The Central Middle Ages (c. 900-1200): Castles and Fiefs
Lords with their own power - as opposed to aristocrats exercising (or usurping) someone else's power - came to prominence in the wake of the Carolingian empire's collapse at the end of the ninth century.
The role of violence in this development is extremely controversial. The disintegration of centralised Carolingian power made the counts independent, and their positions, once official, became hereditary. Nominally subordinate magnates underwent a similar transformation. Wholly new, more localised, powers sprang up. Castles began appearing, whose occupiers dominated the countryside through the violence they visited upon non-combatants, like peasants and monks. At least, that was how clerical writers told the story, especially when they were in conflict with a neighbouring castellan. The multiplication of castle-based lordships and the weakening of regnal and even comital power meant that local lordship became the dominant form of authority and expression of power in many parts of Europe. Not every area of Europe experienced this transformation equally or simultaneously. Lordship in this sense had long been a fact in Germany's politically fragmented lands, whereas in northern and central France many contemporary observers found castle-based lordship a surprising, even shocking, novelty. The relationship between violence and lordship depended a great deal on local norms and contexts.This landscape of multiple, small powers that comes into sharper focus around 1000 was organised around bonds of loyalty and submission, often called faith or fidelity, which was sometimes signified by an act of homage and sometimes linked to grants of land or castles, which were sometimes called fiefs. In some cases, holding the fief entailed promising to carry out armed service for its grantor. This neat picture of ‘feudalism', however, betrays a much messier reality, in which relationships were rarely so codified and violence was an important means of adjudicating and distributing power.
An account composed in the 1020s and known as the conventum (or ‘agreement') illustrates how such configurations of power could be productive of violence. In the story, which may be fictionalised but involves historical people, Count William of Poitou, duke of Aquitaine, apparently mistreats one of his men, Hugh the castellan of Lusignan. William grants lands and castles to other followers and fails to aid Hugh against his enemies, who besiege his castles, burn his town, and threaten his wife. Hugh never directly attacks William in the story, but he repeatedly gathers his forces and marches on his own enemies, burning castles, capturing people, and even amputating knights' hands (a judicial punishment for perjury).In this world bristling with arms and dominated by castles, women, even aristocratic ones, appear only as avenues to power through marriage or as proxies for threats to their husbands, and peasants exist only in the guise of targets or as foils for aristocratic models. It is the bonds between elite men that shape the story. Hugh's violence is necessitated by his long-suffering faithfulness in the face of his lord's arbitrary inconstancy. In one memorable exchange, William shrugs off Hugh's reproaches, saying, ‘You are mine, to do my will. '9 But between the lines, Hugh's ostensible fidelity to William is compromised by alliances with other nobles, including the neighbouring count of Anjou, and one suspects William may have been wise to limit the number of castles under Hugh's control. The reciprocal faith and service between a lord and his man thus covers a series of opportunistic moves and strategies based on force, not loyalty. The ways in which both William and Hugh fail in their responsibilities to one another is suggestive of what some historians have called ‘feudal anarchy', illustrating the violent potential of lordship and the inability of institutions to contain conflict.
Yet if institutions appear light on the ground - though not wholly absent - rules are more evident.
None of the characters feels that William possesses his power illegitimately, only that he exercises it that way. While such abuse (often considered in and of itself violentia by medieval writers) engenders a violent response, the narrator, possibly a cleric writing on Hugh's behalf, does not characterise Hugh's actions as evil or usurpatory. The violence itself is not anarchic or uncontrolled. Carefully limited and targeted, its purpose was neither to annihilate the opponent nor to prolong the enmity indefinitely, but rather to force them to the bargaining table (albeit in a flexible state of mind). As the title conventum itself indicates, William and Hugh ultimately did come to an agreement that re-established peace between them. Indeed, throughout the story, numerous such agreements (conventi, or alternately fines, literally meaning ‘ends') are proposed or made between other players, often in formal, court assemblies (placita) that seem routine. There is ample evidence here not just of unwritten rules and cultural norms, but also of an approach to conflict resolution that has been characterised as ‘substantive legalism'.[470] [471] The way that the personal and the ‘public' were intertwined in such processes of ‘feuding and peacemaking' is reflected in the language that sources used to describe them: words like ‘anger' (ira) and ‘love' (amor) were terms that expressed not only (and perhaps not even) internal experiences, but also quasi-legal states.Not everyone was as impressed by the regulation and termination of aristocratic disputes as medieval historians sometimes are. Some representatives of the church were especially critical. Physical violence was not usually considered evil in and of itself, but its tendency to harm non-aristocrats, including clerics and peasants (who were, not incidentally, often rent- or service-paying labourers on ecclesiastical properties), was a problem. In the decades around the year 1000, some Church councils and synods - sometimes accompanied by large crowds of common people - in what is now France and Spain began issuing promulgations limiting violence on pain of excommunication.
In 989, the bishops, monks and nuns assembled at the Council of Charroux forbade anyone from breaking into churches, stealing farmers' livestock and attacking unarmed priests.11 These protections for ‘non-combatants' were expanded in later councils, and truces were proclaimed that forbade violence at particular times. The Peace of God, as these councils are collectively called, is often portrayed as a popular initiative that addressed problems of public order created by social elites in the abeyance of central authority. But the great clerics who were its driving force were as aristocratic in background as those whose violence they sought to calm, and many peace efforts were as much individual responses to particular constellations of local power relationships as they were part of an effort to limit violence in a universal or even ideological way.12Nor were kings and great princes absent from peace efforts, any more than they had really abandoned the business of public justice.[472] [473] [474] Ceremonially and ideologically, central medieval kingship remained a sacred office and a touchstone of political philosophy. The rise of lordship and its attendant violence nevertheless thoroughly reshaped regalian power. If lords sought to become like kings (or at least more like counts, or so the monks claimed), kings themselves became more like lords. A shared culture of nobility drew kings as deeply into the world of knighthood and epic as their vassals and their vassals' vassals. Seeking to dominate their inferiors and rivals, kings built great castles and warred against enemies near and far. Abbot Suger of SaintDenis wrote accounts of King Louis VI's expeditions against the recalcitrant nobles of northern France that echo with the clash of swords and the crackle of burning buildings. Recounting Louis's campaign against Leo, castellan of Meung, Suger observed ‘The lord Louis curbed him with his mighty hand... as the strong is always subdued by the stronger, [Leo] could not withstand the pressure of arms and fire directed against him.'[475] [476] [477] Louis was an anointed king by hereditary right (and in Suger's view, by divine right as well), but ruling his kingdom required physical power against his magnates as well as legal authority over them.
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