by Dr Becca Grose and Dr Alex Traves (University of York)

Kinship is often treated as a social phenomenon that binds people together permanently through the creation of mutual ties, obligations, and emotions between individuals. Over the last decades, work on family and kinship in the early Middle Ages has addressed the basis of this claim through considering two key issues: i) how new types of kinship ties emerged in the early Middle Ages; ii) how far early medieval kinship was derived from spiritual or blood ties. However, what has been studied much less thoroughly is the way in which kinship can also be used to separate as much as bring together. Kinship ties were not always as permanent as might be inferred, and it was exploring these moments of separation, or potential separation, that this two-day workshop (held 1st-2nd June 2023 at King’s Manor, University of York) focused on. The workshop brought together scholars based in the UK, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and the USA, thanks to the generosity of the Past & Present Society, the Department of History, University of York, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York. It aimed to identify moments where kinship might be said to have been dissolved in the early Middle Ages, and how these moments of rupture could help us identify potential comparative frameworks to analyse the ways that kinship was formed and maintained in early-medieval European, African, and Asian contexts.

A significant theme across most papers was the apparent reluctance of early-medieval authors to frame the breakdown of kinship ties through a lens of dissolution, i.e., through acknowledgment that a tie which had once existed had permanently ceased to exist. Rather, the relationships that broke down in our sources were frequently presented as paused or lost, or that they ever existed was disclaimed or erased. Even where relationship breakdowns have been generally treated as dissolution, such as marriage breakdown, early-medieval viewers may have simply seen earlier relationships as coterminous with later marriages (Tranter) or seen these relationships as transformed without dissolving the original tie (Laprade, Stone.) And, where ties were seemingly dissolved, such as through civil war, this may have been an aberration or threat that the family themselves sought to avoid (Audebrand).  The significance of studying the ‘dissolvement’ of kinship ties in this evidence thus came down to two points: what factors led given relationships in given historical contexts to be ended by these different means, and why was dissolution not a common way to understand the ending of kinship ties?

To consider these points, various contributors reflected on what made kinship ties distinct from other forms of hierarchical ties in their historic context, and two significant factors emerged: property and life cycle. Across all papers, the ending of kinship ties primarily benefited the more economically powerful party, regardless of whether kinship was primarily derived from a biological, spiritual or legal basis (Cubitt.) However, in many examples, the breakdown of ties could damage all family members, even the more powerful party, by reducing the overall familial size and property. Moreover, in many case studies from the post-Roman West, the nature of property ownership and inheritance frequently left individuals connected to one another in a variety of forms, and thus the dissolution of one tie between two individuals could jeopardise not only the status of vulnerable individuals and children (various), but also a wider balance of debts and obligations spread across a network of assumed mutual dependency and status (Dailey, Halsall, Hicklin.) During the roundtable, many speakers noted the value of further work on how the balance of these relationships within families were distinctly shaped by the human life cycle, e.g., as dependent children became responsible for the care of their elderly parents.

Various speakers also noted that the dissolvement of kinship ties (writ broad), might be usefully compared with other socio-economic ruptures such as the severing of patronage ties, enslavement, or manumission. However, the dissolvement processes in these papers arose from the specific ways that families functioned as distinct anchors of property and reproduction in these societies, where familial property could be gifted to individuals to disclaim their membership of the family (Grose), and women who adopted the religious life could lose their strong ties to their parents by not producing heirs, but consequently develop stronger ties with siblings (Bourne). Therefore, most speakers identified the need to comparatively study familial developments before such wider comparisons could fruitfully be made. Moreover, in the situations where familial breakdown did interact with other socio-economic divisions, the outcome was very culturally contingent:  in some post-Roman scenarios, individuals could be enslaved but maintain or create kinship ties (Traves), whereas in some caste-based societies, caste structures could constrain or erase kinship ties among specific groups, through a denial of property rights (Gomes.) Nonetheless, three useful avenues to categorise kinship ties that were raised by these attempts appeared to be:  the stability and latency of ties, which may have been more pertinent at different life points (Halsall); whether the resistance to dissolution found among siblings (Audebrand) or wives (Stone) was shaped by the relative horizontality and verticality of different ties; whether certain ties could be coterminous or exclusive (Tranter, Laprade.) In all avenues, speakers noted the continued importance of evaluating the silences in our sources, and how far they allow us to fully explore the experiences of the groups that may have been most vulnerable to these processes (e.g. children, women, enslaved people, or hostages) at all.

