historiographical essay georges duby’s maˆconnais …flcheyette/publications/files/duby.pdf ·...

Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317www.elsevier.com/locate/jmedhist

Historiographical essay

Georges Duby’sMaconnais after fifty years:reading it then and now

F.L. Cheyette∗

Department of History, Amherst College, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002-5000, USA

Abstract

Georges Duby’sLa societe aux XIe et XIIe siecles dans la region maconnaise was thefoundation stone of the major school of French medieval social history in the last generation.This article reflects on the reasons for its historiographical importance at the time, andespecially the narrative of the ‘feudal revolution’ that it is largely responsible for generating.Returning to Duby’s database, the charters of Cluny and of St Vincent of Maˆcon, it reconsidersDuby’s portrayal of tenth century society in the Maˆconnais and concludes that there is nobasis in that evidence for any ‘mutation’ or ‘revolutionary’ social change occurring aroundthe year 1000. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Georges Duby; Maˆconnais; Tenth century; Feudal revolution; Cluny

I still remember my excitement on readingLa societe aux XIe et XIIe siecles dansla region maconnaise for the first time in 1955.1 I had picked up the book in oneof those old academic book stores on the Boulevard Saint Michel shortly after arriv-ing in Paris to work on my dissertation, and was quickly captivated by what I foundon its pages. Somewhere yellowing in my files is a copy of the letter I wrote toCharles Taylor, my Harvard mentor, filled with my youthful enthusiasm at the dis-covery. I could not have predicted then how central the book would be to the emerg-

∗ Tel.: +1-413-542-2229; fax+1-413-542-2727.E-mail address: [email protected] (F.L. Cheyette).

1 Georges Duby,La societe aux XIe et XIIe siecles dans la region maconnaise (Paris: A. Colin, 1953).[HereafterMaconnais]. The work was reprinted with different pagination: Paris: Editions de l’e´cole deshautes e´tudes en sciences sociales, 1982. My references will be to the original edition. My thanks toStephen D. White and Barbara Rosenwein for commenting on earlier drafts and for their bibliographi-cal suggestions.

0304-4181/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S0304 -4181(02 )00021-0

292 F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317

ing field of medieval social history—how in so many important ways it would rein-vent the subject—and I doubt that others would have done so either. Less than tenyears later, however, its position was already evident, and a French colleague wouldwhisper, ‘Voila Duby’ , with awe in his voice when we crossed the great man on astreet near the Sorbonne in the summer of 1963.

On first encounter there was something paradoxical about the work. It was a thickbook, 645 pages in length in its first printing, and thick as well with details ofeleventh- and twelfth-century life that I had imagined unrecoverable, details thatcalled into question many of the definitions and generalisations I had so thoroughlylearned as a graduate student. Yet in other ways the book seemed curiously con-strained as well as physically ephemeral. It had been grossly mangled by the pub-lisher, Armand Colin, perhaps because, as I have heard tell, Duby himself had topay to have it printed. Typesetters seem to have dropped lines of type on the floorand replaced them at random. Footnotes were printed in type smaller than that usedfor stock market reports: is it hardly a wonder that they were poorly proofread? Eventhe table of contents was scrambled. And the book’s format was not much largerthan the Livres de poche that were just coming on the market, easy to drop into thepocket of my raincoat to read on the bus or the Metro on my way to the archives.More peculiar for the early 1950s, when regional studies were usually relegated tothe Bulletins and Revues of local learned societies, the book’s geographical rangeappeared to be bizarrely narrow, a mere 150 parishes, an area stretching little morethan 40 km east to west and 70 km north to south on either side of the Saone river.A warm glow might have come to the reader’s mouth on seeing the village namesGevrey-Chambertin or Meursault mentioned in passing , but the region’s marginalitywas, if anything, emphasised by the author himself. On the very first pages Dubyinsisted that the Maconnais was a borderland, partly in the Empire and partly in thekingdom of France, and agriculturally divided between the world of northern Europeand that of the Mediterranean. Micro-history was still far in the future. At the time,it was hard to know what to do with the book’s ample minimalism. At least onereviewer for a major journal did not seem to see beyond its apparent narrowness.John Williams of Dartmouth, in a four paragraph review for the American historicalreview, managed to summarise the book’s contents in two sentences, and spent morespace remarking on the carelessness of Duby’s Latin. And yet to my novice eyesthe book not only opened up new questions but, more importantly, revealed newways to go about the craft of medieval social history.

Two English-language reviewers did see the richness secreted on the book’s ill-printed pages. Elizabeth Furber was nothing but laudatory in her review in Speculum.‘Lords and prevots, peasants and merchants in the region of Macon’ , she wrote,‘come to life in this penetrating study of their families and fortunes, of the evolutionof their activities and institutions, and of the varying nature of the ties which boundthem together in the “ two great feudal centuries”’ .2 In the English Historical Review,Reginald Lennard began his equally laudatory review, ‘ In this important and admir-

2 Speculum, 30 (1955), 274–5.

293F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317

able, if sometimes challenging, volume Professor Duby shows clearly that he standsin the front rank of social historians. ... He brings to the interpretation of his materialsa strong but always disciplined imagination, which is historical in the truest senseof that term’ .3 I pick out these few sentences from two extended reviews to emphasisetwo characteristics that struck me and I am sure many other historians then at thebeginning of their careers.

The first was Duby’s seemingly unquenchable curiosity about the stories of indi-vidual lives, however fragmentarily we can know them. In contrast most notably toMarc Bloch’s Feudal Society —where, as more than one critic has remarked, thereader is told a lot about ‘medieval man’ but not much about any individual man(or woman)—Duby’s book gave you the uncanny feeling that families you had neverheard of, and would never hear of again—the Gros, the Beaujeu, the lords of laBussiere—were familiar figures, something like distant cousins that people told sto-ries about at family holiday gatherings. And even when these individuals were infact composites—like Duby’s penurious descendants of lords who had been tooprofligate with their pious gifts—they too somehow took on a mimetic reality. Thisfocus on the stories of individuals would continue to be a feature of Duby’s output.In contrast to his older colleague Fernand Braudel, for whom the entire Mediter-ranean or all of material culture from the fourteenth century to the Industrial Revol-ution were barely sufficient stages on which to deploy his erudition, Duby showedhimself to be an accomplished miniaturist. In this, though in very little else, Dubyas a social historian resembled the R.W. Southern of The making of the middle ages,published the same year. His penchant for stories of individual lives was only oneof the ways in which that ‘strong but always disciplined imagination’ showed itself.And yet, however laudatory some of the reviews may have been, none of them—atleast none that I have been able to track down—paid serious attention to what becameover the subsequent decades the most influential of the book’s many arguments.

1.

Although the book’s title announces that it will be about the eleventh and twelfthcenturies, it actually begins in the tenth. It is Duby’s portrait of that preceding world,furthermore, that underpins both the argument for much of the first half of the bookand what subsequent historians have done with it, especially the discovery (orinvention) of a mutation feodale, a ‘ feudal revolution’ , in the decades around theyear 1000.4 Curiously, it was in this first and most influential part of the book thatthe qualities so praised by reviewers were least in evidence; it was here, as I shallargue, that a preconceived position, long a commonplace of French legal history,

3 English Historical Review, 70 (1955), 99.4 The first term popularised by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation feodale: Xe–XIIe

siecles (Nouvelle Clio,16, Paris: P.U.F., 1980); the second by Thomas Bisson, ‘The “ feudal revolution” ,’Past and Present, 142 (1994), 6–42.


combined with a powerful set of methodological assumptions to override a carefulassessment of the evidence.

Duby’s tenth-century Maconnais is a society that, ‘ is still held together by Caro-lingian political institutions, which establish clear divisions within it’ . The most pro-found of these divisions is the one that separates the free from the servile. At thesame time, among the free, among the peuple franc, a less clear division is beginningto emerge, one that is strictly economic, between the peasants and the rich; and atthe very top a small elite have already taken over the military rights of command.This elite, however, is not yet blessed with either titles or privileges; it is not yet ajuridical class; and it is ‘still respectful of comital power’ .5

In the last decades of the tenth century and the first decades of the eleventh, thissociety undergoes a profound transformation. Duby marks them with a series of lastsand firsts as they appear in the documentation of Cluny and St Vincent of Macon:971 the first appearance of miles as a title;6 986 the first ‘private’ court; 988 a banallord demands payments from all, both free and servile, in his district; 994 the firstpeace council in the region; 1004 the last sign of an independent vicarial court; 1019the last sentence rendered by the count’s court against a castellan; 1030 services ofvassals are regularly recompensed by concessions of fief; 1032 ‘knight’ has com-pletely replaced the title ‘noble’ . In these steps we have the advent of what Dubycalls ‘ feudal society’ , though he denies the existence of a ‘ feudal system’ and notesthe modest role of fiefs in the totality of noble land holdings.7 The transformationhe describes is marked primarily by the disappearance of a ‘public’ world and itsreplacement by one in which all power, even that of the count around his seat atMacon, is fundamentally ‘private’ . With the disappearance of the public world disap-pears the old distinction that separated free from servile; with it the old public powersnow pass into the hands of those strong enough to enforce them, notably the castel-lans who had exercised those powers in the name of the count and now do so astheir own ‘private’ right. Other lords claim those powers as well, the promoters ofland clearances in the forests, for example, who combine lordship of the land withlordship of command. Though a servile population still exists, the important distinc-tion comes to be between the peasants and those rich enough to become fightingmen. And among the fighting men, the boundary between those at the top of thehierarchy and all the others solidifies. Even those who gain wealth cannot cross whatare now impermeable membranes.

