three individuals that have been asked to participate in this initially oral and now written discussion around Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order and Exclusion, I am the one working most closely on Cluny, and will therefore concentrate my remarks on the sections dealing above all with this Burgundian abbey. I will mainly examine the first part of the book, the history of the church and of Cluny in particular, as well as the manner in which the argument constructed in the first part relates to the hypothesis developed in the two other parts, in other words, the relationship between the place assigned to Cluny and to the church hierarchy by Iogna-Prat, and the production of Peter the Venerable’s three treatises against the Petrobrusians, the Jews and the Saracens. In the following pages, I will raise various questions concerning IognaPrat’s overall argumentation in Order and Exclusion. However I should state right away why I consider this author and his book to be incontournables. Many great scholars have studied Cluny, but in my view Iogna-Prat is one of its most important specialists since Ernst Sackur in the late nineteenth century, because his approach is both innovative and holistic. Over the last two decades, he has repeatedly brought together Cluniac scholars in fruitful exchanges at Cluny or Auxerre 1 and he has accompanied his own inventive research 2 by essential ‘panoramas’ of Cluniac writings and history.3 His second book on Cluny, Order and Exclusion, is a masterpiece. By masterpiece I mean that, even though I disagree with some of its affirmations, I consider that it offers to medieval studies the opportunity to make an important leap forward. Order and Exclusion not only proposes a more nuanced and therefore more realistic rephrasing of R.I. Moore’s fundamental thesis regarding the ecclesiastical roots of the exclusion process which got momentum in the 1

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One illustration of these fruitful meetings is the article he published in collaboration with C. Sapin, ‘Les études clunisiennes dans tous leurs états’, Revue Mabillon, new ser. 5 (1994), pp. 233–58. D. Iogna-Prat, ‘Agni immaculati ’: recherches sur les sources hagiographiques relatives à saint Maieul de Cluny (954–994) (Paris, 1988). Many of these articles can now be found in D. Iogna-Prat, Études clunisiennes, Les médiévistes français 2 (Paris, 2002).

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late eleventh century,4 it also presents the first fruits of various new and extremely rich avenues of research in medieval studies, especially regarding sacrality and space.5 The ability of Iogna-Prat to tie together these new approaches in an overall meaningful whole makes Order and Exclusion a ground-breaking work. Because what Iogna-Prat has to say about the history of the Middle Ages is so innovative, but also because he addresses himself directly to us, asking us to reflect on our own intolerance and its past history, I cannot help but compare his Order and Exclusion to Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum.6 In both cases, though some of the claims can be challenged, the final result remains fundamental, both for our understanding of the Middle Ages as well as our understanding of ourselves. Both authors were at similar stages in their career, both benefited and benefit from the same encompassing and far-reaching view of the history of the Middle Ages, and both share the same deep concern for our society, which propels them to write to us directly, asking us medievalists not to shy away from our duties in today’s world.7 Iogna-Prat’s request, which mainly concerns our perception of religious groups, including Muslims, is one that, sadly, needs urgently to be taken into account given the events of the last four years. However, considering my specialization in the history of monasticism, especially in Cluniac monasticism, I will deal primarily with what Dominique IognaPrat said regarding ‘order’ rather than ‘exclusion’. While privileging one over the other, I should make it clear that I completely agree with 4

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R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950 –1250 (Oxford, 1987). On this topic, cf. the description of the meeting envisaged for 27–29 June 2005 in Auxerre, in D. Méhu, ‘Mises en scène et mémoires de la consécration d’Église au Moyen Âge’, Centre d’études médiévales, Auxerre. Études & Travaux (2003–4), pp. 191–2. Cf. also J.A. Harris, ‘The Place of the Jerusalem Temple in the Reform of the Church in the Eleventh Century’, Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto (2002). Among other publications on the topic of sacred places, cf. for instance A. Vauchez (ed.), Lieux sacrés, lieux de culte, sanctuaires: approches terminologiques, méthodologiques, historiques et monographiques (Rome, 2000). C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987). Bynum’s care for society, and especially its sometime too fragile young women, is apparent in her preface (‘My act of writing is therefore my pledge to her granddaughter, Antonia Walker, and to her granddaughter’s generation that women’s creativity shall not in the future be silenced.’) and in her epilogue (‘Are there any implications of my study for twentiethcentury culture . . . ? The most basic implication, I think, is this. Although medieval life styles and devotions seem inapplicable (without great revision) to modern problems, the range and richness of medieval symbols have something to teach us about the impoverishment of our own. And because our understanding of food and flesh is fearful and awkward, our therapies for those who suffer from “eating disorders” are narrow and awkward too.’ Holy Feast, p. xvi and p. 299). Cf. also the beautiful last two sentences of Iogna-Prat’s book: ‘No doubt our relationship to the past is more a matter of residues than of permanence. Yet whatever the discontinuities that make the Middle Ages seem distant and exotic, it is worthwhile to seek to identify their residues and project a little light into the theater of our shadows.’ (Order and Exclusion, p. 365).



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Iogna-Prat (and R.I. Moore for that matter) that the socio-religious order implemented by the institution of the Church is coterminous with and inseparable from a process of exclusion. And that this dual process of definition/rejection (which can also be viewed as a phenomenon of dilatatio/purgatio, to use Peter the Venerable’s and Iogna-Prat’s expressions8 ) was at the heart of the long twelfth century. I do not debate the existence of this link, but rather Peter’s circumstances during – and motivations for – developing his rhetoric of exclusion. In other words, I am not certain that the exclusion discussed by Iogna-Prat in the second and third parts is the one coterminous with the order depicted at the beginning of the book. Hence the plural I used in the title of this article. The first and most obvious criticism that can be formulated against Order and Exclusion is that its main character had a small audience and, therefore, a limited impact. In his introduction, Iogna-Prat writes: ‘In the struggles against the Jews and against Islam, Peter the Venerable was a protagonist of major importance’ and adds on the following page, that by studying Peter the Venerable’s thinking on non-Christians, he is analysing the ‘dominant tendency’ inside the Church. 9 But how important or paradigmatic really is Peter the Venerable for understanding the twelfth century (or even twelfth-century monastic thinkers) and the evolution of Christian thought regarding order and exclusion? Peter’s main sources of fame among medievalists derive from his peaceful, tense, and sometimes even violent relationships with famous contemporaries (such as Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Pontius of Melgueil), as well as his reform of Cluny. Less importance has been given to his writings than to those of Bernard or Abelard, not only because of the lesser complexity of their content, but also because of the discrepancy regarding their dissemination. Even though Peter was an unusually prolific author, he was a quite marginal one. Except for his two books on miracles,10 his writings were infrequently copied during the twelfth century and even later, as is illustrated by the small number of extant manuscripts that survive of his three treatises (or of his letters for that matter 11). The Contra Petrobrusianos and the Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem each survive only in four extant 8 9 10 11

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 265. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, pp. 3–4. Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libri duo, ed. D. Bouthillier, CCCM 83 (1988). If we ignore the manuscripts containing individual letters, there remain essentially six manuscripts containing a collection of Peter’s letters; cf. G. Constable (ed.), The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, MA, 1967), II, pp. 48–63. This number is not even a tenth of the surviving manuscripts containing a collection of the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux; cf. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais, ‘Introduction’, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 7: Epistolae, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1974), pp. x–xv and, more recently, M. Duchet-Suchaux, ‘Introduction’, in Bernard de Clairvaux, Lettres, ed. J. Leclercq, H. Rochais and Ch. H. Talbot, trans. H. Rochais, Sources chrétiennes 425 (1997), I, pp. 43–6.



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manuscripts;12 the Contra sectam Sarracenorum survives in only one.13 Iogna-Prat does not really discuss this issue when presenting these treatises. He makes no reference to the dissemination of the Adversus Iudeos, except mentioning one study on the topic in a footnote, 14 while he evokes almost without comment the four manuscripts of the Contra Petrobrusianos.15 It is only in the last seven lines of Iogna-Prat’s chapter on ‘Islam and the Antichrist’ dealing with the Contra sectam Sarracenorum that he reveals that only one extant manuscript exists of this treatise. 16 He then admits that the impact of the treatise may have been (and here I quote from these same seven last lines) ‘faint’, ‘very limited’ and ‘short-lived’. Given this restricted dissemination, the three treatises at the foundation of Order and Exclusion cannot be considered influential. Can they nevertheless be considered paradigmatic, given that their author was the abbot of so important a monastery? Peter the Venerable, who ruled from 1122 to 1156, is the first abbot of Cluny who can be considered a true archetype of the mode of thinking of the Ecclesia cluniacensis because, unlike all his predecessors (with the possible exception of Aymard, about whose early life we are entirely ignorant), he did not enter the Ecclesia cluniacensis as an adult (i.e. at any time from age fifteen onward):17 Peter had been an oblate in a Cluniac dependency, Sauxillanges. Therefore, moulded by the Ecclesia cluniacensis from an early age, he can be perceived as one of its purest products and a true exemplar. However, the Cluny of the second quarter of the twelfth century was no longer the glorious Cluny of Abbot Hugh of Semur, who ruled in the second half of the eleventh century, from 1049 to 1109: the terrible crisis that followed Pontius’s return from exile in the early 1120s, an uneasy economic situation constraining Peter to make serious cutbacks in spending, numerous clashes with bishops opposed to the exemption of the Ecclesia cluniacensis, and 12

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J. Fearns, ‘Introduction’, in Peter the Venerable, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos, ed. J. Fearns, CCCM 10 (1968), p. viii and Y. Friedman, ‘Introduction’, in Peter the Venerable, Aduersus Iudeorum inueteratam duritiem, ed. Y. Friedman, CCCM 58 (1985), p. xxviii. The treatise discussing Judaism written by the controversial Abelard can be found in more or less as many manuscripts (three medieval but four modern ones): cf. J. Marenbon and G. Orlandi, ‘Introduction’, in Collationes, ed. and trans. J. Marenbon and G. Orlandi (Oxford, 2001), pp. xci–ciii; however his treatise Sic et non survived in eleven manuscripts, all but one from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; cf. B.B. Boyer and R. McKeon, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Abailard, Sic et Non. A Critical Edition, ed. B.B. Boyer and R. McKeon (Chicago, 1976), pp. 5–6. J. Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, NJ, 1964), p. 155. More recently, but mainly repeating Kritzeck, G. Rizzardi, Domande cristiane sull’Islàm nel medioevo. Edizioni e studi sul Corpus cluniacense a proposito dei saraceni (San Cataldo, 2001), p. 17n. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 285. Iogna-Prat only admits that ‘The work was therefore not subject to very widespread literary diffusion in the Middle Ages’, Order and Exclusion, p. 116. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 357. The most recent and complete overview of the early history of Cluny with all the important primary sources can be found in Joachim Wollasch, Cluny – ‘Licht der Welt’. Aufstieg und Niedergang der klösterlichen Gemeinschaft (Düsseldorf, 1996).




