21
In 967, the Saxon aristocrat Wichmann Billung was caught unawares by the Bohemian allies of his enemy Prince Mieszko of the Poles. Wichmann was fighting against his uncle Duke Hermann of Saxony at the time, on behalf of smaller Slav tribes, the Wagri and the Abodrites. Mieszko had converted to Christianity the previous year and was allied to Hermann and Otto I; Wichmann, like his father, had never forgiven Hermann for gaining the most prominence inside the family, thanks to the king/emperors, and had raised what was in effect a feud against him. Wichmann tried to flee the Slav attack but was surrounded, and fought till he was exhausted. The Slav leaders found out who he was and offered him a safe conduct. But Wichmann, ‘not forgetting his former nobility and virtue’ (as Widukind says, quoting Sallust), refused to ‘give his hand’, that is, surrender, to social inferiors, and asked them to send for Mieszko so that he could hand over his weapons to the prince himself. They agreed, but, while waiting, all continued to fight, since, of course, Wichmann had not put down his weapons; Wichmann was killed.
This insistence on social hierarchy even in such an extreme situation may well seem to us absurd, but it would have been taken for granted in the ninth and tenth centuries. Widukind himself, who rejoiced in Wichmann’s death, could not avoid writing it up heroically. Aristocrats did indeed feel themselves to be totally different from the ordinary free strata of society. We can see this even in Abbot Odo of Cluny’s Life of Gerald of Aurillac (d. 909), the first saint’s life of a lay aristocrat, written around 930. Odo’s Gerald was so virtuous that he broke all the rules of lay society, thus allowing Odo to picture someone as a saint who was a rich local lord, perhaps (not certainly) a count, and who never took religious orders. Some of these rules are thus implicitly laid out. Gerald never wore silk or gold; he did not take gifts from the poor before he helped them, and he allowed them to sit in his presence. He hated drunkenness and would not come drunk to judging in the law court. He would not let his men plunder the countryside when engaging in local wars, and he insisted on buying cherries from a peasant rather than taking them. When he met his fugitive dependant in another region, while journeying to Rome, and discovered that the latter was passing for a man of wealth and status, Gerald did not betray his origin - this was particularly remarkable in Odo’s eyes (‘who but Gerald would have done this?’). He was saved from sleeping with the daughter of one of his unfree dependants by a miracle; Odo comments at length on his chastity, thus marvellously preserved, but makes no remark about Gerald’s casual command to the girl’s mother to have her ready when he came, a standard lord’s prerogative. Gerald’s wars against his neighbours were always defensive, and therefore counted as protection of the poor (he banned not only plunder but also ambushes); he only undertook to participate in ‘the right of armed force’ at all because his entourage were indignant that ‘a great man might suffer violence from persons of low degree who lay waste his property’, and he never ever sought revenge.
These and many other parallel acts, and also plenty of miracles, made Gerald a saint, in Odo’s narrative at least; and that narrative in turn had sufficient resonance with its 930s audience to contribute to a successful cult of Gerald - his own Aurillac monastery of Saint-Pierre was dedicated to him by the middle of the century, and Saint-Géraud became a pilgrimage centre, to Gerbert’s great benefit, as we saw in Chapter 18. The norms of small-scale aristocratic behaviour thus become clear, as practised by men who were not saints, whether they date to the later decades of the ninth century with Gerald or to the years around 930 with Odo (who was himself from a similar lesser aristocratic background, a generation later, and, like Gerald, was a protégé of Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine). The normality of small local wars; the practical rights of the military strata to take whatever they liked from the peasantry; the assumption that aristocrats would often get angry (and drunk) and be violent to other people; the harsh and self-righteous policing of social boundaries, between unfree and free, unmilitary free and aristocratic, poor and rich: these were the aristocratic values assumed (and, to be fair, criticized) by Odo of Cluny, and they were lived by social élites throughout the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period, as also, with only minor modifications, both before and after.
Aristocratic bad behaviour was thus not born with the ‘feudal revolution’ of the eleventh century (see below). But nor do these almost timeless norms really clash with what else we know about aristocrats, as seen in previous chapters, such as their generalized attachment (and even loyalty) to kings and other major political figures, or their religiosity, or even their absorption of the values of Carolingian education and correctio. This chapter aims to look at aristocratic practices from their own standpoint, not from those of rulers and writers, in so far as that is possible given our sources, and to see what they meant to their practitioners, in the varying environments of western Europe after 750 or so. I shall start with a set of four brief case studies, to set out how different families reacted to the political changes of the period in different parts of Europe. We shall then look at three interlocking themes, the structures of local power, dependence, and then, returning to these accounts of Wichmann and Gerald, aristocratic values.
The ‘Guilhelmids’ were a family from Burgundy who may have been distant relations of the Pippinids; they gained importance under Charlemagne and were part of his Reichsaristokratie. William of Gellone (d. 812) was the first really prominent family member; he was sent south, to rule Toulouse and Septimania, in the 790s, and founded the monastery of Gellone in the latter region, near modern Montpellier, where he retired as a monk in 806. His son Bernard of Septimania (d. 844) was count of (among other places) Barcelona in the 820s before coming to Louis the Pious’s court as his controversial chamberlain in 829-30 (see Chapter 16); Bernard’s wife Dhuoda (d. c. 843), as we have also seen, wrote her Handbook for their son William in 841-3, the masterpiece of Carolingian lay piety, stressing regular prayer, a temperate conduct, and unequivocal loyalty to Bernard, to the Guilhelmid family as a whole, and to Charles the Bald as king. However that might be, the least one could say of the Guilhelmids was that they were equivocal; Bernard played a very ambiguous role in the civil wars of the 840s, and was executed for treason by Charles in 844; William, who was at least loyal, but to Pippin the Younger not Charles, was killed for that five years later. The family was notably unpopular in these years; Bernard’s brother Gozhelm was executed and his sister Gerberga drowned as a witch by the emperor Lothar in 834.