This ‘fi rst feudal society’ , however, is itself unstable, for pious donations andinheritance customs bring about the impoverishment of many families both great andsmall. It is further distorted by a growing economy, a rise in prices and a growing

5 Maconnais, 114–5.6 Maconnais, 230. Duby here seems to have missed a much earlier use of the term; Auguste Bernard

and Alexandre Bruel, Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, 6 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,1876–1903), [hereafter, ‘Cluny’ ], no. 224 (c. 920): ‘placuit inter prudentes viros milites videlicet domniArdradi presulis’ ; miles here is arguably a description (‘fi ghting man’ ) and not a title, though the precedingadjectival phrase argues to the contrary.

7 ‘Feudal system’ : Maconnais, 195; fiefs and alods: ibid., 291–8.


taste for luxuries as well as the increasing demands of equipment for warfare andcampaigns in faraway lands. Such are the conditions in the Maconnais when theking again becomes a political player there in the later twelfth century. Slowly, themembers of the knightly class replenish their treasuries by bartering their fidelity forcoin, turning their still substantial alodial holdings into fiefs. Meanwhile, some citydwellers—merchants, artisans, and the servants of the powerful—gain in wealth andinvest their fortunes in urban real estate and the countryside, and at the same time,the peasant class becomes more diverse, a few in each village accumulating signifi-cant amounts of land while others subject themselves to increased rents on theirmeager holdings. Money gives to some—especially the city dwellers—the power tofree themselves from the dues of lordship. In the thirteenth century, as rival lordsbegin submitting their disputes to new judicial institutions, peasants gain the opport-unity to fix the customs to which they are subject. Liberties spread. The ‘new servi-tude’ that follows in the wake of Roman Law will only come later. By 1250, societyhas become far more diversified, and that diversity is largely dependent on wealth.

Such, in very broad strokes, is the master narrative of Duby’s thesis. It has become,I think it fair to say, the ‘standard model’ for the history at least of the westernlands of the old Carolingian Empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and thearguably divergent development of Britain and Germany in those centuries isoccasionally presented as a deviation from or alternative to this standard model. Asstandard models have a way of doing, so this one in turn has become the target ofrevisionists—most notably by Dominique Barthelemy in France—even as it has beenforcefully restated by Thomas Bisson.8 It thus demands that we exercise our historicalimagination to understand how nearly fifty years ago this book could strike some ofits readers (myself among them) as little short of revolutionary.

Let us begin with the standard model that it slowly replaced. Medieval historywas then still under the determining influence of nineteenth-century sociology (ofwhich Marxism is the last fading remnant), a sociology that sought to simplify andsystematise the complexities of historical social structures and, in so doing, explaintheir very long-term transformations. However ill the fit, over half a millennium ofEuropean social history was reduced to two categories: ‘ feudalism’ and ‘man-orialism’ , ‘societe feodale’ and ‘ regime seigneurial’ , ‘Lehnrecht’ and ‘Landherrsch-aft’ . Their stories were usually made to begin with the Carolingians. For ‘ feudalism’a critical moment in many accounts was the capitulary of Quierzy-sur-Oise, whenCharles the Bald promised his magnates that their ‘honors’ would pass to their sons,though the ever-inventive Lynn White Jr. argued that its true beginnings were acentury earlier when the spur and new forms of horse harnesses allowed CharlesMartel to create the Carolingian heavy cavalry.9 Yet other historians preferred to

8 Dominique Barthelemy, La mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu?: servage et chevalerie dans laFrance des Xe et XIe siecles (Paris: Fayard, 1997).

9 The first idea goes back to Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, and appears in one form or anotherin Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 193–5, Francois Ganshof,Feudalism (New York: Harper, 1961), 47–8, and Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et feodalite (Paris: Aubier,1959), 71–2. See the comments of Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, (London: Longman, 1992), 13, 245.


push the beginnings of feudalism back to the Merovingian antrustiones or even tothe Dark Germanic Forests.10 Seemingly forgotten in this standard narrative was thealternative proposed by Fustel de Coulanges to make of feudalism the outgrowth ofRoman clientage.11 The story of ‘manorialism’ also began with the Carolingians, inthe bi-partite estates described by the great polyptiques. Though surprisingly littlenoted in the reviews of the time, probably because Duby continued to use the adjec-tive ‘ feodal’ , when he insisted on the overwhelming importance of alodial holdingsamong all classes of society, even in the twelfth century and even among the peasan-try, Duby showed how narrow and inadequate both those standard terms, ‘ feudalism’and ‘manorialism’ , really were. The Maconnais, however much a boundary land itmay have been politically and agriculturally, is, after all, located squarely betweenthe Loire and the Rhine, the traditional ‘heartland’ of ‘classical feudalism’ . Theabstractions of the textbooks simply did not correspond to the realities of landholdingor of human relationships he had discovered in the cartularies of the region. All thediscussions of the last generation about the usefulness of the concepts ‘ feudalism’and ‘manorialism’ really begin with his book.

One consequence of a social and economic history shaped by these two multi-secular categories was that relatively little account was paid to change that did notseem ‘structural’ , that did not reach to something that was arguably ‘ fundamental’to feudal or manorial institutions. Where such changes really had to be faced, around1200 and again in the later middle ages, it was necessary to invent sub-sets of thetwo categories. For the first, Achille Luchaire provided us with ‘ feudal monarchy’and for the second, Charles Plummer gave us ‘bastard feudalism’ , with all the attend-ant debates on how these sub-sets should be defined and when they began.12 Thebest that Marc Bloch could do to restore some sense of movement into the societiesof the period 900 to 1200 was to distinguish ‘ two feudal ages’ whose boundary heplaced around the year 1050, a distinction that by the 1960s had become a fixtureof French historiography. A second consequence was what now seems a very peculiarway of handling texts. A striking feature of many books on medieval institutionspublished in the first half of the twentieth century—at least by historians writing inEnglish and German—was the ease with which authors juxtaposed texts from theeleventh century, or even the ninth and tenth, with others from the thirteenth, withoutany sense of anachronism, as if the more voluble texts of the later period were only

For the second: Lynn White, Jr., Medieval technology and social change (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1962), 1–38, and the critique by Bernard Bachrach, ‘Charles Martel, mounted shock combat, thestirrup and feudalism’ , Studies in Medieval and Renaissance history, 7 (1970), 49–75.

10 For example, David Herlihy, The history of feudalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 80–1.11 Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (Paris, Hachette, 1924–

27), 6: Livre IV.12 Charles Petit-Dutaillis, La monarchie feodale en France et en Angleterre, Xe–XIIIe siecle (Paris:

Renaissance du Livre, 1933). Sir John Fortescue, The governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 15, revived by K. B. McFarlane, The nobility of later medieval England(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). See Michael Hicks, Bastard feudalism (London/New York: Long-man, 1995).


making explicit what was already implicit in the earlier. Here was longue dureeresolved into essentialism.13

Duby, in contrast, placed his emphasis on movement, on transformations, forwhich he used the term ‘crises’ (which in French does not necessarily have the sameearth-shaking resonance as its equivalent in English: the same word serves for apossibly fatal ‘crise cardiaque’ and for an only slightly disabling ‘crise de foie’ , aswell as for those ‘crises du gouvernement’ under the Fourth Republic that wereeasily resolved by a minor reshuffling of cabinet posts). Duby, to be sure, was notalone in emphasising the radical changes taking place between 1000 and 1200. Againone thinks of The making of the middle ages, though Southern’s concern with socialrelations was relatively limited and his argument was the very opposite of a suc-cession of ‘crises’ . After Duby the problem of anachronism could no longer beignored; one had to be acutely aware of the differences between the tenth centuryand the eleventh, the eleventh century and the thirteenth.

For many of us coming into the profession when the Maconnais was published, itwas likewise on these pages that we discovered the potential wealth of ecclesiasticalcartularies for the history of something other than monastic estates. Duby, to be sure,was not the first to use them for social history. His own teacher, Charles-EdmondPerrin had explored them to write his thesis on rural lordship in Lorraine, publishedin 1935; but that book was a highly technical discussion of late-Carolingian estaterecord books, and I doubt that it was read by any except people who worked onsuch records. Duby’s older colleague, Philippe Dollinger, had also used ecclesiasticalcartularies for his work on the rural classes in Bavaria. And there was that nearlyunreadable work of Paul Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France,published in 1903.14 But unlike Guilhiermoz and Bloch, and to a certain extent Dol-linger as well (whose thesis was still dominated by the legal categories so carefullyconstructed by generations of German historians), Duby understood a necessary cor-ollary of making sense out of the cartularies: if you wanted the names in the docu-ments to be more than mere names, more than tokens, if you hoped to imagine themas individuals and understand the relations among them, above all if you wished tocomprehend the social and physical environments within which those people livedtheir lives, you had to work on a small geographical scale. Thus, as the influenceof Duby’s thesis grew and eventually came to dominate French medieval socialhistory and the work of those elsewhere who came under its spell, the region becamethe favoured framework and the cartulary or charter collection the most familiar typeof source.

In addition to these striking and long-lasting innovations in the techniques and

13 I commented on this habit many years ago in ‘Custom, case law, and medieval ‘constitutionalism’ :a reconsideration’ , Political science quarterly, 78 (1963), 362–90.

