ABSTRACT
On all this, Patrick Wormald had much to say in his awe-inspiring survey of the legal cultures of continental Europe in the early Middle Ages. For him this was a world of tensions, gaps and contrasts: between northern and southern Europe, between clerical and secular literacy, between aspirations of the court and results on the ground, between lex and capitulary, and between kings and the ‘intellectuals’ who put these texts together. One of his conclusions was that ‘Frankish capitularies were left so plastic by kings that only intellectuals … could give them real shape.’3 This paper is essentially a comment on that statement, one that seeks to modify it by closing the gap between kings and their ‘intellectuals’. In order to do this, I will focus on one man, Ansegis, abbot of St-Wandrille in the north of Francia (823-33), who compiled a collection of capitularies in 827. Gerhard Schmitz’s superb edition of this text for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, with an introduction that is essentially a book-length study of it, is the starting point for all work on Ansegis, and this paper is deeply indebted to it. This introduction exposes the limitations of Ansegis’ achievement and they are well known. Out of a possible total of around 100 known capitulary texts he collected only 26; he included legislation that was out of date, together with texts that were so terse as to be meaningless; he misattributed capitularies, probably because he was working with undated material; he collected all the texts he could, he did not make a selection, etc.4 These may seem to be harsh strictures but they in fact point to the contemporary historical circumstances and culture of Ansegis. They thus do
die Kapitularien? (Darmstadt, 1961); J.L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London and Ronceverte, 1986); eadem, The Frankish World 750-900 (London and Rio Grande, 1996); R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989); H. Mordek, Studien zur fränkischen Herrschergesetzgebung (Frankfurt, 2001); for P. Wormald’s work, see n. 3 below. For a deft sketch of capitulary problems, see now M. Innes, ‘Charlemagne’s government’, in Charlemagne: Empire and Society, ed. J. Story (Manchester, 2005), 71-89, and the thoughtful new approach by C. Pössel, ‘Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies, 779-829’, in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. R. Corradini, R. Meens, C. Pössel and P. Shaw, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 12 (Vienna, 2006), 253-74.
