Fouracre, Origins Nobility Francia
Functions, terminologies, legal standing, 'fierce competition', known unknowns..
Exhibit category type 7 rank over status society.
Wikipedia: “The Kingdom of the Franks (Latin: Regnum Francorum), also known as the Frankish Kingdom, the Frankish Empire (Latin: Imperium Francorum) or Francia, was the largest post-Roman barbarian kingdom in Western Europe. It was ruled by the Frankish Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties during the Early Middle Ages.”
Wikipedia: Expansion of the Frankish Kingdom, 481–870
The Source:
Paul Fouracre, ‘Origins of the Nobility in Francia’ in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe, edited by Anne J. Duggan. Boydell Press, 2000
[As usual, references in the original text have been omitted.]
Any review of work on the early medieval nobility quickly reveals that historians use the term ‘nobility’ to refer to an élite which was open, imperfectly defined, and subject to regional variation. With regard to the Frankish nobility, one can apply a series of normative statements about its origins and nature, but any general observations must always be qualified, or even contradicted, in the light of particular case studies. We can, for instance, observe that Frankish sources laid great emphasis on birth as the basis of nobility. That a person was ‘born noble’ was a standard way of indicating high social status … at least from the early seventh century onwards. Yet the Frankish nobility was by no means a closed élite. One can detect sentiments of exclusiveness, a horror, almost, of people who had risen from below to occupy the highest positions. …
… The Frankish élite was also one which apparently united family wealth with political and ecclesiastical high office, and expected to pass on wealth and office to the next generation. … The family might thus sometimes appear to have a rather exotic cognatic structure, or it might look much more like the modern two-generational family. As for marriage, both endogamous and exogamous practices can be observed. …
… [The] Frankish nobility was sufficiently pliable to allow the Carolingian rulers to attempt to shape it into a supportive body. This they tried to do by restricting the range of people entitled to have their own armed following, and by encouraging links between the most privileged people over a wide area. They favoured exogamous marriages by insisting on the forbidden degrees of marriage, and they also encouraged families across the different areas of their empire to build up bonds of friendship and spiritual ties.
This linkage, and the dispersal of key families throughout the widespread territories ruled by the Carolingians, was … a basic means of government.
… the concept of an ‘imperial aristocracy’ deliberately dispersed across continental Europe, the so-called Reichsaristokratie, may need to be qualified in all sorts of ways, but nevertheless, ‘it is worth preserving as a useful tool as it offers insights into the structure of the empire and the social history of the aristocracy’ — that is, the Carolingian Empire, and its aristocracy, which is usually taken to mean the couple of hundred or so families which provided the counts, bishops, and abbots who effectively ran it. It is this … pliable … group which provides those case histories which allow us to see how normative ideas of custom actually worked out in practice. …
… It has long been accepted that the origins of these aristocratic families was mixed … important Carolingian families back from the ninth into the early seventh century and demonstrated that they had Gallo-Roman, Burgundian, and Frankish ancestors. Intermarriage reflected the history of the area, with successive newcomers marrying into the native élite. …
… On the other hand, the origins, culture, and standing of the Frankish nobility in general has been subject to fierce debate. It is a debate which got caught up in the wheels of the even bigger question of whether the development of early medieval Europe owed more to ‘Germanic’ or ‘Roman’ influences. Was the nobility of Francia (as opposed to the Frankish nobility) descended from Gallo-Roman natives or from Germanic invaders? … ‘both’, is clear for the élite, but what about the lesser nobility? Or, was the aristocracy one of blood or one of service? If it was one of blood, and that blood was not Roman blood, did it introduce new and non-Roman customs, culture, and institutions into society? Or if it were one of service, do we see the nobility preserving Roman institutions through the tenure of positions derived from the offices of late Roman provincial government?
At issue here is the ultimate question about the affective nature of power: was society built around the private power of chieftains whose ascendancy was based on blood, following, and loyalty? Or was the political structure based on public power mediated through a hierarchy of offices and services?
Recent scholarship tends to dissolve these global questions, not least because we no longer think in terms of … basic opposition between concepts of ‘Germanic’ and ‘Roman’ culture and institutions, or between notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ power.
At the same time we recognize that there is no decisive answer to the question of how the nobility in Francia came into being. For not only was that nobility so broadly constituted and so much subject to regional variation that it becomes impossible to argue a single origin for all nobles, we also understand that our perception of what the nobility was like is warped by the vagaries of our source materials. …That is to say, we have to be able to track families across several generations … This we can usually do only from the eighth century onwards. For the later sixth and seventh centuries we must rely more heavily on narrative sources which concentrate on that élite which was involved in high politics centred on the royal court … dramatic events … a picture of huge loosely knit families which were spread right across the Frankish realm. For the later period, charters tend to show smaller families, close knit and concentrated in a much smaller region. And for a period even earlier than that covered by the narrative sources, archaeology gives us yet another impression, namely, of an élite which was only just beginning to differentiate itself from the rest of the community.
