Exhibit category type 7 medieval rank over status society. Type 7 is at ‘research stage’.
The Source:
Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and royal government’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II c. 700—c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick*, Cambridge University Press 1995
THE LOGISTICS OF POWER
Size was a fundamental constraint. An Irish king in his tiny kingdom some 50 km from end to end, would know everyone who mattered, be able to visit every settlement, settle disputes personally. In an empire the size of Charlemagne's, the ruler could govern only a relatively small part directly. Most of it he would never visit. The empire was a conglomerate of previously separate regna, each with its own hereditary nobility.
In the regna of the East Frankish kingdom, and in Lombardy, the aristocracy had a strong sense of collective identity, and Charlemagne had to reckon with this. Existing regional (as well as local) power had to be accommodated. If Charlemagne summoned, say, Bavarians to his host, they fought together, as Bavarians. The establishment of a king's son in a sub-kingdom was an acknowledgement of regional power, and only to a lesser extent a limitation on it — an intrusion from the centre. Some aristocrats would retain and enhance their positions by collaborating with the new regime …
More tensions arose from the relationship of son to father than from regional, or regnal, resistance to central directives, which anyway were few.
The sons of Charlemagne and, still more, those of Louis the Pious [co-emperor with Charlemagne], though given effective powers to make grants of lands and privilege in their own names, and even to issue coinage, resented their fathers' occasional interventions such as … Louis’ redrawing of the boundaries of his sons' sub-kingdoms.
Louis the German [grandson of Charlemagne], in the next generation, explicitly distinguished levels of power when in 865 he delegated to his sons certain fisclands and responsibility for 'lesser judicial cases', while himself retaining control of bishoprics, countships, the bulk of the fisc and 'more important cases’.
Building up powerful military retinues and support within their own lands, yet unable to issue charters or coins, the sons oscillated between loyalty and restiveness as long as their father lived.
Charles the Bald, by appointing men from his own entourage as court officials for his son Louis in Aquitaine, ensured loyalty of a kind.
[HOUSEHOLD]
The heart of the political system within each kingdom, large or small, was a royal household. Size and scale made a difference to its operations. In an Irish kingdom, it was small, and specialisation of function minimal. In any Christian court specialist staff were required to perform religious services, and an Irish king might call on a neighbouring monastery for those.
In larger and more complex kingdoms, specialised personnel were in more or less permanent attendance on the king. There are hints of palatine staff [local lords] serving, and sometimes conspiring against, the ninth-century kings of the Asturias. …
The chamber, literally the royal bed-chamber, was traditionally where the treasure was stored. According to Hincmar's treatise, The Government of the Palace, the chamberlain, along with the queen, looked after the treasure-hoard, dispensing annual gifts to the warriors of the household. Scarcely less important were the butler and seneschal [steward], who saw to the provisioning of the king's table and the feeding of the court, including all those who visited it as guests or envoys. The constable, in charge of the king's horses, seems also to have co-ordinated the military activities when the king's retinue, on campaign, operated as a war-band. Royal foresters, falconers and huntsmen played a key part in the hunting that fed the court and, in semi-ritualised fashion, bonded the king with the young aristocrats who rode with him. Ushers, literally doorkeepers, controlled admittance and so access to the king. In all these 'departments', the chief post would be given by the king to a favoured aristocrat, who presumably placed clients in junior posts. All senior household positions involved a political dimension. Though the numbers involved may have been fewer, a royal household's structure and functioning were not essentially different from what we know of the better-documented twelfth-century or fifteenth-century domus regis.
In much of western Europe in this period, the functions of royal households were governmental, that is, routinely involved in centralised administration by agents of public authority.
[GOVERNANCE PROCESS]
Nearly everywhere, some traditions of late Roman imperial government survived, or were revived. … In Francia, the expansion of empire, and the sheer volume of business coming to the king's court, generated new requirements for delegation and co-ordination, for the multiplying of royal agents, and for forms of communication, therefore, between those agents and the king.
Charlemagne and his successors west of the Rhine and in Italy were heirs to Frankish and Lombard kingdoms in which forms and traditions of late Roman government had been preserved. These included the use of the written word.
Royal charters, that is, records of grants and confirmations of predecessors' grants of land and/or privileges, survive in their hundreds for the reigns of ninth-century Carolingians, including those east of the Rhine.
