Georges Duby`s Maˆconnais after fifty years

Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
www.elsevier.com/locate/jmedhist
Historiographical essay
Georges Duby’s Mâconnais 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’s La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise was the
foundation 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, and
especially 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 Mâcon, it reconsiders
Duby’s portrayal of tenth century society in the Mâconnais and concludes that there is no
basis in that evidence for any ‘mutation’ or ‘revolutionary’ social change occurring around
the year 1000.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Georges Duby; Mâconnais; Tenth century; Feudal revolution; Cluny
I still remember my excitement on reading La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans
la région mâconnaise for the first time in 1955.1 I had picked up the book in one
of those old academic book stores on the Boulevard Saint Michel shortly after arriving in Paris to work on my dissertation, and was quickly captivated by what I found
on its pages. Somewhere yellowing in my files is a copy of the letter I wrote to
Charles Taylor, my Harvard mentor, filled with my youthful enthusiasm at the discovery. I could not have predicted then how central the book would be to the emergTel.: +1-413-542-2229; fax +1-413-542-2727.
E-mail address: [email protected] (F.L. Cheyette).
1
Georges Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris: A. Colin, 1953).
[Hereafter Mâconnais]. The work was reprinted with different pagination: Paris: Editions de l’école des
hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982. My references will be to the original edition. My thanks to
Stephen D. White and Barbara Rosenwein for commenting on earlier drafts and for their bibliographical suggestions.
∗
0304-4181/02/$ - see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 3 0 4 - 4 1 8 1 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 2 1 - 0
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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 reinvent the subject—and I doubt that others would have done so either. Less than ten
years later, however, its position was already evident, and a French colleague would
whisper, ‘Voilà Duby’, with awe in his voice when we crossed the great man on a
street near the Sorbonne in the summer of 1963.
On first encounter there was something paradoxical about the work. It was a thick
book, 645 pages in length in its first printing, and thick as well with details of
eleventh- and twelfth-century life that I had imagined unrecoverable, details that
called into question many of the definitions and generalisations I had so thoroughly
learned as a graduate student. Yet in other ways the book seemed curiously constrained as well as physically ephemeral. It had been grossly mangled by the publisher, Armand Colin, perhaps because, as I have heard tell, Duby himself had to
pay to have it printed. Typesetters seem to have dropped lines of type on the floor
and replaced them at random. Footnotes were printed in type smaller than that used
for stock market reports: is it hardly a wonder that they were poorly proofread? Even
the table of contents was scrambled. And the book’s format was not much larger
than the Livres de poche that were just coming on the market, easy to drop into the
pocket of my raincoat to read on the bus or the Métro on my way to the archives.
More peculiar for the early 1950s, when regional studies were usually relegated to
the Bulletins and Revues of local learned societies, the book’s geographical range
appeared to be bizarrely narrow, a mere 150 parishes, an area stretching little more
than 40 km east to west and 70 km north to south on either side of the Saône river.
A warm glow might have come to the reader’s mouth on seeing the village names
Gevrey-Chambertin or Meursault mentioned in passing , but the region’s marginality
was, if anything, emphasised by the author himself. On the very first pages Duby
insisted that the Mâconnais was a borderland, partly in the Empire and partly in the
kingdom of France, and agriculturally divided between the world of northern Europe
and 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 one
reviewer 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 historical
review, managed to summarise the book’s contents in two sentences, and spent more
space remarking on the carelessness of Duby’s Latin. And yet to my novice eyes
the book not only opened up new questions but, more importantly, revealed new
ways to go about the craft of medieval social history.
Two English-language reviewers did see the richness secreted on the book’s illprinted pages. Elizabeth Furber was nothing but laudatory in her review in Speculum.
‘Lords and prévôts, peasants and merchants in the region of Mâcon’, she wrote,
‘come to life in this penetrating study of their families and fortunes, of the evolution
of their activities and institutions, and of the varying nature of the ties which bound
them 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.
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293
able, if sometimes challenging, volume Professor Duby shows clearly that he stands
in the front rank of social historians. ... He brings to the interpretation of his materials
a strong but always disciplined imagination, which is historical in the truest sense
of that term’.3 I pick out these few sentences from two extended reviews to emphasise
two characteristics that struck me and I am sure many other historians then at the
beginning of their careers.
The first was Duby’s seemingly unquenchable curiosity about the stories of individual lives, however fragmentarily we can know them. In contrast most notably to
Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society —where, as more than one critic has remarked, the
reader 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 never
heard of, and would never hear of again—the Gros, the Beaujeu, the lords of la
Bussière—were familiar figures, something like distant cousins that people told stories about at family holiday gatherings. And even when these individuals were in
fact composites—like Duby’s penurious descendants of lords who had been too
profligate with their pious gifts—they too somehow took on a mimetic reality. This
focus 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 Mediterranean or all of material culture from the fourteenth century to the Industrial Revolution were barely sufficient stages on which to deploy his erudition, Duby showed
himself to be an accomplished miniaturist. In this, though in very little else, Duby
as 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 one
of 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—at
least none that I have been able to track down—paid serious attention to what became
over 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 twelfth
centuries, 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 book
and what subsequent historians have done with it, especially the discovery (or
invention) of a mutation féodale, a ‘feudal revolution’, in the decades around the
year 1000.4 Curiously, it was in this first and most influential part of the book that
the qualities so praised by reviewers were least in evidence; it was here, as I shall
argue, that a preconceived position, long a commonplace of French legal history,
3
English Historical Review, 70 (1955), 99.
The first term popularised by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, La mutation féodale: Xe–XIIe
siècles (Nouvelle Clio,16, Paris: P.U.F., 1980); the second by Thomas Bisson, ‘The “feudal revolution”,’
Past and Present, 142 (1994), 6–42.
4
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F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
combined with a powerful set of methodological assumptions to override a careful
assessment of the evidence.
Duby’s tenth-century Mâconnais is a society that, ‘is still held together by Carolingian political institutions, which establish clear divisions within it’. The most profound of these divisions is the one that separates the free from the servile. At the
same time, among the free, among the peuple franc, a less clear division is beginning
to emerge, one that is strictly economic, between the peasants and the rich; and at
the 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 a
juridical 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, this
society undergoes a profound transformation. Duby marks them with a series of lasts
and firsts as they appear in the documentation of Cluny and St Vincent of Mâcon:
971 the first appearance of miles as a title;6 986 the first ‘private’ court; 988 a banal
lord demands payments from all, both free and servile, in his district; 994 the first
peace council in the region; 1004 the last sign of an independent vicarial court; 1019
the last sentence rendered by the count’s court against a castellan; 1030 services of
vassals are regularly recompensed by concessions of fief; 1032 ‘knight’ has completely replaced the title ‘noble’. In these steps we have the advent of what Duby
calls ‘feudal society’, though he denies the existence of a ‘feudal system’ and notes
the modest role of fiefs in the totality of noble land holdings.7 The transformation
he describes is marked primarily by the disappearance of a ‘public’ world and its
replacement by one in which all power, even that of the count around his seat at
Mâcon, is fundamentally ‘private’. With the disappearance of the public world disappears the old distinction that separated free from servile; with it the old public powers
now pass into the hands of those strong enough to enforce them, notably the castellans who had exercised those powers in the name of the count and now do so as
their own ‘private’ right. Other lords claim those powers as well, the promoters of
land clearances in the forests, for example, who combine lordship of the land with
lordship of command. Though a servile population still exists, the important distinction comes to be between the peasants and those rich enough to become fighting
men. And among the fighting men, the boundary between those at the top of the
hierarchy and all the others solidifies. Even those who gain wealth cannot cross what
are now impermeable membranes.