14 Charles-Edmond Perrin, Recherches sur la seigneurie rurale en Lorraine d’apres les plus ancienscensiers (IX–XII siecle), (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1935). Philippe Dollinger, L’evolution des classes ruralesen Baviere, depuis la fin de l’epoque carolingienne jusqu’au milieu du XIIIe siecle (Paris: Belles Lettres,1949). Paul Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France au moyen age (Paris: A. Picardet fils, 1902).


materials of medieval social history, Duby also set before his readers a number ofresearch problems that still figure prominently on the profession’s agenda: the com-plex history of serfdom between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, the historyof village communities and the development of rural parishes, the connection ofsettlement patterns and especially of the expansion of the agricultural landscape toforms of lordship, the development of the knightly class and its identification withnobility. These are but a few of the fascinating stories that Duby attempted to unfoldwithin the confines of his narrow stretch of land on either side of the Saone river.Some of these problems—especially knighthood and nobility—had already accumu-lated a large bibliography around them; others had been anticipated by Marc Bloch,in particular, but Duby’s treatment gave them fresh salience and, above all, a freshchronological framework within which to investigate them.

As important as all these features were, however, they do not seem to me toaccount fully for the impact the Maconnais eventually had, above all for the wayso much of its chronology became the ‘standard model’ . To my mind, the real expla-nation lies in what Reginald Lennard in his review rightly noted as Duby’s powerfulhistorical imagination.

In 1981–2, when I was teaching in Aix-en-Provence, I would occasionally runinto Duby, who was in the habit of staying in Paris only for the short term he wasrequired to teach at the College de France; he much preferred his residence at LeTholonet, in the shadow of Cezanne’s Montagne Sainte Victoire, where a couple oftimes he invited me to dinner. One evening he told me he was rereading Balzac’sLa comedie humaine, and strongly recommended that I spend what leisure time Ihad in Aix doing the same. Another time a turn in the conversation led me to recalla little anecdote I had heard at the time Duby gave his inaugural lecture at theCollege de France. A friend who had been there told me that when the lecture wasover the Parisian grande dame who was sitting next to him turned and said, ‘Ah,monsieur, c’est un poete, vous ne croyez pas?’ I recounted this story as best I couldin my still rusty French and, much to my surprise, Duby fixed me with his steel-blue eyes, no sign of a smile on his face, and after a moment said, ‘Oui, c’est vrai’ .

Whatever the ease with which he accepted the title that evening, poet is probablynot the best descriptive noun one might choose if one is thinking only of his mannerof writing. Duby’s prose was often vivid and always Cartesian-clear, and—at leastuntil he came under the influence of Fernand Braudel later in his career—it rarelycalled attention to itself. In his garden of writerly virtues, ambiguity and multiplicityof meaning were shunned as noxious weeds. Things, concepts, and categories werewhat they were, precisely distinguished from what they were not. (It goes withoutsaying that jargon, from whatever source it might have come, was likewise rigorouslyexcluded from his pages.) And that desire for clarity, the constant, almost scholasticdrive to say ‘distinguo’ , also shaped his vision of society. Clarity of category wasnot only a principle of writing, it was basic to his reading of historical reality.15 Yet

15 It is worth noting that Philippe Carrard in his chapter on ‘Figures’ in Poetics of the New History(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) rarely cites Duby, while devoting many pages toBraudel and Le Roy Ladurie.


he had the qualities of a novelist in the Balzacian manner in the way he madeeleventh- and twelfth-century charters breathe with the life of individuals, and aboveall in his power to construct a basic plot, a scenario, out of which the many changeshe was narrating would unfold, in his ability to tell a simple story without comprom-ising the complexities of his many micro-narratives.

In the opening sections of the book, however, where Duby describes tenth-centurysociety and its transformations around the year 1000—the section that eventuallygave birth to the standard narrative of mutation feodale—his desire to frame thatcompelling narrative overcame his other powerful impulse to extract a fine-grainedportrait of society from the recalcitrant charters of Cluny and the cathedral of Macon.We can see this if we ask of the tenth-century charters the same questions Dubyasked of those of a later period—who are the individuals they mention and what arethose individuals’ relations with each other—and set the results against Duby’s ownportrait of the age.

2.

The Maconnais begins in the late-tenth century. It is here that Duby sets the stagefor the appearance of the ‘age of independent castellanies’ at the beginning of thesecond millennium. Much in the 150 pages that he devotes to the society and econ-omy of this early period is closely attentive to the ways in which the massive docu-mentation from the region—over 2000 charters in the Cluny cartulary alone—beliesmost of the simple generalisations that were current when he wrote, whether aboutthe nature of property, the circulation of money, the relation of status and wealth,modes of seignorial estate management, ties of clientage, or a host of other topics.Many of those pages still deserve to be read, for the generalisations they counteredhave not yet vanished. At the heart of his discussion, however, are two simple gener-alisations of his own. The motor for all the changes which would come in the follow-ing century, he asserts, are two simultaneous though unconnected developments—the impoverishment of the region’s elite through division among heirs and massivedonations to the Church, and the collapse of comital power. The first of these general-isations has had relatively little echo in the literature, probably because it was soclearly biased by the ecclesiastical sources Duby was using, whose possible bias hehimself admits. The second generalisation was another matter. It soon enough gavebirth to the mutation feodale.

Duby opens his discussion of ‘ les pouvoirs’— the count and his agents and thegreat ecclesiastical immunities in the second half of the tenth century—with thisassertion:

In the years around 980 the political structure of the Maconnais was still com-pletely shaped by Carolingian traditions. Those who enjoyed full liberty—thecommunity of free men (‘ le peuple franc’ )—formed a restricted group within thelarger population. They appear mainly as a peace association. Their members werecalled together to fight against an outside enemy or to judge those disputes that


could not be settled by private arrangements. Service in arms and attendance atcourt were the two obligations of the free man. Indeed, they were the specificsigns of his freedom. ... As for the status of the non-free, relations between neigh-bors, between dependents and their lords, among family members, or betweenbuyers and sellers, these lay beyond the reach of public power and were regulatedentirely by private custom.16

There are two critical distinctions here—between the free and the non-free andbetween ‘public power’ and ‘private arrangements’ or ‘private custom’—and theyare closely intertwined; for the distinction between the free and the non-free is main-tained in the tenth century by the persistence of the count’s mallus, the Carolingianpublic court. The social revolution that Duby will trace through the decades following980 will be the weakening and finally the disappearance of these two fundamentaldistinctions, as another distinction—one between those subject to a seigneurie banaleand those who were free of its constraints—takes their place.

At times in Duby’s imagination this late-Carolingian world takes on the glow ofa golden age. Here for example is his explanation for the weakness of ‘ ties of manto man’ in the tenth century:

Among the free men...the institutions of peace maintain security and allow themto escape other constraints. ... The strength of family ties are weak, because theyhave no use. The organs of peace remaining from the old Frankish state are stillstrong enough to allow the free man to live independently, and to prefer, if heso desires, the company of his neighbors and friends to that of his family.17

Against this idyllic backdrop of a tenth-century world where every free man is atease beneath his fig tree and vine—a vision that resonates with tones of an idealisednineteenth-century bourgeois State under whose protective umbrella free men maylive and prosper in peace—Duby will paint a Hobbesian vision of the later elev-enth century:

After the collapse of the count’s authority in the eleventh century the aristocracy,now restricted only by feudal institutions, found itself free of all true constraints.The most powerful enjoyed total independence. The lesser nobles, more restrictedby the service owed for their fiefs, still had an air of great freedom; for if theycommitted a crime, there was no definite court to judge them nor power to punishthem. For the upper class, feudalism was a step toward anarchy.18

Behind this sharp contrast between the Carolingian world and that which followedlies an argument that Duby had inherited from his teacher, Charles-Edmond Perrin

16 Maconnais, 88.17 Ibid., 136–7.18 Ibid., 195.


and from the textbooks of legal history he had read as a student. In his own thesisPerrin had set out to demonstrate the theory that the dues and obligations of peasantsin the twelfth century and later had developed from two distinct antecedents. On theone hand, the break-up of the old Carolingian villa had led to land-rent as the mostcommon means to draw income from peasant labour. In contrast, all other chargesthat weighed on the peasantry came from the exercise of sovereignty either grantedor usurped.19 Such was the standard story told by professors of legal history in thefirst half of the twentieth century, but neither the chronology nor the exact processby which it had come about had ever been fixed.20 In his Recherches sur la seigneu-rie, Perrin had only been able to document the transformation of the villa; he hadnever taken on the history of the other form of lordship. As a homage to his teacher,Duby set out to demonstrate the other half of the standard legal history narrative.To do so, however, he had to follow a complex path. He first needed to identify thepeople who were subject to the dues that were not land rents, those who were subjectto what he now called the seigneurie banale;21 he then needed to demonstrate thatthey were not the descendants of the late-Carolingian unfree, or at least not onlytheir descendants. Because all the legal historians were convinced these dues werebased on immunities, royal privileges, or most often a simple usurpation based onthe power to command, the bannum, he also had to lay out the history of this powerof command from the Carolingians to the twelfth century. From there it was but astep to writing, among other things, a history of the transformation of freedom andnon-freedom from the tenth to the twelfth century.