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the various Cistercian attacks on their customs, had deprived the Cluniacs of much of their title to glory and leadership among the western monks.18 This leads me to the second criticism that can be made against Iogna-Prat’s book: the construction of Cluny’s glory as depicted in the first part had been much deflated and was under increased challenge when Peter wrote the treatises discussed in the last two parts. The ‘order’ of the first was not contemporary with the ‘exclusion’ of the second. 19 Iogna-Prat presents Peter the Venerable’s writings as the products of an ever-expanding monastic church, which formulated expulsion as a correlate to its extension. However, even though the resulting image is far less attractive, one can envisage a very different scenario: Peter’s anxious writings against the expansion of the heretical groups, the Jews, and the Saracens, could have been a by-product of his anxiety regarding the Ecclesia cluniacensis faced by internal dissension as well as harsh competition from new and extremely successful monastic movements. One can indeed see such a defensive tone in his writings apart from his treatises. His letters answering Bernard of Clairvaux’ acerbic comments on Cluny, especially letter 28, are famous among scholars of medieval monasticism.20 It is noteworthy that he proposed in letter 111, also addressed to Bernard, that they work conjointly against Islam, probably in the hope that this common activity would end forever the strife between the two monastic families. In his statuta reforming the Ecclesia cluniacensis, following the criticisms coming from the inside and the outside, Peter the Venerable found it necessary to offer a causa to excuse the implementation of each new statute. 21 In his De miraculis, he also 18

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I am not claiming that from the twelfth century onward, Cluny disappeared from the religious and political stage; in fact, it never became insignificant, as is illustrated by the glorious individuals that were later chosen by the French kings as abbots. I am only saying that Cluny had now become paradigmatic of one form of monasticism among others, and not the leading one, neither in the political sphere nor in the spiritual one. For Iogna-Prat’s argument, it is important to claim that this decline in influence only started in the thirteenth century (cf. for instance Order and Exclusion, p. 30). In fact, Iogna-Prat only offers a thorough presentation of Peter, his life and his writing at the beginning of the second part (Order and Exclusion, pp. 99 seq.). However, again and again throughout the book, he presents the rhetoric of purgation developed by Peter as contemporary of the process of dilatatio described in the first part. He must do so, as his whole hypothesis on the production of Peter’s exclusion relies on that simultaneity; cf. for instance ibid., p. 360: ‘As a member of a monastic Church identifying itself, in the dynamic of its expansion, with the universe, Peter could not but be drawn logically into establishing the tyranny of a single ring.’ On this topic, cf. especially G.R. Knight, The Correspondence between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux: A Semantic and Structural Analysis (Aldershot, 2002). These causae are typical of Canon Law starting its classical age in the same years. Therefore their adoption by Peter is a proof of his flexibility and adaptability to his age. This said, I see no contradiction in underlining the fact that their use by Peter is also a proof of his unstable position. Peter tries to make radical changes in the Ecclesia cluniacensis. His enterprise is innovative and laudable, but his position insecure. Cf. M. Saurette, ‘Rhetorics of Reform: Abbot Peter the Venerable and the Twelfth-Century Rewriting of the Cluniac Monastic Project’, Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto (2004), part III.



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occasionally adopted a defensive tone, justifying through little anecdotes practices deemed unacceptable by the Cistercians, but which he did not want to eradicate, such as oblation or the entrance ad succurrendum.22 In sum, even though Peter claimed once in the De miraculis that Cluny extended ‘its branches unto the sea’, an expression that Iogna-Prat repeats many times through his book, one must make clear distinctions between rhetorical claims and actual facts. During the second quarter of the twelfth century, Cluny’s expansionary phase had ended, recession had even started, and Peter spent the greater part of his life reforming the fragile institution and justifying his measures. The Ecclesia cluniacensis and its head were both facing not only internal strife but also a newly emerging world (with greater reliance for instance on law and money, and greater admiration for other forms of perfection). Iogna-Prat knows all that and mentions it in his book,23 but he does so very rarely and prefers to refer to the glory of Hugh’s past abbacy as if it had not paled and was still nourishing Peter’s mode of thinking. This is problematic, as is Iogna-Prat’s claim that Peter’s writings were representative of the ‘dominant tendency’. In a changing world in which Cluny was perceived increasingly as passé, one cannot consider the writings of its abbot as paradigmatic of the monastic church as a whole.24 The enormous audiences and converts that Bernard of Clairvaux attracted make him a far more appropriate candidate to express the ‘dominant tendency’ in the monastic church of the middle of the twelfth century. Peter the Venerable’s voice is one among many at the time, and not one much heard if we are to believe manuscript numbers. Turning from Peter the Venerable, I would like to discuss the more general questions of Cluny and the church hierarchy, as well as the roles assigned to them by Dominique Iogna-Prat. In addition to his delicate examination of some of the twelfth century’s mechanisms of exclusion, discussed by D. Nirenberg and L. Pick in this volume, Iogna-Prat has some fundamental pages on the process of ordering society that took place in the eleventh and especially the twelfth century. As he himself points out, the division of society in Dumézil’s famous three orders had been already formulated by ninth-century scholars and probably even pre-existed their formulation.25 The important novelty from the late 22

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Peter the Venerable, De Miraculis, II, xxviiii, pp. 154–6 (a superb praise of oblation, intelligently tied to the Carthusian Order rather than to the Ecclesia cluniacensis) and I, vii, p. 22 (concerning the entrance ad succurrendum, i.e. when an individual was sick and/or approaching death). One such instance can be found in Order and Exclusion, p. 75, where Iogna-Prat admits, in passing, that the flow of bishops entering Cluny and of Cluniac monks made bishops declined after the end of Hugh’s abbacy. Iogna-Prat himself admits that Cluny is paradigmatic of the traditional monasticism (Order and Exclusion, p. 35). Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 14.




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eleventh century onward is the definition and implementation of more rigid boundaries between social groups, such as the ones drawn by the Gregorian reform between the clergy and the laity, or the ones drawn by the church hierarchy between orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy. 26 In this context, I am relatively reluctant to accept Iogna-Prat’s theory of inclusion: that Peter’s Cluny seriously wanted to absorb the whole society into itself. Indeed Cluny wanted to be a refuge for repentant sinners and those desiring to come closer to God, but the borders between the inside and the outside were not to be pulled down. On the contrary, the study done by Didier Méhu on the sacred ban of Cluny and the concrete organization of its lordship illustrates the manifest desire of the Burgundian community to define very clearly its boundaries with the rest of the world in order to accentuate its prerogatives and its (temporarily) harmonious inclusion of a tiny portion of the lay world. 27 The admission of lay brothers, from the twelfth century onward in Cluniac and non-Cluniac monasteries, different from the conversi of the previous centuries,28 can be understood as the admission into the enclosure of non-noble individuals, but it also served as a buffer zone between the choir monks and the rest of society, making the separation between them more radical. One can also tackle from another angle this claim of a sudden dilatatio of Cluny to admit the world: Iogna-Prat talks about Peter the Venerable’s activism through his treatises as an illustration of his novel desire to include society within his community. However Odo of Cluny had been quite active as well, along the same lines, more than two centuries earlier.29 The tension between action in this world and contemplation transcending it is inherent in monasticism, with the latter usually superseding the former without ever really eradicating it. 30 Some scholars studying twelfth-century monasticism have noticed 26

27 28

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This phenomenon is not limited to the abbey of Cluny. In many regions of Europe, the linear boundaries between territorial units developed around the same time; cf. N. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom. Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval Hungary, c.1000 – c.1300 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 13. D. Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, X e–XV e siècle (Lyon, 2001). W. Teske, ‘Laien, Laienmönche und Laienbrüder in der Abtei Cluny. Ein Beitrag zum ‘KonversenProblem’’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976), pp. 248–322 and 11 (1977), pp. 288–339. I am referring to Odo’s Occupatio, ed. Antonius Swoboda (Liepzig, 1900) and his Collationes, PL 133, cols 105–512. In 2005, a new and very promising Ph.D. thesis should be defended in Nice, under the supervision of M. Lauwers, by Isabelle Rosé, ‘Odon de Cluny († 942). Réformes et ecclésiologie monastiques en Gaule méridionale et en Italie’. Cf. however Iogna-Prat’s claim that ‘in the tradition of ancient Christianity, [the monk] confined himself to exercising his office and function in retreat from the world. The situation changed with the reform driven by the papacy in the middle of the eleventh century.’ (Order and Exclusion, p. 24). Historians of monasticism must be careful of believing that they have suddenly discovered the emergence of the monk finally relating with the world. For such a birth in the ninth century, cf. R. Sullivan, ‘What Was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St Gall and the History of Monasticism’, in A.C. Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, 1998), pp. 251–87.



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increased activism,31 while others see precisely the opposite, namely increased separation from the world.32 Both readings are valid, and the Cluniacs do not differ much from the norm in this respect. The last point that I would like to raise concerns the place of the clerics in medieval society and their success, or lack of it, in moulding the laity. This point relates partly to the quest for the roots of western exclusion-behaviour regarding Jews and Muslims, but also to IognaPrat’s depiction of an institutional church, in the first part of Order and Exclusion, which, because of its increasing ascendancy in society had become coterminous with it. Iogna-Prat seems to envision the Church as an all-powerful hierarchy guiding the medieval laity like the captain ruled his ship. He claims in his introduction that ‘Medieval society functioned during a time span (the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and a space (the Latin west) in [such a way that] the production of ideas was the exclusive province of clerics.’ 33 However the laity had far more agency than he seems ready to assign to it in his book. The complex vernacular literature which appears in manuscripts from the twelfth century onward, and which flourished before that in oral form, is not the product of an idea-deprived community. In fact, the content of the socalled courtly literature and of the Fabliaux forces us to question the real impact that the church hierarchy might have had on shaping the medieval laity’s way of thinking: impact there was, but limited it seems. Moreover, one cannot ignore that the lay nobility often held clerics in contempt, or, if you prefer, placed itself above the clergy when thinking in terms of the tripartite division of society. One illustration of this sentiment is to be found in stories related to the practice of oblation. Ulrich of Zell who wrote one of the Cluniac customaries, bitterly complained in the preface that parents give their half-alive (semi-vivi ) or half-human (semi-homines) children to the cloisters.34 The phenomenon was not new, as we learn from the Cluniac vitae of Gerald of Aurillac and Odo of Cluny. In both cases, the parents of the saints were planning to give them to the Church when, and as long as, they seemed too sick or too frail to become good warriors. 35 In other words, 31 32

33 34

35

P.G. Jestice, Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century (Leiden, 1997). Just to give one recent reference, pointing to older ones: C. Caby, ‘Finis eremitarum? Les formes régulières et communautaires de l’érémitisme médiéval’, in A. Vauchez (ed.), Ermites de France et d’Italie (XI e–XV e siècle) (Rome, 2003), pp. 47–8. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 4. Ulrich of Zell, epist. nuncupatoria, Consuetudines antiquiores cluniacenses, PL 149, cols 635– 6, cf. S. Boynton and I. Cochelin (eds), From Dead of Night to the End of Day: the Medieval Cluniac Customs – Du coeur de la nuit à la fin du jour: les coutume clunisiennes au Moyen Age (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 325–37 for a transcription and English translation of this letter. Odo of Cluny, Vita sancti Geraldi Auriliacensis comitis, PL 133, col. 645, I, iv–v (a critical edition of his Vita is in preparation by A.-M. Bultot-Verleysen) and John of Salerno, Vita sancti Odonis, PL 133, cols 46–8, I, 6–9 (a critical edition of this Vita is in preparation by P. Boulhol).




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entrance to the church was sometime conceived as the desperate option, not a glorious one. In such a context, one may doubt that the lay nobility blindly adopted the rhetoric produced by churchmen, who claimed to be the masters of kings and society at large. From the Gregorian reform onward, the clergy might have pretended supremacy over the laity, but, as was said earlier, one should be wary of its rhetoric. Rhetorical claims are one thing, but social reality another. From the 1050s onward, the clerics had probably more say, but they did not have their own way unchallenged. In fact – and this is just a thought to encourage debate, definitely not a steadfast affirmation – one may wonder how much the church hierarchy was more and more shaped by the laity, rather than the other way around once, from the late eleventh century onward, its newcomers were less and less oblates, but adults who had been raised in the secular world (or, even when they had entered early in a cathedral school, always lived in the midst of a city). More affirmatively, one can say that the ideas propelled by the clergy, before and after the Gregorian reform, were the products of a complex interaction between itself and society. To end with the issue of exclusion, the radical changes from the late eleventh century onward, compared to previous centuries, were not so much in the church’s rhetoric (some Carolingian writings against the Jews can easily be compared to Peter’s), as in the physical actions taken by the laity as well as some members of the church hierarchy against the Jews and the Muslims. The extremely rich study done by IognaPrat is essential to understand how ideas for these violent acts germinated among the clergy. However it is also crucial to understand how these same ideas about hatred and violence were occasionally given birth, nurtured, and, primarily from the late eleventh century onward, regularly put into action by the laity (or rather the ‘laities’), whose agency and subjectivity cannot be ignored. Department of History, University of Toronto



Peter the Venerable and the New World Order L  K . P 

Societies and individuals construct and define their relationships to that which they deem ‘other’ according to their understanding of themselves. Implicit or explicit in any definition and categorization of ‘otherness’ is a parallel understanding of that which pertains to oneself, a principle of ordering of the world according to ‘same’ and ‘different’. It is in this respect that Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam is such a welcome and needed contribution to the body of scholarship that seeks to uncover how medieval Christians dealt with the non-Christians in their midst. For Iogna-Prat begins his study of how Peter the Venerable handled his Jewish, Muslim, and heterodox religious competitors by examining how Peter’s Cluny interpreted its place in the world order as a reflection of the order constituted by the broader Christian society. This idea of ‘Christendom’ as an all-encompassing social order contiguous with the church itself – as a ‘spatial and structural entity that ordered an entire society’,1 believers and unbelievers – was founded on early medieval ideas of Creation as an ordered hierarchy influenced by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and on the tripartite schema of warriors, priests, and workers revived in the Carolingian period. Iogna-Prat shows how political theology subsumed these orders under one clerical order, with the papacy at its apex. Having laid down this foundation, the author goes on to show the consequences of this sociology for those groups now deemed outside and challenging to the order of Christendom. Iogna-Prat demonstrates how Peter the Venerable, emerging from this tradition and building on this Cluniac and Christian self-identity, used its conceptions of order to attack the anti-ecclesiological heresies of the Petrobrusians, the anti-rationality and therefore questionable humanity of the Jews, and the immorality of the Muslims, in an effort 1

D. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. G.R. Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002), p. 1.

