Rituales, derechos y relaciones: algunas donaciones y su interpretación en el cartulario de Fulda, c 827

Abstract

This article analyses a cluster of legal documents concerning newly cleared woodland between the river Fulda and its minor tributary the Haune, copied into the earliest Fulda cartulary which was completed in 828. It elucidates the complex interactions between local landholders of varying status, the monks of Fulda and their claims to spiritual patronage and tenurial right, and the public world of legal ritual and county meetings which were central to the exercise of power in the Carolingian world. It argues that the legal rituals recorded in charters were simultaneously attempts to define and regulate the relationships between different social actors (individuals, groups and institutions) as well as to transfer rights over property. Historians need to pay particular care to the mechanisms of transmission, as the archival record wa s carefully constructed to meet immediate needs, and it may obscure the extent to which relationships and the rights embedded in them were matters of interpretation. As well as raising epistemological and methodological questions about the nature of the charter evidence, this discussion also sheds light on the nature of land claims and clearances, and the relationship between internal colonisation and the crystallisation of ecclesiastical and political structures under Carolingian rule, topics which parallel the concerns of much recent work on early medieval Iberia. Finally, it is argued that if charter sare read not of passive records of abstract rights but as active attempts to interpret social relations, they can shed some light on the identities and interests of landowners of relatively modest means, and place them at historiographial centre stage.