Bees & Boundaries

The impetus for this blog post arose from a twitter thread today, in which after a news article on the adaptability of bees took flight like a queen in search of a new hive, Stephanie Lahey followed with a fulsome swarm of medieval and occasionally classical miscellanea. Her first tweet on the subject may be hound here. The thread has been constructed in a number of phases, for instance with the fines given for the theft of hives  in the late-ninth-century Anglo-Saxon laws of Ælfred the Great appearing towards what is currently the end of the thread: including a fine of 120 shillings for the theft of horses, gold or bees. At a previous point in the thread the Anglo-Saxon ‘beoceorle’, or beekeeper, was mentioned (Nos 6-6.2), although one exciting detail was omitted; that (at least in the estates addressed in the Rectitudines Sngularum Perosnarum & Gerefa text), a beekeeper with a taxable swarm owed five sesters of honey to his lord per year [No. 6], or more on some estates should it be the custom [No. 6.1]. A sester being about 5kg. Further details and laws may well be added to this growing thread, but I thought I would take the opportunity and inspiration and see what could be found on the subject from the Lombard perspective.

Bees and beehives are mentioned in two adjacent clauses in the Edictus Rothari (643 CE), Nos 318 and 319. In the manuscripts of the Edictus which include the capitula list or incorporated rubrics, the first of these clauses is introduced simply with the heading ‘de apes’ [on bees], while the second clause continues on from it directly. While the clauses are relatively brief, a closer look, as ever, reveals some interesting features.

The first, Rothari No 318, outlines a fine of twelve solidi as a standard fine for the theft of one or more hives. A number of points of significance arise from this. Firstly, bees are counted by the hive, rather than individually, which is understandable, but it is a little unusual for the laws that the theft of multiple hives is explicitly given the same composition as taking one. That is to say, a person who risks being fined for taking just one hive of bees from another person’s land, may as well be stung for taking the lot. This approach is a little at odds, if we consider the surrounding clauses, values are set per animal, with no mention made for the circumstances in which more than one beast or fowl is taken. Should I steal one domesticated swan from you (Rothari No. 317), then I owe you six solidi in composition, and it is inferred therefore that should I steal both your domesticated swans (surely you didn’t own more than two?), then I should pay six solidi composition for each. This isn’t stated explicitly, but it seems to me a fair inference, from the contrast with the clause on bees were the scope for multiple payments are clearly excluded.

The next point to be observed from Rothari No. 318 is the relative weighting of the fine. As Stephanie noted, Ælfred’s Domboc collates the theft of horses, gold and bees into one fine. In the Lombard laws, bees are treated independently. Nevertheless, the value can be contrasted with the theft of other animals in the surrounding clauses: a hive of bees at twelve solidi is double that of the domesticated swan mentioned earlier, and Rothari No. 317 also includes a falcon belonging to another man and a crane at the same value of six solidi, or twelve solidi where it the king’s (Rothari No. 320). The values for domesticated stags vary depending on whether the beast is juvenile or mature, with a fine of six or twelve solidi, respectively, for just ensnaring it, or else a requirement to return it eightfold should the creature be stolen. The clauses on bees, that is Rothari Nos 318 and 319, then, are interspersed in the middle of a selection of other clauses in which falcons are addressed, Rothari Nos 317, 320, as well as Rothari No. 321 which I have not yet mentioned. Rothari No. 321 sets another fine of six solidi for taking falcons, plural, from a marked tree in somebody else’s woods. Two (or more) birds in the bush, then, seem to be worth literally the same as one on the hand!

The second clause on bees, Rothari No. 319, introduces the same distinction between whether they are domesticated (that is in hives) or wild (in marked trees). The fine for taking bees from a marked tree in someone else’s woods is half that of taking a hive, or six solidi. However, should the tree not be marked, however, then anybody may have the bees, unless the land is king’s. Finally, if the lord who actually owns the woods comes along, then he may take the honey without further blame or consequence. These points in their own right are interesting, especially the distinction made between domestic and wild and the brief implications for how beekeeping may have been pursued (or imagined by law-givers and custom) in seventh-century Lombard Italy.

The point about bees in unmarked trees (on somebody else’s land), however, raises for me an important question. Was it expected or imagined that the person who discovered the bees would take them away and establish a hive on their own land? If not, would they leave them in the tree where they were? The latter seems to be implied by the end of the clause where the owner of the woods is permitted to take honey from these claimed bees with impunity. But going back a step, how would the person investigating someone else’s woodlands and discovering an unmarked tree with bees in claim them? Presumably by marking the tree themselves, but that brings our attention back to Rothari No. 240 in which a fine of forty solidi is established for marking a tree belonging to another person, while Rothari No 241 dictates that an enslaved person who does this of their own accord should have their hand cut off. As well as being a significant sum in its own right, the severity is further emphasised by the fine being paid half to the person whose tree it was and the other half to the king. As such, the marking of trees becomes as much a public matter of concern to what might loosely be considered the Lombard state as it is a private issue of the person whose land was thus affected.

This apparent contradiction in whether trees could be marked or not may be resolved, on the basis that Rothari Nos 240-41 follows on from a set of clauses on the destruction of boundary markers, with Nos 238-39 explicitly detailing the cutting down of trees which had been marked as such (the former by a freeman, the latter by an enslaved person on his own authority). It would perhaps make sense, then, that the unauthorised marking of trees in Rothari No. 240 specifically related to boundary markers alone, but unlike in the preceding clauses on their destruction, this point was not made clear. Moreover, the phrasing in Rothari Nos 240-41 seems to imply that the marking of trees could be for any purpose, not just to signal a land boundary. I cannot yet, then, provide a good explanation for how these two clauses, with heir apparently opposing attitudes to the marking of trees, might be resolved, except to assume that the latter, when addressing bees, presents but does not make explicit, an exception to the normal rule.

