Tenth-Century Courts at Mâcon and the Perils of Structuralist History: Re-reading Burgundian Judicial Institutions 1

In the ongoing debate about whether a violent “feudal revolution” around 1000 suddenly brought about a radical, epoch-making change in the underlying structure of medieval European societies, it has been easy to forget that the main arguments for this dramatic rupture in European history grew out of the late Georges Duby’s fifty-year-old account of how, in the Mâconnais, “judicial institutions” abruptly underwent a total transformation between 980 and 1030. ² Moreover, when the debate on the “feudal revolution” of the year 1000 is identified as a contest between partisans of “change,” who argue that a major revolution of one kind or another took place at this time, and partisans of “continuity,” who supposedly ignore change of any kind during the tenth and eleventh centuries, it also becomes easy to lose sight of the fact that Duby’s early work on the Mâconnais included an argument for continuity in judicial institutions down to 980, as well as an argument for sudden structural change thereafter. ³ On the one hand, Duby maintained that after 980 a sudden, radical change in judicial institutions was correlated with sudden, radical changes in political, social, legal, and economic “institutions” or “structures,” as he and other French social historians increasingly called them. ⁴ On the other hand, he contended that until 980, continuity in Carolingian judicial institutions was perfectly correlated with continuity down to the same date in other Carolingian structures and in the entire Carolingian social system. It was only in 980 and not before, according to Duby, that previously unchanging judicial institutions suddenly collapsed, with the result that by 1030 they had been totally replaced by feudal judicial institutions.