Les societes meridionales a l'age feodal, Hommage a Pierre Bonnassie, 1999, p. 319-324
On the fief de reprise
Fredric L. CHEYETTE
Ever since Georges Duby demonstrated in his thesis on the MIconnais the
riches that could be extracted from eleventh and twelfth century charters,
these documents have become the principal source for the social history of this
period. Commonly, they have been considered unproblematic witnesses,
directly transmitting the past to us almost without interference ; in the
language of electronic engineering, they are assumed to have a high signal-tonoise ratio ; their changing vocabulary directly reflects the usages in the
ambient society, the actions they embody or report are there, as it were, in the
flesh, unprocessed. Such an assumption is particularly strong when historians
interpret the (c legal B vocabulary of charters, directing their efforts at
ascertaining the exact technical meaning of particular words. In this essay I
will ask whether such an <c assumption of transparency D is always valid,
looking at the terms << alod D and (( fief D and a commonplace transaction in
which both are involved_the so-calledfiefde reprise.
From time to time in cartularies we come across a document or pair of
documents which assert that a person or group of persons have given or sold
their (< alod D to another who in turn has given it back to the donors (vendors)
as a (C fief D. The cartulary of the Guillems of Montpellier is particularly rich in
such documents, and since A. Germain’s edition of that cartulary they have
been interpreted as stages in the process by which the lords of Montpellier
extended their power over independent castellans in the countryside,
subjecting those castellans to higher lordship, getting them to recognize that
they held their castles in fief and were obligated to serve for them rather than
holding those castles N in full right B free of all obligations.1
Here is one such story.
I
1
1
So, most recently, S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, Oxford Univ. Pr., New York, 1994, pp. 260263 and passim.
320
In 1139, Rixendis, widow of Pons Fulco of Popian, along with her son
William u gave >s William VI of Montpellier everything they had in the castle
of Pignan, including its lordship and command (<( tradimus...tofum quad
habemus... in seniorivo seu mandamento ipsius cask )b), and receiv’
received it back in
(4
and
in
[William
VI’s]
service
and
fidelity
“;
Rixendis
had this castle, she
fief
said, by succession to her brother Willian+. The scribe who drew up this
particular two-way conveyance did not use the word c< alod sj for what
Rixendis was giving, but that word often appears in other conveyances of the
same kind. Taken in isolation the document seems to match the standard
interpretation. When we place it in the context of other documents concerning
Pignan, however, we see something very different.
Already twenty-five years earlier, in 1114, Peter William c( called Laige
Mant, )) the father of Rixendis and son of an earlier Rixendis had given the
castle of Pignan ad alodium to William V of Montpellier, receiving 500 sol.
Melg. from William’s wife Ermessendis, plus 40 sol. << for my [i.e. Peter
William’s] love )s (pro d&o mea). In 1133, six years before the later Rixendis’s
gift, her son Raimond gave all he had in Pignan c< as my uncle William and my
ancestors held it D to William VI per alodiumfranc, receiving it back in fief along
with 1500 sol. Melg. As Claudie Amado has shown, this is the same family
line, and we can follow it at Pignan through the rest of the century. We could
hypothesize a complex family division of this castle, whose parts the lords of
Montpellier only slowly absorbed into their lordship. That would save the
idea that with each conveyance some << full rights >a (alods), though not the
entire castle, were converted into fiefs. But it would be just as easy to
hypothesize that whenever a new individual succeeded to the headship of the
family -Laige Infant, then William, then Rixendis’s eldest son Raimond, then
(on his death?) Rixendis herself- he or she negotiated a new exchange with
the lord of Montpellier, <t giving b> the castle and receiving it back in fief,
sometimes along with a sum of money, the exchange fixing in the land- and
in everyone’s memory- the service and fidelity and the rights to the castle
that would ensue. If so, the same thing most probably happened when an heir
succeeded to the lordship of Montpelliers.
