Exhibit category type 7 medieval rank over status society. Type 7 is at ‘research stage’.
The Source:
Janet Nelson, ‘Legislation and Consensus in the Reign of Charles the Bald’ in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, edited by Patrick Wormald, Basil Blackwell 1983
… Over fifty capitularies have survived from the reign of Charles the Bald, including fourteen which are records of meetings between Charles and (one or more) other Carolingian rulers … nearly all of them fall within Ganshof’s broad substantial definition of capitularies as
‘prescribing rules of law and ordering their implementation, and/or prescribing measures in particular cases’
… Lupus of Ferrières in a letter to Hincmar of Rheims regretted that the king ‘had not agreed in the first place to the recommendations which he sought and got at Ver’, and recalled: ‘I sent you [Hincmar] these same canons, or, as you call them, capitula, which I then marshalled with my pen’ …
… at this date … the drawing-up of capitularies was in the hands of a very small group of close royal advisers who, especially if a capitulary was not promulgated, could have taken texts away with them to ‘private’ archives. …
INSERT
Key legislation protagonist via Wikipedia:
Hincmar (806-882), archbishop of Reims, was a Frankish jurist and theologian, as well as friend, advisor and propagandist of Charles the Bald. He belonged to a noble family of northern Francia.
STAINED GLASS HINCMAR
BACK TO TEXT:
… Hincmar may have been responsible both for this last capitulary and for the collection … If so, ought we to ask whether he was acting in a ‘public capacity’,‘entrusted’ with the construction of a state archive, or in a private capacity as one interested in collecting, preserving and even composing capitularies (among other legal texts)? …
… taken together, these manuscripts could suggest an attempt at the systematic preservation of Charles the Bald’s capitularies … a number of capitularies in whose composition Hincmar seems to have been involved … all fall within the period when Hincmar can plausibly be assigned a major role in the composition of capitulary texts … of Charles the Bald … traced to a Rheims origin ….
… Of the 46 capitularies in one or more of our four manuscripts, Hincmar’s authorship has been suggested … for 19, and I would think it likely for at least a further 5. In other words, Hincmar’s hand can perhaps be seen in the writing-up of 30 out of the 58 surviving capitularies, and … in the preservation of a further 23. Now it is clear that Hincmar was not the only author or preserver of capitularies in Charles the Bald’s reign. But what seems beyond doubt is the major role of Hincmar in the maintenance and indeed the climaxing (whether judged on formal or substantial criteria) of the Carolingian capitulary tradition. Other Carolingian contemporaries of Charles the Bald ‘prescribed and ordered the application of rules of law’ and took ‘measures for particular cases’ [ref. Wickham]: it was no difference in political practice but a highly differential degree of interest in written law on the part of the clerical elite, and specifically of Hincmar, as compared with prelates in other kingdoms … between c.840 and c.880. …
… The Capitulary of Servais (853) has been held to signify ‘a remarkable restoring to order of the kingdom’ [ref. re Hincmar]. Here was affirmed the principle of the collective liability of free Franks to denounce and pursue criminals in their locality; practical means to enforce this were the oaths required of free men and the hundredman’s role in linking local and central measures to suppress disorder. A total of forty-three missi were named in a dozen missatica in Francia and Burgundy. …
[MH: here is a definition borrowed from an upcoming exhibit MCKITTERICK ‘Charlemagne’: missatica (administrative districts) regularly inspected by the king’s agents known as the missi dominici]
… The Edict of Pitres (June 864) was conceived on a grand scale in thirty-seven capitula. The single largest topic was coinage reform, the siting of mints, the duties of moneyers, penalties for rejecting new coin (including careful specification of type of flogging to avoid permanent health damage), were all spelled out in detail …solidly within the framework of recent Frankish legislation. Yet there is no sense here of merely formulaic repetition: the older provisions were often modified or supplemented, and as in the capitularies o f Charlemagne and Louis the Pious we find a wealth of data about quite specific governmental problems: for instance the need to secure the supply of horses both for military and communications purposes; the difficulties posed for royal estate-managers by the growth of a peasant land-market and the consequent dismemberment of tenurial units that were also fiscal units; conflicts of interest between lords and peasants over labour services and the earnings of migrant workers.
… In this and other capitularies, we can sometimes suspect that remedies are being prescribed for quite local and/or short-term problems. For instance, peasant migration, here said to be ‘recent’ and the result of … ‘persecution’ … It is obvious, too, that a specific factional conflict, centring on the court, lies behind [another Capitulary] …
… To see why any particular topic was the subject of a capitulary, we have to understand the text as the residue - all that survives - of the proceedings of an assembly.