Duby had no doubt that the distinction between the free and the non-free was themost fundamental social distinction in the tenth century; scribal formulae, he noted,insisted on it well into the twelfth century, and not just in the guarantee clausesbeginning with the words si quis that carried much debris of antique legal culturethrough the centuries.22 Open the early volumes of the Cluny charter collection atrandom and you are likely to find a donation that includes mancipii or servi. That

19 Charles-Edmond Perrin, Recherches sur la seigneurie rurale, i–ii.20 See, for example, J. Declareuil, Histoire generale du droit francais des origines a 1789 a l’usage

des etudiants des Facultes de Droit (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1925), 174–80, where one finds almost theentire panoply of phenomena that will become the ‘ feudal revolution’ including both that term and itstwin, the ‘seignorial revolution’ , as well as a brief account of the opposing views of Henri See andJacques Flach. F. Olivier-Martin gives a brief summary along with the bibliography: Histoire du droitfrancais des origines a la Revolution (Paris: Montchrestien, 1948), 154–5.

21 The term is probably not original with Duby, but I have not been able to find an earlier usage withthe range that Duby gives it. In his legal history textbook, however, F. Olivier-Martin, defined ‘ban’ as‘souverainete demembree’ , the outgrowth of immunities, privilege, or usurpation that became customaryright: Histoire du droit francais, 154. It is but a short step from that to Duby’s expression. The associationof this definition of bannum to the concept of ‘sovereignty’ is fundamental to the entire historiographicaltradition, both pre- and post-Duby. Older writers had used the term ‘banalites’ restrictively to refer tomonopoly mills, ovens, and wine presses. Such is the definition given in the seventeenth-century editionsof the Dictionnaire de l’Academie Francaise. In Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise,the oldest examples of ‘banal’ with the legal meaning of monopoly are thirteenth century. The adjectivearguably derives from the alternative meaning of ‘ban’ , a proclamation.

22 ‘ ...ut quicumque... sive liber sive servus’ : Cluny no. 2979, quoted in Maconnais, 118 n.1.


is still the case in the eleventh century.23 The status, Duby noted, is neither socialnor economic—for there are rich serfs, even a servile aristocracy, and serfs join inmarriage with free men and women.24 What, then, marked a person as not free? Onthis question, Duby admited, the evidence is not clear, for the head-tax (chevage)was the sign of being freed, and whatever dues the non-free owed, one can also findfree persons who owed the same dues.25 The distinction between free and non-freewas therefore solely ‘ legal’ . The non-free were those who did not participate in thepublic courts, whose freedom was not protected by their free neighbours. ‘Serfdomis the residue of slavery adapted to a Christian world. It will survive as long as theinstitutions of public law maintain the idea of a free people (peuple franc), and whenthat idea disappears, it will undergo a total transformation’ .26 For Duby, therefore,the non-free were, paradoxically, a kind of residual category,—they were those whodid not bear the mark of being free. And the homines proprii of the twelfth centurycould not have been the juridical descendants of the serfs of an earlier age, becauseby then the public power that had maintained the difference between free and non-free had long since vanished from the scene.27

The free, in contrast, did bear in their actions the marks of their freedom. Two,in particular, as we have seen: they were called on to perform military service andthey participated in the public court presided over by the count. Duby quicklyadmited that his Burgundian documents contain no information whatever about mili-tary service. For his assertion that this duty was imposed on all free men he wasentirely dependent on earlier scholarship on the Carolingian world. For court service,however, he believed he had full evidence in the charters of Cluny and the cathedralof St Vincent of Macon. In the end, his description of the ‘Carolingian’ tenth centuryin the Maconnais rested on this evidence.

No one has taken a critical look at this evidence since the book’s publication,despite the fact that Francois Ganshof had surveyed the same documents only twenty-five years earlier and Francis Estey was publishing his studies of Carolingian courtsat the same time as Duby was writing his thesis, and both had come to very differentconclusions.28 The absence of critical attention to this opening section of the Macon-nais is doubtless a tribute to the richness of the Maconnais as a whole, to Duby’sdemonstration of his immensely detailed command of the charter evidence. Whowould question, or think it worth the time to reread those tenth-century charters fromCluny and St Vincent and judge whether his conclusions were viable?

Though deeply influenced by the Maconnais in my own research, I was long

23 For example Cluny nos. 2992 (1049–65), 2994 (1049–1109), 3324 (c. 1050), 3339 (c. 1050)—oneof a number of examples of manumission, 3879 (1109–1110).

24 Maconnais, 122.25 Ibid., 126–7.26 Ibid.,127.27 Ibid., 257–8.28 Francois Ganshof, ‘Contribution a l’ etude des origines des cours feodales en France’ , Revue histo-

rique de droit francais et etranger, 4me serie, 7 (1928), 644–65. Francis N. Estey, ‘The meaning ofplacitum and mallum in the capitularies’ , Speculum, 22 (1947), 435–39; ‘The scabini and the local courts’ ,Speculum, 26 (1951) 119–29; ‘The fideles in the county of Macon’ , Speculum, 30 (1955), 82–9.


troubled by the way in which the narrative he constructed there was being appliedto all the lands of the West Frankish kingdom. Try as I might, I could not find anysign of a ‘crisis of the year 1000’ or of a ‘ feudal revolution’ in the Occitan documentsI was poring over, and attempts to establish its existence in that region, notably byPierre Bonnassie, seemed to me to be forcing the evidence beyond what it wouldsustain.29 Nor did the society that emerged from the eleventh-century documents inthat region seem to me to be one of independent castellans, ‘ lords of three or fourvillages’ (to borrow Chris Wickham’s expression),30 who were free to subject thepeasantry to their banal lordship. Quite the contrary, the distribution of castlesseemed to represent purposes quite other than control of subject populations; themultiplicity of castle lordships argued against the creation of independent castel-lanies, as did the way in which lordship was scattered across village territories; andthe histories of the viscounts of Beziers, of Albi-Nımes, the counts of Carcassonne,and eventually the Trencavels, as well as the archiepiscopal lordship of Guifred ofCerdagne and his successors, represented something quite other than the fragmen-tation that Duby had described along the banks of the Saone (unless one were totake the Count of Toulouse to be the only ‘ legitimate’ comital power in the region,and all the viscounts, no matter how large their territories, as the local equivalentsof the castellans). Violence there was in plenty, and occasional signs of arbitraryexactions on the peasantry, but the violence was more often committed by agentsof counts, viscounts, abbots and bishops than by lawless castellans, and in the twelfthcentury by the armies of counts and kings. Given the limitations of the evidencethere was no way to demonstrate that it became more frequent after the year 1000,or that the presence of ‘public’ courts before the year 1000 had served to restrainit.31 I wondered whether something might be amiss with the standard model of themutation feodale, a puzzlement that made me sympathetic to the views of DominiqueBarthelemy. It was time to reread the Societe dans la region maconnaise and to lookclosely at the tenth-century evidence on which Duby had built his portrait of theMaconnais before the transformation. In that evidence I discovered a very differentsociety from the one Duby described. It was one that he probably had seen himself,

29 Pierre Bonnassie, ‘Du Rhone a la Galice: genese et modalites du regime feodal’ , Structures feodaleset feodalisme dans l’Occident mediterraneen: Xe–XIIIe siecles (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1980),17–56 at 30–4.

30 Chris Wickham, ‘Debate: the ‘ feudal revolution’ , IV’ , Past and Present, 155 (1997), 196–208 at203–4.

31 Castles: see my ‘The castles of the Trencavels: a preliminary aerial survey’ , in: Order and innovationin the middle ages: Essays in honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan et al. (Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1970), 255–72. Forms of lordship and Archbishop Guifred: Ermengard of Narbonne and theworld of the troubadours (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), chs. 6, 7 and 8. Trencavels: ‘The ‘sale’of Carcassonne to the counts of Barcelona (1067–1070) and the rise of the Trencavels’ , Speculum, 63(1988), 826–64. My work on tenth-century dispute settlement remains for the most part in my files, thoughit is partially reflected in my ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, French historical studies, 6 (1970), 287–99. I havenot had the opportunity to consult the Yale University Ph.D. thesis of Jeffrey Alan Bowman, ‘Law,conflict, and community around the year 1000: the settlement of disputes in the province of Narbonne,985–1060.’


given what he knew about the great families of the region. But his overriding concernwith discovering the origins of the seigneurie banale in a structural transformationof society prevented him from recognising what was there on the page.

3.

What is this evidence? On Duby’s pages, it consists of fifteen dispute settlementsfrom the tenth century published in the cartulary of St Vincent of Macon and thecharters of Cluny.32 All of these settlements take place in the presence (ante or inpresencia) of the count of Macon or Chalon or in the presence of one of their vis-counts or vicars. In nine of these records the expression in mallo publico is employedto describe the court. I call them ‘dispute settlements’ rather than court judgmentsbecause the vast majority of these documents, even those that speak of the mallus,are notices of quitclaims (notitiae guarpitionis). In addition to the fifteen Duby cites,there are twenty other dispute settlements in the presence of the count or his agentsamong the more than 2400 tenth-century documents in these two collections.

There are also twenty-one settlements that take place in the presence of the bishop,monks, monastic officials, or others, and yet twenty-four others in which no courtor judicial assembly is mentioned. Duby appears to classify all of these as ‘privatesettlements’ .33 His reasoning, though never explicit, seems clear enough. The ninedocuments that speak of a mallus publicus all present the count or a viscount aspresiding. That is sufficient for Duby to conclude, first, that there is still a publiccourt—and that others are therefore by definition private—and, second, that all courtswhere the count or viscount presided, whether the documents call them a mallus ornot, were the same public court.

One might ask, however, whether this reasoning is justified. Another possibilityis that the mention of a mallus is one of those examples of old formulae persistingin scribal language when the reality it once referred to has disappeared. There areexamples enough of such survivals in tenth-century charters, and this may just beone of them, for the institution of the mallus goes back at least to the Merovingianperiod.34 And, in fact, in his carefully worded conclusion to Part I of his book, Dubypulled back from the argument that places the great transformation in the decadesaround the year 1000, and recognised the possibility that the image he had con-structed on the basis of those later tenth-century judicial assemblies is an illusion.