It is hard to think of a more dramatic and even shameful political failure in this period than that of the Guilhelmids, for all Dhuoda’s values. But the family did not disappear from its original Burgundian heartland. Bernard’s younger son Bernard (d. 886), called ‘Hairy-paws’ (i.e. ‘foxy’) in one source, was count of Autun in Burgundy in the early 860s, and in 864, for unclear reasons, he tried to assassinate either Robert the Strong or Charles the Bald himself; he lost most of his honores at once, and Autun two years later. His family land still remained, all the same, and by 872 he was back in Charles’s court, killing opponents but also accumulating honores again, probably already including the county of the Auvergne, centre of his future power, which he held until his death. In 878 he picked up many of the honores of the rebel Bernard of Gothia, including the March of Gothia (Septimania) again; he became the guardian of the new West Frankish king Louis III himself in 879. When he died, he ruled a string of counties from the Loire to the Pyrenees, most of which were inherited directly by his son William the Pious (d. 918), who called himself duke of Aquitaine. William behaved for thirty years as an autonomous regional power in eastern Aquitaine, running court cases in the manner of a king as much as that of a count, and seeking to detach the loyalty of royal vassals (including Gerald of Aurillac) from the king and attach it to himself. The family died out in 927 at the death of his two nephews, successive dukes of Aquitaine after him, but up to then we can see all the ingredients of the creative opportunism of an ‘imperial aristocratic’ family: operating by Carolingian rules until the 880s, and autonomously thereafter. It is notable that, despite the family’s spectacular eclipse in the 840s, it was still a natural choice for patronage a generation later; family claims to royal interest died hard. It is also notable that Bernard Hairy-paws reconstructed his power in exactly the areas, stretching southwards from his family lands, that his father and grandfather had dealt in; this was by royal gift, but it indicates the durability of family political aspirations. Into the 920s, also, even though the Guilhelmids were by now independent players, they still operated a Carolingian-style political system, using county-based structures such as law courts, and also the control of royal abbacies (William the Pious was given the major Auvergne monastery of Brioude by King Odo in 893). The long string of their counties, 600 kilometres from north to south but seldom more than 150 east to west, also made most sense in a Carolingian political system, and William had local troubles at the end of his life; successor powers in these areas were more compact.
If we move later into the tenth century and remain in areas of powerful kingship, we continue to find families who, however ambitious, played by royal rules. In England, the families of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ and Ælfhere are clear examples. In Saxony, there were many too; one was the counts of Walbeck west of Magdeburg, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg’s family, thus well documented in his Chronicon. Liuthar I had died fighting Slavs for Henry I in 929, but his son Liuthar II (d. 964) had been involved in a conspiracy against Otto I in 941 in the context of the early 940s civil wars and lost all his lands; he regained them the following year, having paid a hefty fine in money and land, after which he endowed a church in Walbeck to atone for the plot. His sons divided the family patrimony, Siegfried (d. 991) becoming count of Walbeck (he was succeeded by his son Henry, Thietmar’s brother; both were in the entourage of the emperor Henry II). Siegfried’s brother Liuthar III (d. 1003), although not always close to the Ottonian court, became marquis of the Northern March in or after 985, and thus one of the major figures in Saxony in the aftermath of the Slav revolt of 983. In this guise he was one of the king-makers of Henry II in 1002; he supported Henry not least so as to sabotage the ambitions of his rival Ekkehard of Meissen, who had broken the engagement of his daughter Liudgard to Liuthar’s son Werner, and who had humiliated Werner in an assembly in 999 after Werner had abducted Liudgard (with her agreement). Werner married Liudgard after Ekkehard’s death in 1002, and inherited his father’s march a year later. But Werner was also an idiot; in 1009 he responded to machinations against him by Count Dedi at Henry’s court by killing Dedi, and lost his march, his benefices and the king’s favour. Werner instead plotted with Bolesław Chrobry of Poland in 1013, and only kept his properties by paying a large fine to Henry; in 1014 he abducted another woman, this time unwilling (Liudgard had died in 1012), and risked execution had he not died of wounds from the affray - to the huge distress of Dedi’s son Dietrich, who could thus not be avenged. We see the ambition, the feuding and the general bad behaviour of major aristocrats once again, notwithstanding Thietmar’s obvious partiality, but also that the whole sequence of events took place in a king-centred framework, just as the careers of Bernard Hairy-paws and his father had. Thietmar’s world, it can be added, was overwhelmingly a world of counts and marquises (and bishops); no smaller lords have any impact on his narratives. A basic Carolingian political infrastructure remained in place here at least into the 1010s, and indeed much later.