The agenda would be the product of initiatives not only from the king and his close advisers but also from individuals and groups among the aristocracy. Collective deliberations and decision-making could translate private concerns and grievances into public law … Politics is the common denominator, in as much as dealings involving king and aristocracy lie behind all these affairs, and the assembly is the forum in which power is negotiated.
A lively impression of the assembly’s central role in the earlier part of the reign is conveyed in … letters: the operation of networks of patronage and the activity of favoured magnates as brokers between the king and other nobles supplement but are no substitute for personal participation at assemblies.
… Attendance is at once a burden and an opportunity: a summons is a demand for service, specifically military service, and for gifts, but also a personalised signal of the king’s attention. Refusal of such a summons, on whatever excuse, is dangerous.
… Occasionally, charters can be linked with assemblies; but … the absence of lists of subscriptions severely limits the usefulness of charters as indicators of attendance at assemblies. Royal judgements, though very rare, do carry lists of subscribers … Two dated within a week of each other can be read as showing 18 counts as well as 25 archbishops and bishops and 6 abbots with the king at the palace of Verberie in late October/early November 863. The third shows the king attended by nine counts at Rouy (near Laon) in April 868 … both hint at the numbers of magnates that could be present when important business was being discussed. In two cases, the scale of an assembly is indicated in the capitulary emanating from it: it is clear that most of the forty-three missi named in the capitulary of Servais were present there. They represent a majority of the bishops and perhaps also of the counts in the Frankish and Burgundian parts of the kingdom. …
… Enemies of the king might be captured in the provinces but were brought back to Francia to be sentenced at an assembly by the judgement of the Franks. Disputes between magnates might be settled in the assembly-forum … Similar rivalries and reconciliations are attested at another great summer assembly at Pitres … Here too, the royal changes in, or confirmations of, comital personnel that were the outcomes of such manoeuvring, were publicly announced. While aristocratic politics remained centripetal with the court still the natural forum for competition between nobles and for peaceful resolution of conflicts by king and faithful men acting in concert, equally, the king could use the assembly as a convenient locale for orchestrating support. …
… Information on assemblies becomes more detailed and systematic than ever in the annals from 868-77. In 868… the king is said to have received the annual gifts at Pitres … and to have ‘summoned certain leading men of his kingdom, both some of the bishops, and others’ to meet him at Quiersy at …
The term ‘counsellors’ is used increasingly frequently for the clearly small group of leading men who advises on major decisions. Under 874, Hincmar records: ‘Charles held a meeting with his counsellors …”
Hincmar’s description in the last few chapters of the De Ordine Palatii of how ‘the healthy condition of the whole realm was maintained’ by the holding of twice-yearly assemblies whose business was dealt with by means of ‘lists of separately-headed chapters’ … At the general assembly,
‘the whole aristocracy’ [universitas maiorum, lay and clerical attended] the more influential to frame counsel, the less important men to hear that counsel and sometimes similarly to deliberate on it, and to confirm it, not because they were forced to do so, but from their own understanding and freely-expressed opinion.’
Such assemblies were … occasions for the aristocracy to hand over their gifts to the king. The other assembly was attended only by the more influential men, the leading counsellors. It was held in winter, to take stock of what would have to be done in the coming year. Its transactions were confidential: the same matters would be brought up again at the general summer assembly, where,
‘as if nothing had been previously worked out concerning them, they were now subject to the new counsel and consent of the people, policies were found, and, under God’s leadership, arrangements made along with the magnates, for putting good order into effect.’
De Ordine Palatii details the qualities required in counsellors: loyalty, wisdom, the ability to withstand pressures of political friends and relatives, and a commitment to confidentiality.
Recruitment should be by merit, from among the pool of the king’s palace servants (ministeriales palatini). After explaining how the palace officers should conduct less important affairs, Hincmar describes in detail how the counsellors dealt with assembly business …
… phrases in this and other passages reflects what may appear to us as the ambiguous, even contradictory, nature of Carolingian political action: who is making the decisions here, and who is taking initiatives?
The king ‘finds’ the agenda, the counsellors ‘find counsel’, the people ‘find what is required, by their counsel and consent’. The counsellors ‘reach conclusions’; the king ‘chooses’; all ‘follow’.