32 Maconnais, 98 n. 5. The texts he cites here are Cart. Macon nos. 156, 186, 376, 409, 420, 426, andCluny nos 764, 799, 856, 979, 1037, 1087, 1100, 1179, 1249. Two of these (Cart. Macon nos. 376 and426) actually do not belong in this category: the first neither mentions the mallus nor does it indicatebefore whom the complaint was argued, the second was heard by the bishop and canons of the cathedral.

33 Maconnais, 88.34 See Ian Wood, ‘Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems’ , and Paul Fouracre,

‘Placita and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia’ , in: The settlement of disputes inMedieval Europe, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986),7–22 and 23–43.


Apparently, the structures of society have hardly changed during the [tenth] cen-tury.... But this stability is only on the surface. It strikes us because we are depen-dent on archival documents to reconstruct the social environment, and these areall drawn up in accordance with traditional formularies and therefore have greatdifficulty expressing new realities. In fact, only the envelope is Carolingian, andit masks the profound transformations of society.... If the bankruptcy of royalpower has not yet weakened the authority that the count exercises over the higharistocracy, it has removed its public character and its legitimacy. Since 950,comital power is a private power, personal power. Clienteles have formed andcontinue to develop, and bit by bit enclose all free men, both rich and poor, inan increasingly constraining network of dependence.35

These conclusions are closer to what the texts of the judicial assemblies reveal,if we pay close attention to the people whom the scribes name being there. Theclienteles are much in evidence by the mid-tenth century, and one has the decidedimpression that only the thinner documentation from the earlier part of the centurymasks their earlier importance.36 Whether the distinction that Duby insisted uponbetween the count’s one time ‘public’ power and the ‘private’ power he exercisesafter 950 is valid is a separate question which I will address shortly. But it isimportant to note that, whether Duby was aware of it or not, this astonishing conclud-ing paragraph undercut the central argument he was making, that the distinctionbetween free and non-free depended on the continued existence of ‘public’ courtsthat all free men were obligated to attend, an obligation that was the very mark oftheir freedom.

As Duby himself notes, from the early tenth century (though how early we cannotsay, because relatively few documents survive from before 940, and most of thesecan be dated only approximately) the persons mentioned attending the mallus pub-licus in fact form a quite restricted circle. They are sometimes referred to in thesedocuments or elsewhere as the count’s fideles. They are the same people who appearwith the count on other occasions, when he is making a donation to the cathedralor to Cluny. He also appears as a witness when one or another of these fideles ismaking a pious donation. (Given the nature of the sources, dispute settlements andconveyances are all that survive.) Ganshof believed, on the basis of their occasionaldesignation as fideles, that the presence of these men transformed the count’s courtinto a ‘ feudal’ court, but this derives both from a confusion of vassi and fideles andfrom the then common notion of ‘ the feudal court’ that we now realise must ratherbe spoken of as the groups of arbitrators and peace-keepers who settled disputes in

35 Maconnais, 150–1.36 Already demonstrated by Ganshof, ‘Cours feodales’ , and reaffirmed in a more thoroughgoing analysis

by Estey, ‘Fideles’ , two years after the Maconnais was published.


this period.37 We will be able to say much more about this small group when theMunster team completes its index of the Cluny charters.38 Even without that index,and surveying only a limited number of charters, we can be certain not only thatthese men constituted the top of the socio-political hierarchy (as Duby recognised)but that they also formed the noble entourage of the count and the bishop. Theirnumbers were limited, they were often in each other’s presence, and scribes some-times graced them with high honorifics.

To demonstrate this, the procedure I will follow will be simple: I will take as anexample the list of the fideles who joined the count in a judicial assembly sometimearound 950 and note on how many other occasions between 930 and 960 two ormore of these fideles appear together. Counts Hugh of Chalons and Leotaldus ofMacon were then restoring the property of the cathedral of Macon, much damagedby a fire that destroyed and largely depopulated the city. Part of this process wasrecorded as a judicial assembly at which eight named fideles ‘and others of mynobles’ were present.39 Those named are Walter (a common name in the region,but most likely Walter the viscount), Rotbertus, Josbertus, Leodegarius, Raterius,Teodulfus, Witcheranus, and Ugo. Witcherranus only appears as a member of ajudicial assembly this one time, but Walter appears in ten dispute settlements , Rot-bertus in ten, Josbertus in four, Leodegarius in three, Raterius in four, Teodulfus insix, and Ugo (the most problematic of the group since this is a common name in

37 Ganshof, ‘Cours feodales’ , 650–2, 660–3. The charters, however, use varied titles to identify thesame individuals, suggesting that by 900 bonus homo, scabinus, fidelis, and perhaps even vassus areinterchangeable. Gundulricus who is a bonus homo in Cart. Macon no. 501 (dated circa 928) is a vassusof Count William in ibid. no. 204 (dated 886–927), one of the two Evrardi boni homines in ibid. no. 501is also a bonus homo in Cluny no. 90 (905), and either the same person or a descendant of the samename is a fidelis of the count in ibid. no. 644 (943), and if a descendant then most likely the same personwho is a bonus homo in ibid. no. 1226 (967). See also Guichardus, fidelis in ibid. no. 1087 (960) andbonus homo in ibid. no. 1179 (964); Teutbertus bonus homo in ibid. no. 1179 (964) and ‘vicar of thecount’ in ibid. no. 1226 (967). Far more often these same persons are mentioned as witnesses withoutany title. Bonus homo seems to be a synonym for ‘ important person’ , ‘person of high status’ , rather thanfor a person with a particular institutional role. Often enough, both scabini and boni homines are men-tioned as being present at the same time. Sometimes there are far more than seven scabini (15 in Cart.Macon 284, dated 888–98), as well as far less (in the cases Ganshof mentions), calling into questionGanshof’s reliance on the presence of a specific number of scabini to distinguish ‘public’ from ‘ feudal’courts. On arbitration and compromise the bibliography is now voluminous, going back to my own ‘Suumcuique tribuere’ , French historical studies, 6 (1970) 287–99; surveys of the literature in Patrick Geary,‘Vivre en conflit dans une France sans etat’ , Annales, E.S.C., 41 (1986), 1107–26, Gert Althoff, Spielreg-eln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buch-gesellschaft, 1997), ‘Einleitung’ , 1–17.

38 Francis Estey already made a start in his Princeton Ph.D thesis, cited by him in ‘Scabini and thelocal courts’ , note 37. I am indebted to Dr. Hillebrandt of the Munster group for her assistance with thesmall group of people I attempted to track down in the Cluny charters.

39 Cart. Macon, no. 156 (one of the fifteen examples of public courts listed by Duby). No. 103 mentionsthe fire. See also nos. 70, 71, 76.


the region) in nine. Table 1 represents the number of occasions when these individ-uals appear together either in these assemblies or as witnesses to gifts by the countor one of their fellows between 930 and 960.40

Evrardus and Narduinus (and probably a handful of others) can be identified asmembers of the same group: they appear together five times, and Narduinus appearsfifteen times with Count Leotaldus. Each of them appears a few times with thosenamed in Table 1. In the far more limited documentation of the first half of the tenthcentury one can identify men who were probably the predecessors (and theancestors?) of this group, such as Josbertus, Maiolus, Odo, and Arnulf who appeartogether on two important occasions. It is possible, indeed likely, that one of thereasons these individuals appear together is because their own lands were in thevicinity of the property in dispute. But that neighbourliness would only havereinforced the sense of belonging to a small aristocratic community.41

If one found such repeated appearance of a small group of men around a greataristocrat in the eleventh or twelfth century, one would have no hesitation callingthem members of the count’s or bishop’s entourage, the small group of ‘ friends’who are constantly in his presence and often appear with each other. There is noreason not to come to the same conclusion in mid-tenth-century Maconnais. At the

Table 1Members of the judicial assembly, Cart. Macon no. 156, and numbers of occasions they appear witheach other in other documents, 930–960

Rotbertus Walterius Josbertus Leodegarius Raterius Teodulfus Witcheranus Ugo

Rotbertus —Walterius 7 —Josbertus 3 2 —Leodegarius 4 2 5 —Raterius 3 5 1 2 —Teodulfus 5 3 2 3 3 —Witcheranus 2 2 1 2 3 1 —Ugo 4 5 1 2 4 5 1 —

40 The documentary base for the table consists of twenty-one dispute settlements, eleven gifts by CountHugh or Count Leotaldus to the cathedral of Macon or Cluny, one precarial grant by the bishop, one giftby provost Humbert to Cluny, one by Leodegarius, and one by Narduinus: Cart. Macon nos. 71, 72, 73,76, 103, 155, 156, 157, 186, 243, 282, 292, 420, 488, 496, and Cluny nos. 594, 595, 611, 632, 633, 644,653, 655, 656, 719, 728, 729, 746, 764, 797, 799, 856, 976, 1037, 1044, 1087.

