In my continuing quest to get some kind of hold on the late tenth and early eleventh centuries (see previous two posts) I have now dived briefly into the murky waters of study of eleventh century apocalyptic thought and am somewhat wishing I hadn’t. The temptation just to decide that the whole field is meaningless or insignificant is substantial.

It didn’t help that I started off with Richard Landes on the historiography of the Year 1000 (http://www.bu.edu/mille/scholarship/1000/AHR9.html), who is both excessively polemical and on some basic points plain wrong (for example, he chides Barbara Rosenwein for not discussing millennial thought in her studies of Cluny, claiming that this is an important factor in why aristocrats donated so much land to it in the 980s to 1030s, ignoring the fact that Rosenwein’s figures show transactions in decline after 993). However, when I then looked briefly at some of the essays in Michael Frassato’s The Year 1000: Religious and Social Responses to the Turning of the First Millennium (Palgrave, 2002), the same basic problems seemed to be evident.

What the believers in the ‘weak terrors’ thesis (that apocalyptic thought was significant for the years around 1000-1033) have been able to show is that there is more evidence for such thought in the period than most twentieth century historians have believed. Their problem is that there still isn’t much evidence. I think it’s significant that there are two papers each in Frassetto’s collection on Archbishop Wulfstan and Ademar of Chabannes; there aren’t many other authors with that kind of sustained interest in the millennium.

Landes accounts for the lack of evidence as a conspiracy theory - the ‘church’ doesn’t like such things discussed and also people want to conceal the fact that they expected the end of the world and it didn’t happen. His view of the church as able successfully to hush up a matter might just apply to a disciplined modern Catholic church. For the pre-Gregorian reform church, it’s ridiculous. Because St Augustine said one shouldn’t discuss the date of the millennium, that does not make it an official Catholic doctrine, let alone one everyone adhered to. Also, one of the safer generalisations about clerical and monastic historians is that they’re never knowingly understated. If there was widespread millennial concern, it would have been discussed in overwrought tones by far more monastic sources. Landes also want to claim that a lot of clerics secretly shared these millennial hopes. Again, in an atmosphere when denouncing your clerical/monastic enemies was commonplace, why do rivals not point out such hypothetical erring believers? And even if you can’t trust accounts written after 1000 or 1033, what about all the charters? There are some with what you might interpret as millennial formulae, but not (as far as I can gather) many, and there are an awful lot of 10th century charters.

More generally, a lot of the discussions seem to focus on date-based apocalypse and not on event-based apocalypse, whereas the evidence is rather the reverse. By date-based apocalypse I mean that people believe the end is nigh because it’s almost the year 1000/1033 etc. By event-based apocalypse, I mean that people believe the end is nigh because of famines/floods/Vikings etc. It’s completely unrealistic, as Richard Landes does, to discuss Wulstan’s apocalyptic thought without mentioning that it was in the midst of devastating Viking attacks. Similarly, when Rodulfus Glaber mentions apocalyptic beliefs and pilgrimages around 1033, it’s in the context of devastating famines in 1030-1033. Was it really the date 1033 that was the key to all this concern or the famines?

In particular, the general lack of apocalyptic sources from Germany (or indeed Italy) strongly argues against date-based apocalyptic thought on its own as being crucial. (So does the finding of more evidence of both earlier and later apocalyptic thought). What you can see is date-based apocalypse used as providing an explanation for catastrophe: the Viking attacks in the tenth century are given a new added millennial significance as against those in the ninth century.

But that leads on to the final problem for the ‘weak terrors’ historians: what practical difference does it all make? People may believe that the end of the world is nigh, but how does this affect the course of history? Trying to see how millennial thought made a difference is very tricky: for example, who did it matter to (apart from himself) that Ademar of Chabannes had millennial beliefs?

The most politically significant people who seem to have held millennial beliefs are Otto III and Wulfstan. But Otto III was (as Susan Reynolds memorably described him): ‘a young man with a lot of fancy ideas, but he didn’t last long’. And Wulfstan’s response to the belief that the Vikings were a sign of the end of times was a call on the Anglo-Saxons to repent - which is the same message that the Franks were given during the Viking attacks of the ninth century, when it was simply a matter of appeasing God’s wrath. In other words, he behaved in much the same way that he would have done in a situation without millennial expectation.

