Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia (The Middle Ages Series)
Constance Brittain Bouchard
Language: English
Pages: 257
ISBN: 0812235908
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time.
Focusing on the Frankish realm between the eighth and twelfth centuries, Constance Brittain Bouchard outlines the operative definitions of "family" in this period when there existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group. Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children.
Bouchard also engages in the ongoing scholarly debate about the nobility around the year 1000, arguing that there was no clear point of transition from amorphous family units to agnatically structured kindred. Instead, she points out that great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century. Those of My Blood clarifies the complex meanings of medieval family structure and family consciousness and shows the many ways in which negotiations of power within the noble family can help explain early medieval politics.
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descendants members of their families just because they shared this highly significant ancestor. On the other hand, the grandsons and great-grandsons of Charlemagne in the ninth century were fully aware that they shared a common ancestry, but they treated their first and second cousins not as family members and allies but as the enemy. Women especially might make major changes in their own lives as to their family affiliation: a woman considered an outsider by her husband would be one of the most
character. Louis IV, who married Gerberge, was the first Carolingian king, in the two centuries that Carolingians had been kings, to be known for certain to have named a daughter for his wife’s relatives, rather than for his own.44 Very quickly, however, this practice began to spread, even among royal lineages. By the middle of the eleventh century, there had been an alternation over five generations in a straight line, of women named alternately Mathilda or Gerberge, for their own maternal
background.3 At the same time, women with these names regularly began to produce daughters named after their own, rather than their husbands’ relatives. Partly this may have been due to the prestige of the Capetian line; men who married Capetian women were eager to give their daughters names that would identify them with that lineage. But in part the counts and castellans who established their power in the eleventh 6216 Bouchard / THOSE OF MY BLOOD / sheet 134 of 261 Figure .. Migration of
addition, Gui V, son of Lady Beatrix of Vignory, had a daughter Beatrix, who married the lord of Clefmont and had a granddaughter also named Beatrix. Gui V also had a granddaughter Beatrix, named for her father’s relatives, who married the lord of Brancion at the end of the twelfth century and had a daughter named Beatrix after herself. Thus, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, though many women were still named Beatrix and Hadwidis after their fathers’ relatives, many also began to be named
lords of Noyers and of Toucy; they might occasionally mention this connection, but they did not support these lords in their wars, or commemorate them in their charters. Within a given generation, younger brothers were very much part of the family group. Aswalo I had three sons who grew to adulthood and remained in the world (a fourth entered the church), and the three, Daimbert I, Bochard, and Stephen, all regularly appear in each other’s charters. Daimbert was the heir, and after he succeeded