The multinational research project “À la recherche des communautés du haut Moyen Âge” is the result of collaboration between the universities of Paris1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, Littoral-Côte-d’Opale, Lille, Arras, Ca’Foscari in Venice, Padova, Roma Tre, and Eberhard-Karl in Tübingen. The team has produced three volumes so far on maritime and insular communities (Brepols, Collection Haut Moyen Âge [HAMA] 38, 2020), communities under threat (HAMA 42 [2021]) and community spaces (Reti medievali rivista 24.2, 2023 https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-2214/2023/2).
The fourth volume (HAMA 49) is about communities acting collectively and derives from a conference held in 2019. An introduction (Bührer-Thierry and Le Jan in French) and conclusion (Loré in Italian) frame fifteen chapters, of which five are in French (Depreux, Bayard, Gautier, Jebe, Jégou), four in Italian (Provero, Tomei, Stoffella, Vignodelli), four in English (La Rocca and De Angelis, Davies, Tente, Martín Viso), one in German (Goetz) and one in Spanish (Santos Salazar). The book is organised in two sections: modes of community action, and communities interacting and in conflict. The range of places discussed includes France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Britain. As might be expected, most chapters say something about how to define a community/ies: especially useful in raising questions about this are Davies, Goetz and Tente. The introduction directly addresses the overall theme in three sections: “being able to act/agency” (14-15), deciding to act (15-17) and “acting” (17-21). The authors stress that the whole project deals with communities of practice and mostly with small scale societies rather than larger ones, well-covered elsewhere. [1] They stress that persons were not individual agents in the Enlightenment sense but instead defined by their relational activities with groups (15), which is demonstrated with several empirical examples including the famous case of peasant resistance at Limonta on Lake Como in the ninth century (18, also examined by La Rocca and De Angelis, Provero and Loré respectively at 54-56, 72-74, 319-20). Here they make the point that although one group of peasants at Limonta did not support their monastic lord another group of peasants from a different estate (Bellagio) did support him—even while he was in turn fighting for control with another monastic lord (Reichenau). [2]
This sort of relational complexity is evident throughout the book. All the chapters are worthwhile and the book as a whole holds together extremely well, a significant achievement for the editors as all book editors will recognise. In fairness to the authors, I will comment briefly on each chapter in turn. Philippe Depreux (25-38) considers how going to court in the Carolingian world might provide evidence of acting together using examples of the efforts of Conwoion, abbot of Redon, to obtain a privilege from Louis the Pious in the 830s, of the nature of groups appearing at court, and what he felicitously terms the “games of shadow and light” played by intermediaries and petitioners. He concludes quite reasonably that group action was necessary to prepare for a court case as well as during the actual proceedings, and that reading the evidence with this in mind does indeed reveal a degree of community action.
Cristina La Rocca and Gianmarco De Angelis observe the communities formed around the process of “taking possession of property,” which is evidenced by fourteen unusual brevia in the surviving archive of the monastery of Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan. They begin with the fascinating example of Bishop Notting of Vercelli taking physical possession of a bridge of the river Stura in person by riding his horse over it. This leads to examples in Milanese charters of the abbots and priests of Sant’Ambrogio doing similar things, perhaps also on horseback as in the abbot’s case, to claim their properties (46, Fig. 1). This chapter is about performance at places some distance from Milan and with the assistance of witnesses external to the places concerned. These physical and symbolic rituals constituted “a grammar of authority shared by actors and spectators” (51) and the occasions on which they were performed allowed “individuals and rural communities to make claims, and to organise forms of resistance. To recognise and be recognised,” which were, of course, forms of collective action. This is a very rich paper which returns to a topic first dealt with nearly a hundred years ago in a very different way. [3] This chapter is nicely followed by Luigi Provero’s extremely clear discussion of the limited political action possible for peasants in Carolingian Italy, which concludes that examples of peasant action in court cases and other scenarios do not constitute examples of collective action (71). He points out that the spaces where peasants tried to act were not usually the villages in which they lived—an important observation—which put them at a disadvantage as they were out of their comfort zones, so to speak. Wendy Davies, in the following chapter, deals with similar issues in the context of ninth-century Brittany. After a typically lucid discussion of charter evidence and the Gesta Sanctorum Rotoniensum, she concludes that there is little evidence in this case for collective action even though there is very good evidence for community structures and that therefore there was not a causal relationship between action and community formation. Indeed, there is some evidence of “individual action and initiative” (85).
