German History 2010 Bachrach 399 423

German History Vol. 28, No. 4, pp.
399423
The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal

Administration under King Henry I, 919936
David S. Bachrach
For more than a century, German-speaking scholars have worked diligently to portray
the eastern portions of the Carolingian empire, forged by Charlemagne (768814), as
administratively backward as contrasted with the West. In very important ways, this
scholarly effort was a manifestation of German hostility towards France arising from the
Napoleonic wars and, looking even further back, from Louis XIVs wars of conquest in
the Rhineland. The Carolingian empire, built on Roman administrative and fiscal
foundations, was seen as the precursor to France. German scholars, embarrassed by
Germanys failure to develop as a nation state along the lines of its more westerly
competitors, sought refuge in the romantic-nationalist ideology of the free Germanic
warrior, resistant to the civilizing domination of Rome.1 This ideological justification
for Germanys special path (Sonderweg), although now long removed from its initial
inspiration, still underlies much of contemporary scholarship regarding the government
of early medieval Germany.2 The burden of this essay is to call into question this
dichotomy between East and West, by showing the continuation of Carolingian-style
written administration during the reign of the first Saxon king, Henry I.
In her seminal and fundamentally revisionist study of the role that the written word
played in the administration of the Carolingian empire as a whole under Charlemagne
and Louis the Pious, and of the West Frankish Kingdom under Charles the Bald, Janet
Nelson stresses that royal power depended on the accurate and systematic descriptio of the
royal fisc. This included both those resources under direct royal control (dominium) and
those that had been granted as benefices (beneficia).3 With regard to the West, Nelson
disputes the rather pessimistic view of F.L. Ganshof that documents were rarely used by
counts or comital subordinate officials (vicarii) to provide detailed reports to royal missi
who were sent from the court.4 With specific regard to the requirement, set out in
1 For a detailed discussion of the development of German nationalism in the early modern period, see the valuable
recent study by Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der
Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Gttingen, 2005); and the review by David S. Bachrach in Sixteenth Century
Journal, 39 (2008), pp. 31618.
2 Regarding the centrality of the Sonderweg model for studies of the German middle ages, particularly during
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Timothy Reuter, The Medieval German Sonderweg?: The Empire and its
Rulers in the High Middle Ages, in Anne J. Duggan (ed.), Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe (Exeter, 1993),
pp. 179211.
3 Janet L. Nelson, Literacy in Carolingian Government, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early
Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 25896, here p. 27274.
4 Missi were officials who acted as an extension of the royal will at local level, executing royal commands and solving
problems in the royal interest as they understood it.
The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
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I. Introduction
400 David S. Bachrach
5 Ibid, p. 285.
6 Ibid, p. 294.
7 Nelson, Literacy, p. 294; and Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London,
1979), p. 102 for the quotation, and Leyser, Ottonian Government, English Historical Review, 96 (1981), pp. 721
53, repr. in Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 9001250 (London, 1982), pp. 68101.
8 Georg Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 6 (2nd edn, ed. G. Seeliger, Berlin, 1896), p. 323 ff. For Waitzs
observation concerning a lack of higher supervision over economic affairs, see Waitz, Deutsche
Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 8 (2nd edn, Kiel, 1878), pp. 21618. For further expressions of these same views, see
Otto Brunner, Moderner Verfassungsbegriff und mittelalterliche Verfassungsgeschichte, Mitteilungen des Instituts
fr sterreichische Geschichtsforschung (MIG), Ergnzungs-Band, 14 (1939), pp. 51328, repr. in Hellmut Kmpf
(ed.), Herrschaft und Staat im Mittelalter (Wege der Forschung, 2, Darmstadt, 1956), pp. 119; Heinrich Mitteis,
Land und Herrschaft. Bemerkungen zu dem gleichnamigen Buch O. Brunners, Historische Zeitschrift, 163 (1941),
pp. 25581, 47189; Hagen Keller, Grundlagen ottonischer Knigsherrschaft, in Karl Schmid (ed.), Reich und
Kirche vor dem Investiturstreit: Vortrge beim wissenschaftlichen Kolloquium aus Anla des achtzigsten Geburtstag
von Gerd Tellenbach (Sigmaringen, 1985), pp. 1734; and Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800
1056 (London, 1991), pp. 89 and 211.
9 Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 6 (2nd edn), p. 330. M. Stimming, Das deutsche Knigsgut im 11. und 12.
Jahrhundert, I. Teil: Die Salierzeit (Berlin, 1922), p. 28, notes Waitzs observations and, in this context (p. 29), argues
that it would have been impossible for King Henry III (10391056) to have made grants of one-ninth or other fractions of royal income without having a rather good idea of what the total sum of royal revenues was from particular
royal estates of the fisc. This same observation has been made more recently by Neil Middleton, Early Medieval Port
Customs, Tolls and Controls on Foreign Trade, Early Medieval Europe, 13 (2005), pp. 31358 with regard to the
distribution of income from royal tolls.
capitularies, that vicarii were to make detailed reports regarding the beneficia in their
districts for transmission to the royal court, Nelson observes: it is harder still to doubt
that counts and vicarii often communicated with each other in writing.5
By contrast, however, with her positive assessment of the successful use of the written
word in the West to maintain up-to-date and detailed records regarding the status of
fiscal resources, including those granted out as benefices, Nelson accepts the model of a
very limited use of the written word for the Carolingian East, and its Ottonian successor
state.6 Here, Nelson draws attention to Karl Leysers contention that Ottonian
government operated with a modest array of institutions and very little use of written
documents.7
Ironically, Leyser himself intended his study on Ottonian government to serve as a
rather more positive portrayal of the use of the written word, and institutions that
depended on the written word, than had hitherto been the norm in German
historiography. The great nineteenth-century constitutional scholar, Georg Waitz, who
had actively sought continuities between Carolingian and Ottonian governmental
practices, was frustrated by the lack of normative, capitulary legislation for the tenthcentury East that set out models of how a written administration should operate under
the Saxon kings.8 Waitz did argue that there was some kind of central collection office for
tax and toll revenues and that Otto I (936973) probably did have information about the
gross sums of money that were coming into the royal treasury.9 Nevertheless, it was
Waitzs pessimistic conclusions regarding continuity of Carolingian administrative
practices, which focused largely on the lack of surviving capitularies, that dominated
subsequent German-language scholarship.
Indeed, Marc Bloch, working from a francophone perspective, critically observed in
1928 that scholars specializing in early and high medieval German history virtually
The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal Administration under King Henry I, 919936 401
ignored the question of administration, especially when contrasted with the concerted
efforts of their French contemporaries to grapple with administrative problems.10 Bloch
emphasized that
There is almost always something disappointing about reading two histories one after the otherhowever
excellent they may bedealing on the one hand with the institutions of medieval France, and on the other
with those of Germany during the same period. You seem to be looking on at a desultory dialogue in which
neither of the speakers ever gives an answer exactly meeting the requirements of his partner. One of the two
books points to the problem and solves it in a certain way. But when you turn to the second book you find
most of the time that the problem is not even mentioned.11
Despite the continuity of the idea of empire and the model of Charlemagne, everything that was of particular importance for high Carolingian imperial organizationcentrality, office, law-giving and writing
was absent in its successor states. Indeed they simply came to an end.12
Writing a decade later, Gerd Althoff defends the provocative subtitle of Die Ottonen:
Knigsherrschaft ohne Staat, by simply asserting the total absence of administration of any
type, much less written administration, in the German kingdom.13 This study, which is a
popularizing adaptation of Althoff s collection of essays, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter:
Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde, takes as its central premise that the Weberian model of
the state is the appropriate benchmark against which to compare the Ottonian and
Salian kingdoms. According to this standard, Althoff relegates them to the status of
archaic societies.14 The corresponding anglophone tradition is neatly summed up by
John Bernhardt in his book on the Ottonian royal itinerary:
Since the Ottonian and the Salian kings lacked the governmental infrastructure of the Carolingian kingdom
and empire at the height of its power, they governed less through their representatives or written instructions
sent out from the court and generally had to make their will manifest in person. There is little doubt that the
Ottonian kings made less use of the written word in government than the Carolingians had at the height of
10 March Bloch, A Problem in Comparative History: The Administrative Classes in France and in Germany, in
Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J.E. Anderson (Berkeley, 1967),
pp. 4481. The article was first published in Revue historique de droit franais et tranger, 7 (1928), pp. 4691.
11 Bloch, Problem, p. 44.
12 Hagen Keller, Zum Charakter der Staatlichkeit zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmittelalterlichen
Herrschaftsausbau, Frhmittelalterliche Studien, 23 (1989), pp. 24864, here p. 257. For a slightly more positive
assessment of the existence of a royal administration, similar to that set out by Leyser in Ottonian Government,
see Hans-Werner Goetz, Staatlichkeit, Herrschaftsordnung und Lehnswesen im Ostfrnkischen Reich als
Forschungsprobleme, in Il Feudalesimo nellalto Medioevo (Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sullalto
medioevo, 47, Spoleto, 2000), pp. 85147, here p. 123.
13 Gerd Althoff, Die Ottonen: Knigsherrschaft ohne Staat (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 8.
14 On this point, see the review of Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und
Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), by Howard Kaminisky in Speculum, 74 (1999), pp. 68789, who points out not only
Althoffs numerous mistranslations of Latin texts, but also his methodologically flawed practice of opportunistically
choosing passages that are taken out of context.
In the present orthodox view, however, even Leysers modest and impressionistic effort to
revise the tendency observed by Bloch in the German historiographical tradition has
largely been rejected by German scholars over the past three decades. In a 1989 article in
Frhmittelalterliche Studien, the prominent specialist in Ottonian history, Hagen Keller,
states explicitly:

their power. In fact, the east Frankish kingdom of the Carolingians already used the written word in government less than did its west Frankish or Italian contemporaries.15
Very recently, this view was reiterated by Henry Mayr-Harting, who described the
scholarly consensus in this manner:
Ottonian politics is not easy for us moderns to grasp. Quite apart from its being so much about inheritances
and feuds within or between kinships, it largely lacked anything which we can recognize as an administration or a bureaucracy, such as we historians have tended to think of as the spine of any body politic which
they study. Ottonian rule was not, in Max Webers terminology, bureaucratic but patrimonial.16
These claims that Ottonian kings made limited use, or indeed no use at all, of written
documents and written administrative practices are particularly disconcerting in the face
of a very different consensus among specialists in the study of the royal fisc in eastern
portions of the erstwhile Carolingian empire. Many German scholars have established
that the models of estate management that were employed by Charlemagne, Louis the
Pious and their successors in the West, based on extensive written records, were also used
by both the eastern Carolingians and by the Ottonians up to the end of the reign of
Henry II in 1024. Of central importance in this context is the general argument that the
organizational model set out in capitulary de villis, composed perhaps as early as 771 and
certainly before 800, was the norm in administrative affairs and not merely normative.
In 1960, Wolfgang Metz synthesized a decade of research in his enormously influential
Das Karolingische Reichsgut.17 He demonstrated conclusively, contra Alfons Dopsch, that
capitulary de villis was meant for the empire as a whole rather than for Aquitaine.18 He
also demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that this capitulary provided
information about the basis on which royal fiscal properties were organized and managed
over the course of the ninth century.19
As Metz made clear, the orders set out in capitulary de villis resulted in the making of
numerous inventories.20 In this context, Metz emphasizes that regular inventory lists of
royal estates that were under direct royal supervision (dominium) were drawn up in a
manner consistent with capitulary de villis.21 In addition, Metz noted that the king
required detailed information about fiscal properties that had been granted out as
benefices, and also about church holdings, principally for military planning purposes.22
15 John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany c. 9361075 (Cambridge,
1993), p. 5.
16 Henry Mayr-Harting, Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany: The View from Cologne (Oxford, 2007), p. 3.
17 Wolfgang Metz, Das karolingische Reichsgut: Eine Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung
(Berlin, 1960).
18 Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 1872, who followed here Klaus Verhein, Studien zu Quellen zum Reichsgut der
Karolingerzeit, Pt 1, Deutsches Archiv fr Geschichte des Mittelalters, 10 (1954), pp. 31394; and part 2 ibid., 11
(1955), pp. 33392.
19 Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 1772, 22027, and passim. In many respects, Metzs studies were developed on the basis of
the insights of Verhein, Studien, Pts 1 and 2.
20 Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 1872, who followed here Verhein, Studien, Pts 1 and 2.
21 Metz, Reichsgut, p. 17.
22 Ibid, p. 19.
II. The German Historiographical Tradition Regarding the Royal Fisc
We are very well informed about the organization of individual royal villae by the priceless Capitulare de villis
vel curtis (sic) imperii ... that current scholarship correctly regards as having been applicable to the entire
Frankish kingdom with the exception of Italy, against the more restrictive thesis of Dopsch, who saw this text
as being applicable only to Aquitaine.26
In his discussion of the tenth century, Brhl notes the unfortunate absence of a royal
document comparable to capitulary de villis, but argues, on the basis of surviving monastic
administrative records, that the internal organization of the royal fisc remained largely stable
under the Ottonians.27 Brhl specifically drew attention to the comparative analysis by
Bruno Heusinger of the administrative structures set out in capitulary de villis and the fiscal
administration that can be identified in the mid-twelfth century Tafelgut Verzeichnis, which was
issued by either Conrad III (11371152) or Frederick I (11521190).28 Heusinger concluded
that the models of royal estate management had not changed in any significant manner.29
Wolfgang Metz came to the same conclusion in his comparison of the two documents.30
23 Ibid, pp. 1921 for a list of these inventories.

24 Wolfgang Metz, Zur Erforschung des karolingischen Reichsgutes (Darmstadt, 1971), p. 21, So steht Capitulare de
Villis zeitlich am Anfang grozgiger und wegweisender Gterbeschreibungen, von denen nur einige Beispiele fr
das Reichsgut der Karolingerzeit erhalten sind.
25 Carlrichard Brhl, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium Regis: Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Knigtums in
Frankenreich und in den frnkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vom 6. bis zur Mitte des
14. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Cologne and Graz, 1968), here p. 68.
26 Brhl, Fodrum, Gistum, p. 81, ber die Organization der einzelnen kniglichen villae sind wir genauestens unterrichtet durch das unschtzbare Capitulare de villis vel curtis (sic) imperii ... , das von der Forschung heute wieder mit
Recht fr das gesamte Frankenreich mit Ausnahme Italiens in Anspruch genommen wird gegen die restrictive These
von Dopsch, der es in seinem Geltungsbereich auf Aquitanien beschrnkt.
27 Brhl, Fodrum, Gistum, pp. 18081.
28 Ibid., esp. n. 257.
29 Ibid., with reference to Bruno Heusinger, Servitium Regis in der deutschen Kaiserzeit. Untersuchungen ber die
wirtschaftlichen Verhltnisse des deutschen Knigtums 9001250, Archiv fr Urkundenforschung, 8 (1923),
pp. 26159, here p. 123.
30 Wolfgang Metz, Das Tafelgutverzeichnis des rmischen Knigs und das Problem des servitium regis in der
Stauferzeit, mit besonderer Bercksichtigung Sachsens, Niederschsische Jahrbuch fr Landesgeschichte, 32
(1960), pp. 78107, here p. 106.
It is exceptionally important that several of these lists, which contained severely timeconditioned information, have fortuitously survived.23 The survival of these inventories
is particularly significant because they demonstrate the actual implementation of royal
legislation. It should be emphasized, however, that neither Metz nor his supporters
argued that the regulations in capitulary de villis were slavishly copied and cited by royal
estate managers. Rather, as Metz emphasized in his 1971 recapitulation of the essential
arguments in his earlier monograph: Thus, capitulary de villis stood temporally at the
beginning of a period of extravagant and path-breaking property descriptions of which
only a few examples survive regarding the royal fisc of the Carolingian period.24
The general thrust of Metzs argumentthat the administrative models set out in
capitulary de villis actually were utilized by estate managersreceived immediate
acceptance from scholars who focused on the royal fisc. Carlrichard Brhl, in his magnum
opus, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium, emphasized that the system of organization set out in
capitulary de villis applied not only in the West, but also in the eastern regions of the
Regnum Francorum.25 Brhl wrote with regard to capitulary de villis:
31 An urbar is a property record that includes a description of the property and its contents (human, animal, and inanimate) as well as, on occasion, a description of the production of the estates in question.
32 Michael Gockel, Karolingische Knigshfe am Mittelrhein (Gttingen, 1970), p. 27, Die gewonnenen Ergebnisse
mssen in jedem Fall anhand der einschlgigen Kapitularien, vor allem des Capitulare de villis berprft werden,
wobei jedoch weitgehend programmatischer Charakter nicht auer acht gelassen werden darf. In this context,
Gockel cites Metz as the dominant authority on the importance of the capitulary de villis and its use in interpreting
surviving urbaren.
33 Gockel, Knigshfe, p. 31, die Inventarisierung und Beschreibung des Knigsgutes fr die knigliche
Zentralverwaltung nach einheitlichem Programm vorgenommen wurde.
34 Ibid, p. 31. Here he cites Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 17ff; and the use of the phrase in villa N.N. inveniuntur from the
Lorsch Reichsurbar that corresponds to the phrase invenimus in eo loco that is used in the brevium exempla.
The inquest or inquisitio was a commonplace under Charlemagnes rule so that its continued use in the middle
Rhineland during the ninth and tenth century is another index of continuity of royal administration. For a list of orders requiring royal missi to carry out surveys and inquests in regard to beneficia held by vassi dominici, see
A. Boretius and V. Krause (eds), Capitularia regnum Francorum, 2 vols (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [henceforth
MGH]: Leges Sectio II, Hanover, 1883, 1897 [henceforth Cap. reg. Fr.]), no. 18, ch. 5; no. 23, ch. 35; no. 24, chs 1, 6;
no. 33, ch. 6; no. 34, chs 1011; no. 46, chs 67; no. 49, ch. 4; no. 59, ch. 3; no. 62, ch. 9; no. 63, ch. 9; no. 64, ch.
14; no. 65, ch. 9; no. 77, ch. 4; no. 80, chs 57.
35 Gockel, Knigshfe, p. 72. He also emphasizes (p. 82) continuity in forest administration from the Carolingian to the
Ottonian period.
Marianne Schalles-Fischer, Pfalz und Fiskus Frankfurt. Eine Untersuching des frnkisch-deutschen Knigtums
(Gttingen, 1969), p. 326, similarly makes clear in her investigation of the Carolingian fisc in the Frankfurt region
the descriptive value of capitulary de villis for the management of royal resources. She emphasizes that Metzs views
had largely been accepted with specific reference to the latters view that the Carolingian fisc was organized into
very large complexes that were administered by royal officials (Beamte). Schalles-Fischer agreed with Metz regarding
the heuristic value of the capitulary de villis in understanding the administration of the fisc. However, she disagreed
with his view regarding the size of the fiscal units that had their caput in the various royal palaces. She argued instead (p. 326ff) that the palaces were supported a series of autonomously administered fiscal units that had obligations to deliver supplies to the central palace.
Studies in Landeskunde also have validated Metzs conclusions with regard to the
administration of fiscal resources in several of the regions of East Francia and the
subsequent Ottonian kingdom. In investigating Carolingian fiscal resources in the
Rhineland, for example, Michael Gockel emphasizes that the material drawn from
sources such as the Lorsch Reichsurbar,31 which included numerous fiscal properties that
had been granted to this royal monastery, must be assessed in light of the capitularies,
and above all the capitulary de villis, keeping in mind the thoroughly programmatic
character of this text.32 He then concludes, on the basis of a comparison of the text of
the Lorsch Reichsurbar with the procedures set out in capitulary de villis that: the
inventorying and description of the royal fiscal properties for the royal central
administration was carried out following a uniform program.33 Gockel sees this
accounting as resulting from a process of inquisitioroyally directed inquiries that made
use of both documents and the oral testimony of witnesses.34 In addition to the major
task of developing detailed accounts of fiscal production and transmitting these to the
central government, Gockel also argues that Chapter 10 of capitulary de villis, regarding
the establishment of administrative centres for royal forest lands, also can be seen in
effect in the middle Rhineland in the ninth and tenth century.35
Gockels findings were fully in accord with the earlier work of Franz-Josef Heyen that
was focused on the fiscal resources centred on Boppard. Heyen concluded that the
administration of this Rhenish fiscal district was in accord with the models set out by
capitulary de villis and the brevium exempla, the latter having been produced during the reign
of Louis the Pious.36 In this context, Heyen refers specifically to clear evidence of royal
participation in assarting activities in the Boppard fisc.37
In his thorough-going investigation of the Carolingian and Ottonian fiscal resources
in Regensburg and the wider Bavarian regnum,38 Peter Schmid also followed Metz in
identifying capitulary de villis as being the basic model for the administration of royal
fiscal properties that are held in dominium.39 In this context he argued:
Schmid, in a manner similar to that employed by Gockel, then examined contemporary