That expectation, indeed, is what the rough Latin of Laige Infant’s gift to
William V announces: t< If William of Montpellier has not devised (dividebat)
this castle [by will], then I give it to his eldest son ; if his eldest son has died
(moreretur) without heir, then I give it to his second son bp, and so forth, with
more hypotheses following. This could be read as nothing more than a way to ,
assure the donor’s continuing loyalty to the dynasty, a complement to the
2
3
On the fief de reprise
Fred& L. CHEYETIE
A. Gennain, Liber instrumentonun memorialium: cartulaire des Guilkms de Montpellier, SocSt6
arch6ologique de Montpellier, 1884 [hereafter LIM], no 421. On this family see C. Duhamel
Amado, La famille aristocratique languedocienne, Thhe de doctorat, Universitb de Paris IV,
1994, T. 2, p. 299, n. 24.
LIM, no. 402-407. Rixendis’s son William is still around to give an oath of fidelity to
William VII in 1156 : no 410.
321
notice that William’s wife has given 40 sol. to the donor for his love. But
another, and very different, possibility behind this strange sequence of
imperfect indicative and imperfect subjunctive verbs -all regarding future
events (for William V did not die until 1121)-- is that on William’s death Laige
h&nt would give the castle again to William’s sons in the order of succession
that William had already determined. That is the literal meaning of the
sentence ,(when we allow for the scribe’s limited command of Latin tenses),
and there seems no reason to reject it. That is, Laige Infant’s gift ad alodium was
not a once-and-for-all event; no one imagined that it transferred a specific
c< bundle of rights >) from the donor to William and that another, different or
lesser bundle came back as a fief. Laige Infant and his successors would give it
again, just as he did in 1114, and receive it back again, as he did, in fief.
If we turn to the charters for Le Poujet in the same cartulary, such repeated
giving is exactly what we find.
Sometime late in the eleventh century, probably soon after William V
succeeded to the lordship of Montpellier in 1068, a woman named Girondes,
daughter of Adivenia, gave her oath of fidelity to him for this castle.4 A decade
earlier, in 1059, she had divided her lands and rights there among the sons
from her two marriages. Then, three-quarters of a century later, in 1124, her
son Bernard Raimond along with his nephew Raimond Berenger and niece
Girondes, sold the << honor that belonged to [their mother and grandmother]
Girondes D in le Poujet to William V’s widow Ermessendis, and she returned it
to them in fief ; from its description we know it was exactly the same land and
rights that the older Girondes had divided in 1059 and for which she had
sworn fidelity around 10685.
Another grand-daughter of Girondis, Azalais, daughter of Hugh Peiron of
Poujet, was also castellan in this village ; in 1114, as William V was preparing
his expedition to seize Majorca, she and her son swore fidelity for the castle to
him, and ordered her husband to do the sames. When William V died in 1121
leaving the western part of his domains to his second son, William of
Aumelas, Azalais swore fidelity to the young heir. On the death of William of
Aumelas his rights passed to William VI, and in 1132 after Azalais’s husband
died, it was to this lord that the widow and her son gave their c( alod, D
including control of le Poujet for three months each year (<c trado ... III menses
quos annuatim per alodium... cum toto alio alodio js), receiving it back in fief and
again swearing fidelity for it’. Here again, the chance copying of documents
into the Montpellier cartulary lets us see in action the repeated process laid out
by Laige Infant in his gift to William V. Neither Azalais nor Girondes’s
4
5
6
7
For the families of le Poujet see Amado, Famille aristocratique, T. 2, pp. 274-83.
LIM, no 482,484,485,499.
NE mamiam te, Guilelm Assalid, quef Ii juts et omenesc e seruizi l’en jiis~ : L&I, no 500.
LIM, no 489-491,500-503.
Fredric L. CHEYETTE
On the fief de reprise
descendants were independent castellans XC converting N their alods into fiefs ;
at the time of the surviving (< gifts )), they and their family were already in the
fidelity of the lords of Montpellier for the castles they were << giving )>, and had
been so, perhaps, for generations. The alods they were giving were already
fiefs.
