"Behind this book lies the conviction that assembly was a most important aspect of the apparatus of political power in the earlier Middle Ages, together with the realization that there has been little systematic attempt to understand it, or even to define it" (ix). So begins P. S. Barnwell's preface to this promising collection of essays on political assemblies. As the introduction concedes indirectly, a collaborative effort to examine the phenomenon is easier to conceive than to accomplish, in no small part because assemblies "rarely feature in the surviving contemporary sources as more than the backdrop to the stage on which the substance of the action ... took place" (1). Moreover, the accounts that do provide a glimpse reveal a flexible range of terms and a malleable set of functions. Consequently, an assembly might include anything from a royal convocation to the crowd that assembled for the dedication of a local church, both of which could provide communal consensus, handle justice or constitute property rights. Since a broad conception of assembly could be extended to weddings and funerals, and thus invite chaos, the collection wisely has been restricted (mostly) to "political assemblies," which meet four criteria: "consultation for the common good (by and for those assembled, and often on behalf of a wider group); legislation for the common good (subject to the same qualifications); jurisdiction and judgment; commemoration or celebration of an event (such as king-making or the consecration of a church) considered important to those assembled or to the wider group represented at the assembly" (3). Barnwell proceeds to fill out the definition for another fourteen lines, drawing attention to the public and frequently ad-hoc nature of political gatherings. He admits that even this definition is "complex" and "loose," but reasonably concludes that it reflects the lack of institutional systemization before the twelfth century.
The essays were pulled together from presentations made at sessions on "Consensus in the Early Middle Ages," and "Assemblies" at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 1999 and 2000. By Barnwell's own admission, the coverage is uneven, a not uncommon problem with collections drawn from scholars working in different regions. Chronological diffuseness contributes to the imbalance: half of the articles are skewed toward the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one of which, by Elizabeth Fitzpatrick on Ireland, deals extensively with the high and later medieval periods and, so far as this reviewer can tell, deals more with royal rituals than with assemblies. In some cases, notably in the perceptive article by Janos Bak and Pavel Lukin on central and eastern Europe, the lateness is justified on the grounds that in the east, early medieval is the tenth and eleventh centuries. With the exception of Barnwell's article on the barbarian kingdoms, the remaining contributions are weighted to the later early medieval period. Thus, the collection does not deal squarely with the early middle ages; rather a preponderance relates to the problematic of political assembly in societies on the cusp of administrative streamlining in the high middle ages.
Conspicuous by its absence, aside from a few comments in Stuart Airlie's excellent essay on east Francia, is any attention to the high Carolingian period. While the omission insulates the collection from complaints of Frankocentrism, it nonetheless deprives the enterprise of a crucial interpretive foil. Indeed, the preface leads one to expect a systematic discussion of assembly in the Frankish empire, noting that, although "much has been written, particularly concerning the Carolingian world, ... other times and places have received less attention, and a comparative approach has not ... been attempted for some time" (ix). The introduction, and several of the essays, do lean on Timothy Reuter's article on assemblies in western Europe; nonetheless, in view of the absence of any separate treatment of Francia, helpful might have been a summation of Carolingian scholarship on assemblies in the introduction, and a pointed discussion of its convergence or divergence with respect to findings in the regions that follow. Consequently, the title of this collection, as well as the cover, which bears the sketch of an assembly in the Utrecht Psalter (Reims, ca. 825-835), may mislead more than a few readers.
The first three articles, by Barnwell, "Kings, Nobles, and Assemblies in Barbarian Kingdoms," Airlie, "Talking Heads: Assemblies in Early Medieval Germany," and Charles Insley, "Assemblies and Charters in Late Anglo-Saxon England," deal largely with royal assemblies. Barnwell surveys the achievement of royal power and consensus in assemblies in the Visigothic, Lombard, and Merovingian kingdoms. The article identifies four broad areas of topical concern: "king making," "trials and punishments," "rule with consent," and "routine assemblies;" and concludes that assemblies ultimately expressed the royal will, were often pre-arranged, and that acclamation of the participants symbolized the unity of the realm. These conclusions are a tad surprising in that the body of the article continually calls attention to the vagueness of the sources. Moreover, the author's conviction that "there is no evidence that the full assembly engaged in active debate" (28) may be premature in light of the cited sources, which tend to focus on outcomes and may exaggerate royal control. Although Barnwell sensibly rejects any continuity with ancient Germanic custom, he might have drawn upon his own expertise in late antiquity to speculate on the possible persistence of Roman traditions.