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to continue the ongoing outward movement and growth of the church through expansion and purgation by means of the writing of religious polemic. For Peter, Christendom and ‘not-Christendom’ existed in a dialogical relationship – literally so, in some of his writings. Peter the Venerable is an excellent figure on whom to base this kind of study because of the wide range of his known preoccupations. With Peter, Iogna-Prat can contrast letters and treatises written with ‘Christian’ problems and identities in mind with polemical texts written against the Petrobrusian heretics, a treatise against the Jews showing an awareness of rabbinic textual traditions, and anti-Muslim writing emerging from a project to translate the Qurån and other Islamic texts. The possibility for internal comparison of which Iogna-Prat is able to avail himself in his study is what makes Peter the Venerable and Cluny such a valuable case study for understanding the connection between a social anthropology and relations with minority religious competitors. In this respect, Peter the Venerable recalls a different medieval actor, namely Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who was archbishop of Toledo between 1209 and 1247, a period of rapid Christian conquest of Muslim lands in Spain. 2 In both figures we can see a tightly worked out sociology and anthropology that closely shaped their understanding of the nature and limitations of Christendom, their own place within the world, and their respective approaches to theological competitors. The similarities between these two are striking, and their differences are highly instructive. In the rest of this paper, I will contrast the approach of these two figures to the problem of religious difference and I will pay special attention to how their very different conceptions of order within Christendom affected their understanding of the possibilities of interreligious relations. I hope by doing this to highlight some of the implications of Iogna-Prat’s book. I will begin by briefly discussing some surface similarities, to establish the legitimacy of comparing these two figures. Both wrote works of anti-Jewish polemic which, unusually for their time in both cases, included attacks on the ‘fables’ of rabbinic literature. 3 Peter the Venerable sponsored the first ever translation of the Qur’ ån into Latin, as well as other Islamic texts. Rodrigo sponsored the second translation of the Qur’ ån into Latin, and probably was the impetus behind the translation of a treatise of the Almohad leader, ibn T Umart. Peter used 2

3

Much of what follows on Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada is a summary of arguments made at greater length in my book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004). Their approaches differ, however. Peter the Venerable chooses extracts that he can condemn as blasphemous, while Rodrigo tries to point to what he perceives of as inconsistencies between different Jewish exegetes.



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his translation project as the inspiration for a work of anti-Islamic polemic. Rodrigo conveyed his polemical ideas through a historical text, the Historia Arabum, the first extant work of history in Latin to treat exclusively the rise and spread of Islam. Both saw themselves as somehow the pinnacle of a church within the church: Peter as abbot of Cluny and apex of the ‘Cluniac nebula’; 4 Rodrigo through his claims to be primate of Spain with authority over all the other archbishops within the peninsula. Finally, both had a conception of the world as ordered by Christendom. Here, however, we see an important distinction that provides the major point of contrast between these two figures. For Peter the Venerable, this order was totalizing and exclusionary. For Rodrigo, this order was totalizing and inclusionary. Rodrigo’s political theology provided a place for non-Christians to live, subordinated to Christian rule, by which he meant the rule of the church. Rodrigo’s different perspective was founded in his work as a historian. Most of Rodrigo’s writing was historical; and even his polemic against the Jews turns primarily on differences between Christian and Jewish understandings of the working out of salvation history through time. Rodrigo’s histories reflect an understanding of the world as ideally one and unified under God but fractured since the Fall; here, unusually, not the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. This interpretive framework provides a place for Muslims and Jews to live in a Christian world. This is evident in the opening chapter of his De rebus Hispanie, a history of Spain to his own day. This text begins with the world united under Noah after the Flood. Yet that unity proves necessarily short-lived because the world is soon divided between Noah’s sons, and the universal language of the world is itself fractured into many as a punishment for the construction of the Tower of Babel. The multiplication of languages after the collapse of Babel has profound significance for Rodrigo, for it was this fall that created nations and ethnicities. Before this collapse, everyone lived together according to the same customs. But the emergence of new languages resulted in the emergence of different peoples who constituted provinces and territories in which they could live. People speaking different languages began hating each other, and death and war arose when those sharing a common language invaded other regions to seek peaceful places in which they could establish homelands. 5 For Rodrigo, ethnicity is created by language. Warfare and conflict are a direct consequence of different linguistic groups living side by side. But the emergence of 4 5

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 60. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie siue Historia Gothica, ed. J.F. Valverde, CCCM 72 (Turnhout, 1987), I.i, pp. 9 –10.



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multiple languages was itself a direct consequence of the decision by God to destroy the Tower of Babel to punish the pride of its builders. The challenge of living in the world among potentially hostile groups was therefore ordained by God himself. Rodrigo reminds us that it is not possible to attain divine unity in this world, and the cost of this is an unavoidable loss of uniformity. Similar themes run through all of Rodrigo’s historical writings: all unity has its origin in the divine unity of God, and is therefore something to be maximized as much as possible. Diversity represents a falling away from this divine unity; and the history of the Jews, since Christ, and the story of the Muslims since Muhammed, represent examples of this falling away. Diversity is inevitable, in this fallen world, but it is to be minimized as much as possible. Uniformity is not a realistic goal; in our own age unity under Christian hegemony is as close as we will be able to come to the originary divine unity. This view contrasts with that of Peter the Venerable, who seems to believe that Christian uniformity is possible within this world, and need not be put off until the end of time. The theological roots of Rodrigo’s political theology include the Pseudo-Dionysian and Eriugenian understandings of hierarchies of being between God and Creation, and the neo-Platonic cosmology and mathematical speculations on the Trinity by thinkers associated with Chartres. This theology is founded on a notion of God as the principle of unity from whom all creation unfolds. A common denominator for many of these ideas is the work of Alan of Lille, and it seems likely that Rodrigo was his pupil in Paris. It is significant that Iogna-Prat sees Alan of Lille’s De fide catholica contra haereticos as the natural successor to Peter the Venerable’s programme of writing.6 Étienne Gilson has highlighted the peculiarly polemical character of Alan of Lille’s theology. Alan founded his theology on an understanding of the monad – God – as pure unity, that by which everything is one, and Rodrigo used this formulation in his polemic. Thus, Gilson argues, Alan must justify Christian dogma by translating all relations between superiors and inferiors in terms of relations between ‘same’ and ‘other’. Wherever there is some being, there is some unity and this unity ultimately comes from the monad. As we descend down the hierarchical chain of being, from God to the angels and thence to mankind, plurality increases with the distance from God.7 Tending away from unity in their divergent beliefs, non-Christians represent an undesirable increase in plurality. Yet, as participators in 6 7

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 23. É. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York, 1955), pp. 172– 4.




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being, they do still have some share in unity and so they are different in degree from Christians, not, for Rodrigo, in kind. Here again, Rodrigo seems to differ from Peter the Venerable. The view of the relationship between God and Creation as a hierarchical chain of being, shared by Alan and his pupils, had practical consequences for how the world was understood to be ordered. It justified the hierarchy observable in the world. Rodrigo demonstrates a strong interest in the angelic hierarchy, and the way it models the earthly ecclesiastical hierarchy in his polemic. He explains to his Jewish interlocutor that Christ himself ordered a church of angels and a church of men. He then lists the nine orders of angels and follows it by listing the ecclesiastical offices, from the pope, ‘who alone has the plenitude of power’, and cardinals, down through the doorkeepers and psalmists. 8 These passages are part of a very strong set of statements concerning the subordination of the secular realm to the church. Here, he parallels the views of Peter the Venerable. Rodrigo asserts that the prophecy in Isaiah XLIX.23 – ‘The kings and queens will be your nursemaids’ – was fulfilled in the church, since the emperors, kings, and princes who once condemned Jesus to death, were later filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit and endowed the church. ‘And such was their sadness and grief when they saw the wounds of Jesus Christ that they thought themselves to be less than trampled dust, and then they built churches and furnished them with gifts, and endowed them with castles, cities, and lands.’9 Rodrigo then alludes to the Donation of Constantine, noting how Constantine yielded the imperium to Pope Sylvester, ‘taking himself down from the imperial summit and relinquishing power of command to the pope’.10 Rodrigo continues: He who is now called emperor of the Romans avows that he is a vassal of the pope; the emperor of Constantinople and many other kings are vassals of the Roman Church; many others are tributaries; many other princes of territories, dukes, counts, marquesses, and very many knights are subject to taxation and even overlordship by local churches. 11 Rodrigo makes a forceful statement here on the sovereignty held by the church over temporal rulers.12 It supports the importance he placed on himself as primate of Spain and thus a figure around whom all Spain 8

9 10

11 12

Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Dialogus libri uite, eds J.F. Valverde and J.A. Estévez Sola, CCCM 72C (Turnhout, 1999), IV.iiii, ll. 17–22, p. 298. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Dialogus, eds Valverde and Estévez Sola, IV.ii, ll. 59– 63, p. 294. ‘Ab imperiali culmine se deponens et papae concedens imperii potestate’, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Dialogus, eds Valverde and Estévez Sola, IV.iii, ll. 7 – 9, p. 295. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Dialogus, eds Valverde and Estévez Sola, IV.iii, ll. 9 –14, p. 295. Cf. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Dialogus, eds Valverde and Estévez Sola, IV.iii, ll. 58 – 68, p. 297.



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could unite. Blame for the crucifixion is placed on the rulers, however, not on the Jews, in Rodrigo’s text. This stands in sharp contrast to Peter the Venerable’s perspective. Placing the church above the secular sphere, and then differentiating a hierarchical ordering within the church is the only way that Rodrigo divides up the earthly sphere. He does not place the secular world in a hierarchical order, and so he neither defines a place for Jews, Muslims, and other non-believers within such a hierarchy, nor does he say that they would be excluded from a properly ordered secular world. He was obviously aware of the secular hierarchy that prevailed in his world, including the provision that Jews were servants of the Crown, but he ignores this to make the more important point for him, that the whole secular world was subject to the church. There is no theory of the Jews as royal serfs in Rodrigo’s thought. In the world rightly ordered under the church that he was trying to build, other hierarchies become less important and even political disunity becomes possibly irrelevant. In any case, as we saw from his historical writing, political disunity is inevitable since the Fall. The theology of unity found in his polemic thus provides a place for non-Christians, so long as they, like lay Christians, lived under the rule of the church. What are the implications for the way Rodrigo’s ideas of order differ from those of Peter the Venerable? Iogna-Prat tells us that Peter had no truck with contemporary Jews. He did not do business with them and he did not borrow money from them. Peter’s life of Matthew of Albano makes a point of remarking on the refusal of that saintly monk to borrow from the Jews. In contrast, we know that Rodrigo had considerable financial dealings with local Jews. He mitigated the provisions of the Fourth Lateran council directed against the Jews, enabling Toledan Jews to avoid wearing distinctive dress, and replacing the tithe of Lateran IV with a more acceptable poll tax. Prebendaries from his own cathedral even complained to Rome that Rodrigo showed excessive favour to Jews. It would be wrong, however, to speak in terms of relative tolerance when we compare Rodrigo and Peter, for the ideological preconditions for an idea of tolerance no more existed for Rodrigo than they did for Peter. On the other hand, the notion that even a universalist religious ideology can provide room for those with different beliefs, albeit in circumscribed conditions, could be somewhat encouraging to us today in a world in which we confront the failure of western post-Enlightement arguments for tolerance and peaceful coexistence to be universally compelling, and we search for additional reasons to stop people from killing each other. It is significant that we have two medieval authors faced with similar raw materials, in terms of pre-existing ideologies and material conditions, who come to two very different conclusions about the relationship of Early Medieval Europe   ()



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non-Christians to Christendom. It is especially noteworthy that the more, to us, moderate and inclusive position was articulated by the later author. This reminds us that, even if Peter the Venerable’s anti-Jewish polemic, ‘laid one of the essential stones in the road that led from antiJudaism to anti-Semitism’,13 it was not the case that Peter established a path on which all who came after him were compelled to follow, but rather that he proposed models that were found compelling by later generations. What to us looks now like a straight road, was built step by step by actors making choices. Attention to possible detours, like that of Rodrigo described here, makes this vivid. If Alan of Lille marks the next brick in Peter’s road, it is significant that his student, Rodrigo, was able to turn in quite a different direction. Divinity School, University of Chicago

13

Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, p. 319.



