Knights, Lords, and Ladies: In Search of Aristocrats in the Paris Region, 118-122
432
Knights, Lords, and Ladies: In Search of Aristocrats in the Paris Region, 118-122
432Hardcover
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Overview
In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin turned to church charters, royal inventories of fiefs and vassals, aristocratic seals and documents, vernacular texts, and archaeological evidence to create a detailed picture of the transformation of aristocratic life in the areas around Paris during the four decades of Philip Augustus's reign. Working outward from the reconstructed biographies of seventy-five individuals from thirty-three noble families, Baldwin offers a rich description of their domestic lives, their horses and war gear, their tourneys and crusades, their romantic fantasies, and their penances and apprehensions about final judgment.
Knights, Lords, and Ladies argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power and to the wealth of churches and monasteries, but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812251289 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Series: | The Middle Ages Series |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
In Search of Aristocrats
At the beginning of the twelfth century the region around Paris entered history with the reputation for being the land of unruly aristocrats. Entrenched within their castles they were viewed as quarreling among themselves, terrorizing the countryside, harassing churchmen and peasants, pillaging, and committing unspeakable atrocities. There is an immediate explanation for this bad press. It is Suger, the contemporary abbot of Saint-Denis, who wrote a biography of the reigning Capetian monarch, Louis VI (1106-37). In his vivid account he pictured the king riding tirelessly throughout the region, besieging the castles (not always successfully), suppressing the disputes of aristocrats, and pacifying the region. Abetting the anarchy in the background was the unsettling presence of the powerful Anglo-Norman king Henry I, whom the Capetian was unable to defeat in pitched battle. Suger's Vie de Louis VI le Gros therefore has provided the master narrative for the period. Although occasionally exaggerated and infused with a royal perspective, Suger's picture of the region nonetheless is essentially correct in its broad outlines. His themes are supported by contemporary ecclesiastical charters and confirmed by similar reports from contemporary church chroniclers for the neighboring regions. Oderic Vitalis in Normandy, Guibert de Nogent in the Beauvaisis, Galbert de Bruges in Flanders, and William of Malmsebury in England at civil war depicted remarkably comparable disturbances for their regions. In fact, modern historians often depict the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the "Age of Anarchy." Suger himself wrote not only as a spokesman for the Capetian monarchy, but also as a churchman who was sensitive to the endemic depredations against monasteries, beginning with his own Saint-Denis and spreading to other churches throughout the region.
When we return to the Paris region at the end of the twelfth century during the reign of Philip Augustus (1179-1223), however, the picture has changed dramatically both at the higher level of the kingdom as well as at the local level around Paris. At the higher level, Philip Augustus had created the major governmental organs of the Capetian monarchy and replaced the feudal magnates at the royal court with loyal men of lesser rank. Most important, he had taken the duchy of Normandy from the English kings and expelled them to territories south of the Loire. All of these achievements were confirmed with his stunning victories against King John of England and his allies at the battles of La Roche-aux-Moines and Bouvines in 1214. At the local level the major castles were subdued; peace reigned throughout the countryside; the same aristocratic families reappeared, but they acted no longer as brigands but as fideles of the king, at times offering loyal service in his court. This pacification of the Paris region itself, however, had been in process since the time of his grandfather. Louis VI not only reduced the offending castles, but he began to recruit aristocratic families into his entourage. The policy of co-opting the local lords was continued by his son Louis VII, so major progress had already been accomplished before Philip Augustus's accession. The churches and monasteries were now secure from despoliation by the local castellans with the result that the usurpation of land had markedly decreased. Instead, land circulated peacefully and principally through substantial transfers of property and revenues from the aristocracy to churches, all accomplished by the instrument of written charters.
Benefiting from this condition of peace and stasis, the present study proposes an examination of the aristocracy of the Paris region exclusively during the reign of Philip Augustus. It will forgo further attention to previous or later developments that would enable establishing long-term trends. By focusing on the four decades pivoted on the year 1200 (1180-1220), it will compensate for this reduction of time span by attempting to plumb the depths of all the sources available for the period. This will involve relatively little reliance on the chroniclers' accounts and relies instead on large numbers of ecclesiastical charters and frequent statistical analyses of their contents, joined with church obituaries, tombstones, saints' lives, and royal inventories of fiefs and vassals. In addition to these traditional sources largely written in Latin will be the archaeological excavations both of castles and residences as well as of their moats and latrines, the examination of numerous aristocratic seals and of works of history and literature recited, not in Latin, but in the vernacular French, composed for the pleasure of aristocratic audiences. Sacrificing extended chronology and broad geography, this study shall attempt to provide vivid concreteness of detail as well as quantitative analysis for an important area. During the reign of Philip Augustus, Paris was undoubtedly the dynamic center of the Capetian realm, and the local aristocrats contributed not only to Philip Augustus's military victories but also to the creation of the Capetian monarchy that dominated western Europe in the thirteenth century.
À la recherche of aristocrats . . . When called upon, our aristocrats identified themselves by the concrete terms of "knight," "lord," and "lady." (The two or three who qualified used the title of "count.") To designate themselves in the aggregate they did not use the qualification of "noble" (nobilis, noble), which was employed exclusively by the clergy when they addressed the lay aristocracy. "Nobility" as a generic term did not come into common parlance until later in the thirteenth century. The term "aristocrat" (of Greek etymology), however, originated in the late medieval period and is currently employed by historians in a sociological sense to identify the free, dominant class of the medieval period. At the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, our aristocrats would not have understood it; nonetheless we are obliged to use it because we lack alternatives.
Once Upon a Time There Was No Île-de-France
Nor would they have understood the term "Île-de-France." In 1913 when Marc Bloch published a trailblazing monograph on the Île-de-France, he asserted that no one had yet written a history of the region. To justify this bleak observation, he recited a litany of reasons. The name was recent and its geographical limits were never defined. Although the church archives were rich, no one had yet inventoried the unpublished manuscripts, and until modern times the region contained no archives produced by laymen. Undoubtedly Bloch would further agree that the national interests of the king and his capital at Paris have continually overshadowed attention to local affairs. And he concluded that not only has the history never been written, but it should not be written because the region lacks social and political cohesion unlike Champagne or Burgundy. A century after Marc Bloch's appraisal, the history of the Île-de-France has remained unwritten for the medieval period. The present volume is an attempt to meet his challenge for the period from 1180 to 1220, a period that roughly corresponds to the reign of Philip II Augustus.