Pigs and Pledges

The impetus for this post arose from a fruitful discussion the other day, with Dr Jaqueline Bemmer of the Institut für Römisches Recht und Antike Rechtsgeschichte (Institute for Roman Law and Ancient Legal History) of the University of Vienna, Austria. Dr Bemmer, specialises in the early medieval Irish laws and has a particular interest in debts and pledges. She noted that in the Irish laws, the giving of pigs as a pledge for an unpaid debt was considered the worst possible option [a quick update here, I originally wrote the ‘taking’ of pledges, but have just been informed/reminded that this is wrong in the case of medieval Irish law. And that I have incautiously set foot into a hotbed of scholarly dispute. But never fear – a follow up coffee, cake and chat has been scheduled to put this (or at least my knowledge of it) to rights!]. The grounds given in the laws being the damage that pigs to the ground with all that rooting and churning. The Irish laws are beyond the scope of my current research, so I’m delighted to have been given this gem of knowledge; moreover, Dr Bemmer has kindly sent me further details on this, and informs me the law is edited in the Corpus Iuris Hibernici Nos. 471.9-13 (ed. Binchy, 1978), and originates from the Bretha im Ḟuillemu Gell (Judgements concerning pledge-interests). It is the 23rd text of the most important surviving early Irish law book, known as the Senchas Már (the texts of which are linguistically dated to c. 650 to 750, so within a century following the promulgation of the first Lombard law-code, the Edictus Rothari), which itself survives in Dublin, Trinity College, MS H 2.15A (cat. 1316), with the clause on pigs as pledges running from fols 33b to 34a.

In the same conversation, Dr Bemmer also asked how things stood in the Lombard laws. This was also beyond my immediate knowledge, as my main focus to date has been on book culture on the one hand, and what might be considered criminal law on the other (injuries, killings, arson and poisoning, in particular). Where I have turned my attention to legal procedure, my focus has been on oaths and pledges, for which I still have a half-written post waiting for me to finalise… Anyway, conveniently I had my copy of Katherine Fischer-Drew’s translation, The Lombard Laws (1973), on me, and over coffee and cake we had a quick flick through and began to see that, while pigs are also not considered suitable pledges in the Lombard laws, there were some notable differences as to why.

Clauses indirectly addressing the taking of pledges occur throughout the Edictus Rothari, but the discussion of the specific legal procedures and circumstances are included in a group of clauses, edited in the modern day as Nos 245-252, following on from some clauses that mostly focus on boundaries (as well as two on forgery and illegal minting of coins interspersed amongst them), and leading in to the collection of clauses on theft.

Rothari No. 245 underscores that a pledge cannot be taken for an unpaid debt until the return of the debt has been demanded three times. Presumably this means on three separate occasions, rather than three times in a single conversation, although here the law is not explicit. Where the clause is explicit is in making clear that the return must be demanded three times. Rather than simply stating the minimum number of times required, the clause emphasises each demand by stating, following Fischer-Drew’s translation, that he ‘shall demand his debt from him once, twice and even three times’ (1973: 101). In the original clause, this stipulation is written in Latin, which contrasts with the specific legal terms written in the proto-Germanic dialect of Langobardic, that crop up throughout the law-code. Nevertheless, the emphatic underscoring seems directed to an audience, ensuring that there are no grounds for a person to claim they had misunderstood. With all due caution, I am tempted to speculate whether this performativity might even reflect an oral mode for the transmission of this segment of the laws, more than it just being a rhetorical device employed in a literate law. I should emphasise that this is not to suggest a strictly (oral) Germanic origin for this facet over a (literate) Roman thread. That oversimplification has, I think, been thoroughly laid to rest with the argument and observation that for more than a century before the Edictus Rothari was penned in 643 CE, the Lombards had been coexisting within a framework of Roman legal literacy, and elements of Roman Law were undoubtedly and indivisibly transmitted as part of the oral culture of law (see Pohl (2000) in particular, and both Everett (2000, 2003) and Petrucci (1995) in general; references given below).

What matters here though, for our consideration of Lombard legal practice (at least how the law-givers imagine and present it), is that the return of a debt had to be demanded three times before a pledge could be taken. The following clause, Rothari No. 246, outlines the response to the pledge being taken prior to that, dictating that the value of the goods taken as a pledge should be returned ninefold. This scale of compensation for the act is identical to that for theft given in a clause that follows soon after, Rothari No. 253. The main differences between the two clauses being that regular theft, when committed by a free man, also includes an eighty solidi punishment for the guilt of the crime, and if the freeman cannot return the goods ninefold then he pays with his life instead. If the thief is an enslaved man or woman, then the price for the guilt (to be paid for by their owner) is forty solidi, although in the case of the enslaved man only he can be killed as part of the settlement instead (Rothari Nos 254 and 258). For the free woman, no additional payment beyond the ninefold return of the goods is demanded for the guilt, but instead shame is imputed to her, as I have previously discussed. Comparatively, then, taking pledges for an unpaid debt that has not been demanded three times per legal norm is set as a crime similar to theft, but not quite identical.

The next clause, Rothari No 247, outlines who can take pledges on behalf of the one who is owed the debt. Essentially this is nobody, unless they are one of their heirs and are claiming their inheritance. The remaining clauses then outline the various types of property which cannot be taken as a pledge, and the compensation that is due in emends should that prohibition be ignored. As you will no doubt have assumed, pigs are included amongst these. However, rather than jumping straight to the swine let us put them in context by first looking at the other things which are excluded from being taken as pledges.

The first property prohibited as a pledge is enslaved men and women, the details given in Rothari No. 248. Where the previous clause, No 245, seemed to go to great lengths to ensure that ignorance or misunderstanding of the law could not occur, this assumes from the outset that an act in which an enslaved person was taken as a pledge must have been by mistake. The clause states that no recompense is due, as long as the person returns the enslaved people taken as pledge immediately upon learning the truth, and swears an oath that they were taken accidentally rather than with evil intent. However, should they not dare to swear the oath, then they must return eight times the value of the enslaved people to the person they took them from. The law does not make explicit why the eightfold value has been given, but I wonder if it can be considered in light of the ninefold value given for both theft and for taking a pledge before three demands for its repayment have been made. Does this value suggest that the relative severity of taking enslaved person as a pledge is noted, but that the law-givers are conscious of emphasising that it is not as severe a crime as first taking the pledge without due legal process? The second point to be observed in the clause is that, should the person who erroneously took the enslaved person as a pledge have injured them in anyway, then he must pay for the wounds per the usual injury tariffs (Rothari Nos 103-126). This, of course, is a subtle reminder that violence against enslaved people by their owner was not compensated: after all, the compensation was paid to their owner, not to them.

