JAMES L.

KELLEY

A SORDID BOON: AN EXPLORATION OF THE FRANKISH ORIGINS OF HEART BURIAL

R O M A N IT Y P R ES S N O R M A N , O K

Cover Image: Crystal urn containing the heart of Louis XVII, on display at the Basilique de SaintDenis. Source: C. Portier-Kaltenbach,

The Eternal Life of Bones. Medicographia 32 (2010).

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us, (1807).

A S R ID B O OD O N

The Arms of Christ. Ca. 1495 A.D. Bodleian Mss. Arch. G. f. 13.

C NE T O T NS
Introduction

Chapter One: The Frankish Origins of

Heart Burial as the Hidden Key to Medieval Historiography A. Introduction A. Heart Burial and Frankish Civilization B. Frankish Demonization of the Laboring Class in the Middle Ages Chapter Two: Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Francophile Historiography ..

Chapter One: The Frankish Origins of Heart Burial as the Hidden Key to Medieval Historiography A. Introduction

It all started in the coziest and snuggest of living rooms. My feet were propped up on a plush hassock, my neck sunk deep into an overstuffed sofa cushion. As usual, I was perusing a tome with a ponderous title. On another day my book of choice may have had The Idea of History or Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages on its spine. On this particular occasion it was Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity by Stephen Toulmin.1 Earlier I had spied the title on a friends bookshelf and, my interest piqued, I made my way to the local Barnes and Noble to buy it. Nothing unusual here. Viewed from one perspective,
Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
1

my entire life has been one long reading list, one protracted good read after another. I love the serendipity of desultory reading; that is, I spend a good portion of my scholarly life simply reading whatever I want to read. I often peruse rows of titles in the stacks of research libraries and on the shelves of bookstores. If something strikes my fancy, I grab it and open up the cover. And I read. What amazes me is that the more I engage in this seemingly random endeavor, the more latticed and interwoven become my ideas. Far-flung notions and hunches seem to come together magically. Admittedly, I do spend the other half of my time as a writer compiling and reading lists of articles and books about specific topics toward which my blissful randomness beckons, but I am careful never to let the predetermined course of study side of the seesaw hit the dirt. Okay, I have let this happen before, and it is the closest I have ever come to writers block. But, back to my living room couch Im there, my nose buried in a book titled Cosmopolis. The first thirty or so pages start off promisingly enough: Toulmin proposes a revision of the received wisdom about the early Modern period. For Toulmin it is nonsense to think of the first half of the seventeenth century in the usual manner, as being a silver-lined sequel to Dark Age misery. Rather, Modernitys feverish dream of rationalistic progress morphed into the nightmare of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), a series of conflicts that rival the World Wars for sheer devastation and social upheaval.2 Whats more, this all-out, Europe-wide war was rooted in religion. It was Roman Catholics versus Protestants, and everybody lost. Some have estimated that thirty percent of Europe perished either directly or indirectly from the Thirty Years Wara staggering, even mind-numbing figure. Modern indeed. So, Cosmopolis has me hooked right away. Next Toulmin introduces a figure I think I already know well, Mr. Ren Descartes. Yet I hardly recognize this strange figure of Toulmins its Descartes alright, only a fledgling, seventeen year old Descartes, a student at the Jesuit College of La Flche near Le Mans in France. It seems our pensive youth was aesthetically inclined, and he quite enjoyed his time amongst the students and instructors. In fact, this Descartes did not at all fit any conventional Descartes notion. He was no monkish rationalist
2

Ibid., 16-17.