charters to show the ways in which the models set out in capitulary de villis were employed
in Bavaria. In discussing the actual administration of the Regensburg palace, for
example, Schmid points out that capitulary de villis required that every royal fiscal unit
(curtis) should have a fishpond and that one of the elements of the royal palace complex at
Regensburg was a fishpond (vivarius).41 Schmid similarly points to officials, identified in
ducal and royal charters, who fulfill the functions that are set out for such men in
capitulary de villis.42 These include, for example, the royal officials (actores) of Louis the
German (840876) who serve in the royal villae,43 and a royal agent (ministerialis regis),
employed by the same king, who served as supervisor of the royal forest lands.44
On the basis of a thorough examination of the Staffelsee Urbar, Konrad Elmshuser
emphasizes the influence of royal administrative models on eastern ecclesiastical estate
management, particularly in the region of Upper Bavaria. He argues specifically that:
the resulting description of the bishopric of Augsburg on the basis of its number of
mansi demonstrates an actual overview of the obligations imposed by the crown.45 The
same observation was made with regard to Fuldas administrative documents by Ulrich
Weidinger.46
36 F.J. Heyen, Reichsgut im Rheinland. Die Geschichte des kniglichen Fiskus Boppard (Bonn, 1956), p. 65.
37 Ibid.
38 A regnum was a subordinate territiral unit of the German kingdom governed by a duke (dux).
39 Schmid, Regensburg, p. 230, who cites Wolfgang Metz, Zur Erforschung des karolingischen Reichsgutes, p. 8ff for
the central importance of capitulary de villis.
40 Peter Schmid, Regensburg: Stadt der Knige und Herzge im Mittelalter (Kallmnz, 1977), p. 230.
41 Ibid., p. 248.
42 Ibid., p. 254.
43 A villa was a fiscal unit, and could vary widely in type and size.
44 Discussion by Schmid, ibid., p. 254. The charters in which these men appear are Die Urkunden der Ludwigs des
Deutschen, Karlomanns und Ludwigs des Jngeren ed. Paul Kehr (Berlin, 19321934), LdDt 24 and 132.
45 Konrad Elmshuser, Untersuchungen zum Staffelseer Urbar, in Werner Rsener (ed.), Strukturen der
Grundherrschaft im Frhen Mittelalter (2nd edn, Gttingen, 1993), pp. 33569, here p. 352. He cites here, as comparative examples, the Saint Riquier and Saint-Wandrille polyptyques.
46 Regarding royal influence on the development of Fuldas estate administration, see Ulrich Weidinger,
Untersuchungen zur Grundherrschaft des Klosters Fulda in der Karolingerzeit, in Rsener, Strukturen der
Grundherrschaft, pp. 24765, here p. 247.
Even if it is the case that the administration of the demesne was not present everywhere at the same time and
in the same manner, we have before us a model of the way in which the Carolingians conceived the administration of the royal fiscal properties.40
47 This term identifies a specifically established royal forest with a host of attendant rights and obligations attached
to it.
48 Karl Hauck, Tiergrten im Pfalzbereich, in A. Gauert (ed.), Deutsche Knigspfalzen: Beitrge zu ihrer historischen
und archologischen Erforschungen, vol. 1 (Gttingen, 1963), pp. 3074.
49 Hauck, Tiergrten, pp. 3334.
50 Hauck, Tiergrten, pp. 35 and 39. Regarding the zoo belonging to the palace at Regensburg, also see Schmid,
Regensburg, p. 248.
51 Hauck, Tiergrten, p. 51; and Liudprand of Cremona, Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, c.37 in P. Chiesa
(ed.), Liudprandi Cremonensis Opera Omnia: Antapodosis, Homelia Paschalis, Historia Ottonis, Relatio de Legatione
Constantinopolitana (Turnhout, 1998).
52 Ironically, in his role as a promoter of archaeological studies, Walter Schlesinger helped to establish at Gttingen the
scholarly tradition of Pfalzenforschung which led to many of the investigations of the Carolingian and Ottonian fisc
that shed light on the continuing importance of written documents in the administration of fiscal resources. See, in
this context, Walter Schlesinger, Verfassungsgeschichte und Landesgeschichte, Hessisches Jahrbuch fr
Landesgeschichte, p. 3 (1953), p. 134; and Schlesinger, Merseburg: Versuch eines Modells knftiger
Pfalzbearbeitungen, in Deutsche Knigspfalzen, vol. 1, pp. 158206.
53 Regarding this tradition, see Hans-Werner Goetz, Die Wahrnehmung von Staat und Herrschaft im frhen
Mittelalter, in Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz (eds), Staat im frhen Mittelalter (Vienna, 2006),
pp. 3958, here p. 39; and Steffen Patzold, Die Bischfe im karolingischen Staat: Praktisches Wissen ber die
politische Ordnung im Frankenreich des 9. Jahrhunderts, in Airlie et al., Staat im frhen Mittelalter, pp. 13362.
More focused studies of particular aspects of royal administration also have made
clear the continuing importance of the model of estate administration set out in
capitulary de villis. Karl Hauck, for example, examined the implications of capitulary
de villis with regard to the maintenance of wild animal preserves, distinct from ther royal
forest (foresta47) which had to be maintained by royal officials and their staffs.48 Hauck
makes clear the ongoing validity of the requirements in this chapter by noting that these
duties were subsequently emphasized by Louis the Pious in 821, who prohibited royal
officials from conscripting illegally the labour of free men to help maintain the fences
that kept the wild animals within the parks.49 Hauck also emphasizes that an animal park
(brogilus) continued to be maintained at each palace, western and easternFrankfurt,
Regensburg and Aachen, for examplethroughout the ninth century.50 The royal
courtier and later bishop, Liudprand of Cremona (died 972), observed that Otto I also
maintained animal parks (brolia), albeit without the breed of wild ass kept by the
Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II (963969).51
In the light of this broad agreement among specialists in the history of the royal fisc
about the continuity of Carolingian administrative models into the ninth and tenth
century, it is certainly a problem that specialists in royal history (Reichsgeschichte) have not
integrated this information into their own works. In this context, it is worthy of note that
the view that administration, even of the vestigial type, was completely absent in the East
developed out of an entirely different scholarly tradition than that focused on the fisc.
This tradition is the so-called New Constitutional History as practised by historians
including Theodor Mayer, Otto Brunner and Walter Schlesinger from the 1930s to the
1970s.52 This school sought to identify the specifically Germanic character of the early
medieval state.53 Emphasizing a move away from the institutional model codified by
Georg Waitz, the new constitutional history insisted on a state model (Staatlichkeit) based
on the Germanic concept of lordship (Herrschaft), characterized by personal ties between
III. Henry Is Fisc in Carolingian Perspective