Ordering Christian society through exclusion: the strange history of Cluny D  I - P 

It is a great pleasure – and also an extraordinary honour – to discuss Order and Exclusion under the auspices of Early Medieval Europe. The critiques of Order and Exclusion presented in this volume seem to me to orient the discussion around two principal questions: first, how well do Cluny and Peter the Venerable’s writings serve as a ‘case study’ for addressing the issues of the ecclesial reordering and church reform that took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And second, how inclusive of society was the ecclesial conception, an issue that is at the heart of my study. At the end, I will add to these issues some thoughts about the relationship of the historian to his subject (the past) and to his own day (the contemporary world). I. Cluny and Peter the Venerable as a ‘case study’ My readers argue, it seems to me, two divergent positions. The first affirms without difficulty my choice to take Cluny and its ninth abbot, Peter the Venerable, as pertinent subjects for a global study of the ordering of Christian society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. On this foundation, Lucy K. Pick elaborates a useful parallel between Peter the Venerable and Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo (1209–47), who occupied the same discursive terrain between ecclesiology and political theology in the context of a confrontation with Jews and Saracens. However, the second position underlines the quite limited interest of such a case study. There are four principal reasons for its limitations: 1 The poor dissemination of the writings of Peter of Venerable – with the notable exception of his De Miraculis. *

I wish to thank Catherine Cubitt, who first suggested that my book be discussed in a special session at the Kalamazoo International Congress, as well as Lucy K. Pick, Isabelle Cochelin, and David Nirenberg, who have so kindly read and commented on my book.


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2 The paradox of the chronological choice, since there is no way that Cluny in its time of crisis under the abbacies of Pons le Melguiel and Peter the Venerable can serve as a paradigm of the church triumphant. 3 Under these conditions, the writings of Peter the Venerable should rather be understood as a case of special pleading meant to defend the value of the Cluniac model – here conflated with traditional Benedictine monasticism – before an internal audience (the Ecclesia cluniacensis) and an external one – that of the monastic reformers, especially Cîteaux. 4 In any event, the choice of Peter and his theological writings necessitates making a distinction between, on the one hand, the abbot’s conception of Christian society and, on the other, the actual facts – as if it were possible, not to say useful, to place the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ on two parallel and dissociated planes. Of course, as a faithful disciple of Georges Duby, I do not share this point of view. Rather, I seek in my work to conjoin these two planes, which interact. Why did I make such a limited choice? In fact I made a double choice, capable of being criticized, no doubt, but in my view still pertinent today. First, I made Cluny my focus of general questions about the ecclesial institution because this choice allowed me to use a source base of exceptional richness and diversity and, thus, to combine the threads of different discourses on society, conjoining scholarly disciplines too often separated from one another, such as diplomatics, narrative texts, liturgy, theology, and the history of art. Second, the choice of Peter the Venerable is paradoxical but it is a historically interesting paradox: it is in fact necessary to wait until the Cluniac model is in crisis to finally get an ecclesiology hitherto unknown at Cluny. Indeed, Peter brought to the fore ideas that were already dépassé in his own day. But is it not characteristic of ideologies to theorize about historical situations that have outlived their time? It is nevertheless the case that Peter’s polemical fight against the heretics, Jews, and Saracens has general value; it was not elaborated simply to defend the Ecclesia cluniacensis alone; it was meant to apply to the Ecclesia tout court. II. The question of ecclesial inclusiveness The second point of our discussion – the limited interest of my case study – will require a longer response, for it strikes at the very heart of the argument of Order and Exclusion as a whole. Cluny’s inclusiveness was first of all monastic right from the start. It followed an ancient model, as Isabelle Cochelin has pointed out, since Odo, following the example of every great reformer in the Carolingian Early Medieval Europe   ()


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tradition, who dreamt of conjoining church and society. But this ‘theocratic’ dream really had no resolution until the Gregorian period. In the name of realia Cochelin counters that the Cluniacs included and excluded at the same time, for example by imposing spatial limits on the Cluniac seigneurie in the Mâconnais – the famous ‘sacred ban’ – or, again, by distinguishing within the convent itself between choir monks and conversi. The criticism, welcome as it is, nevertheless seems to me to rest on a confusion. All social conceptions of a holistic nature make place for internal divisions and stratifications. What is important is the logic of the whole of the scheme – and that is, without question in the case of Cluny, inclusive. Nevertheless, I agree with Cochelin in recognizing that Peter, the monks, and indeed the clergy in general were far from being ‘captains of the ship’. The laity too had a resonant voice. Moreover if other voices (lay and ecclesiastical) had not made themselves heard, there would not have been any anti-heretical polemics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries around the great issues that constituted Christian society in the feudal age: baptism, marriage, death. But in the end the laity did not resist without effect, since the medieval west did not become a theocracy. On the question of inclusivity, the parallel proposed by Lucy Pick between Peter the Venerable and Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada is very illuminating. Peter argued a conception of Christian society as an excluding entity; Rodrigo saw it as an inclusive one. Both notions are embedded in the same conceptual framework: a cosmological unity borrowed from the neo-Platonic thought of Pseudo-Dionysius (of whom the Cluniacs were, from the tenth century on, major aficionados). This allowed them to imagine the order of the world and the social order as one movement within a hierarchical framework that assumed a movement of descent from the primordial monad towards its multiple manifestations, and the reverse. This unity is the mode of expression of the ecclesiastical sovereignty, which includes the laity in the hierarchy of the whole. To feel the force of this inclusive framework borrowed from Pseudo-Dionysius, it is necessary only to plunge into the truly monumental work of Hugh of St-Victor, especially his De sacramentis. Hugh was from the same era as Peter, that is, the era of the pre-scholastics and the great summae. The fundamental difference between Peter and Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, whose lifetimes were separated by more than half a century, seems to me to lie in the distinction – clear only at the turn of the thirteenth century, but not before – between the ‘sacramental space’ and the ‘jurisdictional space’ of the church. In the first – the only one to exist in the time of Peter the Venerable – the church assembles the faithful, the ‘us’ that figures in the canon of the mass (‘Ut nobis corpus et sanguis fiat dilectissimi © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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tui domini nostri Iesu Christi’), from which, beginning in the 1050s, heretics, Jews, and pagans were excluded. On the other hand, the jurisdictional space theorized by Innocent III (1160/1161–1216) allowed the church to recall Jews and pagans to their duties in the name of a ‘natural law’ that applied to all mankind. Peter the Venerable’s exclusion of deviants, Jews, and Saracens from the sacramental space of the church is all the more notable because the abbot’s anthropology was monogenistic: humanity was one, but a part of it was excluded. From this derives the unresolved question: what to do with the excluded if Christendom, coterminous with humanity itself, offers no space other than the sacramental one? Still on the subject of inclusivity, David Nirenberg asks if it is legitimate to make Cluny a microcosm for Christendom. Before responding to the substance of this question, let me make one observation: English speaks of ‘Christendom’ while French refers to ‘Christian society’. But did Cluny – and the image of Noah’s ark (or rather Peter’s ark), which gained ascendancy from the time of Hugh of Semur – sum up all of Christian society? Nirenberg thinks, quite rightly, that the Cluniac confusion is a common one; all Christian communities considered themselves the church in miniature. This phenomenon, which derives from a synecdoche (‘the part for the whole’) is, it seems to me, rooted in the constitutive ambiguity of the ecclesial person: a believer, several believers, or the ensemble of believers. That said, Peter the Venerable makes a good try when he seeks to confound the Ecclesia cluniacensis and the Respublica christiana. For weren’t the abbot of Cluny and a number of the Cluniac monks the essential cogs in the machinery of the Roman papacy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, serving as eminent members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy? It remains to understand the hidden element in this desire for universality. Is it not a structural necessity – as I argue, but in perhaps too timid a manner? Is it not as well, as Nirenberg suggests, a way to mask tensions at the heart of the church (and – to begin with the microcosm – the church of Cluny)? These are the social tensions between the members of the seigneurial order, both lay and ecclesiastical; the ecclesial tensions between clergy of various sorts – regular versus secular, and, indeed, regular versus regular; and finally tensions between the two heads of the Ecclesia cluniacensis – the abbot and the pope. I grant this. The clerical desire for universality is the ideological form of a spiritual monarchy that is unable to impose itself entirely. My hypothesis is that this ideology is first formulated in a monastic milieu, at Cluny; a sort of sovereign social space created by great spiritual lords to justify their designs in the name of libertas Ecclesiae. From Cluny, it moves to Rome, where it develops to another level – that of Christendom. Early Medieval Europe   ()


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This brings me to the problem of sovereignty that Nirenberg poses. How shall we articulate sovereignty and exclusion? Is it correct to see in sovereignty a logic that demands exclusion – of the Jews, in the first place? Taking as his point of departure the example of the Jews in an earlier period, Nirenberg asks to what extent Judaism posed the question of a Christian order overall. The confrontation of Ambrose of Milan and Emperor Theodosius over the burning of a synagogue in fact illustrates two conceptions about the maintenance of order: the public order on the one hand, the Christian order on the other. My thesis is that the notion of a ‘public Christian order’ did not exist before the end of the eighth century at the earliest. The politico-religious universe of Ambrose and Theodosius was that of an ordered dyarchy: in the spiritual sphere, the temporal was ruled by the spiritual; in the temporal sphere, it was the reverse. All this changed when the dyarchy became – or tended to become, in the west – a spiritual monarchy. From then on, the church and society became one, and there was no difference between public and Christian order. It was from this situation that there derived the impossibility of integrating any religious difference into the fabric of society. Analysing my interpretation of the relationship between ‘order’ and ‘exclusion’ in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Nirenberg concludes that ‘exclusion’ risks being understood as ‘an unfortunate consequence’, a ‘collateral effect’, rather than a ‘central component’. Let me immediately clear up this misunderstanding by recalling the regret that Georges Duby expressed at the very end of his memoire, L’Histoire continue, that he never appreciated the place – the enormous place – of the ‘religious at the heart of feudalism’. That is the fundamental problem: how can we make sense of the norms and rules that governed the functioning of Christian society in the feudal age? My answer is: on the foundation of the inherent sociology of the Christian ecclesial system that existed at the time, especially its sacramental theology embracing baptism, the Eucharist, and extreme unction. This allows us to consider the question of social ties and the force of reciprocal engagements by the standard of the solidarities that were thought necessary between the living and also – perhaps above all – between the living and the dead. Under these circumstances, heretics, Jews, and Saracens do not pose secondary issues: they are the central issue, particularly the Jews, who were at the very historical foundation of Christendom. The heretics called into question the mediatory roles that constituted the Christian order; the Jews and the Saracens prevented the system from functioning entirely. It would be as if you tried to make a computer work without an operating system – Windows, Linux or Unix! © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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III. The historian and his world To conclude, I would like to hazard a few personal reflections on the empathy that the historian must have for his subject. Is the Middle Ages an exotic realm for us, one that ought to be treated with the distance that an anthropologist brings to societies radically different from his own? Personally, I have always mistrusted ethnological distance and the possibilities of detached scientific activity. In the case of history, I am certain of it. History is not an intellectual activity separate from social perspectives. Our choices as historians are made socially possible – or they are not. Above all, our activity and our production depend on and nourish a conception of the past that is, at bottom, derived from our own way of interpreting the present. Certainly, it is impossible to establish direct continuities between the ‘persecuting society’ of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and ourselves. Nevertheless, our conception of the past is nourished by it under the guise of remaining traces that are more or less active depending on the context. For example, I affirm that the anti-Jewish turn, indeed the judeophobia of Petrus Alphonsus and Peter the Venerable are important stepping stones in the construction of modern anti-semitism. And then consider the ‘axis of evil’: doesn’t it evoke, even by its very formulation (which serves to demonize the other as entirely other) an old way of defending the ‘universal Christian order’? Like it or not, we are thus called to study the past in order to respond the better to the folly of the present. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Auxerre



