Sidney Painter

The Lords of Lusignan in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

FEW feudal families are of interest to as wide a variety of scholarly specialists as the house of Lusignan. The historian of Poitou sees the Lusignans as the most turbulent and vigorous of the regions baronial dynasties -one which in the thirteenth century almost succeeded in creating a feudal principality between the Loire and the Garonne. To the historian of France as a whole the Lusignans were for many years the chief impediment to the development of Capetian authority in Northern Aquitaine. The student of English history is interested in them both as participants in the long struggle between the Capetians and the Plantagenets and as intimates of King Henry III. The fact that, once the Crusades began, every head of the house of Lusignan was a Crusader, and that the family supplied three kings of Jerusalem and the dynasty which ruled Cyprus until 1474, has centered on it the attention of specialists in the history of the Crusades and the Latin East. The literary historian is attracted by the family so deeply involved with the famous legend of Melusine. Finally, the student of feudal institutions finds in the Lusignans a family which has a reasonably well established history from the ninth to the fourteenth century. It is this last aspect that is the primary interest of this article. The activities of the Lusignans in France, England, and the Near East after the year 1200 are well known, but only an unpublished dissertation deals with the early history of the family. Yet it supplies a fascinating example of the process by which a tenth-century landed family could develop into a thirteenth-century baronial house. According to the Chronicle of Saint-Maixent, the founder of the house of Lusignan was Hugh Venator. His son and successor, Hugh Carus, built the castle of Lusignan.1 As the Lusignans were the most powerful neighbors and chief vassals of the abbey of St-Maixent, there seems to be no reason for rejecting the chroniclers tatement. M. Richard assumes that Hugh I was the huntsman, perhaps the chief huntsman, of the count of Poitou, but the fact that in later years the Lusignans held the forest o the east of their castle from the bishop of Poitiers suggests that Hugh may have held his office from that prelate.2 The first definite reference to the castle of Lusignan is in 1009.3 Beginning about 960 the name Hugh appears frequently among the witnesses to the counts charters, but

Castellans of the Plain of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

ALTHOUGH few aspects of the history of mediaeval France have been studied as extensively as the feudal and seigniorial systems, there still remain lacunae in our knowledge of their development. The scholars of the nineteenth century showed fairly clearly the origins of these institutions and their nature in the thirteenth century, but their accounts of the process of growth which lay between were largely imaginative speculations based on a few documents. Early in the twentieth century scholars like Haskins and Halphen began the meticulous study of the documents of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Later still Marc Bloch posed new questions and suggested fruitful methods of solving them. These pioneers have been followed by others, and we now have a number of regional studies covering all or part of this obscure period. From these works emerges a new picture of the growth of feudal and seigniorial institutions. They also show clearly that while the broad outlines of this process may be much the same throughout France there are striking regional variations. The object of this article is to examine the development of the middle echelons of the feudal hierarchy, the barons and castellans, in the central part of the county of Poitou during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A succeeding article will attempt to illustrate this process in detail by tracing the history of the house of Lusignan during this period. Before embarking on the history of the feudal potentates of the region it is necessary to survey briefly the geographical and political structure of tenthcentury Poitou. At the close of this century the county of Poitou covered the present-day departments of Vendee, Deux-Sevres, Vienne, Charente-Maritime, and a small part of Gironde to the east of the estuary of that river. Except for the part of the department of Loire-Inferieure south of the Loire which had been lost to the count of Nantes when he expelled the Northmen who had held the region for some years, this was the territory which Charlemagne had given to his count of Poitiers. In terms of tenth-century political geography, Poitou was bounded on the west by the sea and on the north, east, and south by the counties of Nantes, Anjou, Touraine, Berry, La Marche, Limoges, Angouleme, and Bordeaux. Topographically, tenth-century Poitou consisted of the Plain of Poitou, a strip of lowland lying between the Central Massif and the Armorican Massif, and the southern part of the Armorican Massif. The southeastern part of the Armorican Massif was a true highland region known as La Gatine, while the southwestern part, now usually called Bas-Poitou, was less rugged. In the northwestern corner of the Plain of Poitou lay an extensive marshy region known as the Marais Poitevin. South of it was a fertile coastal plain bearing the regional designation of Aunis. To the south of Aunis lay Saintonge, which was geographically more closely related to the county of Angouleme than to Poitou and is not considered a part of the Poitevin plain. It is with the Plain of Poitou, especially the narrowest