Perhaps the strict separation of political and fiscal history of the type practised by many
current scholars in German medieval history is not so surprising in the light of the
institutional divisions between the historiographical traditions treating the monarchy
and those focused on regional history (Landesgeschichte), and the even greater separation
between royal and local history.58 The vast scholarly production in the area of economic
history at the regional and local level, of which studies of the fisc are but one important
component, would require that those writing the political narrative of the king and court
assimilate a very large corpus of scholarship for scores of regions and localities. In
54 Goetz, Wahrnehmung, p. 39, describes the model established by the new constitutional school as emphasizing
the aristocratic community of the king and nobility at the expense of institutional or territorially-based organizational principles.
55 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte sterreichs im Mittelalter
(4th edn, Vienna, 1959), with discussion of this view by Patzold, Bischfe, p. 133.
56 Walter Schlesinger, Die Entstehung der Landesherrschaft. Untersuchung vorwiegend nach mitteldeutschen Quellen
(Dresden, 1941 and repr. Darmstadt, 1964), p. 113, Der antike Staat ist gemeines Wesen, der germanisch-deutsche
Staat ist Herrschaft, with discussion by Patzold, Bischfe, p. 133. The term ein ethisches gemeines Wesen, was
developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (died 1804).
57 It should be noted that there is some difference of opinion between Althoff and Goetz regarding the Staatlichkeit of
the Ottonian kingdom. While both scholars see the late Carolingian East and its Ottonian successor as being fundamentally without administrative institutions that depended heavily on written texts, Goetz, nevertheless, wishes to
characterize the Ottonian and late Carolingian polities as states. Althoff, by contrast, wishes to deny the status of
stateness (Staatlichkeit) to the Ottonian kingdom. For a detailed discussion of the differences in views on this point,
see Goetz, Wahrnehmung pp. 3958.
58 In his pioneering work on the royal fisc at the local level, F. J. Heyen, Reichsgut im Rheinland. Die Geschichte des
kniglichen Fiskus Boppard (Bonn, 1956), p. 24, pointed out that Reichsgutforschung lies at the nexus of
Reichsgeschichte, Landesgeschichte and Lokalgeschichte. However, he did so in an effort to justify his research to an
audience that then, as now, was far more focused on the political activities of the king and magnates than upon the
resources that were required for the implementation of their plans and policies.
the lord and his retainers, or the aristocratic association (Herrschaftsverband) of the king and
the nobles.54 Among the more notable elements of the Herrschaft model of government
are its romantic focus on a warrior-nobility, and the concept that administration and laws
were rejected by Germans who would not submit to the restrictions on their freedom that
were part and parcel of the Roman system maintained by the Carolingians. Otto Brunner
argued, for example, that Herrschaft was the contra-positive of a relationship based upon
command and obedience (Befehls-Gehorsamsbeziehung).55
Walter Schlesinger, for his part, asserted that the Germanic kingdom of the East
Carolingians and the Ottonians was fundamentally different from that found in antiquity
and in the Carolingian West. The latter, Schlesinger claimed, maintained many of the
political and institutional concepts and methods of the Roman world. It is in this context
that Schlesinger made his famous claim: The ancient state is based upon a commonality
of being, the Germanic-German state is based upon lordship.56 It is this fundamental
dichotomy between institutions and lordship that has been adopted by scholars including
Althoff, Keller, Bernhardt and Mayr-Harting, mentioned above.57
59 In his recent study of Otto III and Boleslav Chrobry, for example, Johannes Fried, Otto III. und Boleslav Chrobry: Das
Widmungsbild des Aachener Evangeliars der Akt von Gnesen und das frhe polnische und ungarische Knigtum
(2nd rev. exp. edn, Stuttgart, 2001), does not indicate any recognition of the importance of economic or administrative matters to political relations, nor any awareness of the vast literature concerning the royal fisc.
One index of the success of Rosamond McKittericks ideas in changing the scholarly discourse regarding the use of
writing during the early middle ages can be seen in the responses of scholars who once had held an essentially pessimistic view regarding the use of written documents for administrative purposes. See, for example, the dramatically
altered treatment of this topic between the first and second editions of Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to
Written Record, England 10661307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979; Oxford, 1993). In the first edition, Clanchy promoted the long-established view that writing was of little significance on either the continent or in England. By
contrast, in the second edition Clanchy adopts wholesale the views set out by McKitterick in Carolingians and the
Written Word. Now also see the important new study by Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a
European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), esp. pp. 137291.
Other important studies that have drawn attention to the widespread use of written documents for written purposes throughout the Carolingian empire include Mark Mersiowsky, Regierungspraxis und Schriftlichkeit im
Karolingerreich: Das Fallbeispiel der Mandate und Briefe, in Rudolf Schieffer (ed.), Schriftkultur und
Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolinger (Opladen 1996), pp. 10966; Philippe Depreux, The Development of
Charters Confirming Exchange by the Royal Administration (EighthTenth Centuries), in Karl Heidecker (ed.),
Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 4362; Matthew Innis,
Charlemagnes Government, in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), pp.
7189; Eric J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817876 (Ithaca,
2006), pp. 18, 135, 137, 144, 164, 166, 203, 21112, 214, 229, 297, and passim; and most recently, Walter
Goffart, Frankish Military Duty and the Fate of Roman Taxation, Early Medieval Europe, 16 (2008), pp. 16690.
A somewhat different approach is taken by Simon MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles
the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2003), who argues that the capitularies overstate the
centralized nature of the Carolingian government under Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and their western successors. It should be emphasized, however, that MacLean does not investigate the kinds of questions taken up here,
and does not discuss the ways in which the royal government was able to manage and make use of fiscal resources.
For a comparative discussion of MacLeans approach and that of Goldberg, Struggle for Empire, see David A.
Warner, Review Article: Louis the German / Ludwig der Deutsche: New Thoughts on an Old King, Early Medieval
Europe, 16 (2008), pp. 21531.
60 Rosamond McKitterick, Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989). The general tendency of scholars to
see the early middle ages as a period bereft of the use of writing for secular purposes has been subjected to sustained criticism, as noted above, since the publication of McKitterick, Carolingians and the Written Word. For a
specific criticism of this model with a focus on the use of documents by lay people in the eastern regions of the
Regnum Francorum, see Warren Brown, When Documents are Destroyed or Lost: Lay People and Archives in the
Early Middle Ages, Early Medieval Europe, 11 (2002), pp. 33766, here pp. 33738.
scholarship concerning early medieval royal and political history, this process of
assimilation continues to be very rare.59
Concomitantly, it should be emphasized that much of the scholarship on the royal fisc
pre-dated the innovative work in the anglophone tradition on the practical use of written
documents, pioneered by Nelson and Rosamond McKitterick, and the explosion of
research that followed in their wake.60 As a consequence, these early discussions of the
organization and operations of the royal fisc made little reference to the role played by
written documents in its administration, at the local level, in the court, and in
communications between the two in conformity with the model of administration set out
in capitulary de villis. Rather, these fiscal studies were written against a background in
IV. Sources of Information

The sources of information for the Ottonian period, and indeed for the later Carolingian
period particularly in the East, present a significantly different profile from those for the
eighth and early ninth century. For the earlier period, scholars have available a
considerable body of prescriptive material, such as capitulary de villis, discussed in detail
above, but comparatively little descriptive material aside from fortuitously surviving
administrative documents such as the monastic polyptyques and Urbaren, as well as royal
administrative documents such as the brevium exempla, as seen above.
By contrast, the proportion of prescriptive to descriptive sources of information is
reversed for the later Carolingian and Ottonian periods.63 There are far fewer
prescriptive texts, as Brhl, noted above, emphasized in his discussion of the use of the
royal fisc to support the kings itinerary. However, a much larger corpus of descriptive
61 In this context, see Brhl, Fodrum, Gistum, p. 74, who emphasizes the overwhelming absence of the use of the written word in administration (berwiegenden Schriftlosigkeit der Verwaltung) in the Frankish kingdom on the basis of
F.L. Ganshofs earlier and pessimistic work written in the wake of the Second World War. See also the relevant note
in the Appendix to Notes below.
62 For the administrators of the royal fisc, see Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 14455. To gain some insight into the activities of
royal officials, albeit judicial rather than fiscal, at the local level, see Katherine Bullimore, Folcwin of Rankweil: The
World of a Carolingian Local Official, Early Medieval Europe, 13 (2005), pp. 4377.
63 For a detailed discussion of this problem, see Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, Continuity of Written
Administration in the Late Carolingian East c. 887911: The Royal Fisc, Frhmittelalterliche Studien, 42 (2008), pp.
10946.
which writing of all types was believed since Waitz to have played only a very limited role
in the activities of the government.61
In the light of the important scholarship embodied in the studies of the royal fisc,
discussed above, the burden of this paper is to illuminate the ways in which the sources
concerning the reign of Henry I, when read in their proper Carolingian context, shed
light on the ongoing relevance of long-established fiscal administrative institutions. In
this context, it is of central importance to show the crucial role that written documents
continued to play in the management and exploitation of the royal fisc.
The administration of the fisc as whole, however, is far too broad a topic to treat in an
article-length study. In narrowing our focus, it is important to note that traditionally,
scholars have recognized that the land-based estates and other resources of the royal fisc
were divided into two major segments. One group of estates was maintained in the
possession of the king. These were administered directly by his government officials both
at the local level in the villae distributed throughout the countryside and by officials
attached to the central government and based at the royal court, wherever it itinerated.62
A second complex of the kings holdings (facultates), including both royal landed assets
and other resources, belonged to the fisc, but these were held from the king as benefices
by various of his dependents (described as both vassi and fideles). The present study will
focus on the latter of these two elements of the fisc, and consider in detail the question of
how Henry I was able to manage these properties through the use of the written word.
V. Grants of Benefices from the Royal Fisc under Henry I

In November 920, the year after his royal accession, Henry I issued a charter on behalf
of Babo, a vassallus66 of Duke Burchard I of Swabia (917926), in which the king
permitted Babo to retain possession of certain specified properties that he had held up to
that time as a benefice (beneficium).67 Moreover, at the request of Burchard, who had
agreed to subject himself to Henrys authority (ditio) after the Saxon kings lightning
campaign into Swabia in 919, the king permitted Babo henceforth to hold this benefice
as his personal property (in proprium).68
This royal confirmation of Babos possession of the benefice, and further permission
by the king for Babo to possess this property as an allod,69 almost certainly means that the
property, which was located at Singen near Lake Constance, earlier had been granted as
64 For the text of the indiculus, see Ludwig Weiland (ed.), Constitutiones et act publica imperatorum et regum
9111197, vol. 1 (MGH, Hanover, 1893), pp. 63233. Regarding the nature of the indiculus loricatorum, and particularly the fact that the surviving text refers to the reinforcements summoned by Otto II for the campaign in Italy, see
Karl Ferdinand Werner, Heersorganisation und Kriegsfhrung im deutschen Knigreich des 10. und 11.
Jahrhunderts, in Ordinamenti militari in occidente nellalto medioevo (Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano
Sullalto Medievo, 15, Spoleto, 1968), pp. 791843, here p. 825.
65 See, in this regard, Thomas Zotz, Beobachtungen zur kniglichen Grundherrschaft entlang und stlich des Rheins
vornehmlich im 9. Jahrhundert, in Rsener, Strukturen der Grundherrschaft, pp. 74125, here p. 80; and Franz
Staab, Aspekte der Grundherrschaftsentwicklung von Lorsch vornehmlich aufgrund der Urbare des Codex
Laureshamensis, in ibid., pp. 285334.
66 A diminutive of vassus.
67 Theodor Sickel (ed.), Die Urkunden der deutschen Knige und Kaiser: Konrad I., Heinrich I. und Otto I. (Hanover,
18791884). Henrys charters will be identified henceforth as DH, and Otto Is charters will be identified as DO I.
Concerning the charter on behalf of Babo see DH 2.
68 Concerning Henrys campaign into Swabia and Burchards surrender, see Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae Saxoniae,
ed. and trans. Reinhold Rau (Quellen zur Geschichte der schsischen Kaiserzeit, 8, Darmstadt, 1971), 1.27.
69 An allod is a piece of property that is held freely by an individual or corporation. It is not subject to rent.
documents survive. It must be emphasized that administrative documents very frequently