Book reviews

Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen). Teil II: Laon–Paderborn. By Bernhard Bischoff. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2004. xxiii + 451 pp. EUR 149. ISBN 3 447 04750 X. This is the second, long-awaited posthumous volume in the palaeographer Bernhard Bischoff ’s Katalog . . . des neunten Jahrhunderts series, prepared for publication by Frau Dr Birgit Ebersperger under the auspices of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The first volume, covering the archives and libraries Aachen to Lambach, was published in 1998, seven years after Bischoff ’s death. Bischoff left behind him not only many published works, but also a wealth of handwritten material in various states of readiness for publication. While the first volume of this series existed in manuscript form and had been corrected by Bischoff, this second volume was in an earlier stage of production and Dr Ebersperger, as she relates in her introduction, had to wrestle with the problems engendered by the renaming, reclassification and reorganization of individual manuscripts, whole archives and, in the case of St Petersburg, the renaming of a whole city. (In this last case, the old nomenclature of Leningrad has been retained so that the material already prepared on this important collection could be included in this second volume). Ebersperger also notes that this volume is based on Bischoff ’s fresh examination of the codices, and is not simply an extension of any of his previous publications. Therefore certain entries previously ascribed to the ninth century may be missing in this volume, and conversely others previously described only as ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ being created in the ninth century are now included. Another important addition to this volume is a fifteen-page supplement to Volume 1 of the series. Chronologically speaking, the series starts where Lowe’s monumental Codices latini antiquiores (CLA) series on manuscripts produced before the end of the eighth century, ends, but in scale and format the two could not be more different. Unlike CLA, for example, Bischoff ’s catalogue Early Medieval Europe   () 419– 439 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

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contains no illustrations and uses a considerably smaller format. This is arguably inevitable given the much larger numbers of extant ninthcentury manuscripts in comparison to their pre-ninth-century counterparts. Perhaps most significantly, however, Bischoff ’s catalogue is far less user-friendly than Lowe’s or indeed many others, as entries are highly compressed and abbreviated. This makes the abbreviations table at the beginning of the volume absolutely essential and it can be useful to photocopy this table to have it to hand when deciphering entries, rather than constantly having to flick backwards and forwards. The most frustrating element of the layout of the entries, however, is that often only the lead or most important text in any given manuscript is listed, making it very difficult to use the catalogue to research the transmission of a specific text in the ninth century. This reflects the firmly palaeographic focus of the volume, although there is also no explanation of how Bischoff reached his conclusions on the origin and date of a particular manuscript. This volume remains, however, an incomparable and irreplaceable condensation of a lifetime of research and experience of an exceptional palaeographer, and is therefore an essential resource for anyone concerned with the cultural, literary, religious or political history of the ninth century in western Europe. We can but hope that this series will eventually be completed so that Bischoff ’s great legacy can be available to all. University of Manchester

CLARE PILSWORTH

Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain. By Ross Brann. Princeton University Press. 2002. xi + 194 pp. £27.95. ISBN 0 691 00187 1. As Ross Brann observes at the beginning of this revealing study of interfaith and inter-cultural relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain, ‘encounters between Muslims and Jews in al-Andalus seem to have been highly charged and, it appears, marked by contradiction’ (p. 1). Brann wisely rejects those over-simplistic interpretations of Muslim–Jewish relations, which have sought either to present al-Andalus as an ‘interfaith utopia’, in which Jews experienced their ‘Golden Age’, or conversely as a hostile environment in which Jews became the frequent object of discrimination, exclusion and violence. Instead, through close analysis of a variety of texts, he is interested to highlight the ambivalence with which Andalusi Muslim and Jewish writers portrayed, or rather imagined, one another. Brann does not seek Early Medieval Europe   ()


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to uncover a ‘historical truth’ here or, in his words, to ‘set the record straight’, but rather to point up the inherent contradictions of the texts he examines, and the ideas and attitudes they articulate. In the first three chapters, Brann compares and contrasts a selection of Muslim views of Isma‘il ibn Naghrila (Samuel the Nagid), an eminent scholarly figure, whose political influence led him to serve as chief minister to the rulers of the Zirid kingdom of Granada from 1038 until his death in 1055 or 1056. Drawing on the writings of eleventh- and twelfth-century authors such as Sa‘id b. Ahmad al-Andalusi, Ibn Hayyan al-Qurtubi, ‘Abd Allah b. Buluggin, Ibn Hazm and Ibn Bassam, Brann demonstrates the inconsistency and mutability of these representations, with Ibn Naghrila variously praised for his intelligence, acumen and nobility, or damned for his religious ignorance, insubordination, foolishness and deceit. Brann argues that the contradictory nature of these textual representations of Ibn Naghrila are in many respects a reflection of the crisis of Muslim religion, culture and identity that gripped Andalusi society at a time of heightened political instability, and that Jews served as a convenient ‘other’ on to which Muslim writers could project their anxiety and hostility. By contrast, Andalusi-Jewish authors were seemingly reluctant to portray Muslims in their works at all, the relevance of which Brann thoroughly explores in Chapters 4 and 5. He emphasizes that the Jewish sense of detachment from the politics of the time – reflected for example in the poetry of Abraham ibn ‘Ezra – was in part a reflection of the socio-cultural rupture that was experienced by Jewish communities in the wake of Almohad persecution after 1146, and above all of the sensitivity and ambivalence of a subordinate minority within al-Andalus. Brann’s lucid and elegant study represents an important contribution to our understanding of the forging of social attitudes and identity in medieval al-Andalus, and will undoubtedly prove of wider interest to scholars of multiculturalism in other parts of the Islamic and Mediterranean worlds. Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Exeter

SIMON BARTON

The Cartulary of Monitier-en-Der, 666– 1129. Edited by Constance Brittain Bouchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004. xxxix + 298 pp. + 1 appendix, 3 maps and 2 tables. £48. ISBN 0 8020 8807 4. The abbey of Montier-en-Der, in the diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne, was founded, the editor argues, in 666 AD by Bercharius, hermit of the woods at Der (pp. 6, 15; no. 3). A privilege of Louis the Pious in 832 (no. 11) notes that the abbey was reformed and following the Benedictine © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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rule until Scandinavian raids saw it abandoned. Der was refounded in 935 by Gauzlin, bishop of Toul, but not before Abbot Alberic (935 – 60) had ousted a group of wayward monks occupying it. It was Abbot Roger (c.1095–c.1130) who oversaw the compilation of this, Der’s first cartulary (Chaumont, Archives départmentales de la Haute-Marne, 7 H 1), in the 1120s, which this volume sees published in its entirety for the first time. The volume consists of 167 documents, including a polyptyque begun in the ninth century and updated into the eleventh (no. 164). Significant charters are examined in some detail in an excellent introduction, useful in both a technical and an interpretative sense. Forgeries, including pseudo-original papal bulls, are evaluated in their historical context and two ‘forged’ Merovingian royal charters are reinstated (pp. 11– 15, nos 1, 2). The edition also contains an appendix of nine charters relating to the period pre-1130 but not incorporated into the cartulary, a list of abbots to c.1130, and a chronological cross-listing of documents. Maps of the immediate and wider region and of villas, where the polyptyque indicates monastic-held property, are included. The editor has given careful thought to the question of how to edit the manuscript from an epistemological standpoint. The document is presented to us as a single source, as the monks conceived it. Its charters are not reordered chronologically, nor are ‘missing’ charters – copied at the end of the manuscript – reinserted into the main text, nor are Latin idiosyncrasies ‘corrected’. As such it reflects the way the monks envisaged and represented their property and entitlements and the problems and opportunities encountered by them – including the reassembling and ‘improving’ of an archive scattered in the turbulent period marking the abbey’s tenth-century restoration and recovered by Abbot Adso (960–92). The reader, therefore, not the editor, interprets the evidence, according to which aspect of monkish outlook and activity they wish to explore. The uses to which the source may be put are extensive. The history of late tenth- and early eleventh-century mainland western Europe, for example, will benefit from the wider availability of the source in several ways. It adds evidence to discussions concerning both the extent to which knights appear increasingly to have been preying on resources claimed by abbeys, and the degree to which public authority was in a position to adjudicate in this process. The editor herself locates such conflict primarily in the later decades of the eleventh century, asserting a shift on the part of the lords of Joinville from protector to predator in that time-frame (pp. 22–3, nos 33, 34, 37, 60, 72, 82, 91, 92). However, genuine documents of c.1027 concerning Stephen of Joinville and the villa of Vaux-sur-Vaise could be read as supporting models locating the Early Medieval Europe   ()


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rupture in the protective role of castellans much earlier in the century, and suggesting that conflict was subsequently somewhat diminished (p. 29, nos 33, 34, 36, 116, 164.iv). In terms of the legal status of the people living on such property, the rapid degradation of freedom arguably apparent in documentation from more southerly regions is not obviously evidenced in donations from the late Carolingian period onwards. Evidence of status and obligation compiled by the 1120s had been supplemented by marginalia and folia added to charters over time, which the polyptique’s copyist incorporated integrally into its documents as though it were synchronic with the charters in origin. We thus gain little evidence from the polyptique of whether the balance of free people (typically ingenui ) and unfree (hospicia, mancipia) had shifted. However, more interest is shown in legal status in some of the earlier charters than in the later period, and the editor herself is insightful concerning the usefulness of the economic evidence in other ways (pp. 29–30). Several documents point to subtle reforming strategies in a period in which monastic independence from episcopal influence was still contested. Although the bishops of Toul and Châlons clashed over the right to consecrate Abbot Milo (1035–49), and he was in any case the appointee of the Count of Blois, two of those involved – Milo and Bruno of Toul, the latter as Pope Leo IX (1049–54) – turned reformer in 1049, undoing the canonically suspect appointment. But Leo’s reforming and fatherly beneficence (evident in particular in Der’s first papal privilege, his confirmation in 1050 of the abbey’s right to elect its own abbots), is also the context for several forged bulls before 1073 (pp. 18–22; nos 52, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 80). Finally, a reader familiar with Abbot Adso’s astonishing Libellus de Antichristo will, on having access to his abbey’s cartulary for the first time, turn fairly quickly to charters originating in c.1000–c.1033 to see whether the monks of Der reflected Adso’s preoccupations concerning the anniversaries of Christ’s birth and passion. But the charters in question reveal little ‘millennial anxiety’ within the community of monks and benefactors. Detailed analysis may reveal patterns contradicting those outlined above. It is primarily in the case of modern, well-edited cartularies – well referenced and supported by quantitative, tabulated and documentary analysis, yet as far as possible unaltered in terms of content and structure – that the monks’ own working practice may be observed within its context of compositional innovation and editorial restraint. This marvellous edition, as excellent and welcome as it is long-awaited, will enhance greatly our understanding of the monastic drive toward stability and permanence in a changing world. University of Nottingham © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

CLAIRE TAYLOR Early Medieval Europe   ()

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Die Annales Quedlinburgenses. Edited by Martina Giese. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi 72. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. 2004. 680 pp. EUR 60. ISBN 3 7752 5472 2. Among the numerous editions that the Monumenta Germaniae Historica has published in the last decade, it is significant for scholars of early medieval Europe that at least eight stem from the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth centuries. Martina Giese’s excellent new edition of the Annales Quedlinburgenses (AQ ), arguably one of the most important witnesses for late tenth- and early eleventh-century Germany along with Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicle, is a worthy addition to this group, for it far surpasses the previous edition of Georg Pertz (1839). Giese, in an exhaustive 380-page introduction, examines every aspect of the text and offers important information to historians, scholars of texts and their transmission, and philologists. Building upon Robert Holtzmann’s critical study of the AQ (1925), Giese adopts the one author thesis (with some reservations) and establishes the text’s precise composition date. Although nothing in the text definitively points to the gender of the author, she draws upon new research into female writing activity and the overall cultural milieu of the convent Quedlinburg and convincingly argues for a female author – probably one of the canonesses at Quedlinburg. Giese then discusses the work’s two-part division, a world chronicle based on classical models of the six eras of world history and an annal, commencing in 702 and ordered by Christian dating, and she demonstrates that only those entries in the actual period of writing are exact or approach chronological correctness. Giese summarizes the work’s four main narrative themes and delineates its main historical tendencies, stressing its particular importance as a historiographical source for the Liudolfinger family and Quedlinburg, its function as a source of memoria, and its strong role in legitimizing rulers. Thereafter, she addresses the possible causae scribendi, discusses the text’s great literary significance based upon the plethora of the legendary material in the chronicle section, and analyses its overall style. The remainder of the introduction Giese devotes to the manifold written sources upon which the AQ drew, its primary and secondary transmission, and an analysis of the lacunae and interpolations in the sole sixteenth-century manuscript from Dresden (D). Based on the texts used by the AQ ’s author, Giese provides an overview of the books available at Quedlinburg and establishes some of the author’s method of compilation (and sometimes, critical analysis). Giese’s extensive analysis of the text’s transmission from its sister sources demonstrates that the AQ existed in several more extensive versions than the one extant today Early Medieval Europe   ()