Personal Choices
Like most historical enterprises, studies of medieval local aristocracies are conditioned by two underlying sets of criteria, the personal choices of the researcher and the availability of sources. My personal choices affect the present project both longitudinally in time and laterally in space. Recent and successful studies of the aristocracies in medieval France such as those of the Mâconnais, the Vendômois, Anjou, and Champagne have extended their scope over more than a century to explain change in society over time. This approach became less feasible for me in 2006 with the appearance of Nicolas Civel's noteworthy study La Fleur de France: Les Seigneurs d'Île-de-France au XIIe siècle. Concentrating primarily on the first half of the twelfth century, he has written a penetrating examination of seigneurial society in the Île-de-France and has raised many of the questions that I had already posed for the period of Philip Augustus. Drawing primarily on the chronicles and charter sources from the twelfth century, he has come close to exhausting the available evidence. Since I could hardly hope to improve on his work, I have gladly welcomed his study as a benefit that freed me to limit my study to the later period of 1180 to 1220. Eschewing the longitudinal approach, therefore, I have made a personal choice to limit my research to a brief half century comprising little more than two or three generations conveniently delimited by the reign of Philip Augustus. It is the period with which I am most familiar and constitutes a pendant to a previous study, Paris, 1200, which was likewise focused tightly in time and place. Making a virtue of this restriction I propose a sharply focused snapshot of the period—hopefully with the precision of MRI imaging—that offers more in detail than in broad scope in pursuit of evolving trends.
Like Bloch I have sought to limit my study spatially to the region around Paris, but I have abstained from the modern terms Île-de-France or Francilien, which, as Bloch pointed out, were not known in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is nonetheless true that in the early Middle Ages the West Franks had long distinguished a small Francia that was centered on Paris from a large Francia that encompassed the western half of the empire. For example, in my period, Pierre the Chanter, the celebrated Parisian theologian, echoed this distinction when he noted in glossing the Bible that just as there was a particular Judea as distinct from a general Judea in the Holy Land, there is also "a particular francia around Paris and a general francia." Moreover, the smaller category of "castellany of Paris" that emerged in thirteenth-century royal administration is too limited, but the boundaries of the royal domain, that is, land benefiting the king directly, is too large and fluid because it expanded exponentially during Philip's reign, increasing to two to three times its former size. To recreate an Île-de-France for my period, therefore, I have found it most useful to set the boundaries arbitrarily by juxtaposing two sets of sources: two surveys of fief-holders ordered by Philip Augustus and the corresponding concentration of ecclesiastical cartularies. Defined by feudal surveys and church cartularies, the limits of this territory can be best envisaged in a map (Map 1). It is likewise my personal choice to remain as rigorously within the temporal and spatial limits as possible. All material before and especially after my period has been considered anachronistic, and all witnesses have been restricted as much as possible to within the geographic boundaries, although admittedly I have been occasionally tempted to include sources close to these boundaries in order to enrich the narrative with testimony unavailable within my prescribed limits. A final, but not innocent, choice has been to exclude peasants. I fully recognize the value of treating the aristocracy in symbiosis with their unfree tenants, but this option was not possible within the constraints of the present research.
Sources Are Indispensable . . . Churchmen Have Seized the Microphone
Personal choices are arbitrary, but credible sources are supremely important for shaping any regional study. Professional historians, to be sure, are fully aware of this condition, but readers of history may not always realize how much the results of research are shaped by the sources. The conclusions attained are usually determined by the nature of the sources from which they are drawn. We shall see that the sources in Latin and the vernacular produced, in fact, perspectives that were remarkably different. Careful consideration of the nature and properties of sources, therefore, is essential to evaluating the conclusions of regional studies. Each category of sources will be introduced briefly here but will be treated in greater depth for their specifics when they become relevant to the discussion. There is no doubt, however, that churchmen, both clerics and monks, contributed by far the greatest quantity of documentation on the aristocracy of the Paris region, as they did for most of the early and central Middle Ages in western Europe.
Around 1200 the local chronicles were not as numerous or as influential as they were at the beginning of the century, Suger's epoch, but the two most important for the Paris region were written by ecclesiastics like Suger in the service of the king. Rigord of Saint-Denis, who wrote the Gesta Philippi Augusti in Latin prose, was both a doctor of medicine and a monk at Saint-Denis, as well as the king's chronicler. His status as a royal historian is not entirely clear, but he did have access to the king's archives, and his work was later incorporated into the official history of the monarchy written by the monks of Saint-Denis. The continuation of Rigord's Gesta, likewise in Latin prose, was undertaken by Guillaume le Breton who was a royal cleric, active at the court, chaplain of the king, and the first "official" historian of the Capetian dynasty. Guillaume also composed a second work. As chaplain he witnessed the battle of Bouvines at first hand; Philip's victory inspired him to redraft the Gesta Philippi into verse as the Philippidos, a grandiloquent tribute to the king. His works too were incorporated into the chronicles of Saint-Denis. Rigord and Guillaume were both partial to the interests of their patron and expressed a royal perspective, but as ecclesiastics their Latin histories likewise echoed the preoccupations of churchmen.
Writing in Latin, churchmen not only composed the major chronicles, but, more important, they generated an enormous quantity of charters in behalf of their churches, as well as other documents such as obituaries and saints' lives. For strategic reasons I have chosen not to consult the originals of the charters deposited in the local archives. Not only would this have been onerous, it was also not altogether necessary. In the second half of the thirteenth century the individual charters were copied into codices called cartularies in which clerics and monks preserved those charters that were of greatest interest to them. The cartularies therefore preserve more charters than have survived separately, but they naturally retained those of greatest interest to their compilers. More than sixty extant cartularies from the region have generated well over two thousand charters that contained transactions pertaining directly to the local aristocracy. From thirty-two of the most substantial of these cartularies I have selected a sample of 1,729 charters that contain transactions between churches and aristocrats. After the major issues had become clear, I conducted a second and more refined survey of a sample of 610 charters that dealt in greater detail with those individuals I had identified for particular attention.
