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STUDIES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES EDITORIAL BOARD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CENTRE FOR MEDIEVAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF YORK Elizabeth M. Tyler (University of York) Julian D. Richards (University of York) Ross Balzaretti (University of Nottingham) VOLUME 7 POLITICAL ASSEMBLIES IN THE EARLIER MIDDLE AGES Edited by P. S. Bamwell and Marco Mostert ~ BREPOLS Talking Heads: Assemblies in Early Medieval Germany STUART AIRLIE he assemblies that are the concern of this paper were high society, gatherings of a ruling elite. These gatherings dealt with the great business of the realm: war T and peace, condemnation of rebels and the rewarding of the faithful,judgement and legislation. In Nelson's words, they were 'the one thing that held political systems together'. I We should not make the assumption that, since kings were the leading actors in such systems, assemblies were simply vehicles for the exercise of royal power and theatres for its display. Assemblies were venues for collective action which meant that the identity and authority of their participants were constantly asserted, displayed, and maintained. This feature was well caught by Reuter in a wide-ranging paper on assem- bly politics: 'it was through embodying itself as an assembly that the [... ] political community was empowered and enabled to practice politics'f But if we should not imagine such meetings as overshadowed by untrammelled royal authority, it seems that we should also not imagine them as venues for frank speech and fierce arguments. 1 Janet L. Nelson, 'Rulers and Government', in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. JII, c. 90O-c.l024, ed. by Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 95-129 (p. 124). 2 Timothy Reuter, 'Assembly Politics in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth', in The Medieval World, ed. by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London, 2001), pp. 432-50 (p. 442); see also his analysis ofa specifically Ottonian context in idem, 'Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian Ruler Representation in Synchronie and Diachronie Comparison', inHerrschaftsrepräsentation im Ottonischen Sachsen, ed. by Gerd Althotfand Ernst Schubert, Vorträge und Forschungen, 46 (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 363-80 (pp. 378-79), and idem, 'König, Adelige, Andere: Basis und Überbau in ottonischer Zeit', in Ottonische Neuanfänge, ed. by Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter (Mainz, 2001), pp. 127-50 (pp. 128-29). 30 STUART AIRLIE Important work by Althoff shows that members of a ruling elite anxious to defend their honour could not take the risk of using language of open challenge and insult in public assemblies, as these assemblies were not sufficiently flexible structures to contain potentially explosive episodes. This means that the great emotional set-pieces in our narrative sources of sudden grantings of mercy, of shedding of tears etc., have to be read as elements in a system of calculated display and representation, a system that was carefully stage-managed and where displays were far from spontaneous but agreed upon in advance, usually in 'secret' meetings involving only an inner circle of key players.' But could all meetings be really so tightly controlled? And did all participants in such staged encounters read them in the same way? While drawing on the ideas of Althoff, this paper seeks to develop and test them further, and will argue that assemblies were neither so controlled nor as rigid as some influential current thinking suggests. The focus of this paper is on early medieval Germany, a question-begging term which should be understood here as referring to the Carolingian east Frankish kingdom and its Ottonian and Salian successors," We are less informed on this area than we are on its west Frankish counterpart (at least for the ninth century), and some of the gaps in our sources may reflect gaps in the organization of the kingdom. We have, for example, no east Frankish equivalent of the treatise On the Governance of the Palace by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (c. 806-82), with its description of assembly management," Nor is there anything to compare to the great body of capitularies issued 3 Althoffhas approached these problems in a variety of articles, the most relevant of which here are Gerd Althoff, 'Colloquium familiare - colloquium secretum - colloquium publicum: Beratung im politischen Leben des früheren Mittelalters', Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 24 (1990), 145--67, reprinted in idem, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 157-84; idem, 'Demonstration und Inszenierung: Spielregeln der Kommunikation in mittelalterlicher Öffentlichkeit', Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 27 (1993), 27-50, reprinted in idem, Spielregeln der Politik, pp. 229-57. Since Althoff's book contains most of his key articles on this area, reference will henceforth simply be made to it, rather than to individual articles. For helpful