Tag Archives: Government

Governing the Dutch Republic: New access to the resolutions of the States General

Startscreen of the portal Goetgevonden (detail)

In the Early Modern period governments wielded much more power than allowed later on by the division of legislative, executive and judicial powers. Hence access to the resolutions of a governing body in Early Modern Europe gains in importance for historians of this period. On December 9, 2024 the Huygens Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences launched the portal Goetgevonden [Approved] for the resolutions of the Staten-Generaal [States General] between 1576 and 1786. The English version of this portal has yet to be published, a good reason to restrict myself here to first impressions concerning the value of this project.

Governing a mosaique of regions

The history of the beginnings of the Dutch Republic has many sides. Different explanations have been offered for the start of the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish king Philips II. Pinpointing the start of the troubles is another difficulty. The iconoclastic movement that hit churches and monasteries in 1566, the military actions as for example occupying Den Briel in 1572, the first self-planned meeting of the States of Holland at Dordrecht in 1572, and treaties such as the Unie van Utrecht (1579) all mark milestones, as does the formal abdication of the Spanish king Philips by the States General in 1581.

At the Goetgevonden portal a special section deals with the history of the States General. In its new form it convened first on its own initiative from 1576 to 1592 as an irregularly convocated body. Since 1588 it resided permanently at The Hague. Foreign observers had as much difficulty as we in defining the exact powers of the States General. In the seventeenth century it gradually became standard doctrine that external sovereignty according to international law resided with the States General, but internally the states of the seven provinces kept their own sovereign rights. Within the Dutch Republic Holland was the most powerful province, and within Holland the city Amsterdam had a dominant position. The States General strived for unanimous decisions to convey an image of concord and unity. Its representatives had to act after consultation with and with mandates given to them by the provincial states, a time-consuming process. The raadpensionaris, the main secretary of Holland, and the permanent secretary of the States General, the griffier, played an important role as did also the committees preparing resolutions.

The resolutions of the States-General had both a political and a legislative character, but I would refrain from the statement on the website “resolutions were to some extent laws”, a questionable simplification. The actual platform for the online resolutions enables you to filter for different resolution types, yet another fact unduly neglected in this unlucky statement. Resolutions could be ordinaris (ordinary) or secreet (secret), or even speciaal. I will show a way to look at the degree of secrecy achieved. From 1703 onwards the ordinary resolutions appeared in print, and this version has been used for the digital project for this period.

The new website informs you about earlier editions – mainly in summarized form – and gives you a concise bibliography for the main scholarly literature on the history of the resolutions, the working of the States General and political representation during the Dutch Republic. In particular resolutions between 1576 and 1630 were already accessible online in summary fashion with good annotation and indexes in a project of the Huygens Institute and its forerunner, the Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis. An interesting feature on the portal is the provisional overview of private meeting notes by provincial representatives, some of them edited, others awaiting exploration in Dutch archives.

The resolutions of the States General are part of its archival collection held at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague (toegang (finding aid) 1.01.02). The Dutch National Archives provide you with their own concise guide to the resolutions, now also pointing to Goetgevonden. The monograph by Theo Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht. De Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 1576-1796 (2nd ed., 2 vol., Amsterdam 2019; online, also as PDF) tells you about the creation of the archives of the States-General and the long and winding road to the modern inventory, including the story of retrieving a few decades ago the volumes of some resolution series that inadvertently had been removed. In my view this book can help much to foster a better understanding of the history of the States General and the Dutch Republic.

Unlocking a massive corpus

The Goetgevonden portal is the fruit of the REPUBLIC project of the Huygens Institute running from 2019 to December 2024. Luckily there is a project summary in English. Apart from access to images of the resolutions and transcriptions its important to know the ground truth for the computerized transcription with Transkribus and the datasets for entities such as persons, roles, locations and committees, are available online. The new platform acknowledges the role of some 560 volunteers at the Vele Handen transcription and indexing portal to prepare the ground truth from 50,000 scans comprising 100,000 pages. The Huygens Institute developed in cooperation with the KNAW Humanities Cluster the open access tool set LOGHI to enhance the degree of character recognition to a very high level.