Rothari Nos 250 and 251 address taking either horses which have been broken for riding or else oxen that have been trained to the yoke for ploughing. The first of these clauses prohibits taking either, and interestingly sets a ninefold return to the owner. As such, the taking of horses or oxen is set at the same severity as taking a pledge before having (properly) announced it three times. Clearly the earlier speculation about due legal procedure outweighing prohibited items does not count here, or perhaps at all. The second of the clauses outlines a legal procedure for when all the debtor has to their name are broken horses or plough-oxen. In this case the person owed the debt must go to the local legal official, the schultheis, and state his case. Assuming the schultheis performs his duty correctly (or unlikely but possibly perhaps hers, if the contexts of the Carolingian female sculdarissa in northern Italy, identified by Hayley LaVoy (2015), had roots in the Lombard kingdom prior to the Carolingian conquest), then the horse or oxen are placed in the creditor’s possession until the debt is paid off. At which point, they are to be returned to their original owner, emphasising that the pledge does not form part of the repayment. Should the sculdtheis fail to perform their duty, then they are to be fined twelve solidi, to be paid to the king. Neglect of their legal duty here, then, is a crime against the king and, as it were, the state, rather than against the wronged individual. It also ensures that the king and government have a direct interest in seeing that breaches of legal process and duty are addressed.

The final clause on pledges, Rothari No. 252, prohibits the taking of a casa ordinata tributaria [a holding which owes tribute] as a pledge, and concludes with details on the time limits for paying the debt back after the pledge has been paid (twenty days, if they live within a hundred miles of each other, sixty days otherwise), and the responsibility of the former debtor to retrieve his pledge himself, after the debt has been repaid. Between these two things, the clause lists the things which can be taken as pledges, comprising cows or sheep, but also, and to me confusingly, enslaved men and women. The latter part here clearly contradicts the earlier clause on taking enslaved people as pledges, and unless it is an exception based on the specific economic contexts of the tribute-paying holding, then I cannot yet see how to square these two elements. That, however, is something to think about another day – although any suggestions or insights will, of course, be welcome.

Returning to the taking of pigs as pledges, who we skipped over earlier, they are addressed in Rothari No. 249: here, we see a substantially different set of circumstances. The clause prohibits the taking of pigs along with mares as pledges, but rather than setting up an eight or ninefold return per the other prohibited pledges or a legal process through which the normal situation can be circumvented, the punishment is instead death. The sentence is emendable, however, in that the accused can instead pay 900 solidi, should they have such a sum, half to be paid to the person he took the pig(s) or mare(s) from, and the other half to the king. This clause then must be set in light of the crimes in the Lombard Edictus that are punishable by death which I collated in a previous post, although at that time I somehow omitted this one. In that post, I noted that the crimes for which death, emendable or not, is set as a punishment comprised treason, mutiny in the army, leading uprisings of enslaved workers, adultery, destroying boundary markers and theft. In contrast to the death penalty being applied for theft when the ninefold goods cannot be returned, or the ninefold return of goods with no threat of death should a pledge be taken without repayment of the debt having been demanded three times, for taking pigs and mares as pledges, death is the default response. In the manner which it is allowed to be emended, and as with all such emendable death penalties in the Lombard laws, the taking of mares or pigs as pledges is set as a crime against the king and state. This though is in a vastly different way, and at a vastly different scale, to the case of the sculdtheis who avoids their duty and does not give justice. Clearly this is not about prioritising legal procedure over taking things as pledges which are not permitted, and the socio-economic value of pigs and mares in Lombard agriculture are underscored heavily here. This relative weighting can also be seen in the praetium due for killing an enslaved master swineherd, fifty solidi (per Rothari No. 135, in contrast to the twenty solidi for a goatherd, oxherd or cattle herd of similar social class and experience (Rothari No. 136).

There is undoubtedly much more to be said about both pigs and pledges in Lombard law. However, I hope that this overview of the laws and their implications for Lombard legal process has at least piqued some interest and sparked some thoughts. To return to the comparison with the situation in the Irish laws outlined at the outset, we can see that both early medieval Lombards and the Irish were set against taking the taking of pigs as pledges. The later for the damage the swine caused to good land, the former reflecting the social and economic significance of these animals, as hinted at in the inordinately high value set as recompense for taking them as pledges.

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References

Binchy, D. A. ed., Corpus iuris Hibernici: ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum, 7 vols (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978)

Bluhme, Frederick, ed., ‘Edictus langobardorum’, Leges, 4: Leges Langobardorum, ed. by Frederick Bluhme (Hannover: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1868), pp. 1-234

Everett, Nicholas, ‘Literacy and the law in Lombard government’, Early Medieval Europe, 9 (2000), 93-117

Everett, Nicholas, Literacy in Lombard Italy, c. 568-774 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Fischer-Drew, Katherine, trans., The Lombard Laws (Cinnaminson, NJ: UPenn, 1973)

LaVoy, Hayley, ‘Hirmindrut Sculdarissa: a ninth-century woman’s original letter and its implications’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 25 (2015), 29-50

Petrucci, Armando, ‘The Lombard problem’, in Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. and trans. By Charles M. Radding (Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 43-58

Pohl, Walter, ‘Memory, identity and power in Lombard Italy’ in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Yitzah Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), pp. 9-28

Revising the Description of Florence, BML, MS Plut. 89 sup 86

I’ve spent a few days this week revising and correcting my description of Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana MS 89 Plut. 86 which I studied and described as part of my FWF Lise-Meitner project (my end of project blogpost from May can be found here). I acknowledged in March when I uploaded the descriptions that they were drafts, reasonably good, I hoped, but that I would polish and replace each in short order, as required. I’d expected that phase to come some throughout the summer, but time, tide and the writing of the next research proposal and monographs wait for no one. Winter is already drawing in and, so far, I’ve only revised one of the manuscripts. The finalised description of the Florence manuscript and the other drafts can be found on the main portal on this website. The other manuscripts will get revised as and when I get the chance. Hopefully most of the others won’t require as much work as this one did!

It’s quite common in research to only publish successful findings, while errors and wrong directions get swept quietly under the rug. Perhaps they get aired with friends, or at a departmental seminar, but they’re rarely made public. It’s also becoming more common to note that this is not actually a good response. On the one hand, it curates an impression of researchers as infallible that can be down-right disheartening if you compare all your own errors with everybody else’s apparent stream of perpetual successes. On the other hand, sharing and talking through some of those mistakes may be useful for others engaged in similar research or for clarifying a methodology if a similar situation is encountered again. So, in the spirit of comradeship and usefulness, here’s an outline list and commentary of some of the errors I made in my original draft description of the Florence manuscript of the Liber Papiensis and how/why I corrected them. Conveniently, by going through the emendations and alterations in the order they appear in the description, I get to leave the biggest to last.