This ‘first feudal society’, however, is itself unstable, for pious donations and
inheritance customs bring about the impoverishment of many families both great and
small. It is further distorted by a growing economy, a rise in prices and a growing
5
Mâconnais, 114–5.
Mâconnais, 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 domni
Ardradi presulis’; miles here is arguably a description (‘fighting man’) and not a title, though the preceding
adjectival phrase argues to the contrary.
7
‘Feudal system’: Mâconnais, 195; fiefs and alods: ibid., 291–8.
6
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
295
taste for luxuries as well as the increasing demands of equipment for warfare and
campaigns in faraway lands. Such are the conditions in the Mâconnais when the
king again becomes a political player there in the later twelfth century. Slowly, the
members of the knightly class replenish their treasuries by bartering their fidelity for
coin, turning their still substantial alodial holdings into fiefs. Meanwhile, some city
dwellers—merchants, artisans, and the servants of the powerful—gain in wealth and
invest 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 significant amounts of land while others subject themselves to increased rents on their
meager holdings. Money gives to some—especially the city dwellers—the power to
free themselves from the dues of lordship. In the thirteenth century, as rival lords
begin submitting their disputes to new judicial institutions, peasants gain the opportunity to fix the customs to which they are subject. Liberties spread. The ‘new servitude’ that follows in the wake of Roman Law will only come later. By 1250, society
has 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 western
lands of the old Carolingian Empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the
arguably divergent development of Britain and Germany in those centuries is
occasionally presented as a deviation from or alternative to this standard model. As
standard models have a way of doing, so this one in turn has become the target of
revisionists—most notably by Dominique Barthélemy in France—even as it has been
forcefully restated by Thomas Bisson.8 It thus demands that we exercise our historical
imagination to understand how nearly fifty years ago this book could strike some of
its readers (myself among them) as little short of revolutionary.
Let us begin with the standard model that it slowly replaced. Medieval history
was then still under the determining influence of nineteenth-century sociology (of
which Marxism is the last fading remnant), a sociology that sought to simplify and
systematise the complexities of historical social structures and, in so doing, explain
their very long-term transformations. However ill the fit, over half a millennium of
European social history was reduced to two categories: ‘feudalism’ and ‘manorialism’, ‘société féodale’ and ‘régime seigneurial’, ‘Lehnrecht’ and ‘Landherrschaft’. 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, when
Charles 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 a
century earlier when the spur and new forms of horse harnesses allowed Charles
Martel to create the Carolingian heavy cavalry.9 Yet other historians preferred to
8
Dominique Barthélemy, La mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu?: servage et chevalerie dans la
France des Xe et XIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1997).
9
The first idea goes back to Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, and appears in one form or another
in 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 féodalité (Paris: Aubier,
1959), 71–2. See the comments of Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, (London: Longman, 1992), 13, 245.
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F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
push the beginnings of feudalism back to the Merovingian antrustiones or even to
the Dark Germanic Forests.10 Seemingly forgotten in this standard narrative was the
alternative proposed by Fustel de Coulanges to make of feudalism the outgrowth of
Roman clientage.11 The story of ‘manorialism’ also began with the Carolingians, in
the bi-partite estates described by the great polyptiques. Though surprisingly little
noted in the reviews of the time, probably because Duby continued to use the adjective ‘féodal’, when he insisted on the overwhelming importance of alodial holdings
among all classes of society, even in the twelfth century and even among the peasantry, Duby showed how narrow and inadequate both those standard terms, ‘feudalism’
and ‘manorialism’, really were. The Mâconnais, however much a boundary land it
may have been politically and agriculturally, is, after all, located squarely between
the Loire and the Rhine, the traditional ‘heartland’ of ‘classical feudalism’. The
abstractions of the textbooks simply did not correspond to the realities of landholding
or of human relationships he had discovered in the cartularies of the region. All the
discussions 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 multisecular categories was that relatively little account was paid to change that did not
seem ‘structural’, that did not reach to something that was arguably ‘fundamental’
to feudal or manorial institutions. Where such changes really had to be faced, around
1200 and again in the later middle ages, it was necessary to invent sub-sets of the
two categories. For the first, Achille Luchaire provided us with ‘feudal monarchy’
and for the second, Charles Plummer gave us ‘bastard feudalism’, with all the attendant debates on how these sub-sets should be defined and when they began.12 The
best that Marc Bloch could do to restore some sense of movement into the societies
of the period 900 to 1200 was to distinguish ‘two feudal ages’ whose boundary he
placed around the year 1050, a distinction that by the 1960s had become a fixture
of French historiography. A second consequence was what now seems a very peculiar
way of handling texts. A striking feature of many books on medieval institutions
published in the first half of the twentieth century—at least by historians writing in
English and German—was the ease with which authors juxtaposed texts from the
eleventh century, or even the ninth and tenth, with others from the thirteenth, without
any 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 University
Press, 1962), 1–38, and the critique by Bernard Bachrach, ‘Charles Martel, mounted shock combat, the
stirrup 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 féodale en France et en Angleterre, Xe–XIIIe siècle (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: Longman, 1995).
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
297
making explicit what was already implicit in the earlier. Here was longue durée
resolved into essentialism.13
Duby, in contrast, placed his emphasis on movement, on transformations, for
which he used the term ‘crises’ (which in French does not necessarily have the same
earth-shaking resonance as its equivalent in English: the same word serves for a
possibly fatal ‘crise cardiaque’ and for an only slightly disabling ‘crise de foie’, as
well as for those ‘crises du gouvernement’ under the Fourth Republic that were
easily resolved by a minor reshuffling of cabinet posts). Duby, to be sure, was not
alone in emphasising the radical changes taking place between 1000 and 1200. Again
one thinks of The making of the middle ages, though Southern’s concern with social
relations was relatively limited and his argument was the very opposite of a succession of ‘crises’. After Duby the problem of anachronism could no longer be
ignored; one had to be acutely aware of the differences between the tenth century
and the eleventh, the eleventh century and the thirteenth.
For many of us coming into the profession when the Mâconnais was published, it
was likewise on these pages that we discovered the potential wealth of ecclesiastical
cartularies 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-Edmond
Perrin had explored them to write his thesis on rural lordship in Lorraine, published
in 1935; but that book was a highly technical discussion of late-Carolingian estate
record books, and I doubt that it was read by any except people who worked on
such records. Duby’s older colleague, Philippe Dollinger, had also used ecclesiastical
cartularies for his work on the rural classes in Bavaria. And there was that nearly
unreadable 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 Dollinger as well (whose thesis was still dominated by the legal categories so carefully
constructed by generations of German historians), Duby understood a necessary corollary of making sense out of the cartularies: if you wanted the names in the documents to be more than mere names, more than tokens, if you hoped to imagine them
as individuals and understand the relations among them, above all if you wished to
comprehend the social and physical environments within which those people lived
their lives, you had to work on a small geographical scale. Thus, as the influence
of Duby’s thesis grew and eventually came to dominate French medieval social
history and the work of those elsewhere who came under its spell, the region became
the favoured framework and the cartulary or charter collection the most familiar type
of 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’après les plus anciens
censiers (IX–XII siècle), (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1935). Philippe Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales
en Bavière, depuis la fin de l’époque carolingienne jusqu’au milieu du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres,
1949). Paul Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l’origine de la noblesse en France au moyen âge (Paris: A. Picard
et fils, 1902).