Search filters Goetgevonden viewer (detail)

Let’s not wait any longer and go to the IIIF compliant viewer for the actual resolutions. At the left side there are several filters below the free text search field. The use of wildcards is recommended in order to deal with variant spellings. You can set the degree of context shown for search results. The time filter allows you to pinpoint an exact period of days for your particular question. You can also limit your search to resolutions with a specific number of words. You can pick a particular type of resolution, such as a request, a consultation, report or a memoir. Below the filters shown here is a filter for the proposition types, nicely listed by their actual number – for some 400,000 resolutions the type is unknown – and open to alphabetic sorting at will. Add to this the filters for deputees, functions, persons, committees, institutions and locations, all similarly open to sorting in your own chosen order. Thus you can set indeed very specific search limits. This summer you saw me struggling with the use of similar filters for entities at the portal for the registers of the medieval canons of the Notre-Dame in Paris. The Huygens Institute gives you here most useful tools for your search questions.

However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating! It crossed my mind to look at a remarkabke member of the Hardenbroek family from the province Utrecht. I could have chosen Gijsbert Jan van Hardenbroek (1719-1788), a well-known deputy in the eighteenth century who left political memoirs, and also an admirer of Isabelle de Charrière, but I would like to find out more about Pieter van Hardenbroek (1593-1658). He succeeded in being quite frankly Catholic in a protestant country and yet pursuing a political career. From 1616 to 1648 he was a member of the States of Utrecht. He was a deputy in the States General from 1618 to 1650, he presided the knighthood of Utrecht since 1627, and he served two periods at the Raad van State, the State Council, too. The confirmation of his marriage with Agnes van Hansselaer in 1633 was even presided at Liège by the papal nuntius. However, the nuptial conditions set by his father-in-law and the prospect of an income from his possessions led to an outright feud pursued at any possible (legal) level.

A 1631 resolution concerning the marriage case of Pieter van Hardenbroek

To the right of this resolution from August 19, 1631 you can check the metadata entered for this resolution, yet another splendid feature. However, it is also clear a mistake has been made. The image shows two resolutions, but the metadata refer only to the lower resolution concerning France and a complaint about illegal weapon imports into France. The first resolution clearly escaped attention, because the resolutions have not been separated in the transcription as they are in the original image on the left, with explicit notes in the margin, too. The States General decided to await further advice by the State Council on the Hardenbroek case, “goetgevonden ende verstaen datmen hierop sal nemen t’advis des Raets”. I suppose such unfortunate tuning and checking of the transcribed output can readily happen, and I just happened to spot this example. Using the navigation menu – below the image and the text – did not help here. I mentioned this tiny menu to another early user who had not yet spotted the back-to-results-button. We both agreed this new platform offers huge research possibilities, and we should not stop using them when encountering such problems. It is wise to have a look at the help page with some general explanations about search functions and navigation

Getting insight into Dutch politics as a foreigner

How did foreigners perceive and assess the direction and goals of Dutch politics? They did not have access to the resolutions, be they ordinary, secret or special. In October 2024 the Huygens Institute presented another digital project which shows in my opinion nicely how a foreign representative found his information, and it will be most instructive to read both his reports and the actual resolutions. The project concerning the 725 letters – with some 7,000 pages – sent by Cristofforo Suriano, the first Venetian ambassador to the Dutch Republic between 1616 and 1623, newly edited by Nina Lamal, builds on earlier research. P.J. Blok published already a volume Relazioni veneziane. Venetiaansche berichten over de Vereenigde Nederlanden van 1600-1795 (The Hague, 1909; digital version, Huygens Institute). There is also the edition and Dutch translation of letters in Brieven van Lionello en Suriano uit den Haag aan Doge en Senaat van Venetie in den jaren 1616, 1617 en 1618 (…) (Utrecht, 1883; online, ÖNB, Vienna). Pieter Geyl wrote the study Christofforo Suriano, resident van de serenissime republiek van Venetië in Den Haag, 1616-1623 (The Hague, 1913; online, Delpher). The eleven volumes (filze) of the original records are kept at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia in the series Senato, Dispacci, Signori Stati.

Start screen Suriano - Huygens Institute (detail)

For my own pleasure I searched in the online edition for the town Utrecht, and also for Hugo Grotius. The existence of a subdomain for the edition is an understandable feature, but you will miss a simple button to return to the start page of the project website. There is only a full text search field and a time filter, and you can set the display to small, medium or large, bringing you more or less text around a search term below the English summary of a letter.