I should also note that, despite the issues, I have been using these descriptions as a working tool. I’m currently in the process of writing the first draft of my chapter on the materiality of the Liber Papiensis manuscripts, and am currently focusing on the various strategies taken to pricking and ruling the quires and producing the ruling grid. Through the process of writing up a prose description, which is a detailed form of analysis in itself, some of the major errors were revealed. Other errors came to light simply from having put nine months between writing them and re-reading them (not to mention over two years from first taking the notes on which the descriptions were based in a fortnight of manuscript handling in Florence in August 2014).

The first error is an invisible one from the outside, and arose from bad data management. Oh, I’ll make excuses about a hard-drive having burnt out, and a laptop having died between then and now, but that’s really no excuse. When I went to try and find the .doc of the description I discovered it was… gone. All I could find was an early draft from 2015, which had only about quarter of the information. Thankfully, I had the pdf from the website, and was able to cut and paste a lot of the information back into a word file, and reformatting most of it wasn’t too bad. Apart from the tables and diagrams in the appendices, those required a bit more effort. I’ll come back to the actual contents of the table of ruling grids in due course.

The next error is an issue of naming.  I raised this in my blog post from May of this year, when the funded period of my postdoc came to an end. From the outset of my project, I’d referred to the collected text of the Lombard Laws and Frankish and Saxon capitularies as the Liber legis langobardorum rather than the alternate title, the Liber Papiensis, by which it is also known. I opted for the former, having read in the scholarship that this was attested in the manuscripts (I don’t have the reference to hand at the moment, unfortunately). Conversely, the name the Liber Papiensis is modern, a convention adopted in the mid-nineteenth century when the laws were edited for volume IV of the Leges series of the Monumenta Germiniae Historica. All very good, except that the manuscript attestation of the Liber legis langobardorum only survives on other versions of the laws, whether the Edictus or the twelfth-century re-systemisation of the Lombarda. As I said, this wasn’t a newly-discovered error of the last week, but a long-standing correction that has been lingering on the to do list for months.

The next error was actually the last I discovered, floating to the surface of that golden-haze moment when I thought the corrections were finalised, I re-made the pdf, sent a copy to the printer and then went to collect it. My eye glanced down to the front page and took in the opening sentence of the manuscript’s summary, which I reproduce here verbatim for your amusement:

“A distinctly decorated manuscript of relatively portable size, with numerous line-drawn initials with foliate and knot-work features and highlighting in red-ink.”

What on earth, I asked myself, does ‘distinctly decorated’ mean? It reads like one of subjectively vague description of palaeographic hands, when some scribe is described as elegant, dramatic, crowded, untutored or whatever. an expression that means everything (to the describer, perhaps) and nothing (to the bemused reader). I certainly agree with my former self in that the Florence manuscript is relatively more decorated than most of the other surviving copies of the Liber Papiensis dating to the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. (The two volumes of the copy of the Liber Papiensis now held in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan MSS O 53 sup and O 55 sup, are even more decorative than the Florence manuscript, in that there are animalistic and anthropomorphic elements to the initials, and a wider range of coloured inks are also used. Meanwhile, the copy in the British Library, London, MS Add. 5411 has a half-page line-drawing of an enthroned Charlemagne flanked by two dapper retainers at the start of the capitularies. I digress from my subject here, though). But still, what does ‘distinctly decorated’ really mean? The latter part of the sentence covers it I think, as it emphasises the foliate and know work construction of the line-drawn initials used to introduce new clauses. Conveniently, a cleaner opening sentence to the summary description of the manuscript can be produced simply by removing those two offending words, and increasing rather than losing meaning in the process: “A manuscript of relatively portable size, with numerous line-drawn initials with foliate and knot-work features and highlighting in red-ink”.

The main area that needed correcting, however, was the table of ruling grids. As can be seen from the quire diagram (which, apart form having been remade as I couldn’t cut and paste it from my pdf, remains the same), there are only two atypical quires in the manuscript, the first and the last. Quire 1 has a folio added at some later point, while Quire 17 was produced from the outset from five bifolia rather than the more regular four. Apart from that later, additional folio at the start of the manuscript, the scribe made no use of half-sheets (or singletons if you prefer) and every folio is one side of a complete bifolium. Moreover, every ruling grid throughout the manuscript has through-lines that extend through the central spine of the bifolium. As such it can be confirmed that both sides of each bifolium were ruled simultaneously as one large, open sheet. This is not unusual, of course. But my tabulation of the ruling grids described them by folio, effectively treating each half as an independent block. Perhaps that is not painfully problematic, but it jarred with me when I was trying to use the description as raw data to write my section on the pricking and ruling of the manuscript. So, I decided to revise it. And there I found another set of errors.

Examination of the photos of the manuscript available online from the BML revealed that a notable number of the extenders and through-lines I’d recorded by folio back in 2014 didn’t always match the images. Now many of the ruling lines are faint and often difficult to discern, and my notes from the library frequently mentioned this. But comparing the two revealed a much different pattern. My impression before had been that each bifolium had been ruled individually, and where two ruling grids appeared to be roughly the same it was in most cases chance rather than design or an artefact of the scribe’s working practice. Reviewing the data revealed a significantly large number of adjacent bifolia with paired ruling grids, and sometimes where there were still differences between them there was enough evidence to support a strong hunch that the difference was because some lines on one were too faint to notice. It seemed that the regularly (if not exclusively) employed pattern was to rule the bifolia stacked simultaneously in stacked pairs.

Revising that error took the better part of the three days. It was definitely worth it. Moreover, I also uncovered in the process some further evidence that did not quite fit that model: Suggestions of the ruling grid sometimes having been produced in two phases. However, that reaches beyond the requirements of describing the manuscript, and brings me back to the interpretation of how the scribe physically produced the manuscript, a further insight into the material praxis of their book culture. As such undertaking corrections to my previous work, some of which I have been a touch embarrassed to confess to and type up, has brought me full circle to the activity that allowed me to spot the errors in the first place. I’ll save further discussion for the monograph, but suffice to say it’s peeled back another layer of the obfuscating mist that lies between us, looking on in the modern day, and the minutiae of activity of the otherwise unknown scribe who made this delightful and intriguing manuscript of laws, capitularies and related text in the last decades of the eleventh century.

 

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Oh, and I’ve also made multiple back-ups of the revised files 🙂

Italy, ca. 1000 CE

Italy, ca. 1000 CE

Just a short update to go with this lovely map. My girlfriend, Shaz, gave me this picture as a present and I thought I’d share it on here as a Hallowe’en present. She got a new laptop recently with a digitiser pen and made this as a pentest (using the software Artrage). She used a map from wikipedia as a base, and re-worked it to produce a cloisonné appearance. I think she succeeded rather marvellously!