These documents, which had standardised forms and could be subjected to stringent tests of authenticity, were treated as firm proof of legal tenure. A charter, with seal attached bearing the imprint of the king's seal-ring, was a precious item in the archive of a lay aristocrat or of a church, to be produced in court if a dispute arose over the property or rights in question. Individuals, and representatives of ecclesiastical institutions, travelled great distances, and laid out substantial sums, to get charters issued or confirmed.
Even though charter-writing was very far from a full-time occupation, and the team of notaries at a Carolingian's court at any one time consisted of no more than three or four men, their work met the needs of the governed.
Royal notaries had plenty of opportunity to amass wealth through gifts; and the chancellor, the man in charge of their output and of the king's seal, was invariably a leading ecclesiastic who enjoyed special Konigsndhe.
[I still do not know the meaning of this word Konigsndhe which is not to be found in my large German dictionary or on a brief internet search but I suspect has something to do with feeling or being ‘royalish’ or in royal favour.].
The fact that the number of Carolingian royal judgements surviving is extremely small compared with those of the [preceding] Merovingian period suggests that still more importance now attached to charters as expressions of the royal will and vehicles of royal command.
Kings had a unique capacity to confer and legitimise property rights and to confirm ecclesiastical privileges. Similarly, Carolingian royal authority lent unique and realm-wide force to legal and administrative measures embodied in capitularies.
Not a single capitulary survives as an original 'official' text, and it may well be that few were produced, or kept, centrally. Instead, the manuscript evidence suggests that drafts were made by interested parties with influence at court. These drafts formed the basis for legislation. Once that had been enacted, those same interested parties might make their own copies of it, as aides-memoire. There is even one piece of evidence showing the swift translation into local judicial practice of capitulary instructions on legal procedure. There are hints, too, that some royal agents, mainly west and south of the Rhine, had copies made of capitularies, as they were supposed to do.
Bits of Carolingian legislation, in short, were 'received' both because they had royal authority and because they served the purposes of those who had applied them.
[My first impression is that little is known about the process (if any) of Carolingian ‘legislation’. There is surprisingly little about legislation in the now ‘state of the art’ history book [previously exhibited], although some of the main references there to legislation cite Nelson’s publications, including today’s one. Rosamond McKitterick’s introduction to this Vol 2 has more. I will look there and keep readers informed.]
In the latter part of Charlemagne's reign when Aachen was his defacto capital, and in the reigns of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, despite their more mobile residence pattern, there clearly was a royal archive, in which master-copies of at least some capitularies were kept, presumably made by royal notaries, and into which royal agents sent or placed the written reports and lists required of them. Ninth-century chancery output was significant not only in the Carolingian kingdoms, but also in Wessex where King iEthelwulf had a Frankish chief notary, and in the kingdom of the Asturias, where the trickle of surviving royal charters became a stream. As significant is the fugitive evidence of royal mandates conveying instructions to agents, of letters and seals which kept the king in touch with other potentates in and beyond their realms, and in which, as Alfred put it, 'you can know your lord's intention’.
Written messages did not displace oral ones. The couriers (veredarii) and envoys on whose comings and goings the annalists of the court depended for their information and royal agents for their instructions must have dealt far more often in the spoken word than in the written word.
[CONTROL]
Keeping control of their agents was a constant problem for kings in this period. Alfred in his small kingdom needed to chastise as well as cajole his ealdormen, thegns and managers of royal estates. Charlemagne recommended that maiores (village-headmen) be recruited 'not from among the potentiores, but from the middling ranks, who are faithful' (mediocres quifideks sunt).
Estate-managers were required to report to the monarch thrice annually, and to present accounts: if not numerate themselves, they would need to find help. Some adores [adore is another unexplained word, used only twice here] worked efficiently, at least in the sense that they reacted vigorously against theft of royal property. There are also complaints of corruption. Not surprisingly, some adores seem to have been the kinsmen of magnates, whose interests would have been hard to ignore. Moneyers [person who mints money] may have found themselves in a similar position. …
[COUNT ON THE COUNTS]
Counts (comites, literally 'companions'), then, were the essential middle- men between ruler and people in the kingdoms of the Carolingians.
Originally troubleshooters of later Roman emperors, counts had become all-purpose agents of government in the post-Roman west.
Carolingian capitularies show rulers instructing counts to act in three main government capacities: first, to keep social order in their localities, presiding over local courts to 'do justice' between local landowners, and repressing crime; second, to look after royal estates in their localities; third, to summon men to the host when the king campaigned.
