McKitterick, literacy and legislation
Legal identity, group identity, subjective identity, and ambiguity..
Exhibit category type 7 medieval rank over status society. Type 7 is at ‘research stage’.
Attentive readers might notice since starting work on medieval Europe I stopped identifying myself as MGH. The reason is that in medieval studies the letters MGH are of huge importance, and appear constantly in the exhibit footnotes.
The Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) is a comprehensive series of carefully edited and published primary sources, both chronicle and archival, for the study of parts of Northwestern, Central and Southern European history from the end of the Roman Empire to 1500. Despite the name, the series covers important sources for the history of many countries besides Germany, since the Society for the Publication of Sources on Germanic Affairs of the Middle Ages has included documents from many other areas subjected to the influence of Germanic tribes or rulers (Britain, Czech lands, Poland, Austria, France, Low Countries, Italy, Spain, etc.). The editor from 1826 until 1874 was Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795–1876); in 1875 he was succeeded by Georg Waitz (1813–1886). [Wikipedia]
In fact, the University of London where I [MGH] worked in the 1990s as Lecturer in Government & Politics of Southeast Asia has a whole webpage devoted to THE MGH.
The Source:
Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Introduction: sources and interpretation’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II c. 700—c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick*, Cambridge University Press 1995
*Subscriber to Social Science Files since July 2022.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: SOURCES AND INTERPRETATION
Rosamond McKitterick
… Literacy, hitherto thought to be confined to a clerical elite, and literate skills, from the king issuing legislation and admonition and the landowner granting property to the church to the unfreed slave clinging to his new social status by means of a charter, were in fact widely dispersed throughout the society of the eighth and ninth centuries. Indeed, all the evidence available suggests that literacy and the written word were central elements of early medieval society, especially in the Frankish world. Written texts could also be made accessible to the unlettered by reading them aloud. No group could remain unaffected by the activities of those able to make the most of the opportunities afforded them by their possession of literate skills. …
… There were [a variety of] written modes of recording memory produced with different objectives, such as all the legal records designed to establish irrefutable proof of possession … It might be thought, moreover, that it is precisely the strength of the legal sources to provide some kind of authentic and reliable voice, were it not for the fact that the legislation which comprises a major proportion of this legal material is normative and may be outlining an ideal rather than reflecting what actually went on within any one region of Europe.
Legislation may well have confirmed reality …but in … in some of the major capitularies of the Carolingian rulers … the laws are prescriptive rather than descriptive. They establish and define aspirations and norms of right conduct and say what ought to be done, not what was being, nor what had been, done.
When older secular and ecclesiastical legislation is drawn on by secular rulers and the clergy, it may not always be in order to proclaim a specific ruling so much as to establish a principle or associate themselves with the wisdom of earlier law-givers.
Even functional documents such as law-codes are inconsistent in their terminology and an unreliable indication of reality. Yet there seems little doubt that the functioning of the law in practice was a major concern of early medieval rulers. For some the law-books produced may well have been intended as a set of guidelines and accumulated wisdom. For others they were more obviously of direct social relevance and served to define group self-consciousness in a practical way.
A wide variety of early medieval texts expresses group consciousness and a sense of community in one way or another, whether or not this can be linked to nationality or ethnicity.
The law-codes or so-called Germanic leges in particular, that is the leges of the Salic and Ripuarian Franks, and the Bavarian, Visigothic, Lombard, Burgundian, Alemannic and Saxon laws, have been thought to express a very narrow self-consciousness linked to nationality. They may witness rather to the bestowal of political allegiance and the acknowledgement that one codification of legal customs will be the set of guiding principles in social and legal relations rather than another on the part of a number of groups. These groups might, on grounds of language or family origin, appear to be very different from one another and may have had little else in common other than the authority they recognised or had been forced to acknowledge.
Group identities … may have been allegiances subjectively determined with little reference to race, culture, religion or language, and where freedom, or lack of freedom … may have been the most important social determinants of status and action.
Certainly the Carolingians established the principle of the personality of the law in the early ninth century. That is, they confirmed the legal principle that different legal systems applied to different groups within the same society according to ancestry or place of origin.
The Carolingian rulers legislated in their capitularies for radically new social and political situations; as their conquests spread, so their legislation became applicable to the new territories which came under their rule.
Yet they apparently endeavoured at the same time to cater to local and habitual modes of settling business and dealing with injury and misdemeanour by allocating to certain groups their 'own' law. To this end they encouraged the production of revised versions of the leges and did much to promote their dissemination.
It is certainly the case that the Carolingian rulers took a very close interest in assembling the laws of the peoples within their realm and for ensuring that correct texts were available to the judges in the court for use.
… But the link between the production of … legal codes and rulers may not always have been … direct …
… In terms of surviving manuscripts, for example, we are often confronted with collections that are linked with the individual enterprise of particular bishops known to have acted as counsellors to the king, such as Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims. …
[Upcoming exhibit will highlight the predominant role of this single bishop in writing up — as the surviving evidence of capitulary legislation — the outcomes of the king’s assemblies with his nobility.]
The thoughtfulness in providing a people with its own written law may not always have been appreciated by the recipients. In 841, for example, the Saxons refused to follow written law and wished to retain their own customs, regarded by the annalist as pagan and evil usage. This may be as much Saxon rejection of Frankish legislation as a specific objection to written law as such; nevertheless, the Saxons' apparent suspicion of what was written and preference for their own custom, held within their collective memory, act as a warning not to overestimate the success of the Franks in superimposing their own cultural presuppositions and methods on another people.
While the legislation of the Carolingians, its production and distribution have received full discussion in recent years, the role of the king in the production of copies of the so-called customary laws of the people … as well as the actual dissemination, reception, function and use of these collections by the peoples for whom they were ostensibly destined, remain a matter for debate.
Although it is acknowledged that the link between literacy and the law is an essential one to have established, the effect writing had on the law and the degree to which it may have altered its function or affected its practical applicability and adaptability within early medieval society still remains to be fully explored. Clearer distinctions need to be maintained between the legislation of rulers, notably that of the Carolingians in capitularies, and the laws embodied in the so-called Germanic leges.
If laws are an ambiguous, if crucial, category of evidence, the formularies for charters and the extant charters themselves provide an indication of the special importance attached to the written word and its correct application, quite apart from what they reveal about the structure and affiliations of many early medieval communities. For the day-to-day recourse to legal procedures and documentary methods of proof, particularly in relation to land ownership, many charters survive, both in originals produced in relation to the actual transactions, and in later copies made of such originals. …
Other chapters written by Rosamond McKitterick in this Vol. II were exhibited a long while ago on Social Science Files and can be read here:
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