… Taken together… the single term ‘nobility’ should comprehend a spectrum of people which stretched from the leaders of small communities of several hundred people, through to an élite group of families which dominated a single county, to that supra-regional élite which would later make up the Reichsaristokratie.
Unlike ‘nobility’, the term ‘aristocracy’ was not used by the Franks. We use it, often vaguely, to refer to one end of the spectrum, the ‘more important families’, that is to an élite within an élite. Some people we place in this super élite because we judge that they were very important, simply because they were mentioned in narrative sources. Otherwise we assume that certain jobs or offices were so important that their holders must have been top people. This would be true of bishops, abbots, dukes, counts, or a few other high officials. Finally, we can identify a few terms, such as optimates, proceres, or illustres, which designate high status without reference to office.
Often we would refer to any or all of these important people as ‘magnates’, a term we can use as a safer alternative to ‘aristocracy’, in that it appears to leave more open questions about how the élite was formed.
For two reasons we assume that the magnate group was an open élite which recruited members from the layer of people directly below it.
First, the inclusion of office-holders in the group suggests that it was possible to climb the social hierarchy as one’s career progressed. This is certainly demonstrable for churchmen.
Second, good evidence for strong social competition suggests a real prospect of advancement at all levels. The kind of people who might have had hopes of advancement through service, reward, marriage, or luck we may see in those who appear in the magnates’ followings as locally important people who regularly witnessed their charters.
Lastly, we can detect a large group of lesser nobles in those who appear in the circles of smaller churches and monasteries, and who often became privileged tenants of the church. It is not possible to draw a clear line between these people and the non-nobles, for there were other community leaders, such as boni homines, rachymburgi, or (in Brittany) machtierns, whose status was never clearly associated with nobility, but who nevertheless exercised considerable influence in law courts and in community affairs generally.
The point in describing the social spectrum of nobility in this way is firstly to remphasise its width, and secondly to demonstrate that its stratification is one which we have deduced, not one which they ever expressed. ..
… [It is] possible to detect the origins of some of those at the top end of the spectrum. The results of his name-research are consistent with the occasional references to ethnic identity in our narrative sources. Together they speak of an ethnic diversity which we must add to observations on the social complexity of the nobility.
In different regions we can see different origins. In the source-rich Auvergne, for instance, we can see a Gallo-Roman élite conserving its wealth and privilege from the fifth through into the eighth centuries. In the unlikely case that the Franks and others who invaded this area were naive of a nobility, one must assume that the more ambitious among them would have wished to acquire comparable status to these successful landowners, counts, and bishops. In the Meuse-Moselle-Rhine region to the north, archaeology gives a quite different picture of élite formation, with, as we have seen, an élite which still at the end of the sixth century was not quite separate from the rest of the community. Yet within this region was Trier, where people with Roman names and the high-status title senator are visible into the mid-seventh century. No doubt this pattern of new and old was repeated in other areas.
Nor is it unlikely that in some places at least three processes might have been at work:
élite formation at community level,
the raising of status through association with, or service to, newly created religious and political institutions in the locality,
and the establishment, forcible or otherwise, of magnate groups in the region.
The diverse origins of the nobility and regional variations in the assessment of social status are reflected both in the variety of law codes in operation in Francia and in the way in which law and custom were hard to distinguish from each other.
A legal system which could comprehend a variety of local laws and customs was one tailored towards mediation between nobles from different regions and of different origins. But at the same time as it facilitated communication between those of different traditions, the judicial process helped to preserve the differences.
The preservation of different legal traditions in fact became something of a political principle, for it was a way of representing Francia as an empire made up of many peoples. But by ‘peoples’ we should understand the leaders, the nobles.
Law thus provided a common means by which nobles of different origins could protect their property, and this was because of, not in spite of, the variety of laws in operation. Particular law codes, famously, did not distinguish nobles from other people, although they did assign higher levels of compensation to those in royal service.
This fact has been a key element in the ‘origins debate’, for if the nobility did not figure in the earliest law codes, it has been argued, then perhaps they did not exist when the codes were first drawn up. If so, it would follow that the only way to achieve higher status was through service to the king.