Ealdormen in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms apparently performed similar functions. In Lombardy, dukes (duces) had originally been military appointees of kings, and in the eighth century were still pre-eminently war-leaders, while gastalds looked after royal estates. When the ninth-century kings of the Asturias extended their realms southwards, they claimed overlordship of the counts of Castile, but there is no clear evidence that this meant the imposition of official duties. Some of the earliest Castilian charters, from the later ninth century, refer in the same breath to 'the king ruling in Oviedo' and 'the count ruling in Castile’. Prescriptive texts sometimes show what counts and dukes were supposed to do. Evidence of them at work is scrappy.
In Alemannia, a small-scale landowner would have the record of his grant to St Gall formally noted 'done under count so-and-so'; but this may be no more than a formula, for there is no sign that the count was present, or had approved the transaction. Sometimes counts certainly did what they were not supposed to do: in Alsace, Count Erkanger, having received one estate from the fisc of Lothar I, 'abstracted' another. Counts themselves complained in 811 that men were refusing to obey their summons to military service, and alleging instead a duty to their own lords.
Neat lists of functions can mislead. Early medieval reality was untidy.
Counts, for instance, were far from homogeneous. East of the Rhine where no structure of Roman civitates had existed, the countships created by the Carolingians were not always discrete territorial units, but were interspersed with areas of others' jurisdiction.
In the empire at large there were 'greater' and 'lesser' counts: some were great magnates, since some counties were much larger and wealthier than others; others were of merely local importance. Counties were sometimes (perhaps increasingly through the ninth century) held in plurality; but on the empire's periphery, several counts could be jointly responsible for a single frontier area (march, mark) and were called marchiones.
The system evolved over time, local concentrations of power were formed, and discrepancies grew. Titles acquired new meanings—marchio for instance, came to denote a powerful count. Vassus, meaning 'boy' (cf. French garqon), was applied, originally half-humorously perhaps, to the man vested with the authority of a royal agent.
Countships tended, like kingships, to be, or become, hereditary. Counts were nobles, who seem generally to have operated in areas where they possessed lands: hence the 'official' lands associated with the countship — the count's ‘salary' — would tend to be assimilated to his own estates, privatising the public.
Counts seem to have chosen their own subordinates (viscounts: vicarii; centenarii; notarii), and used their lands to build up what would later be called affinities of men (often kinsmen) holding land from them and dependent on their patronage.
Counts, and missi too, were aristocrats first, royal agents second. 'Officials' is a misleading term for such men, whatever notions of office some kings tried to instil.
[Missi: could be the Latin — legate, messenger]
Frankish aristocratic collaborators made possible the initial expansion of Carolingian power. They were also prime beneficiaries, rewarded with honores in the acquired regna. Charlemagne's conquest of Aquitaine was sealed by his appointment of nine Frankish fideles to key countships. So many Franks were 'exported' to posts in the Italian regnum 'to enforce the authority of laws and cause the custom of the Franks to be observed' that it was said — and this was a Francocentric view — that '[Charlemagne's] palace was emptied of the leading men of the people’.
Charles the Bald was able to destroy his rival, and nephew, Pippin II, by convincing a majority of Aquitaine nobles that he himself would be a better lord. In his legislation, he safeguarded certain legal arrangements of the Romani, that is, Aquitainians who used Roman law.
… Despite occasional Frankish outbursts of imperialist rhetoric, the Bavarian and Alemannic and Lombard aristocracies kept their own laws — which meant much in terms of collective self-consciousness and autonomy. Hence the embodiment of those laws in written codes, along with a more protracted process of the incorporation of custom into written tradition, eased the Bavarians' accommodation to Frankish overlordship.
In practice law was mostly territorial, not personal, in the ninth century. But it was the possession of the people (gens) whose social leaders were the resident nobility. In attempting to ensure the loyal co-operation of counts, kings worked with the grain of their society. It would never have occurred to them to challenge heritability. If there were no adult male heir to a countship, there might be a choice between kinsmen as potential successor.
If there were no suitable kinsmen, the king might appoint another local man, or more rarely an outsider (this was hardly possible east of the Rhine, however). The ebb and flow of familial conflict, royal and aristocratic, ensured a supply of rebels and traitors whose honores the king could take and redistribute to faithful men. Thus kings exploited 'natural' opportunities to check the entrenchment of comital dynastic power.