41 In the documents cited in the previous note, Rotbertus appears in 13, Walterius in 13, Josbertus in7, Leodegarius in 6, Raterius in 10, Teodulfus in 10, Witcheranus in 3, and Ugo in 13. See alsoRotco/Rocco in Cart. Macon no. 204 and Cluny no. 90, and Gundulricus in Cart. Macon no. 501, mostlikely the same vassus of count William who presides over a judicial inquest, ibid. no. 204. Other earlytenth-century boni homines who are probably the ancestors of mid-century members of the count’s entour-age are Evrardus, Letbaldus, and Guichardus, ibid. no. 501. On the Evrardi see Maurice Chaume, ‘FeodauxMaconnais: les premiers possesseurs de la Roche de Solutre’ , Annales de Bourgogne, 9 (1937), 280–95.Information on the landholding of many of these men is given by Estey, ‘Fideles’ , 84–5.


very least, they are certainly not ‘all free men’ , and they are just as certainly farmore than ‘ free men’ . Their designation as ‘nobles’ as well as fideles should not beunderestimated. Walter, in addition to being viscount, is the count’s missus on twooccasions, Rotbertus is called fidelis in the records of five other dispute settlementsand once entitled nobilissimus, an accolade he shares with Teodulfus and Nardu-inus.42 Probably more often than my limited means allow me to tell, the witnessesto quitclaims that are not made in the count’s presence belong to the same smallgroup of the count’s fideles.43 Duby, in other parts of his discussion, in fact identifiesmany of these men as the ancestors of those who will be the great castellans of theeleventh century.44

These men are favoured not only by the counts but by the bishops of Macon andthe abbots of Cluny as well. A precarial grant by abbot Maiolus in 960 to a ‘certainman’ (quidam viro) named Warulfus offers a wide window into this practice.Warulfus has a son by the name of Leutbaldus, and those two names allow us toidentify the man who received the gift as the scion of a distinguished lineage thatwould become known as the Grossi family, lords of Brancion. Another documentof the same year identifies him as a fidelis of the count. The grant was one link ina chain of continual gifts and countergifts that affirmed the ongoing bonds betweenthe dynasty and the monastery. Early in the century, an ancestor, also namedWarulfus was called vassus of the count of Macon when he and his wife exchangedproperty with the archdeacon Geraldus. His brother Leotbaldus appears as a bonushomo resolving a dispute in 925, and in multiple gifts to Cluny, two of them for thesouls of countess Ava, count William (the Pious) and his nephew William, as wellas for members of his own family. A later Leotbaldus, who also held a precarialgrant from Cluny, would become bishop of Macon, as a later Warulfus would appearin the count’s entourage.45 Other receivers of precarial grants from Cluny show thesame intimacy with the count of Macon: Adalbertus who is so honoured in 953 and974 appears once as missus of the count and as a witness to two important quit-

42 Cluny no. 764.43 For example, Cluny nos. 911, 1759, 1821, 1842, 1867.44 In direct contradiction of the thesis he is arguing he states that the count’s ‘ tribunal’ is composed

of ‘members of the highest society.’ Maconnais, 98, and identifies Narduinus as the father-in-law of theviscount, Walterius as Gautier de Chevignes ‘parent pauvre’ of the Evrardi, Raterius as Ratier de Bage,ibid., 99. Although he does not give particular family details, in a later article, ‘Lignage, noblesse etchevalerie au XIIe siecle dans la region maconnaise: une revision’ , Annales, E.S.C. 27 (1972), 803–23,(Eng. transl. in G. Duby, The chivalrous society [Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press,1977] ch. 3) he asserts that he can trace the ancestors of twelve of the 34 families that form the upperrank of lay society in the Maconnais around 1100 back to 950. Presumably they would include most orall of the people in this table.

45 For this dynasty’s relations to Cluny, see Rosenwein, Neighbor of St Peter, 115–8. Precarial grant:Cluny no. 1088; fidelis: ibid. no. 1087; vassus ibid. no 271. Warulfus as witness to count’s acts: Cart.Macon, nos. 272, 487 (probably son or nephew); early tenth-century Leotbaldus: Cluny nos. 251, 271,272, 276, 283, 387, all showing close connection to the count, and especially the restitution of the propertyof the cathedral of Macon by Marquis Hugh and Count Leotaldus, with Leotbaldus as one of the witnesses:Cart. Macon no. 72.


claims;46 Teotbertus, cousin of the bishop of Apt, granted a precarium sometime inthe later tenth century, is bonus homo in 964, the count’s vicar in 967, and often awitness for the count or other members of the count’s entourage.47

Would such men have been ‘constrained by a network of dependence’ , as Dubythought? One may be permitted to doubt it. Constrained, yes, but by the ideals andpractices of their status, by the expectations created by an economy of gift andcountergift (so thoroughly analysed by Barbara Rosenwein), and by the values offidelity that contemporaries will soon start calling ‘ friendship’ or ‘ love’ .48 Duby’sassumption of constraint comes directly from that Hobbesian vision of society onwhich his analysis is grounded. Its modern form is what John L. Comaroff andSimon Roberts have named the ‘ rule-centered paradigm...of social life’ , the beliefthat ‘societies do not cohere effectively in the absence of centralised authorities,which formulate rules and ensure conformity with them’ .49 The assumption does notcome from the documents but from the deeply rooted premises of modern legalhistory. For in tenth-century documents we find a very different notion of how thesocial fabric is knitted together, most clearly expressed in precarial grants. ‘Spiritualmen should treat their fideles well, in order that they be more prompt in their defer-ence and that their services not be made use of without temporal compensation’ ,was the way in which Abbot Maiolus put it in 974 when he gave land to Adalbertus.50

Four years later the abbot gave land to the bishop of Lyon, ‘ that he may be our aidand defender, our guardian and most faithful hope’ .51 The first text echoes a standardphrase in imperial grants of benefices.52 In the second, we immediately recognisethe biblical language. Gift and companionship, gift and service, gift and protection:the familiar combinations were already there in the tenth century. They are theactions and values that already hold these communities of great lords and powerfulfollowers together. They are projected onto the next world, as well, when St Vincentof Macon and the abbey of Fleury establish their brotherhood through an exchangeof land, ‘ that by enriching with earthly goods they may enjoy heavenly companion-

46 Precarial grants: Cluny nos. 834 and 1389; ‘missus’ : ibid. no. 1100; witness: ibid. no. 1723 and Cart.Macon no. 292.

47 Precarial grant: Cluny no. 919; cousin of bishop: ibid. no. 1071; bonus homo: ibid. 1179; vicar: ibid.1226; holds court with the count and bishop: Cart. Macon no. 409; witness: ibid. no 426, Cluny nos.1087, 1291, See also an earlier Teotbertus, most likely an ancestor, given common aristocratic namingpractices: ibid. nos. 276, 283.

48 Rosenwein, Neighbor of St. Peter, chs. 2 and 4, and my Ermengard of Narbonne, ch. 13.49 John L. Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and processes: the cultural logic of dispute in an African

context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5, quoted in Stephen D. White, ‘Tenth-centuryCourts at Macon and the perils of structuralist history: re-reading Burgundian judicial institutions’ , toappear in Conflict in medieval Europe, ed. Piotr Gorecki and Warren Brown ( Ashgate, forthcoming).My thanks to Prof. White for sharing his manuscript with me.

50 ‘Debent [spirituales viri] fidelibus suis in posterum consulere ut promptiores in eorum existant obse-quio vel ne eorum absque temporali recompensatione utantur servitio’ : Cluny no. 1389. For Adalbertussee above n. 42.

51 Cluny, nos. 1389, 1508.52 Compare Cluny no. 237.


ship’ .53 We touch here the heart of the culture of fidelity, the culture that givescohesion to the tenth-century elite as it will to their descendants in the eleventh andtwelfth. This is the elite whose presence around the count and bishop the dispute-processing documents of the tenth century reveal.

We may conclude that even before the middle of the tenth century there is nodifference between the composition of the count’s ‘court’ when a dispute is beingsettled and when the count or one of his entourage is engaging in the significantsocial act of donating property to the saints, and that the same people are sometimesinvolved in settling disputes when the count or one of his deputies is not present.Does this call into question Duby’s distinction between the ‘public justice’ of thecount, expressed in the term mallus publicus, and the ‘private arrangements’ and‘private customs’ that otherwise serve to keep the peace? Both in the Maconnaisand in an earlier study Duby himself recognised that, from the early tenth centuryon, those who served as judges in these Carolingian courts were ‘ the most consider-able men of the region’ .54 He believed, however, that the same men served in differ-ent roles: in the count’s mallus as public officials by virtue of the public oath offidelity they had sworn to the count, and on other occasions as private individuals(just as in the modern world an individual might serve in his official capacity ofjudge and on other occasions as a private individual helping to resolve a dispute‘out of court’ ).55 Do the records of dispute settlement provide any support for thisbelief? Are ‘official’ procedures followed in some cases but not in others? Apartfrom the occasional, but far from consistent, use of the term ‘mallus’ , are there anyother signs that in some cases we are looking at records of ‘public’ courts and inother cases not?56

4.

It is in this context that the simple counting-up of documents (mentioned earlierin this article) takes on its importance, not so much for the numbers involved as forthe diversity of categories into which they can be classed. The cathedral cartularyand the collection of Cluny charters contain nine notices of disputes in which theassembly that heard them is called a mallus and twenty-four others heard ‘before’or ‘ in the presence of’ the count, a viscount, or the count’s vassus. On six of theseoccasions the count is accompanied by his fideles; on one occasion he is joined bythe bishop, on another by the abbot of Cluny and the provost Vivianus, and on yet

53 Macon, nos. 12, 197.54 Georges Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’ evolution des institutions judiciaires pendant le Xe et le XIe siecle

dans le sud de Bourgogne’ , Le moyen age, 52 (1946), 149–94 and 53 (1947) 15–38, trans. by CynthiaPostan as ‘The evolution of judicial institutions’ in Georges Duby, The chivalrous society (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1980), 17.

