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...and 'moved countries' comes with cultural freight that surely can't be pertinent here. Bertha of Holland too is the stepdaughter of Count Robert of Flanders, also de facto count of Frisia - is 'country' not a bit anachronistic here in the face of political formations which cross regnal borders?

More contentiously, perhaps, I struggle a bit to see 'moved countries' as a relevant lens through which to see the career of Queen Emma II, insofar as they're married while both of them have 'B-listers in the political orbit of Otto the Great' as their primary affiliation - family is the key...

...and it was as Flemish ruler not Italian princess that her marriage was important. Ditto Bertha of Burgundy, only with 'Arnulf II' and 'Flanders' switched out for 'Odo I' and 'Blois-Chartres-Tours'. (Agree with Levi about Matilda on similar grounds)

...but she had been married to Arnulf II of Flanders to years (so hadn't 'moved country to become a queen', even if we allow she was _in_ Italy to start with rather than having fled to Autun with her brother King Adalbert - a possibility I dwell on b/c I've only just thought of it...)...

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Constance of Arles, Robert the Pious' third wife - moved from Provence, and was percieved at the time (by e.g. Ralph Glaber) as being weirdly foreign. Also, I think you may need to delete some entries on your list. Rozala-Susannah may originally have been daughter of Berengar II of Italy...

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The obvious problem, ofc, is that by definition*I* don't need to be persuaded that the very niche topic I devoted my entire adult life to is interesting...

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

OK, don't know how this is going to sound, but I promise it's because I'm basic, not egotistical: I am doing a first re-read of the initial draft of a major chunk of my book, and I keep getting distracted, not because my prose is so inspiring or anything, but because c10th history is so interesting!

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Y'know what'd be useful? (And might exist, IDK) A list of lay authors of the earlier Middle Ages. Said b/c I'm rn comparing Fulk le Réchin and William IX (so right at the end of the earlier MA admittedly) and thought 'hang on, two lay rulers writing within decades of each other? That's weird!'

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Congratulations! I'm so happy for you :)

Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

The greyhound is completely on our wavelength, for the record

Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Now she's a twelve-year-old dog going "mummy, daddy, let's play!", and we go, "we love you and will play with you, but we're so aware we only get so many movements in these physical bodies"

Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

One of the main disadvantages of my dog ownership is that my mongrel, who is the best girl, has aged so much less over the last six years than we have.

Unfortunately, the cartulary of the cathedral chapter of Narbonne only survives in BNF MS Doat 55, which is undigitised. But point 3) there makes me very worried. Can anyone throw any light on this?

1) 3rd year of Hugh Capet should really be 990, not 995 2) If this charter exists and says what the GC purports it to say, I'd have expected the editors of the _Histoire générale de Languedoc_ to edit it 3) Viscount Ermesind Bonne doesn't exist, or at least she's no-one obvious

"Aigo, archdeacon of Narbonne, and Bernard the treasurer... Viscountess Ermesind, called 'Bonne', 22nd October, 3rd year of the reign of Hugh, in the presence of Bishop Fredelo, from the cartulary of the chapter of Narbonne". Problems immediately arose!

Gallia christiana, in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa; Qua series et historia archiepiscoporum, episcoporum et abbatum Franciae vicinarumque ditionum, ab origine ecclesiarum ad nostra tempora ded...

...an earlier c19th French catalogue of the bishops of Elne, and that one *does* give a reference, to the _Gallia Christiana_, vol. 6, col. 126: books.google.bg/books?id=6y2...

books.google.bg

I can't find the scribe (_Petrus presbiter_, "Peter the priest") in other Elne charters, but the way of phrasing the dating clause is paralleled in other documents of the time. So I wondered about the 995 document. I found that Monsalvatje's _Noticias historicas_ is simply translating...

Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

More progress on this. Thanks to @graemeyward.bsky.social, I've been able to see BNF Moreau 16, the charter of 996 with Bishop Fredelo in it. And the dating clause is pretty unambiguous! The charter is dated "the year when King Robert of the Franks began to rule in Francia".

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"Hi, and welcome to Blue Peter. Today, we'll be teaching you to make siege equipment out of the bobbins of thread you already have at home"

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Annoyed again at Bernard Bachrach. No, William of Malmesbury did not describe Fulk Nerra performing a _calcatio colli_ Bachrach: Fulk *places foot on neck* "now art thou vanquished" What William actually says: Fulk, kicking the shit out of his son, "bet you're beaten now, boy, huh? huh?'

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

...rather than civic ones (so lots of 'Burgundians' and 'Normans', few to no 'Angevins' or 'Poitevins'). After a bit of digging around, nothing else on this has come up, and I said to myself "oh crap this is a research finding isn't it stopping writing this book has got further away"

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Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

So I've noticed that Post-Carolingian (West Frankish*) authors will present groups of subjects of non-royal rulers as having capacity for autonomous action (e.g. "the English rebelled" as opposed to "a bunch of people rebelled") when they can be seen in terms of ethnic identities...

Fraser McNair @ralphtorta.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Yes, I've emailed him, but I think he's got his hands full with his new job, unfortunately...