So those who want to argue that the millennium made a substantial difference, essentially have to both a) say there was widespread popular belief and then b) show how this actually affected events. When you look at the suggestions, they mainly start looking a little thin. Landes has six: the Peace of God, popular heresies, anti-Jewish violence, mass popular movements, political and religious reform and transformation of the conception of Christ

Starting with heresy: the chronological fit is only approximate. As Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy puts it : ‘Heresy...reappears in the West after a gap of a hundred years [after Carolingian events], creates alarm in the 1020s, fades, then disappears as mysteriously as it had come.’ The heresies of the 1020s might have apocalyptic roots (though what we can see of their doctrines don’t mention it), but they don’t have any lasting significance. It’s only in the twelfth century that you get sustained heretical traditions.

As Landes himself says, most of the anti-Jewish violence occurs after the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Caliph al-Hakim in 1009, which was blamed on the Jews in the West. This again looks very much like event-driven apocalypse.

In ‘mass popular movements’, Landes includes pilgrimages and also the proliferation of saints’ cults, liturgical drama and mass penitential pilgrimages. I would say it’s very hard to see how most of this fits specifically with millennial thought, rather than with a general religious revival; the same is true of ‘religious and political reform’. I’d accept there’s a new emphasis on the humanity of Christ from the late tenth century: it can already be seen in the Gero Cross in about 970 (http://www.westga.edu/~rtekippe/slides2201/gero.html) and Phyllis Jestice (in Frassetto’s book) shows it in hagiography. But there’s no obvious reason to connect it to millennial thought. If anything, I’d say that millennial thought would have the opposite effect, stressing the divinity and inhuman power of Christ at the Second Coming (as seen in the modern millennial Left Behind novels, slowly and painstakingly being dissected by Slacktivist).

Which leaves the Peace of God as the one main event that may have been substantially influenced by millennial thought. The problem with knowing about this is the nature of the sources. There is a clear disconnect between sources showing the results of the councils and those describing the atmosphere. The acta of the councils look fairly pragmatic and controlled; the hagiography that describes the settings often make them look far more popular and fervent. In particular, most of what we know from contemporaries about the early peace councils is from Ademar of Chabannes (Landes reckons he is the source of 80% of all the material on the Peace from the first hundred years). The more apocalyptic Ademar is shown to be, the more cautious we have to be about accepting his view of events as unbiased.

I’d put down substantial apocalyptic thought in the Peace of God movement as possible but unproved, though I’d be prepared to be convinced about it. As a wide-ranging explanation for historical change, therefore, apocalyptic thought fails pretty spectacularly. It might get a passing mention in my teaching, but I can’t at the moment see that it is worth any deeper scrutiny. (If anyone knows more convincing articles on tenth/eleventh century millenarianism, please let me know).

Jon has definitely started something. At once, the idle historian's mind (which should be concentrating on the possible significance of apocalyptic chiliasm) starts dreaming instead about LolDuby:

I am trying to get a take on the Feudal Transformation/Revoluton/Mutation etc (as a non-specialist) and realising once again why I always find it so hard. It’s not simply a dispute about why changes happened (or different timetables in different places). It’s a dispute in which half the things which are said to have changed may not actually have happened at all (or happened many centuries earlier or later). For my own sake I’m trying to work out some of the possible factors and connections, but I’m still not sure I’ve got a grip on it.

I’m focusing here on ‘France’ in a broad sense, because almost everyone does, but with the proviso that both England and Germany show things can be different. Firstly, there are some things that look rather like red herrings.

1) Castles and changing settlement patterns don’t seem to be the key, because they occur in places outside France without the same effects.

2) Similarly patrimonialisation of lordship happens in France (following political fragmentation) and Germany (without political fragmentation).

3) The ‘transition from slavery to serfdom’ also doesn’t look very useful, because it’s not clear that slave modes of production are ever widespread, because slavery as social death is already in decay in the early Middle Ages and because for all the supposedly tight Carolingian legal boundary of slave/free the reality looks somewhat different.