55 Maconnais, p. 97.56 My discussion of these questions largely follows the extended analysis of this topic by White, ‘Tenth-

century courts at Macon.’


another accompanied by his mother.57 There are twenty-one other disputes heard andsettled ‘before’ either a bishop (three cases), the abbot of Cluny (two cases), theprovost of Cluny (nine cases, all but one of them before Vivianus), monks of Cluny(seven cases), a group of boni homines (one case), or the defendant himself (onecase). In a final category are twenty-three quitclaims that mention no individual orgroup of men who heard the dispute.

In his effort to draw the line between public and private, Duby placed not onlythe cases that specifically mention the mallus but all those where the count or anagent were present on the ‘public’ side of the ledger. To these he adds those wherethe bishop is present, presumably because of the mention of the bishop at a mallus.58

Since on one occasion, the abbot and provost of Cluny are present alongside thecount, should we not grant to the abbot and his agents the same status of ‘public’person? That would seriously restrict the occasions when we see truly ‘private’ settle-ments, given that the primary source of our documentation is the collection of Clunycharters. If abbots (and other monastic officers) are not ‘public’ persons like thebishop, what distinguishes them? And what about the count’s mother? Duby inter-preted the bishop’s function in the mallus as a ‘public’ role, substituting for theabsent count. If we accept this interpretation, what then would we make of a quit-claim of 977 included among the Cluny charters, the resolution of a dispute heardby the archbishop of Vienne and a royal missus (as well as monks, clergy, and laity)in which the archbishop is awarded the precedence of being named first.59 If thiswere a ‘public’ occasion, would the king’s agent not take precedence? One stronglysuspects that the order in which people are listed in this document derives not fromany public/private distinction but from their personal status. If that was the case, isthe distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ roles of tenth-century individualsnot questionable?

If basing the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dispute settlements on thepersonnel of the assembly is ambiguous, at best, on what basis shall we decide inwhich box to place an individual case? Should we confine the ‘public’ categoryexclusively to those cases recorded as heard in a mallus publicus since the adjectiveappears only with mallus (and not always even there)?60 Is there a documentary formthat we can identify as a ‘public’ document? Are there procedures that we can ident-ify as those that distinguish a ‘public’ court? Although a preliminary look at thedocuments suggests that the answer to all three questions might be ‘yes’ , a moredetailed examination demonstrates that the answer to all is ‘no’ .

In the Carolingian world, the standard form for recording a dispute before a malluspublicus was that of the placitum, found in Bavaria, Flanders, Occitania, and all the

57 ‘Vassus’ : Car. Macon no. 204; with fideles: ibid., nos. 156, 282, 420, Cluny nos. 644, 719, 856; withbishop: ibid. no. 856, in addition to the mallus when the bishop was present: ibid., 632; with abbot andprovost of Cluny: ibid., no. 1989; with mother, ibid., no. 1789.

58 Maconnais, p. 98.59 Cluny no. 1437.60 For example in Cart. Macon no. 501 the dispute is heard in mallense comitale.


lands between.61 It normally began by naming the members of the mallus, includingscabini, then described the claim of the plaintiff and the response of the defendant,sometimes in direct discourse sometimes in indirect, followed by a mention of writtenproofs submitted and/or the inquest made by the court and, finally, the decision. Inthe two major Maconnais collections, only five of the records of disputes heardbefore a mallus follow this placitum formula more or less in full, and two of theseare from the ninth century.62 Of the nine tenth-century disputes described as beingheard by a mallus, six (including one of those in the form of a placitum) are calledquitclaims (notitia guarpitionis) and one is called notitia proclamationis. On theother hand, five dispute settlements from the end of the ninth and beginning of thetenth centuries that do not mention the mallus are recorded more or less in the formof a placitum; one of them—an inquest conducted by a vassus of the count—isexplicitly called a placitum.63 In none of these latter are scabini mentioned as beingpresent; but that is also true of all but three of the tenth-century disputes heard ina mallus. Thus, apart from the adjective itself (which is inconsistently applied), thereappears to be no consistent criteria by which one can distinguish the records of a‘public’ court from those that were not. Rather, the scribes seem to have taken (orbeen given) wide latitude in the manner in which they follow, abbreviate, or ignorethe placitum form when recording the settlement of disputes, whether heard in anassembly qualified as mallus publicus or not. Rather than expressing a clear division,the formal choices open to the scribes shade over imperceptibly into the minimalistquitclaims that Duby classified as ‘private’ , or forms that, among other literaryopportunities, allowed a monk to parade at length his sententious rhetorical pro-clivities.64

To the extent that the variety of scribal choices allow us to observe the proceduresfollowed in these judicial assemblies, whether called mallus publicus or not, theydisplay the same wide diversity. Of those specified as being heard by a mallus, fourare simple quitclaims with no procedures described other than the presentation of acomplaint, three mention a charter being read, two mention inquests being made, andsix (including many already mentioned) specify that one party or the other proved the

61 A detailed description of the placitum formula is given in Warren Brown, Unjust seizure (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2001), 108–12; examples of equivalent documents from Aquitania are ClaudeDevic and Joseph Vaissete, Histoire generale de Languedoc (Toulouse: Privat, 16 vols., 1872–96), 3:332 (862), 5: 97 (898), 137 (918) all from the charters of Montolieu. Placita published before the lastdecade of the nineteenth century are inventoried in Rudolf Hubner, ‘Gerichtsurkunden der frankischenZeit, ‘ Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte; germanistische Abteilung, 12 (1891) 1–118,14 (1893) 1–258, reprinted as a book (Aalen: Scientia, 1971).

62 Cluny no. 3 (814), Cart. Macon no. 284 (888–98), 501 (c. 928, according to the editor, but problem-atic, because the person hearing the dispute is ‘ lord Ranulf’ , either a mistaken reading for Raculf, or areference to a count from elsewhere), Cluny nos. 256 (926), 764 (950).

63 Cart. Macon no. 204: individuals named who ‘ad placitum constitutum convenit.’ Other disputes:Cluny nos. 15, 29, 81, 192.

64 Cluny no. 353 (917–42), a complaint by a woman and her sons over a small plot of vineyard, resolvedwhen the monks offer 2 solidi and a modest quantity of grain and wine for her quitclaim, a case heardby the count and some familiar members of his entourage.


truth of their claim by oath.65 Among those disputes not specified as being in amallus publicus, in one dispute heard before the bishop and in the placitum directedby the count’s vassus there is an inquest66; trial by battle occurs once in a case heardbefore the count and is offered on another occasion in a dispute heard before bonihomines;67 written documents are offered twice in disputes heard before the count.Almost all the remaining disputes are recorded as simple quitclaims. Once again, onthe basis of procedures actually recorded—most likely again a scribal rather than an‘ institutional’ choice—there is no way to distinguish clearly those heard in a ‘public’venue and those that were ‘private settlements’ .68

This analysis of the membership in dispute-settling assemblies, of the formal man-ner in which those settlements were recorded, and of the procedures followed, seemto me to demonstrate that Duby’s distinction between ‘public’ courts and ‘private’settlements in a ‘Carolingian’ tenth century is entirely a priori. It is imposed on thedocumentary evidence, not derived from it. Without the assumption that the distinc-tion had to be there, the evidence by itself shows nothing of the kind.

One can also point to evidence that some of the phenomena Duby ascribed to therise of the castellans in the eleventh century were also common early in the tenth.Among the charters of Cluny we can spot a Humbert, probably of Beaujeu, whosometime in the 920s or 30s became a monk and quit ‘ the evil customs and unjustdemands’ that he had been making. Sometime around 960 there is another Humbert,probably his nephew, to whom Abbot Maiolus granted the protection of four priories.The good abbot states that he is doing this ‘ in place of the satisfaction and repaymentwe demanded for the innumerable evils that you did to us and for which we wantedto excommunicate you, and in return for your giving up what you took from us’ .Humbert agrees not to take any ‘customs’ from the priories. If invited to do so bya monk, he may dine there with ten fighting men and then go his way.69 Doubtlessfar more material of this sort still awaits discovery in the first three volumes of theCluny charters. Whether we describe such actions of powerful men as a Hobbesianstate of nature, as ‘anarchy’ or something approaching it, or rather as a society inwhich self-help was always available as a step in dispute processing (as it continuedto be for many centuries) depends more on our assumptions about what holdssocieties together than it does on any assemblage of evidence. For some historians a‘dark age’ must always be located somewhere. Others may be happy to do without it.

From this analysis of tenth-century Maconnais dispute processing, from the aristo-

65 Simple quitclaims: Cart. Macon nos. 185, 186, Cluny nos. 632, 1100. ‘Carta’ : Cluny nos. 3 (ninthcentury), 256, 764. Inquest: Cart. Macon nos. 284, 501. Oaths: ibid. 284, 501, Cluny nos. 256, 764,979, 1179.

66 Cart. Macon no. 204, Cluny no. 1240.67 Cart. Macon no. 282, Cluny no. 251.68 For a more thoroughgoing analysis of the procedures in the fifteen cases cited by Duby see White,

‘Tenth-century courts at Macon’ . Estey long ago suggested that whether the placitum formulae werefollowed in the tenth-century depended on the habits of particular scribes. Of two whose names arerecorded in mid-tenth-century Burgundian documents, Otgerius sticks closely to the traditional formulae,Berardus, he comments, ‘was not so slavish’ : Estey, ‘Fideles’ , 88.

