Tag Archives: memory



The Voice of October 2016


Brayford Campus of the University of Lincoln

The Brayford Campus of Lincoln University, just for context


Law in the Post-Roman West

  • Graham Barrett, “Legislation and Codification after Rome”







Medieval Iberia


The voice of January 2018 now takes up the story…


    Monastery of San Julián de Samos



Keynote 2


The Old Palace Hotel, Lincoln

The Old Palace Hotel, Lincoln


Justice and Judicial Practices in Early Medieval North-Western Iberia





    Cathedral of SS Just & Pastor, Narbonne




West front of Lincoln Cathedral






More curiosities of the Beaulieu cartulary documents

One of the things that can happen with charter collections that interests me most is when we find that an institution has for some reason or other preserved two versions of the same document. My pet case of this is the bequest from the will of Count Guifré II Borrell to the cathedral of Vic in 911: there are two versions of this, with slightly different witness lists but differing most significantly in whether or not the grant includes a third of the revenues from minting in the city.1 Both appear to be more or less contemporary with the grant date, both are single sheets, both are properly signed off, they are diplomatically ‘authentic’ but one of them is obviously not true. If you want to get properly thinky about it, there are scenarios in which which one that was could change: for example, say the count originally intended to make the grant, and a document was drawn up, but he was then persuaded to reconsider and keep the mint for himself and his heirs, so a new one was drawn up. Then, maybe a century later or maybe sooner, the cathedral outs with the first version at some argument with the count and get the rights conceded. Certainly the bishops of Vic struck coin by the eleventh century, but the other version of this grant must only exist because at some point the opposite was preferred.2 So, true, false, then true again, authentic all the time! I think it should be that way round, because otherwise why would the cathedral keep the one in which they got less? But anyway, these cases help illustrate that several versions of a text could exist from the beginning and even be preserved by the same people, which means a bit of rethinking over some of the classical assumptions of diplomatic.

An episcopal diner of Vic, showing Saints Peter and Paul facing each other paired with a man ploughing with an ox right

An episcopal diner of Vic, showing Saints Peter and Paul facing each other paired with a man ploughing with an ox right, probably of the late eleventh century and now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

The example I’ve come across at Beaulieu is more mundane but also more personal. It is from May 885, when one Ermenric became concerned about the end of the world (in the way that we’ve discussed) and the state of his soul if it did, or at least was made to say so by the scribes who wrote his resulting donation to the monastery of Saint-Pierre de Beaulieu. He was no minor person, Ermenric, holding some of his land by direct gift from King Carloman, and Beaulieu got richer by twenty-four distinct farmsteads, most of whose tenants were named (three being empty), and a castle that was on one of these properties. They also got richer by the slaves, who were mostly not named (unusually for Beaulieu documents) but among whom, it is specified, were to be counted those who had run away, presumably a trick to stop landlords moving their slaves off an estate before it was transferred and then recovering them and redeploying them as their own still.3 Thirteen men witnessed, including some of the men who show up in these documents most often at that time. It was presumably quite the affair.

The abbey of Saint-Pierre de Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne

The abbey of Saint-Pierre de Beaulieu again, presumed setting of the transaction. Par Wester (Travail personnel) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 ou CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

I had not, when I first wrote this in January, got my head round how the Beaulieu cartulary is organised; I’m still not sure I have. Foundational and royal documents open it, intermingled, and then the organisation may be vaguely geographical, or there may be other links, perhaps of donor families, that I’m not yet seeing. Either it’s much subtler than I think, anyway, or it fails here because, more than a hundred documents further on, this transaction is copied again with the same date, same donor and same witnesses, and indeed the same properties transferred.4 There is some change, though: one part of the donation that looks like a copyist’s error (a place that turns up twice in different vicairies, but which doesn’t seem to be significant for the organisation of the cartulary) is eliminated, and one of the farmsteads acquires an extra slave. So, just an update because the transaction had taken a while to organise? Or just a bug-fix that didn’t replace its faulty predecessor in the archive? Well, only if it’s quite some bug, because the other change is in the religious payback. The monks are to have an annual feast in memory of the donation and offer up prayers and thanks, and although this is unusually specific it’s not odd, it’s just that in the first version the anniversary is to be Ermenric’s death and in the second it’s his brother’s. And that, I’ve never seen before. I guess that the most upsettingly possible explanation is his brother died while they were sorting the gift out and this was what they could do to look after his soul. The brother isn’t named so I can’t check if such a person disappears from the record about then. But both versions still made it into the archive, apparently in such a way that the later copyists didn’t realise. I wonder if they just had two feasts?