caring nothing for the hubbub of events around him. Rather, Toulmin points to Descartes deeply seated aesthetico-political concernsfixations obscured in previous Descartes studiesby depicting the young philosopher in the act of dashing off a poetic tribute to the recently assassinated Henry of Navarre!3 I am literally on the edge of the sofa, and then what I read next makes me slide off and hit the carpet Finally, [Henry] agreed that after his death and that of his second wife, Marie de Medici, their hearts should be enshrined in the College Chapel at La Flche.4 There is kind of delayed reaction as the eerie import of these words sink inthen it hits me like a blackjack to the skull. With trepidation, I read on Twentieth-century people, who have their own expectations about the proper disposal of human bodies, may find this last clause gruesome. Aside from post-mortem examinations and organ transplants, we expect them to be preserved respectfully and intact: those of Kings and Queens (if anything) with greater delicacy than those of commoners. But there was a well-established medieval system of ideas about the embodiment of kingship in the corporeal forms of individual monarchs, and provisions such as Henry conceded were not unusual in the royal families of Europe. (-) On hearing of Henrys death, the Jesuits claimed his heart. It was taken from Paris to La Flche by stages: there, in a silver chalice, it was enshrined in the Chapel early in June, at an elaborate ceremony mingling grief with pride, and attended by the whole College community. (-) A pyramid 45 feet high was built at the College, in which the chalice with Henri IVs heart was demonstrated to visitors.5 Surely my leg was being pulled. Why had not I, no stranger to the Medieval period, ever heard of this system of ideas that
3 4 5

Ibid., 59-60. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57.

propped up such a grisly practice? My next thoughts flew to the funeral Mass at La Flche. Were all eyes focused upon the silver gore-filled receptacle as the Mass was said? Did the bloody heart serve as a proxy for the tasteless, colorless wafer normally ensconced in the monstrance? I could not keep up with my thoughts. Each query branched into scores of others, like one of those luminous fractal diagrams that always reminded me of smaller and smaller veins and the webbing of capillaries that connect them, some so small red blood cells must queue up. No cutting in line! Now I am transported to the vaguely nauseating sights and smells of school cafeterias. A fitting mood-setter for our macabre journey

***

***

***

These questions festered for months before I pulled myself away from my then-current project, a study of the theology of Greek-American theologian Fr. John S. Romanides.6 My immersion in Fr. Johns writings resulted, among other things, in a slender volume that dealt with his early writings, most notably his seminal Ancestral Sin.7 Initially, I had planned to write a further volume on his later writings, especially those that dealt with medieval historiography. These writings, written by Fr. John late in life, present what has been called the Romeic thesis.8 However, owing to my harrowing encounter with Henry of Navarres heart, the second Fr. John project was shelved, though, for reasons that will become plain, the Romeic thesis ended up as a key to my new line of inquiry. My new ambition was to write a history of the origin of the bizarre burial practice performed on
The result of these researches was a book-length studyA Realism of Glory: Lectures On Christology in the Works of Protopresbyter John Romanides (Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2009)and a translation of a sermon by Fr. JohnThe Life in Christ (Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis Press, 2010). 7 (Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002). 8 See D.P. Payne, The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political Hesychasm of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).
6

Henry of Navarre, a custom I later learned was known as heart burial. Thus began a strange journey into the gutsliterallyof the Middle Ages.

B. Heart Burial and Frankish Civilization

Who were the Franks? Before we can comment upon heart burial as a Frankish institution, it seems appropriate to say a few things about who these Franks were, where they came from, and by what historical avenues they ended up the power brokers of Europe, and in some wise the world. Heart burial is a Frankish practice. That is, from its appearance among members of the Carolingian Frankish royal family in the ninth century to its spread into the rank and file of Frankish noble society in the next two centuries, we see only Franks practicing heart burial.9 Heart burial even continues
See Charles A. Bradford. Heart Burial (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933) for a list of English aristocrats who had heart burials and whose names and/or titles betray their Norman Frank pedigree. On the Frankish beginnings of heart burial in France, see Pierre Duparc, Dilceratio Corporis, Bulletin de la socit nationale des antiquaries de France (1981): 360-372; for an overview centered on Eastern-Germanic Frankdom, see Dietrich Schfer, Mittelalterlicher Brauch bei der berfhrung von Leichen, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin) (1920): 478-498. For a less technical treatment, see the pictorial romp through the ghastly corridors and dank cells of Frankish heart burial that is Dr. Armin Dietzs superb website www.heartburial.com. It is true that some non-Franks have undergone heart burial, but these are in the main English literary figures such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Hardy whose motivation is a kind of Romantic nostalgia for all things Medieval, though Hardy may have seen his body division as fitting for an English knight. See below for the origins of knighthood in England with the
9

