INTRODUCTION

An appreciation of the motives and impact of the patronage of Farfa requires that we deal not only with the abbey's relations with formalized authorities, but also with patronage that originated in the ownership or tenure of land: ‘private’ property, to use an anachronistic but recognizable phrase. It has to be admitted straight away that to separate ‘private’ activity from that attached to ‘public’ organs of government is to make a distinction for hermeneutic convenience. The extent to which there was anything resembling such a distinction in early medieval societies is highly debatable. Certainly, we can agree with Matthew Innes that ‘we should avoid assuming that modern understandings of public and private translate unproblematically into the early medieval world’ that it is anachronistic to see the aim of rulers as the creation of a bureaucratized ‘state’, or that of private individuals as being to subvert, bypass or overcome that state. Roman law provided some public/private distinctions that carried over into the language of early medieval charters, and early medieval rulers were sometimes keen to promote a notion of the public as the domain of their authority. But in more fundamental ways the two mapped on to each other: we have seen how dependent the exercise of ‘public’ authority was on the attitudes of ‘private’ individuals and groups; landownership, on the other hand, can be seen as a firmly public matter since, as will be argued here, it itself both empowered and necessitated action in public.