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F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
materials of medieval social history, Duby also set before his readers a number of
research problems that still figure prominently on the profession’s agenda: the complex history of serfdom between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, the history
of village communities and the development of rural parishes, the connection of
settlement patterns and especially of the expansion of the agricultural landscape to
forms of lordship, the development of the knightly class and its identification with
nobility. These are but a few of the fascinating stories that Duby attempted to unfold
within the confines of his narrow stretch of land on either side of the Saône river.
Some of these problems—especially knighthood and nobility—had already accumulated 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 fresh
chronological framework within which to investigate them.
As important as all these features were, however, they do not seem to me to
account fully for the impact the Mâconnais eventually had, above all for the way
so much of its chronology became the ‘standard model’. To my mind, the real explanation lies in what Reginald Lennard in his review rightly noted as Duby’s powerful
historical imagination.
In 1981–2, when I was teaching in Aix-en-Provence, I would occasionally run
into Duby, who was in the habit of staying in Paris only for the short term he was
required to teach at the College de France; he much preferred his residence at Le
Tholonet, in the shadow of Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte Victoire, where a couple of
times he invited me to dinner. One evening he told me he was rereading Balzac’s
La comédie humaine, and strongly recommended that I spend what leisure time I
had in Aix doing the same. Another time a turn in the conversation led me to recall
a little anecdote I had heard at the time Duby gave his inaugural lecture at the
College de France. A friend who had been there told me that when the lecture was
over the Parisian grande dame who was sitting next to him turned and said, ‘Ah,
monsieur, c’est un poète, vous ne croyez pas?’ I recounted this story as best I could
in my still rusty French and, much to my surprise, Duby fixed me with his steelblue 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 probably
not the best descriptive noun one might choose if one is thinking only of his manner
of writing. Duby’s prose was often vivid and always Cartesian-clear, and—at least
until he came under the influence of Fernand Braudel later in his career—it rarely
called attention to itself. In his garden of writerly virtues, ambiguity and multiplicity
of meaning were shunned as noxious weeds. Things, concepts, and categories were
what they were, precisely distinguished from what they were not. (It goes without
saying that jargon, from whatever source it might have come, was likewise rigorously
excluded from his pages.) And that desire for clarity, the constant, almost scholastic
drive to say ‘distinguo’, also shaped his vision of society. Clarity of category was
not 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 to
Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
299
he had the qualities of a novelist in the Balzacian manner in the way he made
eleventh- and twelfth-century charters breathe with the life of individuals, and above
all in his power to construct a basic plot, a scenario, out of which the many changes
he was narrating would unfold, in his ability to tell a simple story without compromising the complexities of his many micro-narratives.
In the opening sections of the book, however, where Duby describes tenth-century
society and its transformations around the year 1000—the section that eventually
gave birth to the standard narrative of mutation féodale—his desire to frame that
compelling narrative overcame his other powerful impulse to extract a fine-grained
portrait of society from the recalcitrant charters of Cluny and the cathedral of Mâcon.
We can see this if we ask of the tenth-century charters the same questions Duby
asked of those of a later period—who are the individuals they mention and what are
those individuals’ relations with each other—and set the results against Duby’s own
portrait of the age.
2.
The Mâconnais begins in the late-tenth century. It is here that Duby sets the stage
for the appearance of the ‘age of independent castellanies’ at the beginning of the
second millennium. Much in the 150 pages that he devotes to the society and economy of this early period is closely attentive to the ways in which the massive documentation from the region—over 2000 charters in the Cluny cartulary alone—belies
most of the simple generalisations that were current when he wrote, whether about
the 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 countered
have not yet vanished. At the heart of his discussion, however, are two simple generalisations of his own. The motor for all the changes which would come in the following century, he asserts, are two simultaneous though unconnected developments—
the impoverishment of the region’s elite through division among heirs and massive
donations to the Church, and the collapse of comital power. The first of these generalisations has had relatively little echo in the literature, probably because it was so
clearly biased by the ecclesiastical sources Duby was using, whose possible bias he
himself admits. The second generalisation was another matter. It soon enough gave
birth to the mutation féodale.
Duby opens his discussion of ‘les pouvoirs’—the count and his agents and the
great ecclesiastical immunities in the second half of the tenth century—with this
assertion:
In the years around 980 the political structure of the Mâconnais was still completely shaped by Carolingian traditions. Those who enjoyed full liberty—the
community of free men (‘le peuple franc’)—formed a restricted group within the
larger population. They appear mainly as a peace association. Their members were
called together to fight against an outside enemy or to judge those disputes that
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F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
could not be settled by private arrangements. Service in arms and attendance at
court were the two obligations of the free man. Indeed, they were the specific
signs of his freedom. ... As for the status of the non-free, relations between neighbors, between dependents and their lords, among family members, or between
buyers and sellers, these lay beyond the reach of public power and were regulated
entirely by private custom.16
There are two critical distinctions here—between the free and the non-free and
between ‘public power’ and ‘private arrangements’ or ‘private custom’—and they
are closely intertwined; for the distinction between the free and the non-free is maintained in the tenth century by the persistence of the count’s mallus, the Carolingian
public court. The social revolution that Duby will trace through the decades following
980 will be the weakening and finally the disappearance of these two fundamental
distinctions, as another distinction—one between those subject to a seigneurie banale
and those who were free of its constraints—takes their place.
At times in Duby’s imagination this late-Carolingian world takes on the glow of
a golden age. Here for example is his explanation for the weakness of ‘ties of man
to man’ in the tenth century:
Among the free men...the institutions of peace maintain security and allow them
to escape other constraints. ... The strength of family ties are weak, because they
have no use. The organs of peace remaining from the old Frankish state are still
strong enough to allow the free man to live independently, and to prefer, if he
so 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 at
ease beneath his fig tree and vine—a vision that resonates with tones of an idealised
nineteenth-century bourgeois State under whose protective umbrella free men may
live and prosper in peace—Duby will paint a Hobbesian vision of the later eleventh 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 restricted
by the service owed for their fiefs, still had an air of great freedom; for if they
committed a crime, there was no definite court to judge them nor power to punish
them. For the upper class, feudalism was a step toward anarchy.18
Behind this sharp contrast between the Carolingian world and that which followed
lies an argument that Duby had inherited from his teacher, Charles-Edmond Perrin
16
17
18
Mâconnais, 88.
Ibid., 136–7.
Ibid., 195.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
301
and from the textbooks of legal history he had read as a student. In his own thesis
Perrin had set out to demonstrate the theory that the dues and obligations of peasants
in the twelfth century and later had developed from two distinct antecedents. On the
one hand, the break-up of the old Carolingian villa had led to land-rent as the most
common means to draw income from peasant labour. In contrast, all other charges
that weighed on the peasantry came from the exercise of sovereignty either granted
or usurped.19 Such was the standard story told by professors of legal history in the
first half of the twentieth century, but neither the chronology nor the exact process
by which it had come about had ever been fixed.20 In his Recherches sur la seigneurie, Perrin had only been able to document the transformation of the villa; he had
never 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 the
people who were subject to the dues that were not land rents, those who were subject
to what he now called the seigneurie banale;21 he then needed to demonstrate that
they were not the descendants of the late-Carolingian unfree, or at least not only
their descendants. Because all the legal historians were convinced these dues were
based on immunities, royal privileges, or most often a simple usurpation based on
the power to command, the bannum, he also had to lay out the history of this power
of command from the Carolingians to the twelfth century. From there it was but a
step to writing, among other things, a history of the transformation of freedom and
non-freedom from the tenth to the twelfth century.