Both the Guilhelmids and the counts of Walbeck had family lands as a basis on which to accumulate counties/marches and benefices. So did the Canossa in Italy, but with a slightly different result. Adalbert-Atto (d. 989) of Canossa, a castle in the Appennines above Reggio Emilia, was made count of Reggio, Modena and Mantua by Otto I in the 960s for his support against Berengar II. He used these comital positions, however, above all as a support for his further accumulation of lands, in outright property, or in lease or benefice from churches and monasteries, along the River Po in all these counties (and others), and also to a lesser extent in the Appennines. These lands were the basis of Canossan power for the next century, far more than the counties were. They were studded with castles, and the local rights which Adalbert-Atto, his son Tedald (d. c. 1010), and his grandson Boniface (d. 1052) held in them were as complete as any count had anywhere, whether or not the Canossa held the county they were in. This was a de-facto power that was substantially different from those of our earlier examples. Tedald added the county of Brescia to his father’s collection, but, when he called himself marquis, seems to be holding a title he had claimed for himself. The Canossa did not spurn Carolingian-style public power; when they were given the march of Tuscany by the emperor Conrad II in 1027, a strong political unit, they ran it with enthusiasm in a traditional Carolingian manner until the family died out in 1115. But in their Emilian heartland they ruled in a very different way, on the basis of their extensive landholding and their informal political powers over that land, powers which historians call ‘seigneurial’ (see below). After their initial rise under Otto I, they also needed royal patronage rather less; they tended to be loyal to the king/emperors, and were far from unhappy to receive benefits as a result, not least in 1027, but their careers were far less focused on royal favour, even though the king/emperors remained institutionally strong in Italy. They had become regional powers with whom the kings had to deal, and in the Po valley they did not strictly need their comital offices in order to maintain their power, by 1000 at the latest.
The idea that a lay aristocrat might be powerful without being a count (or else a palatine official) was a novelty. Of course, one might not be a count at any given moment, as Bernard Hairy-paws was not for most of the first half of his career, but aristocrats systematically aspired to be one, to legitimate their status, and were thus inevitably tied into a royal patronage network. The Canossa did, of course, owe their rise to kings, and never after 962 lost comital or marchional office; they were not unrecognizable to ninth-century eyes. But their interests were different, all the same. They had parallels elsewhere, too. In the later tenth century, many families emerged, particularly in West Francia, who had the same focus on land, de-facto local power, and castles that the Canossa had, but operated on a far smaller scale. The lords of Uxelles were one such, in the county of Mâcon, once under the control of William the Pious but after the 920s in the hands of a local family of counts. The counts married, oddly, into the family of King Berengar II of Italy, whose male-line heirs thus controlled the Mâconnais into the eleventh century; but the first of these, Berengar II’s grandson Otto-William (d. 1026), was so intent on an ambitious politics that he stirred up regional opposition and weakened his local position notably. Josseran I (d. c. 990) owned the villa of Uxelles; his descendants held the castle there, presumably from the count of Mâcon, with a set of local comital rights, over justice and tolls for example; these became hereditary in his family, and they were backed up by the solid set of family properties in the same area. Between 1000 and 1030 or so, the counts lost their power over them. By the second quarter of the eleventh century, Bernard II (d. c. 1050), Josseran’s grandson, held a network of powers in the territory around Uxelles, based on his family land on the one hand and the privatized judicial powers associated with the castle on the other, and extending, eventually, to all sorts of military and customary dues owed by his tenants and landowning neighbours alike, which were largely invented by the Uxelles lords themselves. This was what the Canossa had in and around their own lands, and again we call it ‘seigneurial’; but this time the Uxelles seigneurie was only about 100 square kilometres, by no means all of it directly controlled by the family. The tiny scale of political units of this kind (there were a dozen or so in the county of Mâcon) marked a radical change from that described up to now. This was power constructed for the most part from the bottom up, as well. The lords of Uxelles will hardly have dealt with the king, who was only an external power in this area by 1000, but from then on they also hardly needed the count either, who was little more than another seigneurial lord, with lands and powers restricted to the area just west of Mâcon. Mâcon is justly famous, for it is one of the best-documented areas of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe, thanks to the thousands of charters of the monastery of Cluny (see below), and also to Georges Duby’s epoch-making regional study of 1953. But this pulverization of the structures of the county, and the takeover of all the public traditions of the state by private landholding families, has parallels across much of West Francia around 1000, and in later centuries could be found in other parts of Europe too.
These very diverse aristocratic experiences have some basic elements in common. The first, entirely predictably in the early Middle Ages, is land: nobody could be a political player before 1000, even in a tiny area, without a locally substantial property, held either in full ownership or in long-term concessions from churches or kings. A feature of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period is that more land came to be under aristocratic control than before, and less was under the control of non-aristocrats. This change was particularly important in England, as we saw in Chapter 19, and was even more acute in Saxony, where Charlemagne’s conquest resulted in a rapid takeover of land previously under peasant ownership, by the kings themselves, by churches and monasteries, by incoming Frankish lords, and (perhaps most of all) by the surviving native Saxon aristocracy. The speed of this social change provoked the largest-scale peasants’ revolt in early medieval Europe, the Stellinga uprising of 841-2, during the Carolingian civil war, but this failed, and the new political powers continued to accumulate land. The newness of Saxon aristocratic power, and its close connection to royal protagonism, may well help to explain the solidity of the Ottonian political system in Saxony, as it certainly does for royal power in England. In Francia proper, and Italy too, the period 750-1000 also marks a steady increase in aristocratic wealth and power, at the expense of a surviving peasantry, thanks largely to the political opportunities for successful aristocrats under Charlemagne and his successors. As a result of this still ill-studied process, landowning peasantries are rather less visible in 1000 than in 750 throughout Francia and Italy, and in some places had disappeared altogether. We shall look at this issue again in the next chapter, but it is an essential backdrop to aristocratic affirmation at the political level; lords had more land to play with politically, and sometimes - as with the most successful monasteries, or the ‘imperial aristocracy’ - far more land. This was not affected by the growing regionalization of the aristocracy (outside England) after 850 or so; that process simply meant that lords increasingly used their lands as elements in a regional politics, as well as (or instead of) a kingdom-wide one.