A search result with source view, transcription and metadata of the Suriano project

By clicking on the header of a result you arrive at a screen very similar to the resolutions viewer. Alas the navigation buttons on the slim navigation ribbon below the image and texts are similarly grey. It took me some time to spot the Next scan button to arrive at this page (f. 2r) concerning Grotius in this letter of August 7, 1618 (Filza 7, f. 1r-4v, 9r-v), received in Venice on August 22, 1618. The exact archival reference is given in the metadata on the right side, it is abbreviated in the page view, a difference with the resolutions viewer. The metadata indicate when necessary the presence and nature of documents enclosed with the letters. Rare pamphlets and ordinances might be included among them.

A major difference is the manual transcription of these sources by the project team. Lamal promises more enclosed and related documents will be uploaded in due time. Distinctly Italian and much to the point is the elaborate explanation of the transcription rules used for this project. The viewer here, too, highlights names of persons, and you can read descriptions about them. Clearly a layer with entities has been created, but this has not or not yet been integrated with the search functions. However, it is pleasing to see the use of English – and at some points also Italian – for this project.

Enciphered letters and the decoded results have been preserved together. Some letters were only partially enciphered. Federica D’Uonno and Nina Lamal explain how the Venetian cypher upto 1623 was still in use although its weaknesses had already been exposed in 1606 by Venetian officials. A committee worked since 1619 on its replacement. One wonders whether other nations had cracked this cipher, too.

As for the events of August 1618, Suriano rightly mentioned Grotius. In a letter of August 29, 1618 – and in the following weeks, too – he reported on the arrests of Grotius and Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, the main opponents of prince Maurits (Maurice), events in a bitter struggle ending in 1619 and commemorated here in 2019. Suriano mentions also Jacob Magnus, a deputy in the States General who quickly became a good friend. He clearly had the capacities and experience to report with some solid insight on the political troubles of the Dutch Republic. The rich archive of the Hardenbroek family and castle (Het Utrechts Archief, finding aid 1010, Huis Hardenbroek, presented here in 2019) contains a number of documents concerning the Magnus family.

First forays and first impressions

It is time for some preliminary conclusions after only a week of probing the qualities of two projects. Obviously they can supplement each other. Leaving behind me all remarks and asides the important thing is to rejoice in having for the first time good online access to the resolutions of the States General from 1630 onwards, too, and not just in summarised form, but with images, transcriptions and metadata. The annotation is richer than for the older printed editions. Tuning the texts to show separate resolutions is definitely a challenge, and you have to be aware also of the average error degree in the transcriptions. It is cheap to note only faults and blemishes when one should admire the overall qualities. The time and money allotted for the final technical tuning of a digital project can be painfully restricted. Instead we should ponder and prepare our own voyages on this vast ocean of information on Dutch politics, culture and society at large. The resolutions do not show the work behind the screens to reach agreements on matters, but other sources can to some extent fill such gaps.

I leave it to you to check the resolutions of the States General in August 1618, or for example in the summer of 1672, another heated pivotal period in the Dutch Republic. You will agree with me this resource helps to gain insight, too, in the degree foreigners could gauge the intricate ways of Dutch politics. Suriano surely builded his own network to find out more about ruses and policies, double-entendres and newspeak, matters that hamper our understanding of our contemporary world, too. It will do no harm to look in the mirror of the Dutch Republic and its elusive governing bodies to help you see where we ourselves fail to perceive what is happening to us. The English version of this important project should have been there at its start, as a tribute to the importance of the Dutch Republic as the most surprising major European power of the seventeenth century and the core of a Early Modern colonial empire. This project merits the tag world history as much as the project for Suriano’s letters and related documents.

A postscript

In February 2025 I saw the English version of the main website. The FAQ section notes a problem with search for particular dates. Somehow there is a one-day difference. For some earlier years lacunae in the resolutions are simply due to the fact the sources to be used are not kept at the Dutch national archive, but at the Royal Library, just a few meters away from each other in The Hague. These resolutions will be added soon.

Petitions in Early Modern Britain: Asking for justice, questioning the law

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Banner "The power of petitioning in seventeenth-century England"

In the study of English legal history a number of themes receive much attention. Learned literature, rolls in many genres, the role of courts and of particular legal officials, the history of prisons, and not in the least the representation of law and justice in English literature are among these subjects. While searching for collections with digitized printed pamphlets and broadsides a slightly different form, too, attracted my attention, manuscript pamphlets. They led me to projects concerning petitions in Early Modern Britain. By chance I noticed a new volume with essays in open access, edited by Brodie Waddell and Jason Pearcey, The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London: UCL Press, 2024; online (PDF, 79 MB)). Waddell leads the research project The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England. Combining the volume and this project in a new post together with some related projects seems a good idea.