Duby had no doubt that the distinction between the free and the non-free was the
most 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 clauses
beginning with the words si quis that carried much debris of antique legal culture
through the centuries.22 Open the early volumes of the Cluny charter collection at
random 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.
See, for example, J. Declareuil, Histoire générale du droit français des origines à 1789 à l’usage
des étudiants des Facultés de Droit (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1925), 174–80, where one finds almost the
entire panoply of phenomena that will become the ‘feudal revolution’ including both that term and its
twin, the ‘seignorial revolution’, as well as a brief account of the opposing views of Henri Sée and
Jacques Flach. F. Olivier-Martin gives a brief summary along with the bibliography: Histoire du droit
français des origines à la Révolution (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 with
the range that Duby gives it. In his legal history textbook, however, F. Olivier-Martin, defined ‘ban’ as
‘souveraineté démembrée’, the outgrowth of immunities, privilege, or usurpation that became customary
right: Histoire du droit français, 154. It is but a short step from that to Duby’s expression. The association
of this definition of bannum to the concept of ‘sovereignty’ is fundamental to the entire historiographical
tradition, both pre- and post-Duby. Older writers had used the term ‘banalités’ restrictively to refer to
monopoly mills, ovens, and wine presses. Such is the definition given in the seventeenth-century editions
of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française. In Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française,
the oldest examples of ‘banal’ with the legal meaning of monopoly are thirteenth century. The adjective
arguably derives from the alternative meaning of ‘ban’, a proclamation.
22
‘...ut quicumque... sive liber sive servus’: Cluny no. 2979, quoted in Mâconnais, 118 n.1.
20
302
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
is still the case in the eleventh century.23 The status, Duby noted, is neither social
nor economic—for there are rich serfs, even a servile aristocracy, and serfs join in
marriage with free men and women.24 What, then, marked a person as not free? On
this 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 find
free persons who owed the same dues.25 The distinction between free and non-free
was therefore solely ‘legal’. The non-free were those who did not participate in the
public courts, whose freedom was not protected by their free neighbours. ‘Serfdom
is the residue of slavery adapted to a Christian world. It will survive as long as the
institutions of public law maintain the idea of a free people (peuple franc), and when
that 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 who
did not bear the mark of being free. And the homines proprii of the twelfth century
could not have been the juridical descendants of the serfs of an earlier age, because
by then the public power that had maintained the difference between free and nonfree 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 and
they participated in the public court presided over by the count. Duby quickly
admited that his Burgundian documents contain no information whatever about military service. For his assertion that this duty was imposed on all free men he was
entirely 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 cathedral
of St Vincent of Mâcon. In the end, his description of the ‘Carolingian’ tenth century
in the Mâconnais rested on this evidence.
No one has taken a critical look at this evidence since the book’s publication,
despite the fact that François Ganshof had surveyed the same documents only twentyfive years earlier and Francis Estey was publishing his studies of Carolingian courts
at the same time as Duby was writing his thesis, and both had come to very different
conclusions.28 The absence of critical attention to this opening section of the Mâconnais is doubtless a tribute to the richness of the Mâconnais as a whole, to Duby’s
demonstration of his immensely detailed command of the charter evidence. Who
would question, or think it worth the time to reread those tenth-century charters from
Cluny and St Vincent and judge whether his conclusions were viable?
Though deeply influenced by the Mâconnais in my own research, I was long
23
For example Cluny nos. 2992 (1049–65), 2994 (1049–1109), 3324 (c. 1050), 3339 (c. 1050)—one
of a number of examples of manumission, 3879 (1109–1110).
24
Mâconnais, 122.
25
Ibid., 126–7.
26
Ibid.,127.
27
Ibid., 257–8.
28
François Ganshof, ‘Contribution à l’étude des origines des cours féodales en France’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4me série, 7 (1928), 644–65. Francis N. Estey, ‘The meaning of
placitum 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 Mâcon’, Speculum, 30 (1955), 82–9.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
303
troubled by the way in which the narrative he constructed there was being applied
to all the lands of the West Frankish kingdom. Try as I might, I could not find any
sign of a ‘crisis of the year 1000’ or of a ‘feudal revolution’ in the Occitan documents
I was poring over, and attempts to establish its existence in that region, notably by
Pierre Bonnassie, seemed to me to be forcing the evidence beyond what it would
sustain.29 Nor did the society that emerged from the eleventh-century documents in
that region seem to me to be one of independent castellans, ‘lords of three or four
villages’ (to borrow Chris Wickham’s expression),30 who were free to subject the
peasantry to their banal lordship. Quite the contrary, the distribution of castles
seemed to represent purposes quite other than control of subject populations; the
multiplicity of castle lordships argued against the creation of independent castellanies, as did the way in which lordship was scattered across village territories; and
the histories of the viscounts of Béziers, of Albi-Nı̂mes, the counts of Carcassonne,
and eventually the Trencavels, as well as the archiepiscopal lordship of Guifred of
Cerdagne and his successors, represented something quite other than the fragmentation that Duby had described along the banks of the Saône (unless one were to
take 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 equivalents
of the castellans). Violence there was in plenty, and occasional signs of arbitrary
exactions on the peasantry, but the violence was more often committed by agents
of counts, viscounts, abbots and bishops than by lawless castellans, and in the twelfth
century by the armies of counts and kings. Given the limitations of the evidence
there 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 restrain
it.31 I wondered whether something might be amiss with the standard model of the
mutation féodale, a puzzlement that made me sympathetic to the views of Dominique
Barthélemy. It was time to reread the Société dans la région mâconnaise and to look
closely at the tenth-century evidence on which Duby had built his portrait of the
Mâconnais before the transformation. In that evidence I discovered a very different
society from the one Duby described. It was one that he probably had seen himself,
29
Pierre Bonnassie, ‘Du Rhône à la Galice: genèse et modalités du régime féodal’, Structures féodales
et féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen: Xe–XIIIe siècles (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980),
17–56 at 30–4.
30
Chris Wickham, ‘Debate: the ‘feudal revolution’, IV’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 196–208 at
203–4.
31
Castles: see my ‘The castles of the Trencavels: a preliminary aerial survey’, in: Order and innovation
in the middle ages: Essays in honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. William C. Jordan et al. (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1970), 255–72. Forms of lordship and Archbishop Guifred: Ermengard of Narbonne and the
world 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, though
it is partially reflected in my ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, French historical studies, 6 (1970), 287–99. I have
not 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.’
304
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
given what he knew about the great families of the region. But his overriding concern
with discovering the origins of the seigneurie banale in a structural transformation
of 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 settlements
from the tenth century published in the cartulary of St Vincent of Mâcon and the
charters of Cluny.32 All of these settlements take place in the presence (ante or in
presencia) of the count of Mâcon or Châlon or in the presence of one of their viscounts or vicars. In nine of these records the expression in mallo publico is employed
to describe the court. I call them ‘dispute settlements’ rather than court judgments
because 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 agents
among 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 court
or judicial assembly is mentioned. Duby appears to classify all of these as ‘private
settlements’.33 His reasoning, though never explicit, seems clear enough. The nine
documents that speak of a mallus publicus all present the count or a viscount as
presiding. That is sufficient for Duby to conclude, first, that there is still a public
court—and that others are therefore by definition private—and, second, that all courts
where the count or viscount presided, whether the documents call them a mallus or
not, were the same public court.