69 Cluny, nos. 317, 889.


cratic networks it reveals, from signs of aristocratic heavy-handedness already in theearly tenth century, and from the values of the culture of fidelity already expressedin tenth-century precarial grants, I think we may plausibly conclude that claims forthe occurrence of a mutation feodale, a ‘ feudal revolution’ , when the structure ofpublic power disintegrated around the year 1000 has no basis in the evidence, atleast in the original homeland of that construction, Duby’s Maconnais. If there wasone it either occurred earlier (as a much older strain of historiography insisted) orwas the result of a centuries-long transformation of Roman patronage.70 To be sure,vast amounts of material from a variety of regions have since been added to themeager supply of evidence that Duby first offered, but I am not sure it would havebeen found convincing support for a ‘ feudal revolution’ had the narrative structurehe built not already been in place. We would probably be better off without it.71

5.

Given Duby’s sensitivity to the diversity of human conditions and experiences inthe Maconnais, the richness of almost novelistic detail that gives the book its imagin-ative power (and that, to my mind, Duby never achieved again to the same degreein his later works), we might well ask why he was less sensitive to the same featuresof tenth-century society. Part of the answer, as I suggest at the beginning of thisarticle, surely lies in his desire to prove Charles-Edmond Perrin’s theory about peas-ant dues and ‘banal’ lordship. The more fundamental reason, I believe, lay in thevery narrative structure that Duby chose to employ: a narrative of structures.

This organisation of subject matter has since become so familiar, especially in thework of those connected with the Annales school, that most of the time we scarcelynotice it.72 Duby made this organisation explicit in his table of contents, and whetherthe word ‘structure’ or an equivalent such as ‘cadre’ is used or not, his manner oforganisation has dominated the entire genre of La terre et les hommes. In the Macon-nais, discussion of the tenth century begins with information on the forms of wealthof a category of people called ‘ laymen’ , primarily the wealthy and powerful, thestructure and function of landed lordship, and the relation of landed lordship to‘society’ . This is followed by a description of the powers of a category of peoplecalled ‘counts’ , and their agents, and the relation of these ‘political institutions’ to‘social structure’ . We come finally to those ‘structures’ which are composed of two‘ legally’ defined groups, the un-free and the free, with the latter in turn composedof ‘classes’ within which, and across which, individuals are held together by various

70 For example Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, 6 part 4.71 I make this argument in a different way in ‘Some reflections on violence, reconciliation and the

“ feudal revolution”‘ , in: Conflict in medieval Europe, ed. Piotr Gorecki and Warren Brown (Ashgate,forthcoming).

72 For a refined rhetorical analysis of ‘stage narratives’ such as this, see Carrard, Poetics of the NewHistory, especially 47–53. For much of what follows I am indebted to White, ‘Tenth-century courtsat Macon’ .


sorts of ‘ ties’ (liens).73 This portion of the Maconnais is a narrative of categories(people who bear official titles, ‘classes’ ) and of ‘ institutions’ with particular func-tions, all of which fit together into ‘structures’ which also have specific functions.The entirety composes a unit in which changes in the nature or functioning of onecategory, institution, or sub-structure will have consequences throughout the linkedstructures. As Professor White points out in a recent paper, this analysis

presupposes premises virtually identical to the ones underlying the analyses ofthose structuralist–functionalist anthropologists who represented society as ‘anenduring system of groups, composed of statuses and roles, supported by valuesand connected sanctions which operate to maintain the system in equilibrium’and who understood ‘social structure’ as an enduring ‘arrangement of persons ininstitutionally controlled or defined relationships’ .74

In this way, Duby integrated a traditional and well-developed mode of readinghistorical sources with a mode of social understanding much prized in post-war Paris:on the one hand, the well-tested methods of legal historians, for whom the individualsin the documents they examine are examples of categories (noble, serf, plaintiff,judge, vassal, etc.) whose actions are governed by rules that they seek to discern;on the other the structural analysis derived ultimately from Durkheim (rather thanEnglish anthropology) via Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and a major group of post-war French economists.75 This brilliant synthesis of the old and the new was nodoubt what stirred the wave of Duby-inspired medieval social history, regionallydefined and rurally focused, that followed. It was easily integrated into Marxist meta-narratives, to which Duby himself was attracted in the 1960s (though he claimed inhis memoirs of 1991 to have always rejected the ‘abuses of determinism’ and theimprisonment of the flow of history in the shackles of ‘structures’ ).76 It also broughtin its structural baggage the idea that history moves by a series of ‘crises’ or‘mutations’ from an older ‘coherent complex of structures’ to a new one. As theeconomist Andre Marchal expressed it in 1954:

The diverse structures evolve independently, some more rapidly than others andin one direction or another ... generating the maladjustments that simultaneouslyaccount for the ‘crisis’ or ‘alteration’ of the system and the ‘mutation’ or ‘passage’

73 Maconnais, 38–152.74 White, ‘Tenth-century courts at Macon’ , quoting Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of friends (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1974), p. 4 and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and function in primitive society (New York:Free Press, 1965), 11.

75 Traian Stoianovich, French historical method: the annales paradigm (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1976), 106–7.

76 Georges Duby, L’Histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 104–8, quote at 105.


from one system to another. These maladjustments finally cause the system to‘snap’ .77

Here is the theoretical, aprioristic foundation of the mutation feodale, of the ‘ feu-dal revolution’ .

Duby’s synthesis of institutional categories into a narrative of structures promoteda particular technique of reading the charter evidence: individuals were reduced toexamples of categories, to tokens (as in the legal historians’ ‘ John Doe’ and ‘RichardRoe’ ), and their significant actions to rules or norms. It thus eliminated the specificityof the individuals whose names the charters contained; they were interchangeablewith other individuals performing the same acts or belonging to the same category,and their individual particularity became another variety of the ‘events’ that were tobe banished from historical narratives. As a matter of method, the micro-politics ofsocial relations was beyond the purview of the social historian, since the individualand his (or her) actions were not the proper object of study, but only the collectiveand the generalised.

So too, and rather surprisingly, neither Duby nor any later workers in the vineyardof La terre et les hommes ever explored the fundamental question that their sourcematerial—charters—presented. Rather, the answer was assumed by the legal, insti-tutional method itself. Many conveyances in these charter collections are written inthe first person (though, through scribal carelessness or ignorance a certain numberwobble back and forth between first and third person). ‘Notices’ (notitiae) and rec-ords of dispute settlements often look like ‘official’ records or eye-witness reports.Hardly surprising, then, that historians have taken these documents at face value,despite their obviously formulaic nature. Indeed, that formulaic nature has encour-aged historians to read verbs such as ‘sell’ , ‘give’ , ‘mortgage’ , and nouns such asmallus, placitum, scabini as technical legal terms referring to a body of law or aninstitutional structure that governs their use.

Neither Duby nor his followers spent much effort on a set of prior questions. Howdid scribes decide what to pen in these charters? How did they and the people whopaid them imagine those parchments being used? Are references to Roman or Visig-othic law in charters (as is the case, for example, in Occitania and Catalonia) ademonstration that such laws ‘governed’ both their drafting and their uses? That is,did these charters function in their own age as notarised documents, legally bindingcontracts and similar documents function in ours? Were they drawn up with similarsorts of requirements in mind and with similar potential use in case of dispute ordisagreement? Or did scribes have a much wider choice among the formulae avail-able for them to copy? Were their choices essentially rhetorical rather than ‘ legal’?Were the uses that people made of charters likewise rhetorical, ritual, or theatrical,rather than what we consider ‘ legal’? The answers we give to these questions dependson how we understand the process of dispute settlement during the centuries before

77 Andre Marchal, ‘Prise de conscience: Structure et concept de periode’ , Revue economique, 6 (Nov.1954), 924, quoted in Stoianovich, French historical method, 106–7.


the legal revival of the later twelfth-century and how the writing and keeping ofcharters relates, under those circumstances, to claims of rights. The answers to thesequestions must profoundly effect the manner in which we interpret the charters thatthese scribes produced. What I have said about the body of documents recordingtenth-century dispute settlements argues that no legal or institutional rules determinedtheir form. Was this true of other documents as well? And, if so, how are we todetermine what those documents meant to the people who had them made and storedthem in their treasure chests?

Here is a large research programme that remains to be developed. It suggests thatalthough Duby’s Maconnais and all the theses on La terre et les hommes that fol-lowed its brilliant path have contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of eleventh-and twelfth-century Western European society, they have not exhausted the subject.They have not been the ‘ total history’ that their promoters have sometimes claimedthem to be. There is still much to be learned by going back to the documents theseauthors have so diligently analysed and asking very different questions.

I firmly believe that Duby himself would have endorsed this last assertion. Hedelighted in challenges to received opinion, even though his own reputation madehim in his later years one of the most important creators of received opinion. Hewas always quick to say that there were no final answers to historical questions.Nevertheless, whatever may be the ultimate fate of many of Duby’s propositions,the clarity and myth-making simplicity of the synthesis he achieved in the Maconnaisand the richness of that historical imagination of which I spoke at the beginning ofthis article will deservedly place him in the pantheon of great historians, alongsidesuch writers as Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga. He, like they, will surely beremembered (and perhaps even read) long after medieval social history has evolvedin ways that neither Duby, while he was still among us, nor any of us now canimagine.

Prof. Frederic Cheyette is the author of Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (CornellUniv. Pr., 2001). He has published numerous articles on medieval social and legal history. When not doingmedieval history he spends his time singing, collecting flowering shrubs, and restoring an eighteenth-century farmhouse.

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