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description= 10 posts published by Jonathan Jarrett during August 2007;
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archives, ii, the, this, medieval, monthly, august, 2007, information, for, websearchers, review, ralph, turner, magna, carta, solomonic, bishops, and, processional, communities, seminary, there, is, nothing, new, under, sun, hero, worship, commerce, in, dark, ages, metablog, feudal, transformations, iv, of, course, you, realise, means, war, job, that, do, student, report, recent, comments, see, something, wrong, blogroll, currently, reading, institutions, tourism, pictures, personal, webpages, resources, email, subscription, rss, feed,
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on metablog posted on 15 august 2007 11 comments i don t understand the way people come to this blog wordpress are remarkably informative but their information confuses me sometimes the process is obvious richard nokes kindly links one of my posts i get a shedload more readers this i understand i don t know how many because i guess most people are reading through feeds and wordpress only counts actual direct hits but i see the effect on that i guess that means in fact that i will see more effect from links than from anything else but that that doesn t necessarily relate to regular readership but sometimes the information i get makes no damn sense at all the day that i drafted this apparently i got fourteen hits from the blogroll beside an old worthy and sane but uncommented and ancient post of another damned medievalist surely this is someone s browser going mad and not real information it goes on the same day more people read the well hidden sex and medievalists post than any other but this seems to be because hits on the actual front page which linked to it at the time of drafting aren t separately recorded so the click through shows up as most important even though it wasn t really because more people read what s up front certainly only one of the search engine strings wordpress tells me of would have led there and mainly what those tell me comfortingly but uselessly is that my little first crusade paper is something people want to find this is useless because it wasn t actually a blog post so although it s nice to know it s being useful without reorienting my research by some way it s not something i can develop further for the readership s benefit so what this means is that actually although wordpress is trying very hard i don t really know what people are reading and what they re skimming what brings you here and what sends you away unless you comment now this blog was originally set up as self publicity after a suggestion at a party by someone who seemed to believe that the blogosphere was the new stock market this is why for example i don t mention rejections or lack of progress in it i get them as does everyone at my level i think but i don t necessarily want prospective employers or rivals to find this out easily no i don t really have any rivals fair enough anyway but even such readership as i do have makes me wonder whether i shouldn t be bearing them in mind as well currently i just spout whatever i m currently finding interesting into draft posts and then stick them up when the action seems a bit quiet webwise this is also good for last minute reconsideration of exactly where i m hyperlinking to or whom i m arguing with i m finding but is that floating your boats i therefore tentatively invite feedback from anyone that might wish to give it for example i have categories set up many of which i hardly use for currently reading mini reviews and outraged spluttering general medieval i e this is not really my area anglo saxons which only used to be my area carolingians catalonia charters crusades i keep forgetting this is there england i do live there feudalism islamic crescent picts spain humour for want of a better word next paper is due advertisements and panic now working on doesn t everyone use the web as a sounding board nowadays and uncategorized and these apart from the last are sort of the areas that i know my way in a bit some more than a bit if you have no other feedback let me ask you would you like to see more use of any of these and if so which or some other if there seems to be some definite movement i ll try and come up with a que sais je kind of post or two or some recent relevance if not i ll assume things are probably ok as they re going but thankyou in advance if you do have feedback to add also in a metablog kind of way hey carolingian nice to meet you but dammit next time i buy the lunch all right 11 comments posted in uncategorized feudal transformations iv posted on 14 august 2007 leave a comment more josep maría salrach this time from the older procés de feudalització where i find him observing that both before the feudal revolution say 950 and after it say 1070 the count is in charge of the nobility who run his castles for him although there is as you will have observed from the previous post something of a blip between times the difference is in the way the link works beforehand the count is the representative of the public power the power enshrined in the law as the princeps delegated from the king and the nobles are agents whose title is constituted by their office that he gives them afterwards the relation is more two way an agreed sharing of power that leaves the noble the count s vassal actually this means that the count has more power over the vassal as the vassal owes not just the castle if requested but also military service and most importantly homage which has nasty consequences if broken whereas before the count s power was more or less restricted to the taking back of the officer s honores if he even could but the exchange is that the count has to give away more power leaving the vassal more or less independent in a territory that had once paid the count dues and renders which are now going to the vassal both sides give more to get more now of course some might say that the carolingians imposed universal oaths of homage with theoretical penalties of death for transgressors the local nobles were always more or less invulnerable in their heartlands unless ousted by force and that generally less changes here than salrach implies except in the field of theory and rules but as ever i m interested to see the change described so clearly the big problem remains that we are looking at a lot of changes altogether which are not necessarily associated by nature some day i ll write it some day leave a comment posted in catalonia currently reading feudalism of course you realise this means war posted on 8 august 2007 14 comments the blogging world seems to be on vacation or in work panic so i guess i have to contribute some content of my own and i actually do have a fair bit of stuff queued up so here is the largest to chew on i try and draw a line in the sand with my work that stops me going beyond 1030 because after that the evidence i use changes shape and also multiplies in volume to an unmanageable size how modernists ever manage to generalise i don t understand anyway this should also mean according to the accepted chronology which is too compressed that i miss the particularly thorough going case of feudal revolution that catalonia has from 1041 onwards but a few days ago i was because of chapters that start before and end after reading that stuff again and got a fresh sense of what an incredible story it is one of those that makes you wonder if the real point of this discipline isn t to provide us with a lifetime of material for film scripts but i m not going to write the script so i thought i d try and briefly tell the story from before count marquis ramon borrell of barcelona succeeded in 993 the nobles of catalonia had been being established by the counts in an