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. Although there is an obvious concern with making sure no text can be added to either the top of the document nor the sides, there is no such concern with the bottom of the document; it is possible to add two or even three lines of text here. Finally, while this document is not a chirograph, the scribes at Toulouse did use this practice with some regularity. However, instead of the standard northern practice of cutting the word “chyrographus” in half, they used a series of paired letters of the alphabet, and accordingly referred to the practice as “divisum per alphabetum”.
The text begins simply, having no religious invocation. It then introduces the two primary actors—in this case Peter Marsam and his son Ponce—and then identifies the particular items
10 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.2 (1155). being transferred—two casales.11 These territories are first identified by their general location— outside of one of the city gates—and then by the properties they are between. There may be an order to the listing of these properties, possibly east-west and then north-south, but it is almost impossible to determine. Here, only two neighbors are given. In any case, this method of describing property borders is distinct from the practice of literary perambulation which is a consistent feature of Cistercian diplomata in Anglo-Norman contexts and in Champagne. Next, the diploma describes what is happening to the property, namely that Peter and Ponce are surrendering it back to its owner, Gerald de Lombardia and guarantee not to claim the casales again in the future.
The “et tunc” in line 5 is a dividing point in the diploma, marking the transition from the actions of the sellers to the actual transfer from the properties’ feudal owner, Gerald, to its new possessor, Domerg and his “estate” (eius ordinio). The next clause, beginning “tali pacto” lists out
Domerg’s obligations to Gerald in a series of clauses which are almost universally identical across more than 300 documents, although the precise sums attached vary based on the property: the yearly rent from the properties and its due date, usually some time in November or December, which is to say after the harvest; the reacaptatio or “death tax”, the cost of transferring the property to one of Domerg’s heirs upon his death; a pledge of loyalty if there is a clamor regarding the fief; the forfeit if Domerg is found remiss in his obligations; the amount of money due to Gerard if
Domerg sells or mortgages the property, usually a denarius per solidus (i.e. 5%); and finally an agreement to consult Gerard before making an such sale or mortgage. Gerard in return guarantees without any reservation (enganno) that the properties are otherwise Domerg’s to do as he wishes.
11 The word “castle” is not quite right for the English translation here, since it suggests a walled and fortified military location. “Compound” or perhaps “homestead” is a closer, though not exact, sense, since they are almost always transferred cum edificio, which is to say with their associated structures (barns, etc.). The final section of the document begins with the dating (facta carta), a point at which the scribe will occasionally also distinguish when the agreement itself was reached, which is always by either the month and ferial or month and day, with the use of the Roman Ides/Nones/Kalands only appearing in the thirteenth century. The dating clause is then always followed by the reigning king of France and the current count and bishop of Toulouse, and then the year. Neither the indiction nor regnal year are ever given. A witness list, usually no more than two or three names, then follows, and the document concludes with the scribal colophon.
Figure 2: A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 58.3 (n.d.), detail Almost all of these features are incredibly consistent for both earlier and later documents.
In one earlier document which dates to August of 1130, preserved in a twelfth century scroll from
Grandselve, we find a high degree of similarity:
Hec est carta commemorations. Borellus Aldegarius dedit ad feuum duos aripen- |tes de terra ad plantandam vineam Arnaldo Ortolano . et Raimundo de Novilla suo | consanguino . et eorum ordinio . Tali convenientia quod quando aripentes eiusdem te-|nentie dabunt quartum .’ Arnaldus et Raimundus donent ei oblias . de quoque aripento si | inculpabuntur . Si hi prediciti feuatores volunt hos predictos duos aripentes ven-|dere aut inpignorare .’ faciant consilio domini Borelli . et reddant ei de uno quoque solido | venditionis .I. denarium et de solido pignoris .Ia. mezalam . Servitium predictum dabunt in festo omnium | sanctorum . hi predicti duo aripentes sunt infra terram Belloti Forasterii et malolem Rai-|mundi Maleti . in condamina predicti Borelli . Insuper dominus Borellus debet eis ga-|rire hos predictos duos aripentes de totis amparatoribus sine enganno . | Facta carta huius donationis mense Augusti . feria .Va. regnante Lodoico francorum rege . | et Ildefonso tolosano comite . et Amelio episcopo . anno ab incarnatione domini .M.C.XXX. | Signum Sicardus Forasterius . et Poncius Faber . et Guilabertus de sancto Lupo . atque Raimundus . Bernardus . qui huius rei sunt testes . Vitalis scripsit.12
Unlike the first document, this one does have a brief introduction, but this may have been a later addition. Nevertheless, the standard clausulae—et eorum ordinio, tali convenientia (for tali pacto), faciant consilio domini et reddant ei de uno quoque solido, insuper dominus debet eis garire, facta carta, the specific order of month, ferial, reigning authorities, and then the year, huius rei sunt testes, and the simple scribal identification—are readily evident. Further, even at this early date, there is a suggestion that being a scribe was a family affair. Occitanian naming conventions would suggest that this Vitalis is likely to be the father of Poncius Vitalis, a notary who is active in the