[dict. comital: relating to a count or earl]
The Carolingians used artifice as well, in the form of alternative agents of two types.
[MIGHTY MISSI]
First, missi dominici were appointed to inspect and report back on counts. Missi were not bureaucrats: often chosen from among the greater counts of the region in which they operated, they were already potentes in their own right. That was why they could pack a considerable punch in their localities — why, for instance, Charlemagne could realistically tell his missi to supervise the selection of the local panels of knowledgeable men (boni homines) to serve in comital courts, or to hear and remedy complaints of lesser folk against counts. But missi were also empowered by royal authority. Local potentes who failed to attend the assemblies summoned by missi were, Charlemagne ordered, to be listed and the black-lists brought to him. Missi could hold local inquisitiones, and require locals to give sworn testimony on particular cases … An Alemannian count, who had confiscated someone's property on the grounds of incest, was overridden by royal missi. The answer to the question, 'who will guard those guards?' was: the ruler himself.
[VASSI RECRUITS]
Secondly, the Carolingians used vassi, men with personal obligations to themselves [to the Carolingians], and sometimes endowed with lands (benefices) by them. At the palace vassals might help the king in making judgement, or be sent on diplomatic missions. Six vassals (along with six counts) swore on Lothar II's behalf that he would treat his wife 'as a king should a queen’. … Vassals could function as agents of royal authority in centre and province. In 869 Charles asked his vassals in each county to make check-lists of benefices held by counts (counts were to do the same for their own vassals) in order to assess contributions to royally ordered fortifications on the Seine. Thus, though vassals were vulnerable to the pressure of potentes, the king could keep direct access to their loyalty and services. In all the above contexts, vassals were clearly distinguished from counts; and the absence of any case of career-progression from vassal to count suggests that ninth-century vassals were recruited, sometimes at least, from the ranks of the mediocres.
[Potente does not appear to be a specific category but seemingly is ‘someone with real power’, one of the higher nobility as opposed to a mere ‘pauper: see above].
[CHURCH FUNCTIONS]
Most missi were already potentes, but kings could choose high ecclesiastics to serve alongside laymen. As missi, bishops might organise oath-takings, supervise mints. Abbots held immunities, that is, rights of jurisdiction over persons on the lands of their church, thus presided over courts where disputes were settled and criminals punished. Carolingians, especially in the ninth century, could compensate for lack of fisclands in certain regions by the granting of ecclesiastical honores to favoured clerics.
Clerical abbots, that is, secular clergy, often in minor orders, endowed with lordship of abbeys whose lands they then controlled, were as significant as lay abbots here. The king urged co-operation between bishops and counts, or might simply deploy episcopal authority or episcopal military retinues as substitutes for comital equivalents. The military contribution, euphemistically known as the 'solace', solatium, organised by senior ecclesiastics covered the equipment and mustering and dispatch of troops when the king summoned them. If violence was never far below the surface of politics, kings had, in the form of their own household troops and the men of their bishops, abbots and court clergy, a means to keep it under control. Charles the Bald may sometimes have kept countships vacant, relying on ecclesiastical agents instead. Alternatively, archbishops, as regional magnates, were responsible for 'their counts’.
[REMOVAL REDRESS REPRISAL REVOLT]
What sanctions had rulers for agents' non-fulfilment of their duties? Removal from post; deprivation of patrimonies (allods); exile. … It is hardly surprising that rulers rarely imposed … drastic punishments — remarkable, though, that they sometimes did, and that not only counts but bishops might sometimes be punished by removal from office (dishonoratio). The only cases to reach the historical record were reprisals for acts of treason or rebellion: Charlemagne after 792, Louis the Pious after 818 and 833, Charles the Bald after 858, Louis the German in 861, Charles the Fat in 833, and apparently Alfred after 878. The seriousness of these revolts showed the fragility of royal power.
Charlemagne's sigh of relief in 792-3 is audible through the contemporary account of his largesse to the loyal. His biographer was anxious to explain that rebels had been killed in 786 only when they drew their swords to resist arrest and Louis the Pious granted rebels 'life and limb and their hereditary possessions', commuting death-sentences to exile. Charles the Bald had traitors executed and, in the case of a bishop, blinded, but took care to secure condemnations for treason 'by judgement of the Franks'.