Inspired by Gerd Althoff's work on the calculation and management of public assemblies, Airlie sets out to "argue that assemblies were neither so controlled nor as rigid as some influential current thinking suggests" (30). After a rehearsal of the limitations of the sources, Airlie asks, "What do we know? What did go on at assemblies" (39)? The ensuing brisk and perceptive reading of select late Carolingian, Ottonian and Salian evidence underscores the orchestration as well as the unpredictability of assemblies, which could be swept by "rumors" and "reveal weakness and danger," (41) and where the king "could be questioned" and "consensus itself could fail to be expressed" (45).
The goal of Insley's article is "to raise some questions about the relationship between the nature of [royal] assemblies and the function of charters during the tenth and eleventh centuries" (47-48) in England. Similar to Airlie, Insley notes many of the problems in assessing assemblies, namely determining the relative amount of deliberation and compulsion, but asserts that they "encompassed both a measure of consent and negotiation as well as coercion" (50). It is Insley's method, a masterful demonstration of the value of the ubiquitous yet terse charter evidence, that marks out this essay as especially insightful. Because witness lists to royal charters "act as a rough guide" to attendance, and because "the granting of charters and meetings of the royal council were closely linked" (51), the author is able to extract "an echo of the dialogue which may have taken place at meetings of the witan" (52). The transmission and reception of the council's message remain hidden beneath the evidence, but the charters do illuminate debates over property claims, royal power and the collective identity of the realm, and expose "a structure relying on persuasion, negotiation, and compromise as much as institutions" (59).
A second cluster of articles examines the continuity of assemblies in societies on the brink of transformation. Stefan Brink's fascinating study of "Legal Assemblies and Judicial Structure in Early Scandinavia" valiantly seeks to uncover the "legal customs" of pre- Christian Scandinavia as part of an effort to elucidate the region's indigenous "legal mentality and judicial organization" (61). This is a daunting task in that the written sources, as Brink notes, bear the imprint of Romano-Christian legal conventions. Consequently, Brink has decided to focus "on places, settlement, and landscape, so that their testimony is added to that of the few written records, mainly runic inscriptions" (62). His perceptive linguistic, topographic and archaeological analysis uncovers a number of popular assembly mounds later reconstituted as royal or Christian assembly sites. The evidence points to a native conception of popular custom, as opposed to royal law, although the extent to which he has opposed the two is a matter for debate. As the article progresses, Brink's interpretations become a bit grand. Whereas in the opening paragraph the invocation of "Scandinavian law" is carefully qualified as "legal customs" (61), towards the end a runic inscription unexpectedly becomes a "legal document" (68), and another "implies that, in the ninth century, the people of Haelsingland thought they had a corpus of legal rules and customs" (70). This formalism is difficult to justify from the slender linguistic evidence. The epistemological problems of the philological method, the effort to elucidate complex ideas and institutions from the vestiges of language, persist.
Bak and Lukin's discursive "Consensus and Assemblies in Early Medieval Central and Eastern Europe" examines royal law in Hungary, a ducal decree from Bohemia, and narrative sources from Poland and on the Russian veche, the meeting of townspeople. As in the essays on other areas, the authors discern no fixed terminology, and find that before political routinization in the thirteenth century, royal assemblies in the east were held irregularly. Assemblies in the east also betray a similar dynamic and range of concerns detected elsewhere: political authorities enacting laws with the support of churchmen and magnates, efforts to curb violence, the celebration of festivities, the election of rulers, or deliberation for the common good. The veche "passed decisions by consensus," (105) but its actual significance as a consultative body has been exaggerated, the authors feel, by Romantic historians, who traced it to ancient Slavic tribal assemblies, or more recently by scholars who want to see them as proto-democratic institutions. In this respect, modern historians were anticipated by medieval narrators themselves, especially those of the thirteenth century, who recalled a pre-history of popular assemblies and consensual decisions. The authors doubt these claims to continuity, although they concede the accounts may convey some memory of a connection to the distant past.