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and that these earlier manuscripts were known and used. She demonstrates that the manuscript transmission was limited almost exclusively to Saxony and reached its apex in the twelfth century with the Annalisto Saxo and the Annals of Magdeburg ranking as its two most important witnesses. Moreover, she shows that while Thietmar used the AQ (although edited heavily), one finds no trace in AQ of Widukind’s Saxon History. Based on readings in the manuscript and in the sister texts and others, Giese offers an edition of the fragmentary text in D and attempts to ‘reconstruct’ a complete text of the AQ. Her edition supercedes the Pertz edition with an expanded critical apparatus that employs modern critical methods and a wider range of variants drawn from a new reading of the primary manuscript and the secondary transmission. Moreover, Giese supplements it with a detailed historical and textual commentary and concludes with extensive indices of manuscripts, names, and words. San José State University

JOHN W. BERNHARDT

Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain. Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp. Edited by Helena Hamerow and Arthur MacGregor. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 2001. 180 pp. ISBN 0 84217 051 1. This volume comprises selected papers from the proceedings of a conference held in April 1999 in honour of the seventieth birthday of Professor Rosemary Cramp, a leading figure in the study of early medieval stone sculpture and monastic archaeology and former head of the archaeology department at the University of Durham. Professor Cramp’s legacy is celebrated by six academic papers by former students at Durham, a comprehensive and useful bibliography of her work compiled by Derek Craig, and a sketch of her academic career provided by Christopher Morris. The six archaeological papers focus on subjects close to Cramp’s interests: the archaeology of monasteries and elite settlements (Peter Hill on Whithorn, Chris Loveluck on Flixborough, Deirdre O’Sullivan on Lindisfarne); stone sculpture (Nancy Edwards on St David’s, Martin Carver on monumentality); and, finally, a paper on Mediterranean contacts before the conversion (Catherine Hills on Spong Hill). As well as building on Cramp’s legacy and taking her work in new directions, they are all important papers in their own right. Consequently, this volume is a valuable collection of new research that also celebrates Professor Cramp’s lasting influence on early medieval archaeology. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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The volume inspires two comments on the current state of early medieval archaeology. First, including the volume discussed here, there have been numerous edited volumes on this period in recent years, as well as some superb syntheses of particular themes and regions. Yet there remains the need of a more detailed, comprehensive and theorized assessment of the archaeology of early medieval Britain to expand upon David Wilson’s 1976 edited volume The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, and extend the discussion beyond England to the British Isles as a whole. Second, while all the papers appear to create contextual interpretations of their data, the lack of the explicit use of theory paints a worrying picture of the current state of early medieval archaeology. The volume presents no clear assessment of current theoretical perspectives and their relationship with the views of Cramp and her generation of scholars. This raises the question: is theory still a dirty word among some circles within early medieval archaeology? If, as Morris suggests in his contribution to the volume, Cramp was uncomfortable with the overt use of archaeological theory and its attendant jargon, then it is surely the duty of subsequent generations of early medieval archaeologists to employ theoretical approaches as openly, explicitly and clearly as possible and also to assess critically both past and contemporary theories. Otherwise, I believe we run the risk of squandering the legacy of Cramp and her contemporaries by developing upon its strengths while maintaining its limitations. With these two observations in mind, this volume stands as a valuable collection of research papers, but as a critical assessment of Cramp’s work and legacy in early medieval archaeology, it represents an opportunity missed. University of Exeter

HOWARD WILLIAMS

Gold und Herrschaft. Die Schätze europäischer Könige und Fürsten im ersten Jahrtausend. By Matthias Hardt. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 2004. 369 pp. + 20 b/w figures. EUR 64.80. ISBN 3 05 003763 6. Over the past decade, Matthias Hardt has published a series of articles discussing the often overlooked topic of royal hoards and their role in the representation of royal power. This book continues those themes. As the title suggests, Hardt concentrates on the first millennium AD, but much, if not all, of the relevant discussion is about the last six hundred years of that time span. The book is well documented, with extensive footnotes, and serves to remind historians and archaeologists alike of the wealth of information regarding hoards in general and royal treasuries in particular. The work begins with a chronological survey of Early Medieval Europe   ()


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the role of hoards and treasures in the representation of royal power, from Merovingian to Carolingian kings, with separate sections on Thorismud, the capture of hoards of Germanic kings by Byzantine troops, and the imperial treasure in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire. One critical comment in a minor vein is that the chronological span announced in the title is not entirely realized in this part of the book. Nevertheless, Hardt demonstrates that hoards had a key role in such events as the death of a king, usurpations, or wars against rival kings. Variations in political attitudes towards thesauri can only be explained in terms of their contents, a topic fully explored throughout the second chapter of the book, with an impressive amount of evidence drawn from both written sources and archaeological finds. In this chapter, Hardt analyses a variety of items, from gold and silver ingots to crowns, weapons, silk clothes, and books. A separate section is dedicated to relics, in an inspired discussion of their value for hoarding. The third chapter deals with the origin of such objects and addresses their association with royal policies – taxes, confiscations, tribute, or dona annua. Chapter 4 deals with the preservation and administration of the treasure, as well as with issues of transportation of the royal movable wealth. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the use of the treasure. Hardt’s discussion is somewhat sketchy, but he makes the noteworthy point that besides representation, the most important role of the royal treasure was to be a permanent source of gifts to vassals, churches, or other rulers. In conclusion, Hardt finds that in terms of both collection and distribution, the customs surrounding royal treasures of the early Middle Ages were a continuation of Roman practices, a form of imitatio Imperii. This is a thoughtful conclusion. It suggests that a truly ‘feudal’ society came into being only when the political function of treasures ceased, and the social importance of gift giving receded. I can only wish Hardt’s conclusion had been grounded more firmly in anthropological theory, especially since he admits that gift giving was such a fundamental component of royal politics. We need to look more widely, and more systematically into whatever evidence is available about such things as gift giving as a form of power representation, the political effectiveness of the annual distribution of gifts, even what proof there might be that luxury grave-goods, such as torcs or brooches, were part of, or in any way related to, royal treasures – a controversial issue that the author does not touch. Until then, Hardt’s book will continue to challenge historians to re-examine much of what they thought about treasures and hoards. All who read it will be indebted to its author for a deeply researched and clearly argued historical interpretation of an important subject. University of Florida © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

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Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century. By Michael W. Herren and Shirley Ann Brown. Studies in Celtic History 20. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2002. £50. ISBN 0 85115 889 7. This book falls into a particular category: it is designed to advance and defend a set of interrelated propositions which are admittedly controversial. The arguments are derived, moreover, from new readings of old evidence rather than evidence unknown or ignored by previous scholars. Everything depends, therefore, on how accurately and perceptively the authors have interpreted texts and objects. The ambition behind the book goes beyond an intention to change fundamentally hitherto accepted views based on texts, since it also proposes that the preferred interpretations cast light on sculpture and manuscript illumination as much as on religious writings. Three main propositions are defended: that there was in Britain and Ireland, from the mid-fifth century up to c.630, a ‘common Celtic Church’; that this church shared a set of beliefs and attitudes strongly influenced by Pelagius and his followers; and that the early art of Celtic Britain and Ireland may be divided into an early non-representational phase, intimately associated with the Pelagian-influenced ‘common Celtic Church’, and a later representational phase, which could only prevail because the influence of Pelagian views had seriously weakened. Michael Herren wrote the chapters which advance the first two propositions, while Shirley Ann Brown defended the third. In general, I shall refer to ‘the authors’ rather than specifying which of the two was responsible for any particular chapter. The first thesis is that there was something which can fairly be described as a ‘common Celtic Church’. A phrase such as this is bound to raise eyebrows and the authors are at pains to explain themselves: the ‘church’ in question is not an institutional entity, for there is no reason to believe that any church council had authority in both Britain and Ireland after the fifth century; instead it was a relative community of belief and practice. This, of course, makes for difficulty: no one disputes that the Irish church was strongly influenced by that of Britain in the fifth century and that links long remained close thereafter; but the same kind of relationship obtained for a time between the church in Northumbria and the Irish church, especially Iona. To call the relative community of belief and practice a ‘common Celtic Church’ cannot avoid giving, by terminological diktat, preference to one relationship over the other. The authors were aware of objections to their terminology but nevertheless persisted in adopting it because of their conviction that what was shared between the British and Irish churches to the exclusion of Early Medieval Europe   ()


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other neighbouring churches was sufficiently fundamental to justify writing of a single ‘common Celtic Church’. The section of the book on which the rest depends is, therefore, Chapter 4, ‘The Common Celtic Church’, which sets out a series of common characteristics. If this chapter is persuasive, any objections to the terminology will be relatively minor. Also, even if one were to accept the shared characteristics but deny that they derived from Pelagian theology (Pelagianism in Britain and Ireland is the subject of Chapter 3) much of the rest of the book might still stand. Chapter 4 is thus the pivot of the entire work. What it needs to show is that the supposed common characteristics were indeed common – that is to say, they were not just one strand of belief and practice among others but were generally adhered to in both Britain and Ireland in the period 450 –c.630. To take one example, it has been apparent since the mid-nineteenth century, when scholars began to study the remains of Old Irish in eighth- and ninth-century manuscripts, that some Irish exegetes appeared to be happy to quote Pelagius as an authority. The Old Irish glosses on St Paul’s Epistles preserved in a Würzburg manuscript readily cite Pelagius’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Yet, first, the glossator is also ready to express views closer to Augustine than to Pelagius; and, second, the period in which the glosses were written puts them well beyond the end-date of the supposed ‘common Celtic Church’. A further difficulty is that there is relatively little evidence for British and Irish belief and practice before 630. If we run through the main texts we can see the difficulties: Palladius, the first bishop for the Irish Christians, came from an antiPelagian circle for which we have good textual evidence; Patrick was an unambiguous believer in his dependence on divine grace (the authors see him, however, as indirect evidence for the Pelagian views of his British critics, pp. 82–3); the early penitentials are held by the authors to show an attitude to penance opposed to Pelagian views (pp. 123–5); Gildas was a critic of Pelagian views (pp. 85–6), while both Gildas and Columbanus were part of the penitential tradition. The way the authors handle this evidence further illustrates the difficulty of their task. They acknowledge, very fairly, that, if the usual dating of the Penitential of Vinnian (or Uinniau) is correct, ‘Its very existence denotes the end of any possible monopoly exercized by the Pelagian party on the spirituality of the common Celtic Church’ (p. 124). As with Patrick, however, opposing evidence is understood as indirect testimony to the strength of Pelagian influence: the penitential’s exegesis of Proverbs XXIV:16 is claimed to show ‘a sensitivity to potential Pelagian criticism’ (p. 125). The odd explanation along these lines is acceptable, provided that the weight of evidence supports the main contentions of the authors. The trouble is that this stratagem is ubiquitous and needs © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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to be. Any argument about the British and Irish churches between 450 and 630 which accepts that Patrick, Gildas, Vinnian and Columbanus were all ‘friends of Grace’ is plainly going to have to argue that they all testify indirectly to a ‘silent majority’ deeply influenced by Pelagianism. If the task faced by the authors is Herculean, their methods of tackling it are not such as to command conviction. When most of the overt evidence seems to be stacked up against them, a lot must depend on their sure-footedness in interpreting texts so as to show that they witness to a set of common characteristics indebted to Pelagianism and shared by the British and Irish churches. Yet too many of their interpretations are forced. I shall take four examples. First, they quote Gildas (in Winterbottom’s translation), ‘This pleasant agreement between the head and limbs of Christ endured until the Arian treason . . .’; they comment: ‘Gildas’s phrase “agreement between the head and limbs of Christ” refers, of course, to the correct relation between Christ’s divinity and humanity’ (p. 52). Yet the obvious interpretation is likely to be the correct one: it is merely an agreement between Christ and members of the church. Second, they say of Patrick (p. 82): ‘It would appear that he is addressing Pelagian elements among his detractors, when he says “. . . (God) is no respecter of persons and he chose me for this task”.’ This is another example of the ‘silent majority’ argument, but one may object that Patrick was simply aware that Christ’s first disciples were Galilaean fishermen and was deeply convinced that he himself, like those fishermen, was an instrument of divine providence. There is no need here for a ‘silent majority’. Third (p. 84), they quote Patrick’s Confessio: ‘I have not studied like others, who have successfully imbibed both law and Holy Scripture alike.’ Patrick is understood by Herren and Brown as defending himself against Pelagian critics, ‘for Pelagian authors believed that, without a sure knowledge of the laws contained in the scriptures, salvation was impossible’. Yet the ‘law’ referred to by Patrick is likely to be Roman law, since ‘law’ and ‘Holy Scripture’ seem to be quite distinct. The fourth example is their approach to early Irish and British attitudes to the eucharist (pp. 126 –7). We are told that ‘Pelagian texts rarely mention the eucharist’; six lines further on this becomes ‘The ignoring of the eucharist by Pelagians’. The penitentials are invoked in support of the notion of ‘a minimalist attitude towards the eucharist’; yet penitentials were concerned with penitents, who, usually, were by their very status excluded from communion. Moreover, we have already been told that the penitentials were, by their nature, inconsistent with Pelagian theology on the sacraments. What it seems to come down to is an absence of insistence on frequent communion, but here one may note that attitudes on this point have differed over the centuries without any difference in fundamental theology. Early Medieval Europe   ()


