On Tuesday , we asked how, formally, one became a non-royal lay ruler in the earlier Middle Ages. There, we were talking about the surviving liturgies from Normandy and Aquitaine, and ended up talking about them as essentially twelfth-century texts from a twelfth-century context. So you might have been left wondering: what about the tenth century? Or thereabouts…. First of all, I have to reiterate that we are not dealing with a lot of evidence here.
However, I think this is actually significant: not just absence of evidence, but evidence of absence. More particularly, what I think it is evidence of is the absence of any kind of standard, formal process of investiture with comital rank. Part of the reason I think this is because we do have some sources which suggest that being granted honores could be very informal. The first comes from the History of the Counts of Nevers , written around , which describes how the first count of Nevers, Landric, got his title.
According to this legendary account, the duke of Burgundy offered him whatever he wanted to get him to stay in the region. This is, of course, a much later source; but it does chime with tenth-century evidence. In particular, the Miracles of St Maximin describe how Arnulf of Carinthia bestowed the abbey of St Maximin, the most important lay abbacy in Trier, on the regional magnate Megingoz.
The point here is not whether or not this happened, but that contemporary authors did not imagine it happening with much pomp or ceremony. For me, the clear implication is that most of the time this was not a glamorous procedure.
We do, however, have evidence of change around the year First of all, we have evidence of an increasing role for comital widows and daughters. For instance, Geoffrey Grisegonelle of Anjou became count in Chalon as a result of marrying Adelaide, widow of his predecessor Lambert.