In addition to the massive amount of documentation preserved in cartularies, the churches and monasteries likewise compiled obituaries consisting of names of persons of interest to the religious community with the dates of their deaths and a notice of their gifts to the church. One of the major purposes of these compilations was to keep record of the donors to the church so that prayers could be offered for their souls during the daily celebrations of the liturgy. Although most of the inscribed names were clerical or monastic, lay aristocrats were also included, especially when they had been generous in their giving. Seven of these obituaries are available from the Paris region. The influence of these obituaries was further expanded through the creation of mortuary rolls that circulated throughout the region bearing the names of the donor for whose soul the recipients of the roll were invited to offer prayers. A striking example of this practice is found in the roll that was circulated for Guillaume des Barres, perhaps the most celebrated knight of his day.
Finally, two saints who were active within the temporal and spatial limits of my study were canonized for their sanctity, which, in turn, generated saints' lives (vitae) that mirrored the environment in which they lived. Since in this period a saint was invariably born to an aristocratic family, the lives of Thibaut de Marly and Jean de Montmirail deal with their aristocratic milieu as well as with their pious exploits. Thibaut originated from one of the leading aristocratic families to the southwest of Paris, but Jean was from a distinguished family not far away, within the western borders of Champagne. I have felt justified to include him not only because of his unusual life but also because of his close connections to the Paris region. He was raised at the royal court, served the king loyally in the Norman wars, and was ceremoniously buried at the Cistercian abbey of Longpont within the limits of my region.
The overwhelming importance of local churches for generating the basic sources for writing regional histories has often encouraged French historians to devote separate chapters to the leading monasteries of the region. The studies of the aristocracies in the Vendômois, Haute-Marne, and now the Île-de-France, for example, have designated special chapters to the leading churches of the region. Even Georges Duby's pioneering study of the Mâconnais acknowledged that the local society could not have been analyzed without the charters produced by the great abbey of Cluny. Following the fashion of American historians, however, I have not attempted such a preliminary historiography. Instead of focusing on the leading churches of the region, I have assembled charters from an array of churches and monasteries—some prominent and many not—with the purpose of subjecting them to statistical analysis. In doing so, I have drawn on a two-part statistical study of the 1,729 charters in ecclesiastical archives. In the present work I have made use of the data published in these two articles, occasionally summarizing conclusions previously presented. Nonetheless, the frequent presence of tables of statistics will underline the quantitative nature of this study.
All of the ecclesiastical documents were drafted in Latin, the official language of the church, in which clerics and most monks were expected to be competent. As such, a churchman was considered to be litteratus, that is, proficient in Latin. A layman, however, was illiteratus, or not expected to know Latin, and this included most aristocrats who were thereby forced to rely on clerics to write the charters that were issued in their names. Through the monopoly of the Latin language, therefore, churchmen produced the vast majority of the documentation available for this study and thereby adapted it to their particular interests. Not only is this apparent in the saints' lives and obituaries, but also in the available chronicles, even those composed for the king, for they were likewise composed by clerics. It is especially pertinent to the thousands of charters that were issued in the names of aristocrats. Undoubtedly there were preliminary discussions between the aristocrat and the churchman before an agreement was reached, but it was a cleric or monk who drafted the text in Latin and then selected those charters that would be preserved in the church's archives or copied into a cartulary according to his church's interests. Those that survived were therefore invariably favorable to the church.
The contents of these charters confirm this ecclesiastical bias. The vast majority of the surviving charters involve the transfer of property from an aristocrat to the church by gift, sale, gift-countergift, exchange, or pledge, for which the former received some form of compensation in roughly a third of the transactions (see Table 2). Of the 14 percent of charters that detailed litigation between the aristocrat and the church, nearly all naturally reported settlements favorable to the church. Altogether, the charters represent a massive transfer of property to the church. Further, although the charters were issued in the name of an aristocrat, many concerns that were important to him were virtually absent: hunting, tournaments, castle-guard, warfare, even his many horses. And finally, the geographic distribution of ecclesiastical documentation, particularly the charters, was based on the implantation of churches and monasteries which did not necessarily correspond to the distribution of the aristocracy. Although some families, like the counts of Beaumont, founded religious houses that served them as writing bureaus and archives, this was not often the case. Since the founding of churches was not systematic and did not always follow aristocratic patronage, there could be, as the map shows, areas that were devoid of ecclesiastical archives and cartularies. The coverage of aristocratic families in the charters is therefore necessarily sporadic, if not haphazard; some received full attention and others were omitted.
As churchmen, clerics and monks were subject to the regime of canon law that was enforced in the courts of the diocese and of the papacy. Canon law was founded on biblical passages, opinions of the church fathers, the decrees of church councils, and, most recently, decretals of popes. By the mid-twelfth century these legal materials were collected and codified by a monk named Gratian in a book called the Decretum, which then inspired a group of masters at Bologna to create the legal system of canon law. Ecclesiastical law was also studied at Paris by the end of the twelfth century but not as intensively as at Bologna. The treatises of the Parisian masters like Pierre the Breton, for example, were not as influential as those of masters at Bologna, such as Bernard of Pavia. Bernard was the first to collect the recent decretals of the popes in a separate volume, and between 1191 and 1198 he composed a brief textbook on canon law entitled the Summa decretalium. Although his Summa was written in Bologna, it circulated widely in numerous manuscripts that were also available to the Parisian canonists. It was a particularly useful text in assembling and summarizing the basic principles of canon law that were in effect at the time. Nonetheless, it is nearly impossible to judge how well the bishops, clerics, abbots, and monks of the Paris region were instructed in the rules of canon law to which they were subject in principle. None has left evidence that he studied the subject either at Bologna or Paris. In the ecclesiastical documentation available to this study, their formation in canon law can therefore only be judged through their actions. To compensate for this lacuna, however, I have introduced the opinions of Bernard of Pavia's Summa decretalium whenever they were relevant to the issues involved. From this comparison it will appear for the most part that the ecclesiastics of the Paris region were, in fact, aware of the broad principles of canon law whatever their legal training.