Carolingians frequently reminded, and occasionally berated, counts in their capitularies. Alfred threatened his ealdormen with loss of their posts if they failed to learn to read. In practice, even powerful rulers found difficulty in removing counts. Louis the Pious did manage to remove Count Matfrid of Orleans and sent missi to encourage the locals who had suffered Matfrid's 'misdeeds' to come forward and complain. The new count would have to replace some, at least, of Matfrid's men by his own supporters. High politics were behind all this, and the revolt (?) of 833 was part of the backlash against Louis. Some suffering locals were no doubt better off under Matfrid's successors.
A king's very existence offered hope of redress. Because King Odo happened to be at Tours in June 890, the canons of St Martin, displeased at comital failure to remedy a grievance, were able to threaten an appeal directly to the king. …
… East of the Rhine, deeply rooted patterns of lordship over people, in the hands of local and regional aristocrats, were what new Carolingian over-lords had to come to terms with, while local and regional nobles came to terms with the Carolingians.
Noble lordship, wielded now as public authority in the king's name, coexisted with sporadically intrusive royal power. East Francia is not the only part of the empire where it is hard to find evidence for royal appointment of men bearing the title of count.
Everywhere there was exercise of public jurisdiction through local lordship: for instance when a missus (with the local boni homines firmly in tow) sat as judge in his own county in a dispute between himself as lord and a peasant who claimed to be of free, not servile, status. There was little practical difference between such local government, and a seigneurie [lordship]. In West Francia, one and the same clause of the Edict of Pitres (864) shows both that immunities had been granted to lay potentes and that the king claimed the right to send his agents into those immunities in pursuit of criminals. In the various regna [little kingdoms], and in localities, details of court cases show trade-offs and reconciliations between royal and local aristocratic interests.
In Carolingian government there was inevitably a good deal of subsidiarity, untidy as that always is. [Note ‘subsidiarity’ was the motto of the Maastricht Treaty 1993]
There were times, nevertheless, when 'persons from the regions came to the palace'. They came to pursue their own cases, to seek redress, to lodge appeals. Pressure of daily business meant that Charlemagne buckled down to judging cases when he was scarcely out of bed. Peasants might still come to the palace seeking judgement from the king and his vassi. Those were private initiatives. But the palace —Hincmar said the word was 'nowadays in normal use to mean [what in Antiquity had been called] the praetori[um]' — was a public place: made so by what people perceived as the king's relatively frequent, hence expected, residence in it. The palace was where you would find the king. Many routes led to the king's tun, as Alfred said. Once there, even if not actually beside the king, you were in his presence. The palace was so much the king's place that the killing there of one of Arnulf of East Francia's leading men without express royal command was a peculiarly shocking event. When Louis the Pious seemed to fail to maintain the palace's moral order, he was losing his grip on the realm. …
[ASSEMBLIES AS A ‘GROUP’ REPRESENTATION]
Regnal 'order' was never clearer than when the king summoned an assembly. It was a court, an occasion and a shared experience that surely reinforced participants' sense of themselves as a group. Such a perception seems to be reflected in the title given by a scribe, writing about 870, to a capitulary collection: 'Capitula of Bishops, Kings, and Especially All The Noble Franks’. Judicial business was always on the assembly agenda.
Legislation consisted, in part, in generalising from the particular, as Charles the Bald apparently did when he addressed the problem of luring back emigrant peasants to work on estates in the Seine valley, and as Alfred did when he settled a case arising out of an accident with a spear. There was no clear-cut distinction between 'local' and 'central' issues. Judgement on all matters required similar kinds of practical wisdom. … Through the regnal assembly royal government was applied to every kind of problem. The agenda of Charlemagne's great council at Frankfurt in 794 included… dealing with a serious famine, fixing prices, punishing profiteers …
In June 864, the Edict of Pitres, the most substantial piece of administrative law produced by a Carolingian assembly, launched a counter-assault on crime; spelled out details of a renovatio monetae; regulated royal estate management; vigorously reformed military organisation; and … arrangements for its own diffusion to the realm at large.