One might ask, however, whether this reasoning is justified. Another possibility
is that the mention of a mallus is one of those examples of old formulae persisting
in scribal language when the reality it once referred to has disappeared. There are
examples enough of such survivals in tenth-century charters, and this may just be
one of them, for the institution of the mallus goes back at least to the Merovingian
period.34 And, in fact, in his carefully worded conclusion to Part I of his book, Duby
pulled back from the argument that places the great transformation in the decades
around the year 1000, and recognised the possibility that the image he had constructed on the basis of those later tenth-century judicial assemblies is an illusion.
32
Mâconnais, 98 n. 5. The texts he cites here are Cart. Mâcon nos. 156, 186, 376, 409, 420, 426, and
Cluny nos 764, 799, 856, 979, 1037, 1087, 1100, 1179, 1249. Two of these (Cart. Mâcon nos. 376 and
426) actually do not belong in this category: the first neither mentions the mallus nor does it indicate
before whom the complaint was argued, the second was heard by the bishop and canons of the cathedral.
33
Mâconnais, 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 in
Medieval Europe, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986),
7–22 and 23–43.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
305
Apparently, the structures of society have hardly changed during the [tenth] century.... But this stability is only on the surface. It strikes us because we are dependent on archival documents to reconstruct the social environment, and these are
all drawn up in accordance with traditional formularies and therefore have great
difficulty expressing new realities. In fact, only the envelope is Carolingian, and
it masks the profound transformations of society.... If the bankruptcy of royal
power has not yet weakened the authority that the count exercises over the high
aristocracy, it has removed its public character and its legitimacy. Since 950,
comital power is a private power, personal power. Clienteles have formed and
continue to develop, and bit by bit enclose all free men, both rich and poor, in
an 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. The
clienteles are much in evidence by the mid-tenth century, and one has the decided
impression that only the thinner documentation from the earlier part of the century
masks their earlier importance.36 Whether the distinction that Duby insisted upon
between the count’s one time ‘public’ power and the ‘private’ power he exercises
after 950 is valid is a separate question which I will address shortly. But it is
important to note that, whether Duby was aware of it or not, this astonishing concluding paragraph undercut the central argument he was making, that the distinction
between free and non-free depended on the continued existence of ‘public’ courts
that all free men were obligated to attend, an obligation that was the very mark of
their freedom.
As Duby himself notes, from the early tenth century (though how early we cannot
say, because relatively few documents survive from before 940, and most of these
can be dated only approximately) the persons mentioned attending the mallus publicus in fact form a quite restricted circle. They are sometimes referred to in these
documents or elsewhere as the count’s fideles. They are the same people who appear
with the count on other occasions, when he is making a donation to the cathedral
or to Cluny. He also appears as a witness when one or another of these fideles is
making a pious donation. (Given the nature of the sources, dispute settlements and
conveyances are all that survive.) Ganshof believed, on the basis of their occasional
designation as fideles, that the presence of these men transformed the count’s court
into a ‘feudal’ court, but this derives both from a confusion of vassi and fideles and
from the then common notion of ‘the feudal court’ that we now realise must rather
be spoken of as the groups of arbitrators and peace-keepers who settled disputes in
35
Mâconnais, 150–1.
Already demonstrated by Ganshof, ‘Cours féodales’, and reaffirmed in a more thoroughgoing analysis
by Estey, ‘Fideles’, two years after the Mâconnais was published.
36
306
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
this period.37 We will be able to say much more about this small group when the
Münster 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 that
these 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. Their
numbers were limited, they were often in each other’s presence, and scribes sometimes graced them with high honorifics.
To demonstrate this, the procedure I will follow will be simple: I will take as an
example the list of the fideles who joined the count in a judicial assembly sometime
around 950 and note on how many other occasions between 930 and 960 two or
more of these fideles appear together. Counts Hugh of Chalons and Leotaldus of
Mâcon were then restoring the property of the cathedral of Mâcon, much damaged
by a fire that destroyed and largely depopulated the city. Part of this process was
recorded as a judicial assembly at which eight named fideles ‘and others of my
nobles’ 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 a
judicial assembly this one time, but Walter appears in ten dispute settlements , Rotbertus in ten, Josbertus in four, Leodegarius in three, Raterius in four, Teodulfus in
six, and Ugo (the most problematic of the group since this is a common name in
37
Ganshof, ‘Cours féodales’, 650–2, 660–3. The charters, however, use varied titles to identify the
same individuals, suggesting that by 900 bonus homo, scabinus, fidelis, and perhaps even vassus are
interchangeable. Gundulricus who is a bonus homo in Cart. Mâcon no. 501 (dated circa 928) is a vassus
of Count William in ibid. no. 204 (dated 886–927), one of the two Evrardi boni homines in ibid. no. 501
is also a bonus homo in Cluny no. 90 (905), and either the same person or a descendant of the same
name is a fidelis of the count in ibid. no. 644 (943), and if a descendant then most likely the same person
who is a bonus homo in ibid. no. 1226 (967). See also Guichardus, fidelis in ibid. no. 1087 (960) and
bonus homo in ibid. no. 1179 (964); Teutbertus bonus homo in ibid. no. 1179 (964) and ‘vicar of the
count’ in ibid. no. 1226 (967). Far more often these same persons are mentioned as witnesses without
any title. Bonus homo seems to be a synonym for ‘important person’, ‘person of high status’, rather than
for a person with a particular institutional role. Often enough, both scabini and boni homines are mentioned as being present at the same time. Sometimes there are far more than seven scabini (15 in Cart.
Mâcon 284, dated 888–98), as well as far less (in the cases Ganshof mentions), calling into question
Ganshof’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 ‘Suum
cuique tribuere’, French historical studies, 6 (1970) 287–99; surveys of the literature in Patrick Geary,
‘Vivre en conflit dans une France sans état’, Annales, E.S.C., 41 (1986), 1107–26, Gert Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), ‘Einleitung’, 1–17.
38
Francis Estey already made a start in his Princeton Ph.D thesis, cited by him in ‘Scabini and the
local courts’, note 37. I am indebted to Dr. Hillebrandt of the Münster group for her assistance with the
small group of people I attempted to track down in the Cluny charters.