Studying petitions

At the portal British History Online you can quickly find the editions of petitions in the seven printed volumes of the series English Petitions. This series show clearly the study of Early Modern petitions is not an entirely new subject. The presence of several current research and editions projects is the reason I would like to look at these petitions.

The volume with scholarly articles edited by Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck, University of London) and Jason Pearcey (University College London) is most helpful in gaining some basic perspectives on the role of petitions in various locations. Waddell and Pearcey provide you with just that in their introduction (pp. 1-32). They stress the variety of persons petitioning and the variety of institutions they addressed. All kind of grievances were expressed, both by individuals and by persons petitioning together. The editors see no linear development or a neat distinction between petitions which typically would be the field of social history on one side, and political history on the other. The title of petitions varied widely, as do the material forms, making it important to study the original documents, not just the texts. Printed petitions only slowly gained acceptance after 1620. The paragraphs on expectations and effects are equally important and interesting. Attention is also given to the way petitions were presented, and medieval petitions, too, are not forgotten.

Although it would be great to here look at all nine articles of The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century Britain, wisdom and good sense lead me to focus on a few articles. The volume does indeed deal with the entire United Kingdom, not just with England. In some articles the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, too, come into view. Hannah Worthen contributed a fundamental chapter, ‘The process and practiceof petitioning in early modern England’ (pp. 61-81), discussing the actual roads a petition could go, the importance of geographical location, and the position of petitions in comparison to other means of (legal) redress. The chapter by editor Jason Pearcey, ‘‘The universal cry of the kingdom’: petitions, privileges and the place of Parliament in early modern England’ (pp. 81-113) looks at the ways protections were granted or revoked by Parliament. Brodie Waddell focuses in his contribution ‘Shaping the state from below: the rise of local petitioning in early modern England’ (pp. 201-227) on 3,800 petitions between roughly 1560 and 1790 directed to sessions of the peace, and the development of local initiatives to influence the state and state formation.

My brief summaries can scarcely do justice to the wealth of detailed information, the various questions and the questioning of earlier research presented in these and the other contributions. They definitely show the importance of including petitions and their role as a vital element of British legal life in the Early Modern period.

At the project website of The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England Waddell wrote in 2019 a concise introduction to the nature of petitions, their survival in archives and their role in society. In this period petitioners seldom wrote a petition themselves. The main addressees of petitions were local magistrates, the Crown and the parliament. Petitions to civic and country magistrates from before 1700 exist for some twenty of the fourty counties; they are mainly preserved among the quarters sessions papers and rolls. According to Waddell some 30,000 petitions to local magistrates exist for the period 1570 to 1690. Some 10,000 petitions survive for Westminster in the eighteenth century. Among petitions to Parliament only those for the House of Lords have survived. Waddell mentions also other genres of petitions.

A Derbyshire petition asking for the removal of Robert Boocley from the Swarkeston schoolhouse – Matlock, Derbyshire Record Office, Q/SB/2/63 – image source: British History Online

The online edition of petitions in the series English Petitions is the fruit of this research project. The series contains now seven volumes, dealing with Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Worcestershire and Westminster, and with petitions among the State Papers and those addressed to the House of Lords between 1590 and 1700. Apart from these petitions there is also a larger dataset at Zenodo for some 2,800 petitions and 10,000 petitioners between 1573 and 1799, created by Brodie Waddell and research associate Sharon Howard (University of Sheffield) who edited the volume on Cheshire with 290 items from around 5,000 surviving petitions for this county. At British History Online I somehow could not readily find the names of the editors and the date of publication of each volume. Some care and attention for the metadata of this important born digital online editions in open access would be welcome.

The project website restricts itself to essential information about the project team, the resources, the project partners – including the assistance of country record offices – and funders, but there is a blog section with an annotated bibliography on the study of British petitions. The list of project publications mentions also a number of public and academic events around the project. The overview of resources lists the editions of petitions, and contains also external resources which could have been marked as related projects. They figure in the second part of my contribution.