A dining scene from the Luttrell Psalter

The only plausibly related image I can search up is from the Luttrell Psalter, so wrong country and century but at least it has monks in it? London, British Library Additional MS 42130

The other curiosity is a boundary issue. (As so many things are…) There is an odd contrast to my Catalan documents here in the matter of roads on property boundaries. Actually giving property boundaries (or at least, leaving them in documents that are copied into the cartulary) is unusual here, but roads do turn up, they’re just always ‘public’ ones. That does happen in Catalonia but there’s lots of other sorts; here, not so much.5 This is not the odd thing. The odd thing is that when these public roads turn up, they are overridingly often on the fourth boundary of the proprties concerned. Impressionistic you say, so have some numbers: in the 74 ninth-century documents as Deloche dated them, only 12 actually give boundaries at all. These give bounds for total 29 properties, though, so it’s a slightly better sample than that implies. Of those 29, 8 don’t have bounds on a public road at all (which is to say that nearly 3 times as many do). Of the 21 that are actually evidential for my point, then, 16 have such a road on their fourth boundary. Admittedly, 5 also have one on their third boundary (and 4 of these are in the same donation, so le Vert must have been quite the spaghetti junction) but I’m not sure that weakens the point, and 1 of the non-compliants has a road on its third boundary but doesn’t have any more, so if I said `last’ boundary instead it would conform. The remaining 3 have roads on first and second, on first (of three) and on third boundary respectively.6 I think 16 or 17 out of 21 counts as a trend.

Roman and Romanesque bridge over the River Ter at Roda de Ter

The Roman and Romanesque bridge that carries the old strata francisca over the River Ter at Roda de Ter, about the one image I have which I can be sure shows a medieval street

So, as they say, what’s up with that? An outside possibility: we’re looking at wine country here, is it actually possible that most of these properties are just on the same side of whatever valley they’re in, to catch the sun appropriately? I find this implausible: I reckon the marginal lands should be in use too by the 880s, and anyway it’s not all vines (though I will confess that a lot of it is). So if not that, what? The most obvious thing would seem to be that they are actually counting the bounds by starting in such a place as to finish with the road. In Catalonia the bounds are, as we’ve discussed, usually done east-south-west-north around the compass; here, however, it must be subjective, and that leads one to wonder if they’re even necessarily sequential. If I’d met this first, of course, I’d think Catalonia weird for its cardinal points every time but as it is, this implied practice seems weirdly fluid and hard to plot with. What do you folks think, assuming anyone’s read to the end of another post about charter bounds?

1. Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX-X), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascicles, doc. no. 55.

2. Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer & Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a catalogue of the coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 6: the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge 2013), pp. 82-83.

3. Maximin Deloche (ed.), Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Beaulieu (en Limousin) (Paris 1859), doc. no. LV, my emphasis: “De mancipiis vero ad ipsam curtem pertinentibus sive intermanentibus, fugam lapsis, et unde aliunde transgressi sunt, cedo, pro remedio animæ me&ealig; ad monasterium quod vocatur Belluslocus, ubi Gairulfus abbas præesse videtur custos, ipsam mancipia in integrum….”

4. Deloche, Beaulieu, doc. no. CLXVI.

5. Jordi Bolòs i Masclans, “Aportacions al coneixement de les vies de communicació” in Federico Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium Internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991-1992), also published as Memorias de le Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Vols 23 & 24 (Barcelona 1991 & 1992), I pp. 409-436.

6. The 12 documents are Deloche, Beaulieu, doc. nos XX, XLV, LII, LIV, LXIII, CXXXIII, CLII, CLIII, CLVII, CLVIII and CLXXVII, which might look like a cluster towards the end but in chronological order would be XX, CLXXXIII, LIV, CLIII, XLV, CLVIII, CLII, CLXXVII, LXIII, LII, CXXXIII & CLVII, so actually not so much. Of these LXIII is the one with all the roads; the rest, you could look up yourself if you wished


Just a short note to let you know that I have a new post up at Cliopatria discussing objectivity, peasants, ghosts and memory apropos of an article of Simon Doubleday’s I was reading on my way up to Leeds. Some of the themes are old ones here and some are new material. You may like to have a look

Mission statements 2: custodians of memory

Logo of the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal

I was going to leave the previous post as a singleton, and then of course it was Remembrance Day. I might have thought the things I go on to say here when I came across Another Damned Medievalist’s post on the subject, but actually I was already thinking it because of, quite unconnectedly, having that evening watched an episode of Dr Who I’d not seen before in which they had cause to show part of a Remembrance ceremony. It was total coincidence that we chose that DVD this evening, as far as I can tell, but it contained the following words that may be familiar to you:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

