Ecclesiastical dispute and lay community : Figline Valdarno in the twelfth century - article ; n°1 ; vol.108, pg 7-93

Wickham Chris

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Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age - Année 1996 - Volume 108 - Numéro 1 - Pages 7-93
Chris Wicicham, Ecclesiastical dispute and lay community : Figline Valdarno in the twelfth century, p. 7-93. Figline, halfway between Florence and Arezzo, is the focus for one of the best-documented conflicts in twelfth-century Italy, a set of disputes over property and ecclesiastical rights, including mills, heard in fourteen documented hearings between 1175 and 1195. This article analyses the conflict by putting it in its socio-political setting in the developing rural commune of Figline (the settlement and its leaders, and its aristocratie patrons, are themselves well-documented); it goes on to discuss the signifia cance of ecclesiastical ritual for the determination of rights and duties in the late twelfth century and the ways in which disputing was conducted (including modes of proof and strategies of the presentation of cases) in the period, on the basis of the Figline dispute and parallel cases. An at- (p.t.o.) tempt is made to show how the example of Figline contributes to under-standing the sociology of disputing as a whole.
87 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

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• Publié par: MELANGES_DE_L-ECOLE_FRANCAISE_DE_ROME
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1996
• Nombre de lectures: 42
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Chris Wickham
Ecclesiastical dispute and lay community : Figline Valdarno in
the twelfth century
In: Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps modernes T. 108, N°1. 1996. pp. 7-93.
Abstract
Chris Wickham, Ecclesiastical dispute and lay community : Figline Valdarno in the twelfth century, p. 7-93.
Figline, halfway between Florence and Arezzo, is the focus for one of the best-documented conflicts in twelfth-century Italy, a set
of disputes over property and ecclesiastical rights, including mills, heard in fourteen documented hearings between 1175 and
1195. This article analyses the conflict by putting it in its socio-political setting in the developing rural commune of Figline (the
settlement and its leaders, and its aristocratie patrons, are themselves well-documented); it goes on to discuss the signifia cance
of ecclesiastical ritual for the determination of rights and duties in the late twelfth century and the ways in which disputing was
conducted (including modes of proof and strategies of the presentation of cases) in the period, on the basis of the Figline dispute
and parallel cases. An at-
(p.t.o.) tempt is made to show how the example of Figline contributes to under-standing the sociology of disputing as a whole.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Wickham Chris. Ecclesiastical dispute and lay community : Figline Valdarno in the twelfth century. In: Mélanges de l'Ecole
française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps modernes T. 108, N°1. 1996. pp. 7-93.
doi : 10.3406/mefr.1996.3480
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/mefr_1123-9883_1996_num_108_1_3480CHRIS WICKHAM
ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTE AND LAY COMMUNITY :
FIGLINE VALDARNO IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY
Twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Italian records of the testimony
of witnesses in court-cases are unparallelled in contemporary Europe in
the richness of their detail. They are the first substantial corpus in the long
line of witness records that continue until the present day in civil, eccle
siastical and (eventually) criminal courts. Such records in the late medieval
and early modern periods are recognised as one of the best sources any
where for legal practice, the nature of proof, and, beyond these, for the
day-to-day procedures of social life; they have been the bases for some of
the most famous and methodologically innovative works of social history
written in the last two decades.1 The earliest Italian witness records, howev
er, have been little studied. Partly this is because they survive in a rather
casual way : before the later thirteenth century, with our first extant regis
ters of public courts, they can only be found (often with some difficulty) in
church archives, among hundreds and thousands of parchments about
quite different issues; testimonies were also usually transcribed separately
from the formal documents that record judicial sentences, and as a result
were less often preserved. Partly, however, this lack of study derives from
the relative neglect of twelfth-century judicial practice in Italy as a whole.
1 As, among many examples, E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de
1294 à 1324, Paris, 1975; G. Levi, L'eredità immateriale, Turin, 1985; N.Z. Davis, Fic
tion in the archives, Stanford, 1987 - not based on witnesses, but located very firmly
in the arena of legal practice; G. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna, London, 1986,
which has also produced a methodologically interesting critique, T. Kuehn, Reading
microhistory, in Journal of Modem History, LXI, 1989, p. 512-34; closest to my period
and to the sort of evidence at my disposition is W.M. Bowsky, Piety and property in
medieval Florence, Milan, 1990. 1 am grateful to Patricia Skinner and Robert Swan-