The impact of wars and other aspects of petitions

A key period in the seventeenth century rightly gets much attention, the Civil War – or perhaps even better Civil Wars – between 1642 and 1651. Thus it is no surprise a separate research project exists for Civil War petitions which even extends the period of civil wars to 1710. Several universities worked together in this project led by Andrew Hopper (Oxford). The project website scores with a clear division into themes of petitions, with images of recently added petitions and transcriptions of them, and apart from a blog also with an educational leaflet (13 pp.; PDF) as part of its educational activities. A section Discoveries is also one of the attractions here. A glossary of terms and a bibliography, too, enhance the website. In these Civil War petitions people ask for pensions, in particular widows and orphans, and veterans apply for support to pay for medical care. This project clearly aimed at and succeeded in creating (digital) public history, making the lives and voices of ordinary people alive, an aspect stressed by scholars and teachers speaking in the video made at the project conclusion at the National Army Museum.

It should not be entirely surprising to see the involvement of Sharon Howard here again. She has a great role in the project for the Digital Panopticon discussed here in 2014, and apart from supporting several digital projects for English (legal) history she is a most active creator of websites. As an offspring of the project London Lives 1690 to 1800 project she created the London Lives Petitions Project which is equally a sister project to The Power of Petitioning. Here you can find information concerning some 10,000 petitions written in the eighteenth century from London and Middlesex. Howard created a number of graphic visualisations of key information about petitions for aspects such as gender, the courts involved, the role of parishes and churchwardens in petitions, and such obvious but quickly forgotten matters as showing the shortest and longest petitions. Howard’s page on petitioners gives a good impressions of the kind of information she extracted. Petitions were delivered to sessions of the peace in London, Westminster, Middlesex and a few also to the Old Bailey. For London Lives’ Voices Howard also created data on paupers, coroner’s inquests and trials at the Old Bailey. She explicitly warns for hasty use of these data. Of course Howard contributed also a chapter to the new volume on British petitions, ‘The local power of petitioning: petitions to Cheshire quarter sessions in context, c.1570−1800’ (pp. 229-261), with again revealing visualisations.

A bit different is the approach to petitions for one particular subject in the research project Intoxicants & Early Modernity – England 1580-1740 (University of Sheffield and Victoria & Albert Museum, London). For this project 135 petitions to quarter sessions, mainly from Norfolk and Lancashire, have been transcribed. In a number of them village people wanted an alehouse (pub) to be closed, others elsewhere asked a licence to open an alehouse. Interestingly, the database for this project contains also socalled presentments, official complaints about behavior deemed bad. In the volume edited by Waddell and Pearcey only Sharon Howard mentions presentments, without a clear indication of their official nature. The combination of sources used and presented for the history of intoxicants is tempting indeed. The presence of a source which I did not know at all, presentments, confirms for me the value of looking here at a wider array of resources.

Libels and manuscript pamphlets

In the final section of this post I would like to look at two research projects for sources which seem to me related to petitions. The project Early Stuart Libels presents some 350 libels, defamations in poetic form in writing or print, taken from various manuscript sources held at British and American libraries and record offices. You can search these libels in various ways, not in the least by choosing one of the twenty main themes of these libels written between 1590 and 1640. Defamation clearly could have legal consequences, both in civil (private) and criminal law. The project website created by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae comes with a bibliography. These libels can serve here to make the point that a certain literary quality, be it conciseness, telling words or prolixity, can all serve purposes in a petition, too.

The second project to be mentioned here is Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England created by the universities of Birmingham and Bristol. It brings you an inventory of currently 532 handwritten pamphlets from the holdings fifty British and American institutions, with for some 200 of them transcriptions. Those with images and transcriptions have been marked with icons, but you cannot currently select only pamphlets with transcriptions and/or images. Noah Millstone and Sebastiaan Verweij score points with their candid explanation about what is missing in the database. For example, they excluded on purpose the libels covered by Early Stuart Libels. They adduce several reasons why manuscript pamphlets came into use.

In my view both projects fill a clear gap when you would look only at cases dealt with by courts or parliament, or exclusively at petitions. These libels and handwritten pamphlets set at least a part of the general scene within public opinion for the reception of petitions and presentments.