So, Happy Hallowe’en all!

 

 

Crimes Punishable by Death

Having previously collated the clauses in the Edictus Rothari which set restitution at 900 solidi, and those in proportion to the victim’s praetium or worth, I thought I would next collate those which are punishable by death. Clauses with a death penalty attached are again set at multiple levels, those from which there is no escape from death, and those in which emendation can be made through a monetary payment. The majority of the capital clauses are clustered at the outset of the Edictus, but others can be found throughout the law-code, particularly when the perpetrator is not a freeman.

Rothari No. 1 proscribes capital punishment and, explicitly, the confiscation of all property from anybody who conspires against the life of the king, or even gives council. The difference in value between plotting against royalty and against a freeman, with composition set at 20 solidi (Rothari Nos 10-11), is distinct. Here the crime must be considered unamendable, as no recourse is offered for the person who is found guilty to make good their crime through a monetary payment instead. Indeed, as the clause demands the confiscation of all property as well as the death of the accused, the possibility of buying redemption from the crime is here removed. Confiscating the property of the accused, then, not only serves to disinherit their heirs, but also prevents emendation for the crime being made through other means. This is not to say that an accusation of conspiring against the king was an automatic death penalty, however, as Rothari No. 9 offers grounds for a (free)man accused in front of the king of a crime punishable by death to prove his innocence through oath or camfio – that is judicial duel or trial by combat. I won’t say much on this subject for now, however, as I have a somewhat stalled blog post in the making that I hope to finish up soon.

The next crimes outlined are Rothari Nos 3 and 4, which are again made unamendable both by the clause explicitly stating that the accused’s property will be confiscated and by having no mention of the payment of a monetary composition being possible. The first of these clauses addresses a (free?)man who tries to flee the country, the latter the (free?)man who invites or introduces enemies into the land. The scope of unamendable crimes thus far, then, concern themselves with the protection of the Lombard regnum itself, the king as its leader and the protection of its borders. The laws do not explicitly state that the confiscated wealth will go to the royal fisc, but it seems to be the most likely outcome. While the laws in the Edictus frequently impart justice at a horizontal level, with composition being given by the accused to the victim (or their heirs, guardians or owners), here the wronged party is the state. Reparation, then, is made vertically, and ensures the protection and unity of the Lombard regnum as a whole – or at least from the royal perspective.

The contents of Rothari No. 5 expand on the clause preceding it, setting a death penalty, emendable with composition of 900 solidi, for anybody who aids a spy already in the land, either by hiding or provisioning the spy. Here the clause is explicit that, should monetary emendation be made, the payment is made to the king. Here, as might be expected, should the punishment be death, no mention is made of the property of the accused being confiscated in the process. Presumably, therefore, the heirs of the accused were still able to inherit, despite the crime.

The next two clauses, Rothari Nos 6 and 7, mark the end of the crimes punishable by death given at the outset of the Edictus. Here the attention turns to preserving discipline in the Lombard army, with the former being the punishment for raising a revolt against king or duke, and the latter for desertion. Neither of these clause includes mention that the property of the accused should also be confiscated, nor that emendation for the crime can be made through monetary payment. Three levels of capital punishment are then observable in the clauses which open the Edictus. In rising order of severity, these are firstly, emendable with a fine of 900 solidi; secondly, apparently unamendable but with no further impact on the personal wealth of the accused and, therefore, the wealth and status of their heirs; and thirdly, unamendable with the complete confiscation of their property. Assuming in the most severe case that their heirs or women whose mundium they held, had some personal wealth of their own already, this situation might not strip them entirely of their position in Lombard society. But, presumably, the more central and powerful the accused was within the social dynamics of a given family group, the more impact on the social status and wealth of that family his accusation of one of the most severe of unemendable crimes would have. Here, penalties of death and confiscation might serve to preserve the Lombard social order as a whole, but the impact on a specific family within that structure might be far more wide-reaching. These consequent implications, however, are not explicitly outlined in the laws.

If the army is considered as a part of the infrastructure of the Lombard regnum as a whole then, again, death as a punishment is being used to preserve its integrity. This may be reading too much into the political and legal structure underlying the laws, however. Instead, it seems to me that it may be as much a matter of enforcing social norms. The accused in the opening clauses are assumed to be both male and free Lombards. The clauses given later in the Edictus in which capital punishment is proscribed broaden the scope to a wider range of Lombard society.

Rothari No. 203 proscribes an unemendable death penalty to the woman, free or enslaved, who kills her husband. Here property, which for the most part would have been held by her husband if they were both free, is not confiscated, and it is not directed to the royal fisc. Instead, any land and wealth goes to her children if she has them (presumably children with her late husband, rather than children by another man, although the clause does not state), or else to the relatives of the dead man. No possibility for emendation is given in the clause. Also, however, no comment is made on whether the killing was deliberate or accidental. Death is used here to regulate the behaviour of women and to enforce Lombard social norms and gender relationships. This can be seen by contrasting Rothari No. 203, with the clauses addressing a freeman who kills his free wife, No. 200. Here, the clause first provides a proviso that it only applies if she was innocent, and if she deserved to die according to the laws then no emendation was required. Otherwise he was to pay 1200 solidi to her family in composition. While this value is immense, indeed the highest given value in the Edictus, it still marks a difference between the two crimes: a husband killing his wife deliberately or accidentally, might be legal, and if not it is theoretically emendable. Conversely, a woman killing her husband is always an unamendable crime.

The next set of crimes discussed in the Edictus for which a (free) person might be put to death in the laws are again related to the regulation of sexuality and the protection of marriage (and therefore inheritance) in Lombard society. Rothari No. 211 sets a death penalty for a free man or slave who marries a woman who is already married to another man. The consent of the woman is, however, addressed here, and she is only to be killed if she was a willing participant to the second marriage. The next two clauses address adultery, with a man being permitted to kill his wife and her lover if they are caught in the act (Rothari No. 212), while the clause following is an unamendable death penalty for the man accused of adultery with another man’s wife (Rothari No. 213). Here, echoing the stipulation of Rothari No. 9, the accused may attempt to prove his innocence through either sworn oath or fighting a judicial duel with his accuser.

