Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  The Champagne fairs were not an invention of the thirteenth century – they were firmly established by the end of the twelfth – but they had their greatest impact after 1200. The trunk of the huge tree of European commerce, which had its roots in northern Italy and southern France, divided in Champagne: its principal boughs stretched to London, Paris, Bruges and Lubeck, supporting branches that reached northern England, Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, Denmark, Germany and Poland by 1300. Those branches gave rise to twigs that flowered and became heavy with the fruit of many small markets, with most towns holding at least one fair of their own every year. In England, about 1,500 new fairs were added to the 146 that existed in 1200.9 Like the markets, not all these fairs survived, but a great many did. Most towns with a weekly market held at least one fair in the summer months, and many had more than one. They usually lasted for three days and were a spectacle even for those who had little or nothing to trade. Jugglers and musicians would perform, crowds would gather, business acquaintances would meet and exchange news. Rarer commodities would be sold, both retail and wholesale. At a major fair you could buy pomegranates, which were sought after by the wealthy for their stomach-settling medicinal properties, and opium, desirable for pain relief. Through this international trading network, oranges and lemons reached northern Europe. So too did sugar, cloves, pepper, silk, medicinal drugs and carpets. These luxuries had hardly been known in the region in 1200. By 1300 they were widely available in cities and major towns, albeit at a price.

  All this trade brought the old days of barter to a close: you simply couldn’t do business in a market if everything had to be bartered. Huge amounts of new coinage were required. Mints were reformed and enlarged, with small provincial and private operations being closed down so governments could control the money supply more effectively. The main unit of currency throughout Christendom in 1200 was the penny, written in Latin as denarius (hence the ‘d’ in ‘£sd’). In France, pennies were called deniers, in Italy denari, in Spain dineros, in Portugal dinheros, in Hungary denars, in the Low Countries penningen, and in Germany pfennige. But pennies were remnants of a system in which money was the exception, not the rule. By the time of the Champagne fairs, some transactions could involve very large numbers of coins, and it was impractical for merchants from, say, Genoa to haul sacks of silver denari over the Alps. As the only gold coin available – the nomisma of the Byzantine Empire – was in short supply, some kingdoms started minting high-denomination coins of their own, in both silver and gold. The Venetians produced silver grossi – ‘fat ones’ – from about 1200. Brindisi, in Italy, began to mint gold coins in 1232. Florence struck the first fiorino d’oro in 1252 and the Genoese hammered out gold genovini from the following year. In England, Henry III experimented with a ‘gold penny’, worth 20d, but the gold was worth more than the face value of the coin, so most examples were melted down straight away. The famous Venetian ducat was first minted in the 1280s. France and Rome introduced their own silver grossi in the second half of the century, and in the Low Countries, higher-denomination silver coins acquired the name groten. The name travelled well: in Germany it became groschen, and in England, Edward I’s new coinage of 1279 included ‘groats’, worth 4d. Coins of a lower value were minted too: halfpennies and farthings had previously been made by cutting a penny in half or into quarters; now specific coins of these values were struck. By 1300, money was established throughout Europe as the normal way – and in many places the only way – of doing business.

  For those attending the Champagne fairs, even bags of high-denomination coins were an encumbrance and a liability. Rather than passing over quantities of bullion every single time a deal was agreed, merchants started keeping written notes of who owed whom money. When they sat down at the end of the fair, they could pay their debts by transferring the amounts due. But even then, they realised, there were alternatives to settling every deal in coin. Bills of exchange could be drawn up and passed on by agents, promising payment by a certain company at a certain date. Herein lies the origin of banking, for these agents started to extend credit facilities to reliable merchants. They sat on benches called banche, which gave rise to our word ‘bank’. Along with credit and bills of exchange, these banking companies introduced double-entry bookkeeping: the method whereby outgoings and incomings are separately recorded and made to balance. By 1300, they may also have invented the means for goods in transit to be insured; certainly records attest to merchants underwriting shipped goods in the next century. The major banking companies are famous – the Ricciardi (of Lucca), the Bonsignori (of Siena), and the Frescobaldi, Buonaccorsi, Scali, Bardi, Acciaiuoli and Peruzzi (all of Florence). Their businesses were international – the Frescobaldi and the Ricciardi, for instance, both loaned money to Edward I of England in the thirteenth century. Quite a lot of the sap in that commercial tree described above was driven by their ingenuity. Next time you open your wallet and pull out a credit card, have a thought for the merchants of the thirteenth century.

  Education

  There is a watershed in historical evidence around the year 1200. Very few systematically created records survive from before the reigns of Richard I in England (1189–99) and Philip Augustus in France (1180–1223). In England there are no bishops’ registers and no local manorial documents from before 1200. Apart from the pipe rolls – the records of loans by and debts to the King of England by his sheriffs and vassals, which date from 1130 – there are no regular royal accounts. With the exception of the Italian city states, where civic record-keeping began in the twelfth century, to write the history of Europe before 1200 we are dependent on privately composed chronicles and scraps of other evidence, such as royal letters and grants, and private charters copied into monastic cartularies.