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That Pelagian views had some influence on some writers in Britain and Ireland one may readily concede, but that is not enough to establish a distinctive set of beliefs generally held in a ‘common Celtic Church’. The tendence on the part of the authors to lump together Pelagians and so-called ‘semi-Pelagians’ should be firmly resisted: that is to adopt a view only sustainable if one subscribes to the strongly Augustinian standpoint of Prosper of Aquitaine. The ‘silent majority’ argument is altogether overplayed. And, perhaps most seriously of all, the authors’ reading of the evidence is unreliable. This book is stimulating but quite unconvincing. Jesus College, Oxford

T.M. CHARLES-EDWARDS

MS E. Edited by Susan Irvine. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 7. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 2004. clxxviii + 174 pp. + 1 b/w plate. £65. ISBN 0 85991 494 1. The publication of Susan Irvine’s edition of the E text of the AngloSaxon Chronicle is a notable event. With its appearance, all six major manuscripts of the Chronicle, manuscripts A to F, are available to be compared and contrasted in the Collaborative Edition. Moreover, this is the first full edition of MS E to appear since that of Earle and Plummer in 1892–9. As the editor of Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343 (EETS, os 302), Susan Irvine’s credentials for producing such an edition are excellent; and we are not disappointed. This is, apparently, not the book we might have had if Irvine had not been following the conventions of the series: in separate places she regrets that she was not able to provide a translation (p. vii) and that she has not preserved the manuscript punctuation (p. clxvii). However, the advantages of the collaborative project are here evident in the way Irvine is able to respond to, and extend the work of, previous editors for the series. Given the close relationship of E to F, it is natural that Irvine builds especially upon Peter Baker’s MS F (Collaborative Edition 8, published in 2000). For example, she adopts Baker’s argument that Latin entries derived from Norman annals and shared by E and F were added independently to both √E and F by the F scribe, not copied into F from √E (Irvine, p. lxxxix; Baker, pp. xxxii–xxxiv). She is able to show in addition that these entries fall into four blocks in which the F scribe has concentrated his revising activities on either √E or F; only for the period 876 to 1031 do all six Norman entries appear in both (pp. lxxxix– xc). Another continuing (and better-known) debate to which Irvine makes an important contribution is the question of the relationship © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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between C and E for annals 983–1043. C and E are close for 983–1022 and 1042–3b (C 1043–4) but diverge considerably in the intervening annals. Irvine contends that C and E both derive from a text containing annotations of Abingdon interest for 983–1022 and 1042–3b (C 1043– 4), but that the annals for 1022b –41 in E have been supplied from another source, probably in the course of revision at St Augustine’s, Canterbury (pp. lxiv–lxviii). The introduction is a feast of detailed arguments such as these, written in an admirably clear style. Like other volumes in the series, it concentrates on codicology, textual history and language; Cecily Clark’s literary appreciation in her partial edition (2nd edn 1970) and well-known article (1971) will remain very useful. Irvine’s text improves in accuracy on both Earle and Plummer and Clark, judging from the portions I have checked against Whitelock’s facsimile (though I did notice a misprint in the bibliography: the date of Patrick Conner’s The Abingdon Chronicle is given as 1966 rather than 1996). This new edition is a work of impressive scholarship and destined to become indispensable. The University of St Andrews

ALICE JORGENSEN

Late Roman Spain and its Cities. By Michael Kulikowski. Ancient Society and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. xxxii + 489 pp. £39.50. ISBN 0 8018 7978 7. Late Roman and early medieval Spain has never garnered the scholarly attention bestowed on its neighbour to the north. In part, of course, this is owing to the lacunose literary record, and to the unsatisfactory nature of much of the archaeology carried out within the peninsula over the course of the twentieth century. Yet as Michael Kulikowski points out in this excellent study, these shortcomings have not prevented the perpetuation of a remarkably pervasive image of urban decline in late Roman Spain. Spanish towns, it has frequently been supposed, barely survived the third-century crisis in recognizable form. The breaking of the epigraphic habit and decline of civic evergetism during the fourth century seemingly coincided with the emergence of great aristocratic villas in the countryside. Simultaneously, the darkly apocalyptic image of barbarian destruction painted by Hydatius, Orosius and fragmentary chronicles seemed to confirm the social instability implied by the spate of wall-building that seemed to mark the fourth and fifth centuries. Late Roman Spain and its Cities does an admirable job of refuting this narrative, systematically challenging the foundations upon which it rests Early Medieval Europe   ()


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and proposing in its place an image of Spanish urbanism which survived in more or less recognizable ‘classical’ form into the mid-fifth century, as the superstructure for imperial rule within the province. While urban life certainly changed in the later fifth and sixth centuries, moreover, Kulikowski demonstrates that the city remained a central tool in the conceptualization of early medieval Spain. These new conclusions are hard earned – few new literary sources have emerged from the darkness, and the modern scholar remains dependent upon the imperfect archaeological recording techniques of the past. Nevertheless, Kulikowski’s argument – that the material record must take priority over fragmentary and parochial texts – can scarcely be disputed and his application of a healthy scepticism to the established chronological ‘truths’ of existing scholarship, allow a more convincing image of urban transformation to emerge. The true scope of the study is belied by its title, however. Kulikowski’s consideration of his subject takes him on long – and immensely valuable – digressions. The reconstructed account of barbarian and Roman interaction in the fifth century, for example, which occupies much of Chapters 7 and 8, is a hugely impressive untangling of a notoriously knotty narrative. Equally thought-provoking are the writer’s observations on other enigmas of the period. The suggestion that Diocletian’s reorganization of the Spanish provinces was intended to provide a hinterland for the Atlas-bounded territory of Mauretania Tingitana, and not to protect a non-existent Pyrenean frontier, surely explains the reordering of an otherwise oft-neglected imperial province. Inevitably, many of the conclusions within this book raise eyebrows and with them further questions, particularly when the mind of the reader looks beyond Spain to the wider world of the post-Roman west. Kulikowski’s interpretation of the inscriptional evidence, for example, is provocative. He argues that the decline of epigraphy in the fourth century did not represent an atrophying of Roman feeling within Spain, but quite the reverse; inscriptions, he suggests, were primarily tools of acculturation, and their disappearance in the later Roman period actually reflected a society confident in its own cultural identity. Persuasive as this is within the Iberian context, do the mute stones elsewhere in the empire say the same things? One wonders, for example, why aristocrats in Italy bothered to set up inscriptions at all if the expression of an uncertain ‘Roman’ identity was the primary motivating factor. Similarly, it is argued that the city walls that began to appear in third- and fourth-century Spain primarily represented a new form of civic display, and need not be seen as evidence of an increasingly unstable world. Again, the case is made very well for Spain, but defensive considerations must have been paramount elsewhere in the empire, and the historians © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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and archaeologists whom Kulikowski challenges can surely be forgiven for assuming a defensive function for these structures in the light of contemporary building activity in northern Gaul (for example). At times the reader wonders if Spanish society adhered to different rules from those of the rest of the empire. At the very least, this thoughtprovoking and stimulating study demands a fundamental reappraisal of some of the long-standing assumptions of social and urban transformation: not only in Spain, but in the western empire as a whole. The University of Wisconsin-Madison

A.H. MERRILLS

Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950 –1100. By Leonora Neville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. xii + 210 pp. £45. ISBN 0 521 83865 7. The Byzantine imperial government did not intervene to regulate provincial society. So long as provincials paid their taxes and recognized the emperors’ sovereignty, they were free to order their own communities; emperors only stepped in to protect their own interests. Such is Leonora Neville’s argument in this slim but useful volume. By stressing the role of households and political status based on social networks, she shows that the imperial government and its representatives were ephemeral phenomena in the lives of most people in the empire. The argument is carefully constructed, beginning with an introduction that nicely encapsulates the main thrust, followed by six thematic chapters and a separate conclusion. First, Neville demolishes the image of Byzantine administrative bureaucracy by showing that titles were often more ceremonial than functional in her period and that increasing prosperity actually made centralization more, not less, difficult. By then shifting her gaze to the central provinces of the empire, she can demonstrate the limited nature of imperial activity. The third chapter highlights the Byzantine culture of describing social relationships in terms of the oikos, the household, which is the key to her analysis. Neville wants to shift the emphasis of our view to the household, away from the dichotomy of dynatoi and villagers. Households entered into horizontal and vertical relationships as each sought to stabilize and improve its position in local society. In Chapter 4, readers see the relationships between provincial households and the imperial administration. Personal links to Constantinople prevailed over any supposed jurisdiction; people appealed to the highestranking individuals they knew, not the judge or official in charge of the area. It is also significant that locals raised their own cases; the tax Early Medieval Europe   ()


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collector was the only invasive administrator. In terms of how provincial society was in fact regulated, policing the community, maintenance of bridges, and the use of town space were left to locals. Even religious practice was often a matter of ‘choice and privatization’, and private chapels were the rule. Finally, the issues of power and authority on the local level take the spotlight. Here, records of dispute settlement illuminate consensus-building, intimidation and violence. In the end, the reader must tie together the strands of the argument. The result is a Gordian knot of kinship and friendship networks binding local oikoi to each other and to well-placed allies. If, on the one hand, provincials could evade and manipulate imperial authority, but on the other hand call upon that same authority to assist them in local disputes, one can only imagine the difficulties Byzantine people faced. Thanks to her departure from previous assumptions, the picture Neville paints of Byzantine politics and society resembles more the local landscapes of western Europe in the central Middle Ages than the bureaucratic Byzantium familiar to students. She stresses the activity of the imperial government, while also demonstrating a critical attitude toward the language of her sources. Those familiar with western Europe will see similarities to tenth-century lordship and amicitia. The melding of ‘state’ with ‘society’ finds parallels in the Carolingian empire. But in other aspects, we see the opposite of the west; for example, Carolingian attempts to regulate society through renovatio – by means of capitularies and directives such as the Admonitio generalis – had no parallels in Byzantine culture. The book’s straightforward structure and repeated reassertions of the main thesis make it accessible for beginners. Some readers, however, are perhaps likely to take such repetition as attempting to hammer home the thesis by simply restating it until the reader succumbs. While it is true that each chapter begins with a reiteration of the central point of oikoi vis-à-vis imperial government, some do not meet expectations. Chapter 5, about the regulation of local society, announces the importance of the household in its opening paragraph, but gives evidence of monastic activity – privileging one type of household while denying us insight into lay behaviour. This bias may well result from the problems of source survival, but no such warning prefaces the presentation of evidence. Readers may thus wish for a fuller treatment of the sources and the problems they pose. Especially given the reliance on hagiography, readers should be informed of the degree to which the author deems it accurate narrative rather than formulaic discourse. These reservations aside, we must admit that the Byzantine government Neville describes was not staffed by professional bureaucrats who meticulously managed the affairs of the provinces. Instead, we see networks of family © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 


