When documents are destroyed or lost: lay people and archives in the early Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I discuss some largely unexplored evidence about lay archives in early medieval Europe. This evidence consists of a set of formulae from late Roman, Merovingian, and Carolingian Gaul, and from Carolingian Bavaria. According to these formulae, lay men and women in these regions from the sixth to the ninth centuries kept documents in private archivesbecause they regarded documents as vital to the security of their property holdings. The manuscripts in which the formulae survive indicate that lay people continued to keep archives throughout the ninth century and into the tenth. They also suggest, however, that by the end of the eighth century traditions about how lay people used and stored documents were being preserved and maintained to a large degree by churches and monasteries.