Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories. Simon Teuscher
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regarding how a lord had enforced the rights that he claimed. One might expect that the witnesses answered these questions at least partially by recounting incidents in which noble and ecclesiastical lords confronted their dependents to confirm orders, enforce regulations, or collect payments. Yet the witnesses cited at the beginning of this chapter, who listed their lord as their friend, seem to have received hardly any attention from the latter on an everyday basis. These witnesses were also asked whether they had seen any official lordly acts of the two quarreling brothers of Chalon, both of whom had spent some time in the region. At best the witnesses mentioned in their answers, along with formulaic phrases about the oath of loyalty, that they had seen the lords riding into or out of the castles or heard that they had named officials.12 Apart from such solemn occasions, not a single witness furnished an example of a specific piece of manorial business during which he appeared directly before one of the two lords.
From the answers to the individual questions of the commissioners, it is evident that even witnesses who expressed their strong personal ties to their lords did not necessarily know very much about them. Guillaume had inherited the title of a prince of Orange and lord of Arlay from his father and was usually described with the appropriate titles in the court records. Yet only one witness could correctly answer the question of where this Orange and this Arlay actually were, namely “in Provence” and “in Burgundy,” respectively.13 Even the notary Jean Criblet, a serf and tenant of Chalon who had served Guillaume for three years as the substitute (Statthalter) of the castellan of Yverdon, answered that he did not know, although he must have been to the area. In another place in his statement, Jean noted proudly that he had traveled to Rome, Avignon, and Burgundy.14 It is perhaps not so surprising that lords who controlled such extensive territories as the lords of Chalon seldom appeared in the field of view of their local populations. Yet even in witness depositions that concern lords of small and even tiny lordships, practically all the talk is about the activities of their officials. The relationship of these witnesses to their lord did not involve the type of intimacy that we associate with concepts like friendship and loyalty.
Instead the witnesses drew from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of accounts about people who acted in the name of the lord. The abundance of information in the witness statements about the actions of officials must have been perceived as irritating background noise by contemporary courts, which wanted to establish the rights of the lords themselves. Even to the modern view, the information scattered throughout the witness deposition records about the lower levels of lordly administration seems confusing and disparate, not least because it attests to very diverse local structures, terminologies, and divisions of labor among officials. Nevertheless, in what follows it is possible to sketch a few patterns of the delegation of lordship duties—such as the collection of dues and the implementation of local regulations—that witnesses described regularly, although in conjunction with very diverse organizational structures. We will examine these patterns of daily activities to see how lordship was delegated and which forms of participation in the practice of lordship arose from that delegation. Although the precise social status of the parties is difficult to establish, they nonetheless give information about the ways in which they were linked to one another, to lords, and to the dependents of lords and about how practices of exercising lordship fit into a broader context of rural forms of cooperation and conflict.
While witnesses’ statements in depositions regarding the activities of their lords remained quite sparse, they went into great detail regarding officials in the broadest sense, whether they were called castellani, officarii, deputati, nunci, receptores, or mandati. Even the witnesses who had so little to say about the lords themselves in the conflict between the brothers Chalon made very precise statements regarding officials. The witnesses saw how they rode into each of the four lordships, stayed in the castles, saw to their maintenance, and ate and drank. Moreover officials collected dues, fines, and labor obligations for their lords; leased mills; and exercised jurisdiction rights by holding curia or banchus publicus.15
Unlike in the formalized depictions of the activities of lords themselves, the descriptions of the more everyday manorial activities of their officials make evident the diversity of individual perspectives from which witnesses could experience lordship. Among the dependents of the lords of Chalon who were examined was one whose nephew had acted as dues collector for Guillaume in Montagny. A second had held the office of accountant for Guillaume; a third had once served as a substitute for Guillaume’s mistralis in the village of Yvonand outside of Grandson; and a fourth numbered among the people who had guarded the castle of Grandson on commission from Guillaume.16 At this level the boundary between rulers and ruled was very blurry indeed.
The Tithe Administration of the Chapter of Amsoldingen
An especially precise insight into delegation relationships is provided in the few witness depositions in which at least one party needed to ask the witnesses systematic questions about the practices of officeholders in order to prove its position. The chapter of Amsoldingen found itself in such a situation in 1312 when it defended its alleged right to the tithe of the church of Hilterfingen against the claim of the cloister of Interlaken, or rather against the rector appointed by Interlaken.17 The settlement of the legal situation was complicated by the fact that the recently deceased rector, Heinrich von Wädenswil, had for many decades held the office of provost of the chapter of Amsoldingen in addition to that of rector, as had his predecessor. The Interlaken party took the view that the dead provost had had claim to the tithe only by reason of his additional post as rector, and the new successor named by Interlaken was therefore entitled to it. Against this, the chapter of Amsoldingen held that part of the tithe had accrued to Heinrich von Wädenswil not in his function as rector but rather as provost of the chapter, and that therefore the chapter could claim the tithe in the future. To substantiate this position, it was necessary to illuminate the mechanics of collecting the tithe in enough detail to highlight the difference between Heinrich’s two positions.
An astoundingly high number of witnesses—at least twenty-seven of the total forty—who made statements on behalf of the chapter of Amsoldingen had themselves taken part in the collection of the tithe at the church of Hilterfingen in the preceding decades. In addition, numerous others who did not testify were mentioned by those who did testify. That so many people were involved is even more striking because the church of Hilterfingen was entitled to the tithes only from the village of the same name and the hamlet of Ringoltswil. At the head of the administration of these tithe rights, the statements agreed, were people who were described as ministri or ministeriales of the chapter. These terms refer to representatives of the regional service aristocracy, such as members of the families of Gobi, Lösch, and Rieden under the leadership of Heinrich Rieden, who is described in the charter as a miles and even as a dominus by one of the witnesses.18 Also belonging to this core group of lesser nobility were two illegitimate sons of the provost and a member of the Rieden family, whom the witnesses describe as the stepson (filiaster) of the provost. Although most of these people occasionally appeared in conflict with the provost, they presumably belonged to his personal retinue, which he brought with him to his church office as the scion of one of the most influential noble families in the region. These ministeriales had leased their share of the tithe of Hilterfingen for decades.
Below them came a series of people who were bound less closely to the provost, apparently belonging to the higher class of peasants. Now and then they had leased the right to the tithe of a smaller area, or even only a portion of it, for a duration of one or a few years—perhaps not from the provost or the chapter itself, but rather as subleasers of the ministeriales.19 A now-prominent member of those leasing the tithe, R. Kriecho, remembered how his father had begun to lease small shares of the tithe right of the church of Hilterfingen in one year or another. At the beginning he had to join together with his two brothers and a neighbor. In the evenings, the four had then divided the earnings among themselves at home.20 In addition to the tithe leasers, nine other witnesses stated that in one year or another, when they were hired for the task by the provost or another member of the chapter, they transported the tithe earnings from the church of Hilterfingen, where the collectors had initially assembled the tithe, back to Amsoldingen for delivery to the chapter. This involved mostly peasants from the area who