But inasmuch as law’s principal aim was to protect property, and nobility was associated with wealth, then law effectively protected noble status.
Custom more obviously protected status and privilege by allowing for redress against those slights to honour and reputation which could not be given a tariff in terms of injury or easily proved in a law court. Service was indeed an important element in the formation of a nobility, but it was one element among many. Rulers certainly aided the formation by providing opportunities for service.
From sixth-century legislation we see what was possibly a numerous group of people given a special status as armed servants of the king. These were the antrustiones. In addition there were the centenarii who functioned as royal agents at local level and who were in one instance treated as antrustiones. Were these people made noble through royal service? At a higher social level, it was by and large only those who were already powerful who were given high office, and the holders of high office must have had a distinct advantage in competition with other nobles. But at the same time as they stimulated the formation and stratification of a nobility, rulers also helped to preserve its diversity, not only by recognising the high status of people of different backgrounds, but also by adding to the means through which people’s status could be raised. …
… eighth century … documents tend to show us nobles holding fractions of estates and struggling to rationalise dispersed lands, or even to stay afloat in the face of divided inheritances. It has therefore often been supposed that the nobility ‘originally’ held compact estates which were then divided in each generation for purposes of inheritance, causing something of a crisis of resources for those noble families whose original holding had been on the small side to begin with. This idea of diminution through partible inheritance may be true of lands which had been acquired from the king, but there is no reason to believe that there was ever an age in which most nobles held undivided estates. Why should there have been such an age? Or, more to the point, if there was one, when was it?
With the exception of grants of large blocs of former royal land to the church, the earliest charters show family or ‘allodial’ [absolute ownership] land held in fractions or portiones. People can be seen buying, swapping and shuffling land holdings in order to build up larger and more efficient units. Charters certainly recorded this activity and no doubt facilitated it, but there is no reason to believe that they called it into being.
Many families were indeed so short of resources that further division of their lands would have deprived some or all members of the wealth needed to maintain noble status. It is, however, illogical to imagine that this happened only in the eighth century as the culmination of a process which had been going on for generations, for it was a continuous process.
The important point here is that we must assume that even as some people were entering the nobility, others were sinking to a social level below it. In this sense élite formation was an unending process, with movement throughout the social spectrum as wealth was continuously accumulated and dispersed.
The basic factor here was that there was not enough wealth to maintain relative social status across generations, and the result was that there was fierce competition for wealth at all social levels, and at all times. It was competition which made the Frankish nobility essentially biddable and ready to serve those of higher status, be they counts, dukes, bishops, abbots, or kings.
The essential precondition both for the formation of an élite, and for competition within that élite, was the existence of a stable work-force made up a tied peasantry. It was this labour resource which made it possible to take control of portions of land through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or through reward for service, and to profit from that land immediately.
Social mobility among the nobility was thus predicated upon a degree of social immobility at peasant level, and it is of course true that a dependent peasantry was formed at different times in different places.
This observation hugely undermines any notion that the Frankish nobility came into being at roughly the same time, everywhere.
What muddies the question of origins even more, is the fact that in Francia élite formation took place against a background of … homogenisation. A written culture which was latinate and Christian and very much the same everywhere masks diversity of origins. For example, an area such as Central Germany which had been outside the zone of late Roman bureaucratic tradition until the mid-eighth century, then suddenly began to produce large numbers of charters, as if the nobility there was as familiar with this way of recording transactions as, say, their counterparts in the Auvergne who had been doing it for centuries … [and] the very terms used to describe family relationships were Roman and archaic.
It is the conformity of this written culture which allows us to draw up normative statements about the nature of the Frankish nobility, but which also makes it essential to qualify those statements with the evidence of case studies. The complexity which these studies reveal is not in the least surprising given the diverse origins of the Frankish nobility and the difficult competitive conditions in which it operated.
If we accept that the formation of the Frankish nobility was a slow, variable, and possibly endless process, this conclusion leads us to a final set of questions. Given that new peoples were recruited to the Frankish empire in the eighth and ninth centuries, when, if ever, did the process of formation come to an end?
If we say that the formation of the élite was both bottom up (from the organization of a dependant peasantry) and top down (through service to rulers), what provoked subsequent change within it?
Did this happen top down when the Frankish rulers lost power and nobles exercised more authority in their own right?
Or was it provoked from below as more wealth was produced in the countryside, thus taking the edge off that competitive need which drove magnates into royal service and into supra-regional politics?
… [As] we have more detailed sources we can understand older patterns in a more nuanced and subtle fashion.
Please send comments or corrections to me directly at mgs.heller@gmail.com
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