amongst those of Frankish noble descent to this day, as Armin Dietz relates: The last of the Wittelsbach dynasty, whose heart came to Alttting, was the crown princess Antonie von Luxemburg (1954). The last empress of the House of Habsburg, Zita of Bourbon-Parma (1938), was possibly the last person to realize this royal privilege and thereby symbolize eternal loyalty to both spouse and lineage.10 Allow me to relate a momentous fact that I believe few historians have truly considered. Perhaps this bit of information, since it so directly calls into question the standard historiography on the Middle Ages, should be viewed as a blunt and rather jarring answer to a question that academia has never dreamed of posing. Indeed, the question could not be asked by most academic historians, their orientation having, before the word go, accepted a version of historical reality that runs counter to the point of view of this study. So, here you have it: the Franks were the less than 2 per cent of Europe that came to rule much of the rest of the European population in the Middle Ages.11 Indeed, the origin of the English words frank, meaning sincere, and franchise, meaning a right to operate or move
Norman Frankish invasion of 1066. 10 www.heartburial.com. 11 John S. Romanides, Examples of the Science of the Ethnic Cleaning of Roman History and a Vision of the Future United States of Franco-Romania, Hellenic College Lecture Oct. 17, 1998 [revised Feb. 1999]. Avail at: www.romanity.org/htm/rom.21.en. the_ethnic_cleaning_of_roman_history.01.htm#k2. Cf. Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 115: While population estimates are impossible to make with any accuracy, one guess puts the number of Franks in the entire kingdom at a maximum of about 150,000 to 200,000 spread out within a population of six or seven million Gallo-Romans. While these figures are almost certainly exaggerated, it is reasonable to think that an estimate of a bit more than two percent Franks is not entirely unreasonable. This two percent, concentrated above the Loire and dominating the rest of the population, had an effect far beyond its numbers. On the use of the designation Frank as free and thus non-serf in late Capetian royal letters of enfranchisement, see Paul H. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 112-13. Freedman identifies the early twelfth-century Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (He cites Marc Bloch, Rois et serfs: Un chapitre dhistoire captienne [Geneva, 1976 (1920)], 144.) as the first use of Frank as free (113).

freely, is found in the Frankish word franc, meaning free. It does not require an imaginative labor of Hercules to guess the etymology of villein, which designated any non-Frank living on Frankish plantations. The plantations themselves were called villae. In other words, a villain was anyone who was not free. My great-great-grandfather was alive when African-American slaves were enfranchised, or made free.12 Many divergent theories abound as to how such a small group of people came to hold so much power, but the following elements doubtless played a role: 1) Here Come the Cavalry. The Carolingian Franks were using mounted cavalry more extensively and more effectively than any other group in the West from the seventh century on. This fact made it possible to decimate armies full of footmen with a surprisingly small number of armored knights. This military innovation the knight or armored mounted warriorwas not a worldwide phenomenon, as fairy tales seem to suggest with their knights in shining armor. Such thinking gives the impression that a knight was just a mundane soldier,
On the etymologies of villain, see John S. Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981), 14: With the advent of Frankish feudalism, former free Romans were transferred en masse from the cities and were established on the slave labor camps called villae and mansi, alongside the serfs. They were called villeins (vilains), a term which, for understandable reasons, came to mean enemies of law and order. Cf. Stanley Leman Galpin, Cortois and Villain: A Study of the Distinctions Made Between Them by the French and Provenal Poets of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Ryders Printing House, 1905), p. 8, which cites the medieval court poem Ille et Galeron:
12