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and friendship, relations of intimidation and cooperation, much like the contemporary west. Lycoming College

CULLEN CHANDLER

Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe. Edited by Aliki Pantos and Sarah Semple. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2004. 251 pp. £50.00. ISBN 1 85182 665 3. A reader of much of the scholarship produced in the nineteenth century might be forgiven for wondering how the stout Anglo-Saxon peasant would have found time to farm his hide of land (let alone serve in the militia) given the seemingly interminable round of moots he had to attend. The attention paid by scholars to assembly practices in medieval Europe has, unsurprisingly, declined from the heights it reached in the nineteenth century and this volume, arising out of a conference held in Oxford in 2000, is, the back cover tells us, ‘the first study in over a century to focus on . . . the origin and evolution of medieval royal, judicial and popular assemblies’. As the editors acknowledge, however, the medieval Europe examined in this volume is a restricted one with a geographical bias towards Britain and Ireland and a chronological bias towards the early period, with few papers making it out of the first millennium. The editors’ introduction sets out something of the now familiar historiography of assembly in the Middle Ages, though it is unfortunate given the geographical focus of the volume that attention is devoted predominantly to England and other ‘Germanic’ societies. After this introduction the book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Richard Warner examines the development of the royal mound in Ireland, beginning with a sympathetic reconstruction of Iron Age sacred enclosures as places where kings ‘opened a route between [the otherworld] and the real world’ and then considers the association of mounds and royal residences. Elizabeth FitzPatrick discusses Irish royal inauguration mounds and how they appropriate the power of a pre-existing landscape with their users ‘inventing tradition’ where necessary. Stephen Driscoll offers a reconsideration of the origins of the inauguration site at Scone, arguing against its origin in a prehistoric past and suggesting that it is the product of ninth-century political changes. The final paper in this section, by Thomas Charles-Edwards, considers the meanings of three Welsh terms, llys, gorsedd and dadl, and what light they shed on assemblies and courts in medieval Wales. The second section focuses on assembly in Anglo-Saxon England. The first two papers, by Howard Williams and Sarah Semple, share Early Medieval Europe   ()


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much common ground in their consideration of the use of burials and burial sites as opportunities for, and places of, assembly. They argue Anglo-Saxon funerals could have been, in Williams’s words, ‘occasions for a range of social activities including feasting, settling disputes and forming alliances’, and also highlight the need to see cemeteries as part of larger ritual landscapes rather than simply places of burial. The other two papers, both by Aliki Pantos, focus more on the later Anglo-Saxon period. In the first, Pantos examines what is known about the sites of Anglo-Saxon assemblies and the approaches scholars have taken to locate and identify such sites. She argues previous studies have relied over much on place name evidence and calls for a ‘substantial reassessment’ of scholarly approaches. Her second paper considers what light Old English vocabulary can shed onto assembly practices in the AngloSaxon period, again arguing the need to combine the onomastic evidence with the documentary and archaeological. The final section is more varied in its geographical spread. Stefan Brink draws attention to the link between cultic and legal practices in early Scandinavia, showing that meeting places had a distinctive set of physical characteristics and were often close to royal or religious sites. Timothy Darvill focuses on Tynwald Hill on the Isle of Man, tracing the stages in its development up to the remodelling of the site in the nineteenth century and suggesting that open-air assemblies on the Isle of Man ultimately stretch back to the first millennium BC. In the final paper, Paul Barnwell considers the early Frankish mallus. Differing from many of the other papers in the volume both in terms of evidence employed and focus, Barnwell considers procedures rather than location, exploring the kinds of cases brought before the mallus and the status and role of the participants. It is perhaps inevitable given the predominantly archaeological focus of many of the papers in this volume that emphasis is placed primarily on the assembly places of the title rather than the practices. As a consequence there is sometimes a looseness in terminology: the phrase ‘popular assembly’, for example, is used a number of times with little attempt to define precisely what was ‘popular’ about such assemblies. It must also be said that a number of papers rely on later documentary sources or ethnographic analogies in order to make their cases, and how successful they are perceived to be necessarily relies on how appropriate individual readers consider such parallels. These potential problems aside, a great many debates and issues are raised and discussed in this volume and it is likely to suggest new and potentially fruitful lines of enquiry to scholars of early medieval assemblies. University of Manchester © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

MARTIN RYAN Early Medieval Europe   ()

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Book reviews

Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England. By Victoria Thompson. Anglo-Saxon Studies 4. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2004. x + 236 pp. £50. ISBN 1 8483 070 1. Whilst the study of mortuary practices and burial remains an important feature of late, as well as early, Anglo-Saxon archaeology, there has been no equivalent detailed study of the written evidence for attitudes towards the dying and death in England; this lacuna is in contrast to the research on the early medieval continental evidence published in the last fifteen years by Frederick Paxton and Cécile Treffort, amongst others. But Victoria Thompson’s study does more than fill an obvious gap in the current literature: this is not only a necessary book, it is also a very rich and stimulating examination of the subject, exploring the many different types of evidence produced in England from the time of Alfred the Great to that of William the Conqueror: narrative writings, poetry, charters, law codes, penitentials, homilies, liturgical sources, archaeology, manuscript art, and sculpture. By choosing to range across such a variety of materials, and to concentrate mainly on vernacular texts, Thompson is able to investigate the Old English language of death in detail. A, perhaps inevitable, corollary of her linguistic expertise here, and the breadth of her survey, is that she fails always to give individual sources the attention they might merit, failing always to recognize where her material is not unique. For example, her interesting analysis of the pastoral rites for the dying recorded in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 482, which she argues was compiled to teach priests how to administer pastoral rites for confession for the sick and dying, would have benefited from a comparison with similar collections on the continent, such as that compiled in late ninth-century Lorsch (Vatican Library, Ms. Pal. Lat. 485 ) or early eleventh-century Rome (Vatican Library, Ms. Archivio S. Pietro, H. 58) which scholars have concluded, independently, were compiled with similar educational purposes in mind. Such insularity is the probably inevitable consequence of her catholic approach, gathering wildly different materials together; the result is rather like a kaleidoscope, juxtaposing different genres to reveal different perspectives on the subject. The book begins with a case study of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (d. 918), examining both the evidence for her own death, and the deaths of those close to her. As Thompson recognizes, the evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle B (a. 918) is laconic: she died in Tamworth but was buried in Gloucester (p. 1). Thompson therefore investigates a range of evidence, from Asser’s reference to the death of Æthelflæd’s siblings in infancy, to the grants she made with her husband, Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia, to the cathedral community at Worcester, in Early Medieval Europe   ()


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order to investigate attitudes to death amongst the aristocracy in the early tenth century. The second chapter gives an overview of changes to dying and burial in the context of overall social and cultural change in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The third chapter investigates the pastoral rites for the dying, using the evidence of Bodleian Library, Ms. Laud. Misc. 482. The fourth looks at the ways people sought to protect themselves from sickness, and to safeguard the grave after death, pointing to the contrast between the desire in the liturgical texts and charters for commemoration of the dead, and the archaelogical evidence which suggests old graves were often reused and gravestones became weathered, losing their significance as grave markers. The fifth examines graves and funerary monuments, investigating the symbolism of the wyrm – embodying the transformation of the soul and its rebirth in their iconography – and relating this to the textual symbolism appearing in written sources. The last chapter investigates the theme of judgement, both terrestrial and celestial, investigating the way in which secular judgements were reflected in funerary practices, with the separate burial of outcasts. In sum, this is an ambitious and interesting book which opens up a series of perspectives on an important topic. University of Exeter


SARAH HAMILTON


Index of reviews for Volume 13 List of reviews Alfonso, Isabel, Kennedy, Hugh, and Escalona, Julio (eds), Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies, 297 Althoff, Gerd, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter, 298 Althoff, Gerd (tr. Christopher Carroll), Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe , 298 Baker, Nigel, and Holt, Richard, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church: Gloucester and Worcester, 119 Barceló, Miquel, and Sigaut, François (eds), The Making of Feudal Agricultures?, 219 Barnwell, P.S., and Mostert, Marco (eds), Political Assemblies in the Early Middle Ages, 220 Berkhofer, Robert, The Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France, 302 Bischoff, Bernard, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen). Teil II: Laon–Paderborn , 419 Blickling Homilies: Edition and Translation , The, Richard, J. Kelly, 125 Brann, Ross, Power and Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain , 420 Cartulary of Monitier-en-Der, 666 –1129, The, ed. Constance Brittain Bouchard, 421 Early Medieval Europe   () 441– 443 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd ,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA

442

Index of reviews for Volume 13

Christys, Ann, Christians in al-Andalus (711–1000), 120 De Nie, Giselle, Word, Image and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul , 222 Die Annales Quedlinburgenses, ed. Martina Giese, 424 Everett, Nicholas, Literacy in Lombard Italy, c.568 –774, 122 Gesta Principum Polonorum: The Deeds of the Princes of the Poles , trs Paul W. Knoll and Frank Schaer, 305 Giese, Martina (ed.), Die Annales Quedlinburgenses, 424 Gill, Miriam, and Hawkes, Jane (eds), Images of Salvation: The Story of the Bible through Medieval Art, 223 Halsall, Guy, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450– 900 , 123 Hardt, Matthias, Gold und Herrschaft. Die Schätze europäischer Könige und Fürsten im ersten Jahrtausend, 426 Hamerow, Helena, and MacGeorge, Arthur (eds), Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain. Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, 425 Herren, Michael, W., and Brown, Shirley Ann, Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century , 428 Higham, M.J., and Hill, D.H. (eds), Edward the Elder 899 – 924, 303 History of the Normans by Amatus of Montecassino, The, ed. Graham A. Loud (trs. Prescott N. Dunbar), 301 Irvine, Susan (ed.), MS E, 431 Keevil, Graham, The Tower of London Moat. Archaeological Excavations 1995–9, 305 Kulikowski, Michael, Late Roman Spain and its Cities, 432 Lapidge, Michael (ed.), Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain, 306 Early Medieval Europe   ()


Index of reviews for Volume 13

443

MacGeorge, Penny, Late Roman Warlords, 127 Marzinzik, Sonja, Early Anglo-Saxon Belt Buckles (Late Fifth to Early Eighth Centuries A.D.): Their Classification and Context , 225 MS E, ed. Susan Irvine, 431 Naylor John, An Archaeology of Trade in Middle Saxon England , 308 Nees, Laurence, Early Medieval Art, 128 Neville, Leonora, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 , 434 Pantos, Aliki, and Semple, Sarah (eds), Assembly Places and Practices in Medieval Europe, 436 Thompson, Victoria, Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England, 438 Tyler, Elizabeth M. (ed.), Treasure in the Medieval West, 309 Worm, Peter, Karolingische Rekognitionszeichen: Die Kanzlerzeile und ihre graphische Ausgestaltung auf den Herrscherurkunden des achten und neunten Jahrhunderts, 310

List of reviewers Barton, Simon, 120, 420 Bassett, Steven, 303 Bernhardt, John W., 424 Chandler, Cullen, 434 Charles-Edwards, Thomas, 428 Conant, Jonathan P., 122 Cowen, Alice, 125, 431 Creighton, Oliver, 305 Cubitt, Catherine, 306 Curta, Florin, 426 DeGregorio, Scott, 223 Effros, Bonnie, 310 Ganz, David, 128 Goddard, Richard, 119 Goldberg, Eric J., 123 Hamilton, Sarah, 438 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 

Hinton, David A., 308 Hudson, John, 302 Kosto, Adam, 297 Koziol, Geoffrey, 310 Kulikowski, Michael, 127 Maclean, Simon, 220 Merrills, A.H., 432 Pilsworth, Clare, 222, 419 Ryan, Martin, 436 Scales, Len, 298 Squatriti, Paolo, 219 Taylor, Claire, 421 Weiler, Björn, 305 Williams, Howard, 225, 425 Wolf, Kenneth Baxter, 301


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