Languedoc Chapter #2 to the Twelve Monks Sent from Clairvaux to Bring

Languedoc Chapter #2 To the twelve monks sent from Clairvaux to bring Grandselve into the Cistercian order in 1145, life in the Midi must have come as something of a shock. Given St. Bernard’s preaching mission, they must have expected heretics, and a weak episcopate was unfortunate but hardly unusual, but northern monks would have found themselves unprepared to discover that the Occitanian relationship with the written word was radically different from that found in Champagne and Burgundy. The precision and authority of Occitanian documents, particularly those produced in or near Toulouse, was fundamentally incompatible with the looser social agreement to which the northern videmus bear witness. The videmus documents so prevalent in the northern context were, as I demonstrated in chapter 2, grounded in the power and authority of the person whose will they represented, i.e. the noble or ecclesiastic who issued them, and were thus constitutive elements of a culture of “memory”, as opposed to one of “written record.”1 Arriving at Grandselve, however, the apostolic twelve would have found a written culture that saw the document in and of itself as legal authority, centered on a regularized, formal notariat at Toulouse. The complex negotiations that would unfold between the Occitanian Cistercians and this notariat, combined with the rapidly changing dynamics of social class during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, would come to define the political and social trajectory of the region in the century following the Albigensian Crusade. Drawing primarily on an extensive archive of fourteenth and fifteenth century notarial registers, modern scholarship on Mediterranean notarial culture has long emphasized the power 1 Cit. Clanchy etc. and sophistication of the notariat in Provence, and particularly in Marseille.2 However, the nature of these sources had meant that the practices of Occitanian notaries before they were subject to northern influences following the Albigensian Crusade are almost entirely unstudied. The work that has been done associates the emergence of a formal notariat with the various consular movements in Languedoc in the mid-twelfth century, combined with the general renewal of interest in Roman law.3 As a consequence, notarial culture in Languedoc has been thought to initially be a costal phenomenon, following the consular governments at Béziers and Arles (1131), Narbonne (1143), and St-Gilles (1144).4 Further, surveys of documents from the period have focused on a scribe identifying themselves as a notary, and declared that “the importance of the notariate [sic.] can be measured by the occurrence in the documents of terms such as tabellio, scriptor publicus or notarius which were converging toward the “public notary” adopted by practice in the thirteenth century”, with the formal office of notary first established in 1174 at Béziers.5 Thus, notaries in Languedoc only took “shape and definition” in the thirteenth century, and cities that established a consulate relatively late, such as Toulouse, took additional time to develop a formal notariat.6 An examination of the actual contents of twelfth century diplomata tells a somewhat different story, and one which has profound consequences for the Cistercians of Languedoc: the city of Toulouse had already established and standardized notarial practice by 1140. Preserved 2 Cit. Smail, etc. 3 Maïté Lesné-Ferret, “The Notariate in the Consular Towns of Septimanian Languedoc (Late Twelfth - Thirteenth Centuries),” in Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France: Provence and Languedoc, 1000-1500, ed. Kathryn Louise Reyerson and John Victor Drendel (Brill, 1998), 4. 4 Lesné-Ferret, 4. 5 Lesné-Ferret, 4. 6 Lesné-Ferret, 11. among the documents taken from Grandselve at the time of its dissolution during the French Revolution is an archive of over 300 pre-crusade diplomata and well over 1,000 notarial acts from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. Perhaps because they were organized as monastic rather than civic documents, or because they are loose documents rather than a bound cartulary, this collection of documents has never been systematically studied; even the finding aids of the Archives départementales de la Haute-Garonne only make reference to 16 of the 61 boxes of extant materials.7 The earliest original notarial documents preserved at Grandselve date to the 1150s and are more than a century older than any extant notarial register.8 Further, there are several twelfth century copies of documents from the 1120s through the 1140s, and, as I shall show, the contents of these copies should be considered extremely reliable. 