In the case of the lay aristocracy, this land could be then added to by honores: royal-confirmed offices, such as counties, and benefices. These were given by kings and could, for a long time, be taken away again. Werner of the Northern March is a case in point: he lost his offices and benefices in 1009, though he kept his properties. It is not that the king/ emperor could not confiscate his properties as well; this nearly happened in 1013, indeed. But under normal circumstances (that is, anything except treason, and sometimes even then) kings would leave aristocrats with their full property even when they fell out of favour and lost the rest. We have seen in previous chapters that aristocrats always sought to preserve counties and benefices for their sons, and very often succeeded, including under Charlemagne. But until that inheritance became a right, kings kept strategic control of this large sector of aristocratic wealth and power. In most of the post-Carolingian kingdoms before 1000, and also in England, such rights to automatic succession in counties/ ealdormanries and benefices only existed on political margins, such as, in England, Northumbria, or, in Italy, parts of the march of Spoleto in the far south or Piemonte in the north-west. The major exception to this was West Francia, where such rights were in effect extended to nearly every duke and count in the decades around 900, with catastrophic effects on royal power. When this ‘patrimonialization’ process occurred, of course, aristocracies hugely increased their practical control over wealth and local patronage powers, for they could now add ex-royal land and local political rights to their own properties, as long as they could keep control of them in the framework of local rivalries which were no longer moderated by kings.
These collections of properties and rights in the hands of single families were heterogeneous, usually scattered (even if, as just noted, increasingly in a single region), and would be further scattered by property transfers at marriage and by partible inheritance among sons. (This was universal until past 1000, except that counties and benefices, until they were patrimonialized at least - and often later - could not be divided internally.) Families sought to give them some structure. One way was by founding a family monastery, a procedure already popular in the seventh century in Francia but steadily expanding after that; by the tenth century every aristocratic player had one, except the very smallest. Such monasteries were characteristically under full family ownership, very often with a family member as abbot (or abbess - many were nunneries in some parts of Europe, particularly Saxony); but effective family control could often be preserved through rights of patronage, even if the monastery was alienated away, as often happened, to bishops or larger (and more prestigious) monastic groupings, including if the monastery was ‘reformed’, as we shall see later. Ownership or patronage was characteristically shared between all family-members, a great advantage if families expanded demographically, for it represented a core of family-controlled power that was not divided; six men seem to have shared control of the Berardenghi family monastery of Fontebona in Tuscany in 1030, for example, and eleven by 1060. By then, it was the main thing keeping the family together.
Castles were another resource, by the tenth century. The origins of the widespread use of fortified sites by aristocrats is still under debate. Fortifications were already common in the sixth century in some parts of Europe (such as Italy, divided geographically as it was), but these were for the most part public structures, controlled by kings and their officials, and they often included large areas inside the walls; they were fortified villages rather than élite residences. This practice slowly extended across all Europe, not least in the context of defence against Vikings and other frontier invaders, as with the urbes of both the tenth-century Saxons and their Slav opponents, or the burhs of tenth-century England. They are very visible also in the local wars of the Seine valley chronicled in Flodoard’s Annals in the 920s-960s, for control over them had devolved to counts and bishops, and they were much fought over. But this latter example by now poses the issue of whether aristocrats could put them up themselves. Charles the Bald certainly thought they might; in the Edict of Pîtres in 864 he banned all castella et firmitates built without his consent, because they were the foci for ‘many depredations and hindrances for their neighbours’, and he demanded that they be pulled down. Laws such as this seldom work, and Gerald of Aurillac had a castle in the late ninth century which was almost certainly private. But actually, both in archaeology and in documents, private castles were more a tenth-century phenomenon, and indeed expanded for the most part fairly slowly outside the political stratum represented by counts and bishops; for the lesser aristocracy, it was the eleventh century, not the tenth, that saw castles built widely. Major aristocrats by 950 or so nonetheless in most of continental Europe (though not England) had castles, often many in number, as points of reference for their counties and their properties. These were defences for local power (both legal and illegal), obviously; they were also centres of family cohesion, much as monasteries were. (In the eleventh century, when surnames developed, families would often come to be named after their principal castle.) Both were signs of a much less fluid political geography, for they tied aristocrats to single areas even more firmly than the steady regionalization of political interest did.