39
Cart. Mâcon, no. 156 (one of the fifteen examples of public courts listed by Duby). No. 103 mentions
the fire. See also nos. 70, 71, 76.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
307
the region) in nine. Table 1 represents the number of occasions when these individuals appear together either in these assemblies or as witnesses to gifts by the count
or one of their fellows between 930 and 960.40
Evrardus and Narduinus (and probably a handful of others) can be identified as
members of the same group: they appear together five times, and Narduinus appears
fifteen times with Count Leotaldus. Each of them appears a few times with those
named in Table 1. In the far more limited documentation of the first half of the tenth
century one can identify men who were probably the predecessors (and the
ancestors?) of this group, such as Josbertus, Maiolus, Odo, and Arnulf who appear
together on two important occasions. It is possible, indeed likely, that one of the
reasons these individuals appear together is because their own lands were in the
vicinity of the property in dispute. But that neighbourliness would only have
reinforced the sense of belonging to a small aristocratic community.41
If one found such repeated appearance of a small group of men around a great
aristocrat in the eleventh or twelfth century, one would have no hesitation calling
them 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 no
reason not to come to the same conclusion in mid-tenth-century Mâconnais. At the
Table 1
Members of the judicial assembly, Cart. Mâcon no. 156, and numbers of occasions they appear with
each other in other documents, 930–960
Rotbertus
Walterius
Josbertus
Leodegarius
Raterius
Teodulfus
Witcheranus
Ugo
40
Rotbertus Walterius Josbertus
Leodegarius Raterius Teodulfus Witcheranus Ugo
—
7
3
4
3
5
2
4
—
2
3
2
2
—
2
2
5
3
2
5
—
5
1
2
1
1
—
3
3
4
—
1
5
—
1
—
The documentary base for the table consists of twenty-one dispute settlements, eleven gifts by Count
Hugh or Count Leotaldus to the cathedral of Mâcon or Cluny, one precarial grant by the bishop, one gift
by provost Humbert to Cluny, one by Leodegarius, and one by Narduinus: Cart. Mâcon 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 in
7, Leodegarius in 6, Raterius in 10, Teodulfus in 10, Witcheranus in 3, and Ugo in 13. See also
Rotco/Rocco in Cart. Mâcon no. 204 and Cluny no. 90, and Gundulricus in Cart. Mâcon no. 501, most
likely the same vassus of count William who presides over a judicial inquest, ibid. no. 204. Other early
tenth-century boni homines who are probably the ancestors of mid-century members of the count’s entourage are Evrardus, Letbaldus, and Guichardus, ibid. no. 501. On the Evrardi see Maurice Chaume, ‘Féodaux
Mâconnais: les premiers possesseurs de la Roche de Solutré’, Annales de Bourgogne, 9 (1937), 280–95.
Information on the landholding of many of these men is given by Estey, ‘Fideles’, 84–5.
308
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
very least, they are certainly not ‘all free men’, and they are just as certainly far
more than ‘free men’. Their designation as ‘nobles’ as well as fideles should not be
underestimated. Walter, in addition to being viscount, is the count’s missus on two
occasions, Rotbertus is called fidelis in the records of five other dispute settlements
and once entitled nobilissimus, an accolade he shares with Teodulfus and Narduinus.42 Probably more often than my limited means allow me to tell, the witnesses
to quitclaims that are not made in the count’s presence belong to the same small
group of the count’s fideles.43 Duby, in other parts of his discussion, in fact identifies
many of these men as the ancestors of those who will be the great castellans of the
eleventh century.44
These men are favoured not only by the counts but by the bishops of Mâcon and
the abbots of Cluny as well. A precarial grant by abbot Maiolus in 960 to a ‘certain
man’ (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 to
identify the man who received the gift as the scion of a distinguished lineage that
would become known as the Grossi family, lords of Brancion. Another document
of the same year identifies him as a fidelis of the count. The grant was one link in
a chain of continual gifts and countergifts that affirmed the ongoing bonds between
the dynasty and the monastery. Early in the century, an ancestor, also named
Warulfus was called vassus of the count of Mâcon when he and his wife exchanged
property with the archdeacon Geraldus. His brother Leotbaldus appears as a bonus
homo resolving a dispute in 925, and in multiple gifts to Cluny, two of them for the
souls of countess Ava, count William (the Pious) and his nephew William, as well
as for members of his own family. A later Leotbaldus, who also held a precarial
grant from Cluny, would become bishop of Mâcon, as a later Warulfus would appear
in the count’s entourage.45 Other receivers of precarial grants from Cluny show the
same intimacy with the count of Mâcon: Adalbertus who is so honoured in 953 and
974 appears once as missus of the count and as a witness to two important quit-
42
Cluny no. 764.
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.’ Mâconnais, 98, and identifies Narduinus as the father-in-law of the
viscount, Walterius as Gautier de Chevignes ‘parent pauvre’ of the Evrardi, Raterius as Ratier de Bâgé,
ibid., 99. Although he does not give particular family details, in a later article, ‘Lignage, noblesse et
chevalerie au XIIe siècle dans la région mâconnaise: une révision’, 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 upper
rank of lay society in the Mâconnais around 1100 back to 950. Presumably they would include most or
all 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.
Mâcon, 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 property
of the cathedral of Mâcon by Marquis Hugh and Count Leotaldus, with Leotbaldus as one of the witnesses:
Cart. Mâcon no. 72.
43
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
309
claims;46 Teotbertus, cousin of the bishop of Apt, granted a precarium sometime in
the later tenth century, is bonus homo in 964, the count’s vicar in 967, and often a
witness for the count or other members of the count’s entourage.47
Would such men have been ‘constrained by a network of dependence’, as Duby
thought? One may be permitted to doubt it. Constrained, yes, but by the ideals and
practices of their status, by the expectations created by an economy of gift and
countergift (so thoroughly analysed by Barbara Rosenwein), and by the values of
fidelity that contemporaries will soon start calling ‘friendship’ or ‘love’.48 Duby’s
assumption of constraint comes directly from that Hobbesian vision of society on
which his analysis is grounded. Its modern form is what John L. Comaroff and
Simon Roberts have named the ‘rule-centered paradigm...of social life’, the belief
that ‘societies do not cohere effectively in the absence of centralised authorities,
which formulate rules and ensure conformity with them’.49 The assumption does not
come from the documents but from the deeply rooted premises of modern legal
history. For in tenth-century documents we find a very different notion of how the
social fabric is knitted together, most clearly expressed in precarial grants. ‘Spiritual
men should treat their fideles well, in order that they be more prompt in their deference 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 aid
and defender, our guardian and most faithful hope’.51 The first text echoes a standard
phrase in imperial grants of benefices.52 In the second, we immediately recognise
the biblical language. Gift and companionship, gift and service, gift and protection:
the familiar combinations were already there in the tenth century. They are the
actions and values that already hold these communities of great lords and powerful
followers together. They are projected onto the next world, as well, when St Vincent
of Mâcon and the abbey of Fleury establish their brotherhood through an exchange
of 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.
Mâcon 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. Mâcon no. 409; witness: ibid. no 426, Cluny nos.
1087, 1291, See also an earlier Teotbertus, most likely an ancestor, given common aristocratic naming
practices: 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-century
Courts at Mâcon and the perils of structuralist history: re-reading Burgundian judicial institutions’, to
appear 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 obsequio vel ne eorum absque temporali recompensatione utantur servitio’: Cluny no. 1389. For Adalbertus
see above n. 42.
51
Cluny, nos. 1389, 1508.
52
Compare Cluny no. 237.
310
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
ship’.53 We touch here the heart of the culture of fidelity, the culture that gives
cohesion to the tenth-century elite as it will to their descendants in the eleventh and
twelfth. This is the elite whose presence around the count and bishop the disputeprocessing documents of the tenth century reveal.
We may conclude that even before the middle of the tenth century there is no
difference between the composition of the count’s ‘court’ when a dispute is being
settled and when the count or one of his entourage is engaging in the significant
social act of donating property to the saints, and that the same people are sometimes
involved 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 the
count, expressed in the term mallus publicus, and the ‘private arrangements’ and
‘private customs’ that otherwise serve to keep the peace? Both in the Mâconnais
and in an earlier study Duby himself recognised that, from the early tenth century
on, those who served as judges in these Carolingian courts were ‘the most considerable men of the region’.54 He believed, however, that the same men served in different roles: in the count’s mallus as public officials by virtue of the public oath of
fidelity 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 of
judge 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 this
belief? Are ‘official’ procedures followed in some cases but not in others? Apart
from the occasional, but far from consistent, use of the term ‘mallus’, are there any
other signs that in some cases we are looking at records of ‘public’ courts and in
other cases not?56
4.