7 The only scholar to have worked with these documents in any concerted way seems to have been John Mundy, who treated them as sources in many of his works but did not consider them as a unit. Mousnier, L’abbaye cistercienne de Grandselve makes no mention of these documents at all. Berman, Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians, 2 does mention the existence of the 108 H file, which contains two later cartularies, but does not mention the instrumenta, nor does she utilize them as evidence. Similarly, studies on other subjects in the Midi rely solely on cartulary evidence to make their arguments; for example, see Constance Bouchard, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Pierre Bonnassie, ed., Fiefs et féodalité dans l’Europe méridionale: Italie, France du midi, péninsule ibérique du Xe au XIIIe siècle (Toulouse: CNRS: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2002); Biller, “The Cathars of Languedoc and Written Materials”; Élisabeth Magnou-Nortier, “Notes sur le sens du mot fevum en Septimanie et dans la marche d’Espagne à la fin du Xe et au début du XIe siècle,” Annales du Midi 76, no. 67 (1964): 141–52. Indeed, most studies of Occitania have proceeded as if the cartulary were the only source base extant for the study of the high middle ages; see Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Les Cartulaires: actes de la table ronde organisée par l’Ecole nationale des chartes et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S, Mémoires et documents de l’Ecole des chartes 39 (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 1993). This focus is particularly problematic in Occitania and Iberia, where there is much less evidence for a reliance on monastic centers in document production; Adam J. Kosto, “Sicut mos esse solet: Documentary Practices in Christian Iberia, c.700-1000,” in Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Warren Brown et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 262. 8 Cit. Although they would not give themselves the formal title of “notary public”—or indeed any title at all—until the thirteenth century, the earliest documents preserved at Grandselve show that Toulousian notaries had already developed and standardized a regular formula for the documents they produced. A short document from March of 1155, containing the return of feudal rights by Petrus Marsam and his son Poncius to Gerald de Lombardia as part of their sale of two casales to one Domerg, provides an example of this standard form: Figure 1: A.d. de la Haute-Garrone 108 H 1.2 (1155) Sciendum est quod Petrus Marsam . et Poncius eius filius . sua propria voluntate illum feum quod tenuerunt de | Petro Malero et de Ricsenda sua uxore hoc est .II. casales qui sunt foris portam de Ponza mi|lano9 inter casalem Borelli Aldegarii . et casalem Arnaldi de Cozas . reddiderunt illum feum Gi-|raldo de Lombardia . sine ullo retentu . et debent inde ei facere garenciam de omnibus suis here-|dibus . et tunc dominus Giraldus de Lombardia . dedit ad feum predictos .II. casales cum ethfitio quod | ibi est Domergo et eius ordinio . et tali pacto quod reddat inde ei servitium in unoque anno ad martrorem .XII. denarios . et reacaptationem quando eveniat .XII. denarios . et de clamore huius feui fide | habeat dominus . et .IIII. denarios . iusticiam si iuste inculpatur feuatarius . et de quoque solido venditionis .I. denarium . et | de quoque solido pignoris .I. mazalam . et sit factum consilio predicti domini Giraldi qui debet inde face|re garenciam de totis amparatoribus sine enganno Domergo . et eius ordinio . facta carta | mense mardo feria .VIa. regnate 9 This is the Pouzonville gate, located in the city wall east-northeast of the basilica of St-Severin and above the Matabiau gate. It would be the closest gate to the college of St. Bernard at Toulouse, the former site of which is to this day bordered on one side by the Rue Pouzonville. Lodovico francorum rege . Raimundo Tolosano [francorum reg del.] comite | Raimundo episcopo . anno ab incarnatione domini .M.C.L.Vo. huius rei sunt testes . Petrus de Libraco | et Iohannis Raterus . et Petrus de Pino. Raimundus SCriPSIT … 10 Several features of this diploma are important to note as they are indicative of twelfth century Toulousian notarial culture and practice. The script is a rapidly executed late Caroline or early Protogothic miniscule, written with a wide, square tipped pen and without ruling. The ‘a’ is formed with one compartment, although it has begun to progress towards a two-compartment ductus, and the form of the ‘z’ is distinctive. The short ‘s’ is absent except for the initial capital. Abbreviations are straightforward but regular, and hyphenation of words which continue on another line is irregular. The mistaken repetition of “francorum rege” is expuncted with a series of vertical slashes above the letters, but crucially there has been no erasure of text. The hyphen is used regularly for words that cross lines, which is a relatively early adoption. There is no scribal sign beyond the three Trinitarian dots and scribal colophon marking the end of the document, nor is there any indication of a seal, either physically or as a reference in the text itself.

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