The next chapter (Catarina Tente) moves us to Beira Alta in central-northern Portugal and to the evidence of archaeology. In this paper the issue is really how to find evidence of community action in the archaeological record. Tente defines “a community as several households living in close proximity to each other” (90) and then goes on to explain very carefully what this means in terms of the volume’s concerns, noting that it is impossible to distinguish archaeologically between collective action and collective work, the latter being the subject of the chapter. This seems entirely reasonable, and the chapter provides a very good survey of rural settlement in this part of Portugal, with excellent illustrations. There is evidence of structures including walls, palisades, and a rock-cut burial ground that must, as she argues, have been produced collectively in some way. Further, there is evidence of considerable specialist tasks at some sites which suggests that “articulation between communities” was necessary. Similarly, the existence of a system of transhumance “implies complex cooperative work.” These seem to me to be perfectly reasonable inferences to make. Work is also the theme of Adrien Bayard’s chapter, which investigates salt production in the Pertuis Charentais on the French Atlantic coast, but using written evidence only, in the absence of archaeology. Contrary to previous work, he argues that there was a quite equal relationship between the monastic owners of the salt marshes and the workers who made the salt because monasteries acquired already functioning salt pans, and that the status of the salt workers appears to have been relatively high (114-15). The technical aspects of the work and the nature of the terrain necessarily required collective work (a point which speaks to Tente’s chapter) and the workers rather than the monks took the initiative. Paolo Tomei, in an original chapter which closes this section on types of community action, turns our attention away from peasants to those aristocrats in the Lucchesia who formed the domestic community around the figure of the Marquis of Tuscany. Tomei does not on this occasion employ charter evidence but instead focuses on a couple of sophisticated narrative sources, Liudprand’s Antapodosis and the Vita metrica Anselmi, which he subjects to precise linguistic and structural analysis. He is able to argue, convincingly to my mind, that there was indeed in real practice—and not simply in these texts—a community of aristocrats. His argument employs the concept of coopetition—a combination of cooperation and competition taken from business-speak—to argue that this aristocratic community was formed by their attraction to the marquesal court because of the material and symbolic capital to be found there (120).
Moving on to community interaction and tensions, Hans-Werner Goetz asks if sworn associations (coniurationes) were communities in this period. The first few pages deal impressively with definitions of community within German historiography and with the nature of coniurationes in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. In the past it was argued (e.g., by Oexle) that such associations were guilds, but Goetz shows that this was not so, largely because the evidence for that is not reliable (143). He then goes on to show that most evidence refers to specific conspiracies, different from each other and of short duration, which had formed spontaneously. They were not really communities in the modern sense and are perhaps better described as “groups of people.”
The next chapter by Alban Gautier deals with heroes in early medieval England, juxtaposing individual (“solitary”) and collective (“community”) action. It forms an interesting comparison with Tomei’s chapter although it is inevitably framed within the concerns of the Old English literary works (Beowulf, the Fight at Finnsburgh and the Battle of Maldon) that form its evidential base, including larger-than-life heroes and the warrior ethos. However, the key point made here is that individual heroes were always part of warrior groups, which had a collective dynamic that was heroic, for example as evidenced by the longstanding trope where the warrior engaged in singular combat was often compared to a wild boar (e.g. King Alfred by Asser, 176). In the final section Gautier raises the possibly that real world people were inspired by these literary heroes, using the example of Guthlac as presented by Felix in his Life to confirm that individual prowess could only take place within a community.