Some closing remarks

After presenting here a number of related projects for Early Modern petitions in the United Kingdom, followed by a paragraph on two projects dealing with different resource genres, you might think I am a bit intoxicated by them! The array of subjects is indeed alluring for me, but there is more to them in my opinion. These petitions and the other genres serve here first of all as forceful reminders Early Modern England was not an untroubled nation. Revolts, rebellions and outright revolutions happened between 1500 and 1800, and it dispels the myth of unbroken continuity in English history. Rebellions and revolts happened in the medieval period, too. How do these petitions relate to legal developments in particular shorter periods? It would be fascinating to relate these petitions to cases heard at courts, surely partially by providing another way of obtaining justice from authorities. Looking at petitions can reveal the weaknesses and lacunae of a legal system, and indeed show how law and justice are sometimes anything but truly law and justice. I found it illuminating, too, to see the different qualities in the projects presented here, and I am afraid I could not mention enough of them here.

I saw an announcement of the volume Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America From the Late Medieval Period to the Present (Oxford, etc., 2024) to be published shortly, with Brodie Waddell and two Dutch historians among its editors. No doubt the contributors will provide insights to understand better the peculiarities of English petitions in the Early Modern period. I could not resist the opportunity to look now briefly at a subject deserving attention from legal historians.

Medieval sources for Normandy’s (legal) history

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Musing about a possible goal for a holiday this summer France is bound to enter my thoughts! Thus it made me really happy to find a new portal about French regional history with an European dimension. The portal Norécrit. Aux sources de la Normandie. Pratiques de l’écrit das la Normandie médiévale is a project at the Université de Caen Normandie bringing you a tripartite online corpus with sources for legal history, ecclesiastical administration and the history of medieval archives and libraries, in particular for the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. In earlier posts I looked here at Norman customary law and at the cultural heritage in the form of manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. What kind of sources can you find at Norécrit? How does the version presented at the new portal differ from earlier (online) editions?

Familiar and unfamiliar

The portal Norécrit came to my attention thanks to the Réseau des médiévistes belges de langue française (RMBLF) which offers a calendar of scholarly events concerning medieval studies in Europe, and much else, too, such as notices about new publications and online projects. Let’s first chart the institutional constellation for Norécrit. The portal is the fruit of a team at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (MRSH), and more specifically its unit Centre Michel de Boüard – CRAHAM (UMR 6273). Earlier on this centre launched in cooperation with numerous other institutions already the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. You can read more about the CRAHAM also at its blog Les Échos du Craham.

Law in medieval Normandy

The first section of Norécrit is directly concerned with medieval legal history. The équipe for this section is led by the director of CRAHAM, Laurence Jean-Marie. Under the heading Ecrits nomratif et vitalité économique. Les coutumes des villes et des ports you will find nineteen texts with customary law. Those for harbors contain regulations for tolls, they are not just tariff lists. The introduction states clearly we should not expect too much uniformity. Many texts are not official statements, but instead more privately produced text collections. Texts concerning forestry law have not been included. The Grand Coutumier de Normandie is not mentioned at all, since these texts have clearly a more local range. The Coutumes de la prévôté d’Harfleur (1387) is the first text edited at Norécrit, and the edition comes with a useful introduction and a presentation of the sources. A nineteenth-century edition used only one archival source, but here three medieval sources have been used for the new edition. You can browse the text using the sommaire or use the search function (recherche). This section brings a most valuable addition for the study of customary law in Normandy.

Viewing church life in the archdiocese Rouen

Administration par l’écrit dans l’Église du XIIIe siècle is the theme of the second section, led by Grégory Combalbert, and more specifically the development of the use of written records in the archdiocese Rouen covering the territory of Normandy. Three sources brought together here can show you church life during the thirteenth century in great detail. Apart from a pouillé, an overview of parishes in this archdiocese and episcopal acts from four archbishops the main resource here is the famous register of archiepiscopal visitations created by Eudes (Odo) Rigaud, archbishop from 1248 until 1275.

I suppose I am not the only scholar remembering reading about him in the great synthesis of medieval ecclesiastical history by the late Sir Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1970). The concise introduction to the visitations refers to both old and modern literature about this very active archbishop and his register. The edition by Théodose Bonnin, Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis : journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen 1248-1269 (Rouen 1852) can be consulted online at Gallica as can also the manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. latin 1245, alas only taken from an old but serviceable microfilm. It is wise to look at the full description of this manuscript at the website of the BnF, too, because it points you to some scholarly articles and the English translation by Sidney M. Brown with an introduction by Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The register of Eudes of Rigaud (New York-London 1964).