son for reading and critiquing drafts of this text; to Richard Holt for discussing mills
with me; to Paolo Pirillo for much helpful and stimulating discussion about Figline
and its history; and to Henry Buglass for drawing the maps. My visits to the Flo
rence archives were funded in large part by the British Academy.
MEFRM - 108 - 1996 - 1, p. 7-93. 8 CHRIS WICKHAM
Theory, rather than practice, has been the longstanding focus of Italian le
gal history; relatively detailed studies of Manaresi's Placiti, the basic collec
tion of public court records up to the eleventh century, do exist, but they
are characteristically succeeded, not by studies of consular and ecclesiasti
cal sentences, but by analyses of the thought of Bolognese masters of one
law or the other.2 Nevertheless, there is a good deal to say about practice as
well; and when we have, as we sometimes do by the late twelfth century,
not only detailed witness records but also legal decisions or arbitrations
about the same cases, we can build up a detailed picture of how it worked.
When, rather more rarely, we also have documents regarding private tran
sactions of other kinds relating to the cases, we can go further too, linking
legal practice to wider issues of social history. In Tuscany, the current fo
cus of my own research, the best example of this in the twelfth century,
and indeed some way into the thirteenth, relates to Figline Valdarno, hal
fway between Florence and Arezzo, and this case - or, rather, set of cases -
is the focus of this article.
The Figline dispute was between two local churches, the pieve of S.
Maria and the canonica of S. Bartolomeo (sometimes called S. Signore). It
covered a wide range of issues, including the disputed patronage of
churches, the dues and obediences owed by a parish church to its pieve,
and the location of mill canals. Although it only partially involved canon-
law issues, it was heard before the church courts. Ecclesiastical cases, par
ticularly if they involve witnesses, can in fact contain just as much info
rmation for social historians as do lay cases, and this is certainly true for Fi
gline; they were also easier to re-open than civil disputes were. In the Fi
gline case, this means that, beside a long and detailed witness-roll from c.
1190, containing eight parchments stitched together, we have thirty other
documents directly relating to the dispute, involving fourteen separate hea
rings between 1175 and 1195. We can as a result reconstruct a dense narrat
ive of two decades of local tension, which, when set against over seventy
other charters for the twelfth century in Figline, allows us to say a good
deal about Figlinese society in the period. The documents for Figline mos-
2 There are increasing numbers of exceptions to these comments : e.g. A. Padoa
Schioppa, Aspetti della giustizia milanese dal X al XII secolo, in Atti dell'XI Congresso
internazionale di studi sull'alto medioevo, Spoleto, 1989, p. 459-549; O. Guyotjeannin,
Conflicts de juridiction et exercice de la justice à Parme et dans son territoire d'après
une enquête de 1218, in MEFRM, 97, 1985, p. 183-300; and, for a slightly later period,
M. Vallerani, // sistema giudiziario del comune di Perugia, Perugia, 1991; J.-C. Maire
Vigueur and A. Paravicini Bagliani (eds.), La parola all'accusato, Palermo, 1991, nota
bly Maire Vigueur's own article. ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTE AND LAY COMMUNITY 9
tly survive in the large and well-known fondo Passignano in the Archivio di
Stato at Florence; these events are as a result known to scholars, and have
been discussed across a century and more, most notably by Robert David-
sohn and Paolo Pirillo.3 They have not, however, been analysed as a whole
before.
The relation between ecclesiastical tension and the social relationships
of the laity in Figline was not, of course, direct. One could in fact say that
the socio-political history of Figline in the second half of the twelfth centu
ry was dominated by two quite distinct patterns of development, ecclesiast
ical and secular, which only came together at certain, significant, points.
The church sequence began with the bishop of Fiesole's attempt to move
his see to Figline in c. 1167; when this attempt failed shortly afterwards,
following the destruction of the castrum de Figline by the Florentines, the
bishop founded a new pieve there in 1174, which immediately came into
conflict with the previously dominant local church, S. Bartolomeo, in a se
ries of disputes which lasted two decades and revived twice in the next cen
tury. The lay sequence had the same beginning, in fact; for the failed see of
Figline produced, not only the pieve, but also a strong and cohesive rural
commune in the territory of Figline, focussed on the military dependents of
the aristocratic families of the Valdarno Superiore, and defined largely by
hostility to Florence. The similarities between the two stop with their ori
gins, however. Whereas the ecclesiastical narrative is one of internal
conflict, the secular narrative is one of local cooperation and cohesion, in
particular among the élite, but spreading outside it too. How these two s
equences intersected - and interacted, as the lay élites sought to calm the
church disputes - is one theme of this article. The other, separate but rela
ted, is how disputing itself worked, as a social practice, in a large twelfth-
century Tuscan rural settlement : what kinds of proofs were most powerf
ul, what kinds of strategies worked best,