My subject on this occasion goes uneasily with my piety. Lordship did not as such much interest my teachers William E. Lunt and Joseph R. Strayer, who were leaders in their turn of the Medieval Academy of America. In their presidential addresses of 1954 and 1968 both scholars dealt magisterially with subjects each had studied for forty years. Lunt spoke on financial relations of the papacy with England, Strayer on the place of Normandy and Languedoc in the building of an (...) administrative monarchy in France. It is easy to see that in a considerable sense both historians were working on medieval government, and it is some measure of their achievement that even today no one wishing to be informed in this grand subject can do much better than read Lunt and Strayer. I wish I could discourse on my own years of research as did those admirable scholars. If I cannot, it is not simply because I lack the accumulated erudition to reflect summarily on my work; it is also because I lack the conceptual serenity of my teachers in our common subject matter. Like Lunt and Strayer I have worked on justice, finance, and the beginnings of parliamentary life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; unlike those mentors I became uneasy about the paradigm in which these studies were framed. I came to wonder how Strayer could have held students, myself included, spellbound with details about the deportment of judges or sergeants while saying nothing about the adequacy of concepts like “government” or “administration” to describe such behavior. Believing there was something timeless about the action of people in power, he was gifted at evoking the ways of modern bureaucrats in those “corridors of power” he knew from his own experience in Washington. He assumed with other historians of his day and ours that all societies have governments, so that he could speak of feudalism as essentially a “method of government,” of “political organization … reduced to the simplest possible terms.”. (shrink)
Among the regions where history was written in the early Middle Ages Mediterranean France is hardly conspicuous. South of the Limousin we know of no Flodoard to carry on Frankish annals, no Dudo to celebrate a new people's identity, no William of Poitiers to lionize a conqueror; nor did the twelfth century nurture the likes of Orderic Vitalis or Suger. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single historian in or of the deep South during the centuries separating the (...) Carolingian annalists of Moissac and Aniane from the singers and narrators of the Albigensian crusades. Neither Adémar de Chabannes nor Geoffroi de Vigeois can be counted as such, although it is true that these Aquitanian writers transmit important traditions on affairs of Gascony and Gothia; neither was primarily concerned with the distant South. Raimond d'Aguilers, canon of Le Puy and chaplain to Count Raimond of Saint-Gilles, for all that he usefully tells of the count's crusading expedition , says little of his homeland. Nor is it simply contemporary historians that are lacking. Auguste Molinier was thinking of records of all kinds when he wrote that in the south of the old Frankish lands “la production historique a été extrêmement peu abondante à l'époque féodale.” For our knowledge of events in the South we have sometimes to rely on northern sources: such is the case with the confraternity of Le Puy in the 1180s. Moreover, northern events as late and as great as Bouvines have no known echo in the South. (shrink)
