In the Manner of the Franks - University of Pennsylvania Press

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In the Manner of THE FRANKS Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Eu­rope, 300–1000 CE

Eric J. Goldberg

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

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Contents

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Emperors and Elites 15 Chapter 2. Merovingians and Magnates 44 Chapter 3. Charlemagne and the Chase 70 Chapter 4. Louis the Pious and His Legacy 103 Chapter 5. Hounds and Hawks 129 Chapter 6. Peasants and Poachers 166 Chapter 7. Bishops and Boars 190 Chapter 8. Danger and Death 213 Conclusion 238

Notes 247 Bibliography 291 Index 000 Acknowl­edgments 331

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­ fter many weeks of travel, Charlemagne’s ambassadors arrived at the court of A the caliph Harun al-­Rashid. Charlemagne had dispatched his envoys over land and sea to renew his ­father’s alliance between the Frankish and Muslim empires, and as diplomatic protocol required, the ruler of the Franks sent his representatives with costly gifts: fast ­horses, bright fabrics, and fierce hunting dogs. As the wealthiest ruler in the world, the caliph was only mildly impressed by the ­horses and textiles, yet he did take a special interest in the Frankish dogs, and he inquired as to what animals they ­were good for hunting. Charlemagne’s ambassadors proudly responded that they would tear to pieces any beast on which they ­were set. The caliph replied dubiously, “Only time ­will tell.” As chance would have it, the next day it was reported to Harun that a lion was assailing his subjects nearby. He immediately called for the visiting Franks and their dogs, and they set out quickly on ­horse­back. When they came upon the lion, the Frankish dogs encircled the menacing beast, and Charlemagne’s envoys moved in, quickly slaying it with their swords. Seeing the skill and courage of the Frankish hunters, the caliph at last believed the rumors he had heard about the emperor in far-­off Eu­rope. He proclaimed, “Now I know that the ­things I have heard about my ­brother Charlemagne are true: that through constant hunting and exercising his body and mind with untiring energy, he has grown accustomed to conquering every­ thing u ­ nder heaven!”1 As is often the case with early medieval hunting stories, we cannot know if this tale about Charlemagne’s ambassadors slaying a lion in Mesopotamia is based on an ­actual historical event or was simply made up. The anecdote comes from the pen of a St.-­Gall monk named Notker, who had a flair for inventing vivid stories to entertain his intended reader, Charlemagne’s great-­grandson Charles the Fat. Nevertheless, the story is significant ­because it captures essential connections between hunting, masculinity, and power in the early ­Middle Ages. The caliph’s proclamation about Charlemagne at the end of the tale encapsulates two

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prevalent interpretations of hunting in Notker’s day: that it was a badge of the Franks’ vigorous manhood (“exercising his body and mind with untiring energy”) and that it was a symbol of Carolingian kingship and empire (“conquering every­ thing ­under heaven”). Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard likewise associated hunting with Frankish kingship and manhood when he observed that Charlemagne and his sons ­were outstanding hunters more Francorum, “in the manner of the Franks.”2 Einhard’s phrase “in the manner of the Franks” expressed the po­liti­cal ideology that skill at hunting was a defining characteristic of the Carolingian royal ­family and of the Frankish nobility at large. As Einhard summed up with pride, “­There is hardly another ­people to be found on earth who can equal the Franks in this art.”3 This book seeks to understand why authors like Einhard and Notker believed ­there ­were impor­tant connections between hunting, kingship, and masculinity in early medieval Eu­rope. To answer this question, I trace the dynamic history of hunting from the late Roman empire, through the eras of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, up to the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis V—­ fittingly, in a hunting accident—in 987. I argue that hunting played a fundamental role in the creation of aristocratic status and manhood throughout ­these centuries. Moreover, I demonstrate how hunting experienced a number of significant developments during this era that reflected and ­shaped larger changes in politics and society. Not only did cynegetic techniques, law, and geography evolve across the centuries, but the Carolingians also transformed the activity into a symbol of Frankish kingship and po­liti­cal identity. This connection between hunting, kingship, and Frankishness first emerged ­under Charlemagne (768–814), reached its highpoint ­under his heir Louis the Pious (814–840), and continued ­under Louis’s sons. Carolingian royal hunting then experienced a long period of transformation during the ­later ninth and tenth centuries ­until Louis V’s death.