Whatever (< alod )> meant, when a lord bought a castle or received it as a
gift it did not necessarily mean he was gaining a lordship he did not have
before, no matter what appears to us to be the (( legal >> language of the
conveyance. We need only read the charter drawn up in 1158 when two
Aimerys of Barbaira, father and son, sold to William VII of Montpellier N the
entire honor and all the rights which Dalmacius of Castries had or should
have had in the castle of Castles and its territory, in lordship, towers, houses,
fortifications, fields, pastures, woods, [etc.], all of which we freely and entirely
sell to you )). All the latest vocabulary from the Montpellier law school is
deployed in this text, and it would seem as though this is the moment when
the lords of Montpellier finally acquired this important castle so near their
city. It would seem so were it not for all the other documents concerning
Castries that appear in the Montpellier cartulary.
From father to son and uncle to nephew over five generations we can
follow the lordship of this castle in the family <c of Castries )s until it falls to an
heiress, Ermessendis, whose aunt and distant cousin, represented by their
husbands and a son, are the other possible claimants8. Ermessendis was
married to William VII’s brother, William of Tortosa, and left the castle to him
when she died in childbirth in 1157. Soon thereafter he joined the Templars
and headed off to the Holy Land, leaving Castries and the rest of his
inheritance to his older brother, now sole lord of Montpellier. William W thus
became lord of Castries. In the mid-114Os, however, when Ermessendis was
still a child, her father, Dalmace of Castries, had specified that if all his
children were to die (presumably meaning c( without heirs >)) the castle of
Castries was to pass to his nephew, Aimery of Barbaira, the son of his sister
Galberga. It was these rights that William VII purchased in 1158 ; though the
document is drawn up as a sale, he was paying the Aimerys not to bother him
with the claims they might push on the basis of Dalmace’s oral last will (and
perhaps to bind more closely to himself a family that had long served the
Trencavels). And indeed at the same time, Gaucelm of Claret, husband of
Ermessendis’s distant cousin Agnes, agreed to forego his claims to the castles.
If the sale by the Aimerys of Barbaira was the only document in the Castries
file to survive we would know nothing of all these complications. Misled by
its seemingly unimpeachable legal language would we not take it at face
value ?
These are not the only complications in the Castries file to call the literal
interpretation of twelfth-century legal language into question. Dalmace of
Castries, lord of the castle in the years around 1100, was at least the third
generation of his family to control it. Yet two charters of about that time record
gifts of the castle (( ad alode sb to him by men who are probably his females, both
donations followed by grants of fief, both classicalfiefs de repriselo. The more
complex of these is actually a double gift, first from Raimond (t son of Viola >>
and his wife Garsendis << daughter of Froiles bb to their sons, and then from
those sons to Dalmace. The donors are otherwise unidentifiableii.
How shall we interpret their donations ? As extensions of Dalmace’s
castellany (the interpretation of A. Germain, the editor of the Guillem
cartulary) ? Why then the two-stage gift ? Why, above all, the generality in
describing what is given : (( [Upsum castellum... et muros, et quod est intus
muros D in one, N castellum.. et ipsas fortezas que ibi sunt )> in the other ? It is more
plausible to imagine these as the same ritual (< transfers )> we have seen at
Pignan and Le Poujet, but here further down the caste&n hierarchy, those
actually manning the castle <c giving )) it to their lord N as alod >> and receiving
it back in fief as their predecessors had done. The occasion here was the
departure of Dalmace’s father, Eliziar, and uncle, Rostagnus, on crusade12. It is
a novel interpretation, to be sure, but one that more fully explains the
peculiarities of the text.
322
8
9
For the complex genealogy of this family see C. Amado, Famille aristocratique, T. 2, pp. 37,41.
LIM, no 348-400. Dalmacius’s testament : no 394. Ermessendis’s testament : no 395. Gift to
William VII : no 397. Sale by Aimery of Barbaira : no 400.