Castles came to be the typical bases for seigneurial powers. This did not have to be immediate, but such powers did increasingly crystallize in the years around 1000 or shortly after, particularly in West Francia but also in much of Italy. Both comital families and lesser lords came to be able to dispose of a wide range of rights, on their own properties and over the properties of their neighbours, by now seen as private prerogatives: the obligation to do castle-guard or to billet and feed a military detachment; dues in return for being able to travel a road, or putting in at a river port, or attending a market; dues for being able to cut wood in a common woodland; compulsory cart service on given days of the year; compulsory use of a lord’s mill, with the attendant dues; or, above all, the profits of an increasingly privatized justice. This basket of rights (with different elements stressed in different places) is called the ‘seigneurie banale’, Georges Duby’s phrase, in much modern scholarship - ‘banale’ because many of these rights were once royal, making up much of what Carolingian sources call the king’s bannum. They had very diverse origins, all the same; as in the case of the lords of Uxelles, the creation of a seigneurial lordship was very often the result of a creative bricolage of old and new powers over tenants and neighbours, established both by force and by agreement. In some areas of West Francia in the twelfth century and later, seigneurial rights came to be more profitable than taking rents; but that development had not begun yet in 1000.
Castles and seigneurial rights are markers of a new attention to local dominance, beginning particularly after around 900 in the post-Carolingian lands, and steadily increasing, and becoming more localized still, after 950/1000. Aristocrats had, as we have seen in earlier chapters, previously sought identity and status above all through royal or at least ducal patronage. They needed land in order to have the wealth to play at that level, and to be able to afford the armed entourage that was equally essential for royal politics; but they did not need to be able to dominate their neighbours to have kingdom-level status, and they might anyway move around substantially in royal service. Increasingly, however, especially in the tenth century, attention to one’s local power-base was essential. If one did not pay attention to it, it might break up, as we shall see in a moment. But it was also the case that lords moved around rather less by now, so might find their local power-base more of an interesting long-term commitment; and the logic of castle-guard, and the intricacies of seigneurial powers and private law courts, pointed towards quite localized political initiatives. This did not happen everywhere. Notably, it did not happen in England, where tenth-century evidence even for the lesser aristocracy shows some strikingly wide and potentially changeable areas of interest, as with the family of Bishop Oswald of Worcester, who owned from Worcestershire to the Fens, or Ælfhelm Polga, whose will of the 980s shows him holding land from Essex to Huntingdonshire, without reference to any political centre at all, even a principal place of residence. But it happened across most of post-Carolingian Continental Europe, and also in some of the crystallizing Slav and Scandinavian polities, which were themselves still fairly small-scale.
If we look at the structures of aristocratic dependence, these same processes can be seen again, from a different standpoint. Major aristocrats needed an armed entourage, of fideles or, to use the new terminology of the late eighth century and onwards, vassals: men who had sworn oaths of loyalty to them, and who had often, probably, gone through some form of ceremony representing dependence. As public power became weaker in many places, that ceremony became increasingly elaborate and ritualized, for personal bonds of this type became ever more clearly the key to effective political power. This was also increasingly linked to military status itself. Under Charlemagne, military service was still the theoretical obligation of all free men, but even then, in practice, warfare was carried out by professionalized soldiers, milites, most of them in the entourage of their sworn lords. From the ninth century onwards, military status was increasingly seen as the prerogative of an élite, and entry into it was also associated with a ceremony, increasingly often an ecclesiastical one. This network of rituals underpinned what historians after 1000 call ‘knighthood’, and one translation of miles is by now not just ‘soldier’, but ‘knight’.
This knightly imagery really belongs to a later period than this book covers. All the same, to call oneself a miles was by the tenth century in some places a claim to status. Not yet in Saxony; milites are generally (even if not always) second-order figures in Thietmar. But, once again, in West Francia and secondarily Italy, by the later tenth century a miles was a significant player, and milites were establishing themselves as the lowest rung of the aristocracy, rather closer to counts than they were to the upper strata of the peasantry. This time, England goes in part with West Francia, for miles there, although still often representing quite humble soldiers, was also one of the standard Latin translations of thegn, the basic stratum of the late Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, and fairly comfortably off (every thegn was supposed to hold five hides of land, roughly 2 square kilometres, not a small amount of full landholding; Ælfhelm Polga, a rather more substantial landowner, seems to have been a king’s thegn). The lords of Uxelles, who were rather richer than this, were milites (and also, significantly, nobiles) around 1000; in Italy, a famous law of 1037 of Conrad II conceded to all milites the right to inherit benefices, given not only by kings but also by counts and bishops; although they could still lose them if they committed certain offences, the gap between full property and benefices was receding at the level of legislation too. In many parts of Italy, indeed, milites themselves came in two levels, capitanei and valvassores; even the latter could be socially prominent, and would form the ruling class of twelfth-century cities, but the former were certainly, by 1000 at the latest, political leaders by contemporary Italian standards.