In the end, the Carolingians’ emphasis on the hunt as a badge of royal power and Frankish identity endured long ­after the end of their dynasty.

In this study I define “hunting” broadly as all methods of capturing or killing wild animals and birds.4 By ­doing so, I follow the lead of one early medieval author who characterized hunting as any technique for slaying or catching game “with practice, skill, and cunning.”5 Geo­graph­i­cally I focus on the lands of western Eu­rope that became the core regions of the Carolingian empire (Gaul, Germany, and Italy), with occasional glances further afield to Byzantium, the ‘Abbasid caliphate, Anglo-­Saxon Britain, and the Scandinavian and Slavic worlds. While previous studies of medieval hunting have tended to focus on techniques and law, I seek to understand the larger po­liti­cal, cultural, and ideological meanings of the chase in the context of early medieval society. I contend that hunting played a vital yet little-­understood role in the social construction of po­liti­cal power, noble

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status, and elite manhood in this formative period of Eu­ro­pean history. Hunting, in other words, contributed to the creation of Eu­rope itself.

Approaches to Early Medieval Hunting

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The prevalent view of hunting in the early ­Middle Ages is that it was somehow more primitive, militaristic, and “Germanic” than in ­later periods. This perspective goes back to the Enlightenment, when Edward Gibbon characterized hunting by the “German conquerors” as a destructive force that undermined Roman peace, law, and social order. Through the usurpation of public lands to create private forests, Gibbon argued, the barbarians oppressed the civilized inhabitants of Roman Gaul and drove the large-­scale reversion of productive agriculture to primeval wilderness.6 The sociologist Norbert Elias contributed to this view through his influential work on the formation of court socie­ties and what he called the “civilizing pro­cess.” Elias was interested in the historical development of restrained codes of courtly be­hav­ior that compelled aristocrats to stifle violent impulses and behave according to rules of refined etiquette.7 Only in the l­ater ­Middle Ages and early modern era, Elias believed, did Eu­ro­pean monarchs become strong enough to curb aristocratic vio­lence through what he termed the “courtierization of warriors.”8 As part of his model, Elias argued that it was not ­until the post-­medieval era that hunting emerged as a civilized “sport,” by which he meant an or­ga­nized group activity centered on competition, physical exertion, and “rules which define the permitted limits of vio­lence.”9 In contrast, Elias believed that hunting in the ­earlier medieval centuries was simpler, more violent and un­regu­la­ted, and focused on the “real pleasures, the pleasures of killing and eating.”10 Early medieval historians have long discredited such antiquated views of the “Dark Ages.” Nevertheless, ­these outdated notions endure in modern scholarship on the history of hunting. In the only monograph dedicated exclusively to early medieval hunting (published in 1940), Kurt Lindner described this period as one of secondary importance for the overall history of the subject.11 For Lindner, the Merovingian and Carolingian eras provided only the rough-­hewn foundations for “all the beauty and sublimity that was the peculiar characteristic of late medieval hunting in its Golden Age.”12 More recent scholarship on medieval hunting accepts Lindner’s interpretation. In his impor­tant history of hunting from prehistoric times to the pre­sent, Werner Rösener posed the question, “In which age and ­under what circumstances did the ‘noble art of the chase’ evolve out of the wild slaying of animals?”13 The answer, Rösener argued, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the supposedly primitive hunting by the Franks evolved