comments on Althoff's work, see Jean-Marie Moeglin, 'Ritue1s et Verfassungsgeschichte au moyen äge', Francia, 25 (1998), 245-50, and the review by Timothy Reuter, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 23 (2001),40-47; the impact of his work is apparent in contributions to Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation imMittelalter, ed.by GerdAlthoff, Vorträge und Forschungen, 51 (Sigmaringen, 2001). Alternative perspectives arc offered by Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (lthaca, 1992) and Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual (Princeton, 2001), and there is fruitful English material for comparison in John Hudson, 'Henry I and Counsel', in The Medieval State: Essays Presented toJames Campbell, ed. by John Robert Maddicott and David Michael Palliser (London, 2000), pp. 109-26. 4 General surveys and definitions in Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056 (London, 1991), and Benjamin Arnold, Medieval Germany, 500-1300: A Political Interpretation (Basingstoke, 1997). 5 Ed. with a German trans. by Thomas Gross and RudolfSchieffer, Hinkmar von Reims. De ordine palatii (Hincmarus De ordine palatii), MOH Fontes, 3 (Hannover, 1980). Talking Heads 31 by Charles the Bald (t 877).6 Further, tenth-century Ottonian government is generally seen as having had a much less substantial apparatus than its Carolingian predecessor. It certainly generated much less documentation, and that tells us something about its character.' Reuter echoes Leyser's warning to historians not to be seduced into writing up the Ottonian period 'in terms ofa shadow-history of institutions that did not exist,.8 Such warnings are salutary, but assemblies did take place east of the Rhine and did so before the establishment ofa Carolingian kingdom there. We do not need to turn to Tacitus (c. 55-116/20) to establish this point. Before the Carolingian take-over of788, the Agilolfing dynasty of the dukes of Bavaria had a palace in Regensburg and assem- blies and meetings must have taken place there, though Duke Tassilo III (749-88/94) seems to have preferred Salzburg to Regensburg." The pagan Saxons held assemblies, if we can trust the vivid account of one in the mid-ninth-century Life of Saint Lebuin (Liafwine). This describes how the saint travelled to the site of the Saxons' annual assembly where their leaders (the Saxons did not have kings) gathered to make laws and prepare for war etc., and how he enraged some of them with his warnings of the military catastrophe which the Christian king of the Franks, Charlemagne (768-814), would visit upon them if they did not convert to the worship of the true God. IO lan Wood has recently warned us against assuming that the Life ofLebuin opens a window onto actual Saxon practice in the eighth century, noting that part of what looks like an account of distinctive Saxon political structures actually derives from a text by Bede (672/73-735), 6 To be found in Capitularia regum Francorum, vol. 11,ed. by Alfred Boretius and Viktor Krause, MGH Capit. 2 (Hannover, 1890-97). 7 Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 84-94, 208-20; Nelson, 'Rulers and Government', offers a wide-ranging comparative context as she also does for the earlier period in eadem, 'Kingship and Royal Government', in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. n, c. 700-<:. 900, ed. by Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 383-430. On Hincmar and west Frankish assemblies under Charles the Bald, see eadem, 'Legislation and Consensus in the Reign of Charles the Bald', in Ideal and Reality: Studies in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society Presented to J. M Wallace-Hadrill, ed. by Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1983) pp. 202-27, reprinted in eadem, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 91-116; Nelson already saw how assemblies were 'managed' in advance. Equally indispensable on Ottonian government remains Karl Leyser, 'Ottonian Government', English Historical Review, 96 (1981),721-53, reprinted in idem, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours 900-1250 (London, 1982), pp. 69-101. 8 Reuter, 'Assembly Politics', p. 433, citing Leyser, 'Ottonian Government'. 9 Carlrichard Brühl, Palatium und Civitas: If Germanien (Cologne, 1990), pp. 223, 246. 10 Vita Lebuini Antiqua, c. 4, ed. by AdolfHofmeister, in Supplementa tomorum XVI-XV, ed. by AdolfHofmeister and others, MGH SS, 30.2 (Leipzig, 1926-34), p. 793; comment and context in Henry Mayr-Harting, 'Charlemagne, the Saxons and the Imperial Coronation of800', English Historical Review, III (1996), 1113-33 (pp. 1124-26), and see the brief overview of Saxon society in Waiter Pohl, Die Germanen, Enzyklopädie DeutscherGeschichte, 57 (München, 2000), pp. 39-40, 114-15. 32 STUART AIRLIE who himself was drawing on the Old Testament.II All this, with the Life's author's distance in time and culture from the society he was purporting to describe and the likelihood that Charlemagne's conquest of Saxony destroyed much of its original culture, makes this text an unreliable witness.
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