Bien sai que del diable est plains Qui pour se prouece est villains; Vilonie vient de vil lieu. (vv. 1615-1617) As for the origin of the word franc: There is strong evidence that the higher and lower nobility of European feudalism were mostly descendants of Germanic and Norman conquerors, and that the serfs were mostly descendants of the conquered Romans and Romanized Celts and Saxons. This explains why the name Frank meant both noble and free in contrast to the serfs. This usage was strong enough to get into the English language by way of the Normans. Thus, even the African-American was described as receiving his franchise when set free (Ibid., 30).

a kind of stock-character like the farmer.13 Presumably, knights were found everywhere, and rode around in every kingdom the world over as some generic fighter. In actuality, knights were Franks, a military and social elite,14 bound together by their (perceived) sharing of noble blood and their noble calling to dominate the world in the name of God and for the glory of God. Just so this obvious yet somehow elusive point is made abundantly clear, let me reiterate: The knight is a peculiarly Frankish socio-military phenomenon, and thus, all later European knights are imitations of a very specific and well-defined (none stood apart from their neighbors more than Frankish knights vis--vis the European peasantry) class of Franks. The knight is a heavily armored, mounted Frankish berwarrior. Francophiles such as the esteemed R. Allen Brown have clamored for the educated public to recognize the amazing genius of the Franks becauseamong other thingsthey invented the knight. Indeed, they were the knights. 2) May I Be Frank? With the ascension of the ultra-martial Carolingian Franks (7th-9th centuries A.D.) came a new societal alignment: Frank came to mean being a freeman, a warrior, a lord and/or vassal, and a Godbeloved noble. Non-Frank meant disenfranchised. To be a serf under a Frankish knight-lord, and to be vulgar or ignoblethis was the lot of all non-Franks.15
Georges Dubys three orders were ingrained in nature. Marxs idea of feudalism as a stage that all societies pass through, though seemingly far removed from the fairy tale version of the Middle Ages, is equally wrongheaded, for the simple fact that knights, with their distinctive military tactics, idiosyncratic architectural innovations, and other distinctive cultural marks, did not tap into some Platonic form called medieval society, but rather consciously forged a new way of life out of the Late Antique reality into which they found themselves thrust. 14 R. Allen Brown, Origins of English Feudalism (London: Unwin Hyman, 1973), 24. 15 On the Medieval notion of the laboring class as subhuman, see Appendix, pp. []. Let us remember, however, that the Middle Ages did see the gradual (or, in some places, abrupt) rise of an urban merchant class. In other cases, towns seem to have functioned more-or-less continuously from Roman times, through the medieval epoch, and up to the present day. Besanon is a good example of a Roman town that, with the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West, became first an episcopal city (ruled by the local archbishop), only later to
13