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into the courtly sport of French and German aristocrats.14 For Rösener, hunting in the central and ­later ­Middle Ages was fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the early medieval “wild slaying of animals” (die wilde Tierhetze) in that it was “courtly,” a formulation that echoes Elias’s views. Rösener associated the courtly chase with a range of characteristics including stag (red deer) hunting, falconry, elaborate rituals, elegant attire, banqueting, and the participation of ­women. In contrast, Rösener depicted hunting ­under the Merovingians and Carolingians as militaristic, heroic, focused on slaying dangerous wild boars, and less interested in the more refined stag hunting and falconry.15 Thus it allegedly was only in the ­later ­Middle Ages that hunting came to play “an impor­tant role in the thought and be­hav­ior of the nobility and court society.”16 This supposed contrast between the warlike heroic boar hunting by the Franks and the sophisticated courtly chase of the central and ­later ­Middle Ages reflects the general scholarly consensus.17 As a result, studies of medieval hunting often begin in the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, as if the previous millennium ­were of ­little consequence.18 Contributing to this view is the fact that most medieval hunting and falconry manuals date to the twelfth ­century and ­later.19 Thus one scholar concludes that the dearth of cynegetic treatises and pictorial illustrations before the twelfth ­century “in itself suggests that hunting was still essentially for the pot and that the methods ­were basic and ­little affected by sophisticated ritual.”20 In contrast to this popu­lar view, specialists in the history of early medieval Eu­rope have long recognized the importance of hunting in Frankish society.21 As Thomas Zotz summed up, “Seen from the point of view of the court and its culture, the hunt without question stood at center stage.”22 Early medieval historians have written on dif­fer­ent aspects of this subject from social, ­legal, administrative, and ideological perspectives.23 In recent years Martina Giese and Baudouin Van den Abeele in par­tic­u­lar have revolutionized our understanding of the sources and techniques of medieval and early modern hunting and falconry.24 While the scholarship of Giese and Van den Abeele tends to focus on the central and ­later medieval centuries, this book concentrates on the much-­less-­studied early ­Middle Ages. My objective is not to focus on the minutiae of cynegetic techniques (although they certainly are impor­tant) but rather to view hunting within the larger context of early medieval politics, society, and culture. To do so, I situate early medieval hunting within three broad themes: masculinity, ritual, and the environment.

First, this book views the history of hunting through the lens of scholarship on masculinity and gender. In recent years, ­there has been significant scholarship on the history of masculinity in the ­Middle Ages. This work begins with the recognition that, while biological sexes (male and female) are historical constants, gender—­that is, how socie­ties think about manhood and womanhood—­varies

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across time and cultures. This is ­because ideologies of gender are always ­enmeshed in how a society symbolizes and legitimates power. Scholarship on medieval masculinity stresses that, although society was decidedly patriarchal, ­there was not a single, dominant, “hegemonic” version of manhood.25 Instead, t­ here ­were overlapping and competing masculine groups, including laymen, clerics, monks, nobles, warriors, courtiers, commoners, and (in the East) eunuchs.

Power­f ul men often strove to dominate and marginalize other male and female gender groups, although not without re­sis­tance.26 In the early ­Middle Ages, lay noblemen embraced a version of masculinity that combined the active life of politics, marriage, and warfare with the contemplative life of reading, penance, and prayer.27 As Rachel Stone has argued, this was especially true in the ­later eighth and ninth centuries, when the efforts of the Carolingians to create a Christian empire based on cooperation between lay nobles and churchmen led to more positive views about lay masculinity.28 In light of this gender complexity, scholars emphasize the socialized and performative nature of medieval masculinities: that notions of manhood ­were acquired through pro­cesses of education, discipline, and self-­mastery and that masculinity constantly needed to be asserted through the “stylized repetition of acts.”29 Royal courts played an especially impor­tant role in shaping aristocratic masculinity by modeling male be­hav­ior for the sons of noble families raised at the palace.30 Historians have also begun to explore medieval male bodies and investigate the ways in which masculine identities ­were constructed through cultural practices such as diet, hair, clothing, exercise, and asceticism.31 A central argument of this book is that hunting was essential to the masculine identity of one dominant gender group: lay aristocrats. By lay aristocrats (or lay nobles—­I use the terms synonymously), I signify male members of the early medieval po­liti­cal and social elite who ­were not clerics or monks. I prefer the adjective “lay” to “secular,” since lay elites ­were often highly religious and literate and therefore did not possess a profane secular culture separate from that of the educated clergy.32 The lay nobility was a loosely defined group that constituted the upper strata of early medieval society, although ­there was considerable hierarchy, fluidity, and ambiguity within it.33 The written sources employ a range of terms to describe its members, including “nobles” (nobiles), the “power­f ul” (potentes), the “­great” (proceres, magnates), the king’s “faithful men” (fideles, leudes), and “warriors” (milites).34 One historian estimates that members of the lay aristocracy prob­ably numbered in the low thousands at any given time.35 Scholars of early medieval Eu­rope have often noted in passing the connections between hunting and aristocratic manhood, but this topic has not yet received the focused attention it deserves.36 It was precisely ­because of the subjectivity of noble status, the dif­fer­ent manifestations of masculinity, and the blurry lines between laymen

