The Murder of Charles the Good

 Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was murdered in 1127.  The details of the plot, the murder, and the consequences are told in several contemporary accounts.  The events reveal much about twelfth-century attitudes and social expectations, starting with the fact that the complicated alliances, betrayals, and plots seen in Game of Throne are mild compared to the real Middle Ages.

To start, Charles was only half Flemish (we would say Belgian, except that Belgium only became a country in the nineteenth century) and half Danish.  Members of great noble and royal families married members of similarly powerful families, meaning that in the twelfth century family ties stretched across all of Europe, even into Russia.

Charles was the son of Cnut, king of Denmark, and of the daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders.  The name Charles was certainly chosen to evoke Charlemagne, emperor three centuries earlier and still alive in epic and story.  The counts of Flanders actually were descended from Charlemagne, as they were very proud to tell anyone who would listen, and in naming his son Charles, King Cnut may have been hoping to gain some imperial cachet for Denmark.  His assassination ended that hope, however.

Although born in Denmark, Charles went with his mother back to Flanders after his father was assassinated.  Noble widows at the time usually left their children with their dead husband's family if they left, but Charles's mother may have feared Cnut's assassins might be coming for her son (she did leave her daughters in Denmark).  He was a toddler at the time, so he probably grew up with few memories of his native country.

His mother settled back in Flanders with her father (Count Robert) and brothers but soon left again, this time to marry the count of Apulia (southern Italy), leaving her son behind this time.  Charles was principally raised by his grandfather, Count Robert, and by his uncle (Robert's successor), also named Robert.  After Robert II's death, his son Baldwin succeeded as count of Flanders, and Charles acted as chief advisor for his cousin.  (Keeping up so far?)

So far everything looks fine, other than nothing matching our idea of a child being raised by a loving two-parent family.  And when Count Baldwin died in 1119, after only a short reign as count, he designated Charles as his successor.  But now the plotting and betrayals begin.  Robert II's widow, Clementia, daughter of the count of Burgundy, wanted a different cousin to succeed, the son of a younger brother of Robert II.  (Thus Burgundy and its alliances enter the picture, and I'm simplifying a lot.)  Everybody went to war with everybody.

But Charles eventually prevailed and settled down to try to be a just count, trying to find food for his subjects during a famine, seeking to pass fair judgments in legal cases.  He also proved himself a generous patron of the church.  When he was murdered, it was not by all his relatives and in-laws, but by his serfs.

In this period, the first quarter of the twelfth century, serfdom was rapidly disappearing in western Europe, as peasants asserted their freedom.  Erembald, who led the conspiracy against Charles, was said by contemporaries to have been born a serf but to be trying to hide his origins, and he decided it was better to kill Charles than to have the count reveal his true status.  This sounds rather implausible, but that contemporaries would say it is an indication of how sensitive an issue servile status was at the time.

Charles was murdered in church, something contemporaries stressed as making an evil deed even worse.  In fact, one chronicler said he was simultaneously praying, singing psalms, and distributing pennies to the poor when he was stabbed.  (Quite the multi-tasker.)  Such a description made Charles's death a virtual martyrdom; someone would have to be killed for one's faith to be an actual martyr, but the chronicler seemed to think this was close enough.

The murder was considered terrible and shocking, sending shock waves throughout Europe.  The Scandinavian royal families had been trying to kill each other off for generations, but further south aristocrats liked to believe they lived in modern, peaceful times, when noble violence was restricted to killing Muslims in the Holy Land (it wasn't).

Charles never became a saint, in spite of being killed in a church and designated "the Good."  Without an heir, he left Flanders in turmoil.  First of course the murderers had to be caught and hung.  Then a successor had to be found.  King Louis VI of France decided he should make the decision as to who succeeded, as Flanders was considered part of the French kingdom.  He settled on William Clito, grandson of William the Conqueror of England, whose wife had been a sister of Robert I of Flanders.  But William Clito had little support, and the county was taken within a year by Thierry of Alsace, whose mother was a sister of Robert II of Flanders.

Can't ignore the role of women in medieval inheritance.

