Marc Bloch could not have imagined the long shadow his discursive essays entitled Feudal Society (1939–40) would cast over the historiography of medieval France.¹ Seeking to capture the essence of medieval society for a general audience, he framed a paradigm of social organization that has served as referent ever since. For the period after ca. 1050—what he called the “second feudal age” and precisely the “long” twelfth century of this conference—he adopted two seemingly incongruent propositions from Paul Guilhiermoz’s massive study on the French nobility: nobles and knights constituted a single “social class,” yet nobility existed in...

In the last of the illuminations that decorate the Bern manuscript of Peter of Eboli’s Liber ad honorem Augusti, Emperor Henry VI is depicted in triumph over his enemies, seated on a throne flanked by his principal counsellors: Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of Hildesheim and chancellor of the Empire; Markward of Annweiler, duke of Ravenna and imperial seneschal; and Henry of Kalden, marshal of the imperial court.¹ Conrad of Querfurt was born into a powerful family of free Saxon lords who were hereditary burgraves of Magdeburg. Henry of Kalden and Markward of Annweiler, on the other hand, were ascribed by...

It is Georges Duby who first sketched the portrait of those milites who found a place in the elite by sitting in a castellan’s court, thereby sharing in a more elevated sociability than that of the village. He cited Guigonnet de Germolles as an example of such a knight.¹ Other historians also found such examples and in 1960 Jean Richard provided the fullest description of them in an article entitled “Châteaux, châtelains et vassaux en Bourgogne aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” a title I draw on here. Richard’s model attributed two notable traits to knights of the castle.

(1) The...

The word “power” (pouvoir) is vague in French. Let it be clear that I shall not be speaking of all kinds of power, but only of that expressed by the Latin term potestas in records of the period we have chosen to study. That is, the power to command and to punish. My question is this: in what measure did women share in this power?

It is a difficult problem. I have my own idea about it. Some of our medievalist colleagues do not agree with me; often I found myself in debate with K. F. Werner, formerly Director of...

In around 1060, a famulus called Bunghole² became entangled in a lawsuit with the abbey of Saint Vincent of Le Mans when, with the support of his lord, Richard of Loupfougère, he challenged the monks’ right to a tithe in the village of Puizieux. In response, abbot Hugh arranged a meeting to discuss the dispute in the court of count Roger of Montgomery at Luerzon. There, in the count’s absence, Bunghole offered to support his challenge against the monks by undergoing the ordeal of hot iron. On the barons’ advice, abbot Hugo accepted the offer. But when he and the...

Historians have long recognized the importance of ritual in communicating the sacred attributes of early medieval kingship. For almost as long they have understood that the power of later medieval monarchies to shape public opinion was the power of political theater.¹ But between the sacred liturgies of pontifical kings and the political theater of statist monarchs lies the twelfth century, whose political rituals we understand scarcely at all. The fundamental difficulty lies in the transitional nature of twelfth-century Kingship, which was moving toward the sophisticated adminstrative apparatuses of the later medieval state while still publicly avowing the political morality of...

In the twelfth century the county of Flanders was one of the most famous “territorial principalities” of the kingdom of France.¹ For two centuries it had behaved as an autonomous state—Galbert of Bruges does not hesitate to call it a regnum and its count a princeps²—but legally speaking it was held in fief from both the French and the German crowns. These two parts of the county are known respectively as la Flandre sous la Couronne or Kroonvlaanderen (almost 90 percent of the total Flemish territory) and la Flandre Impérialeor Rijksvlaanderen; the Scheldt frontier went back to the...

In the exercise of power in twelfth-century Europe, no claims to primacy of authority and jurisdiction equalled those of the papacy in their universality and essentially spiritual nature. The fundamental basis of papal claims to universal jurisdiction lay centuries earlier in the doctrine of Petrine supremacy, the superiority of Peter among the apostles. From the fourth and fifth centuries, following the imperial acceptance of Christianity, this theological concept was interwoven with the jurisprudence and judicial procedures of Roman Civil Law, and from this union flowed the Romanocanonical procedures of the papal curia, and of the canonists and ecclesiastical judges of...

Imprisoned in Pavia and frustrated in his episcopal ambitions, Rather of Liège, writing his Praeloquia about 935, denounced lordly pretentions among the hereditary nobility. The “patron” or “lord” (senior), as he was now customarily flattered,¹ paid no heed to what Augustine, Gregory, and Benedict had set down long ago about human “equality” before God. Distinctions among people arose, Rather pointedly noted, from the human will, not from nature (non natura sed uoluntate homines a se inuicem distare). More than three centuries earlier Gregory had described as mysterious the providential ordering of human affairs (occulta administratio) by which, though all born...

Among the earliest of Romanesque tympana is one over the door opening into the southern aisle of the church of San Isidoro in León. At first glance the choice of the ancient theme of the Agnus Dei seems to reflect the pioneering state in the early twelfth century of the tradition of figured tympana. The pairing on the central axis of the Lamb and the Offering of Isaac apparently establishes a eucharistic iconography of a type which was to remain marginal for such public settings. However, when the relief is read across its horizontal axis a theme of far different...

So ends a biography (or vida) prefacing a group of poems attributed to the vernacular poet and performer Marcabru in a thirteenth-century manuscript collection of lyrics.² What is the historical value of such a statement? Literary scholars have shown that many of these vidas are based solely on interpretations of the poetry that follows in a particular manuscript collection, poetry mostly composed, in the case of Marcabru, over a century before it was written in surviving manuscripts. Furthermore, lyrics ascribed to Marcabru in one manuscript may be ascribed to other poets in other manuscript collections.³ There must have been an...

This study suggests ways of assessing the part played by courtly literature and courtly ideals in the social changes of the twelfth century. It is not easy to assess the role of literature and ideas in any climate of social crisis and change.¹ For twelfth-century court society, where imaginative literature forms a large part of the documentation, the problems are great, and that makes methodology a fundamental concern. Courtly literature is fantastic and artificial;² the society in which it arose was rough, rude, and violent.³ The society produced social codes that seem to mediate between literature and reality, or at...

Potestas and dominatio: even when denoting traditional rulers of royal rank, power and lordship were highly sulfurous concepts within clerical Herr-schaftstheologie.¹ I have quoted from one of Gregory VII’s famous letters to Hermann, bishop of Metz; I could as well have called on Augustine’s earlier condemnation of Roman lust for domination, libido dominandi.² What became of this negative face of power and domination in the century following Gregory VII? John Van Engen has argued for the progressive clerical acceptance, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of domination exercised by non-royal or princely lords.³ The process he describes...

People feared the great in the twelfth century, and wondered who was great. Men with power, worried when they lacked status or recognition, struggled to secure customary—that is, legal—assurance of rank. It is a characteristic oddity that ministeriales tainted with servitude often rose higher in their societies than the untainted famuli, mayors, and provosts of western France. But it is clear that service created power. By the later eleventh century one no longer needed to seek out kings to rise and gain; dukes or counts would do, and not a few of these could envy the engaging courtliness...