dealt with information that was severely time-conditioned. Consequently, it is only by the
barest of chances that one would expect to find such a text surviving either as an original
document or even as a copy. One such fortuitously surviving text is the indiculus loricatorum,
which was drawn up by Otto IIs chancery in 982 to summon reinforcements from both
ecclesiastical and secular magnates in Italy.64
As a consequence, most of the surviving administrative documents from the reign of
Henry I and, indeed, from the entire tenth century, are to be found as imbedded
fragments within other texts (fragmenta), or as references in extant documents to no longer
surviving texts (perdita). For the most part, these fragmenta and perdita are to be found in
surviving royal charters, and in so-called private charters that were drawn up by private
parties, including secular and ecclesiastical magnates. The prominent administrative
historians,Thomas Zotz and Franz Staab, who have both worked extensively on the
administration of agricultural estates in the Carolingian East and Ottonian kingdoms,
have demonstrated in considerable detail that royal charters provide detailed information
about the management and administration of fiscal properties, including both those
held directly by the king, and those that were granted out as benefices.65
70 DH 2. Babo held the beneficium in the pagus of Hegowe, which formed part of the comitatus of Burchard. Since this
was royal property, the only man with the authority to grant it out as a benefice, other than the king, was Burchard.
Moreover, this grant would only be legal if it were drawn from the resources of Burchards own ministerium. Since
Henry agreed to the transaction, permitted it to stand, and did not comment on its illegal origin in the royal charter,
it seems likely that Burchard had followed the rules on these points.
71 In this context, see, for example, DO I 28, 114, 197, 230, 291 and 387.
72 Cap. reg. Fr., no. 49 ch. 7. In discussing this text, Nelson, Literacy, p. 285, points out that the comital vicarii probably communicated with their superiors in writing when providing details about the state of all of the beneficia in
their regions.
73 Cap. reg. Fr,. no. 49 ch. 4; and Cap. reg. Fr., no. 80 ch. 5. On this point, also see Nelson, Literacy, p. 285.
74 Cap. reg. Fr., no. 49 ch. 4, vel etiam quid unusquisque, postquam hoc facere prohibuimus, in suum alodem ex ipso
beneficio duxit vel quid ibidem exinde operatus est.
75 Cap. reg. Fr., no. 80 ch. 5, ut missi diligenter inquirant et describere faciant unusquisque in suo missatico, quid unusquisque de beneficio habeat vel quot homines casatos in ipso beneficio.
a beneficium to Babo by Burchard out of the properties (ministerium) that Burchard himself
held as a beneficium from the king to support his office as count (comes) of the pagus of
Hegowe along the shores of Lake Constance.70 If this property had been granted as a
benefice to Babo by the previous king, Conrad I, we would expect to see mention of this
earlier royal grant in the charter. It is an even more remote possibility that this benefice
had been granted to Babo out of Burchards own allodial property. There is no evidence
of which this author is aware that Henry I, his predecessors or his successors confirmed
the grant of private land by one secular individual to another. By contrast, royal charters
routinely were issued to confirm the concession by one individual to another, or to a
church, of properties that had been held up to this point as benefices from the royal fisc.71
This grant to Babo by Henry at a royal assembly (placitum) held at Seelheim, located in
the modern Landkreis of Kirchhain near Kassel, therefore sheds light on several aspects
of both institutional and administrative continuity with Carolingian paradigms early in
Henrys reign. First, the grant, which was issued at the request of Burchard, makes it
clear that the Swabian duke wished to regularize and obtain royal sanction for his
subgranting of fiscal property in beneficium. In doing so, Burchard was following the
procedures established by Charlemagne and maintained by his successors for royal fideles
who used part of their beneficia to provide support to their own fideles.72 Specifically, as
Janet Nelson has identified with regard to the West, benefice holders were to work with
the comites, vicarii and royal missi to provide detailed and updated assessments of the status
of fiscal resources currently being held as beneficia.73
In the context of Babos possession of fiscal property as a beneficium, two points are of
particular importance. First, earlier under Charlemagne, Carolingian government
legislation explicitly forbade the unilateral transformation of a benefice into an allod by
the holder of the beneficium.74 Thus, Burchard was required by law to seek royal
permission on behalf of Babo for the transformation of this beneficium into property held
in proprium. Second, each holder of a beneficium was required to provide specific details
regarding all of the fiscal resources that he had used to establish his own fideles as housed
men (casati) from the material basis of his beneficium, including the location and
administrative jurisdiction in which the property was located.75 As Henrys decision in
this case makes clear, he or his officials were satisfied that Burchards description of the
76 Not insignificantly, the grant identifies the property by villa, pagus and comital jurisdiction.
77 Regarding the thoroughness of this checking process and its importance for assuring a regular stream of supplies to
the king and court, see Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 21013, 23132. It is clear that the inquisitio process often relied on
oral testimony rather than exclusively on the written word. In this context, see the valuable overview of the process
of evaluating property claims using both written documents and oral testimony in Patrick Geary, Land, Language
and Memory in Europe 7001100, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 9 (1999), pp. 16984.
78 See DH 35.
79 Ibid., totam marcham illam ad matricem aecclesiam in Breitinga spectantem, sicut per fideles viros cum iurisiurandi
affirmatione circumducta est. With regard to the widespread practice of interviewing knowledgeable men about
the boundaries and contents of properties, see Geary, Land, Language and Memory, esp. pp. 17882, for a discussion of this practice east of the Rhine during Charlemagnes reign.
beneficium that was granted to Babo conformed with the records possessed by the royal
government.76
The very fact that Burchard found it necessary to follow these procedures sheds yet
further light, from an administrative perspective, on the written information that was
available to Henrys fiscal officials regarding the state of the royal fisc in Swabia as early
as November 920, which was within a few months of his elevation to royal power. As the
duke of Saxony, Henry certainly had no personal information about the extent or
distribution of royal possessions (facultates) in Swabia before his election as king in May
919. Yet, here was Burchard, appearing at Seelheim, some 400 kilometres north of
Singen, to ask for royal approval, according to law, of an act that undoubtedly took place
before Henry became king less than two years earlier.
The most likely explanation for this course of action is that Burchard was aware that
the details of the royal fiscal holdings, including those facultates that had been granted as
beneficia, were now available to Henry and his advisors once information about these
fiscal properties had been transferred to the new king. Seen from Burchards perspective,
it obviously would have been a much simpler matter to avoid the need to obtain royal
authorization for this property transaction by acting as if the grant to Babo consisted of
Burchards allodial possessions, or by simply hiding the matter completely from the king.
Naturally, such a course of action, which was illegal, was only viable if the duke could be
sure that the king was not aware of the extent and nature of the property designated for
the support of the comital office (ministerium) in Hegowe, and thus would not be able to
detect resources that had been usurped from this ministerium. However, it is clear that
royal agents, through a process of investigation (inquisitio), were able to detect such
usurpations, both in the Carolingian period and in Carolingian successor states, using
both written documents and oral testimony, taken under oath, a procedure of which
Burchard was certainly aware.77
Just such a process of inquisitio is discussed in one of Henry Is charters that concerns
an exchange of properties undertaken between the monastery of Hersfeld and the king
in June 933.78 In this case, the king made a grant of the entire property attached to the
church at Frauen-Breitungen, just as this was delineated by faithful men who affirmed
their findings with an oath.79 There follows a word map of the boundaries of this
property, drawn up on the basis of the inquisitio of the properties conducted by a royal
official who interviewed the faithful men (fideles viri) of the locality.
The clear implication of the behaviour of Burchard at Seelheim in 920, from both an
institutional and administrative perspective, is that the duke believed Henry I had access
80 Widukind, Res gestae, 1.26, Evurhardus adiit Heinricum seque cum omnibus thesauris illi tradidit. The use of the
plural here, i.e. treasuries or treasures, should not be thought to exclude the formal transfer of the impedimenta of
the royal court to the new king. Nor should the reader be under the misapprehension that the treasury, or indeed
royal treasure, was an unlikely repository for administrative documents. The storage of substantial numbers of administrative documents as part of the royal wardrobe in England during the thirteenth century provides an illuminating illustration of the extent to which even heavily bureaucratized states, such as England under Edward I
(12721307), blurred the boundaries between the private royal household and the administrative apparatus of the
state. For a useful guide to the administrative documents from this period, including their means of storage, see
Bryce D. Lyon, A Constitutional and Legal History of Medieval England (2nd edn, New York, 1980); also Bryce Lyon
and Mary Lyon, The Wardrobe Book of 12961297: A Financial and Logistical Record of Edward Is 1297 Autumn
Campaign in Flanders Against Philip IV of France (Brussels, 2004).
According to the elder Vita of Mathilda, MG SS 10, p. 576, when Henry I acceded to the throne he also obtained
totaque regni facultas. Such a statement only makes sense, however, if Henry had information about these
facultates.
81 Schmid, Regensburg, p. 118.
82 Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, 1.27.
83 DH 23.
to information about royal fiscal resources in Swabia. The likely source of this
information were documents stored as part of the royal treasury (thesaurus) handed over
to Henry I by Duke Eberhard of Franconia after the formers royal accession in 919. It
seems likely that this treasury included dossiers of written materials detailing the royal
fiscal resources as they were known to exist under Conrad I, Eberhards elder brother,
including those facultates that had been granted out as beneficia.80 Of course Conrad, as
regent of Louis the Child (died 911), had access to all the records of the royal fisc under
the last Carolingian king.
As Peter Schmid has demonstrated, even in the period 916918, when both Duke
Arnulf of Bavaria and Burchard of Swabia were in open revolt against Conrad, the
resources of the royal fisc maintained their distinct royal status and were not allodialized
or confiscated either by the rebellious dukes or their comites.81 As a consequence, not only
did the facultates of the royal fisc remain under royal control de iure, but the rapid
submission of Burchard, and then of Duke Arnulf (921), meant that the de facto royal
control over these fiscal resources was secure as well.82 Burchards need to obtain royal
recognition for Babos beneficium and the request for the grant in proprium is therefore a
clear indication of Henrys possession of detailed information regarding the royal fisc in
Swabia, and consequently of his ability to exercise authority over these properties,
including those that had been granted out as benefices.
As other surviving documents from Henry Is reign make clear, the maintenance of
detailed records available to the king regarding the facultates of the fisc that had been
granted out in beneficium concerned not only property, but also incomes in cash and kind
derived from royal estates. In June 930, for example, King Henry issued a charter in
which he granted as a beneficium one-ninth (pars nona) of the entire revenues of forty-seven
named villae to the canons of St Mary at Aachen.83 This ninth was due to be provided
from the entire production (conlaboratus) of these villae, including specifically ninths of the
grain production (annona), cash payments (census) due from the dependents of the villae, a
ninth of the new-born cattle (pecus), and a ninth of the newborn animals (animantes),
which might include chickens and pigs. The scribe noted in the charter that this grant of
84 DH 23, in annona in censibus pecoribus et cunctis animantibus et omnibus que dici aut nominari possunt compendiis, sicuti in predictorum regum scriptis tenetur
85 Paul Kehr (ed.), Die Urkunden Arnolfs (MGH Diplomata regum Germaniae ex stirpe Karolinorum, 3, Berlin, 1940),
henceforth DA. See DA 31.
86 DA 31, de nominatis iam XLIII villis, de omni conlaboratu dominii nostri et speciali peculiare omnium animantium
et iumentorum seu ex omni censu quarumcumque rerum pars nona a ministris ipsarum villarum, sive in regis
dominium sint sive quibuslibet personis beneficientur, absque negligentia iugiter tribuatur.
87 For a detailed discussion of this supervision of royal fiscal properties, see Bernard S. Bachrach, Charlemagnes Royal
Fisc in Military Perspective, in Felice Lifschitz and Celia Chazelle (eds), Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval
Studies (New York, 2007), pp. 11937, with the relevant literature cited there. With regard to the transmission of
this information to the royal court by the officials of the fisc, as well as by missi, see Nelson, Literacy, p. 281.
one-ninth of the conlaboratus of the villae conformed with the conditions of the grants of
beneficia to St Mary as these had been set out in the documents (scripta) of earlier kings.84
In this context, Henrys grant in 930 to the church of St Mary was a modified version
of a beneficium grant going back to the reign of Lothar II (855869), and updated regularly