It is in this context that the simple counting-up of documents (mentioned earlier
in this article) takes on its importance, not so much for the numbers involved as for
the diversity of categories into which they can be classed. The cathedral cartulary
and the collection of Cluny charters contain nine notices of disputes in which the
assembly 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 these
occasions the count is accompanied by his fideles; on one occasion he is joined by
the bishop, on another by the abbot of Cluny and the provost Vivianus, and on yet
53
Mâcon, nos. 12, 197.
Georges Duby, ‘Recherches sur l’évolution des institutions judiciaires pendant le Xe et le XIe siècle
dans le sud de Bourgogne’, Le moyen âge, 52 (1946), 149–94 and 53 (1947) 15–38, trans. by Cynthia
Postan as ‘The evolution of judicial institutions’ in Georges Duby, The chivalrous society (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 17.
55
Mâconnais, p. 97.
56
My discussion of these questions largely follows the extended analysis of this topic by White, ‘Tenthcentury courts at Mâcon.’
54
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
311
another accompanied by his mother.57 There are twenty-one other disputes heard and
settled ‘before’ either a bishop (three cases), the abbot of Cluny (two cases), the
provost 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 (one
case). In a final category are twenty-three quitclaims that mention no individual or
group of men who heard the dispute.
In his effort to draw the line between public and private, Duby placed not only
the cases that specifically mention the mallus but all those where the count or an
agent were present on the ‘public’ side of the ledger. To these he adds those where
the 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 the
count, 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’ settlements, given that the primary source of our documentation is the collection of Cluny
charters. If abbots (and other monastic officers) are not ‘public’ persons like the
bishop, what distinguishes them? And what about the count’s mother? Duby interpreted the bishop’s function in the mallus as a ‘public’ role, substituting for the
absent count. If we accept this interpretation, what then would we make of a quitclaim of 977 included among the Cluny charters, the resolution of a dispute heard
by 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 this
were a ‘public’ occasion, would the king’s agent not take precedence? One strongly
suspects that the order in which people are listed in this document derives not from
any public/private distinction but from their personal status. If that was the case, is
the distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ roles of tenth-century individuals
not questionable?
If basing the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dispute settlements on the
personnel of the assembly is ambiguous, at best, on what basis shall we decide in
which box to place an individual case? Should we confine the ‘public’ category
exclusively to those cases recorded as heard in a mallus publicus since the adjective
appears only with mallus (and not always even there)?60 Is there a documentary form
that we can identify as a ‘public’ document? Are there procedures that we can identify as those that distinguish a ‘public’ court? Although a preliminary look at the
documents suggests that the answer to all three questions might be ‘yes’, a more
detailed examination demonstrates that the answer to all is ‘no’.
In the Carolingian world, the standard form for recording a dispute before a mallus
publicus was that of the placitum, found in Bavaria, Flanders, Occitania, and all the
57
‘Vassus’: Car. Mâcon no. 204; with fideles: ibid., nos. 156, 282, 420, Cluny nos. 644, 719, 856; with
bishop: ibid. no. 856, in addition to the mallus when the bishop was present: ibid., 632; with abbot and
provost of Cluny: ibid., no. 1989; with mother, ibid., no. 1789.
58
Mâconnais, p. 98.
59
Cluny no. 1437.
60
For example in Cart. Mâcon no. 501 the dispute is heard in mallense comitale.
312
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
lands between.61 It normally began by naming the members of the mallus, including
scabini, 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 written
proofs submitted and/or the inquest made by the court and, finally, the decision. In
the two major Mâconnais collections, only five of the records of disputes heard
before a mallus follow this placitum formula more or less in full, and two of these
are from the ninth century.62 Of the nine tenth-century disputes described as being
heard by a mallus, six (including one of those in the form of a placitum) are called
quitclaims (notitia guarpitionis) and one is called notitia proclamationis. On the
other hand, five dispute settlements from the end of the ninth and beginning of the
tenth centuries that do not mention the mallus are recorded more or less in the form
of a placitum; one of them—an inquest conducted by a vassus of the count—is
explicitly called a placitum.63 In none of these latter are scabini mentioned as being
present; but that is also true of all but three of the tenth-century disputes heard in
a mallus. Thus, apart from the adjective itself (which is inconsistently applied), there
appears 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 (or
been given) wide latitude in the manner in which they follow, abbreviate, or ignore
the placitum form when recording the settlement of disputes, whether heard in an
assembly qualified as mallus publicus or not. Rather than expressing a clear division,
the formal choices open to the scribes shade over imperceptibly into the minimalist
quitclaims that Duby classified as ‘private’, or forms that, among other literary
opportunities, allowed a monk to parade at length his sententious rhetorical proclivities.64
To the extent that the variety of scribal choices allow us to observe the procedures
followed in these judicial assemblies, whether called mallus publicus or not, they
display the same wide diversity. Of those specified as being heard by a mallus, four
are simple quitclaims with no procedures described other than the presentation of a
complaint, three mention a charter being read, two mention inquests being made, and
six (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 Claude
Devic and Joseph Vaissete, Histoire générale 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 last
decade of the nineteenth century are inventoried in Rudolf Hübner, ‘Gerichtsurkunden der fränkischen
Zeit, ‘ Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte; germanistische Abteilung, 12 (1891) 1–118,
14 (1893) 1–258, reprinted as a book (Aalen: Scientia, 1971).
62
Cluny no. 3 (814), Cart. Mâcon no. 284 (888–98), 501 (c. 928, according to the editor, but problematic, because the person hearing the dispute is ‘lord Ranulf’, either a mistaken reading for Raculf, or a
reference to a count from elsewhere), Cluny nos. 256 (926), 764 (950).
63
Cart. Mâcon 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, resolved
when the monks offer 2 solidi and a modest quantity of grain and wine for her quitclaim, a case heard
by the count and some familiar members of his entourage.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
313
truth of their claim by oath.65 Among those disputes not specified as being in a
mallus publicus, in one dispute heard before the bishop and in the placitum directed
by the count’s vassus there is an inquest66; trial by battle occurs once in a case heard
before the count and is offered on another occasion in a dispute heard before boni
homines;67 written documents are offered twice in disputes heard before the count.
Almost all the remaining disputes are recorded as simple quitclaims. Once again, on
the 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 manner in which those settlements were recorded, and of the procedures followed, seem
to 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 the
documentary evidence, not derived from it. Without the assumption that the distinction 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 the
rise 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, who
sometime in the 920s or 30s became a monk and quit ‘the evil customs and unjust
demands’ 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 repayment
we demanded for the innumerable evils that you did to us and for which we wanted
to 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 by
a monk, he may dine there with ten fighting men and then go his way.69 Doubtless
far more material of this sort still awaits discovery in the first three volumes of the
Cluny charters. Whether we describe such actions of powerful men as a Hobbesian
state of nature, as ‘anarchy’ or something approaching it, or rather as a society in
which self-help was always available as a step in dispute processing (as it continued
to be for many centuries) depends more on our assumptions about what holds
societies 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 Mâconnais dispute processing, from the aristo65
Simple quitclaims: Cart. Mâcon nos. 185, 186, Cluny nos. 632, 1100. ‘Carta’: Cluny nos. 3 (ninth
century), 256, 764. Inquest: Cart. Mâcon nos. 284, 501. Oaths: ibid. 284, 501, Cluny nos. 256, 764,
979, 1179.
66
Cart. Mâcon no. 204, Cluny no. 1240.