It seems to me artificial to claim that there is a special insistence here on the king’s authority, to contrast this with Hincmar’s ‘accent on the collaboration of the counsellors’ …
… since Hincmar, as author of these Annals, was concerned that this information should be recorded … But most significant of all is the complex way in which the action, and interaction, of assembly participants is described. I do not hear … just one ‘accent’ on the king’s role: on the contrary, the counsellors’ ‘collaboration’ sounds an equally strong note, while the ‘understanding’ of the people provides a ground-bass with which king and counsellors harmonise. Lines of communication, and of influence, run between all these participants. Initiatives might come from one or several different points. There is no doubting the king’s central role: the assemblies physically centred, after all, on the king’s palace. But the king operated through a generalised ‘authority’ and a series of informal pressures on individuals.
‘Counsel’ engaged a select group of magnates, then a wider range of greater and lesser nobles, in collective deliberation: hence, whatever the origin of a given item on the agenda, each participant could feel himself involved in decision-making. This is not to suggest that the system was ‘democratic’: rather, that assemblies were natural forums for the exertion of magnate influence and of the demands of the ‘less important’ for protection and support; for the interplay of interest between patrons and clients, and of competition between patrons and between clients; and, last but not least, for royal contact with and influence on individuals and groups among both greater and lesser aristocracy.
The formation of ‘opinion’ was the product of these complex and multiplex interactions of people in a locale where the king’s peace prevailed: in a society where so many transactions directly involved coercion, meetings of the assembly seem to have stood out in Hincmar’s mind as occasions when men, even minores, did not act ‘because they were forced to do so’.
The picture may have been idealized, but it did, I think, accurately represent a contemporary reality: assembly politics were consensus politics, and that consensus — achieved through political processes of persuasion and brokerage, of authority as well as power … — is what is represented, quite literally, in the terminology of ‘consent’, ‘consultation’, ‘counsel and aid’ in the capitularies of Charles the Bald.
It was not just that changes in the procedures and penalties of Frankish law required the formal expression of the people’s consent as well as royal promulgation. A… statement of this principle does indeed occur in the 864 capitulary:
‘law comes into being by the consent of the people and by the establishment of the king.’
… But more significant, and … evidently quite compatible with this technical application of consent to legal change, is the invocation of the ‘consent of the faithful men’ in the prologue of the 864 text, and in several other capitularies of this period, with reference to political decision-making in general. … Therefore … it need not … be understood in terms of a ‘shift of legislative initiative from the kingship to the aristocracy’ [ref. to this claim]: rather, in the context I have described [elsewhere], it at once expresses and appeals to a sense of ‘common utility’ on the part of all, or most, members of a political community which really did remain a going concern throughout Charles the Bald’s reign.
In … De Ordine Palatii, Hincmar gives a vignette of the king’s role during the general assembly. … If requested, the king would join the counsellors in their closed session, and in an atmosphere of good-fellowship [familiaritas) would listen to their debates.
‘Otherwise, he would be occupied with the rest of the assembled people, receiving gifts, greeting important men, swapping stories … expressing sympathy … sharing their pleasures … and so forth … in spiritual as well as secular affairs.’ [shortened]
This could, of course, be any Carolingian king about his business … or even a composite royal image. But Hincmar could also be drawing on his memories of Charles the Bald’s assemblies, and of Charles’ speeches on those occasions.
… In context, Charles, repeated assurances that he will ‘preserve to each man his law and justice’ should be interpreted not as symptoms of weakness [ref. to claim] nor as statements of new constitutional principle of ‘the birth of contractual monarchy’ [ref. to claim] but as affirmations of a thoroughly traditional ideal relationship of mutual trust and collaboration between king and aristocracy: the ‘familiar face’ of Frankish politics.
This image, this ideology, has been preserved for us — thanks, not least, to Hincmar’s efforts — in the capitularies of Charles the Bald. …
For each of the noble Franks, his ‘law’ in the subjective sense was his status, his social standing, his fair treatment according to ‘the law(s)’ in the objective sense of customary norms and procedures including the judgement of his peers.
… Hence the evident requirement that any change in those customary procedures as practised in public courts should be made, should ‘come into being’, ‘with the consent of the Franks’, as well as ‘by the establishment of the king’.
Capitularies, duly consented to and established, themselves became laws, part of that law (in the general sense), composed of both statute and codified ‘gentile’ custom, which was the collective possession of the king’s faithful men. The law of all constituted the framework that guaranteed and preserved the law of each.
Bishops, and still more kings with authority, had a crucial function in law-making that maintained ‘the stability of the kingdom ’; but it was not surprising if for one well-informed contemporary … the capitularies belonged in a special way — maxime — to ‘all the noble Franks’.
[END]
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