One Frankish phrase used to describe non-Franks vilisimi ribaldican be translated vile low-lifes.16 As for non-Franks being unfree, the words of an English priest who had seen enough Englishmen trodden under the feet of Norman Frankish lords speak volumes: We are called serfs and beaten if we are slow in our service to them.17 As I touched upon in a previous book, it was not until the late 13th century or so before the rank and file commoner in France became known as French or a Frenchman. Even then, it was because of the political scheming of a FrankPhilip le Bel, King of Francethat the enserfed former Gallo-Roman citizens of the Roman Empire were told they were French. Interestingly, this promotion of peasants into French was the first instance of universal taxation, as Philip was in dire need money to support his wars against the Flemish and against his cousin, King Edward of England. It was also possible now to institute a wider-reaching draft, for everyone knew that to be a Frank or to be French was to fight for patria (we can add to our alarming list of Frankish firsts this latter notion of fighting for the fatherland, a harbinger of the totalitarian nationalism that has haunted the modern world for the last centuries).18 3) A Mans House Is His Castle. Franks invented the castle. Elizabeth Armitage was perhaps the first to recognize the Frankish origin of the castle (or, at least, she was the first to call proper attention to the significance of the
become a commune in 1290, ruled by the townspeople, the change coming about by royal charter. The following vignette, a passage from Fernand Braudels The Identity of France (2 vols. New York: HarperCollins, 1989) provides some interesting details: The chartermade [Besanon] a free imperial city in whose affairs the archbishop would interfere less and less, a sort of urban republic with the right to levy taxes and pronounce justice, to police itself, even to sign treaties of alliance and (only after 1534 it is true) to mint money stamped with its own arms (1.193). 16 Antione Thomas, Fransesco da Barberino et la literature provenale en France au moyen ge (Paris, 1883), 117: Vidi regem Francorum salutantem in Piccardia tres vilissimos ribaldos qui inclinabent se illi, et volentes illi loqui equitare ad latus ejus et ipsum singulos patienter audite. Cited in Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Persona et Gesta: The Image and Deeds of the Thirteenth-Century Capetians, Viator 19 (1988): 219-246, at 229. See Appendix, p. []. 17 Froissart, Chronicles, Part One (London: Penguin, 1968), 212. 18 See my Anatomyzing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011), 94-95.

castle) in her important book Early Norman Castles of the British Isles.19 Armitage points out that before the Franks, fortifications were designed to protect an entire community and its livestock. As her follower R. Allen Brown emphasizes, the Franks innovated by building the worlds first castles: [T]he castle is a fortified residence, uniquely combining the dual role, and moreover it is the private, as opposed to public, and the residential fortress of a lord.20 Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel are among the scholarly majority that has overturned the false romantic notion that audacious adventurers covered the land with strongholds to protect a helpless peasantry from the raids of Viking, Hungarian, or Saracen pirates. Poly and Bournazel corroborate Armitages insight that, before the rise of the Carolingians, the fortifications known as burgherforts or Volksburgen, which were large enough to protect entire communities, peasants and all, were the norm.21 Around the year 1000, everything changed. Smaller castra were constructed that often formed the focal point of a villa or manse. These castleswhich popped up everywhere in Franciawere constructed to protect the Frankish lord, his family, and sometimes his retainers from everyone else in the community. A word from Georges Duby illuminates the deeper significance of the castle as knightly/noble residence: [T]he majority of these castles were built by great landholders to support the exercise of power which was neither a continuation of old patterns of patronage, nor a substitute for the weakened regalian duty to preserve peace and uphold justice. (-) It is likely that there was widespread and uncontrolled castle-building during the period which saw the fusion of public and private justice.22
Elisabeth Armitage, Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (London: J. Murray, 1912). 20 R. A. Brown, Origins, 30. Also see Armitage, 62. 21 Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation, 900-1200, tr. Caroline Higgitt (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1991 [1980]), citation at 25, see also 24-25 for encastlement. 22 George Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460, From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc, tr. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1987]), 59. Interior citation A. Debord, La Socit laque dans les pays de la Charente (Xe-XIIe s[icle]) (Paris, 1984).
19

However, the Regnum Francorum soon spread beyond the confines of the European continent. In the last fourth of the eighth century, Charlemagne, the most famed Frankish king, campaigned in Italy and Germany, deracinating thousands of Saxons and bringing huge amounts of territory under Frankish control.23 Next, after a purported union with (Eastern) Roman Empress Irene fell through, Charlemagne had himself crowned Emperor by the Pope in Rome. I will go further into the theological and geopolitical facets of Charlemagnes maneuvering in a later chapter. For now, suffice to say that the Franks, far from being politically unsophisticated, had worldwide ambitions, and they often proved to possess the savvy and ruthlessness needed to carry out their gambits. The dynamism of the Franks is evinced in their takeover of England in 1066, their rule of Sicily at different times in the Middle Ages, and their string of Crusades against the Muslims (and, in the early 13th century, against the Christians in Constantinople New Rome!). Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single aspect of the Medieval period that does not have a Frankish king and an army of crusaders behind it. Later on, we will provide a detailed look at the Franks theory of kingship and its idiosyncrasies.