King Philip Augustus, the Inescapable Neighbor
In addition to the numerous churches and monasteries, the region harbored the king at Paris and his royal residences that surrounded it. Philip Augustus enclosed his capital with walls to protect the organs of government that he had recently created. The archives, in particular, were installed there after 1194. They collected and preserved his incoming correspondence in a building later known as the Trésor des Chartes. A decade after their installation the royal chancery began compiling books, called "registers," which resembled the ecclesiastical cartularies and recopied not only incoming and outgoing correspondence but also abundant information useful for governing the kingdom. The initial volume (called Register A) was begun in 1204 and continued until 1212, when it was superseded by a second volume (named Register C), which copied the contents of the first and added material until 1220 when it, in turn, was replaced by a third (Register E) which continued through the reign of Louis VIII and into that of Louis IX. Among the information useful for governing the kingdom, the registers produced lists of the chief personages of the realm that included bishops, dukes, counts, barons, castellans, and knights (vavassores). Another list recorded the bannerets, or those who carried a banner and led companies of knights into battle, all grouped according to region. Of particular importance to my study were the royal inventories of fiefs and vassals. Philip Augustus was not the first to compile these surveys but followed the example of the Anglo-Norman kings and the counts of Champagne. After Philip took possession of Caen in Normandy in 1204, his chancery copied the earliest of the Norman inventories into the French registers. Philip completed this inventory of the fiefs and vassals for the duchy and then continued the survey into the newly acquired Vermandois and Vexin and also into the lands surrounding Paris. Two of these surveys are of particular importance for the aristocracy of the Paris region. The first, which may be called the Nomina militum, recorded those knights who possessed annual incomes of sixty livres or more and whether or not they owed homage to the king. Grouping them in districts called castellanies, it covered the lands closest to Paris. The second, entitled Scripta de feodis, followed the Norman pattern of recording fiefs and homage but added further questions of military service and landed resources. Thus in eighteen castellanies the aristocracy was systematically surveyed around Paris. Although both sets of inventories were incomplete, omitted territories, and occasionally overlapped, I have nonetheless found them useful for defining the boundaries of my study. These feudal inventories compiled for the king offer three important advantages. Not only do they provide information about the aristocracy unavailable elsewhere, but this information was gathered relatively free of the ecclesiastical bias of the cartularies. Furthermore, unlike the cartularies, which were distributed sporadically, the royal surveys were undertaken rigorously and systematically. If their bias was not aristocratic but royal, they nonetheless provide an escape from the shadow of ecclesiastical documentation.
Aristocratic Archives and Landbooks
If the church cartulary and the royal register embodied the interests of ecclesiastics and the king respectively, the aristocrats of the Paris region possessed few comparable archives or books to serve their own interests. The first archives of lay lords appeared in Picardy in northern France in the second half of the thirteenth century. However, in the region around Paris in our period, the counts at Beaumont-sur-Oise collected their charters at their church of Saint-Léonor. These charters survive because they were incorporated into the royal archives in 1223 when the county escheated to the crown.
Archives assemble documents that not only treat the lord's personal interests but also contain transactions that deal with other lords. But the aristocrat was chiefly a landholder who exploited his lands to support himself. To facilitate this task he needed landbooks to record his holdings. Landbooks had first appeared in Carolingian times, but they did not become common in France until the second half of the thirteenth century. The first aristocratic landbook to reappear in northern France was compiled by Pierre du Thillay who came from the Croult valley north of Paris and to the west of Roissy. Pierre styled himself as "knight and lord," but his chief occupation was in the king's service. First appearing in 1200 as prévôt of Paris, he reappeared in 1202 at Orléans where he collaborated with the bailli Guillaume de la Chapelle, but his most permanent post was at Caen in Normandy where he was royal bailli from 1205 for at least two decades. Approaching retirement, he drew up a landbook in 1219-20 that included not only the thirteen properties that the king gave him in Normandy but also three ancestral properties to the north of Paris. It is a small volume of thirty-one folios that has remained in the archives of the Hôtel-Dieu at Gonesse to this day.
Such landbooks were not unknown among monasteries, particularly in Normandy, as, for example, at the abbey of the Saint-Trinité de Caen at the end of the twelfth century. In the Paris region the Cistercians at Val-Notre-Dame to the northwest of Le Thillay devoted six pages of their cartulary in the 1190s to recording their holdings at Taverny and Montmorency. The Cistercians at Chaalis drew up a cadastre for their grange at Vaulerent located nearby in the Croult valley two decades after Pierre's compilation. Around 1206 the clerics in Philip Augustus's chancery included in the registers a survey called a census that listed the revenues or rents (cens) from selected lands in the royal domain. In Normandy the landbooks have been called "customals" or "surveys"; around Paris they were known as censiers because they focused on the cens, which was a land rent. As a landbook, Pierre du Thillay's volume essentially compiled data on the extent of his land and revenues. Since he was well established at Caen when it was compiled, his landbook generally follows the Norman format. After noting the size of the land, it turned to the revenues—money rents, usually called cens, and produce in kind (regarda), which included grain (wheat, oats, and barley), loaves of bread, capons, hens, geese, and eggs. Its significance lies in that it is the first of its kind composed for a nonroyal layman and that it contained three chapters devoted to Gonesse, Tessonville, and Sarcelles at the heart of the Paris region. Although miniscule in size, it offers a momentary glimpse into what constituted the landed wealth of a minor aristocrat of the Paris region.
The Aristocrat Imposes His Seal
With the absence of archives and paucity of landbooks, how did the aristocrats represent themselves and their interests apart from ecclesiastical and royal documentation? It may come as a surprise that the earliest device was the wax seal that they attached to their charters. From early times the charters composed in Latin that were issued in the name of aristocrats and collected by churchmen were authenticated by witnesses who were named at the end of the charter and who testified to the veracity of the text. These witness lists, however, began to disappear at the end of the twelfth century. In their place were seals that were attached to the foot of the charter by cords or strips of parchment. In our period the charter with the appended seal became the standard instrument. The seal had become so mandatory that it was recorded expressly in the charter with the phrase "so that this remains firm and established, I have strengthened the present charter with my seal," and the phrase was retained in the cartulary copy where the seal itself could not be affixed. Composed of wax, many of the seals have disintegrated and disappeared from the original charters, but their presence was constantly recalled in the text. Surviving evidence shows that the usage of seals virtually exploded at the turn of the century passing from a handful to thousands of cases. Most knights and many ladies possessed their own seals. This represented a substantial economic outlay because the seal was formed by the impression of wax on a matrix that was composed usually of bronze or iron and required the intricate and doubtlessly expensive skill of an artisan.
