Trapa frangetur: The Cookware of Resistance in Twelfth-Century France

Abstract

This article examines a twelfth-century game of cat and mouse between a monastic priory and its seigneurial dependents in the villa of La Chapelle-Aude (Berry, France). The monks asserted a broad range of customary rights over the economic lives of the village dwellers, one of which was the obligation to bake bread in the lord’s oven. The priory’s customs, purportedly confirmed in the 1070s by the archbishop of Bourges, include a stipulation about not using a kind of home-cooking device—called a trapa—to bake bread in circumvention of the lord’s monopoly. Lexicographers have misunderstood this piece of material culture, which has led scholars to overlook a rare piece of evidence for indirect passive resistance to seigneurial lordship, and for the indirect documentary means with which lords defended their prerogatives in response. The customs charter was a twelfth-century forgery, a pseudo-original, which envisioned this material workaround as something the prior had foreseen and prohibited from the start. This unusual case of back and forth allows us to see how both sides—domination and resistance, as well as middlemen—resorted to indirect tactics rather than open conflict. By combining insights from social and economic history, food studies, paleography, diplomatics, and social theory, this case study offers wider insights about indirect tactics and material culture in seigneurial relations.