Later in the Edictus, the social level on which the clauses focuses changes, to consider enslaved people. Rothari Nos 237 and 239 proscribe the death penalty for any slave who, respectively, digs out a boundary marker or cuts down a tree with a boundary marker on it. The crime here is not unamendable, however, and the slave’s life may be redeemed for a fine of forty solidi. The Edictus does not state to whom the payment would be made, whether to the party who owned the land on the other side of the boundary or to the royal fisc. Interestingly, the clauses preceding each of these situations, address the same two crimes when committed by a freeman (Rothari Nos 236 and 238, respectively). In each of these there is no death penalty for the freeman, but a composition of eighty solidi is due when half to be paid to the person whose boundary marker it was, the other half to the king. The wily-freeman who orders his enslaved worker to move a boundary marker, hoping to evade the higher fine, is anticipated in the law, with both Rothari Nos 236 and 238 stating that the freeman must still pay the eighty solidi in this instance.

Theft also includes a death penalty, for both free and enslaved men. At both social levels the sentence is emendable, Rothari No. 253 stating that the freeman caught in the act of stealing (the crime of fegangi in the Langobardic language) should be killed if he cannot pay restitution equal to nine-times the value of the goods he took plus a further eighty solidi composition for having committed the crime itself. While, the enslaved man who commits a theft must also return nine times the value of the goods taken, Rothari No. 254 states also that either a composition of forty solidi should be paid by his lord or else the enslaved man be killed. In the clause addressing the freeman the implication seems to be that he is only to be killed if he cannot pay, while that addressing the enslaved man makes it a choice placed in the hands of his lord.

Conversely, the death penalty is explicitly removed when the thief is a woman, whether free or enslaved (Rothari Nos 257 and 258, respectively). Here the clauses state that only nine times the values of the goods taken should be returned, and that for the freewoman no further restitution is required, although shame should be imputed on her. However, for the enslaved woman, a fine of forty solidi is still required (at least until that requirement is negated in 668, Grimwald No. 9), but in this instance her lord does not have the option to pay with her life instead. No shame is imputed to the enslaved woman, however, emphasising that the construction of gender in the Lombard laws cannot be understood only in terms of sex, but must equally consider at the least how that then intersects with social class.

Rothari No. 280 uprisings amongst enslaved people, who commit violence or killings in the process. In addition to the composition due for the actual damage, injury and death each participant inflicted, the leader must either redeem their own life with payment equal to their own praetium (worth) or else be killed.

To conclude this collation of capital crimes in the Edictus Rothari, it can be seen that the death penalty appears in a number of situations: treason, mutiny in the army, leading uprisings of enslaved workers, adultery, destroying boundary markers and theft. In some instances, the crime is emendable, others not; and in others still it is both unamendable and also involves the removal of all property from the perpetrator. The contrast in punishment and redress established for the same crime between free and enslaved, men and women is significant. While these may at some level reflect the social norms of the Lombards that were condensed into the laws, they also reflect the society that the law-givers imagined and were seeking to foster. At the most extreme level of punishment when the accused might be killed for their crime, the way in which the law-givers both frames this or in certain circumstances negated it is intriguing and will surely reward deeper study.

In proportion to worth

In the course of revising an article and preparing a conference paper, both on different aspects of poisoning in the Lombard laws, I began to think a bit more about crimes in the Edictus Rothari which have composition equal to a proportion of the victim’s praetium, widrigild or ‘worth’. I won’t go in to too much specific detail here on the poisoning clause, that can wait for the article and conference, except to note that Rothari Nos 140 and 142 each award the victim of a failed poisoning attempt redress equal to half their praetium. The former of those clauses addresses the situation where the perpetrator is a freeman or woman, the latter when they are an enslaved man or woman. In the latter case the enslaved perpetrator is also killed, and their own praetium counted towards the composition. Heavy stuff, and informative to the Lombard legal imagination, but as I said mot my focus here. What I want to do instead is gather together the clauses of the Edictus Rothari in which the composition is set in proportion to the victim’s praetium. As with the 900 solidi cases I discussed in a previous post, giving a set of crimes a comparable compensation implies that these crimes were likewise considered to be of comparable severity. Moreover, I wonder, and this is a question that I wish to pose but not necessarily answer at this point, if setting the composition in proportion to the value of the person’s life informs something less tangible, more conceptual about how these specific crimes were imagined?

Or, is setting the composition in proportion to social status simply a convenient means of letting certain crimes be compensated at varying levels within the broader strata into which Lombard society was sub-divided in the injury tariffs? As I have previously discussed, the injury tariffs address three strata as a whole, outlining the composition due for different injuries for, first, a freeman Rothari Nos 43-75, then an aldius (‘half free’ men) or servus ministerialis (‘enslaved domestic worker’), Rothari Nos 76-102, and lastly the servus rustigianus (‘enslaved agricultural worker’), Rothari Nos 103-127. The actual praetium for different individuals within these strata varies, for instance an aldius is set at sixty solidi, a servus ministerialis fifty solidi. Therefore, cutting of the nose of either has composition fixed at eight solidi (Rothari No. 82), but as gouging out an eye is set at half praetium, for this injury Rothari No. 81 awards thirty solidi to the aldius but only twenty-five to the servus ministerialis. The enslaved agricultural worker of any rank similarly gets a pre-established composition should their nose be cut off, this time four solidi (Rothari No. 106). The gouging out of an eye is again awarded as half of the praetium, Rothari No. 105. In this case the higher ranking enslaved agricultural workers, such as the servus massarius (enslaved tenant) or master swineherd would each also be awarded twenty-five solidi for the eye, as both have a praetium of fifty solidi (Rothari Nos 132 and 135, respectively). As an aside, presume the composition would actually go to the owners of the enslaved people, rather than directly to them. While that needs saying, it is outside of my focus here).

At the lowest end of the strata containing enslaved agricultural workers, with a praetium of sixteen solidi each, are the enslaved student of a cattleherd, goatherd or oxherd (Rothari No. 136) and the enslaved field worker subordinate to the servus massarius (Rothari No. 134), for whom the composition for the gouged-out eye is only eight solidi. Despite the overarching system of three layers of Lombard society, which adds greater value to the enslaved domestic workers ‘who have been taught, nourished and trained in the home’ (Rothari No. 76, trans.  Fischer-Drew, The Lombard Laws, p.  65) in comparison to the other enslaved workers out in the field, when it comes to the half praetium crimes the worth of the servus ministerialis and the servus massarius are balanced. An eye for an eye, as it were.

