ABSTRACT
The retained household can be regarded as an aristocratic trapping for one good reason: the manner of its organisation became a matter of emulation and prestige. In this case the ultimate model was clear: the household of the Carolingian kings of the Franks. The starting point of a study of the formal noble household is the remarkable tract which is the first surviving description of its ideal layout: the De ordine palatii of Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, written for the instruction of a minor Carolingian king just before 880.1 The essentials of the organisation of the royal household were far older than that; officers named in Hincmar’s treatise occur in diplomata of the seventh century. However, Hincmar presents us with a rounded and coherent picture of the model royal household in a way which tells us that it was now a comprehensible and recognised institution. It was so much an institution that Hincmar might tell us how an ideal version of it must be organised.
