Borders and Boundaries

We like borders and boundaries.  Our maps clearly show where one country, one state, one county, one city starts or stops.  As you drive along, you will see see signs welcoming you to this state or this township.  It's very exciting to have one's picture taken taken where the four states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico all meet.

Medieval people were much less exact about borders, though they certainly believed in them.  The monks of Pontigny, a Cistercian house, noted that if they stood on a bridge near their monastery they would be at the intersection of the bishoprics of Auxerre, Sens, and Troyes.  They found this very significant (for one thing, if one bishop was giving them a hard time they could go to another).

Different monasteries, always in competition with each other, also liked to have the borders between their lands distinguished.  The two Burgundian monasteries of Flavigny and St.-Seine erected a boundary stone, showing Saint Peter (Flavigny's patron) pointing one way, saying his lands were over there, while Saint Sequanus (for whom St.-Seine was named) pointed the other way, to his lands.

But without modern surveying methods, much less GPS, it was hard to be exact.  Rivers always made good boundary markers--the reason that the monks of Pontigny had to stand on a bridge to do the "photo of us standing in three dioceses" thing (not really a photo of course) was because rivers marked diocesan boundaries.  The Rhine was and is the boundary between France and Germany (although the "middle kingdom" of Lotharingia, dating to the ninth century, messes things up, being under German control more often than not over the centuries).  And what did it mean when a river changed course?

It got even more complicated when it came to individual people's lands.  There were no title deeds that described borders such as we have (and even modern title deeds often will say something unhelpful like, "Starting from the stump of an old chestnut tree and proceeding in a northerly direction for about 15 rods, more or less...")

Essentially borders relied on human memory.  If a medieval landowner decided to give a specific field to a monastery, he might describe the borders, but unless there was some obvious physical border, like a road, the borders were described using terms like, "On the west it borders the monastery's fields, on the north Erwulf's fields, on the east my own fields..." etc.  Unless human memory could provide where Erwulf's lands were, much less the donor's, such a description was useless.

If a dispute arose over boundaries, the only reliable method was to get people together who might remember where they had always been and have them swear to their memories.  Even great lords and monasteries would recruit peasants for this purpose (the people who were closest to the land in question), an example of peasant agency.

Peasants were used to remembering borders.  Once the mould-board plow was adopted, the heavy plow that was far more efficient even if a lot more expensive than the old scratch-plow, peasants tended to share both in its cost and in its use.  "Okay, this furrow is mine, but the next one is Ulric's, the next one Rikard's," etc.  Peasants wouldn't write this down--for one thing, almost all were illiterate.  But they remembered.


© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval society, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.