  Things started to change in the 1190s. All of a sudden, it seems, there was an explosion in record-keeping. In France, Philip Augustus ordered the Grande Chancellerie to create Le Trésor des Chartes in the royal palace, where a comprehensive record of royal business began to be preserved. The English government adopted a similar policy. Copies of every letter and charter sent out in the king’s name were written on to rolls – at least one roll for every year of the reign – and stored carefully. Many of these have survived. Thus on the Confirmation Rolls we have the text of every old charter confirmed by the king after 1189; and the Charter Rolls contain every new charter issued from 1199. From 1199 there are also Fine Rolls containing the texts of grants for which a fine was payable to the Crown, such as wardships, liberties, privileges and official positions. If a letter was sent out sealed in an open or ‘patent’ state, it was copied on the Patent Rolls, which survive from 1201; if a letter was sealed ‘closed’ it was copied on the Close Rolls, which are extant from 1204. From early in the reign of Henry III (1216–72) there are files of Inquisitions Post Mortem, these being the results of enquiries made into the landholding of every person who died in possession of land held directly from the king. By 1300 you also have Treaty Rolls, Liberate Rolls (recording royal payments), Roman Rolls (letters to the popes), Scotch Rolls, Norman Rolls, Gascon Rolls, Welsh Rolls, Statute Rolls, and many other series. These are just the very tip of an enormous iceberg of records. Among the records of the Exchequer you may find inventories of royal treasure and jewels, and accounts of daily expenses in the royal household. Surveys of local landholding across the whole kingdom were compiled for the purpose of granting aids or occasional taxation to the king, such as the Book of Fees (1198–1292) and the Feudal Aids (1284). In 1279, Edward I ordered a survey to find out which royal manors had been granted to lords, in the hope of stopping further encroachments on the royal domain. Over the course of the thirteenth century, therefore, central government genuinely did pass ‘from memory to written record’.10

  This revolution was not limited to central government. In dioceses across Europe bishops started preserving records of their acts in episcopal registers. Great magnates and prelates began to keep accounts too. The bishop of Winchester�
��s pipe roll has already been mentioned: this gives details from 1209 of the expenses, loans, fines and other income due to the bishop from his vast estate. Lords of manors started to keep court rolls to preserve information as to which tenants held what land, for how long they might continue to occupy it, and what fines were due. Manorial clerks kept accounts to keep a check on the grain and animals that the tenants produced for the lord as part of their feudal service. The earliest custumnals also date from this century, recording what by-laws and practices were to be observed in the manor: whether the lord was due to pay for a breakfast for workers at harvest time, for example, or whether they were permitted to gather firewood on his land. The earliest systematically created civic records outside Italy also date from this period – rolls of names of freemen of towns, court records and borough custumnals. In secular as well as in religious life, from cities to the remotest rural manors, records started to be systematically created and preserved.

  All this recording begs the obvious question: where did these literate men suddenly come from? If we assume that every monk and clergyman was literate by 1300, and that there was a clerk serving on every manor, then maybe as many as 40,000 men had learnt to read and write in England alone. Some would have been taught by the monasteries. Others – especially scions of noble families, which had preserved literacy as part of the dignity of their class – would have had a private tutor. Peter Abelard and his brothers were examples of this tradition. In 1179, the Third Lateran Council had ordered that every cathedral should run a school; this was reinforced by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, presided over by Innocent III. It decreed that not only should those cathedrals that still lacked a school now set one up to teach the children of townsmen to read and write in Latin, but that every church in Christendom with sufficient wherewithal should do so. This effectively stipulated that there should be a school in every town.

  The real force driving education was simply a massive increase in demand for literate men. At a time of steep economic and demographic growth across Europe, lords and landholders felt that their traditional rights were under threat. Writing things down was a way of preserving information that could later be used in court to back up one’s ownership of land and enjoyment of assets. If you acquired a piece of land or a franchise in the thirteenth century, you wanted your ownership recorded in some way. If you were doing business in a town, you wanted a commercial contract to be drawn up by a notary every time you reached an agreement with another merchant. It was this need for record-keeping that filled the church schools set up in the wake of Innocent III’s council. Even just a dozen more schools could make a huge difference: over the course of a few years, one master could teach hundreds of young townsmen to read and write.

  Literacy is one aspect of the educational revolution of the thirteenth century. Another is the establishment of the universities, which grew out of the intellectual developments of the previous century. The University of Bologna, for example, traced its origins back to Irnerius’s law school. It is sometimes argued that the schools of Paris were a ‘university’ at the time when Abelard was teaching. The University of Salerno claims to date from the twelfth century due to the city’s role in copying and distributing medical texts at that time. In reality, the concept of the university was still evolving in the twelfth century. Abelard’s pupils followed him wherever he went; if he abandoned Paris for Melun, Corbeil or the Paraclete, they went with him. It was the teacher that mattered to them, not the school. The evolution of the university in the early thirteenth century allowed for quite a different form of education: an institutional one, with a code of conduct, a set of standards and examinations, and a sense of its own social value.