A page of the pouillé for Rouen, 1236-1306 - Paris, BNF, ms. Latin 11052, fol, 5v - image source: Paris, BnF — A page of the *pouillé* for Rouen, 1236-1306 – Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 11052, fol, 5v – image source: Paris, BnF

The document with an overview of parishes in the archdiocese Rouen between 1236 and 1306, too, is preserved in a manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Ms. Latin 11052). Léopold Delisle published an edition of the text, ‘Polyptychum Rotomagensis dioecesis’, in: Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France XXIII (Paris, 1876) pp. 228-331. The manuscript has been digitized in full color at Gallica, and you can find a succinct description in the online Archives et manuscrits catalog of the BnF.

Acts of four archbishops of Rouen between 1231 and 1275 form the third and last element in this section. Currently only acts up to 1257 are presented in the online edition. For some acts of Eudes Rigaud copies are found in his register. The edition contains both the texts of original charters and of later copies. The critical apparatus and annotation are all you can desire. It has to be noted that some seventy acts of the 154 acts stem from Eudes Rigaud. This Franciscan scholar and archbishop was clearly in many ways exceptional, but even when you acknowledge the bias caused by his zealous personality he remains most remarkable.

The archives and libraries of monasteries

The third axe of the project at the Université de Caen is led by Marie Bisson and focuses on one particular and very singular abbey, the Benedictine abbey under royal protection of the Mont Saint-Michel. The projected corpus of texts at Norécrit has not yet been completed. As for now you will find liturgical texts, followed by De abbatibus, the chronicle written by abbot Robert de Torigni about earlier abbots, and a subsection with sources concerning miracles happening at or touching Mont Saint-Michel. In a later phase of the project a corpus of texts written and reunited by Dom Thomas Le Roy in 1647 and 1648 will be published, and also the Constitutiones abbatiae Sancti Michaelis (1258) and statutes issued by pope Gregory IX. The constitutions will be edited from the manuscript Avranches, BM, 214, f. 9-16, and the papal statutes are at fol. 8-9 of this manuscript which you can view online in the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. In fact you will find there a description of this manuscript and already the incipits and explicits. It would be helpful if the French team provides this link at Norécrit, too. As an excuse for not doing this they can point to the online journal Tabularia. Sources écrits des mondes normands médiévaux with in the 2019 issue a critical edition of De abbatibus with translations in English and Italian by Pierre Bouet, Marie Bisson and others [‘Écrire l’histoire des abbés du Mont Saint-Michel 3. Édition critique et traduction’]. As a bonus they can point to the blog Mondes nordidiques et normands médiévaux.

Three windows on medieval Normandy

After creating the Bibliothèque virtuell du Mont Saint-Michel with numerous digitized manuscripts, most of them held at Avranches, it is not by coincidence this abbey figures large, too, at the new Norécrit portal. Its preeminence simply cannot be denied, but the portal helps to create a more balanced view in the two other sections. It is is splendid to see customary law at a local and municipal level, thus helping to place the Grand Coutumier de Normandie in its original context. In the Bibliothèque David Hoüard, Bibliothèque numérique de droit normand you can find numerous digitized resources concerning law in Normandy from the Middle Ages onwards. You might want to look also at the blog for the project RIN CONDÉ  (Constitution d’un Droit européen : six siècles de coutumiers normands). By the way, Gallica has among its Essentiels du droit a fine section with books and medieval manuscripts around the Coutume de Normandie. The second section of Norécrit brings together precious and interesting sources on medieval church administration and canon law. When searching for synodal statutes from Rouen you can find fourteen texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Corpus synodalium created at Stanford University.

The connections between Normandy and England, and the position of this duchy within France are obvious reasons for looking at Normandy as a region with European importance already in the medieval period. Hopefully my brief introduction to Norécrit and references to some accompanying projects and blogs helps you to put Normandy into perspective as more than just a lovely region for a summer holiday in France!

A postscript

At the CRAHAM Grégory Combalbert has created an online edition for acts of the bishops of Évreux from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Actes des évêques d’Évreux (xi^e siècle-1223), surely worth mentioning here, too. You can view also images of these charters and acts.

Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog

Legal history with a Dutch view

Tag Archives: Government

Governing the Dutch Republic: New access to the resolutions of the States General

Medieval sources for Normandy’s (legal) history

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