The Rout of Winchester

of accord with those used in the books of Cologne. A list will appear in my forthcoming book. The illumination is similar in all three books, though in Cologne 75 it is not quite so modest as in the other two. Incipits, explicits and titles are generally written in uncials.1 In H the incipits and titles are red; the explicits black or red. In Cologne 184, on the other hand, red seems to be preferred in all cases, whereas in Cologne 75 either color may be used or both colors in alternating lines. Of more significance, however, is the fact that in H and in Cologne 184 the initials2 at the beginning of sections of the text are identical in size (about two lines high) and color (plain black, usually shaded in red). In all three books the first line (or lines) of text immediately following these initials is written in black (or in Cologne 184, red) uncials. This ends our comparison, which need not be continued with further details. There can be little question that the three manuscripts discussed above were products of the same scriptorium. One may conclude, then, that despite the fascinating theory of Mr Granger the London Vitruvius was written, not at Jarrow, but at Cologne, probably circa 850-863. It is certainly desirable to be sure of the origin of our oldest copy of Vitruvius and of one of the worthy monuments in the script of Cologne.

E. A. BENIANS, JAMES BUTLER, and C. E. CARRINGTON. (Eds.). The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. III : The Empire-Commonwealth, 1870-1919. Pp. xxi, 948. New York: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1959.

his dust-heap sorting Mr. Bassett, in a passing defense of Lloyd George’s &dquo;coupon&dquo; and the 1918 election, makes it clear to the alert reader what his conclusion is going to be: MacDonald is to be proved right, on any and every point. He has no difficulty, of course, in showing, as everybody now knows, that the Labour Cabinet, no wiser than anyone else in matters economic-and not having digested Keynes, at whom, however, Mr. Bassett directs a casual and perplexing sneer-floundered miserably in face of the slump, that their floundering was accentuated by Snowden’s rigidity and the almost gleeful haste with which he loosed the May Report, with its recommendations for violent cuts in the standard of the least well-off, upon the world, or that it was only at the last minute that the nine, ten, or eleven saw what they were doing and drew back from the brink. Had he been more balanced in his approach, moreover, he could probably have induced his readers to believe that some of the things said of MacDonald in the bitterness of the moment were unjustified. But he has not studied at all the nature and history of the Labour movement, or the changes in MacDonald’s own attitude over the years; and hagiography, alas, is not history. The book contributes little to understanding, for all the pains its author has taken, and will scarcely help MacDonald’s memory. MARGARET COLE

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desideratum, reluctantly made. One had almost wished that the author’s concentration on symbolism had allowed for a more evident appreciation of the practical utility of the fictions which the English jurists contrived for the daily and urgent business of securing private and public rights, privileges, and prerogatives in public law. JOSEPH F. COSTANZO, S.J. Professor of Political Philosophy and Historical Jurisprudence Fordham University

NORMAN F. CANTOR. Church, Kingship, and Lay Investiture in England 1089- 1135. (Princeton Studies in History, Vol. 10.) Pp. xiv, 349. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

was inevitably the scene of original sin and its punishment and nothing more, he showed a belated affinity with the theologians denounced by Voltaire. This belief in progress and perfectibility inspired both Mazzini and Marx, the two most representative exponents of liberal and collectivist ideas. The all-pervading triumphs of modem science, moreover, for all their empirical basis, derive from eighteenth century tolerance and common sense. Further, the Enlightenment was cosmopolitan. It crossed the oceans as well as the fron-

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poetic ideal by offering a revaluation of the tension between poetry and society. He analyzes four test cases: Stefan George and his circle in Weimar Germany; Ezra Pound and the &dquo;New Critics&dquo; in America; Hart Crane’s &dquo;The Bridge&dquo;; and the impact of industrialization upon modem literature. He rejects the straightjacket of Marxist materialism on the ground that the intrusion of political responsibility, or fear of being an &dquo;irresponsible,&dquo; degrades art into mere propaganda. At the same time he denounces New Critic formalism with its accent on didacticism, shallow isolation, and loss of aesthetic magic. The main prerequisite for all civilization and culture, including poetry, is to be found in ethical values, not in narrow political partisanship. In his concluding chapter Viereck urges the American poet in the machine age to become the mediator between the outward material world and the inner spiritual world. It is not the business of the poet, he concludes, to provide political or economic solutions for the ills of mankind, but, by mediating between the two worlds of machine and spirit, he may inspire in society that bifocal vision which is the prerequisite to any solution. In this way the artist can help man become the master of things instead of things the masters of

BOLGAR, R. R. The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Pp. viii, 592. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

The exact impact of public opinion on Napoleon’s foreign policy decisions is difhcult to judge. Professor Case suggests that this influence was too great for the good of the nation or the regime. He feels that in matters of foreign policy both then and now, the men at the top are usually more competent and far-sighted than the masses; that in such matters, &dquo;Jacques and his fellow compatriots ... can only help in making blunders.&dquo; Whether or not this rather pessimistic view is justified, Mr. Case’s book deserves to be praised-and, better still, to be read. It is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature on the Second Empire. GORDON WRIGHT University of Oregon