  The first official use of the word universitas to describe a type of higher-education establishment dates from a decree issued by the papal legate Robert de Courçon in 1215 to resolve a dispute in the University of Paris. Disputes were not uncommon in the early days of universities: the University of Cambridge was established as a result of a walkout by almost all the members of the University of Oxford in 1208. However, despite such teething troubles, universities were firmly established as part of the educational life of Europe by 1250. Students read for the degree of Master of Arts by studying the seven liberal arts, divided into the ‘trivium’ (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the ‘quadrivium’ (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). From the 1230s, graduation as a Master of Arts gave them the right to teach anywhere without further licence. If they wished to specialise in law, medicine or theology, they had to carry on with their studies in a higher faculty. By 1300, universities were firmly established at Seville, Salamanca and Lérida in Spain; Lisbon in Portugal (later relocated to Coimbra); Oxford and Cambridge in England; Toulouse, Montpelier, Angers and Paris in France; and Vercelli, Bologna, Vicenza, Padua, Piacenza, Reggio, Arezzo, Siena, Naples and Salerno in Italy. By this time it had become usual for any cleric hoping to attain high office in the Church to read for a Master of Arts degree at a university. Methods of debate, scholarship and attaining knowledge had been formalised and distributed systematically across Christendom. Education had been standardised and introduced into all the courts of Europe, and a host of masters empowered to teach the next generation of clerks and scholars.

  Accountability

  In our day and age we take the superiority of a literate society for granted, but in 1200 the value of education was less clear. It was, after all, expensive. Having things written down for you was not a cheap service either, so if central government was keeping records of grants, then why did you need a second copy for yourself? The answer lies in a widespread cautious approach to the law. Monastic institutions and noble families kept copies of royal charters granted to them in case their terms were disputed by the grantor or questioned by a third party. A similar reason underlies the creation of financial accounts. Surviving medieval accounts are more than straightforward financial documents: they often explain why it was necessary to spend the money, as the compiler could be held accountable. The amounts recorded on the bishop of Winchester’s pipe rolls, for instance, were set down not to inform the bishop how much he had left in his coffers but so his treasurer could acquit himself of any outstanding liabilities. In short, the major reason for record-keeping was caution, distrust and a desire for greater certainty. Things were written down so that people could hold each other accountable in law.

  Accountability itself was nothing new. For centuries kings had sworn solemn coronation oaths or promised to uphold certain rights. Other men had regularly sworn solemn vows. However, there was a fundamental difference between swearing on a holy relic – in which case God was the judge of whether the oath had been broken – and being held to a certain promise in law. If you had the text of a charter or a letter from the king, you could hold him to account. Previously, rulers had made laws for their people, but they were not bound by them. Now the very relationship between a king and his people was changing. In the 1190s, Philip Augustus began to call himself ‘King of France’ instead of using the traditional title ‘King of the Franks’. At the same time, Richard I similarly called himself ‘King of England’ rather than ‘King of the English’. These subtle changes stressed that kings ruled over all the people in their kingdom, foreigners included, and that they made the laws for everyone within their domain, not just their followers. It also implied that they had a duty to preserve the borders of their kingdom from incursions and took responsibility for the Church and foreigners within their realm.

  It was a Holy Roman Emperor who first found himself held to account by his subjects. In the 1160s Frederick Barbarossa had tried to impose his direct control on the great cities in the north of Italy. When they resisted him, he destroyed Milan. In defiance, the Italian cities formed the Lombard League and defeated the emperor in battle at Legnano in 1176. In the subsequent treaties of Venice (1177) and Constance (1183), they then established their right to rule themselves while still remaining part of the Holy Roman Empire
. The emperor had been forced to conclude treaties with his subjects and, as a consequence, could be held accountable by them.

  Far more famous in the Anglophone world is Magna Carta, or the ‘Great Charter’, the result of King john being forced to the negotiating table. John was never a popular king. His neglect of Normandy led to its conquest by the French in 1204, with the result that most of his leading nobles lost their ancestral lands there. Moreover, his refusal to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury led to a direct confrontation with Pope Innocent III. In 1208, the pope placed the whole of England under an interdict, whereby he prohibited clergy throughout the kingdom from holding church services and burying people. The following year he excommunicated the king. In 1213, John backed down. He agreed to accept Langton and resigned the kingdom of England and the lordship of Ireland to Innocent, who granted them back to him as his vassal. He also undertook to pay an annual tribute to the pope of 1,000 marks (£666 13s. 4d) and promised to go on a Crusade.

  Having gained papal support, John then proceeded to advance against his enemies. He built up a series of alliances with the count of Flanders and the Holy Roman Emperor, and went to France hoping to regain possession of Normandy. But like most of his strategic plans, this enterprise went terribly wrong. His allies were crushed by the French king, Philip Augustus, at the battle of Bouvines in 1214, and John was forced to return to England empty-handed. He was now more unpopular than ever, and a number of important lords withdrew their fealty to him. In June 1215, he was compelled to agree to Magna Carta, which confirmed the ancient laws of England and established a series of rights and liberties for the English people and the Church that would henceforth be a check on royal power. A council of lords was established to override the king’s rule if he should fail to observe the terms of the charter.