Servile Concubinage in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Bavaria

Abstract

Servile Concubinage in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Bavaria Samuel S. Sutherland Sometime between the years of 1034 and 1041, a dying nobleman named Maganus gathered his wife and children, along with many other witnesses, to make a provision for his daughter Rilint, conferring on her some of his land, along with the unfree men and women attached to it. Due to a complication in ownership involving the monastery of Tegernsee, a Benedictine house in Bavaria situated on a scenic lake in the foothills of the German Alps, a notice detailing Maganus's provision was recorded by a scribe of Tegernsee, which ran as follows: Let it be known to all the faithful of the Holy Church how Lord Adalpero held possessions of the monastery of St. Quirinius. From these he gave one ancilla named Engelraht to a certain nobleman named Maganus, who used her according to the customary manner of a concubine. She bore him a daughter named Rilint. Later Maganus set out with his lord Adalpero in an army headed for Bohemia. But recently, on the day of his death and in the presence of a host of people and the advocate of this church, he conveyed two of his own ancillae to the altar of St. Quirinius and received in return one for himself, who was his daughter. He immediately freed her, so that she might go and live wherever she pleased, except that any future son or daughter among her descendants should, when they come of age, deliver one denarius annually to this same altar. If any wish to break or impede this affirmation, let him make an account before the Lord on the Day of Judgment . . . With these same witnesses Maganus gave Rilint half of his estate which he held in Baiernrain, with its servi [End Page 37] and ancillae. His wife and their children and Eppo and his children were also involved in this.1 Though Engelraht is given only passing mention in this notice—which was composed to record Maganus' donation of her daughter Rilint as a censualis and of two other unfree women into direct servitude to the monastery—her experience as an unfree woman loaned by a monastery, traded between masters, and used as a concubine is one that warrants further investigation. From this notice and others like it, it is possible to access important aspects of the lived experience of unfree women, as well the dynamics of both concubinage and servitude in central-medieval Bavaria. Liable to be loaned, traded, sold, or donated individually, the ancillae, servi, and mancipia who appear in these notices were routinely treated as chattel slaves in every meaningful sense of the word. For enslaved women in particular, this servitude could often have a sexual dimension in the form of the widespread and socially accepted practice of servile concubinage. Although medieval jurists and canonists of this period attempted to renegotiate consensual concubinage as a sort of quasimarriage, there is ample evidence from the treatment of the servile concubines who appear in the monastic and ecclesiastical records of central-medieval Bavaria that their experience was more in line with older conceptions of concubinage that were informal, non-permanent, and non-exclusive. Concubinage in this context appears to be used rather for the casual sexual exploitation of enslaved women by free men. Libri Traditionum and Conditions of Unfreedom in Central-Medieval Bavaria The notice detailing the arrangements made for Engelraht and Rilint was preserved in Tegernsee's liber traditionum—a sort of cartulary in which brief notices of donations with witnesses were collected, along with some full charters, legal settlements, and other various documents pertaining to the monastery's property. An unusually rich collection of libri traditionum survives from various Bavarian churches and monasteries for the eleventh and twelfth centuries, providing a uniquely useful lens onto the social dynamics of slavery and unfreedom in Central Europe during this period. [End Page 38] Like all cartularies and charter collections, libri traditionum must be used with some caution, as they sometimes contain ambitious forgeries and tended to use archaic and legalistic language that could be functionally anachronistic in their own day. The forgeries were intended to be believable, however, and the...