What these processes mean is that, in practice, more people could by now be counted as what we call ‘the aristocracy’. By the Carolingian period, the word nobilis can effectively be translated ‘aristocrat’, its bearers marked out by wealth and lifestyle. It was by no means a legally defined category, but it denoted a rather restricted and special group, those with a great deal of property, those with Königsnähe, those who might expect counties. This was changing by the later tenth century, and milites who had rather localized lands, like the lords of Uxelles, by now could be called nobilis, could behave like richer aristocrats, and, increasingly, could be treated as near-equals by counts. This stratum of the lesser aristocracy was all the same closer to the peasantry, of course, simply because it was less rich than the great ‘imperial aristocratic’ families. ‘Military’ families might be the lesser branches of great aristocratic clans, or the descendants of vassals of Carolingian counts and bishops, but they might well also be descended from the medium landowners of the eighth century, locally prominent families with close connections to their peasant neighbours, who had stayed in the professional military arena. Milites were therefore also much more likely to be interested in local domination, for the local level was the one they were closest to. Many of the more detailed aspects of the seigneurie banale were pioneered by milites. This was reinforced by the emergence of a sharp division between the aristocratic/military class and the peasant majority, theorized already by King Alfred in the late ninth century, and extended considerably in early eleventh-century political writings in West Francia, as the difference between ‘those who fight’ and ‘those who work’. That sharp division marks the defining of an aristocratic stratum fundamentally distinct from the peasantry, which legitimated the local dominance of even quite small castle-holding lords. But all this also means that the local, castle-holding, seigneurie-building lords of the Mâconnais and other parts of West Francia and Italy in 1000, however aristocratic they by now saw themselves as being - and were seen by others as being - would have been regarded as of no account at all by a Merovingian vir inluster or a Carolingian ‘imperial aristocrat’. Not only membership of ‘the aristocracy’, but also the right to an independent political protagonism, was now extended to far more people, even if, still, only to a small proportion of the population at large.
Carolingian lords, just as in the period before 750, rewarded their military clienteles in different ways: by outright gifts of land, by hereditary leases, by revocable benefices. The difference between these latter was not always huge; unlike at the high aristocratic level, small-scale fideles and vassals might not be able to make their outrage felt if even their full property was confiscated by a count or bishop or abbot. As lay aristocrats, and also bishops and abbots, increased their land, they increased their entourages - their armies - by granting out more of it. In the tenth century, they would put their most prominent milites in charge of their castles and the local political powers associated with castle-holding. This would have been safe in the ninth century, because no miles could go it alone without facing ruin. In the later tenth century, however, when in some parts of Europe the ‘military’ stratum was gaining aristocratic identity and a sense of political protagonism, it was more risky. If counts could go it alone with respect to kings, castellans could also go it alone with respect to counts, as with the lords of Uxelles in relation to the counts of Mâcon. If a count or bishop lost control of his castellans, the whole framework of his power could unravel, and often did. Here, the ‘politics of land’ led firmly to political fragmentation of a most extreme kind - seldom before 1000, but often by 1050. The whole shape of politics could potentially change; the public world of the Carolingians might vanish, with nothing remaining in some areas except tiny private lordships.
This process has been called the ‘feudal revolution’ (or ‘mutation’) by many historians in recent years, and the issue has been sharply debated. Indeed, the ‘feudal revolution’ has become for some historians (particularly in France) shorthand for epochal change, the end of the ancient world itself in the most extreme formulations of the idea. The debate cannot be reprised here (it mostly has an eleventh-century focus), but some points can be made about it. One is that the catastrophist tone of many historians is out of place; the new ‘feudal’ world of the eleventh century may have been marked by more violence, for example, than its predecessor, but the difference was only in degree, not kind, as any reader of Flodoard’s Annals or Odo’s Life of Gerald (or, for that matter, theAnnals of Saint-Bertin) will realize; military aristocrats of all types are always violent, and this did not change now that lesser milites were counted in. Another is, however, that there were real changes in some places, some of them very fast, as the Carolingian order was replaced by seigneuries; public assemblies finally vanished, relations of dependence became more prominent, power became more personal, even when it was in the hands of the same people. Comital power in a tenth-century autonomous county tended to have a very Carolingian format; but attempts to see a local seigneurie banale as simply the Carolingian political system writ small have not succeeded. As argued earlier, these shifts make the eleventh-century political world structurally different from the tenth, at least in the parts of Europe where they occurred.
Conversely, this was not the case everywhere. Such shifts certainly did not occur in ‘outer Europe’, where no aristocrats were as yet sufficiently powerful, except in León-Castile. There is no sign that they were about to occur in 1000 in Anglo-Saxon England and Ottonian East Francia, and indeed, in the former, they never did (seigneurial-type powers in England were in the next centuries only held inside a lord’s own lands, and over unfree dependants). In most of what one can now call Germany, analogous processes were hardly beginning before 1100, and never had the form they took in what one can now call France. Even in Italy, where seigneurial fragmentation was often extreme, the continuing centrality of cities in most of the peninsula meant that there was always an alternative locus of political order, however informal, to that of the local lordship. In cities such as Milan or Lucca, the ‘military’ strata largely remained city-dwelling, even when, in the eleventh century, their rural lands acquired castles and seigneurial territories; this thus perpetuated a political community covering the whole city territory. We are left with France as the fulcrum of these ‘revolutionary’ changes. And not everywhere in France either, for, as we shall see in a moment, in Flanders, Normandy, Anjou and Toulouse, counts kept control of their castellans and of substantial elements of the Carolingian political pattern, into the twelfth century and beyond. The ‘feudal revolution’, particularly in its most dramatic form, as in the Mâconnais or, as authoritatively argued, in Catalonia, cannot be extended as a model to more than a minority of Europe, and not to large parts even of France.