Seals served a double purpose: they authenticated documents and they represented the person who possessed the seal. As authenticators of documents, they served not to enhance the owner's image but to constrain him. With his seal the owner guaranteed that he would perform the actions detailed in the charter. By the seal, therefore, churchmen compelled the aristocrat's compliance to the terms of the charter. Beyond an instrument of constraint, however, it also provided a mode of self-representation. We shall explore in later chapters how lords and knights expressed themselves individually and collectively by means of the legends, images, and heraldry on their seals.
Vernacular French, the Aristocrat's Voice
Measuring only fifty to seventy millimeters in diameter, the seal was indeed a minute witness to aristocratic self-identity. The broader entrance into his world was his language. I keep emphasizing that the great majority of records pertaining to the aristocracy were produced in Latin for the church and the king. As illiteratus the knight did not participate directly in this medium of expression. His language, of course, was vernacular French, which he spoke and heard every day. Until the twelfth century very little was written in vernacular French that has survived, but during the second half of the century laymen appeared who read the vernacular and wrote in the vernacular, thus producing the chevalier lettré, or literate knight. By 1200 a considerable body of vernacular literature had come into existence in France. Little of this literary production, however, occurred at Paris or in its immediate surroundings for reasons that remain obscure. Philip Augustus's open hostility to the profession of jongleurs perhaps contributed to this absence, but in any event, the main centers of vernacular literary production were clearly located not in Paris but in Normandy, Flanders, and, most important, in Champagne where prolific and influential writers such as Chrétien de Troyes and Jean Renart flourished. Lacking vernacular voices in my chosen place and time, I have scoured the frontiers of the Paris region to identify authors who, although residing on the perimeters, had connections with Paris and were acquainted with the region. This recruitment has produced a handful of vernacular lay authors, namely, the author of the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, Gerbert de Montreuil, Gace Brulé, the Châtelain de Coucy, and Raoul de Hodenc, to whom I have added two monks, Thibaut de Marly and Hélinand de Froidmont, who likewise wrote in the vernacular.
While history by and large was composed in Latin, a notable exception appears in the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, which was commissioned in the 1220s by one of the leading baronial families of England to recount the biography of their scion, Guillaume le Maréchal, earl of Pembroke, who rose from being a simple knight to become a great baron and regent of the realm. That Guillaume was an English baron would disqualify him for my purposes except that from boyhood he was raised in Normandy and as a young man he participated in the warfare and tournaments in the neighborhood of Paris from the 1180s to 1204 when Philip Augustus expelled the English from northern France. His biography therefore remains one of the most detailed and accurate histories of northern and western France at the end of the century.
At the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the county of Champagne was the undisputed center of vernacular romance, featuring, among many, two influential authors, Chrétien de Troyes and Jean Renart. While Chrétien's five celebrated romances framed the fictional world of King Arthur and thereby set the pattern for romance, the dominating genre of literature for the next century, Jean Renart who followed him closely in time established a new genre of romance. Although his narratives were entirely fictional like Chrétien's, he placed his Roman de la Rose (ca. 1209) in a setting that was historically precise and accurate. By adding "reality effects" (effets de réel), that is, details and episodes from actual life, he enhanced the realism of his narrative. For example, although the heroes of his romances were entirely fictional, the secondary characters were drawn from historical contemporaries whom the audience could recognize. Although Jean Renart was well acquainted with the Parisian region, he set his stories on the borders of the kingdom and in the German Empire. His principal hero in the Rose, for example, was not a French king, but a German emperor.
Jean found a close imitator in Gerbert de Montreuil who chose another flower, the Roman de la Violette (1225-31). From Montreuil located on the northern coast of the county of Ponthieu, Gerbert dedicated his Violette to Marie, countess of Ponthieu (d. 1251), who was married to a baron of the Paris region, Simon de Dammartin. Like Jean Renart in the Rose, Gerbert eschews Arthurian mythology in the Violette. His fine story, he proclaims, "is not about the Round Table, nor of King Arthur and his men" (vv. 34-35). Although he favors Chrétien's romance style more than his mentor Jean Renart (in addition to the Violette, Gerbert also wrote a sequel to Chrétien's Conte du Graal), Gerbert follows Jean in adopting the crucial technique of the effet de réel by naming actual geographic settings and identifiable historical personages. At the same time, despite these affinities with Jean Renart, Gerbert makes a decisive break with Jean's politics by shifting the stage from the empire to the Capetian heartland, from the fictional Emperor Conrad of the Rose to the historical King Louis VIII, Philip Augustus's son. If the reality effects of geography and historical personages were calculated to capture the attention of an aristocratic audience around Paris, Gerbert's work also continued to exploit the fictional characteristics of Chrétien de Troyes's romances. In a territory that was impoverished for lack of vernacular writing, I have therefore found the Roman de la Violette to be useful in sketching the ideals, dreams, and fantasies of the aristocrats surrounding Paris.
Gerbert de Montreuil shared one further innovation with Jean Renart. In his prologue to the Rose, Jean drew attention to the songs in his story: "For just as one puts red dye in cloth so that it will be admired and valued, so [the author] has added songs and melodies in this roman de la Rose, which is a novel thing" (Rose, vv. 8-12). Once again Gerbert echoes Jean: "Now I shall begin a work of the Roman de la Violette. You will hear many courtly songs before the end of the story" (Violette, vv. 44-47). In addition to telling charming stories, therefore, both romances were transformed, in fact, into anthologies of lyrics popular at the time. Jean included forty-eight in the Rose; Gerbert, forty-four in the Violette. Moreover, both proclaim that the lyrics were to be both read and sung, therefore transforming their romances into musical comedies in which music was interlaced with narrative. The lyrical insertions thereby perform the role of the effet de réel by reminding the audience of the songs that were popular in their day.