1140s through to the 1160s.13
12 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 58.3 (n.d.), recto item no. 5. 13 See: A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.3 (1155) and 108 H 1.9 (1162), as well as 108 H 58.3 (n.d.), recto items # 3 (June 1149) and #11 (February 1140). These forms are stable for many decades and across a great number of individual scribes.14
They are immediately recognizable in documents produced in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; many persist well into the fourteenth century. One final example from 1194, documenting Arnold de Samatano’s sale of a malole to William Peter, reads:
Figure 3: A.d. de la Haute-Garrone 108 H 3.15 (1194) Notum sit quod Arn
This document is immediately recognizable as a product of the same notarial praxis as the previous two. It is distinct only in the addition of the specific day as well as the ferial, a practice which is sporadic throughout the twelfth century and which becomes standard in the mid thirteenth century,
14 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1 to 108 H 3 contain the autographs of 24 different scribes active between 1150 and 1200. 15 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 3.15 (1194). replacing the ferial completely, and in the declaration of the number of lines in the main text of the document, i.e. before the Facta sunt clause. This latter feature is unique in the surviving documents from the twelfth century, and only very occasionally used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
These three examples show that the earliest diplomata from Toulouse had a highly standardized, regular approach to the production of legal documents with origins well before the rise of the Toulousian consulate—indeed, before the rise of any Occitanian consulate. Although they would not name themselves “notaries” until much later, these are nonetheless defining features of a formal notariat. Further, the twelfth century diplomata produced by the scribes of
Toulouse show an emphasis on the written word as the container for legal authority not found in northern contexts until the fourteenth century, and one that has widely been considered a hallmark of notarial bureaucracy. Scholarship on diplomatic production has argued that Roman imperial diplomatics merely conveyed or provided a record of imperial law; a document being destroyed or lost would not affect the reality of the law, and losing a document deeding you a property would have no bearing on your ownership of that property.16 Following the fall of the western Empire, however, diplomata became the repositories of both legality and memory. An original charter was proof of ownership and a finding aid to those whose memory could prove that ownership. Studies done on Capetian and Anglo-Norman documents, show that diplomata would not return to being representations rather than containers of the law until well after the Albigensian Crusade.17 Many
16 Peter Classen, Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde: diplomatische Studien zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter, Vyzantina keimena kai meletai 15 (Thessalonikē: Kentron Vyzantinōn Ereunōn, 1977). 17 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 3rd ed. (Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013); Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). of the features of the twelfth century Toulousian diplomata, however, demonstrate an understanding of the role of documents much closer to the Roman model. Witness lists are short, curtailing the function of the document as a repository of memory. Outside of the scribal colophon, there are never any obvious marks or features, such as a notarial mark or seal, to prove authenticity.
The language of the documents is standard, legalistic, and codified. In certain cases, the return
(reddere) of a property to its feudal owner also included a return of the physical document, the
“carta feui” such as in the case of a sale of a terra by Arnald de Trul and his wife Stephana to the brothers Arnald and Bernard de Monte Gagnas.18 Most of all, the Toulousian scribes showed a high degree of concern in the accuracy and fidelity of the documents they produced.
A large number of the lay documents preserved at Grandselve are rescripts of original charters. These may either be stand-alone documents or a compellation of several documents on a single role. If several documents were on a single piece of parchment, they would be separated by
2-4 blank lines and with a drypoint line drawn across the top of each additional document. In both cases, however, a notary would copy over the entire text of the document they had been asked to reproduce, including the previous scribe’s dating clause and colophon. They would then provide their own addendum with their dating clause and scribal colophon, which was in turn witnessed and counter-signed by two other notaries. This addendum also had a highly regular form. In one example, the scribe Ponce Arnold rescripted five different acts concerning the legal obligations of one Stephan de Camerada pertaining to lands he had inherited from Wilhelma Entrevinhana.19 The
18 “Tunc dominus Raimundus de Damiaco recueprato feuo et carta feui | ab eis recuperata laudavit et dedit ad feuum Arnaldo de mont Gagnas et Bernardo frater | suo et eorum ordinio…” A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.10. 19 A.d. de la Haute Garonne 108 H 2.5 (1205). second of these, marking the payment of a reacapitato to Raymond Maurand (lns. 20-27) originally concluded in the expected way:
Istam cartam non scripsit Ramundus Agobertus sed aliam de qua | Poncius Arnaldus istam transtulit eadem racione et eisdem verbis mense madii . feria .IIII. regnante Philippo rege francorum et Ramundo Tolosano | comite . et Ramundo episcopo . anno ab incarnatione domini .Mo.CCo.Vo. huius facti translati sunt testes Helias Barravus . er Sancius Centullus publi-|ci notarii . et idem Poncius Arnaldus qui hec scripsit .