23

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, tr. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 61-64.

C. Frankish Demonization of the Laboring Class in the Middle Ages

[T]he peasants in fighting against economic oppression were also fighting for wider human rights. They strove not merely for a reduction of rent but for human dignity. They fought quite consciously against a system of society which by the thirteenth century had evolved a clear caste interpretation of peasant status, so that blood became the determinant of social and legal rights. What more poignant and bitter comment on this could there be than the action of a Worcestershire tenant of the Earl of Gloucester in 1293? This man was distrained by the earls bailiffs to receive land to be held in the earls manor of Hanley Castle in a servile manner. He had often sworn (so a jury said) that rather than take land on servile conditions he would drown or hang himself. And so he didfor to escape this disgrace he drowned himself in the River Severn at Clevelode. Rodney Hilton24 A twelfthcentury bishop of Trier was assailed by a starving crowd that refused his offer of useless money, seized his fat palfrey, tore it to pieces, and devoured it before his eyes. Morris Bishop25

Rodney Hilton, Peasant Movements in England Before 1381, 122-138 in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Hambledon Press,1985), 138. Orig. published in Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1974): 207-219. 25 Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970), 244.
24

In his controversial The Decline of the West (1922), Oswald Spengler characterizes the medieval peasant as 1) without identity, 2) without culture, and 3) without intellect. These negatives are more than offset, so Spengler insists, by the peasants mystical soul.26 Scholar Allen J. Frantzen, in an effort to expose the inhumanity, indeed the perversity, of this Frankish stereotype of the peasantry, notes that for the nobles [t]he peasants were seen as childlike in their simplicity and assured of salvation because, as Honorius Augustodunensis wrote, they feed the people of God by their sweat. The logic of this conceptwas perverse.27 In effect, the purveyors of this idea have inflicted untold suffering upon millions of non-Franks, all the while easing their own consciences and instilling docility in their humanoid beasts of burden by promising a heavenly reward. What reward is granted the masters in this scheme? Of this we hear nothing. Perhaps more insidious are those overt characterizations of the peasantry as subhuman and bestial. The Norman Frank Geoffrey Luttrell, early in the fourteenth century, commissioned the creation of a book that gives us a window into the Norman Franks views on ethnicity. Literary scholar Thorlac TurvillePetres description is apt: The best-known pictures in the Luttrell Psalter are of the farming year, which are now used as delightful illustrations of country-life in the Middle Ages, but for Luttrell are demonstrations of his ownership of the upplandish men with their miserable, sometimes apelike faces, serving their lord in the borders of his book as in his fields. In one illustration a monkey wearing a cap rides a cart drawn by three horses.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Tr. C.F. Atkinson (New York: A. Knopf, 1926-8), 96. Cited in Werner Resner, Peasants in the Middle Ages. Tr. A. Sttzer (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992 [1985]), 11. 27 Allen J. Frantzen, The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, 1-15 in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, eds. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1994), 8. Interior citation Honorius, Elucidarium, Patrologia cursus completusSeries Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64), 177: 1147.49.
26