The songs anthologized by the two romances covered the whole repertoire of lyrics available at the turn of the twelfth century, but the most frequently cited (seven lyrics) were composed by the best known of all trouvères, Gace Brulé. As a songwriter, Gace's output was prodigious. By the end of the thirteenth century the books of songs (chansonniers) had collected over eighty of his poems and supplied the music for more than sixty, a record that placed him above all contemporary trouvères. As a historical personage, however, his figure is shadowy, and the information that he supplied about himself is oblique. One of his songs was placed in Brittany but suggested nostalgia for Champagne. Another suggests that he came from a place called Nanteuil, a common place-name. Others mention friendships with the counts of Brittany and Blois, as well as the countess of Champagne. We are now aware of two other patrons whom he does not mention. The registers of Philip Augustus's chancery recorded that he received an annual fief-rente of twenty-four livres from the prévôté of Mantes, and the household accounts of Prince Louis from the year 1213 recorded that he received another ten livres, also from Mantes. Moreover, one charter surviving from 1212 states that he held land at Groslières not far from Dreux to the west of Paris. Although literary historians have been inclined to include Gace within Chrétien de Troyes's Champenois orbit, there is independent evidence that he also enjoyed Capetian patronage from the vicinity of Paris.
Closely allied to Gace was another trouvère, the Châtelain de Coucy, who was particularly known for his chansons de croisade. Unlike Gace, he was well attested in the historical documents of the Paris region. A final but short text, the Roman des Eles, composed around 1210 for the aristocracy's instruction, is also drawn from the periphery of our region. Despite its title it was not a roman in Chrétien's sense but a didactic poem teaching the virtues of knighthood. It was organized around the schematic figure of a bird called prowess (proesce) with two wings—on the right side, largess (larguesce); and on the left, courtesy (cortoisie); each possessing seven feathers. The author identifies himself as Raoul de Hodenc, which is most likely the Hodenc-en-Bray in the Beauvaisis to the north of Paris.
The above writers were laymen writing for lay aristocratic audiences in their own tongue, but, as we have seen, lay aristocratic families supplied most of the clerics and monks of the neighboring churches and monasteries. While all clerics and most monks were required to obtain proficiency in Latin, a few at the turn of the century began to write in their maternal language to convey religious instruction to their own class. Because of their aristocratic origins their writings reflected the perspectives of their native milieu. Two in particular, Thibaut de Marly and Hélinand de Froidmont, came from the Paris region or close by. Thibaut de Marly has been occasionally confused with a later homonym, Saint Thibaut of the Cistercian house of Vaux-de-Cernay, who was his great-nephew from the same distinguished family of Montmorency-Marly. The present Thibaut was the uncle of Mathieu de Montmorency, who became royal constable in 1218, and the brother of Hervé, dean of Notre-Dame (1184-92). Dying early in the 1190s, he had been an influential lord from the Paris region for at least two decades before his retirement from the world. Between 1182 and 1189 he wrote a poem of 850 lines, simply entitled Les Vers, devoted to the themes of death and contempt of the world.
Hélinand, a monk at Froidmont in the diocese of Beauvais, was the other Cistercian writer to address the aristocracy directly in their tongue. Originating from a noble Flemish family, Hélinand entered the Cistercian house of Froidmont in the Beauvaisis around 1190, where he remained until his death sometime between 1223 and 1237. He composed a chronicle, political and moral treatises, and numerous sermons in Latin, but his fame is based chiefly on a vernacular poem, Les Vers de la mort, that was composed between 1190 and 1197, after his monastic conversion. Drawing upon his past as a jongleur, he produced a poem that meditated on death and the abandonment of the world with such vivid imagery that it obtained wide circulation.
Lacking vernacular texts composed well within the Parisian region, I am obliged to draw on texts located at the peripheries. The Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal provides testimony from the life of a historical knight who was active in the region during the opening decades of the reign. The Roman de la Violette, written at the end of our period, offers a romance, a literary genre that sums up what aristocratic audiences expected for entertainment. The lyrics of Gace Brulé and the Châtelain de Coucy offer songs that were most popular with these audiences. Cistercian monks like Thibaut de Marly and Hélinand de Froidmont discoursed in the vernacular tongue on death within their aristocratic milieu. Through the fictions and religious messages of these vernacular texts that spoke directly to aristocratic men and women I shall attempt to penetrate the mental universe of the aristocratic audience and to ascertain the ideals, fantasies, and fears that embellished and darkened the life that they pursued.
The employment of vernacular literature raises an inevitable question that merits at least a word of comment. How can a historical project justify the use of fictional works as sources? To be sure, the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal can be treated as a Latin chronicle, despite its evident differences, but Gerbert de Montreuil, Raoul de Hodenc, and Gace Brulé wrote pure literary fictions. Even the monks Thibaut de Marly and Hélinand composed similar moralizing fictions. A generation ago the response of the historical profession was simple: literary works were excluded from the historical canon because their fictionality per se rendered them unreliable testimony. With the exception of the Histoire and a few other vernacular histories, medieval history was written exclusively from the Latin veritas of the ecclesiastical chroniclers, charters, and royal administrative documents. This strategy was uncontested when applied to the early Middle Ages, but raised difficulties for the end of the twelfth century when vernacular texts established their presence. In the 1970s the separation between history and literature was challenged by a school of the literary profession known as postmodernism. They placed particular emphasis on language, discourse, and text and summed up their approach with the label "the linguistic turn." In their view, the boundary between history and literature dissolved—all writing, history and fiction, was fictional. Writing itself was not transparent. One could not assume that it conveyed truth. Instead, it was considered reflexive, that is, self-absorbed, consisting of writing about writing. We need not rehearse the debates that this school provoked and which have since subsided, but simply observe that the postmodernists did succeed in blurring the traditional boundary between history and literature. The two spheres have now become commensurate and can legitimately interact. My personal position is that fictional literature can furnish historical data, but like all historical documents it must always be interpreted according to context, genre, and authorial strategy. Not only can the vernacular Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal be treated as other Latin chronicles, but romance literature and lyric verse may also be examined for what they reveal about the emotional and affective life of the aristocrat to whom they were addressed. The monks' vernacular writings likewise addressed the concerns of the aristocrats' spiritual lives. The radical differences I have perceived between the Latin world of the ecclesiastics and the vernacular world of the lay authors is less a question of contradiction than an issue of expanding horizons. The aristocrat himself, in fact, lived in both worlds and faced the conflicts between the two.