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and clerics that hunting proved to be such an impor­tant marker of the lay aristocracy. Learning to hunt with ­horses, hounds, and hawks transformed wellborn boys into men and distinguished them from ­women, clerics, commoners, and other gender groups.37 The activity instilled in noble boys and youths the essential manly virtue of fortitudo, which entailed not only physical strength but also skill with weapons, ­horse­manship, self-­discipline, and courage. Even ­after becoming adults (a transition marked by marriage and the establishment of a ­house­hold), noblemen continued to hunt as a public ritual of lordship and vio­lence, which ­were key markers of lay masculinity.38 And it must be added that most kings and nobles truly loved to hunt: it was a passion, a form of relaxation, and a source of tremendous joy in what could be a difficult and dangerous world. Even more than warfare itself, it was the love of hunting—­what one scholar has called “noble hunting fever” (adliges Jagdfieber)—­that distinguished power­f ul laymen from every­one ­else in post-­Roman Eu­rope.39 The second body of scholarship on which this book builds are studies of early medieval po­liti­cal ritual. By “po­liti­cal ritual,” this scholarship signifies a semi-­ regularized set of actions performed for their symbolic value to convey ideas about power, authority, and order. Inspired by the work of social anthropologists, historians emphasize the importance of rituals for ordering the status-­conscious, competitive, and undergoverned society of early medieval Eu­rope.40 Rituals functioned on at least two levels: as choreographed events strategically used in short-­term power strug­gles, and as reports of ­those ritualized events by chroniclers who attempted to control their interpretation and memory.41 Scholars of early medieval ritual have tended to view royal hunting through the lens of consensus politics.

Po­liti­cal consensus—­that is, the agreement and support of the nobles—­was the lynchpin of royal power. As Chris Wickham emphasized, forging po­liti­cal consensus often depended on the proper stage-­management of rituals.42 The interpretation of hunting as a key ritual of consensus goes back to a classic article on Carolingian po­liti­cal culture by Janet Nelson.43 Nelson interpreted royal hunts (and other group activities like banqueting, ­going to mass, and gift-­giving) as courtly activities that helped forge bonds of consensus between the Carolingians and the Franks and therefore contributed to the maintenance of social equilibrium and po­liti­cal stability: “For the hunt was an exercise in, and a demonstration of, the virtues of collaboration. The aristocracy who hunted with the king shared his favour, his sport, his military training and his largess.”44 Although Nelson’s brief discussion of hunting focuses on the ninth ­century, historians have tended to accept her interpretation as valid for the entire early ­Middle Ages. Scholars therefore have largely ascribed a functionalist interpretation to early medieval hunting: that it was a group ritual that helped forge po­liti­cal consensus between rulers and aristocrats and thus contributed to po­liti­cal order.45

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In the chapters that follow, we ­w ill find that Nelson’s consensus model of hunting as a royal ritual is at times compelling. This was especially true during the late eighth and ninth centuries, when Charlemagne and his successors transformed the chase into a prominent ritual of royalty. Yet this interpretation requires nuancing and qualifying, since scholars have ­adopted it in a way that tends to flatten, oversimplify, and overgeneralize what was a complex phenomenon that varied greatly over time, space, and context. Royal hunts could be an impor­tant force for consensus, but this was not the only role they played in early medieval society. Moreover, the dynamics for creating po­liti­cal consensus ­were not constant but varied across chronology and geography.46 It therefore is misleading to make sweeping statements about the “function” of early medieval hunting based on Nelson’s ninth-­century Carolingian model. As we ­w ill see, royal hunts played a range of roles in society: not only for forging consensus but also for displaying the king’s prowess and health, announcing the establishment of peace, asserting lordship over territory, testing the courage of the nobles, and providing a venue for exercise and relaxation. Interpreting hunting as a ritual of consensus describes only one aspect of a much more multifaceted, dynamic, and exciting story.

