Annoyed again at Bernard Bachrach. No, William of Malmesbury did not describe Fulk Nerra performing a _calcatio colli_
Bachrach:
Fulk *places foot on neck* "now art thou vanquished"
What William actually says:
Fulk, kicking the shit out of his son, "bet you're beaten now, boy, huh? huh?'
...rather than civic ones (so lots of 'Burgundians' and 'Normans', few to no 'Angevins' or 'Poitevins'). After a bit of digging around, nothing else on this has come up, and I said to myself
"oh crap
this is a research finding isn't it
stopping writing this book has got further away"
So I've noticed that Post-Carolingian (West Frankish*) authors will present groups of subjects of non-royal rulers as having capacity for autonomous action (e.g. "the English rebelled" as opposed to "a bunch of people rebelled") when they can be seen in terms of ethnic identities...
Yes, I've emailed him, but I think he's got his hands full with his new job, unfortunately...
Rather like the Peace of God, therefore, humiliation of relics comes into existence not as a clerical response to long-term social disorder, but as an exercise in marketing by a would-be hegemon responding to specific political circumstances.
...(and probably killed and injured a lot of people) and I think what we're dealing with here is a PR exercise orchestrated by Rainald, drawing on existing discourses of penitential legitimacy at the Angevin comital court. (More on that here: salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/c...)
...and Fulk Nerra did in fact get kicked out of Tours in pretty short order in the end, so coercion isn't an issue!
Instead, we have to look at Bishop Rainald of Angers, Fulk's ally and former treasurer of Saint-Martin. Fulk's invasion of Tours had ruffled a lot of feathers...
...made it a last resort of the powerless canons in the face of a count against whom they had no other recourse; and I don't know which Saint-Martin he's talking about because it ain't the one I know. The Saint-Martin I know is stuffed with wealthy and powerful aristocrats...
...at about the right time. So historiography is right, and this charter is from 996.
Why does this matter?
Because this is the *first* humiliation of relics recorded in the West Frankish kingdom. It's a novelty. So why invent it?
No less a luminary than Patrick Geary...
Finally, though, I found something relevant on the history of Burgos, and it does seem like the title 'bishop of Oca' really wasn't used after the mid-c11th. At the same time, I've been going through some unpublished charters from Tours, and there is a man named Sicard of about the right importance
We don't have really any evidence for the school of Saint-Martin c. 1000, so an argument from silence doesn't bear a lot of weight. However, bishops were known to use archaic titles, such as the way the bishops of Liège were occasionally known as the bishops of Tongeren or Maastricht.
There are two things that might swing it. On one hand, the text mentions a schoolmaster called Sicard. Someone of that name and rank is attested in the early c12th but not the late c10th. On the other, the see of Oca was moved to Burgos in the eleventh century.
Both of these have counterarguments.
Fulk, chastened, did penance in front of Bishop Rainald of Angers and an unnamed bishop of Oca in Spain.
Historiographically, this is agreed to be a tenth-century text, but it could be a twelfth-century one: Fulk could be Fulk Nerra or Fulk V, Rainald could be Rainald II or Rainald III.
After the last couple of days of mysteries, here's one I cleared up recently. A couple of years ago, I posted about a notice from Saint-Martin in Tours. In this notice, Count Fulk of Anjou invaded Saint-Martin, in response to which the canons humiliated their relics...
No worries - I was wondering if maybe there was something in the historiography. There are some leads I can chase up in a library, so hopefully something will emerge...
I can't find previous historical work on it, although admittedly my access to Catalan-language material isn't great. So this line of inquiry is stymied for the moment.
(Perhaps @chandlerprof.bsky.social might be able to clear up some of this mystery?)
...it's about succession crises and Bishop Guy of Le Puy's empire-building, and if he's trying to impose an anti-bishop of Elne, that's a nice little brick in the wall. Conversely, if Fredelo shouldn't be there, that raises some important questions about the authenticity of this document.
...later bishop of Le Puy, and whilst I would love this to be true I can't see any indication that it came from anywhere other than directly out of some editor's behind.
Why does this matter? Well, my argument about Saint-Paulien is that this isn't about social disruption...
says in _El Obispado de Elna_ that there's another, different, act of 995 Fredelo is in featuring Archdeacon Aigo of Narbonne and Viscountess Ermesind. He gives no references, and I'm not sure either of these other people even exist.
Finally, Catalan Wikipedia makes him Fredelo of Anduze...
Someone evidently has access to it, because Catalan Wikipedia quotes from the disposition clause a couple of times; but it doesn't seem to be published anywhere AFAICT.
Even stranger is that Francesc Monsalvatje (on whom more here: tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/t....
...but I've got 'we're temporarily down. service will be restored in a few moments' every single time I've encountered it, so that's no use.
But what about the _Catalunya carolíngia_, the project to edit every Catalan charter from before 1000? Surely it should be in there?
Nope.
Now, the Elne cartulary is lost. But it survives in a copy in the Archives Départementales de Pyrenées-Orientales and (for this charter) Moreau 16 in the BNF in Paris. Unfortunately, neither are digitised. The CNRS purports to have a directory of online summaries in the Moreau collection...
makes a grant of some land in Villeneuve-la-Rivière. The Elne cartulary hasn't been edited, but an inventory has (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...) and yep, it's there. Unfortunately, without even the dating clause let alone the text, there's no way of verifying it...
At the time, the bishop of Elne was a man named Berengar, who ruled 993-1003. He shows up in a few documents and there's no space for Fredelo.
But wait, things get weirder. The _Histoire générale de Languedoc_ mentions an act in the cartulary of Elne from 996 where Fredelo, as bishop of Elne...
Today's mystery is the anti-bishop of Elne. Elne is a see on the Spanish March, and in 994, its bishop, Fredelo, showed up at the Council of Saint-Paulien hosted by Bishop Guy of Le Puy.
salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2024/04/16/c...
Only problem is, at the time he wasn't bishop of Elne.
So, I've been scratching my head over this. It's part of a wider dilemma over indirect movements of archival knowledge, but here it comes with an added layer of spice...
...but that seems like a very loose connection for a specific textual link!
(2) Perhaps more importantly, what a *weird* choice to make, because Odo I's original charter was explicitly and publicly an angry attack on Angevin comital legitimacy! More here:
salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2024/07/23/c...
...were not involved in the foundation of Sainte-Trinité. (Geoffrey poached monks from his father Fulk Nerra's recent foundation of Saint-Nicolas d'Angers, much to Fulk's chagrin.) Geoffrey's wife Agnes had previously been married to the duke of Aquitaine, whose mother Emma had founded Bourgueil...
(and by 'based on' I mean 'the preamble in particular is word-for-word identical in both cases').
This is odd, for two reasons:
(1) There's no obvious chain of transmission. The Saintes charter could quite happily be modelled on the Vendôme one, but AFAICT monks from Bourgueil...
...related, with the Saintes charter being close to a carbon copy of the Vendôme one. However, what I think nobody has noticed is that both are themselves heavily based on a different charter from fifty years earlier: Count Odo I's confirmation of the foundation of the abbey of Bourgueil