This never fails to choke me up. And it’s not because of sadness for the loss of life, as such, or any of the more conventional tugs it’s meant to make at the heartstrings. I freely admit, I used to be a war geek, and I’ve made some effort to get an idea of what fighting in the wars of the last century might have been like, but it’s not even empathy that really gets me with that quote. I haven’t got much right to empathy anyway; I have no relatives who died in the war, indeed I exist only because of my father‘s clever ability to stay alive through it out of his own incompetence, as he told it. Somehow his incompetence made him a lieutenant who served at three invasions, so I’ve had my doubts about whether he, a lifelong pacifist, was really as useless a war sailor as he would have liked to think himself, ever since I read a really good article in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society about Australian Great War veterans and how they liked to remember their service.1 Meanwhile, it’s theoretically possible, though vanishingly unlikely, that my father’s landing craft may have ferried my maternal grandfather’s company onto a Normandy beach in 1944, long before they had ever had cause to matter to each other. They both survived. So it’s not even grief.

No, the reason that quote gets to me is because it’s not true. We won’t remember them, for the vastly most part. We’re already getting to the point where there aren’t enough veterans to hold memorial services for the Great War dead. Soon the media exposure those get will collapse as a result. In another century the Great War will be as distant from the people then as the Franco-Prussian War is now. Its history will probably still be taught in schools, but individual connections to the soldiers, whether by acquaintance or genealogy, will be the preserve of amateur researchers and real obsessives. After all, tracing one’s genealogy back as far as, say, the European settlement of the USA, is still fairly reasonable to our perspectives; but when you get people who claim to be descendants of English nobility from before the Conquest (which I have met twice already) you, or at least I, assume that they’re quietly and harmlessly mad, because we know what the evidence is like and that it basically can’t be done. It’ll be a good guess for most people that they had ancestors in the Great War, but for the most part knowing who they were or what they did or didn’t, won’t be an option without doing heavy research at Kew or wherever.

You may already have seen where I’m going with this. When popular memory fades, as it will, who remembers the fallen? Who, in fact, remembers anyone? We do. Historians are our cultural memory specialists. That sets all kinds of agenda that most of us would probably wish to disavow, but nonetheless we are the only ones who can. In the same way as I can’t bring back a full picture of Adalbert of Taradell, I haven’t been able to get a full idea of what, for example, Sergeant Edward Mott of the 1st Battalion, Border Regiment was like as a person: probably fairly frightening I would have to guess, because in my world people don’t charge German machine-gun nests single-handedly even after being wounded in the eye, but in 1915 actually some ordinary people did do stuff like that, because war is Hell. Similarly when I got my hands on the medal group of 2nd Lieutenant John Mitchell, RAF, my personal reaction was, “you madman!” but that doesn’t remember him as someone who knew him would have remembered him. We can’t do it perfectly; but when no-one else can remember them, we can at least pick up the bits and make something, and this is in some sense what we’re paid for (those of us who are).

Badge of Order of Saint Anne, awarded to 2nd Lieutenant John Mitchell, RAF

Now at the moment the Second World War is still close enough that memories are painful and we see the horror and the heroism with an unavoidable attachment. I read too many Biggles books when young and I still feel kind of the same way about the Great War although not to the extent of glamorising it I hope. But as I’ve argued above we seem now to be watching the Great War crossing that threshold of about three generations whereafter it will be difficult for people to be attached to its memory any longer. It will join the other stuff that we study in the past, where relevance is not immediately apparent and has to be argued, or else can even, eventually, be disowned because popular attachment is now so weak that just interest is a more powerful justification, which puts you about where I was with the previous post in this series. And it will be our job as historians, is already some of our jobs, to try and bring stuff like that back as far as it can be brought back, and to try and tell what it was and what it was like, with imaginative reconstruction where necessary and steadfast adherence to the evidence where possible and so on. Because no-one else will know how to do it well. We have been trained in where to look and how to evaluate. We are the memory experts; we’re boring compared to Beowulf’s scop, maybe, and it may be a toss-up as to who wins between us and Patrick Geary’s cartularising monks when it comes to care and disinterest,2 but for better or for worse, it’s we with the research Tardis whom society needs to hear these lost voices for them. I might have quarrels about whether we can improve ourselves by hearing them, but that’s what the previous post was about, why most of the uses for historians are dangerous or unhelpful in a situation where concrete benefit is demanded. This is the use for history that society will pay for least, though I suppose archivists have got it going on. But it might be the most important one.

1. Alastair Thompson, “Making the most of memories: the empirical and subjective value of oral history” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series, Vol. 9 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 291-303.

2. I refer here to Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: remembering and forgetting in the tenth and eleventh centuries (Princeton 1985), which is actually really quite relevant to the whole question I’m attacking here.