Warren Brown

The Use of Norms in Disputes in Early Medieval Bavaria

The Use of Norms in Disputes in Early Medieval Bavaria. This essay looks at the use of norms in disputes in Bavaria in the late eighth century and the first half of the ninth, exploring in detail whether and how an early medieval society might react to norms, and what sort or sorts of authority those norms might represent. Using property disputes drawn from the earliest cartulary of the cathedral church at Freising, it examines the role played by norms of all kinds, from written laws to unwritten norms explicitly or implicitly invoked in individual cases, in the interaction between authority and local social processes. The Freising dispute records indicate that norms mattered a great deal to the people involved in property disputes. Bavarians treated their norms, however, not as authorities dictating behavior but as resources that offered disputants a range of choices. The importance of a norm and the use to which it could be put depended both on the norm itself and on the dictates of the individual stt...

Documentary culture and the laity in the early Middle Ages

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Charters as weapons. On the role played by early medieval dispute records in the disputes they record

This paper seeks to shed more light on how written records were used during the Carolingian period by examining the role played by records of property disputes in the disputes they record. In it I argue that dispute records were important tools that clerical scribes could use to further their church’s interests, to undermine the interests of their opponents, and to help their church take advantage of changes in the regional political landscape. My examples come from the Bavarian cathedral church at Freising in the first decades of the ninth century. These charters indicate that Freising’s scribes crafted their dispute records to enhance the image of their church and bishop, to undermine the image and reputation of their opponents, and to help the Freising community realise what it saw as its property rights. They also sought to take advantage of Charlemagne’s recent conquest of Bavaria by appealing as much as possible to the sympathies of Carolingian judicial authorities. In addition, the scribes used their dispute records to create useful histories for their church’s property, to mask potentially competing histories, and to reward landholding kindreds who allied themselves with Freising’s interests by guaranteeing them a positive written memory.

Conflict, Letters, and Personal Relationships in the Carolingian Formula Collections

Over the last few decades, scholarship on early medieval conflict has been driven and shaped by the kinds of sources that scholars have used. The different source genres offer their own characteristic pictures of the ways that people processed disputes in the early Middle Ages. Narrative sources, for example, such as chronicles or saints lives, tend in the process of achieving their narrative orhagiographic goals to highlight violence, extra-judicial settlement, and the ritual or symbolic expression of disputes and disputeresolution. Normative sources, such as law codes or royal legislation (for example, the capitularies issued by Carolingian kings), naturally emphasize institutional tools for handling conflict, such as formal judicial assemblies and judicial procedures, royal judicial officials, and laws. Archival sources from the period consist primarily of charters, that is, records of rights or privilege ranging from diplomas issued by kings and emperors to the property records of churches andmonasteries. These tend to blend the images produced by the first two source genres. Often they record the formal resolution of propertydisputes in judicial assemblies headed by kings, counts, or their representatives; often they refer to laws or imply that the cases theydeal with were covered by some generally recognized set of norms. Charters also, however, provide a great deal of evidence for extra-judicial negotiation and settlement, as well as for ritual and public symbolic communication as a part of dispute processing.

On the Gesta municipalia and the Public Validation of Documents in Frankish Europe

The disappearance of the late-Roman gesta municipalia, or municipal document registers, is one of the milestones along the road in Europe that leads from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. While they survived, these registers apparently served two constituencies. The late-Roman state used the gesta municipalia to keep track of tax obligations as property changed hands. Citizens for their part validated and secured legal transactions by having the documents generated by their transactions ratified by the civic authorities and copied into the gesta.

Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270–1330

Skoda’s book deals with violence in a very specific context: Paris and the cities of Artois in nthe late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. She likewise has a particular focus: nviolence as a means of communication. Her violence is therefore carried out in public nview, or joins private to public spaces: violence in the streets, in taverns, by university nstudents, in the service of urban uprisings, and within the home. To find it, Skoda surveys nan impressively broad array of sources: judicial and other legal sources, but also literature nof various stripes, such as hagiography, sermons and religious exempla.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Figures and tables

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Index

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Abbreviations

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Contributors

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.