by Lothars successors, including Arnulf (887899) and Conrad I (911918). In this case,
Henrys grant included one-ninth of the total revenues (conlaboratus) of four royal villae
that did not appear in Arnulf s earlier grant in 888, thereby making it clear that we are
dealing here with a real-time phenomenon rather than the pro forma confirmation of an
old document.85
In his own confirmation of the earlier grant of the benefice to St Mary in 888, King
Arnulf had called attention to the fact that other royal vassals (quibuslibet personis
beneficientur) already held as benefices some complete villae from whose resources the
church of St Mary was to receive its ninth. Making matters even more complex, other
royal fideles held as benefices some portion of the resources of yet other royal villae, which
were still under direct royal supervision, from which St Mary was to receive a ninth of the
conlaboratus. This information in the royal charter indicates the significant levels of
administrative complexity of which the kings officials were capable. Each of the royal
villae, whether held as benefices or directly supervised by royal officials, consisted of
numerous constituent elements, each of which could be, and were, assigned to separate
recipients as benefices. In this charter, Arnulf also makes it clear that the royal
government maintained the power to give direct orders not only to the stewards (ministri)
who administered the villae that remained under direct royal control, but also to the
ministri of the villae that were held from him as beneficia either in whole or in part.86 This is
particularly important, because the ability to give orders to the stewards of villae that
were held as benefices indicates that the royal government maintained ongoing
supervision over these properties much as Charlemagnes government had done a
century before.87
As would later be true of Henry I, King Arnulf made a grant to St Mary at Aachen of
one-ninth of the annual gross product that included crops, animals and all sources of
monetary income. It is, of course, obvious that in order for the ministri of the forty-three
villae listed in Arnulf s charter to provide the pars nona to St Mary, each minister had to have
a record of the gross product of his villa on an annual basis. This type of account had
been required by Charlemagne and by his successors in both the East and the West,
including Louis the German. Indeed, the concept of gross annual output (omnis
88 Concerning the use of the term conlaboratus as the standard technical termalso used in capitulary de villisfor
the entire production of a villa, see Metz, Reichsgut, pp. 66, 129; and Jean Durliat, De conlaboratu: faux rendements et vraie comptabilit publique lpoque carolingienne, Revue historique de droit franais et tranger, 56
(1978), pp. 44557.
89 On this point, even a scholar such as Stimming, Das deutsche Knigsgut im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, p. 29, who was
pessimistic concerning the use of written records by fiscal officials, saw it as necessary that the king had sound information regarding the resources and income of the fisc so that he could be in a position to grant fixed percentages to
recipients.
90 Thomas Gross and Rudolf Schieffer (eds), De ordine palatii (Hanover, 1980), Ch. 2327, refer to ministri established
at court, and also to ministri without specific offices who were available for missions such as auditing written reports
submitted by the stewards of estates.
91 Concerning industrial production at royal villae in the Ottonian period, see Peter Donat, GebeseeZur Problematik
Ottonischer Knigshfe, in Lutz Fenske (ed.), Deutsche Knigspfalzen: Beitrge zu ihrer historischen und archologischen Erforschung, vol. 4: PfalzenReichsgutKnigshfe (Gttingen, 1996), pp. 11048, here p. 138; Michael
Gockel, Tilleda, in Gockel (ed.), Deutschen Knigspfalzen: Repertorium der Pfalzen, Knigshfe und brigen
Aufenthaltsorte der Knige im deutschen Reich des Mittelalters, vol. 2: Thringen (Gttingen, 2000), pp. 549631,
here p. 553
conlaboratus) was used by the authors of capitulary de villis to denote the production of the
royal estates held by the government no later than the first decade of the ninth century
and perhaps as early as 771.88
For the officials of the church of St Mary to know that they were receiving the
stipulated ninth and not some lesser percentage of the annual production of these villae,
and for the king, whether Arnulf or Henry, to know that his orders had been obeyed,
both parties, the royal court and the beneficiary, needed copies of the annual inventory
of production that the steward was required to compile.89 Further, if Arnulf or Henry
were to know if the required inventory, compiled by the minister of each villa, was accurate,
it was necessary, as Charlemagne had emphasized, for agents from the central
government to check the stewards accounts through an inquest at each villa.90 This, of
course, was the inquest process that was employed by Henry I, as noted above, in 933
with regard to properties exchanged with the monastery of Hersfeld.
Moreover, as with any agricultural enterprise, the omnis conlaboratus of each estate
varied from year to year. Natural contingencies such as droughts, rainfall, cold spells,
heat spells, insect infestations and diseases affecting crops or livestock could all have an
impact on overall production. In addition, some of the sources of revenue from royal
estates came from goods such as honey, clothing or manufactured items that were
produced on a year-round basis.91 As a result, it was necessary not only to make a new
inventory each year, but to keep running totals of production over the course of the year.
In returning to Henrys reconfirmation and expansion of the beneficium held by
St Marys of Aachen, it is important to keep in mind that all of the administrative factors
that influenced Arnulf s knowledge of and control over the royal villae, a portion of
whose resources were granted to the canons in 888, were still in force in 930. Indeed, a
grant made in 935 by Henry to the monastery of Stablo helps illuminate even further the
sophisticated administrative procedures that were employed by the royal government to
ensure continued control over resources that were granted as benefices from the resources
of the royal fisc.
While encamped along the Chiers river, a tributary of the Maas, in June 935, Henry
granted to the monastery of Stablo cash payments (census) that were owed by a group
92 DH 40. The demesne of the royal villa at Jupille, which was an important fiscal property and possibly the birth place
of Pippin III, certainly could not have been cultivated by the 10 mancipia and their children listed in this charter.
Rather, the listing of the names of the members of this particular familia mancipium indicates that the term familia
here is an institutional designation for this group of unfree labourers, defined in opposition to other familiae mancipium who served on the demesne at Jupille, as well as in opposition to groups of semi-free and free royal dependents who held various economic relationships with this villa and its minister.
93 DH 40.
(familia) of unfree dependents (mancipia) who were settled on the important royal villa of
Jupille, now located within the municipal boundaries of Lige.92 Jupille, it should be
noted, was one of the villae from whose conlaboratus a ninth was to be granted to the
canons of St Mary at Aachen in both 888 and 930, by King Arnulf and King Henry
respectively. According to the text of the agreement of 935, this census had been held in
beneficium, until the granting of the charter on 8 June, by an unnamed man. This
unnamed man (is qui), or more probably his ancestor, was therefore in a position similar
to those men named in 888 who were noted in Arnulf s charter as having been granted
benefices (beneficiantur) drawn from the royal villae, including Jupille, from which a ninth
of the conlaboratus was granted to St Mary at Aachen.
After identifying the previous status of the census as a beneficium in 888 and 930, the act
of 935 then records the mancipia who paid the census. The ten living adults are all listed by
name. Their census, as well as the census of their male and female children, is specifically
transferred by King Henry as a benefice to the monastery of Stablo. The charter then
requires that the census owed by the children of Gerdruda, who is not listed among the ten
living adults, is also to be transferred to Stablo. In sum, the royal charter concludes that
the aforementioned congregation (Stablo) shall enjoy the grant (concessio) from these
mancipia that we have made.93
The considerable detail given in this charter provides important insights into the
complex administrative work that was required to maintain current and accurate
information regarding the royal resources within villae such as Jupille that had been
granted as benefices. This charter also sheds further light on the large scope of the
written administrative tasks that were required to identify and transmit the ninth of
the entire production of the forty-seven villae that had been granted as a benefice to the
canons of St Mary at Aachen in 930. First, it should be noted that the king was in a
position to grant as a benefice the census payments due from one familia of mancipia while
retaining the bodies and labour of these dependents either in direct royal possession
(in dominium) or for a separate grant as a beneficium. As the charter makes clear here, Stablo
was only to receive the census, but not the labour or possession of this familia of unfree
dependents. The ability to make such important distinctions regarding such closely
related resources undoubtedly is the hallmark of a sophisticated administrative
apparatus, and, moreover, one that obviously made considerable use of the written
word. This administrative sophistication must be kept in mind when considering the
import of the grant of one-ninth of the conlaboratus of villae such as Jupille.
The second point that requires emphasis here is that the royal scribe who drew up this
charter for Stablo had available correct information about the number and names of the
mancipia who were part of this particular familia, and who were alive and capable of
94 Ibid.
95 There are very large numbers of examples from so-called private charters in this period for the purchase by one
spouse of another from unfreedom. See, for example, Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, vol. 2: 9261283, ed.
Theodor Bitterauf (Munich, 1909, repr. Aalen, 1967), nr. 1087 pp. 3031. In this case, the nobilis Adalpreht gave
property to Bishop Lambert in order to purchase the freedom of his wife and son, Hasapurc and Vodarhart.
96 A trained performer can memorize an epic poem, but it is a very different matter for an untrained person to memorize complex lists of names, and these two practices should not be conflated. In this regard, it is useful to compare
the discussion of oral performances, and concomitant claims that medieval society largely lacked a written component, by Michael Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians (Dublin,
1994); Richter, The Oral Tradition in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 1994); and Richters essays collected in Studies
in Medieval Language and Culture (Dublin, 1995), with the observations by Wilhelm Strmer, Heinrichs II.
Schenkungen an Bamberg: Zur Topographie und Typologie des Knigs- und Bayerischen Herzogsguts um die
Jahrtausend-Wende in Franken und Bayern, in Fenske, Deutsche Knigspfalzen: Beitrge, vol. 4, pp. 377408, here
p. 402. The latter concludes with regard to the efforts of Henry II (10021024) to carry out an inquisitio in Bavaria in
1007, that it is not possible that the king and his chancery had simply memorized these numerous places ... This
means, in explicit terms, that Henry II must have had some sort of written description of the lower-Bavarian properties held by the duke and the king before 1007.
97 Cap. reg. Fr. no. 32, chs 55, 62.
paying a census in June 935. The precariousness of life in premodern societies need not be
belaboured here. However, it should be sufficient to note that documents listing the status
of individuals as being alive and subject to paying a census were severely time-conditioned.
Indeed, this reality is manifest in the specific mention, in a separate clause of the charter,
regarding the children of Gerdruda: et his scilicet qui ex Gerdruda procreati sunt. This
makes clear that Gerdruda herself was known by the royal scribe to have had a different
status from that of the other adult mancipia whose children also were required to pay a
census to the holder of this beneficium.94 It seems likely that this different status was that
Gerdruda was now deceased, but there may have been some other reason why she, as an
individual, was not required to pay a census although her children were required to do so.
She may, for example, have remarried a free man who then purchased her freedom.95
We cannot now know the answer to this question, but it is clear that the clerk who drew
up this charter had such information.
The third point that must be noted here, therefore, is that the scribe of this still extant
charter had this information available to him while drawing up the act at a time when he
was located at least 130 kilometres south of where the mancipia in question lived, since he
was encamped with the king along the Chiers river. This geographical reality, emphasized
in the dating clause of the charter, actum iuxta flumen Char, requires that the
information regarding the names of the adult mancipia, the altered status of Gerdruda,
and the fact that she had offspring, was made available to the scribe in written form. Can
one really imagine that one or more people connected to these fiscal assets at least a
weeks travel to the north of the Chiers were brought to the royal encampment and then
dredged up a list of people and other relevant information which they had memorized?96
As capitulary de villis makes clear, one of the three major reports required of royal
stewards, such as the minister of the villa at Jupille, was to provide detailed information
regarding all of the revenues acquired by the villa during the course of the year, as well as
the individual or institutions to which any of these revenues had been disbursed.97 The
transfer of the census payments made by this familia mancipium from the unnamed holder
of the beneficium to the monastery of Stablo was therefore a relatively simple matter of
accounting by clerks at the royal court, but a step that could only be taken because a
detailed file of information was at hand on a regular basis in written form.
VI. Henry Is Fiscal Administration in the Light of Otto Is Administrative