In the following chapter Johanna Jebe studies the actions of early ninth-century monks at the famous monastery at Fulda. As she says straightaway, historians have been accustomed to see monasteries as formalised communities (e.g., using rules). Her attention is instead on the dynamic aspects of monastic community formation, especially which actors took the initiative and how (186). In part this happened at moments of conflict, at Fulda specifically during the dispute about the conduct of Abbot Ratger. The well-known documents suggest that there were pro- and anti-Ratger groups within the monastery, but Jebe then adds a twist by considering a manuscript (Basle F III 15b) copied at Fulda during these events, which sets the Life of Eufrasia (late fourth century) alongside that of Gour (a late sixth-century hermit), a unique juxtaposition. She argues that analysis of the contents of these lives reveals the tensions between temporal and spiritual groups, exposing competing norms of behaviour within the early ninth-century monastery. Essentially, these texts allowed the competing groups within the monastery to justify their actions. The final section examines the hagiographies of Sturm and Eigil for similar themes. Her conclusion that this community was much more complex that hitherto believed is certainly convincing.
The theme of discord within ostensible unities that Jebe raises is continued in an equally excellent paper by Laurent Jégou about behaviours at church councils around the year 1000. The paper moves from a consideration of what unanimity looks like in a wide range of conciliar and liturgical records (e.g., ordines) to emphasise that it was deemed to be the result of collective action speaking with a single voice, even when conflicts seem to have occurred. Then two examples of council behaviour over the disputes at Gandersheim in the later tenth century and the Council held at Saint-Denis in 993-94 are examined. These events may be evidenced indirectly but nevertheless there is enough information to expose how rival communities operated on those occasions. In the next chapter Iñaki Martín Viso continues the theme of disputes, this time in northern Iberia, retuning to rural communities and the evidence of charters, to consider the internal dynamics of these communities via the evidence of disputes during which communities defended their rights. The focus is on communities as actors in disputes, in instances of defining their territory, in fighting over a church, in rights to land expressed in the term presura (meaning in its simplest form appropriation by a group or individual), in access to common lands and claims to freedom. Martín Viso concludes by associating all these instances of community action with micropolitics, modes of collective action “passed on by habitus rather than as regulated standards” (246). Marco Stoffella follows this with a comparison of the actions of clerical communities in Tuscany and the Veneto in the eighth century. One of the conclusions from the Pisan and Lucchese examples is that attempts at the reform of their clerical communities were different from those north of the Alps in that they were less hierarchical—there was only one archpriest or archdeacon in either city in the documents up to the mid eighth century—and there is evidence of clerics who were sons of laymen in high-level roles (273). At Lucca there is some evidence of interest in texts describing how the conduct of clerics should be organised, but that did not result in the adoption of reforms along the lines of those proposed by Chrodegang of Metz. Unfortunately, the evidence for Verona is much less, and doesn't enable meaningful comparison; but what evidence there is does suggest similar interests in local reform. Giacomo Vignodelli focusses on tenth-century Verona in a paper that asks to what extent cathedral canons formed communities there. He argues that it was only in the tenth century that canons formed real communities separate from the bishop (280), taking as the bulk of his evidence the famous disputes between the Veronese clergy and bishop Ratherius who, as Vignodelli notes, attributed actions to specific individuals rather than a collectivity of clerics. Those clerics did, in contrast, see themselves as taking collective action led by their archdeacons and archpriests. Igor Santos Salazar’s chapter completes this section with a study of local concilia and rural communities in northern Spain, the latter a subject of much discussion within Spanish historiography. Santos Salazar highlights the ambiguities around the notion of the “village community,” which are in part due to the fact that most references are found within monastic cartularies and suggest that rigid definitions be abandoned. Concilia, as mentioned in cartularies, appear to have been meetings at which community concerns were represented, and a concilium could be a group witness to transactions of property (as at Olmas de Pisuerga in 1072, 309-10), evidence of the collective action of entire village communities. The term therefore provides some evidence of the existence of specific groups as communities, but caution is still advised. Vito Loré finishes off an excellent volume with a short but useful conclusion which reminds us about the relative invisibility of community action in this time period.
The volume is very well documented in the footnotes and has a useful index of persons and places. There is no bibliography, but the book is already quite long. It would, I think, have been useful to have had abstracts in French and English but that does not detract from a most exciting collection of essays.
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Notes:
1. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon), first issued in 1984 and still a classic.
2. Also examined most acutely by Paul Fouracre, Eternal Light and Earthly Concerns. Belief and the Shaping of Medieval Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 125-28.
3. A. Visconti, “Su alcune ‘notitiae investiturae’ contenute in CDL,” Annali dell’Università di Macerata, 6 (1930).