“scripsit… non scripsit sed…” with as many as four scribes, preserving a record of exactly who had copied any document and when they had done so.20 Further, a notary’s claim that he had copied the document “eadem racione et eisdem verbis”—with the same words and the same sense as the original—was no idle boast. The twelfth century scribes of Toulouse were almost fanatical in their preservation of original orthographies, such as Raimundus/Ramundus or feum/feodum, when it differed from their own preferred spelling.21
Perhaps the best example of this focus on precise reproduction is in the chirographed will and testament of Babilonia, in which she provides her sons Pictavin and Raymond their inheritance early in exchange for a one-time payment of 200 solidi.22 In the penultimate line of this document,
20 Need example here. 21 Another example. 22 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 2.17 (1171). the scribe, Stephan, accidentally repeats the name of the witness Raymond Rufus and expuncts it.
By chance, Babolina’s will was rescripted in 1197, along with several other documents pertaining to the disposition of properties by Pictavin and Raymond, by Arnold Petri.23 In this reproduction,
Arnold Petri not only precisely recapitulates the original document with its orthographic irregularities, such as Stephanus’ capitalization and particular spacing for his final “S C R I P S I
T”, but also the second repetition of Raymond Rufus’ name and its expuncts. Such fidelity on the part of the early notaries of Toulouse shows a clear focus on the document as a legitimizing force in and of itself, not merely a container which might be used to locate those who could legitimize its contents. Written culture in Toulouse had centered itself on the written record before the rest of
Languedoc, and for more than a century before the Capetians and Anglo-Normans. Indeed, given the Angevian interest in Toulouse and the well-documented timeline of the development of the written record in England itself, it is worth asking if northern praxis did not at least in part have its origins in Occitania. The diplomata preserved in the archive of Grandselve demonstrate that
Toulouse had a robust, defined notariat from the first decades of the twelfth century which constituted an important node of power both within the city of Toulouse and through the surrounding countryside. It was an institution with which the Cistercian Order would have to reckon in order to establish themselves in the social and political fabric of Occitania.
Figure 5: A.d. de la Haute-Garrone 108 H 2.17 (1171), detail
Figure 5: A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.17 (1197), detail
23 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.17 (1197). As I have already shown in chapter 2, the exploitation of documentary practice in the particular form of the videmus instrumenta formed the basis for Cistercian relationships to centralizing powers in Champagne, and so stood as an important tool in securing a given monastery’s political, economic, and social place. A videmus instrument was, however, a diplomatic praxis firmly based in the culture of memory; its value rested on the social capital it represented, rather than the legal force of the physical document. This was a cultural incommensurability with which the northern monks who were sent to integrate the Occitanian houses into the order initially struggled to cope. Mixed in among the piles of lay documents, a few examples of documents produced within the monastery of Grandselve have survived. In contrast to the written precision of the Toulousian notariat, these documents are rudimentary in the extreme,
Figure 6: A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.15 (n.d.) and more similar to northern than Toulousian praxis. One example, a chirograph disposition of the monastery’s land, reads:24
Notum sit omnibus hominibus quod ego frater Maurinus prior Grandissilve | cum consensu et voluntate predicte domus seniorum . et aliorum fratrum nostro-|rum . commendamus tibi . Bonete senate de Saissis omnem illum honorem quem | nobis et domui nostre donavit frater . Bernardus dictus filius Petri Arnaldi . scilicet | medium arpennum unius vinee . et unum medium casale quod est a rivo . | usque ad incum in superiori prate . et siquid aliud est . sicut in carta nostra quam de hoc do|no habemus pluribus et legitimis testibus roborata continetur . et illam terram | que est iuxta terram Raimundi de Cruce . hec omnia sicut superius nominata sunt tibi | commendamus et fideli tue comittimus . ut custodias et defendas . donet nos | pro . ut nobis placuerit omnia repetamus . et ad voluntatem nostra de ipsis dispo- |namus . huius commendationis sunt `` . Wilelmus . de Terrda . frater Arnaldus Barravus . | Bernardus de Pinu . Bonetus scriptor . ``testes I will discuss the contents of this diploma later, as they relate to the types of social connections
Occitanian Cistercians were able to form. For now, however, I wish to focus on its form. As with the notarial documents, the script is a proto-gothic miniscule, well-formed, with a single compartment ‘a’ and no use of the short ‘s’. Bonetus does use the standard descriptors of “casalem” and “aripentum”, although he misspells the latter, as well as the common phrase “dictus filius” to make it clear that Bernard was not Peter Arnaldi’s natural-born son. Beyond these features, there is little similarity between this document and those produced by the notaries of Toulouse which we have already seen. First and foremost, the text of the document has a greater sense of orality to it than the notarial documents. Brother Maurinus speaks in the first person, as does the corporation of the monastery, and addresses Boneta in the second person, making it seem closer to a transcript of an oath than a stand-alone legal text. Diplomatically and paleographically, Bonetus has used the word “S I G N U M”, rather than the alphabet, to form the chirograph, and the document lacks all the standard clausulae of the notarial documents. The document has even margins on all sides, and
24 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 1.15 (n.d.). Bonetus identifies himself as the scribe through the noun “scriptor” rather than the verb “scripsit”.