Documents
98 DO I 40. This is very probably Markgraf Gero who served as one of Otto Is most important military commanders
against the Slavs.
99 DO I 40.
100 Ibid.
In addition to providing detailed and up-to-date information about fiscal properties

currently being held as benefices from the royal fisc, the written records maintained by
Henrys government permitted the continuation of an institutional memory regarding
these properties so that they would not be forgotten in the period of transition that
inevitably followed the death of one king and the accession of another. As noted above,
Henry benefited from the detailed record-keeping of his predecessors, including Arnulf
and Conrad, which enabled the royal government to maintain knowledge of and,
therefore, control over fiscal properties that had been granted as benefices. As will now
be seen, the detailed records kept by Henrys government created this same institutional
continuity and memory to the benefit of the government of his son and successor Otto I.
In June 941, Otto issued a charter for the benefit of Siegfried, the son of Count Gero.98
Ottos grant to his godson (spiritualis filiolus) Siegfried consisted of two parts. First,
Siegfried was to receive everything that his father Gero had held as a beneficium in two
villae in Schwabengau, with the important exception of the royal fiscal property
consisting of the church of St Wicbert, which Otto had already granted to the monastery
of Hersfeld. This portion of Ottos grant to his godson is identified by the scribe as
including the newly constructed fort (novum castellum) at Osteregulun (Egeln).99 The second
part of the grant consisted of the beneficium that previously had been held by a man
named Bardo, but which was now in royal possession. This fiscal property consisted of
lands attached to the royal villa of Cokstedi (Cochstedt, south of Egeln), and twelve
mancipia whose names are then listed in the text as being attached to this villa.100
In considering the implications of this text for understanding both the central role
played by written documents in the administration of King Henrys fisc, and also
institutional continuity between the governments of Henry and Otto, several points
must be adduced. First, both the beneficium held by Gero in June 941 and the beneficium
previously held by Bardo were almost certainly granted during the reign of Henry, who
had died just five years previously after holding the royal office for seventeen years.
Consequently, this charter makes it clear that Ottos officials were aware of the status of
these holdings as fiscal property despite the transition from one reign to another. As had
been true in the case of Duke Burchard and the latters vassallus Babo, without royal
records of the grants of beneficia, there was no way to keep track of these fiscal properties
over time, much less across reigns when there was considerable turnover in personnel in
the royal household.
101 DO I 58.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
The second point that requires emphasis here is that the royal charter issued for
Siegfried makes it clear that Ottos officials not only knew that fiscal properties had been
granted out as beneficia during the previous reign, but they also had up-to-date information
about the physical status of these holdings, and the status of their appurtenances,
including dependents. In the case of the two villae held by Gero, the kings clerks identified
a newly constructed castellum, which required a royal license to build. In the case of the
beneficium held by Bardo, the clerk had a list of the mancipia who currently were dependents
of the fiscal property attached to the villa of Cochstedt. As noted above with regard to the
census payments of the unfree dependents attached to Jupille, which were transferred to
the monastery of Stablo, the lifetime of mancipia was highly time-conditioned
information. Thus, we see Ottos officials not only making use of information first
inscribed during Henry Is reign, but we also see them updating this information on an
ongoing basis.
This pattern of maintaining institutional and administrative memory regarding fiscal
property granted as beneficia from the reign of Henry I to the reign of Otto I can be also
be seen in considerable detail in a charter issued by Otto at Rhenen, forty kilometres
south-east of Utrecht, on 17 July 944. Here, Otto I gave royal fiscal property currently
held in direct royal possession, totum quod ... hactenus habuimus, to the church of Utrecht
then headed by Bishop Baldric (917976).101 This grant, which may have been made at
the request of Brun, Ottos younger brother and archbishop of Cologne, consisted of
fiscal lands located in the pagus of Lake and Isla named after the Lek and Ijssel rivers
and located in the modern province of Utrecht in the Netherlands.102 In describing the
history of these fiscal properties, the scribe who drew up this documentit is not known
whether this was a royal or an episcopal officialnoted that this property had been held
by Waltgerus and after him by his son Ratbot from the fisc (ex nostra parte) as a benefice
(beneficium).103
This brief note regarding the previous holders of the fiscal property in the pagus of
Lake and Isla is significant in the context of the administrative and institutional memory
that was maintained between the reigns of Henry I and his son. We are dealing here with
a minimum of four separate property transactions that were recorded and made
available to the scribe who drew up this document. Moving from most recent to furthest
distant in time, royal clerks were aware that the current possession of the property by the
royal fisc was due to its recovery from Ratbot, who had held the facultates as a beneficium. It
is not known now exactly when the property was recovered from Ratbot by the royal fisc,
but it is certainly possible that this occurred during the reign of Henry I, who had died
just eight years earlier.
The second transaction was the grant of the property in question to Ratbot as a
beneficium. Again, given that Otto had been king for only eight years in 944, it is certainly
possible that the grant of the fiscal property in the pagus of Lake and Isla had occurred
during the reign of Henry I.
104 Obviously, a courier using the tractoria systema system of highway resting points that provided shelter and new
horses for riders who were operating under royal ordersthat operated during the Carolingian period could cover
this distance much more rapidly. However, there is no evidence from this charter that such a courier was dispatched
to the estates in question, much less that he made use of this Carolingian-style pony-express. With regard to the
use of the tractoria system to support travel by royal officials in the Carolingian period, see F.L. Ganshof, La Tractoria:
Contribution ltude des origines du droit de gte, Tijdschrift voor rechtsgeschiedenis, 8 (1928), pp. 6991.
The third transaction, as we move backwards in time, was the recovery of the fiscal
property by the royal government from Waltgerus prior to its granting to Ratbot. There
is no indication in the surviving records whether Waltgerus lost possession of the fiscal
lands in question because he had died, or for some other reason, although it is highly
unlikely that Waltgerus had engaged either in treasonous or irresponsible behaviour
given his son Ratbots eventual recovery of the benefice. The temporal interval between
the recovery of the property from Waltgerus and its subsequent grant to Ratbot is not
now known.
The fourth land transaction about which Ottos officials, and subsequently the scribe
who drew up this document, were informed was the original grant of the fiscal properties
in question to Waltgerus as a beneficium. In the light of the temporal framework within
which these transactions occurred, it is very likely that the grant of the benefice to
Waltgerus took place during Henry Is reign or perhaps even earlier.
In sum, we are dealing here with a series of property transactions that may well have
spanned a generation or an even longer period of time. The scribe who drew up this
document, whether a royal clerk or a scribe employed by Bishop Baldric of Utrecht, had
information concerning these transactions with regard to properties that were located
anywhere from forty to eighty kilometres to the west, which would have been between
two and four days travel in each direction from the royal court assembly at Rhenen.104
We must therefore answer this basic epistemological question: how did the scribe who
drew up this charter have available detailed information regarding the history of these
properties as beneficia? It is possible that a courtier of Henry, with specific expertise in the
history of royal fiscal properties in the regions west of Utrecht, appeared at the royal
assembly at Rhenen and provided testimony regarding his memory of the grants of
beneficia made by the old king, information that was then incorporated in very brief form
into this charter on behalf of Bishop Baldric of Utrecht. It seems far more likely, however,
that the dossier regarding these fiscal properties going back to the reign of Henry I, if not
earlier, included information about its history, and that working from this, the scribe
simply added this material to his text.
There are several charters from early in Otto Is reign that shed similar light on the
continuity in written fiscal administration and on institutional memory between the
reigns of Henry I and his son. In 947, for example, while at Salz in Franconia, Otto
granted fiscal properties as allods to a royal estate steward (villicus) named Wetti. The
properties in question, though held in dominium by the fisc prior to the grant to Wetti,
previously had been granted out as beneficia to three men. The first, named Roho, was
apparently a free layman, while the other two, named Engilbraht and Wolfhart, were
unfree dependents (servi) of the church of St Peter (Frankfurt?) and the king respectively.
The properties were located at Seckbach, now a Stadtteil of Frankfurt. Of considerable
105 Regarding this charter, see DO I 87. Other charters with similar information include DO I 1, 10, 22, 33, 44, 51, 57,
61, and perhaps 95 as well, if one sees the property confiscated from Lorsch as originally having been given as a
beneficium.
106 DO I 14. This grant of properties serves as the foundation charter for this church.
107 DO I 14.
108 Ibid.
interest, in the present context, is the detail with which Wettis new possessions are
described in the royal charter. The appurtenances of the one piece of property (hoba
dominica) that previously had been held as a beneficium by Roho, are explicitly identified as
including an unfree female dependent (ancilla) named Gerburg along with her sons and
daughters (filii, filiae). As noted above with regard to census payments of mancipia granted
in 935 by Henry to the monastery of Stablo, information regarding unfree dependents
was highly time-conditioned, and therefore required regular updating. As was true with
regard to several other charters discussed thus far, the royal charter on behalf of the
villicus Wetti was drawn up far from the property that was being granted. In this case, the
royal court was at Salz, some eighty kilometres north-west of Seckbach. Consequently,
we are dealing here not only with the institutional memory of a grant of a benefice
probably made during the reign of Henry I, but also with evidence for the maintenance
of current written records regarding the status of this benefice over time.105
As well as maintaining royal power through an ongoing supervision of properties
granted out as benefices, records of the type discussed thus far served the additional
purpose of helping Otto I to avoid inadvertently granting the same fiscal resource to
more than one recipient at the same time. This issue became particularly important
when the king decided to make very large grants of property to favoured recipients, as
was the case shortly after Ottos accession to the throne. On 21 September 937, King
Otto transferred a very large portfolio of properties, resources, and incomes to the
church of St Maurice at Magdeburg.106 These included the royal curtis of Magdeburg, its
twenty-three named dependent properties east of the Elbe, its six named dependent
properties on the Horaha river, three familiae of semi-free dependents (liti) attached to the
comital ministerium of Gero, fifteen familiae of Slavic dependents (Sclavi) attached to the
comital ministerium of Christian, and all of the census revenues and a tenth of the revenues
of the sales (venundationes) from three other named places.107
In the present context, it is important to note that Otto made these grants with the
knowledge that several of these properties, excluding those belonging to the comital
ministeria of Gero and Christian, had already been granted to other recipients as beneficia:
cuiuscunque sint modo beneficia.108 Ottos officials were in a position to know that many of
these properties had been granted out as benefices, and thus, from an administrative
perspective, they knew which properties had to be recovered in order to validate the act.
Given the very large size of the donation to St Maurice, it is likely that Ottos officials
were faced with the task of identifying and then notifying a noteworthy number of fideles
that their benefices were being revoked in favour of the kings foundation at Magdeburg,
so that we can see here not only a substantial and complicated amount of paper work
but also the substantial deployment of royal personnel. Moreover, since the foundation
of the church of St Maurice took place in 937, just a year after Ottos accession, it is very
likely that the great majority if not all of the benefices in question had been granted by
Henry I, and so we can see yet another example of continuity in administrative and
institutional memory across the reigns of the first two Saxon kings.
VII. Conclusion
109 As Giles Brown, Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), Carolingian Culture:
Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge, 1994), p. 151, here p. 44, makes clear with respect to Ottonian culture,
Wherever one looks there is continuity through the ninth century and beyond. This is especially true in the east
where Ottonian culture is but late Carolingian culture under another name. Regarding the Carolingian-style organization of the Anglo-Saxon state, see James Campbell: Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the
Twelfth century, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth Series, 25 (1975), pp. 3954; and Campbell, The
Significance of the Anglo-Norman State in the Administrative History of Western Europe, in Werner Paravicini et
Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds), Histoire compare de ladministration (IVe-XXVIIe sicles) (Munich, 1980), pp. 11734.
Both of these studies have been reprinted with additional notes in James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History
(London and Ronceverte, 1986).
Scholars who have accepted the Herrschaft model for Ottonian Germany have failed to
address the most fundamental question of administrative history: how? How was it the
case that Burchard obeyed an inconvenient law established by Charlemagne that could
be and was enforced by Henry, the new king? How was it possible for Henry to grant as a
benefice one-ninth of the entire revenues, including census payments, of forty-seven villae
to the canons of the church of St Mary even as many of these villae, or portions of the
facultates of these villae, were themselves held in beneficium by various other recipients?
How were Henry and his fiscal officials able to draw fine distinctions in granting the
census but not the labour or possession of a single group of unfree dependents? How
could a royal clerk located 130 kilometres from the villa at Jupille have up-to-date
information regarding the status, names and numbers of the members of this familia?
How did officials working for Otto I have detailed information about benefices that were
granted to recipients during the reign of Henry I?
We are dealing here with a huge volume of surviving information which can be
multiplied a great many times by the numerous charters that have not been discussed
here. Moreover, this information was largely time-conditioned in nature. The only
plausible explanation is that Henry was able to control the royal fisc, including those
resources that had been granted out as benefices, because he had available substantial
quantities of written information, and a staff of officials who organized, interpreted and
deployed this information in the royal interest in a manner consistent with Carolingian
practice highlighted in capitulary de villis. Crucial to these processes of organization and
interpretation was the royal inquisitio, supervised by officials dispatched by the central
government, that relied for its operation on the availability of written documents, but
also on the oral testimony, taken under oath, of vast numbers of local witnesses. To
assert, in the face of this kind of royal administrative practice, that Henry and his
advisors were bound by some kind of urGermanic aversion to paper-work is to raise
an otherwise undocumented, romantic ethnic stereotype in the face of actual evidence
that survives from Henry Is reign as well as the reign of his son Otto I. In every important
administrative sense, when dealing with the royal fisc, the Saxon king Henry, like his
Anglo-Saxon contemporaries, was a Carolingian-style king.109
Abstract
Keywords: Henry I, royal estates, capitulary de villis, administration, written word, carolingian empire,
continuity, documents
University of New Hampshire

