During the second half of the twentieth century, a number of scholars published studies of medieval society in various regions of France, inspired by Georges Duby’s La société mâconnaise (1953). Because these scholars most commonly compared their regions not to each other but rather to a model (going back to Marc Bloch) of how medieval society developed, there were curious artifacts, such as most of them concluding that feudalism (however defined) was curiously late in reaching their region, with no recognition that other regions experienced something similar. Yet between them these regional monographs presented a highly detailed look at French rural society in the High Middle Ages.
These studies usually were organized around land and lordship, the ways geography and agricultural practice shaped society, and the exercise of castellan power. The church played only a cameo role in these works, even though the bulk of the primary sources were ecclesiastical in origin. Such studies have become less common in the twenty-first century, perhaps because twentieth-century scholars usually worked on their home regions--as Duby had done--and fewer scholars came from regions outside the ones that had already been covered. Here Cédric Jeanneau’s book on Bas-Poitou continues in a long tradition, though giving more attention to the sources as worthy of study in their own right, rather than merely as conveyors of information, and giving more place to the church.
Bas-Poitou, which corresponds fairly exactly to the modern department of Vendée, lay south of Brittany and Anjou, on the Atlantic coast west of Poitiers and of the main body of the county of Poitou. The most important lord in Bas-Poitou was the viscount of Thouars. The region was influenced by the powerful counties and duchies surrounding it but never was a major political player in its own right. This may explain why this is the first land-and-lordship style study of the particular area, even though the broader county of Poitou received its own study of the type with M. Garaud in 1967 (Les châtelains de Poitou et l’avènement du régime féodal).
There are regrettably few original charters surviving for Bas-Poitou, but there were a number of cartularies composed in the Middle Ages, as well as copies made in the early modern period, so Jeanneau had a rich collection of manuscript and printed primary sources to draw on. His bibliography of secondary sources is impressively extensive, including a number of English language works, especially by Americans. There is however far less than one might have anticipated of German language scholarship, given that one of his principal interests is noble family structure, a topic where German scholars pioneered.
Although the book’s approach may appear somewhat old-fashioned, the first chapter breaks with the land and lordship model by providing an extended discussion of the nature of the sources, which goes well beyond the older focus simply on whether a document was authentic or a forgery (an only moderately important question, as most surviving medieval documents are not forgeries). As Jeanneau argues, the organization of medieval documents in the boxes of a modern archive owes much more to the nineteenth century than to the Middle Ages, and originals and much later copies may be mixed indiscriminately.
Charters can profitably be examined for themselves, he notes, as clues to how and why monks (primarily) wrote them, how they were used, and how they were stored and transmitted to future generations. For the monks of Bas-Poitou, creating enduring memories for future generations was especially important given the rupture, caused by the Vikings, between the monastic life of the Merovingian and early Carolingian eras and that of the High Middle Ages. This thoughtful chapter, which also examines the creation of pancartes and cartularies, would be worth perusing by anyone proposing a detailed regional history and first approaching the archives.
After the long first chapter on the nature of medieval sources, the topic turns to the aristocracy, the primary concern for the rest of the book--the topography and agricultural patterns that interested Duby find little room here. Indeed, any treatment of the organization of farming villages, peasant obligations, woods usage, or opening up new fields is subsumed into a discussion of castellan lordship.
Jeanneau suggests that Bas-Poitou was fairly unpopulated in the aftermath of the Viking raids of the ninth and early tenth centuries yet experienced rapid population growth in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, resulting in a multiplication of lords and castles. With the count of Poitou uninterested in the region, he says, the lords of castles exercised banal rights and high justice on their own, and even simple knights (milites) acted with unchecked power. Although he notes that the region had many nobles who were not lords of castles, castellan families are his principal interest.
The numerous castellans of Bas-Poitou in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries do not appear to be the descendants of ancient lineages, in spite of the efforts in the nineteenth century to make them so. Rather, Jeanneau suggests that the so-called mutations of the year 1000 transformed local society, leading to the rise of these new lords. But his analysis is more nuanced than much of the francophone discussion of this supposed feudal revolution, for he makes clear that much of the perceived change is due to how detailed a description ecclesiastical scribes might give of an aristocrat in a charter. His discussion could have been further improved by incorporation of the studies by Richard Barton and Jeffrey Bowman, both of whom published in 2004 and both of whom made the case convincingly against a major transformation in the year 1000 (respectively Lordship in the County of Maine and Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia). Jeanneau includes Barton’s doctoral dissertation in his bibliography though not the resulting book and does not cite Bowman at all.
As Jeanneau’s consideration of the sources as specifically ecclesiastical sources indicates, his book differs from most land and lordship studies by treating medieval religion and the church seriously. Duby famously recalled that he was insulted by churchmen while walking across the Mâconnais in his youth and had no further use for them. Jeanneau in contrast gives over a hundred pages to a chapter on the relations between the aristocracy and the church, starting by citing the American scholars who first took up the subject in the 1980s. He goes on to detail the role of the aristocrats of Bas-Poitou in founding monasteries and establishing priories throughout the region, not only spreading religious houses through an area that had had most of its earlier monasteries destroyed during the Viking era but also creating long-lasting ties with families that might produce both donors and converts. (One does miss a reference to Felice Lifshitz’s 1995 The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria.) Although most of this will not seem new to an anglophone reader, it is a crucial aspect of a study devoted primarily to the aristocracy.
Like other modern scholars studying aristocratic families over the generations, Jeanneau is acutely aware that biological continuity is less important than a sense of shared identity, often demonstrated through the use of hereditary names and of toponyms. He joins in the general consensus that the aristocracy of the eleventh century included both great lords (proceres) and simple service knights (milites) and that the two (rather fluid) groups converged by the late twelfth century in both embracing what they saw as chivalry, variously defined. He explores the matrimonial strategies that lineages adopted and the way that the next generation was prepared for lordship, with many examples from the region. Rather than following strict primogeniture, inheritance among the local aristocracy appears to have passed from brother to brother, oldest to youngest, before going to the oldest brother’s oldest son, though Jeanneau does not make clear whether this viage was just the normal pattern or a recognized rule.
In spite of being nearly 700 pages long, the volume was not long enough for everything Jeanneau wanted to say about the aristocracy of Bas-Poitou. He worked out numerous genealogies, which he provided with prosopographic discussions of family members, making this information available as a very extensive on-line appendix. Even though the volume will do little to change how scholars think about the French aristocracy of the High Middle Ages, it should be welcomed as a highly detailed, thoroughly researched work on one small area. Comparative studies need books like this, and it is especially refreshing to see a French scholar appreciative of the role of the church in medieval secular society.