67
Cart. Mâcon 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 Mâcon’. Estey long ago suggested that whether the placitum formulae were
followed in the tenth-century depended on the habits of particular scribes. Of two whose names are
recorded 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.
314
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
cratic networks it reveals, from signs of aristocratic heavy-handedness already in the
early tenth century, and from the values of the culture of fidelity already expressed
in tenth-century precarial grants, I think we may plausibly conclude that claims for
the occurrence of a mutation féodale, a ‘feudal revolution’, when the structure of
public power disintegrated around the year 1000 has no basis in the evidence, at
least in the original homeland of that construction, Duby’s Mâconnais. If there was
one it either occurred earlier (as a much older strain of historiography insisted) or
was 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 the
meager supply of evidence that Duby first offered, but I am not sure it would have
been found convincing support for a ‘feudal revolution’ had the narrative structure
he 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 in
the Mâconnais, the richness of almost novelistic detail that gives the book its imaginative power (and that, to my mind, Duby never achieved again to the same degree
in his later works), we might well ask why he was less sensitive to the same features
of tenth-century society. Part of the answer, as I suggest at the beginning of this
article, surely lies in his desire to prove Charles-Edmond Perrin’s theory about peasant dues and ‘banal’ lordship. The more fundamental reason, I believe, lay in the
very narrative structure that Duby chose to employ: a narrative of structures.
This organisation of subject matter has since become so familiar, especially in the
work of those connected with the Annales school, that most of the time we scarcely
notice it.72 Duby made this organisation explicit in his table of contents, and whether
the word ‘structure’ or an equivalent such as ‘cadre’ is used or not, his manner of
organisation has dominated the entire genre of La terre et les hommes. In the Mâconnais, discussion of the tenth century begins with information on the forms of wealth
of a category of people called ‘laymen’, primarily the wealthy and powerful, the
structure 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 people
called ‘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 composed
of ‘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.
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 New
History, especially 47–53. For much of what follows I am indebted to White, ‘Tenth-century courts
at Mâcon’.
71
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
315
sorts of ‘ties’ (liens).73 This portion of the Mâconnais is a narrative of categories
(people who bear official titles, ‘classes’) and of ‘institutions’ with particular functions, 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 one
category, institution, or sub-structure will have consequences throughout the linked
structures. As Professor White points out in a recent paper, this analysis
presupposes premises virtually identical to the ones underlying the analyses of
those structuralist–functionalist anthropologists who represented society as ‘an
enduring system of groups, composed of statuses and roles, supported by values
and connected sanctions which operate to maintain the system in equilibrium’
and who understood ‘social structure’ as an enduring ‘arrangement of persons in
institutionally controlled or defined relationships’.74
In this way, Duby integrated a traditional and well-developed mode of reading
historical 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 individuals
in 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 than
English anthropology) via Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and a major group of postwar French economists.75 This brilliant synthesis of the old and the new was no
doubt what stirred the wave of Duby-inspired medieval social history, regionally
defined and rurally focused, that followed. It was easily integrated into Marxist metanarratives, to which Duby himself was attracted in the 1960s (though he claimed in
his memoirs of 1991 to have always rejected the ‘abuses of determinism’ and the
imprisonment of the flow of history in the shackles of ‘structures’).76 It also brought
in 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 the
economist André Marchal expressed it in 1954:
The diverse structures evolve independently, some more rapidly than others and
in one direction or another ... generating the maladjustments that simultaneously
account for the ‘crisis’ or ‘alteration’ of the system and the ‘mutation’ or ‘passage’
73
Mâconnais, 38–152.
White, ‘Tenth-century courts at Mâcon’, 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 University
Press, 1976), 106–7.
76
Georges Duby, L’Histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 104–8, quote at 105.
74
316
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
from one system to another. These maladjustments finally cause the system to
‘snap’.77
Here is the theoretical, aprioristic foundation of the mutation féodale, of the ‘feudal revolution’.
Duby’s synthesis of institutional categories into a narrative of structures promoted
a particular technique of reading the charter evidence: individuals were reduced to
examples of categories, to tokens (as in the legal historians’ ‘John Doe’ and ‘Richard
Roe’), and their significant actions to rules or norms. It thus eliminated the specificity
of the individuals whose names the charters contained; they were interchangeable
with other individuals performing the same acts or belonging to the same category,
and their individual particularity became another variety of the ‘events’ that were to
be banished from historical narratives. As a matter of method, the micro-politics of
social relations was beyond the purview of the social historian, since the individual
and his (or her) actions were not the proper object of study, but only the collective
and the generalised.
So too, and rather surprisingly, neither Duby nor any later workers in the vineyard
of La terre et les hommes ever explored the fundamental question that their source
material—charters—presented. Rather, the answer was assumed by the legal, institutional method itself. Many conveyances in these charter collections are written in
the first person (though, through scribal carelessness or ignorance a certain number
wobble back and forth between first and third person). ‘Notices’ (notitiae) and records 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 encouraged historians to read verbs such as ‘sell’, ‘give’, ‘mortgage’, and nouns such as
mallus, placitum, scabini as technical legal terms referring to a body of law or an
institutional structure that governs their use.
Neither Duby nor his followers spent much effort on a set of prior questions. How
did scribes decide what to pen in these charters? How did they and the people who
paid them imagine those parchments being used? Are references to Roman or Visigothic law in charters (as is the case, for example, in Occitania and Catalonia) a
demonstration that such laws ‘governed’ both their drafting and their uses? That is,
did these charters function in their own age as notarised documents, legally binding
contracts and similar documents function in ours? Were they drawn up with similar
sorts of requirements in mind and with similar potential use in case of dispute or
disagreement? Or did scribes have a much wider choice among the formulae available 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 depends
on how we understand the process of dispute settlement during the centuries before
77
André Marchal, ‘Prise de conscience: Structure et concept de période’, Revue économique, 6 (Nov.
1954), 924, quoted in Stoianovich, French historical method, 106–7.
F.L. Cheyette / Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002) 291–317
317
the legal revival of the later twelfth-century and how the writing and keeping of
charters relates, under those circumstances, to claims of rights. The answers to these
questions must profoundly effect the manner in which we interpret the charters that
these scribes produced. What I have said about the body of documents recording
tenth-century dispute settlements argues that no legal or institutional rules determined
their form. Was this true of other documents as well? And, if so, how are we to
determine what those documents meant to the people who had them made and stored
them in their treasure chests?
Here is a large research programme that remains to be developed. It suggests that
although Duby’s Mâconnais and all the theses on La terre et les hommes that followed its brilliant path have contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of eleventhand twelfth-century Western European society, they have not exhausted the subject.
They have not been the ‘total history’ that their promoters have sometimes claimed
them to be. There is still much to be learned by going back to the documents these
authors have so diligently analysed and asking very different questions.
I firmly believe that Duby himself would have endorsed this last assertion. He
delighted in challenges to received opinion, even though his own reputation made
him in his later years one of the most important creators of received opinion. He
was 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 Mâconnais
and the richness of that historical imagination of which I spoke at the beginning of
this article will deservedly place him in the pantheon of great historians, alongside
such writers as Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga. He, like they, will surely be
remembered (and perhaps even read) long after medieval social history has evolved
in ways that neither Duby, while he was still among us, nor any of us now can
imagine.
Prof. Frederic Cheyette is the author of Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Cornell
Univ. Pr., 2001). He has published numerous articles on medieval social and legal history. When not doing
medieval history he spends his time singing, collecting flowering shrubs, and restoring an eighteenthcentury farmhouse.

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