bachrach@cisunix.unh.edu
Traditionally, scholars have depicted the early Ottonian kingdom, ruled by Henry I (919936) as being deficient in royal administrative structures, particularly those that depended on the use of documents. Instead,
Henry is supposed to have ruled his kingdom through a wide range of rituals associated with sacral kingship.
However, it long has been recognized that both ecclesiastical and royal estates in the eastern portions of the
Carolingian empire, which developed into the early German kingdom, were organized in a manner consistent with the dictates of the famous capitulary de villis. Recent scholarship has made it clear that this
capitulary required the production of large numbers of documents, which were crucial both for the administration of individual estates and for the use of these estates by the king. This essay draws out the numerous
ways in which Henry I and his officials used the written word to administer the kings estates, and shows an
important element of royal administration that demonstrates enormous continuities with the adminstrative
structures that were in place in the Carolingian Empire.

German History 2010 Bachrach 399 423

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German History Vol. 28, No. 4, pp.

The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal

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400 David S. Bachrach

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402 David S. Bachrach

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II. The German Historiographical Tradition Regarding the Royal Fisc

23 Ibid, pp. 1921 for a list of these inventories.

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404 David S. Bachrach

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Schmid, in a manner similar to that employed by Gockel, then examined contemporary

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406 David S. Bachrach

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III. Henry Is Fisc in Carolingian Perspective

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408 David S. Bachrach

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IV. Sources of Information

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410 David S. Bachrach

V. Grants of Benefices from the Royal Fisc under Henry I

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documents survive. It must be emphasized that administrative documents very frequently

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412 David S. Bachrach

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414 David S. Bachrach

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416 David S. Bachrach

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418 David S. Bachrach

VI. Henry Is Fiscal Administration in the Light of Otto Is Administrative

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In addition to providing detailed and up-to-date information about fiscal properties

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420 David S. Bachrach

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422 David S. Bachrach

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University of New Hampshire

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