Archaeology, Hard Evidence on the Ground
Like most historians, medievalists have privileged the written word as the basic medium of their information. The abundance of medieval documentation was produced by ecclesiastical writers who wrote in Latin and thereby transmitted their particular biases. Concurrent with these written sources are, of course, the material remains of medieval civilization that lie beyond the biases of their written interpreters. Churches naturally provide the most abundant, best preserved, and most thoroughly studied of surviving structures, but they are only tangential to the aristocracy. Next are the stone castles erected by the king and high aristocrats. From the nineteenth century, archaeologists have been interested primarily in the military features of these fortifications. The science of castellography came into being to investigate their strategic emplacement and their functional design. Particular attention was paid to the towers, turrets, fortified gates, moats, and thickness of walls that were fitted with crenellations and hourds at the top and were penetrated with archères, narrow slits for archers and crossbowmen—all created to withstand prolonged sieges. These military features remain relevant to the surviving castles in the Paris region constructed before or during the reign of Philip Augustus, but the king's pacification of the aristocracy increasingly turned the attention of the medieval builders to emphasize residence for the royalty and aristocracy. Archaeologists have begun to examine the amount of space devoted to the functions of sleeping, eating, praying, and the assembling of knights or peasants for administrative purposes. Attention has likewise turned to amenities such as kitchens, windows, fireplaces, and latrines.
Whereas in the past archaeologists concentrated on churches and existing or ruined castles, a new type of archaeology was created in 2001 with the institution of INRAP, the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives. With the exponential expansion of urbanization in the Parisian region that paved the area in concrete and asphalt, it was deemed essential to safeguard the material remains of the past that lay beneath the surface. It was therefore mandated by law that all further development be preceded by an archaeological survey before construction could begin. Teams of archaeologists were dispatched to investigate whatever could be found beneath the surface within brief time limits. The scope of the investigations has extended beyond determining the existence of previous structures to a panoply of collateral findings. The presence of foodstuffs has been explored by carpologists for vegetable matter and by archaeozoologists for animal remains. Pottery and cooking vessels have been studied by experts in ceramics and glass; coins and implements by metallurgists. Their preferred fields of exploration have been places of disposal, in particular, moats and latrines. The most interesting discoveries have been the human bones found in cemeteries or elsewhere that not only revealed burial customs but also could cast light on health, sickness, and other physical conditions of past ages. As these remains are further studied through the rapidly advancing techniques of DNA analysis, more extraordinary findings are promised for the future. Although important discoveries using these new techniques were previously made within Paris itself—around the Louvre palace, for example—INRAP's most significant findings were made largely in rural areas unencumbered by existing structures. Particularly fruitful have been the explorations for new highways and rail lines. Major discoveries, therefore, have been made of rural dwellings from antiquity and the early Middle Ages. While some of these sites pertain to aristocratic dwellings from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, those that have been of particular interest to both archaeologists and historians are from the earlier period because they illuminate prehistory before the invention of writing. Less progress has therefore been made for the period of the present study.
Three notable exceptions, however, provide illuminating examples pertinent to the aristocracy of our period. Two come from large, previously existing castles belonging to the high aristocracy, and they are now being studied with the new techniques. The first is at Chevreuse (dép. Yvelines) and is under exploration by a team of archaeologists under the direction of the regional government and concerns a major structure occupied by the Chevreuse family, one of the leading families to the southwest of Paris. The second is the relatively well-preserved and impressive castle belonging to the powerful family of royal cousins of Dreux, located at Brie-Comte-Robert (dép. Seine-et-Marne). It is being carefully preserved and studied by a team of archaeologists sponsored by the local commune. Third, although relatively new, the teams of archaeologists provided by INRAP have made a discovery of special pertinence to our study. When a chain of hotels proposed a new building at Roissy-en-France next to the Charles de Gaulle Airport, INRAP was called to investigate the site before construction. The archaeologists discovered two previous buildings composed of wood that were followed by a modest stone structure complete with tower. These structures were clearly the residences of local aristocracy of the middle rank. Belonging to either the Roissy or Montfermeil families, these structures and their surrounding appurtenances fortuitously illustrate the material living conditions of a modest family of knights in the time and place of our study. Other examples exist that have been less thoroughly explored, but these three provide apposite examples for the aristocracy of the Paris region during the reign of Philip Augustus.
Horses, Abounding and Missing
How determinate our sources are to results obtained is illustrated by the presence or absence of horses in the history of the aristocracy around Paris at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we take the one marker that immediately identifies an aristocrat, it is certainly his seal, which depicts him astride a horse at full gallop into battle. In addition to the riders, therefore, the seals offer a gallery of magnificent horses. It was the cheval (horse), in effect, that bestowed on the knight his professional title of chevalier in his maternal language. He was more than a cavalier (rider). In the vernacular sources that spoke directly to the aristocracy, the horse abounds. In the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, for example, the horse appears to compete with the Marshal himself for the center of attention—at least in Guillaume's youth and early manhood in France. Prevented from engaging in the tournament between Sainte-Jamme and Valennes because he was horseless, the young Guillaume entered his career as tornoieor thanks to the gift of a sturdy steed from his patron the Chamberlain of Tanquerville. The author devoted nearly a hundred lines to its qualities and harness (vv. 1224-1303). Thereafter Guillaume won his livelihood by the horses he captured. The technique was to take one's opponent's horse by the reins (al frein, v. 1334), and thereby he gained four and a half prizes by the end of the day (vv. 1367-70). At Eu he took twelve (v. 3372) and fifteen at Anet (vv. 420-21). Identified as palfreys and destriers in one passage, the counting of forty to sixty horses at a time may have been an exaggeration (vv. 1155-56), but afterward Guillaume went into partnership with another knight and hired a cleric to keep account of their prizes, which numbered in the hundreds (vv. 3403-24). Understandably, Guillaume was not unaware of the prices they obtained on the market, ranging from fourteen to thirty livres (vv. 4258, 4230, 5962-65). In the time off from the tournament, he amused himself by dicing for steeds (vv. 4178-99). As to horses, there was little to distinguish the young Marshal from the cowboy broncobuster of the American Far West.
