A quantitative analysis of Fiefs in medieval Champagne

Abstract

FOR THE HISTORIAN of medieval society who wishes to use quantitative techniques in medieval studies, the fundamental difficulty is the nature of the primary sources available.' Not that substantial bodies of data do not exist. Charters, the discrete records of property transactions preserved in the archives of ecclesiastical institutions, contain the greatest amount of precise information about social and economic conditions from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. Unfortunately, however, in these charters spanning several centuries, there are extreme variations in orthography, terminology, and type of information which present, in purely technical terms, a formidable barrier to simple data processing techniques.2 Moreover, the information that emerges from these records depends greatly on how their data are processed and interpreted, a serious methodological question that quantification alone cannot answer. The original charters and their more numerous but often imperfect copies in cartularies are limited essentially to the property acquisitions of ecclesiastical institutions through donation, purchase (often disguised), or favorable legal judgment, and there is no basis for determining how representative these cases are of general conditions in lay society. Although charters can and must be used in the study of secular social conditions, and especially for those areas and periods in which no other sources are available, the intrinsic limitations of charter data remain even in quantified form.3 There are other sources, however, that are free from such methodological difficulties, that are susceptible to simple data processing techniques, and that can now yield important new perspectives on medieval secular society. The most readily quantified medieval sources are the various financial and administrative documents that contain standardized data on entire populations at fixed dates, a number of which are now being processed to furnish previously unavailable demographic information. Their analyses are not without interpretative problems, but their results contribute to a new standard of precision in medieval social history and have important implications for an evaluation of social organization and evolution. The Carolingian polyptiques, for example, are beginning to yield statistical information on the size and composition of ninth-century tenant families and their properties; the hearth registers that appear in many areas in the fourteenth century permit the earliest quantitative analysis, although crude by modern standards, of rural and urban society on a large scale; and the singular catasto of Florence of 1427, the first census of a large medieval city-state and its countryside, is producing an impressive range of information about medieval family structure.4 The one substantial group missing from these inventories is the feudal aristocracy, which rarely appears in any tenurial or hearth inventory because of its exemption from ordinary tenurial and residential rents and taxes. To my knowledge, the only administrative accounting of a medieval aristocracy that is comparable in detail to the above surveys is the midthirteenth-century ROles des fiefs of Champagne, which furnish probably the most precise quantitative data available for an entire aristocracy and its possessions. The ROles were the culmination of an administrative tradition that began in the mid-twelfth century under Count Henry I the Liberal (1152-1181), creator of the medieval county of Champagne. By superimposing his own castellanies as administrative districts over local castellans and barons, hitherto virtually independent, Henry forged a great territorial