The principal scholar now working on Charles the Good is Jeff Rider of Wesleyan University.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval families, nobles, and inheritance, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Performative Acts

 One of the new directions in medieval studies is a focus on performative acts.  Like many aspects of medieval studies, once scholars got past "rise of the nation state" about 50 years ago, this focus can seem obvious when one thinks about it, even if one hasn't thought about it before.  But what are "performative acts?" you say.  I'm about to tell you.

Every act done in public (and for that matter some done in private) is at some level a performance.  A good actor isn't just reading the lines of the script but performing, making you believe that he or she is really that person, really feeling the emotion of the situation.  In the same way, a college professor giving a lecture isn't just conveying information.  She or he is also indicating by subtle or not-so-subtle cues that this is authoritative information, and the professor is very well informed on the topic.  The professor stands up in front, wears more formal clothes than the students, and is the one who announces, "It's time to get started."

In the same way, medieval people surrounded their actions with symbols, visual cues, and ceremonies that reinforced what was happening or supposed to happen.  A king would "wear his crown" (as the chronicles put it) several times a year, when he wanted his loyal men to renew their vows to him.  Normally of course a king would not walk around with jewels and metal on his head, but when he did it emphasized his position.  (Queen Elizabeth II of England did not usually wear a crown either, but she did when addressing Parliament.)

The oath of loyalty itself was full of symbols, the loyal man kneeling to indicate subservience, the lord kissing him on both cheeks to indicate that their bond was one of mutual affection and respect, not just one of master and subject.  Someone making a gift to a monastery would not merely say he was giving something but would do so accompanied by many witnesses, to give the act extra significance.

In eleventh-century Anjou and probably elsewhere, serfs were expected to pay a penny a year to their lord of the body (in addition to any rent they might owe to the same or a different lord), and they didn't just pay it, but came on their knees with a rope around their neck and the penny on their head.  This certainly underscored their subservient position (and it's not surprising that serfs tried to buy their way out of this ceremony, offering far more than the penny-a-year was worth monetarily).

And then there was getting one's doctorate degree from the University of Paris.  One stood on the front steps of Notre Dame and answered all philosophical questions anyone could throw (in Latin of course).  Talk about a performance!

We still do performative acts, even though we're not nearly as conscious of doing so as medieval people were.  Weddings, with a bridal white dress, groups of male and female attendants, rings, and a church setting even for people who rarely attend church are certainly conveying much more than that two people have decided to stay together permanently.  Medieval weddings weren't quite the same as ours, but they had comparable ceremony.

Once you start thinking about such things, you'll be startled at how many such performative acts you do yourself.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social structures, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Serfs

What's a serf?  What's a peasant?  Given that pretty much everybody of western European ancestry is descended from peasants, this is something that it seems we'd like to know.

A "peasant" just means a country person, a farmer, someone engaged in agriculture.  The most common medieval term was rusticus (which you don't need to know Latin to interpret).  They worked extremely hard (as of course modern farmers do as well), but not all of them were serfs.

A serf (servus) was someone who was legally unfree, although exactly what this status entailed varied widely.  The term servus had been the term in Roman law for slaves, but medieval serfs were not slaves.  Slavery had died out in western Europe by the eighth century.  Serfs could not be bought and sold because they were not property, and killing a serf was murder just as was killing a free person.  They were not even usually referred to with the term servus.  More common were such terms as mancipius, collibertus, famulus, hospes, or colonus.  Because different regions might use different terms, it is nearly impossible to say what was the distinction between these different terms.

Mancipius suggests someone seized in the hand, collibertus someone with only partial liberty,  famulus someone who served the family, hospes someone who came from elsewhere, colonus someone who was supposed to open up new lands, but all we can say for sure is that medieval scribes knew what they meant and we're left trying to figure it out from context.

As legally unfree, a serf (of whatever variety) was not supposed to be able to enter the church--though some did--and was not supposed to be able to give testimony in court--though again, some did.  They were supposed to defer to their lord-of-the-body (as the person whose serf they were was called) in marriage and inheritance, because servile status was hereditary.

