You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. The protesting Guy was hauled into the abbot's court, along with, the scribe tells us, Β«around fifty of his parentela of both sexesΒ» 1. Despite Guy's denials, other acknowledged homines de corpore of Saint-Germain agreed that Guy was one of them, and ultimately Guy was constrained to admit his status, do homage and swear fealty. A charter recording this scene, and the act of homage that ended it, was transcribed soon afterwards in a quire along with records of other efforts under Abbot Hugh V to regularize and record the monastery's patrimony and relationship with various functionaries and tradesmen.
On the verso of the leaf containing the charter is a genealogy of the parentela of mayor Guy, naming one hundred and two people one hundred in the parentela plus two husbands and spanning five generations see text, appended, and stemma, Figure 1 2. Genealogies of various kinds from this period have been increasingly recognized as a complex genre encompassing many different kinds of texts 4.
Despite the diversity of the genre, historiographical fashion has remained focused on the genealogies of royal and princely lineages, with only a few well-known exceptions championed by Georges Duby and his followers 5. In contrast to the more grandiose and paradigmatic dynastic princely genealogies or monastic celebratory genealogiae fundatorum , these genealogies of serfs or tenants were drafted with a legal goal in mind: the perpetuation of memory of a legal relationship tenancy or servitude which might be advantageous to the mother institution usually a monastery or chapter but disadvantageous to the subjects, whose descendants, particularly if they became prosperous, numerous, or pretentious, might wish to deny such origins 6.
The most famous example of such conflict over status in the twelfth century is that of the descendants of Erembald, castellan of Bruges, who murdered the count of Flanders in in a desperate attempt to affirm their free status against accusations of servile origins which had been encouraged or accepted by the count 7.
While lay lords like the count of Flanders could make an issue of servility by manipulating courts, perhaps ecclesiastical lords took to creating genealogical memorials of their subjects β a type of prescriptive account designed to be useful to forestall or combat such denials. At any rate, of all such genealogical texts which I have examined β indeed, of all known twelfth-century genealogical texts of any typeβthe genealogy of Guy of Suresnes is the largest 8.