ever increasing number of castles some were new and some like olèrdola just above there had been on and off going concerns since the bronze age the idea was both to keep the nobles support and use their efforts in the counts wider endeavours of establishing authority networks in frontier areas and thus making themselves much richer and also to provide a defence against occasional raids from the muslim south for which the counts didn t have to provide entirely by themselves ramon borrell however along with his young and spirited wife ermessenda with whom he seems to have made a formidable team raised the game firstly just by acting more royally and concentrating affairs on the palace but secondly and mostly by renewing war on the now disintegrating caliphate of al andalus and beginning to haul huge tributes in muslim gold into his prinicipality which is how he could afford to increase his personal splendour and build masses of castles to hand out to the leaders of his armies and so on he and his father had built a juggernaut because everywhere else in ex frankish europe as the peasant economy slowly begins to boom and the gain from being able to exploit it goes up such nobles were throwing off trappings of subjection to higher authority and making themselves princes in their lands beyond whom there was no recourse but as long as ramon borrell and his brother count ermengol of more northerly urgell and after his death on campaign in 1010 his son of the same name could keep the wars happening and the gold coming in to their advantage it was a juggernaut they could ride ramon borrell seems to have been playing an ottonian kind of game whereby he used status play to open up the gap between him and the steadily richer nobility to justify his ex royal authority he does appear phrasing it like that anyway this is not the story this is just what you need to know to understand how the story unrolls the other thing you need to know is that traditionally this was a society built around public structures of authority i don t know how far i believe that they were important still but the counts protected a system of courts and judicial recourse that operated instead of a feud system of private wars the peasantry were still armed and dangerous and like the rich worldly and administratively active church looked to the counts to keep them independent most castles were held from the counts whose job defence was and who were obeyed because of that necessity but elsewhere society was more and more becoming a tissue of oaths and promises regulating the links between persons where older structures were failing how much of that is to blame for what happens next is a whole big debate and i m bored with preamble now so in 1018 ramon borrell who raided córdoba itself in 1010 while putting a candidate for the caliphal throne onto it in rivalry with a castilian backed one says salrach this isn t how the león centric lomax writes it up at all 1 and has since then extracted gold in bulk from lleida and tortosa repeatedly even if a second coup in 1017 went the other way though the catalans still got paid to leave in 1018 as i say he dies he leaves behind him a frequently ill son berenguer ramon to take over under the rather enveloping care of countess ermessenda that afore mentioned spirited wife who is left the county of girona as her own dowager portion for whatever reasons berenguer does not undertake war on the same level and the few campaigns he does try fail embarassingly this means that the money that is holding him and his mother above the pack stops coming in leaving only ideology and on the border where the castles are in the hands of people on whom no one checks that doesn t count for as much as what you can get by for example taking over the counts revenues and estates yourself and maybe giving them back if and when he makes you with enough money after all you can keep a judicial process going on for a long time during which time you re taking all the taxes so the edges start to get nibbled off berenguer ramon s authority despite mum s increasingly grand and ecclesiastical court which is itself decreasing his power by hiving one of the main counties off out of his control and even if this could be stopped by close and active supervision and also active campaigning that isn t happening things fall apart the centre cannot hold and all that in 1035 berenguer ramon shuffles off his unhappy mortal coil and his sons inherit a partitioned authority which further reduces their combined clout all are children still and until they come of age grandma ermessenda is left in charge some more a charge that she an old woman by now exercises from the cites of girona and barcelona leaving the frontier to her trusted men and their trusted men without necessarily being able or willing to provide the support they need the sons are in ascending order little guillem who gets the county of osona have a map slightly bigger sanç who gets the new formation of penedès in western barcelona and ramon berenguer who gets the rest except of course girona which is still ermessenda s so actually he gets about half of barcelona and no more watch this boy though in film script terms he is the anakin skywalker 2 most of all he grows up with nobles who live the new way oaths not offices territories not benefices subjects not catchment and thinks like them grandmother ermessenda does not think like this sees such thinking as the erosion of the status and rank that not only she but her tearaway grandson are holding onto she is thus stuck between protecting him and trying to stop him getting out of hand and undermining everything she s trying to keep in trust for when he grows some sense in 1039 in the last years of his minority ramon berenguer blows his teenage top and bands up with the castle holding nobles of the frontier not least a man called mir geribert who is based at olèrdola who is son of a viscount of barcelona and daughter of ramon berenguer s great aunt ramon borrell s sister and thus a fair bit older than ramon berenguer but younger than ermessenda ramon berenguer wants girona back but the nobles are hoping for more and so ermessenda is able to strip her grandson of his support mainly by agreeing to negotiate she hands over some fortresses ramon berenguer simmers down the nobles give up on him disgusted the result is increasing discontent until in 1041 in which year ramon berenguer is 21 and officially inherits his counties mir geribert and his allies effectively secede he calls himself prince of olèrdola takes over ramon berenguer s and sanç s properties wherever he can and invades the franchises areas of judicial self government awarded and until now protected by the counts ramon berenguer s response is hampered by the fact that really this is brother sanç s territory but sanç is about fourteen at this point and not reacting in full lordly outrage also the men who bring ramon berenguer his troops when he goes to war are partly involved and on two campaigns one against the count of neighbouring cerdanya and one more dangerously against al andalus he may only be in his twenties but he knows where the answer lies his forces suffer serious desertions in barcelona itself though the citizens arm themselves in his support and pledge him vast sums of money it still isn t enough to stop the actual bishop and the viscount mir geribert s cousins both besieging him in the comital palace although he does at least manage to turn the battle round and capture them he can t however get consensus enough together to punish them he just doesn t have the whole hearted support the count of urgell can t help because he is under attack from muslim saragossa and has a set of peasant communes in andorra taking the joint opportunity to secede cerdanya is ranged against barcelona t...
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