The ‘politics of land’ is, it must be stressed, hard for kings and other lords to keep on top of. There is a potential zero-sum game, in which the more a king or lord grants out, the less he has to give, and the less attractive his patronage seems. Marc Bloch in 1940 called this ‘the fragmentation of powers’, and his phrase still works as an image. There is an underlying tendency to the break-up of larger political systems in favour of smaller ones, at least at the edges of the systems, and in extreme cases (as with tenth-century West Francia) even in the centre. But an underlying tendency is not an inescapable one. Merovingian and Carolingian - and Lombard, Visigothic and post-750 Anglo-Saxon - royal courts were unavoidable points of reference for all political power. Those who failed to get there or did not try were failures, those who went it alone without them seldom survived. Similarly, some counts in tenth-century West Francia could ride the tiger of fragmentation into smaller units still, by avoiding civil war, by policing their castellans tightly, by fighting successfully on frontiers and thus having booty and sometimes extra land to give to their milites, by keeping control of justice, by tying their military dependants to them with as ceremonious a set of ties as possible, and (perhaps above all) by using force as violently and as ruthlessly as they could against anyone who tried to defy them. At the very end of the tenth century, Fulk Nerra managed this in Anjou, Richard II in Normandy, Baldwin IV in Flanders; they successfully kept the balance of power firmly on the comital side, even as some of their neighbours failed to do the same. The Ottonians and the West Saxon kings found the same task rather easier. There was nothing inevitable about the ‘feudal revolution’.
Aristocratic status derived from a variety of elements: high birth, land, office, royal favour, lifestyle, the respect of one’s peers. No one theorized the relative importance of these elements; people ‘just knew’ how they balanced out, and different people had different views about their importance, or their applicability to individuals. When Thegan denounced Ebbo, archbishop of Reims, saying that Louis the Pious ‘made you free, not noble, which is impossible’ (cf. above, Chapter 17), he invoked an absolute criterion that was seldom put so sharply in this period. Ebbo may have been of servile origin; but other political players criticized for their ‘low birth’, like Hagano, Charles the Simple’s counsellor, in Richer’s words, or Willigis archbishop of Mainz (975-1011), Otto I’s former chancellor, in those of Thietmar, seem to have come from lesser aristocratic families, who may well have seen themselves as nobiles. There was not a noble ‘caste’, marked out by unbreakable rules of blood-line, as emerged in some parts of later medieval Europe; there was a grey area of negotiation, marked out by the snobbery of social superiors at every level. It was inside this grey area that milites in some parts of Europe began to take on aristocratic trappings, and to make claims to a status hitherto unavailable to them, which many by 1000 were prepared to grant them. But in order to do so they had to behave like their richer and better-established peers.
Aristocratic behaviour had in many respects not changed greatly from the period before 750, discussed in Chapter 8. Silk clothes with gold and silver decoration, military expertise, hunting, remained basic aristocratic markers, as did a ready use of violence - the markers that were implicit in Odo of Cluny’s characterization of Gerald of Aurillac. Odo refers to Gerald’s education in ‘the worldly exercises customary for noble boys’ - hunting, archery, falconry - but only enough literacy to read the Psalter (though an extreme bout of acne persuaded his parents in Gerald’s case to give him a fuller literary education, in case they had to make him a priest). The Carolingian educational programme seems to have already become rather weaker, if this story relates to Gerald’s youth in the 860s rather than to Odo’s own day, although Gerald was at best on the fringes of the Carolingian aristocracy, and also living in a remote area. All the same, Gerald’s Psalter reminds us that the aristocratic sense of innate virtue - a feature of this period, as earlier - was not just expressed through military valour and the like, but also through an (at least imagined) sense of a special religious charisma and commitment, as we shall see in a moment. Aristocrats were also supposed to be welcoming and generous, at least to their equals; Henry I before he became king of East Francia invited his neighbours to a wedding feast in Merseburg, according to Thietmar, and ‘treated them with such familiarity that they loved him as a friend and honoured him as a lord’. Whether the hilaritas, ‘jolliness’, praised in some narrative sources, was the same emotion as the drunken overbearingness to social inferiors criticized in the Life of Gerald is not clear, though it is likely often enough to have been the case. One of the key elements in the lifestyle of the aristocracy was indeed the potential violence to social inferiors that our sources constantly stress. This was taken for granted when one was dealing with the highest aristocrats; if it often seems that the increasing local power of the military strata in West Francia is associated with more complaints of violence than had been the case for the Carolingian ‘imperial aristocracy’, it is likely that this is not just because milites were establishing seigneuries by a liberal use of force, but also because they were not yet (particularly by vocal ecclesiastical victims) regarded as having a legitimate claim to the violent behaviour of more ‘noble’ figures. If so, however, they soon would.
We saw in Chapter 18 that a sense of a more dynastic family identity was stronger in the tenth-century aristocracy than formerly. This should not be pushed too far. Growing family rights to offices, and the consequential more prominent role of women as intermediaries between generations, are visible in the tenth century, at least in the highest aristocratic strata. But families were still fairly flexible entities; kinship ties of all kinds had gained in strength by now. Men and women were not tied to a single male-line lineage for their identity; surnames rarely existed yet. Thietmar pays almost as much attention to his mother’s kin, the counts of Stade, as to the counts of Walbeck on his father’s side. Furthermore, if maternal ancestors had a higher status than paternal, or more political purchase, they were often stressed more by their descendants, as when around 1012 Constantine, biographer of Bishop Adalbero II of Metz (d. 1005), stressed his descent from Henry I of East Francia, his mother’s mother’s father, above all; his father, Duke Frederick of Upper Lotharingia, by contrast does not have his ancestors listed, presumably because they were less distinguished. All the same, paternal kin, other things being equal, already mattered most; it was from them that most land would be inherited, and with them that it would be - sometimes acrimoniously - divided. This would simply be accentuated as office-holding became less vital an element of aristocratic identity and land became more important.
