The Serf, the Knight and the Historian by Dominique Barthélemy (review)

REVIEWS 231 Dominique Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight and the Historian, trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2009) xii + 356 pages. This translation of Dominique Barthélemy’s La mutation de l’an mil a-t-elle eu lieu? Servage et chevalerie dans la France des Xe et XIe siècles has made Barthélemy’s critique of the concept of the feudal revolution and of the debates surrounding the year 1000 accessible to an Anglophone audience. Barthélemy examines how scholars in the past have treated documentary sources and terminology related to serfs and knights. He argues that the tenth and eleventh centuries showed stability and gradual, not revolutionary, change. Barthélemy reviews the charters and notices used by those who argue for a rapid change in the tenth or eleventh centuries. He asserts that scholars erroneously have concluded that formal legal proceedings diminished during this period . He suggests instead that the changes in documentation should be understood as a diversification of document types rather than as a transformation. These different types of documents coexisting testify to a vibrant legal culture. To support his assertions, Barthélemy approaches the different kinds of documentation as a whole rather than following one specific type. He looks at the use of autograph crosses and concludes that the autograph cross was used to add force to both juridical acts and documents of record throughout the period. Records, with or without autograph crosses, served as reminders to parties involved in disputes of testimony and agreements already made. Rather than indicating a crisis in legal documentation or a decline in court systems, these documents indicate the value of the written record to monks and others involved in legal disputes. The increase in less formal notices can be attributed to better record keeping rather than to radical change. The society that produced this kind of documentation should be understood as stable and slow to change. A study of serfs demonstrates both the stability and the complexity of tenthand eleventh-century medieval society. According to Barthélemy, servitude did not radically change around the year 1000. The books of serfs from Marmoutier show neither an increase in restrictions on serfs nor an increase in the emancipation of serfs. Instead, legal documentation shows servitude as one part of a much larger social network. Men and women chose to donate themselves as serfs as a means of attaching themselves to a powerful institution and as a means of acquiring rights to marry or to control certain offices. A person might donate themselves as a serf in order to pay a debt or atone for a particular crime such as the burning down of a barn. Similarly, many manumissions did not make a serf independent. Rather, the manumission acted as a prelude to enserfment to another institution. The freedom in those manumissions was granted so that a person could take on another obligation. Even in cases where men were freed to become priests, the freedom granted allowed another allegiance , in this case to God, to be made. In a society where a person’s status in servitude could not necessarily be REVIEWS 232 easily recognized, rituals and oaths were used to reinforce a serf’s status and to control them. Monasteries, for example, required their mayors to formally become serfs bound to the monastery in order to ensure that the mayor continued to acknowledge the rights of the monastery over himself and the property that he had been granted along with his office. Serfs in such offices wielded considerable power. As Barthélemy asserts, “serfs of the Middle Ages did not live in servitude. They discharged servile tributes, a fact that is not sufficient to define their lives and their entire social condition as uniformly servile” (82). Serfs owned property, spoke on behalf of their masters at public gatherings, agitated for a change in the terms of their servitude, and transferred between masters throughout the ninth through eleventh centuries. Serfs had rights and a limited amount of power. According to Barthélemy, past scholars have taken these actions on the part of serfs and the changing terminology in the sources relating to serfs to mean that serfs...