Rather like the Peace of God, therefore, humiliation of relics comes into existence not as a clerical response to long-term social disorder, but as an exercise in marketing by a would-be hegemon responding to specific political circumstances.

salutemmundo.wordpress.com

...(and probably killed and injured a lot of people) and I think what we're dealing with here is a PR exercise orchestrated by Rainald, drawing on existing discourses of penitential legitimacy at the Angevin comital court. (More on that here: salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/c...)

Charter A Week 90/1: Monastic Reform in Anjou

I don’t think we’ve really met the Angevins yet. Two of them, Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good, ran that court in 941 where there was a judicial duel; but really we haven’t yet had cause to consider …

...and Fulk Nerra did in fact get kicked out of Tours in pretty short order in the end, so coercion isn't an issue! Instead, we have to look at Bishop Rainald of Angers, Fulk's ally and former treasurer of Saint-Martin. Fulk's invasion of Tours had ruffled a lot of feathers...

...made it a last resort of the powerless canons in the face of a count against whom they had no other recourse; and I don't know which Saint-Martin he's talking about because it ain't the one I know. The Saint-Martin I know is stuffed with wealthy and powerful aristocrats...

...at about the right time. So historiography is right, and this charter is from 996. Why does this matter? Because this is the *first* humiliation of relics recorded in the West Frankish kingdom. It's a novelty. So why invent it? No less a luminary than Patrick Geary...

Finally, though, I found something relevant on the history of Burgos, and it does seem like the title 'bishop of Oca' really wasn't used after the mid-c11th. At the same time, I've been going through some unpublished charters from Tours, and there is a man named Sicard of about the right importance

We don't have really any evidence for the school of Saint-Martin c. 1000, so an argument from silence doesn't bear a lot of weight. However, bishops were known to use archaic titles, such as the way the bishops of Liège were occasionally known as the bishops of Tongeren or Maastricht.

There are two things that might swing it. On one hand, the text mentions a schoolmaster called Sicard. Someone of that name and rank is attested in the early c12th but not the late c10th. On the other, the see of Oca was moved to Burgos in the eleventh century. Both of these have counterarguments.

Fulk, chastened, did penance in front of Bishop Rainald of Angers and an unnamed bishop of Oca in Spain. Historiographically, this is agreed to be a tenth-century text, but it could be a twelfth-century one: Fulk could be Fulk Nerra or Fulk V, Rainald could be Rainald II or Rainald III.

After the last couple of days of mysteries, here's one I cleared up recently. A couple of years ago, I posted about a notice from Saint-Martin in Tours. In this notice, Count Fulk of Anjou invaded Saint-Martin, in response to which the canons humiliated their relics...

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No worries - I was wondering if maybe there was something in the historiography. There are some leads I can chase up in a library, so hopefully something will emerge...

I can't find previous historical work on it, although admittedly my access to Catalan-language material isn't great. So this line of inquiry is stymied for the moment. (Perhaps @chandlerprof.bsky.social might be able to clear up some of this mystery?)

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...it's about succession crises and Bishop Guy of Le Puy's empire-building, and if he's trying to impose an anti-bishop of Elne, that's a nice little brick in the wall. Conversely, if Fredelo shouldn't be there, that raises some important questions about the authenticity of this document.

...later bishop of Le Puy, and whilst I would love this to be true I can't see any indication that it came from anywhere other than directly out of some editor's behind. Why does this matter? Well, my argument about Saint-Paulien is that this isn't about social disruption...

Frèdol d'Andusa - Viquipèdia, l'enciclopèdia lliure

says in _El Obispado de Elna_ that there's another, different, act of 995 Fredelo is in featuring Archdeacon Aigo of Narbonne and Viscountess Ermesind. He gives no references, and I'm not sure either of these other people even exist. Finally, Catalan Wikipedia makes him Fredelo of Anduze...

ca.wikipedia.org

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tenthmedieval.wordpress.com

Someone evidently has access to it, because Catalan Wikipedia quotes from the disposition clause a couple of times; but it doesn't seem to be published anywhere AFAICT. Even stranger is that Francesc Monsalvatje (on whom more here: tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/t....

The cursed book of Francesc Monsalvatje

In 1889 a Catalan historian by the name of Francesc Monsalvatje y Fossas (if you’re spelling in Castilian, as was then still de rigueur) published a two-volume work about his local county of …

...but I've got 'we're temporarily down. service will be restored in a few moments' every single time I've encountered it, so that's no use. But what about the _Catalunya carolíngia_, the project to edit every Catalan charter from before 1000? Surely it should be in there? Nope.

Now, the Elne cartulary is lost. But it survives in a copy in the Archives Départementales de Pyrenées-Orientales and (for this charter) Moreau 16 in the BNF in Paris. Unfortunately, neither are digitised. The CNRS purports to have a directory of online summaries in the Moreau collection...

Ruscino : revue d'histoire et d'archéologie du Roussillon et des autres pays catalans / fondée et dirigée par Pierre Vidal,...

makes a grant of some land in Villeneuve-la-Rivière. The Elne cartulary hasn't been edited, but an inventory has (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...) and yep, it's there. Unfortunately, without even the dating clause let alone the text, there's no way of verifying it...

gallica.bnf.fr

Ruscino : revue d'histoire et d'archéologie du Roussillon et des autres pays catalans / fondée et dirigée par Pierre Vidal,... -- 1913-01-01 -- fascicules