4) A focus on the 'rise of violence' is very dubious; as Carolingianists keep on pointing out, you can see a lot of armed retinues and lordly violence in the Carolingian period as well. (I think there might be more traction in trying to examine exactly who is fighting who: is there a change between noble on peasant and noble on noble violence?)

5) The ‘family mutation’ as Pauline Stafford and Constance Bouchard Britton (among others) have pointed out, increasingly looks to be due more to the different sources we have available than a definite change from a ‘broad’ to a ‘narrow’ idea of family.

The most promising focus is on what you can see that actually does change. At the start you have the Carolingian world, a society organised on a particular pattern of ‘public order’ and local relationships; from the early eleventh century you have (in many places in western Europe) a different looking society, increasingly getting formally organised on a different pattern. In particular, you have some texts giving explicit rules of fidelity for the upper classes (and I’d link with this chivalry, as a class-based code of conduct for acceptable/unacceptable violence, which probably develops in early eleventh century Normandy). You have formalised hereditary public office. You have the formal subordination of peasants to lords (as seen in consuetudines) and more institutionalised village government. The problem is how do you get from here to there. What you do with the tenth century?

The earlier view (down to Marc Bloch, say) was that you got ‘anarchy’ in the tenth century and then new organisation in the eleventh. The feudal revolution view (Georges Duby onwards) is the Wile E. Coyote view of the Carolingian world: public order still keeps going without effective kings, till all concerned suddenly look down, realises they’ve gone over the cliff and crash. One problem is that how much political fragmentation you see depends where you look. George Duby’s Maconnais fragments a lot and the evidence for Carolingian public order continuing much into the tenth century is fairly weak. In contrast, some of the territorial principalities, like Aquitaine, look rather firmer, as Jane Martindale’s pointed out. If you say that small-scale political fragmentation is what drives the emergence of the new order (as Chris Wickham does), then the problem is why that should be? After all, in principle, a locally based society needs fewer explicit rules than a large-scale one does. If you see the territorial principalities as being able to maintain a vaguely Carolingian public order, then why do changes happen at all? It’s hard to see why a ‘Carolingian’ Catalonia that continues into the mid-tenth century then suddenly unravels, when the Carolingians never had much direct impact on the region anyhow.

One alternative to these two views is saying that there’s a gradual evolution of institutions, but the problem here is finding the equivalent of the missing link. Saying it’s all down to Carolingian definitional practices, for example, needs you to find a continuation of such defining practices throughout the tenth century, which is tricky.

Or there’s the approach mainly taken by those who study dispute settlement, that nothing really changes anyhow. Carolingian public order is always just a facade that doesn’t affect practice anyhow, so there’s really no practical difference between the Late Merovingian period and the eleventh century. That goes along with the view (Marxist but also held by others) that medieval peasants are always oppressed. The difficulty with the nothing changes view is answering why the facade is suddenly changed/removed when it is. Why are new rules of the game suddenly written down, when they haven’t needed to be before?

Which is why the most effective explanations I’ve seen so far (such as by Robert Moore) tend to say that church reform and economic development are the key factors, which at least have the advantage of being things that we know did happen. The developing economy (and especially monetisation and the growth of towns) means there is more wealth going and that peasants have more options and both churches and lords are trying to grab control of it and them. Monasteries resort (as is their practice) to defining their rights via charters and this sets off rounds of defining by secular lords as well (either in direct competition or realising the benefits of the tactic). This fits with a view of the Peace of God which sees it at as least partly intended as an attempt by the upper classes as a whole to determine what is licit violence and what is not. (The aims of the Peace of God may be traditional ones of public order, but not the details of the provisions). Given that you can also see a lot of the Gregorian reform as being about setting rigid boundaries and definitions of church/world (as well as an attempt to welsh on the social norms previously agreed between the church and lay landowners), the whole thing hangs together vaguely plausibly. Whether it’s the best answer, I’m not yet sure, but at the moment it looks more coherent than anything else I’ve seen.