Further, the description of the location of the property in question does not match the standard form discussed above. There is no dating clause—an absence common to those documents obviously produced at Grandselve itself. And finally, Bonetus stresses the importance of witnesses’ memory over mere documents with reference to an original “strengthened by many genuine witnesses” (pluribus et legitimis testibus roborata). It is an open question whether such a document would have found legal or social purchase outside the monastery’s walls.
The Cistercians were, as a general rule, nothing if not adaptable, and those in Languedoc were not an exception. By the late twelfth century, the monks had adopted many of the styles of the Toulousian notariat, as several documents attest. The earliest of these is an 1190 rescript of a mortgage by a certain Bertran and his wife Matelios, which reads:
Figure 7: A.d. de la Haute Garonne 108 H 2.28 (1190) Sciendum est quod Bertran de Brezols et uxor eius Matelios miserunt in pignus totum illum honorem quem habent in Equacens erinum et condrietum . et totum honorem de las Landas erinum et condrietum | et .II. solidos morlanos . in Raimundo Calveto et in tenentia eius quod tenet de eis . et totum hoc quod Wilelmus Geraldus de Pompvina debet facere eis prope honorem quem tenet de illis . et .XII. denarios morlanos . in Rai-|mundo Stephano et in tenetia eius quod tenet de eis . et .VI. denarios morlanos in Duran Cipart . et iste oblie supradicte debent in festivitate sancte Marie septebris . hoc totum sicut supradictum est | miserunt in pignus Bertran de Breziols supradictus et uxor eius Namatelios sine omne retentione .’ Johanni de las Erias et toti eius ordinio .’ el sirventadge similiter .’ et totum hoc quod in ho|nore supradicto habebant nec homo nec femina de eis .’ prope .XXo. et .Ve. solidos morlanos . et Bertran de Brezols supradictus et uxor eius supradicta debent facere legitimam garentiam de omnibus ampe|ratoribus de supradicto honore .’ Iohanni de las Eiras et toti eius ordinio .’ bona fide sine enganno . huius rei sunt testes Esquafres de Fronton . Bonvila . Iospitaler . Wilelmus Geral | de Pompina . Facta carta feria .VI. mense Febroarii . regnante Lodovico rege francorum . Raimundo Tolosano comite . Ugone episcopo . anno ab incarnatione domini .Mo.Co.LXXo.IIIo. Poncius Wilelmus scripsit. | Terminus redimendi hoc pignus .’ de martrer in martrer . hanc cartam transtulit Deusdedit monachus Grandissilve de alia quam scripsit Poncius Wilelmus . supradictus eisdem verbis et eodem sensu | anno dominice incarnationis .Mo.Co.XCo. Testibus fratre Otho[ne supra] de Vanzela . fratre Poncio da Gulol . fratre Rogerio monachis Grandissilve. This instrument is notable for a variety of reasons. First, the original scribe, Ponce William, is certainly himself from Occitania. This is evident from the numerous slips into the vernacular— e.g. “el sirventadge” and “martrer” (the Occitan term for All-Saints day), giving toponyms consistently in Occitan rather than Latin without any qualifying phrase such as quod vocatur, etc. as is found in other documents. He is also either from a notariat outside of Toulouse or not formally trained there. Given that Grandselve itself is situated closer to Montauban than Toulouse, this is not an outrageous assumption, and there are several phrases, such as the addition of “toti” to “eius ordinio” that the other notaries in the Grandselve archive never use, and his loose orthography, such as with the two spellings of “Matelios” would not be tolerated. On the other hand, the rescripting scribe, Deusdedit, is just as surely not from Occitania. His name alone would be highly unusual in the region, and his autograph has distinctly Anglo-Norman features. Specifically, the tops of his long ascenders are beginning to fork, as is typical in northern contexts, rather than wedge, which is typical of Occitania. That is, Occitan scribes would cap their ascenders by making a small triangle with their pen held at 45 degrees, whereas northern scribes would hold their pen at slightly less of an angle, creating a thinner line. The northern forking would grow more elaborate with time, and the difference at this early point is hard to distinguish; in the above document, it is most evident in the slight dip in the ‘i' of “Iohanni” on line 4 and the ‘l’ of “Wilelmus” on line 2.