The third body of scholarship on which this book builds is medieval environmental history. Environmental history explores the dynamic interaction between ­human socie­ties, the natu­ral environment, and the animal world, and as Richard Hoffmann put it, “brings the natu­ral world into the story as an agent and object of history. This is medieval history as if nature mattered.”47 Environmental history overlaps with cultural, social, and economic history, since the natu­ral world and animals ­were omnipresent in medieval life.48 The recent “animal turn” in anthropology has influenced environmental history by breaking down traditional rigid bound­a ries between ­humans and other animals and between culture and nature. Scholars now emphasize how ­humans, animals, and ­ uman creation, the natu­ral world w ­ ere deeply interconnected.49 Wilderness is a h always changing, and part of a continuum with civilization.50 Arising from this insight is the field of landscape history, which is related to environmental history in that it explores how ­people since prehistory have changed the physical environment for practical, po­liti­cal, and ideological reasons.51 Thus t­ here ­were no primeval, untouched landscapes in early medieval Eu­rope; since their arrival tens of thousands of years ­earlier, ­humans had profoundly ­shaped Eu­rope’s wilderness regions, depended on them for natu­ral resources, and projected their cultural values onto them.

The study of early medieval hunting must include approaches from environmental and landscape history, since it needs to consider the organ­ization of wilderness for the pursuit of game, the kinds of wild animals that ­people hunted,

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and the trained animals that assisted them.52 For the pre­sent book, the scholarship on medieval forests and game parks is especially relevant. Historians have long recognized that royal forests played an impor­tant role in the evolution of hunting rights and law, and they have attempted to understand the origins and development of forests from ­legal, administrative, geographic, and ideological perspectives.53 That scholarship sometimes assumes that, from their first appearance in the historical sources, royal forests ­were defined by hunting rights and thus primarily for the king’s chase.54 This book, however, emphasizes that royal forests underwent a long evolution during the early ­Middle Ages. We ­will see that it was only ­under the Carolingians that forests became explic­itly associated with royal hunting and jurisdiction over wild animals, especially the Franks’ favorite game—­red deer and wild boar. Related to the history of the forest is the game park, that is, walled game reserves built near palaces for the exclusive enjoyment of the king and his companions. Historians have stressed the impor­tant role of game parks as symbols of royal authority, but most of this scholarship focuses on ­ ill have the ­later medieval and early modern periods, especially in ­England.55 We w a number of opportunities to reexamine the evolution of royal forests, game parks, hunting rights, and game in the course of this study. One of the central arguments of this book is that it was Charlemagne himself who introduced decisive changes in forests and parks as part of his new emphasis on the hunt as an emblem of Carolingian kingship.

In sum, this book aims to put the hunt where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of early medieval masculinity, po­liti­cal culture, and the relationship between ­people and the environment. Rather than approaching hunting narrowly through the lens of techniques and law, I endeavor to understand this complex phenomenon within the broader customs, hierarchies, and habitus of early medieval society. Guy Halsall labeled such a methodology a “substantist” approach that attempts to explain the be­hav­ior of ­people “in terms of the norms, values and mentalities of the society which is practicing it.”56 In other words, early medieval hunting had its own logic that distinguishes it from the modern ­ iddle Ages, hunting was notion of “sport.” I argue that, throughout the early M essential for military training and the construction of noble identity and manhood. During ­these centuries, however, the chase experienced impor­tant changes in the realm of po­liti­cal symbolism and ritual, the development of forests and wilderness landscapes, and its associations with a specifically Frankish po­liti­cal identity. The history of hunting, in other words, reflected, and indeed ­shaped, larger developments in politics and society. Recognizing that early medieval hunting varied over time and place necessitates a contextual approach that avoids lumping together evidence from dif­fer­ent centuries into an oversimplified model of the early medieval hunt. Throughout this book, we need to stay

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attentive to chronology, geography, context, and significant moments of po­liti­ cal change.

