Archives

 Historians love and rely on archives.  An archive is a storage facility for documents, and there are hundreds and hundreds of archives in the US and around the world.  In these days of digital imaging, it is no longer always necessary to travel to an archive (and the dangers of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are to some extent mitigated), but most documents have never been digitized and may well never will be.

A local historical society may accumulate such things as minutes of the city council meetings, or old newspapers, or photographs, or the diary of a Civil War soldier found in someone's attic.  The archives of presidential libraries may include books a president read, with his marginal notes, along with correspondence, signed bills, videos of press conferences, etc.

As a medievalist who works especially on France, my favored archives are the archives départementales.  Where the US is divided into states, France is divided into "departments" for administrative purposes.  There were originally 89 of them, but a few more have been added for the heavily-populated Paris region.  They go back to the French Revolution, when they were created to replace the old counties and duchies (defined by aristocracies).  Every department has its own archives, set up in the early nineteenth century and intended to preserve the region's history and "patrimony" as it is called.

Because France officially went atheistic during the Revolution, church archives were broken up and an awful lot lost.  But when the departmental archives were established, everything that could be found was taken there.  So you have confirmations of a church's possessions from the ninth century, charters of donation from the twelfth century, seventeenth-century parish records recording births and deaths, and so much more.

The documents I myself work on are mostly from the twelfth century, handwritten on parchment (sheep skin).  There is something extremely satisfying about holding in one's hand a piece of parchment someone used to record something important nine centuries ago, to see where he or she was getting tired and sloppy, or made a mistake and corrected it by scraping the ink off the parchment, or carefully stretched the words in a line out to fill the width of the parchment, or decided to write some capital letters very big, and so on.  I'll be sitting there in the archives looking at my documents while other folks there are looking for great-great-grandpa in the parish records.

But where were all these documents before the French Revolution?  Churches all had their own archives.  Some were very careful and systematic, organizing them in boxes by topic, writing brief summaries on the back.  Others were fairly sloppy, just piling everything up in a big pile in a back room.  Monasteries, which were undying entities, tended to be better at preserving their archives than bishoprics.  When a new bishop came into office, he usually brought in a new staff, who might or might not have the slightest interest in the records of what his predecessor had done.  A lot of documents were lost well before the Revolution, to careless storage, rats (who may nibble on parchment), mildew, and the destructive Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most documents found in the archives are entirely authentic.  But medieval scribes might sometimes feel compelled to "improve" the record by creating a few documents that really should have been there.  The people they were most likely to fool were their own successors, who might be startled to discover, a generation later, that they had legal title to some property they hadn't realized they had, and that a king centuries earlier had confirmed it to them in perpetuity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval records and literacy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Forgery in the Middle Ages

Forgery is bad.  We all agree on this.  Forging someone's signature on a check, creating a fake ID so one can drink in the bar at age 20 instead of 21, this is all wrong.  So is calling up someone and saying you're from the IRS and unless they wire you thousands of dollars right away they will be arrested.  So is telling the judge in traffic court that the light was green when you sailed into the intersection (where another car inexplicably materialized) and you weren't looking at your phone, no, not a bit!

But how about medieval attitudes toward forgery?  Their attitudes were pretty much the same as ours.  Augustine wrote on lying and why expressing something that wasn't true, whether in speech or in writing, was a sin.  (His attitude isn't surprising--lying is mentioned in the Ten Commandments.)  But just as modern people may consider a tiny fib not really wrong "if it doesn't really hurt anyone,"  people in the Middle Ages were capable of expressing things that weren't exactly true.

Medieval scholars have been interested since the seventeenth century, when medieval studies really began, in separating real from forged documents.  There has been a strong suspicion of any copies of documents made in the Middle Ages, concern that the copy may have "improved" the content of the original or even be a total fabrication.  Because before the eighth century documents were generally written on papyrus, most of which would be totally lost to us if they hadn't later been copied onto parchment, we are really dependent on post-eighth-century copyists for information on the early Middle Ages--or for that matter the Roman Empire.  (The image below is of a thirteenth-century book into which earlier documents were copied.)

For a long time historians were interested in "what really happened," and any forged (or "improved") document was tossed aside, along with saints' lives and anything else that didn't match modern standards.  More recently historians have become interested again in forgeries.  Once we decided that the really interesting question was "what did people in the past think was important and interesting," rather than just "what happened in what order," historians have decided there is value in studying forgery.

Examining forged documents should not be seen as just determining the truth, because, as already suggested, there was a lot of gray area.  Sometimes medieval scribes just made their best guesses as to what a document said when it was almost illegible, or they corrected spelling or grammar--should we call this a forgery because it's not exactly like the original?  Or sometimes they abbreviated a verbose text--is this not an accurate transcription?  Out and out forgeries were fairly rare.

But sometimes medieval monks might nonetheless forge (in the full sense of the word, which is related to forging implements in a blacksmith's shop, taking raw materials and turning them into something useful).  Sometimes they just knew that (for example) Charlemagne had been generous to them, and since inexplicably there were no documents from him in the archives, they created some.  This was part of an attempt to create a "useful past," an account of past events that worked for their present.

At the monastery of St.-Denis, outside of Paris, the monks went so far in the eleventh century as to take some old, genuine papyrus documents they still had in their archives, turn them over, and write new charters on the backs--charters much more useful to them than what the papyrus had actually said.  (They glued the papyrus to parchment, original charter face down.)

In other cases people forged documents to try to win in court.  A well-known example took place in ninth-century Le Mans (now known for its 24-hour car race, an important religious center then).  The bishop was trying to assert authority over a nearby monastery, which thought it should be independent.  Both bishop and monastery appealed to King Charles the Bald, bringing with them a large collection of forged documents saying that half a millennium of kings and saints had said the monks were dependent on the bishop (or vice versa).  Imagine everyone's dismay when Charles said all these documents were forgeries, ordered them all burned, and said the monastery was in fact his own personal property.  (That didn't turn out well for anyone.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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