In some places, a serf was supposed to come before his lord once a year with a rope around his neck and some pennies on his head.  Serfs usually had to pay a fine if they married someone who was not a serf of the same lord.  And sometimes serfs had to pay an inheritance tax (called mainmort) if they weren't living at home when their parents died and wanted to take up their parents' house and land.

Serfs owed the same mix of rents as free peasants who had landlords--a combination of money, produce, and "work days" in which they worked in the lord's fields.  On the average, serfs had heavier labor dues (more work days) than free peasants, but they were not subject to arbitrary payments.  That is, the lords could not just demand whatever they wanted and get away with it.

A lot of serfs had both a lord-of-the-body and a separate landlord from whom they rented some additional land.  In addition, serfs, like everyone else in a region, were subject to the regional count and the diocesan bishop.  This helped, because they could play one off against another, complaining with heart-rending cries to count or bishop if someone tried to demand something of them not approved by tradition.  Peasants (including serfs) had nothing like the freedoms we now take for granted, but they still had agency, the ability to take charge of their own lives.

Serfdom essentially disappeared in France in the early twelfth century.  Understandably, serfs found the ritual with the rope and the pennies very humiliating, and many bought their way out--their lords were willing to take a large lump sum in return for never again receiving the pennies, whose value became less and less all the time.  Some forgot (or "forgot") that they were serfs, since in many respects they were indistinguishable from other peasants.  Other just ran away to lose themselves in the rapidly growing cities.

In England and Germany, however, serfdom lingered much longer than in France.  Christian Spain started having serfdom for the first time in the thirteenth century.  Russia acquired serfs for the first time at the end of the Middle Ages.

Interestingly, mainmort, the inheritance tax for those heirs not living at home with their parents, lasted for at least a century after serfdom had disappeared in France.  Eventually most peasants bought their way out of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval serfdom

A student of mine once wrote on an exam that "surfs were tide to the land."  I like the maritime motif, but um, no.

A serf, servus in medieval Latin, was someone who was not legally free yet not a slave.  We now have trouble with such distinctions, but both ancient Rome and medieval Europe were fine with it.  Slavery means that someone is assumed to have no will of their own and are thus required to obey all commands, no matter how stupid, arbitrary, or harsh.  A slave can be bought and sold like an animal or any possession.

Serfs could not be bought and sold, and although they might have very heavy obligations, they were not subject to arbitrary commands.  They were still, however, assumed not to have complete freedom of will, so they could not give testimony in court or join the church, both of which required free oaths.  A serf was born into serfdom, under the authority of a "lord of the body."  Because they could not be sold, they could not be sent off their land (this is what "tied to the land" meant--it is sometimes described as a horrible condition, but in fact it was a protection).

Serfdom began in the sixth century, at the end of the Roman Empire.  Although the period is very badly documented, so the details are not clear, what appears to have happened was that as the Roman army stopped conquering and thus stopped bringing home hordes of new slaves, landlords became worried that their agricultural slaves would die and not be replaced, and they would have no one to do the work.  Hence, they allowed their serfs to marry, establish families (thus creating new workers), and have their own little plots of land so that they could support themselves, rather than having to be fed by the landlord.

Helping hurry the end of slavery was the spread of Christianity, which had always preached that all humans were equal in the eyes of God.  It was considered a "good deed" to free one's slaves.  Household slavery lingered in Europe until the eighth or ninth century, but agricultural slavery was gone by the seventh century, replaced by serfdom.  And of course there were always free peasants as well as serfs, on whom see more here.

Serfs were assumed to be born into serfdom; it was inherent in their bodies.  They owed heavy rents, especially labor dues, that is a certain number of days a week they were required to work on their lord's land rather than their own, but these rents were fixed, and the lord could not raise them.  Serfs also had other restrictions, such as who they could marry and who could inherit from them, and in some places they had to come before their lord once a year with a rope around their neck and a penny on their head, to indicate their subjection.

I will discuss the end of serfdom in a later post.  In the meantime, just don't call it feudalism.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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