 

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I may have missed a few clauses on my quick skim through gathering them, but hopefully I have the majority (if/when I find any more, I’ll emend the post or make a note). I’ve sub-divided these clauses into a number of broader categories, although it should be noted that these are abstract and not specifically mentioned in the text or peritext of the Edictus.

 

Gouged Out and Severed Off Bits

As just discussed, gouging out the eye of a freeman (Rothari No. 48), an aldius or enslaved domestic worker (Rothari No. 81), or an enslaved agricultural worker (Rothari No. 105): half praetium. However, gouging out the remaining eye of an already one-eyed freeman has a relatively higher composition of two-thirds praetium. No specific mention is made for the remaining eye of a one-eyed aldius or enslaved person.

Cutting off the nose of a freeman is similarly valued at half praetium (Rothari No. 49), while cutting off the ear of a freeman is set at a quarter praetium. The severing of ear, nose or thumb for either an aldius or an enslaved person of any rank are each given a set composition, rather than in proportion to their worth.

Cutting of the hand or foot of a freeman is set at half praetium (Rothari Nos 62 and 68, respectively), as are the same injuries for an aldius or enslaved domestic worker (Rothari Nos. 88 and 95, respectively), and again for an enslaved agricultural worker (Rothari Nos. 113 and 119, respectively). Injuries to either hand or foot that do not sever the appendage, but instead cause it to be permanently paralysed are given only for the freeman, and are valued at a quarter praetium, while the severing of a freeman’s thumb is set at one sixth of the praetium. Comparable injuries for the aldius or enslaved person are either not addressed or else are given a fixed composition.

 

Beatings and Bindings

Rothari No. 41 proscribes half praetium in composition for surprising a freeman and beating him (without the king’s consent). The law stresses that the high composition is due to the shameful nature of the act and the derisive treatment of the freeman in question. This emphasis on shameful behaviour was one of the points which got me wondering if compositions in which a proportion of the praetium was awarded reflected something more than just compensating for the wounds and injury. If restitution was being made for the shameful behaviour and assault to honour specifically in proportion and symbolic reference to the entire worth of the victim. Unless the same can be argued for the severed bits and gouged eyes mentioned above can be fit into this model, however, the argument may not be compelling. That said, the fact that only the freeman gets restitution in proportion to their worth for a severed nose or thumb may fall somewhere in the middle. Still much to ponder here.

If the assault on the freeman goes further, and he is captured and bound, without cause and again without the king’s consent (Rothari No. 42), then the proportion of composition due is increased to two-third praetium. In this clause, however, there is no discussion of shame or acting with derision. The binding of freemen could perhaps be considered a continuation of the shameful beating, a second clause augmenting the contexts of the first and assuming the treatment to be shameful taken as written. The clause division of Bluhme’s Leges 4 (1858) edition, does not support that reading, but a detailed look at the mise-en-page of the manuscripts is required before I’d like to really pronounce either way. Nevertheless, if the two clauses are considered together, and the do otherwise follow the usual pattern in the Edictus Rothari of addressing outcomes in increasing order of severity, then the shamefulness of the binding as well as the beating may well be inferred. At the very least, the two clauses form a general preamble on overall acts of violence made against a freeman, before the law-givers launch into the specific injuries to specific body parts as detailed in the tariffs.

 

Unseen/Internal Injuries

The final injuries that are compensated for in proportion to the worth of the victim are the non-lethal, failed attempts at poisoning which I mentioned at the outset (Rothari Nos 140 and 142, depending on whether the perpetrator is free or enslaved) and the case when injuries made to a freewoman cause her to miscarry (Rothari No. 75). In this latter instance, the baby is valued in relation to the mother’s preatium. The poisoning and miscarriage clauses appear on the surface to be substantially different, save for both being awarded the same composition. But I think cross-overs can be inferred, both directly and indirectly, which need to be considered. Firstly, both crimes affect the insides of the victim. The injury tariffs of the Lombards make no mention of internal organs (this is likewise true for nearly all of the early medieval ‘Germanic’ injury tariffs, with the exception of those in the Frisian laws, as discussed by Lise Oliver, and even then it is wounds to the belly that cause the intestines to spill out, and is therefore arguably internal organ as external wound: The Body Legal Legal in Barbarian Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 130). My reading, in the case of poisoning, is that a Lombard legal practitioner assessing the damage done to a victim of poisoning would be unable to determine the specific injuries to the victim without causing them further bodily harm. It seems to me that Rothari No. 75 in part presents a similar difficulty in assessing the specific damage done to the mother and unborn child.

These poisoning and miscarriage clauses differ, however, in their attitude to intent. The poisoning clauses, and likewise those on severing or gouging bits, do not address the intent of the perpetrator. Whether the injury was deliberate or accidental is not discussed, although in the case when a person is accidentally killed, by whatever means, is addressed in the penultimate clause of the Edictus, with the note that, if the killing was accidental, then only financial restitution is needed, and that no further faida [feud] is required (Rothari No. 387). The clauses on poisoning make no mention of intent or accident (e.g. if the wrong mushrooms are added to the soup), but the miscarriage law stresses that no faida is required as the injury was accidental. In fact, the reader of the laws can almost hear the words ‘must have been’ in the tone of the laws, and it seems that the Lombard law-givers had great difficulty imagining that a pregnant woman might be deliberately assaulted so as to abort her unborn child. This, probably, reflects another facet of the (painfully misogynistic) gender binary the law-givers were presenting and trying to legislate for, in which it was deemed absurd that a woman might take up arms and commit acts of physical violence. It seems to me that there is a desperate tone in this clause on miscarriage, the law-givers desperately begging that no woman’s miscarriage could have been deliberately inflicted.

But this brings me to another connection between the clauses on poisoning and miscarriage, and the research of Dr. Marianne Elsakkers. In her doctoral research she examines the intersection of poisons and abortives in the early medieval Anglo-Saxon and Salic law-codes and I cannot help but wonder if a related reading should be seen in the Edictus Rothari’s clause on miscarriage.

As I mentioned at the outset, I will not answer here the question regarding the symbolic implications of awarding composition in proportion to the praetium, widrigild/wergeld or worth of the victim as outlined in the Lombard laws. Having collated the main clauses and sub-divided them into speculative categories, my conclusion for now is that the Lombard law-givers’ approach to compensation here is multi-facetted at the least. At this moment, I severely doubt that a unifying interpretation of proportional restitution can be hypothesised, even within the scope of a single law-code, but I’m going to keep picking at it and will let the ideas ferment.

