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.

Cartularies

All medievalists love cartularies.  What's a cartulary, you ask, and why are they so lovable?

A cartulary at its most basic is a book ("codex") into which are copied many charters (a charter is a carta in Latin, as in Magna Carta).  When an institution (most commonly a monastery) had acquired a number of charters, it became clear that a big pile was unwieldy, to say nothing of difficult to save in case of fire or attack, when it would be easiest just to snatch up a book and run.

This was, remember, an era without a printing press, without copy machines, certainly without digital files.  An original document was the only version in existence unless it was manually copied.

Although monks had been organizing the documents in their archives from the time they first started acquiring them in any numbers, the golden age of cartularies was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  A monk or monks would carefully sort through and organize what they had on hand and then copy the documents into a book.  The book, like the original charters, would be written on parchment.

Although to the modern eye the most sensible organization would be chronological, this was actually the least common way to organize medieval cartularies.  Rather, the scribes organized topically.  Often (although not always) he would begin with grants of privilege or immunity from popes, kings, and bishops.  After that the material was most commonly arranged geographically, so that a charter from the emperor Charles the Bald (ninth century) confirming a monastery's possessions in a particular area would be found next to a very recent one donating a piece of a field.  Every scribe organized the material slightly differently; there was no universal standard.

By far the majority of charters dating from before the twelfth century are now found only in cartularies, not as originals.  Thus we would know substantially less about the early Middle Ages if it were not for these volumes.

Once a charter was copied, the original loose piece of parchment became much less important, which could lead to loss.  Sometimes the original was on papyrus, disintegrating badly by the time it was copied.  Where comparisons can be made, it is clear that most cartulary scribes were very conscientious, carefully copying what was before them.  The first few dozen folios of a cartulary are always done very carefully and fully.  At a certain point, however, enthusiasm might begin to flag, and the scribe would begin to abbreviate.  But out-and-out forgery was extremely rare (unless, of course, the document the scribe was conscientiously copying was itself a forgery).

So why do medievalists like cartularies so much?  It is because here is a record of important transactions at the monastery, revealing much about secular society as well as the religious house--most charters record the interaction of laymen and churchmen--and also revealing what the monks wanted to have remembered, and how.  Social historians and historians of religion all use cartularies extensively.

For example, a charter reveals much about family structure if the donor lists all his relatives for whom he wants the monks to pray.  It suggests power relationships if the donor's lord is expected to come and agree to a gift.  Sales of property to the monks, land leased or exchanged, all suggest the complexities of the medieval economy.

And in reading through an actual twelfth-century cartulary, the modern medievalist can better understand the scribe eight or nine centuries in the past, whose handwriting becomes sloppy at the end of the day, who discovers he hasn't left enough room and has to squeeze the last few words in, who draws a finger in the margin pointing at an especially important transaction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015