Sources and Organ­ization

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The historian of early medieval hunting must cast his or her net widely in terms of evidence. While several texts related to hunting and falconry do survive from this period, they are not didactic hunting and falconry treatises like t­ hose found in the ­later medieval and early modern eras.57 The reason for this dearth of early medieval hunting treatises is that ­people in this era learned the necessary skills through oral instruction, observation, and practice rather than by reading.58 To compensate for this, I take an eclectic approach to the sources and examine a broad range of written and unwritten evidence. It is impor­tant to stress from the outset that dif­fer­ent kinds of evidence give us dif­fer­ent kinds of information. We ­will need to keep in mind the assorted types of surviving evidence, the advantages and limitations of each, and the need to check vari­ous sources against each other. Nevertheless, the tremendous variety of sources relevant to early medieval hunting is a significant advantage to its study and an indicator of its social and po­liti­cal importance.

A key category of evidence I use in this book is literary sources, such as chronicles, royal biographies, hagiography, letters, and poetry. In the pages that follow, I frequently refer to chroniclers and poets who tell stories about hunters and describe ­human encounters with wild animals and wilderness. Yet, as we saw in Notker’s story about Charlemagne’s ambassadors hunting with Harun al-­Rashid, one cannot naively accept such literary anecdotes as objective reports of ­actual historical events. Early medieval authors wrote to praise rulers and entertain audiences, they emulated preexisting literary traditions, and they sometimes had ­little firsthand information about the events they described. Moreover, authors like Notker often ­were partisans who wrote to promote specific ideological agendas and to influence the interpretation of past events. They therefore do not provide impartial accounts of ritualized be­hav­iors such as hunting.59 For this reason, it would be dangerous to accept Notker’s report of Charlemagne’s ambassadors hunting with the caliph as historical fact without corroboration from other in­de­pen­dent sources. But Notker and writers like him did not choose their themes haphazardly, and it is significant that, in certain periods and contexts, they placed par­tic­u­lar emphasis on certain kinds of hunting. Moreover, ­whether or not a specific hunting episode actually happened, writers needed to root their narratives in a general basis of real­ity, since other­wise it is difficult to see how their stories would have had an impact on the audiences they sought to influence.60 In the words of Philippe Buc, literary narratives reflect “assumptions and commonplaces concerning what could

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and should happen” ­whether or not a par­tic­u­lar event in fact occurred in the way described.61 We also need to recognize that early medieval authors did not have a single, monolithic view of the chase. Like ­people ­today, they held dif­fer­ent opinions about the activity. Some saw it as a symbol of kingship and manhood; ­others interpreted it as a form of exercise and relaxation. Some criticized it as a symptom of aristocratic arrogance and abuse, while ­others simply had ­little interest in the topic. The hunt therefore was a “semantically flexible motif ” that authors adapted to a wide range of situations and endowed with a wide range of meanings.62 We therefore must consider the reliability of literary sources on a case-­by-­case basis and check the information they provide against other available evidence.

Ultimately, we need to read literary texts on two levels: what they reveal about ­actual hunting praxis as well as what they can tell us about the evolving ideological associations of the hunt. The ideological component is impor­tant, since literary repre­sen­ta­tions of hunting and human-­animal encounters often contain encoded messages about sovereignty, po­liti­cal authority, and power.63 Throughout this book I ­will be interested in both the practice and ideology of hunting, which, ­after all, are dif­fer­ent levels of the same phenomenon. Literary repre­sen­ta­tions of the hunt are as much a part of real­ity as the act itself. Lit­er­a­ture not only mirrored, but also helped fashion, social and po­liti­cal realities.

A second broad category of evidence this study uses is documentary sources, such as laws, capitularies (royal decrees), charters, and administrative rec­ords. ­These documentary, or normative, sources can have certain advantages: they occasionally contain reliable information about hunting practices and rights, they address the concerns of the ­people who wrote or decreed them, and the historian often can date and contextualize them with considerable precision. Such texts ­will play an impor­tant role in this study ­because they offer in­de­pen­dent information that can be compared with the literary sources. And, like lit­er­a­ture, normative sources in some cases could shape social and po­liti­cal realities. Yet documentary evidence pre­sents challenges as well. It can be frustratingly brief and vague, and, in the case of laws and royal decrees, one often does not know the extent to which they ­were carried out. For example, Charlemagne issued a number of decrees against poaching in royal forests, but we have ­limited direct evidence about the extent to which his commands ­were obeyed. Nevertheless, the fact that Charlemagne made so many decrees to protect “our game” is significant in itself ­because it sheds light on his own personal ideas, concerns, and priorities.

