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The Church and a Revaluation of Work in the Ninth Century?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Janet L. Nelson
Janet L. Nelson*
Affiliation:
King’s College, University of London
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Extract

My title poses what may seem an unpromising question. Even to consider the possibility of such fundamental change in ecclesiastical perceptions in the very midst of the Dark Ages may seem anachronistic. After all, were not Christian attitudes to work already well and truly fixed? There is, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis 3.16-19, as displayed in words and pictures in the mid-ninth-century Moutier-Grandval Bible:

Unto the woman [the Lord] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…. And to Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife …. cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 37: The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History , 2002 , pp. 35 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2002

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References

1 The ‘strip-cartoon’ fol. 5V of the Moutier-Grandval Bible, BL, MS Add. 10546, is reproduced in Bullough, D., The Age of Charlemagne (London, 1965), facing p. 162 Google Scholar. To his curse in Gen. 3.16-19, the Lord added, in Gen. 4.12, additional pain as punishment for the sin of Cain: ‘when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.’ Cain was, it has been justly said, the first peasant.

2 Regula Benedicti, c.48, ed. and (French) tr. by A. de Vogue and Neufville, J., La Règle de Saint Benoit, 7 vols, SC, 181-6 (Paris, 1971-2), 2: 598–601 Google Scholar: ‘De opere manuum cotidiano. Otiositas inimica est animae …. et ideo certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum …. tunc veri monachi sunt si labore manuum suarum vivunt sicut et patres nostri et apostoli. Omnia tamen mensurate fiant propter pusillanimes.’ English tr., McCann, J., The Rule of St Benedict (London, 1976), p. 53 Google Scholar.

3 Regula Benedicti, c.57: ‘De artificibus monasterii’. De Vogue and Neufville, La Règle, 2: 624–5; McCann, Rule, p. 62.

4 Brown, P., The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford 1996), p. 138 Google Scholar.

5 J. Le Goff, ‘Les Paysans et le monde rural dans la littérature du haut Moyen Age’, in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 13 (Spoleto, 1966), pp. 723–41, reprinted in idem, Pour un autre moyen âge: temps, travail et culture en Occident (Paris, 1977), pp. 131–44, tr. Goldhammer, A., Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago and London, 1980), pp. 87–97, 306–8 Google Scholar.

6 Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex 387, fol. 90v. See now the penetrating, and well illustrated, study of C. I. Hammer, Charlemagne’s Montlts and their Bavarian Labours. The Politics of the Saxons in the Carolingian Empire, British Archaeological Reports, International Series 676 (Oxford, 1997), to which I am much indebted. For an accessible reproduction of this set of images, see Bullough, Age of Charlemagne, facing p. 145, and for the artistic genre see Webster, J. C., The Labors of the Months in Antique and Medieval Art to the End of the Twelfth Century, Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 21 (Princeton, NJ, 1938 Google Scholar).

7 Einhard, Vita Karoli, 6th edn, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores rerum germanicarum in usum scholarum (Hanover and Leipzig, 1911), c.29 (p. 33).

8 White, L., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962), p. 78 Google Scholar; cf. Bullough, Age of Charlemagne, p. 192. See also R. Morrissey, L’Empereur à la barbe fleurie (Paris, 1997), p. 50, noting Charlemagne’s ‘concern to master time’.

9 A. Borst, Buch der Naturgeschichte. Plinius und seine Leser im Zeitalter des Pergaments, Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, 1994/ii (Heidelberg, 1994), p. 173: ‘schwer arbeitende …. Bauern samt ihrem Werkzeug, mithin den örtlichen Alltag…. [E]s hat den Anschein, als sei die bäuerliche Arbeit…. durchaus geachtet gewesen; schon die Arbeitsdarstellungen auf Buchminiaturen zeugen …. von einer positives Einstellung: es ist bemerkenswert…. dafi man den Bauern – anders als in der Antike – überhaupt für darstellungswürdig crachtete.’

10 Hammer, Charlemagne’s Months, p. 51.

11 J. Martindale, ‘The Kingdom of Aquitaine and the “dissolution” of the Carolingian fisc’, Francia, 11 (1984), pp. 134, 148, 154, 160–2, with a helpful discussion of the historiography at n. 152 (reprinted in eadem, Status, Authority and Regional Power [Aldershot, 1997], ch. II); E. Magnou-Nortier, ‘Capitulaire De villis et curtis imperialibus, vers 810–813. Texte, traduction et commentaire’, Revue Historique, 607 (1998), pp. 643–89.

12 Morimoto, Y., ‘Etat et perspectives de recherches sur les polyptyques carolingiens’, Annales de l’est, 40 (1988), pp. 99–149 Google Scholar; J.-P. Devroey, Études sur le grand domaine carolingien (London, 1993).

13 Niermeyer, J. F., ‘En marge du nouveau Ducange’, Le Moyen Age, 63 (1957), pp. 329–60 Google Scholar; J. Le Goff, ‘Note sur la société tripartite, idéologie monarchique et renouveau économique dans la chrétienté du IXe au XIIIe siècle’, in T. Manteuffel and A. Gieysztor, eds, L’Europe aux LXe-XIe siècles: Aux origines des états nationaux (Warsaw, 1968), pp. 63–71 (reprinted in Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge, pp. 80–90; idem, Time, Work and Culture, pp. 53–7, 296–300).

14 What follows owes much to the pioneering work of D. logna-Prat, ‘Le “baptême” du schéma des trois ordres fonctionnels’, Annales, 41 (1986), pp. 101–26, and E. Ortigues, ‘L’Elaboration de la théorie des trois-ordres chez Haymon d’Auxerre’, Francia, 14 (1988), pp. 27–43, both of whom acknowledge the pioneering work of J. Le Goff (see preceding note) and G. Duby, Les Trois ordres ou l’imaginarie du féodalisme (Paris, 1978), tr. A. Goldhammer, The Three Orders. Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, 1980). See further O. G. Oexle, ‘Tria genera hominum. Zur Geschichte eines Deutungsschemas der sozialen Wirklichkeit in Antike und Mittelalter’, in L. Fenske et al, eds, Institutions, Kultur und Gesellschafter im Mittelalter. Festschrift fur Josef Fleckenstein zum 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 483–500.

15 Commentarium in Romanos, PL 116, col. 482.

16 Expositio in Pauli epistolas, PL 117, col. 802.

17 For the material meaning of sors as ‘share of an inheritance’, ‘estate’, ‘tenure’, in the Latin of this period, see Niermeyer, J. F., Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1997), p. 981 Google Scholar.

18 Miracula sancti Germani, PL 124, col. 1269.

19 Ortigues, ‘L’Élaboration’, pp. 36–7.

20 Expositio in Pauli epistolas, PL 117, col. 577.

40

21 Expositio in Apocalypsin, PL 117, col. 1081; cf. Iogna-Prat, ‘Le “baptême”’, p. 115.

22 Le Goff, ‘Note’.

23 R. Doehaerd, ‘Au Temps de Charlemagne et des Normands. Ce qu’on vendait et comment on le vendait dans le bassin parisien’, Annales, 3 (1947), pp. 268–80; J.-P. Devroey, ‘Un Monastère dans l’économie d’échanges: les services de transport à l’abbaye de Saint- Germain-des-Prés au IXe siècle’, Annales, 39 (1984), pp. 570–89. For the implications of c.31 of the Edict of Pitres (MGH: Capitularia regum francorum, 2, ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause [Hanover, 1897], no. 273, p. 324) ordering that peasant migrants be allowed to keep the earnings made from working in the vineyards, see J. L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), p. 38.

24 Rubin, M., ed., The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Woodbridge, 1997 Google Scholar).

25 Dunbabin, J., ‘Jacques Le Goff and the intellectuals’, ibid., pp. 157–67 Google Scholar, at p. 158.

26 Ibid., p. 162.

27 Nelson, J. L., ‘The political ideas of Alfred of Wessex’, in Duggan, A., ed., Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe (London, 1993), pp. 125–58 Google Scholar, esp. 141–6, reprinted in Nelson, Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1999), ch. IV; see also Constable, G., Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), esp. Pt IIICrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘The Three Orders’, and pp. 277–82, but cf. also Pt I, ‘The interpretation of Mary and Martha’. See further a pathbreaking paper of Holdsworth, C. J., ‘The blessings of work: the Cistercian view’, SCH, 10 (1973), pp. 59–76.Google Scholar

28 Bloch, M., The Historian’s Craft (Manchester, 1954), p. 151 Google Scholar.