Luttrell himself is pictured, magnificent and fully armed on his charger, with his womenfolk gazing up at him in admiration.28 This passage should be sobering to many who have grown up in the American South, where until recently one could find lawn jockeysceramic representations of black people as childlike and simian. Almost invariably these racist emblems wear the same workmans cap we see in the Luttrell Psalter. This author, for one, experienced a moment of truth in coming face to face with a white lawn jockey in the Luttrell Psalter. This provoked the burning questionwhy is enslavement given its proper name in every case except when my beloved non-Frankish European people are at the receiving end of it?29 More evidence that the Norman Franks viewed their English villeins as lewed men is found in the Chronicle of Robert Manning. Here the Anglo-Saxon author insists that, if his people were not starved and oppressed by Frankish overlords, they would be as comely and pleasant as their foreign lords: Als fair are the commune pedaille As the lordynges and of entaille. [If you] Give Englishmen even keeping, Meat and drink and other thing, [Then there] is no man of so fair colour, Never so clear, never of so sweet savour. (I, ll. 14885-90)30 Mannings cry is that of every oppressed person who has been forced to work in inhumane conditions without adequate clothing or shelter. Our faces are dirty, and we do smell bad, Manning might have said, but only because you have enslaved us and given us no hot water and soap! Were we afforded a share in
Thorlac Turville-Petre, Politics and Poetry in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Case of Robert Mannings Chronicle. RES, New Series, 39.153 (1988): 128, at 21, emphasis added. 29 My ancestry is a mixture of Irish, Scottish, English and Germanall peoples either directly or indirectly under the Frankish yoke at one time or another. 30 Robert Manning, The Chronicle of Robert Manning of Brunne, Part I, ed. F. J. Furnivall, The Story of England, 2 vols., Rolls Series lxxxvii (London, 1887). Cited in Turville-Petre, Politics, 26. Bracketed text and modernized rendering of lines 87-90 by author. For the English as lewed men, see Manning, Chronicle, I.ll.6.
28

your lordly privilege, your bright banners and your opulent feasts, we would appear as noble as you! Such self-assertions of English worth would have been unnecessary had the Franks not instituted a feudal culture of oppression and demonization at their arrival in England in 1066.31 The foregoing evidence for Frankish ethnic demonization of non-Franks calls into question the nave opinions of many of todays leading medievalists, who believe that there was no such thing as racism in Europe before the modern period. Paul H. Freedman, after examining Frankish documents used to justify the perpetual enslavement of non-Franks (such as the PseudoTurpin Chronicle and the Customs of Beauvaisis), concludes that [i]f the medieval period for the most part did not share the tendencies of modern racism to posit literal biological distinction, it placed the moment of division far enough back in the historical past to account for the marked, physical difference of the servile population.32 How is this any different than Southern slave owners who justified the enslavement of blacks on the basis of the mark of Cain? I would suggest, following Fr. John S. Romanides, that Western historiography has, either consciously or unconsciously, adopted the perspective of the Franks and their chroniclers and canonists. The spinal column of this Frankish historiography is the justification of Frankish rule on the basis of an ethnic divide between Franks who rule and non-Franks who, because of a literal Fall in the distant past, are doomed to eternal servitude. Though we have already examined the Frankish origins of feudalism, knighthood, the castle, and of course heart burial, it is important for us to bear in mind that the very idea of the peasant comes from the developments in Middle Age Francia, developments that spread to cover a large part of Europe after the eleventh century. Thus the peasants peculiar mode of existence can only be understood through his relation to a Frankish lord.33 In point of fact, the notion of Europe
[] cite English and Normans book, and others JSR? Freedman, Origins, 113. See also The Pseudo-Turpin, ed. Hamilton Martin Smyser (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1937), and Philippe de Remi, sire de Beaumanoir, The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 33 In The Peasantry of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), Werner Resner pinpoints the origin of the peasantry at the heart of the Regnum Francorum: Peasants in the full sense of the wordappear on the European stage only from the eleventh century onward, when an estate of peasants emerged and
31 32

corresponds geographically to wherever peasants are found under lords, freeholding peasants being the exception.

became an entity in its own right vis--vis an estate of knights. The basic features of the European peasantry are already discernible in the heartland of the eighth- and ninth-century Frankish kingdom, that is, the region between the Loire and the Rhine. As the centuries passed, they became more pervasive and spread beyond their place of origin (20, 21). See also idem., Peasants, 12: The peasantwas not an ancient figure unaffected by history but rather a historical figure that emerged in the high Middle Ages.