323
These examples have all come from the region of Montpellier, but the
practice was not peculiar to the lords of that city and its immediate
countryside. The evidence is just as clear to the west, in the lands ruled by the
Trencavels : up in the mountains of Lacatme at the stronghold of !%nnCgats, at
Laure in the Aude plain, at Termes in the Corbieresis.
10
11
12
13
L&l, no 363,383.363 is undated, but the oath of fidelity of one witness to this Dalmace is
recorded in LIM, no 382, another also witnesses no 383, which is dated 1095, and a third is
recorded as a fief holder of this Dalmace in no 373.
Bernard Archarius of LIM, no 363 could be one of the achildren of William Alqueribr or of
Hugo Alquerii among the&ales of Dalmace (n” 373). All might be related to the Alquier of
Comeilhan : C. Amado, Famille aristouatique, T. 2, p. 72 ff. The mother of Garsendis in no 383
is probably the same Froilis who received an oath of fidelity for Villeneuve (-lezMaguelone?) at an earlier date : no 377.
Dalmace first appears as lord of Castries in 1096 ; his uncle’s departure on crusade is implied
in LIM, no 361, placing all the undated exchanges between uncle and nephew at that time : no
358,359,373. See also C. Amado, Famille aristocratique, T. 2, p. 36, n. 12 for Dalmace’s brother
Elisiar.
Senegats : Frotarius, son of Estafana and Ermengaud Ulela, son of Ermenvig gave the
stronghold of S6negats to the Trencavel viscount Bernard Ato in 1124 and received them
back in fief, and their descendants, Frotarius of St Sever and Bernard of Combret and his
wife, gave &same to Bernard Ato’s son Roger in 1144 (Societe archeologique de
Montpellier, ms. 10: Cartulaire des Trencavels, fol. 13). Laure : gift by William <<viscount of
Minerve, to his son William and then by the son to Raimond Trencavel and his son,
Cl. Devic and J. Vaissete, Histoire g&&ale de Languedoc vol. 5 (Toulouse, Privat, 1875), col.
I
324
Fredric L. cZHEYETTE
What we are witnessing in the j?.$de reprise, then, is a ritual of succession.
When an heir or heiress succeeded to a castle or the overlord succeeded to his
or her lordship, more was required than the renewal of the oath of fidelity ;
there had first to be the giving and giving back. Thefief& reprise is but another
variant of the gift [don] and countergift [guerredon] so common to that same
world, the repeated ground of so many a chanson de geste and twelfthcentury romance. To record that exchange, the scribes had only their standard
formulae derived at great distance from the very different world of Antiquity.
Those formulae were made to record the transfer of property, and so that is
what they made the exchange look like. But in fact the person who received
the gift did not gain something he did not have before, nor was the person
who gave it reduced in wealth or status. How, then, should we understand the
terms u ad alodcm )a and u ad jkvum B ? Adverbially, I would suggest, rather
than substantively. They do not name a bundles of rights D but rather ivays of
giving. To give Q ad aiodem B was to hold nothing back ; to give (t nd wrn >B
was to create a perman ent tie. As follower and lord handed back and forth the
same castle, they fixed in the landscape the paired and inseparable values of
fidelity and good lordship ; the one had to be without reserve as the other had
to be for life. What was realized in the exchange was what Laige Infant in 1114
so aptly called C< love )a.
1239 (1161), when oaths of fidelity had been rendered to Raimond’s ancestors for the castle
(including by an earlier William of Minerve) as far back as viscount Bernard Ato (Cart.
Trencavels, fo;. 98., HGL, 5, cols. 910,1066). Termes : WUiam Raimond and his brothers gave
the castle &xt meiius P&us et Olizkus habuerunb to viscountess Cecilia and her sons in
1118, when, decades earlier, Peter and Olivier had rendered oaths for the castle to Cecilia’s
husband Bemard Ato and to his mother, Ennengard (Ca.r~ Trenc. foL 58~ ; HGL, 5, col. 869).