Families continued to feud with each other, too. The imagery of faida, ‘feud’, or, more generally, bellum, ‘war’, frequently appears in narratives, as in the ‘Babenberger’-‘Conradine’ bellum of the 900s in the Middle Rhine, in which the Babenberger Henry was killed in 902, then his brother Adalbert killed Conrad, father of the future king Conrad I, before King Louis the Child was able to intervene, executing Adalbert in 906. All the same, not all these feuds reinforced patrilineal families: the murder of the leading Lotharingian count Megingaud in 892 was avenged on his killer Alberic in 896 by his widow’s second husband’s uncle. These were regional alliances fighting for supremacy, more than kin-groups expressing identity through honour-killings, even if the imagery of revenge was there, and was powerful. At the highest level, indeed, political rivalry could break families up; we saw at the start of this chapter how Ottonian patronage had split the Billungs. On a smaller scale, Thietmar himself found his paternal uncle Marquis Liuthar extremely unwilling to let him take over the family church of Walbeck in 1002, until Thietmar gave Liuthar a large pay-off (and also paid off his predecessor, whom Liuthar had put in), though this may simply be the product of tensions implicit in all inheritance divisions, which have indeed broken up many tight lineages in history, and certainly did so in the ninth and tenth centuries. Which is to say: we must not overstate family solidarity. Families could break up, and be redefined; family links were in any case only one available social bond, alongside personal dependence on kings and other lords, and political/factional alliances of other kinds. All the same, the imagery of kinship was important to aristocrats and widely used; it was kin who could choose whether to accept compensation for killings or continue the faida (as we see, for example, in Charlemagne’s capitularies; he sought to make compensation compulsory); family and kin bonds underlie all inheritance, much political strategy, and an increasing proportion of aristocratic identity.
Aristocratic ‘virtue’ was also, as we have seen, religious. The family monastery channelled that religious superiority, as well as helping to keep the kin-group together. So did the extensive land-giving to churches of all kinds that marks the late eighth century in Carolingian Europe, and, after a break, the tenth and eleventh centuries too. Aristocratic control of monasteries has often been seen as in opposition to monastic ‘reform’, which removed family control and set up (or, sometimes, reinstated) rigorous and autonomous religious communities who chose their own abbots and were beholden to no one. This opposition does exist in some reforming texts, which stress lay resistance to reforming activity, and (especially in the eleventh century) often see lay control as a pollution of monastic spirituality. This is not, however, how aristocrats themselves saw it, or indeed most monks. Bishop Adalbero I of Metz, Adalbero II’s uncle, reformed the great Lotharingian house of Gorze in 933-4, with plenty of rhetoric, overstated, about the monastery’s previous irreligiosity, and later accepted a famous ascetic, John of Gorze (d. 976), as abbot; but the process can also be seen as Adalbero’s family gaining control of Gorze from a rival (the ‘Matfridings’, counts of Metz). In other cases, families themselves reformed monasteries, instituted monastic elections of abbots according to the Rule of St Benedict, but still maintained patronage of the reformed house. In cases such as these they could themselves benefit substantially from the new monastic spirituality, for monastic prayers for the family would be more efficacious; and, not least, as already in the eighth century, the generosity of others to the monastic house would frequently increase if its spiritual reputation was higher, thus boosting the wealth of a church which still maintained its original family links. At a royal level, this sort of religious/political concern is also seen in the monastic reforms of late tenth-century England, very much organized for the spiritual and political benefit of the king, queen and leading ealdormen; this was equally true, for that matter, of the ninth-century Carolingians, who were keen to impose the Rule universally in their domains, but nonetheless disposed of monastic land and appointed abbots with considerable detachment.
The classic instance of a reformed monastery at the end of our period is Cluny, in the county of Mâcon: it was founded in 909-10 by William the Pious, but put, not under his own family patronage, but under that of the pope, to keep it separate from any direct lay domination. Nor did that occur; Mâcon was on the edge of Guilhelmid power, and the family anyway died out in 927; successive abbots were of aristocratic background, for sure, but their families had no authority over them. (Nor did the pope, of course, a marginal figure in most aspects of tenth-century politics, as we have seen.) Cluny was very unusual in its formal separation from lay authority, and its abbots had to be - and were - unusually able so as to maintain it. But its growing reputation as a centre for organized spiritual activity made it the most successful recipient of lay landed generosity anywhere in contemporary Europe, with a thousand charters of gift from the tenth century alone. These did not come with domination, but with relationships, with both aristocrats and smaller neighbours (village élites and peasant cultivators alike - all gave Cluny land), who wanted to see their gifts used to their own spiritual advantage as expertly and authoritatively as possible. Cluny turned into a lordship on a par with the others in the Mâconnais, and far richer than most. It did so not by threatening aristocratic spiritual attitudes, but by drawing on them and validating them. It was its second abbot, Odo (927-42), who wrote the Life of Gerald, after all, the founding text for a lay aristocratic version of spirituality. Odo became an expert in monastic reform, called in across West Francia, and even by Alberic, prince of Rome. Cluny was the very opposite of a critique of tenth-century society: it was in many respects the most perfect product of the aristocratic values, including religious ones, discussed in this chapter.