Further, while it is likely that Deusdedit has seen documents produced by the Toulousian notariat, he is not himself trained as a notary. His rescription formula is only partially correct, and although he provides witnesses, he does not have them countersign the document as was standard practice and uses the ablative instead of the usual nominative of apposition. However, he has understood the importance of the key phrase “eisdem verbis et eodem sensu”—with the same words and the same sense—and has been careful to preserve all the peculiarities of the original document. This is thus a hybrid diploma, fusing elements of two distinct cultures of the written word.
Although his grasp of the specific wording of the clauslae is not perfect, this instrument shows that Deusdedit, and by extension Grandselve, has recognized and embraced the importance of the written record over the ability of the written word to access memory. But there is a further wrinkle: the rescription of this document nearly twenty years after it was originally written suggests that it was intended to record a debt that was recently passed on to the next generation, which is to say Bertran and Matelios’ heirs. But this is the only surviving document which mentions their names, the toponyms “las Landas” and “Duran Cipart” do not appear elsewhere in the Grandselve archive, and the monastery does not appear to have acquired either the mortgaged lands or the debt itself at any point. The Cistercians at Grandselve were therefore not just using documents to guarantee their own property claims, but also offering the scribal services of the monastery to produce documents for the surrounding population.
This understanding of Bertran and Matelios’ mortgage instrument leaves another puzzle: if it is indeed, as it seems, a document produced by the monks of Grandselve for a third party regarding a matter they themselves had no interest in, why is the instrument preserved in the monastery’s archive at all? Indeed, although hundreds if not thousands of documents were preserved in Grandselve’s archive, few of them pertain to the monastery, directly or indirectly, before the late thirteenth century. Instead, they mostly contain the records of local land transactions Figure 8: Diplomata in the Grandselve archive by year. The blue line shows the original dates of the documents (i.e. the origninal date of a rescripted instrument), while the red line shows the terminus post quem of an item's deposit at Grandselve. between the monastery’s neighbors, few of whom have any signs of title or nobility. Further, the rigorous adherence to diplomatic formulae by the public notaries who composed these documents shows that the majority of them were composed between 1190 and 1205, immediately before the commencement of the Crusade. In contrast, the documents preserved in Grandselve’s extant cartularies mostly date to the 1150s to 1170s.25 These deposit patterns that these documents constitute a lay archive, deposited for safekeeping by Grandselve’s “orthodox” neighbors in the prelude to the Albigensian Crusade. The first signs of an uptick in deposits—the actual date of deposit probably lagged slightly from the date of production—corresponds closely to Innocent
III’s accession to the papacy and reaches a height ca. 1200-1205, precisely the period in which the
25 Mousnier, L’abbaye cistercienne de Grandselve, PP. pope has, with the aid of his Cistercian legates, started deposing Occitanian bishops and calling for armed intervention in Languedoc with the promise of remission of sins, which he did first in a bull issued on May 31, 1204.26 The evidence for this hypothesis is strengthened by the presence of a great number several documents from the Capdiners, Latinized as Capite Denario, a family of bourgeois merchants and moneylenders who were among the richest families in Toulouse by
1210. The Capdiners were strong supporters of the Cistercians in Languedoc, evidenced by their donation of the original structure that would house the College of St. Bernard and the University of Toulouse; several of the original instrumenta in the Grandselve archive are also recorded in the family’s surviving cartulary.27
The names and occupations described in the documents preserved in this lay archive— skinner, smith, gardener, shoemaker—and the relative size of the parcels of lands transacted all suggest that the social base of Cistercian support came primarily from the mercantile peasantry. It was a demographic population not that different than the social composition of the monastery’s monks, for the greater majority of Occitan Cistercians were indeed Cistercians from Occitania.