Hair and Flesh

After giving a lecture on codicology in Stuttgart last month, I got a follow up question sent via the organiser (Dr Anja Thaler) regarding differentiating between the hair-side and flesh side of parchment. Rather than just replying, I thought it would make a good subject for a blog post (especially as the month is almost at an end and I’ve not written one yet). So, without further ado hair and flesh.

Before musing on my own experiences, it may first be useful to outline what I mean by ‘flesh side’ and ‘hair side’. First, though, we need to step back and consider parchment (sometimes called membrane, sometimes vellum if derived from cows or bulls). Parchment is the de-haired skin of an animal (particularly cows, sheep or goats, but hey, go wild), which has been soaked, scraped and most importantly dried under tension. The modern definition that leather is prepared through soaking in tannic acid while parchment is not, do not hold for the medieval period, the defining point is the drying under tension. I digress. Imagine the skin while it is still on the source animal, it has two sides: the side facing out from the animal, which has hairs on it, and the side facing in towards the animal in questions flesh and muscles and bones. Flay that skin in one big piece from the (dead, please!) animal and it still has two sides, the ‘flesh’ side that originally faced inwards and the ‘hair’ side that faced out.

Soaking the skin in water, perhaps with some appropriate plant materials added to make a dilute solution of tannic acid or some quicklime, helps loosen the hairs. Scraping the hair side of the parchment helps remove the loosened hairs. More thorough scraping removes the physical structures of the follicles themselves and helps to thin the parchment. Scraping the other side of the skin is also beneficial, any fat left clinging to the flesh side can be removed. Ideally, after its been stretched and dried (and scraped some more during this process) the skin will end up smooth and thin, without too much distinction between the two sides. The practice of pouncing, that is applying finely powdered chalk to the surface, is not always employed, but when it does it makes for a smoother writing surface and causes the hue of the parchment to become paler and more homogenous. Which can add further complications to the job of identifying which side is which.

 

This is a manuscript I’ve not yet had the pleasure of looking at in person: Madid, Biblioteca Nacionale MS 413 (I chose it because the images are freely available and hosted by the library on a creative commons license). It’s a tenth- or early eleventh-century century copy of the Lombard laws originally produced in southern Italy, an overview of the manuscript can be found here. The image here shows an opening with the hair side of two facing folios (30v and 31r). The parchment, from the photo at least, seems relatively pale, but look in the right hand margin of the folio on the right, and a clear area of follicle patterning can be seen. Contrast that with the next opening (fols 31v and 32r), and the relative paleness of the flesh side (even in photo) becomes apparent.

 

When I first began doing my own manuscript research in the second year of my PhD, I remember sometimes struggling with identifying which side of a folio was the hair side, which the flesh. For every folio where it was instantly apparent, there were others which caused me to scratch my head in confusion. It got easier with time and practice, most things do of course. Knowing that, as a general rule the flesh side tends to be paler and whiter in hue helps, especially when the more starkly coloured hair side has not been pounced, is a useful hint.

During my doctoral research I gathered some useful secondary resources on the subject, and can highly recommend both Robin Reed’s Ancient Skins, Parchments and Leathers and Christopher Clarkson’s ‘Rediscovering Parchment’ (full bibliographical details at the bottom of this post). The majority of the information in this post (and in my brain on the subject) has been assimilated from these. It’s worth noting some of the distinctive points:

• Parchment from kid skin tends to be white on the flesh side and grey on the hair side with older goats often having grey-black regions on the hair-side.
• Parchment from lamb skin tends to be yellow on both sides, while sheep skin tends to have a paler flesh side, and
• Parchment/vellum from calf skin tends to be creamier in colour, but again with a darker colour on the hair side for mature animals.

 

Reed notes that distinguishing between goat and sheep can be almost impossible (even with living animals, and includes a cute photo to prove it), while Clarkson suggests that goats differ and can often be distinguished from sheep or calf on account of having softer and more flexible texture.

Both also note that older animals tend to have more established networks of veins and arteries, the presence of which can sometimes be seen or felt in the texture of the parchment even if remaining iron in the blood has not reacted with tannic acid to leave a dark stain in the shape of the vein. Which apparently can happen, although I have not yet seen it in person. Similarly, older animals are more likely to have suffered injuries and scar tissue or (vastly) stretched holes from tick bites, etc., can frequently be spotted on the surface.

Sometimes the hair side of the folio would have been so well scraped that details such as follicle patterns and bits of skin colouring are not really apparent on the surface. Sometimes later damage, abrasion and the such like to the flesh side can have darkened it so much it looks like hair side. Sometimes the parchment has been laterally split to make two sheets, one of which has a hair side and an ‘inside’, as it were, the other a flesh side and an ‘inside’. I’ve not seen this in any manuscripts I’ve studied myself, as it is a later practice not yet developed or employed in the tenth to twelfth century law-books that my research focuses on. It’s a detail worth remembering though, especially as Reed comments that many extra thin parchments assumed to have been produced from uterine vellum (that is parchment produced from calf foetuses) has probably actually been produced as a split skin instead.

Needless to say, in my early days in the archives (still less than a decade ago) I frequently confused hair and flesh, or spent what felt like hours pondering a folio, flipping back and forth. Sometimes I’d just put a question and come back to it. (Hands in the air honesty, it still happens sometimes). On more than one occasion I’d spend ages pondering my way through quire, finally decide on some tricky instances and step back to look at a quire diagram – that gave the same face of two halves of a single bifolium hair on one part, flesh on the other. It happens in recording, but clearly not in the manuscript. The bifolium though sometimes provides an easy solution, if one half is tricky to the point of frustration and the other has a nice, diagnostic feature such as a patch of follicles then the information can just be transferred across the quire. Tricks of knowing where else you can (should) look become a part of the working repertoire alongside an ever attuning eye and holes in the memory that let you slowly forget the difficulties you once had.

 

Bibliography

‘Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 413’, in Biblioteca Legum: A Database on Secular Carolingian Law Texts, ed. by Karl Ubl <http://www.leges.uni-koeln.de/en/mss/ [Accessed 28 July 2016]

Clarkson, Christopher, ‘Rediscovering Parchment: The Nature of the Beast’, in Conservation and Preservation in Small Libraries, ed. by Nicholas Hadgraft and Katherine Swift (Cambridge: Parker Library, 1994), pp. 75-96

Reed, R., Ancient Skins, Parchment and Leathers (London: Academic, 1973)