Bisson Resurrects Long-Stilled Voices

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

On a research trip to Catalonia, Thomas Bisson heard voices crying out to him, voices of people who had lived more than eight centuries before.

The voices belonged to 12th-century peasants who were being abused by ambitious officials and knights. These upstarts used strong-arm tactics to rob the peasants, extort tribute from them, and even, sometimes, drive them off their land.

Scribes working for Raimund Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, recorded the peasants' complaints in a series of documents that preserve many details of rural life and, in some cases, even the "voices" of specific individuals.

Interrogating the Past

Bisson, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History, first came upon the hand-written parchment documents in 1965 in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona. He had been conducting research for another project and could not afford the time to investigate them more closely, but the moving human story they seemed to tell stuck in his mind.

"It's been a long time since I originally encountered them, but finally they wouldn't let me go. They contain such detailed information. There are names of real people and complaints vividly expressed. So it occurred to me that I might interrogate these documents."

The result of Bisson's interrogation is a book, Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 (Harvard University Press), due out this summer.

The short book (176 pages) represents something of a departure for Bisson, whose earlier work has focused on the evolution of political and economic systems in medieval Europe. While Tormented Voices revisits the same feudal landscape as Bisson's earlier books, the documents allow him to look at that world from the peasants' viewpoint, something that few historians have had the opportunity to do since the vast majority of peasants were illiterate and left no records of their lives.

"These documents are wonderful records of medieval humanity, and I became subjectively engaged with them. For me, this is a very personal book, and an experimental one."

His subjective involvement with the documents comes through in his writing. Bisson abandons the effort, once de rigeur in scholarly publications, to efface himself and his feelings from the text. In addition to being a book about people, places, and events, Tormented Voices tells the story of a scholar puzzling out the stories of people long dead and forgotten and tuning his understanding and compassion to the faint echoes of their pain.

"Names, numbers, allegations stare back defiantly like the staccato bits of digital electronic language," Bisson writes. "But I see now less dimly, or hear in what I read, something more than letters and words; hear something pulsing, pulsing out of the lives and predicaments of people who by the cruel dictates of time and corruption should be no more than names to us, or sums. 'Oh Lord Count Raimund . . . give back to us the land we live in, that we may be yours!'"

Land of the Castles

Catalonia, the land over which Count Raimund ruled, is in the eastern part of Spain, between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. The country is hilly and on the tops of many of the hills, one can still see the remains of the stone forts or castles from which the rapacious knights, or "castellans," rode forth to wreak havoc upon the defenseless peasants.

The knights themselves bore scant resemblance to the armor-clad paragons of legend, bound by vows of honor to defend the weak. In many cases, there was little difference between them and the peasants they victimized, except for arms and a horse.

The castles in which the knights lived were surprisingly small. Many of them had less interior space than the average studio apartment. But there were so many of them that they constituted the landscape's most striking feature. Bisson believes that outsiders dubbed the region "land of the castles," which evolved into the present name Catalonia.

For a 12th-century peasant, these Lilliputian castles were the source of constant danger, danger that could take many forms.

Among the numerous examples reported in the book is that of Arnal de Perella, cited by an anonymous scribe for his many depredations and extortions committed against the peasants of his region. Arnal's specialty seems to have been blackmail -- forcing peasants to buy his goodwill by payments of money or goods. Apparently a peasant himself who was charged with overseeing certain lands of the Count, he proved an unfaithful servant, appropriating the bounty he was to have delivered to his master and using it to enrich himself and his family.

Another transgressor is an aristocrat named Guilelm de Sant Martí. Wealthier and possessing greater social status than most of the malefactors named in the documents, he was nonetheless eager to enlarge himself at the peasants' expense. One of the documents accuses him of breaking into several peasant villages, seizing livestock and property belonging to the Count, and forcing peasants to work for him. Those who objected were beaten.

Peasant Honor

Other documents tell stories diverse in their details and circumstances, but with similar outcomes. Peasants are turned out of their houses, animals stolen, people's heads are broken, and noses cut off. Among the poorer peasants, the theft of a donkey or cow could mean the loss of livelihood, and, in at least once case, a man who had suffered this fate is reported to have died.

"One of the ideas that comes across is the concept of peasant honor. We see this in one story of a castellan who comes along on horseback with a few of his thugs -- one of these may have been a woman described as the 'lady knight of Mediona' -- and takes over a peasant's house. The peasant testifies that they evicted him and his family and that he 'suffered great shame and great disgrace in his houses.' Peasants resented such treatment by people they thought no better than themselves," Bisson said.

Bisson's interpretation of the peasants' complaints as literal and essentially honest descriptions of their sufferings is somewhat controversial, and might be characterized by some historians as a failure of objectivity. But Bisson maintains that his credence is not misplaced.

"Some present-day historians believe we should be cautious about accounts of violence because we only have one side of the story, and it may be that the actors are engaged in a strategic game where they're trying to put their opponent in the wrong. But I've come to feel that this view is mistaken in this case because it's clear from these documents that the peasants really meant what they said in terms that we can understand. Theirs was a society that knew real norms of power and could know when these were violated. It shows that we can reconstruct the remote past in terms that are understandable to us."

A Crisis of Power

Did the Count ever take action to recompense the peasants whose lives had been shattered? There is no evidence that he ever did, and the very fact that the documents still exist may indicate that they were filed pending further action, which never took place. But historical hindsight shows that the peasants' misfortunes, far from being isolated, insignificant events, were actually part of a widespread trend that had far-reaching implications.

These oppressions of peasants by agents and would-be knights are examples of what Bisson terms "bad lordship," a phenomenon common throughout Europe in the 12th century. From Poland to Portugal, the control that kings, dukes, and counts had maintained over their peoples had declined, and the power vacuum that resulted encouraged those in the lower echelons to make a grab for wealth and status.

"Around 1150-1180, the situation reaches a crescendo, and you get a reaction on the part of the higher authorities, the kings and prelates. They establish a peace party and impose statutes on the knights and get them to swear not to abuse peasants. What had begun as The Peace of God had its climax in the beginnings of government right at this point."

As Bisson sees it, the Catalonian aristocracy's efforts to deal with this power crisis gave rise to the National Assembly, an institution that earlier historians have identified as having its origins in the next century. It was at this point in history that modern government based on political debate and competence takes the place of lordly power structures based on fidelity.

Bisson's thesis that the institutions of Spanish government had their origin in Catalonia has made him a popular figure with Catalonian patriots, who see themselves as culturally distinct from the rest of Spain.

"Many of them would like Catalonia to be independent, and my work shows that they have a case," Bisson said. "But I try to stay out of politics."