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C h a p t e r 4 Polyptyques: Twelfth-Century Monks Face the Ninth Century Polyptyques, the great ninth-century inventories of monastic holdings, stand at a turning point in the medieval exercise of memory.1 On the one hand, they were originally created in order to have a clear record of property holdings and expected revenues. Their creation was thus part of a ninth-century effort to organize memory and make it unchanging, as well as to rationalize records— like the first cartularies, created at exactly the same time. On the other hand, polyptyques in the high Middle Ages were also part of the memory of the past that later scribes had to deal with, had to try to rework into something that would make sense in their own time. Modern debates over the precise meaning of terms in the ninth-century polyptyques, how they can be related to the agricultural practices of late antiquity , and the creation of “classic” manorialism have absorbed most recent scholarship on these sources. I intend to approach them somewhat differently, as sources that were originally created to preserve memory and then, three centuries later, had lost their meaning when their context was forgotten. Polyptyques in the Ninth Century Polyptyques, listings of the property holdings of and dues owed to major churches, were a ninth-century innovation. There were a few earlier efforts to make records of estate holdings, in particular at St.-Martin of Tours,2 scraps of which still survive, but no efforts were made to enumerate property on the scale of the great polyptyques until the Carolingian era. Charlemagne’s “Capitulare de villis,” which ordered that such surveys be done on his own estates, 54 Chapter 4 is generally taken as the impetus for the creation of all polyptyques.3 If his orders were carried out on royal manors, however, no records survive, and indeed most polyptyques date from at least two generations later. The word “polyptyque” itself was used in late Roman administration to mean a record or account book, a census of people and property for taxation purposes. A significant difference, however, is that Roman census rolls, unlike ninth-century polyptyques, did not specify how much each property was expected to pay, as that had to be worked out annually.4 Even though the ninthcentury form of a polyptyque, a recording of property and dues regularly owed on great manors, was therefore something new, it was built on an older sense that sources of income ought to be written down and organized. A number of monastic houses, primarily in the time of Charles the Bald, sent agents around to their villas to make systematic surveys of land, of dues and obligations, and of those who owed these obligations. Fewer than a dozen ninth-century surveys still survive more or less intact from west Francia: those from St.-Germain-des-Prés, St.-Remi of Reims, St.-Maur-des-Fossés, St.Victor of Marseille, St.-Bertin, Prüm, Wissembourg, Lobbes, and Montieren -Der. St.-Germain’s is the only one to survive as an original; the others are all later copies.5 The polyptyque of St.-Bertin is preserved because when the monks wrote the Gesta of their abbots in the 960s they copied into it the text of a polyptyque already over a century old.6 There are also scraps and mentions of others, such as the polyptyques of St.-Père of Chartres and Marmoutier, enough that it seems highly likely that many more monasteries produced such inventories than those that have survived.7 Like the Domesday Book in England two centuries later, the polyptyques were composed with the hope and belief that once everything was in writing it would be easier to tell what was owned and what was owed.8 Again like Domesday, the polyptyques were never uniform or complete. Some property was simply never recorded in a polyptyque. Because different villas would be surveyed by different men, what was recorded and even how it was counted would have varied.9 Even if we know the names of those who surveyed the monastery’s holdings for the polyptyque, we do not know whether they were monks, monastic agents, or perhaps (and indeed most likely) men of local importance. Sometimes the original polyptyque scribe, writing from the notes of several different surveyors, duplicated or accidentally omitted entries.10 And of course a monastery’s properties were...

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