Judith Everard's chapter on Brittany "examines the phenomenon of assemblies of lay magnates at the ducal curia of Brittany" (115) from 1066-1203. Essentially she argues that the infrequent and informal gatherings that "seem to have been voluntary and to have involved the participants in little more than giving council to the duke and socializing" (115) were transformed into a more formal institution by Henry II of England. It was the Angevins who made the assembly mandatory and used it as an arena for extracting oaths of fidelity and validating ducal legislation. This external pressure helped to impose a corporate identity on the aristocracy, pretentiously dubbed the barones Britannie by Anglo-Norman chroniclers, but in time had the unintended effect of creating a vehicle for collective action to defy Angevin authority. Everard makes a convincing argument for the routinization of assemblies after 1166, although less clear is the case for the emergence of a common identity in Brittany. Her own examination of native sources seems to suggest "a notion of Brittania" before 1166 (121). A review of the organization of Carolingian Brittany might have shed some light on the precise nature of change in these matters.
In "Reasons for Assembly in Catalonia and Aragon, 900-1200," Adam Kosto avoids the nettlesome issue of terminology altogether and simply identifies "five types of occasions" when "large groups of people assemble[d]" (134): councils, the consecration of churches, judicial assemblies, oath assemblies and peace assemblies. The aim is to "examine assemblies on their own terms ... from an anthropological perspective," and thus to avoid treating gatherings "as either extensions of the [Visigothic] past or preludes to the future" of representative assemblies (134). Here more than elsewhere the ever fertile Catalonian evidence allows one to observe a range of local gatherings, some of which, as Kosto's shrewd calculations suggest, could be surprisingly large and, after the manner of comital and royal assemblies, could manifest an amalgam of functions, e.g. community consensus, justice, or the resolution of property rights. One notices however that, despite Kosto's initial caveat, the investigation repeatedly touches on the persistence of Visigothic traditions. In this respect, this fruitful essay offers support to Kosto's own observation at the outset that "viewing assemblies as the continuation of Visigothic tradition has unexploited potential" (134).
Lastly, two essays deal with urban assemblies. A. Demyttenaere presents a rich analysis of the "political meeting culture" in Flanders (151), as depicted by Galbert of Bruges in the aftermath of the murder of Charles the Good. This essay contrasts with the others in that meetings and assemblies were undertaken within a highly developed "territorial political system" (153). Consequently, the gatherings of 1127/28 reveal a variety of assemblies -- the meetings of magnates and urban elites; the revival of traditional, Carolingian style comital assemblies; and the royal assemblies of the intervening French king to impose a successor -- all of which assumed for their initiatives on behalf of the common good a territorial consciousness. By comparison with poorly documented times and places, the Flemish evidence allows a vivid glimpse into the infrastructure underlying the mustering of councils, the rapid dissemination of decisions, and the frequent failure of sovereigns to orchestrate consensus that remains suppressed in more poorly documented times and places. The relevance of all this for the "development of democracy" is unclear. The author invokes the issue at the outset (152), and returns to it toward the end, but this vast problem cannot be adequately explored in this forum and presents a distraction in an otherwise productive analysis.
Edward Coleman's essay introduces us to "Representative Assemblies in Communal Italy" which generally were not undertaken within a larger royal framework. These urban assemblies drew upon a wide swath of "citizens," the non-noble population, and thus, by sharp contrast with many other regions, were unmarked by aristocratic control and hierarchy. Nonetheless, similar to findings elsewhere, Coleman notes the lack of a fixed vocabulary for assemblies, both the regularity and spontaneity of gatherings, the popularity of churches as meeting places, a prominent episcopal presence, and a preoccupation with the business of war, diplomacy, disputes, approval of laws and the election of officials (albeit termed consuls, rather than kings). Here again the internal workings of the assembly and a detailed identification of the amorphous group of attendees remain difficult to assess. Although we learn that assemblies were fixtures in Italian towns dating back to the seventh century, one would like to have encountered some analysis of the early medieval period. As it is, the essay itself is concerned with "the assembly's role in the formation and early development of the city commune;" (196) consequently, the article mostly is preoccupied with evidence of the twelfth-century when communes were beginning to undergo governmental diversification.
In conclusion, if this collection is inconsistent as an exploration of assemblies in the early medieval period per se, it nonetheless lays out the fundamental issues for further research, contributes sharp insights into the changes in assemblies in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and attests to the surprising homogeneity of assembly culture throughout medieval Europe.