A third impor­tant category of evidence is unwritten sources, chiefly art and archaeology. The late antique and early medieval worlds have in fact left ­behind a wide array of hunting imagery in the form of mosaics, stone sculpture, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts. For example, two illuminated psalters produced in the ninth ­century, the Stuttgart Psalter and the Utrecht Psalter, contain a wide

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array of images related to hunting and wild animals.64 While the artists of t­ hese and other manuscripts ­were influenced by classical and Byzantine pictorial traditions, they often tailored images of everyday objects like weapons, armor, tools, and hunting equipment to reflect con­temporary realities.65 Like literary sources, artistic depictions of the chase must be read on two levels: what they reveal about the development of hunting ideology as well how accurately they reflect ­actual practices. In addition to artistic evidence, archaeology and especially zooarchaeology (analy­sis of animal bones from archaeological excavations) give impor­tant insights into the consumption of wild and domesticated animals and the connections between hunting, geography, and social hierarchies.66 Telling patterns emerge, such as the correlation between greater game consumption and elite settlements and the Franks’ predilection for hunting red deer. At the same time, the generally low percentages of wild-­animal remains in bone assemblages (usually ­under 10 ­percent by weight) make clear that early medieval p­ eople did not chiefly hunt for nutrition: instead, hunting and the consumption of game had social prestige as symbols of status and power.

All ­these kinds of evidence—­literary, documentary, artistic, and archaeological—­ have their own advantages, prob­lems, strengths, and limitations. We therefore must evaluate them on a case-­by-­case basis, compare them against each other, and keep in mind chronology and context. The wide range of available evidence greatly enhances our ability to bring to life the dynamic, complex, and changing world of early medieval hunting.

I have or­ga­nized this book chronologically, interspersed with several thematic chapters. Chapters 1 through 4 explore the development of elite and royal/imperial hunting from the age of Constantine the ­Great in the early fourth ­century, through the Merovingian and early Carolingian eras, up to the death of Charles the Bald in 877. The next three chapters turn to thematic topics that nevertheless pay attention to change over time: Chapter 5 on elite hunting techniques, Chapter 6 on hunting by non-­elites, and Chapter 7 on hunting and the Church. The final chapter returns to the po­liti­cal narrative and explores the decline and transformation of royal hunting during the late ninth and tenth centuries up to the death of Louis V in 987.

A Note on Translations, Terminology, Names, and Dates

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All translations are my own ­unless other­wise indicated. To economize space, I have not provided entire Latin passages in the notes, since they can be easily checked in printed and online editions. When a source’s terminology is signifi-

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cant or problematic, I provide the Latin word or phrase in parentheses. I occasionally employ the uncommon adjectives “cynegetic,” “venatic,” and “venatorial,” which derive from the ancient Greek kunagós and Latin venator (“hunter”) and simply mean “related to hunting.” By the term “game,” I mean the wild animals that ­were hunted as well as their meat. Throughout the book, I use the word “forest” to translate the technical Latin term forestis and thus to indicate a special landscape ­under royal jurisdiction, at least initially. ­Under Charlemagne (but not before, as is sometimes assumed), forests became explic­itly connected with the crown’s hunting rights, and thereafter they carried the sense of hunting reserves.67 In contrast, I use a range of terminology like “woods,” “woodland,” and “wilderness” to translate nontechnical terms like silva, saltus, nemus, and eremus.

I Anglicize the names of historical figures ­unless the Latinized version is commonly used. To distinguish the dif­fer­ent rulers of the Carolingian ­family, I use their traditional cognomens (e.g., “the Pious,” “the German,” “the Fat,” “the ­Simple,” ­etc.) while recognizing that ­these epithets often are modern inventions and thus problematic. In the case of place names, I give the En­glish form if one is available. I hyphenate the names of churches and monasteries (e.g., St.-­Denis) but spell out the names of their patron saints (Saint Denis). For the years in parentheses following personal names, the first date indicates the year of accession to office, not the year of birth.

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