Obviously only a selection of persons attended the king's assembly. If the meeting was a small one, as often in wintertime, the king might summon only a few potentes and counsellors. Abbot Lupus of Ferrieres' letters reveal the changing moods oiipotens: anxiously awaiting the king's messenger, for the benefits of proximity to the king and his familiares were great, yet weighing the burdens of attendance, for the king's demands were constant, and pressing. Lupus, knowing that the king's wrath could be terrible, did not refuse an invitation. He hoped for the king's smile …
Summer meetings were normally large affairs, attended not only by magnates, but by lesser men too: a potential army. Consiliarii would have retinues, which however were not to be multiplied beyond the king's view of necessity — and that view would depend, in turn, on a magnate's standing at court, and on the wider political scene.
A bishop who turned up with 'the whole company of his men' (but he was in dispute with the king, and perhaps already suspected of plotting defection) was brusquely told by royal officers that 'ten or twelve retainers' (casati homines), plus clergy and servants, was a sufficient retinue… A hundred Bavarian nobles happen to be named in a document produced at the great assembly of Verdun in August 843, suggesting a total attendance of well over a thousand nobles from the three kingdoms represented on this occasion
… The scale of some ninth-century public buildings permitted large gatherings. … at Aachen … Charlemagne’s church is still standing and can apparently accommodate 7000 people … No building, anyway, constrained the size of assemblies that flowed out into the open air. Tents were a normal part of royal equipment … The presence of large numbers of young men, touchy, aggressive, ambitious, with their own brand of humour and a taste for horseplay, must have posed one logistical problem…
The somewhat idealised description of a Carolingian summer assembly in The Government of the Palace, shows the 'counsellors', that is, the magnates highest in royal favour, conferring in private on an agenda supplied by the king. Meanwhile lesser men conducted their own discussions. As for the king, he joined the counsellors if requested; otherwise 'he would be occupied with the assembled people, receiving gifts, greeting the more important, exchanging news with those he did not see often …
When the counsellors had 'found counsel', and framed this in capitula, 'the less important heard counsel, sometimes deliberated on it, and confirmed it, not because they were forced to do so but from their own understanding and freely expressed opinion' …
… assembly proceedings were punctuated by royal speech-making: a welcoming address, a statement of intent, a pep-talk, an agreed legislative programme … That was why it mattered if a king had a stammer, as did Charles the Bald's son … Charles’ own blend of irony, intimacy and panache still makes an impression even in the stilted Latin of the official record. A king won the aristocracy's confidence by confiding … 'lovingly and friendlily', in a formula which was apparently already standard …
Assembly proceedings, and decisions, have left some residue in the written word. …Carolingian rulers wanted counts and missi to take copies of the capitula agreed at assemblies and bring these copies back to their localities. Some capitula required special publicity: Count Stephen, missus for a group of counties centred on Paris in 802 brought home from an Aachen assembly a set of additions to Lex Salica
“so that he might make these manifest in the civitas of Paris in the public assembly, and so that he might read them out before the judgement-finders (scabini). And this he did. And all consented together, saying that they were willing to observe it at all times and forever. Further, all the scabini, bishops, abbots and counts confirmed these capitula by writing beneath in their own hands.”
[JUSTICE ACCORDING TO CUSTOM]
Those who attended regnal assemblies thus in a sense represented local communities: and their annuntiationes were a kind of report-back. Disputes were settled at the local assembly … Charlemagne let the conquered Saxons continue to settle cases within their patria, that is, within Saxony, 'through local men (pagenses) in local courts with neighbourhood-dwellers according to custom'. Appeals could be 'brought to the palace'.
In all these public courts, crime was punished as an offence against the king's authority, his bann, to which the Saxons were now subject along with the Franks. Heavy fines were imposed, in cash or in kind. Who enforced the settlements, extracted the fines, punished the criminals? Though there was no doubt a good deal of self-help, individual and collective, there were customary public procedures, like the Saxons' burning down of the houses of criminals, which Charlemagne decreed should continue to be carried out 'for coercion to judgement on our behalf’. … Charlemagne, though he did not personally choose local judgement-finders wanted missi to provide him with lists of them.
There was much disorder; but kings took seriously their … obligation to preserve peace and order in their realms, and strove to engage their people along with them.
Military obligation was fundamental, failure to perform it a most serious breach of the ruler's authority. All were involved when external enemies attacked. 'All must come to the defence of the fatherland'. In 864, Charles the Bald laid down the death penalty for those who failed to do so, and for those who supplied the enemy. …
[END for us. Nelson’s Chapter 15 does have a final section ‘THE IDEOLOGY OF POWER’ but we will press on relentlessly to other chapters and books.]
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