Chapter Two: Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Francophile Historiography

BIBLIOGRAPHY
E.S. Armitage. Early Norman Castles of the British Isles. London: J. Murray, 1912. Morris Bishop. The Middle Ages. New York: American Heritage Press, 1970. Marc Bloch. Rois et serfs: Un chapitre dhistoire captienne. Geneva, 1976 [1920]. Charles A. Bradford. Heart Burial. London: Allen and Unwin, 1933. Fernand Braudel. The Identity of France. 2 vols. Translated by Sin Reynolds. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Elizabeth A.R. Brown. Persona et Gesta: The Image and Deeds of the Thirteenth-Century Capetians. Viator 19 (1988): 219246. R. Allen Brown. Origins of English Feudalism. London: Unwin Hyman, 1973. A. Debord. La Socit laque dans les pays de la Charente (XeXIIe s[icle]). Paris, 1984. Armin Dietz. www.heartburial.com. George Duby. France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460, From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc. Translated by Juliet Vale. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1987]. Pierre Duparc. Dilceratio Corporis. Bulletin de la socit nationale des antiquaries de France (1981): 360-372.

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969. Allen J. Frantzen. The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England. In The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat, eds. Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1994. 1-15. Paul H. Freedman. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Froissart. Chronicles, Part One. London: Penguin, 1968. Stanley Leman Galpin. Cortois and Villain: A Study of the Distinctions Made Between Them by the French and Provenal Poets of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Ryders Printing House, 1905. Patrick Geary. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rodney Hilton. Peasant Movements in England Before 1381. In Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History. London: Hambledon Press, 1985. 122-138. James L. Kelley. Anatomyzing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology. Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011. ---. A Realism of Glory: Lectures On Christology in the Works of Protopresbyter John Romanides. Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2009.

Robert Manning. The Chronicle of Robert Manning of Brunne. Part I. Ed. F. J. Furnivall. The Story of England, 2 vols., Rolls Series lxxxvii (London, 1887).

Patrologia cursus completusSeries Latina. Ed. J.-P. Migne. 221 vols. Paris, 1844-64. D.P. Payne. The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political Hesychasm of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Philippe de Remi, sire de Beaumanoir. The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel. The Feudal Transformation, 900-1200. Translated by Caroline Higgitt. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1991 [1980]. The Pseudo-Turpin, ed. Hamilton Martin Smyser. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1937. C. Rgnier. The Heart of the Kings of France: Cordial Immortality. Medicographia 31.4 (2009): 430-439. Avail. at: http://www.medicographia.com/2010/07/the-heart-of-thekings-of-france-cordial-immortality.

Werner Resner. The Peasantry of Europe. Translated by Thomas M. Barker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ---. Peasants in the Middle Ages. Translated by A. Sttzer. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992 [1985].

John S. Romanides. Ancestral Sin. Translated by George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002. ---. Examples of the Science of the Ethnic Cleaning of Roman History and a Vision of the Future United States of FrancoRomania, Hellenic College Lecture Oct. 17, 1998 [revised Feb. 1999]. Avail. at: www.romanity.org/htm/rom.21.en.the ethnic cleaning of roman history.01.htm#k2.

---.

Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981. The Life in Christ. Translated by James L. Kelley. Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis Press, 2010.

---.

Dietrich Schfer. Mittelalterlicher Brauch bei der berfhrung von Leichen. Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin) (1920): 478-498. Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Translated by C.F. Atkinson. New York: A. Knopf, 1926-8. Antione Thomas. Fransesco da Barberino et la literature provenale en France au moyen ge. Paris, 1883. Stephen Toulmin. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: The Free Press, 1990. Thorlac Turville-Petre. Politics and Poetry in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Case of Robert Mannings Chronicle. RES, New Series 39.153 (1988): 1-28.