Outside of the initial impetus of the twelve monks sent from the mother house, Cistercian houses in the Midi rarely if ever drew their leaders or members from outside of the region. Unlike their northern brethren, who primarily recruited from the minor nobility, however, Occitan foundations built a base of support among the rising middle class. Donations from the regional nobility were usually merely guarantees of military protection, and the actual lands upon which each monastery was founded was more likely to come from donations made by untitled men of the knightly class.28
26 RI3 7.77 (PP) 27 Cf. A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 3.1 (1198) in the Cartulary de Capdiner no. 44, ff. 49v-50r; 108 H 3.2 (1195) in the Cart. de Capdiner no. 51, ff. 54v-55v; 108 H 3.3 (1196) in the Cart. de Capdiner no. 54, ff. 56r-58r. 28 Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 35 n.25. Few Occitan Cistercians came from anything other than low noble or mercantile origins.29 Indeed, most of the members of a Cistercian monastery’s choir were from a “new class of knights” who had been rejected from more ancient and aristocratic foundations.30 In this way, the Cistercians in the Midi were not, socio-economically speaking, that different from the mendicants who would shortly follow after them.
This “middle class” support for the Occitan Cistercians is of particular interest given the
White Monks’ anti-heretical bent, for recent scholarship has argued persuasively that the zeal to persecute heresy came not from the lofty heights of the institutional Church nor from a groundswell of the populace, but from the emerging bureaucratic and scholastic middle class.31 The Cistercian efforts in their pursuit of heresy and support of the Crusade did not simply introduce unrestricted chaos into the Midi, but destabilized the entrenched power of its noble families, and allowed the new bourgeois to replace the upper echelons of the regional nobility under an anti-heretical banner.
In short, Cistercian behavior in Occitania can thus be understood, at least in part, as class warfare.
The relationship between Toulouse’s notaries and the Cistercian Order in the immediate context of the Albigensian crusade was fraught. As defenders of orthodoxy, Occitanian Cistercians sought to create and control a frontier between themselves and the region’s population, articulated along the divide between literacy and illiteracy which mapped directly onto the divide between orthodoxy and heresy. the Cistercians could create the need for a class of experts to negotiate
29 Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne, 326. 30 Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 35. 31 R.I. Moore, “Afterthoughts on The Origins of European Dissent,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R.I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 129 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 317. across that frontier;32 a reliance on experts requires that experts be given power.33 An individual’s access to literacy created clear distinctions within the prosecution of heresy from at least the 1148 trial of Gilbert de la Porée.34 A scholastic’s high exegesis of scripture might open them to accusations of heterodoxy, from which they were able to defend themselves, as Gilbert did, through literate mastery, or fail to speak, as with Peter Abelard, and stand convicted. But for the less well-schooled, heretical doctrines had the power to impart a control over literacy. Accusations of heresy and clerical concern over romance translations of Biblical passages walked in lockstep, and the ability of seemingly unlettered heretics to recite scripture in debate startled their orthodox opponents and provided evidence of their sanctity to curious listeners.35 Control over the word, whether it be written or spoken, and the language of that word, formed the first and last battlegrounds in Occitania.
The primary front on which the Occitan Cistercians waged this linguistic warfare was not, as might be expected, in a theological debate over orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but in the production of diplomatic instrumenta. A legendary romanitas had been a key component of monastic identity in the Midi, manifest in diplomatic production through a strong tradition of formal notarial praxis and reliance on legal instruments at almost every level of society, and from the eleventh cenury,
32 R.I. Moore, “Literacy and the Making of Heresy, c. 1000 - c. 1150,” in Heresy and Literacy: 1000 - 1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35. 33 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 3rd ed. (Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013), 19, 48. 34 Moore, The War on Heresy, 155; Peter Biller, “Heresy and Literacy: Ealier History of the Theme,” in Heresy and Literacy: 1000 - 1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6. 35 Moore, “Literacy and the Making of Heresy, c. 1000 - c. 1150,” 22. Occitanian elites were proudly Latinate.36 The long-held assumption that peasant contracts were primarily oral agreements, even as late as the fourteenth century, is, as have seen with the documents from the lay archive at Grandselve, at best questionable.37 And, as we have already seen in the northern context, Cistercians used their ability to write and store documents as a tool to preserve their own power, and the same is true in Languedoc.38 In the south, however, the
Cistercians not only produced great quantities of diplomata for themselves and others, they also sought to regulate their opponent’s production, even if they only managed to do so after the
Crusade had reached its conclusion. The ubiquity of instrumenta in the Midi meant that even
Cathar perfects, fearing to show themselves, nevertheless still required diplomata to conduct their affairs and used credentes to acquire them; during the final great purge in 1243, the Council of
Béziers sought to deprive heretics of access to the written record once and for all by banning notaries from drawing up documents for them.39 Even this prohibition did was not completely successful. Hidden archives of Cathar instrumenta continued to be discovered by defenders of
Orthodoxy as late as 1293.40 Further, the notaries themselves, who provide a point of access to bureaucratic literacy not directly integrated into the hierarchy of the institutional Church, were also targeted as heretics. A “notary from France” is said to have brought Catharism to Lombardy; an
36 Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, 219. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne, 226 dates the reliance on Roman notarial formulae to at least the 1170s, but it is ubiquitous in documents throughout the 12th century. 37 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: G. Braziller, 1978), 119. Clanchy places the beginning of lay use of diplomata at a similarly late date for the English context, but does note that we would not expect such documents to survive since they were not kept or stored beyond their utility, nor were they incorporated into cartularies; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2, 52. 38 Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 41. 39 Peter Biller, “The Cathars of Languedoc and Written Materials,” in Heresy and Literacy: 1000 - 1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 63. 40 Biller, 64. apparent Cathar revival in Autiers in the 1290s was supposedly led by a prominent notarial family and drew heavily on other notaries for support.41 Given the recent explorations of the political dimensions of accusations of heterodoxy, such accusations of heresy made against lay literates are at best deeply suspicious.