Produced for the entertainment of the aristocracy into the thirteenth century, the romances likewise are oriented around the equestrian culture. Chrétien de Troyes's romances created the fictional figure of the solitary knight-errant on horseback wandering through the wilderness in quest of adventure for whose benefit the author places a castle conveniently each night to offer hospitality to both him and his horse. Dinner was rarely served until the steed had been properly stabled. Gerbert de Montreuil's romance, the Roman de la Violette, sent the hero Gerart de Nevers on such a journey, but Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose engaged his hero in tournaments like those of Guillaume le Maréchal. At the tournament of Saint-Tronde, for example, Guillaume de Dole enters the scene on a palfrey as white as snow heading two columns of knights on destriers (vv. 2471, 2492). Guillaume unhorses a Fleming opponent whose mount he uses to pay a debt; another he bestows on Jouglet, his friend, the jongleur, winning in all seven prizes that day (vv. 2665, 2693, 2708). By nightfall the chargers strayed in the field with their reins dangling on the ground—"God, one could have made a fortune there!" (vv. 2809-13). Although Gerbert quickly summarized the tournament of Montargis in the Violette, the hero, Gerart de Nevers, nonetheless performs the obligatory feat of unhorsing the villain Lisïart straightaway. In the following mêlée horses that had lost their riders wandered with their reins hanging; many a fine horse was lost! (vv. 6013-16).
In the Latin charters written by and for ecclesiastics, however, horses disappear completely from sight notwithstanding that the charters were composed in the chevaliers' names. Although earlier in the eleventh century horses were occasionally mentioned as serving as countergifts, such exchanges appear to have declined in the twelfth century. By the reign of Philip Augustus they disappeared altogether. Of the more than two thousand charters examined, I have found only two that mention horses. In 1200 Adam son of Gobert de Vendulia renounced a rent that had been usurped from Mont-Saint-Martin in exchange for a horse and two hundred livres. Similarly in 1222 Payen Gorrez exchanged with the Cistercians of Barbeau his new tithes at Nesles-la-Gilberde for one palfrey and thirty livres parisis. In effect, both were disposing of tainted assets, as we shall see, for more useful money and horses. Apparently, whatever horses ecclesiastics were raising did not enter the transactions with the aristocracy, nor were they interested in payments in horses.
The ecclesiastical chroniclers writing in Latin likewise paid little attention in their narratives to the horses that knights rode. They rarely mentioned the eques (the Latin equivalent of chevalier in French). Only when writing of the battle of Bouvines did the royal chronicler Guillaume le Breton finally acknowledge the horse's determinative role. Convinced that the battle was largely an affair of cavalry, he noticed in his prose account the large squadrons of mounted sergeants who faced the Flemish on the left wing and the fifty knights on horseback led by Thomas de Saint-Valéry. What concerned him most were the numbers of knights who were unhorsed or whose horses were killed. Thus we encounter descriptions of the fates of the mounts of the duke of Burgundy, of Michel de Harnes, of Hugues de Malaveines, of the count of Boulogne, and even of Philip Augustus himself, who escaped from his fallen horse only through the aid of knights of his entourage. When the horse of the count of Boulogne was killed from under him, its neck had pinned another knight to the ground. As an eyewitness Guillaume was therefore convinced that Philip Augustus's victory was due to the superiority of mounted knights. At the end of the reign when Guillaume transformed his prose narrative into the verse of the Philippidos to celebrate the victory at Bouvines, the horse finally assumes a stature comparable to that of the vernacular romance. Guillaume opened with, "The German fights as a footman, but you, ô Frenchman, fight as a chevalier (eques)." The duke of Burgundy was thoroughly humiliated when his horse was killed from under him. When footmen pull the king to the ground with their hooks, he leaps upon his new charger burning with rage. Pierre Mauvoisin seizes the reins of Emperor Otto's horse, but the German bodyguards give him another to escape. At the end, the field is strewn with dead horses; those alive are booty for the victorious.
Although historians have never doubted the importance of the horse for aristocratic society in the High Middle Ages, its material evidence is lacking. Archaeologists have yet to find the skeleton of a horse in the Paris region from the reign of Philip Augustus. It is true that tournaments like those at Lagny were kept to the borders, and no major battle of Bouvines's dimensions was fought in the region. (Even the wheat fields of Bouvines in Flanders, doubtlessly scoured by scavengers, have produced no remains of the fallen horses.) Nonetheless, horses must have been stabled in and around the castles and residences where the aristocracy lived. From the early Middle Ages rare skeletons of horses have been uncovered in graves of warriors in the countryside, but our period is apparently devoid of their remains. One possible explanation is that horses were cut up; their remains were deposited in special depots; their skin and hair were saved and resold; and other parts were recycled or eaten. Butchers and hangmen may have specialized in the disposal of horses. It is true that archaeozoologists today have limited their investigations to the horses that were eaten and which can be found only in the latrines and ditches near castles and residences. In this digested form, however, they constituted only a small part of the aristocratic diet. Stables must have existed, nonetheless, where the horses were kept both within and without the precincts of the castle or residence, buildings that would leave indelible traces of nitrates from urine in the soil. Here, perhaps the crowded urban conditions have prevented the scope of excavation from extending to the stables outside the castle or residence. The castle at Chevreuse, for example, is surrounded by modern houses, as is Brie-Comte-Robert, whose courtyard, furthermore, was thoroughly cleaned in the fourteenth century. The excavations at Roissy-en-France were conducted rapidly in preparation for a hotel, which occupied only a small space in an urban setting. As yet, an aristocratic stable has not turned up in the Paris region from our period. Like the ecclesiastical charters, archaeology with all of its potential for illuminating the past suffers from another gap in the reign of Philip Augustus.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsForeword, William Chester Jordan
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Chapter 1. In Search of Aristocrats
Chapter 2. Who's Who
Chapter 3. Family
Chapter 4. Aristocratic Castles and Residences
Chapter 5. Fiefs and Homage: The Nomina militum and Scripta de feodis
Chapter 6. The Landed Wealth of Lay Aristocrats
Chapter 7. The Landed Wealth of Churches and Monasteries
Chapter 8. The Kingdom of Heaven
Chapter 9. The Voice of Vernacular French
Chapter 10. Knights at the Cathedral of Chartres
Appendix 1. Tables
Appendix 2. Genealogies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments