This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.

This chapter examines the period in which the Merovingian kings were allegedly ‘do-nothing kings’. On the whole there was less internecine fighting, but the relative stability was poorly appreciated due to a lack of ‘great’ kings, underwhelming chronicles, and (with hindsight) the rise of the family that would replace the Merovingians as kings in 751. More successful reigns such as those of Dagobert I, Theuderic III, and Childebert III do show attention to law, administration, and aristocratic interests. The fall of the Merovingians may not have seemed inevitable or even desirable until late in the wars of conquest by the Austrasian mayor Charles Martel in the 730s.

The second chapter continues the investigation of sacrum imperium, demonstrating that while the imperial chancery used the term more and more frequently, it was only the strong Italian presence at court that kept influencing the imperial notaries to use it and other correlated terms. It is also made clear that the converse was true: when there were no Italians at court, this kind of terminology was not used, even as late as the 1220s. The investigation shows, contrary to expectations, that cities where this terminology was used could be identified, and occasionally even individuals could be pinpointed. Moreover, the presence of courtiers or diplomats from the city of Rome is clearly correlated to the appearance of the tripartite title of the Empire (sacrum Romanum imperium and sacrum imperium Romanum). Thus, the most commonly used title of the Empire for most of its existence was not only invented by the Romans, as Jürgen Petersohn demonstrated, but it was also propagated by them to the rest of the Empire and the world.

The first chapter deals with the phrase sacrum imperium in the period 1125–1167. It starts out as a rare occurrence in imperial Italy when the locals sought German imperial assistance and, at the same time, a staple phrase used by Latin diplomats to address the Byzantine emperor. However, Sulovsky shows that after the Second Crusade (1147–1149), the German imperial court increasingly adopted elements of the sacral terminology of the state, as used in the Byzantine east, when dealing with Italian affairs. When Barbarossa’s second Italian campaign (1158–1162) was being planned in early 1157, the term sacrum imperium finally appeared in a document issued by the imperial chancery. However, whereas previous scholars could not tell who the author behind the text was, Sulovsky argues that it was the senior notary Albert of Sponheim, who had introduced other innovations as well, and who had taken part in both the aforementioned crusade and in Frederick’s first Italian expedition as a high-level diplomat. Moreover, Albert adopted sacrum imperium both from the Italian and Byzantine usages to the German one, so that he could convince the letter’s addressee, his fellow crusader Otto of Freising, to join the Italian war.

The law of the virtual Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, combined with customary law, like Salic law, or Saxon Law. Roman law was rediscovered and studied in the first universities in Western Europa. Legal scholars of the day made comments and thus developed so-called canon law: a mix of roman, medieval and religious law. At the same, as a result of feudal relations, quid pro quo documents, like the magna Charta and Joyous entries, emerged, granting different classes different privileges and rights in turn for assistance, tax and loyalty to a ruler. This marked the beginning of conditional power and the rule of law.

Chapter 5 turns to the economic sphere, with special attention to the emergence of the modern economic corporation, as a competitor par excellence. I examine its origins in medieval antecedents, how post-revolutionary US was the ideal environment for its initial cultivation and elaboration, and its subsequent development in Europe and beyond. The economic firm is in many ways the ‘ideal type’ of the modern corporate actor, but I am concerned to show in the next two chapters that new corporate actors in the political and ideological/cultural spheres are also crucial to the general domestication of competition in liberal societies.

The sixth chapter examines the relationship between coutumiers as texts that describe custom, and custom in practice. The difficulty with discussing this is that the coutumiers only begin to be cited in court records at the very end of the thirteenth century and very rarely even then. This was not unusual for the lay courts of northern France in this period, which cited ‘custom’ and not lawbooks or specific precedents. I discuss the relationship between the coutumiers and representations of practice – as filtered through its documentary record-keeping – in two ways. On one level, this chapter shows how at least some people were thinking about court cases that they presided over, took part in, witnessed or heard about. On another, this chapter demonstrates how the coutumier represents practice differently from other remaining records and how coutumier authors used what they saw in practice to extract principles and articulate general rules. Through the coutumiers, we can see how individual actors reshaped specific cases and transactions into general principles, and those general principles into a body of customary law.

This chapter considers the close relationship between child rulership and innovative political and administrative adaptation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Cases of child kingship prompted adaptations to some of the tools of governance, but the boy king’s presence and active contribution were often still crucial. The chapter turns first to the documentary evidence and the diversity of administrative experimentation before focusing on the enduring significance of children’s participation in rule. The third and final section examines practical adjustments to and contemporary representations of counsel, a fundamental instrument of royal rule which could be even more crucial when a boy was king. Overall, the chapter presents an alternative narrative of child rulership which stresses aspects of innovation, adaptation and co-operation. Considering shifts in documentary culture, royal government and consilium by the thirteenth century also reveals the extent to which many of the practical solutions adopted during a period of child kingship differed much more profoundly across time than they did geographically.

This chapter foregrounds children’s involvement in documentary culture as a crucial element of their early political, spiritual and social education within the royal family. The chapter first addresses the documentary celebrations of children’s lives and children’s incorporation within intercessory prayers. Children were not dynamic actors in such cases, but these examples provide valuable evidence for the web of interwoven obligations, influences and expectations around them. As boys advanced through childhood, their active participation, political assent and testimony became important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule. After considering how charters reveal children’s importance as political actors, the chapter finally turns to examine shifts in documentary culture between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries which altered children’s status in royal documents. Young boys still had important roles to play in spiritual intercessions, familial actions and dynastic celebrations but, by c. 1200, royal charters were no longer as prominent a forum for displaying their centrality to rulership, especially not on an individual testimonial basis.

Medieval societies did not exclusively and inflexibly conceive kingship as the remit of a mature man, even if adult male rulers were more typical. This introduction shows the urgency and timeliness of looking beyond the ‘unspoken hegemony’ of adulthood to understand the intersections between childhood and kingship. Focusing first on the interconnectedness of representation and reality, the chapter highlights the necessity of uniting an emphasis on children’s lived experiences as political actors with an examination of cultural representations of ideas about childhood and rulership. The introduction then turns to consider three essential components which shape this study’s methodology: a comparative approach, a diachronic analysis and a holistic approach to the sources. This section argues for the importance of contextualising child kingship within a wider comparative framework which accounts for political, social, cultural and legal change. It also sketches the benefits of adopting a broad approach to the source material which incorporates chronicle, documentary, didactic, epistolary, legal and literary sources.

Twenty-one new charter texts, or references to such texts now lost, add significantly to the corpus of materials that Marjorie Chibnall gathered for the biography of the Empress Matilda. In particular, this new evidence throws light upon the circumstances in which Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet brokered their alliance with Robert of Gloucester, for the first time properly identifying the role played here by Miles of Gloucester, subsequently promoted as earl of Hereford.

This chapter traces foundations for the organizing framework of the modern nation-state to post-Conquest England. Feudalism was essential, as institutionalized in the royal prerogative, administrative kingship, and covenantal social bonds. I focus on the historical factors that made England distinctive, in this period, both in the intensity of its feudal structures and in the strength of royal, prerogative powers. I argue that a unique combination of Anglo-Saxon legal legacies with the Norman Conquest's imposition of powerful rulership facilitated the coalescence of a regime involving new levels of social power. Roman law, canon law, and English common law each played vital roles in this coalescence, with new levels of economic growth fueled by new types of legal privileges. Development of new technologies, for example the windmill, was one result.

This chapter focusses on some aspects of the first stage of Carolingian rule over Italy. Broadly speaking, the focus is set on the three decades between 781 and 810, which correspond to the period in which young Carloman/Pippin was made co-ruler of the Carolingian kingdom of the Lombards. The chapter considers not only some aspects regarding Pippin’s co-rulership over the regnum Langobardorum, which his father Charlemagne had conquered during the campaign of 773–774, but also some major transformations that took place in different areas of the realm under their political action. In the first section, the chapter recapitulates some of the results recently acquired through research with diverse perspectives and interests. In the second section, it focusses on some new aspects. Finally, it adds some further conjectures which may need to be more deeply investigated in the near future.

Successive Carolingian rulers found managing the relationship with their adult sons challenging. The father-son relationship between Lothar I and his oldest son, Louis II, offers a valuable perspective on the forces at work in the relationships between senior and junior rulers more widely, as well as the specific challenges involved in ruling Italy from Francia. While our sources generally emphasize obedience to the father, successful father-son partnerships also had reciprocal elements, and involved effort on both sides. Lothar I and Louis II seem to have maintained a stable and productive relationship between 840 and Lothar’s death in 855. Public affirmation of the partnership between father and son, Lothar’s gradual delegation of power to Louis II, and the absence of key triggers for rebellion, such as a direct threat to Louis II’s position, help account for this success. A tight-knit lay and ecclesiastical elite that spanned both courts also helped stabilize the relationship. When positive factors assisting the father’s control were absent, and negative factors prompting rebellion on the part of the son were present, Carolingian father-son relationships could and did go awry, as in Louis the Pious’s case.

This chapter is the first of three to treat different aspects of Jeanne’s administration to assess how and why the balance of power could vary within a single ruling partnership. It examines the basic material foundations of lordship: land, inheritance, and money, including a survey of the financial challenges in Jeanne and Charles’ rule. It shows that coordination on significant matters was paired with the ability to act independently and more efficiently on lesser transactions. But these shared concerns did not erase distinctions between Jeanne and Charles’ personal responsibilities and status, which influences our understanding of why spousal co-rule functioned so readily in medieval society. Building on the centrality of inheritance within noble society, the chapter highlights two dynamics that enabled the distribution of power between spouses: the emphasis on lineage among the aristocracy, and the practices of divided succession and co-lordship that were prevalent across France, neither of which has been sufficiently studied in relation to co-ruling couples. By reconciling competing ideals of unitary and multiple lordship, these partible seigneurial standards offer an alternative or supplemental framework for contextualizing such ruling partnerships beyond the delegations of authority stressed in studies of monarchy in this period.

The historiography of elite women has often contrasted ‘power’, the effective ability to command and be obeyed, with ‘authority’, the sanctioned right to lead. Using Jeanne’s charters as an idealized projection of her actual position, this chapter argues that this model is too restrictive to reflect contemporary understandings of lordly roles. On the surface, these texts seem to associate Jeanne with ‘authority’ and Charles with ‘power’, but a closer examination reveals that neither authority nor power was monolithic: different types of authority coexisted with different types of power, and all could vary jointly or independently. Moreover, these concepts were not static points of reference, but were actively manipulated by contemporaries according to various social norms. This suggests that instead of using the power/authority dichotomy, a more effective model of power dynamics would account for both the people or things over which power was exerted, and the practical and ideological grounds on which it worked. Approaching power from this contextually specific angle enables more diverse comparisons by privileging no single explanatory factor, aim, or outcome of power, and gives greater insight into the complexity of medieval political structures and their social functions.

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history.

Notions of a person’s ‘worth’ were socially created, This chapter looks for the notions of worth involved in the multifarious everyday transactions between people. As so much depended on others, peasant farmers could not afford to trust anyone who was not of good reputation. Fair dealing and the common good were important in the moral economy of working life not because transactions between neighbours were altruistic, nor even necessarily friendly, but because they were essential. Tenth century laws regulating the hundred built on a moral economy which valued good reputation and personal knowledge and in which co-operation mattered. Courts came to collective decisions, sworn oaths established truth and standing surety for another person meant that personal knowledge of the accused was essential. The witness of neighbours was vital when it came to questions of land: boundary clauses from the ninth and tenth century were based on detailed knowledge which only local people could provide. Peasant farmers became more formally part of the financial system when heregeld began to be levied.