Feuding and Peace—Making in the Touraine Around the Year 1100

Abstract

The conflicts commonly known as feuds, private wars (guerres privées), or vendettas constituted an important type of recurrent political process in Northern France during the later eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries, as well as in earlier and later periods. Because the conflicts to which medievalists have applied these terms could take different forms and cannot be routinely distinguished from other sorts of disputes and because at least one of the most common medieval terms for ‘feud’ — namelywerraorguerre— covered such a wide and variable field of meaning, no rigorous definition of the medieval French feud for our period can now be formulated, or, perhaps, should ever be proposed. Nevertheless, the conflicts analyzed in this study of feuding and peace–making in the Touraine during the years around 1100 had several identifiable traits in common. The combatants were adult or at least adolescent males who came from relatively restricted and elevated social circles. A few were the lords of castles. The others, at least some of whom were explicitly identified as ‘noble,’ can generally be identified as the tenants or clients of castellans and/or as the men of a particular castle. All these men carried on feuds as members of armed groups, not as isolated individuals. While taking many different actions in feuds and striving for various goals through this political process, their avowed objective throughout these conflicts was to gain revenge for an alleged injury. This they tried to achieve by expressing, in conventionalized and well–understood ways, their hatred and loathing for their enemies and their anger. Nevertheless, because the opposing parties to feuds were never complete strangers to one another, but belonged to the same loosely defined regional community, conflicts of this kind could, in theory, be ended or at least temporarily halted in such a way as to create or restore amicable relations between groups that had previously been at war. Whether in practice such settlements could actually be established and create real social peace is another matter.