In addition to their attempts to control the technology of bureaucratic production, the
Cistercians sought to claim Latinity as a particular feature of Catholic, external orthodoxy. Most twelfth century documents in the region, even those of military orders like the Templars and
Hospitalers, were written in Occitan. Cathar rituals and other documents were almost certainly written in Provençal, at least initially.42 However, those of Cistercians, particularly documents produced at monasteries which were known as bastions against heresy like Grandselve, relied almost exclusively on Latin.43 The Cistercian emphasis on Latinity served a twofold purpose. First, it separated the monks from their neighbors. Not only were they using a language that was unintelligible to the uninitiated, they were also making a clear statement of their separation from the culture of noble lay literacy in Occitania, a culture so deeply ingrained in the langue d’oc that the poetry and rhythm of the language were the constitutive components of common legal formulas and oaths.44 Their success was clear: the late twelfth century, there was a close equation of Latinity and Crusader orthodoxy in Occitania.45 This equation was not only a component of the twelfth and thirteenth century clerical imaginary, as manifest in the concerns over vernacular translations of
41 Biller, 82. 42 Bernard Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East: The Reception by the Cathars of Eastern Dualist Texts,” in Heresy and Literacy: 1000 - 1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48. 43 Mousnier, L’abbaye cistercienne de Grandselve, 31. There are, however, several large fragments of a diplomatic scroll in Occitan preserved in the Grandselve archive as 108 H 43.2, 43.4-5, 43.7. 44 Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne, 188. 45 Kienzle, “Innocent III’s Papacy and the Crusade Years, 1198-1229,” 59. scripture discussed above. In response, many Occitanians retreated from their earlier emphasis on
Latinity and focused instead on the power of their vernacular. For example, William of Tudela’s
Song of the Cathar Wars has a strong emphasis on the Latinity of the crusaders, and of the
Cistercians in particular.46 William’s description of the commencement of the Albigensian
Crusade through Innocent III’s bull and his excommunication of Raymond VI of Toulouse specifically points out that the papal edict was “written in Latin” and mentions both the presence of Arnaud Almaric, the Cistercian who would lead the Crusade as legate, and a notary and witness
Milo.47 Milo had been from the papal curia, and it was he who drew up the surrender process of
Raymond in 1209 for Innocent III.48 As to why Milo might be mentioned as such a key adversary within his poem William does not explicitly say, but leaves a hint with a description of the notary’s most notable feature: he “speaks Latin so well.”49
Following the initial fury of the Albigensian Crusade, which had targeted several consular- notarial towns, most famously Béziers, the urban notables of Toulouse would not have been unjustified in their fears that they were next. Indeed, Mark Pegg has argued that the very term
“goodmen” that became synonymous with “Cathar heretic” simply denoted a member of high standing in the urban community.50 Working in both Latin and Occitan and walking the knife’s edge between heresy and orthodoxy, the notaries of Toulouse were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some chose to secure their claim to orthodoxy by allying themselves with Grandselve,
46 For the definitive edition of the text, see Guillaume de Tudèle, The Song of the Cathar Wars: A History of the Albigensian Crusade, ed. Janet Shirley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 47 Kienzle, Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard, 151–52. 48 RI3 12, 143-164. 49 Kienzle, 151–52. 50 Mark Pegg, “Heresy, Good Men, and Nomenclature,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R.I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 129 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 227–40. and it is not a coincidence that a disproportionate number of documents in the Grandselve archive come from a relatively small number of notaries, particularly after Louis VIII intervened personally in the Crusade. One such notary, Martin Chivus, is responsible for the production or rescripting of many of the extant documents from the 1220s.51 Martin was also a consul of the city of Toulouse, appearing on a list in a document from 1220.52 Other common names appearing in the archive for the period for 1200 to 1230 are Isarnus Grillus, Arnold de Interambisaquis, Sancius
Centullus, Ponce Arnold, and several members of the Barravus family, many of whom are members of prominent Toulousian bourgeoisie families.53 Further, several also appear on the consular lists well after the Capetians had consolidated their hold on Langueoc, such as William
Barravus, who is a consul of the city in 1229.54 An examination of lists of Grandselve’s monks also reveals that several of the consular-notarial families of Toulouse would place their members at the abbey after the crusade. For example, William Raymond of the important Bonmancip family, who have appeared in other instrumenta throughout the Grandselve archive from the twelfth century, is a monk at Grandselve in the 1290s.55 Indeed, towards the end of the thirteenth century, a period for which there are substantially more clues as to the specific members of Grandselve’s choir, there is a large amount of overlap between notarial families and the monks of Grandselve.
