Disputes and documents in early medieval Italy

Costambeys, M ORCID: 0000-0003-4201-5895 (2016) Disputes and documents in early medieval Italy. In: Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West, 300-1200. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, pp. 125-154. ISBN 9781107138803

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Abstract

Introduction: When, in 832, the scribe Rodoaldus sat down to write up the dispute between the bishop of Piacenza and the descendants of Hermefrit, he seemed to have a template ready to hand. The bishop claimed that Hermefrit’s descendants owed labour service for their land, but did not want to perform it. There being a matter in dispute, Rodoaldus therefore followed the standard model of a dispute charter, a notitia iudicati, along adversarial lines: he quoted each party laying out their case in turn, in direct speech. Having done so, however, he abruptly switched models. The parties had reached a ‘friendly agreement’ (amica pactuicio), and he wrote the rest of the charter according to the template for a written agreement, a cartula convenientia. The impression, then, is that although the bishop of Piacenza initially pursued his claim through the formal judicial process, his ‘opponents’ - tenants of the bishopric - quickly proved willing to settle ‘out of court’. Documents like this serve to undermine the intuitive image of an early medieval Europe in which often violent conflict was endemic, even normal. It is an easy characterization, encouraged by sources that tend to foreground strife and discord, and that have influenced a historiography that accommodates conflict more easily than peace: ‘simply because [medieval] society was so contentious, order, community and consensus become the problem, not the explanation’. In Rodoaldus’ document, however, where the parties were a bishop and his peasant tenants, the potential for class conflict quickly gives way to social peace; where we might expect to hear discord, we in fact get harmony. The case therefore bears witness to an increasing trend in the documentation of intra-social conflicts (or ‘conflicts’) in early medieval Italy, towards narratives of acquiescence, if not agreement, rather than dispute. It stands in marked contrast to northern Europe, especially west Francia, where the increasing willingness of scribes to set down elaborate, less formulaic, descriptions of conflicts has directly fed a debate among historians over a perceived rise in conflict and concomitant weakening, or ‘privatization’, of mechanisms of conflict regulation: the ‘feudal anarchy’ of classic historiography. Over precisely the same period, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, Italian court-case documents of the notitia iudicati type become more formulaic, frequently adopting limited forms of words which attested not argument, but agreement: instant, unchallenged, and decisive.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	13 Feb 2017 11:42
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 22:06
DOI:	10.1017/cbo9781316481714.008
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3001659