The father and son pair of John and Peter de Ayros are responsible for almost half of the extant documents from 1290 to 1310; their relative Berenger is a cellerer at the abbey in May of 1307.56
Another notary, Arnold de Manso, who is also responsible for a large number of instrumenta from
51 Martin’s autographs are: A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 6.1 (1225), 108 H 6.16 (1223), 108 H 6.23 (1227). 52 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 6.23 (1227), item no. 7. 53 See the appendices of John H. Mundy, Society and Government at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars, Studies and Texts 129 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997). 54 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 46.11 (1299). 55 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 15.4 (n.d.). 56 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 30.2 (1307). the same period likewise has a relative, William Raymond, among the choir in 1303.57 Further, by this time, property confirmations and acts of sale show that many individual notaries held their house in fief from the monastery, as was the case with William Amelii and William de
Pousonville.58 By this late date, the notariat and the monastery had formed deep and lasting ties.
Such decisions and alliances between some of the urban bourgeoisie and the Cistercians at
Granselve fits neatly with arguments recently made by scholars of heresy in Occitania, particularly if viewed in the context of a struggle for power between the new urban elite and entrenched minor nobility. From early in the Crusade, the rural nobility of Languedoc was well-aware that “the persecution of heretical ‘otherness’ [was] a path by which foreign powers could assert and legitimate control in the south.”59 They chose to fight what they saw as an external colonization, and suffered directly for that resistance. These nobles were the first to be affected by the crusade’s imposition of the more rigid and structured feudal ties customary in the north, and by 1215, the redistribution of land to northern crusaders was a near-universal policy.60 This threat to their status and wealth quickly removed any of their concerns over heresy, and the local alliances that formed in the 1220s and 1230s were focused on Occitan political independence.61 The incipient imposition
57 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 17.3 (1303). 58 A.d. de la Haute-Garonne 108 H 20.15 (1314). 59 Taylor, “Authority and the Cathar Heresy,” 194. 60 Taylor, 141; Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne, 231. Although the crusaders took lands from their local owners from an early date, in certain regions they were swiftly returned to their former owners in fief rather than given over wholesale. This policy changed rapidly following the Capetian entry into the crusade; see Taylor, “Authority and the Cathar Heresy,” 161. 61 Taylor, “Authority and the Cathar Heresy,” 151, 164; Philippe Ruiz, “Bourgois, abbés et comtes à Moissace de 1197 à 1214: rôle de la croisade et de l’hérésie dans les luttes politiques urbaines,” of feudal ties to the Capetians after 1229 seems to be the last straw, provoking widespread tolerance for “heresy” in the river towns of the Agnais and elsewhere as a means of resistance, to which the Capetians responded with the large-scale Inquisitorial repression of 1243.62
In contrast, many of the nonnoble urban elite saw this as an opportunity to gain the social status previously denied them and saw the Cistercian Order in the Midi as having compatible aims.
These local experts, in collaboration with Capetian power, would be instrumental in shaping the integration of Languedoc into the Capetian domain through a combination of claims of heresy, the acquisition of confiscated land, and Cistercian agrarian practices. Starting in the second half of the thirteenth century, the Capetians, aided by the Cistercians, began to concentrate the “heretical” peasantry into new planned and fortified towns know as bastides. These bastides would serve to form knots of authority and control in the social topography of Languedoc, representing the first whisper of a technology of colonial control that has echoed down into the modern day.
in Religion et société urbaine au Moyen Âge: études offertes à Jean-Louis Biget par ses anciens élèves, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Jean-Louis Biget, Histoire ancienne et médiévale 60 (Paris: Publ. de la Sorbonne, 2000), 176. 62 Taylor, “Authority and the Cathar Heresy,” 171–72.