Nonetheless, various speakers observed that the value and meaning of early-medieval kinship cannot be fully understood by only assessing its socio-economic impact, the primary area of focus at our workshop. The dissolvement of inheritance obligations between father and son could be used rhetorically to project the uncivilised nature of other societies (Upham), raising questions about the ways our sources on less-documented groups are framed, and what this means for studying a scenario that we considered to primarily occur in situations of extreme power difference. Reflecting more widely on the field, as well as the papers, various speakers suggested that studying the social impact of kinship breakdown without considering spiritual and immaterial obligations (Cubitt; Dailey; Stone), or the emotional traumas involved in disrupting ties (Dailey, Halsall, Stone), might limit the scope of our conclusions far beyond the limits implied by our specific case studies and require further dialogue – a problem for future thought among all participants.  Even more generally, kinship appears to have been an inherently flexible social bond, as Guy Halsall noted in his talk, and family members could have a greater or lesser significance in one’s life depending on circumstance and individual wishes and needs. Discussion on the final day ended by considering whether we should perhaps be cautious about speaking of ‘kinship’ as a single bond or experience, and should instead consider the multifaceted ways in which kinship ties manifested themselves in the early medieval world. In addition, participants also reflected on how we might use the lens of kinship and dissolvement to better understand the social experiences of those typically ‘left behind’ or ignored in early medieval society, especially enslaved individuals, women, and children. These are problems we hope to consider further in the future, as many participants expressed an interest in keeping these important conversations going.

Some of the participants in the Dissolvement of Kinship Workshop stood in the courtyard of King’s Manor in York city centre (L-R: Katy Cubitt, Margot Laprade, Becca Grose, Alex Traves, Brittany Orton, Rachel Stone, Erin Dailey, Alice Hicklin, Maria Tranter, Guy Halsall), photograph by Huw Foden (2023) all rights reserved

Summaries of the papers are listed below. Unless indicated otherwise, these are provided by speakers:

Justine Audebrand. Between the 8th and 9th century, the Carolingian brothers seemed to be constantly at war with each other. However, if we stop looking at them and start considering the ranks of the upper aristocracy, the picture is quite different: brotherhood was a very important tie and it was quite difficult to dissolve, even with exile, disgrace or even death.

 Caroline Bourne. My paper addresses the issue of the nature of female kinship in Early Medieval Wales by focusing on the extent to which eremitic monasticism dissolved familial ties. With the saintly family of the king of Brycheiniog as a case study, it explores how the development of Christianity in the fifth century had an impact on kinship ties in relation to the societal expectation of marriage.

Erin Dailey.  This paper examined examples in which free men intentionally fathered children from enslaved women in order to given themselves the option to affirm or deny the legitimacy of these children, and how those mechanics worked in different regions of the early medieval Mediterranean world. Erin Dailey also wrote some personal reflections on the event for the Dosse Project.

Mekhola Gomes. Through the analytic of Brahmanical patriarchy and a focus on the early medieval Vakataka kingdom (ca. 300–600 CE), the paper demonstrates how while declarations of the kinship of rulers was central to claiming patriarchal rights in land based in caste, kinship ties of labouring groups was never recorded in copper-plate land-grant records. This occlusion of the kinship of labouring groups was central to how kinship, caste, gender, and state power intersected to make the Brahmanical patriarchal social order in early India.

Becca Grose. This paper used four examples to explore what happened when mixed-status marriages broke down in fifth-century Roman Numidia. It showed that spatial separation was often imposed to inhibit effective ties between the lower-status parent and child, but it argued that the latent existence of this tie may have been mobilised by guardians to maintain control over adult children. Meanwhile, the threat of being fully disclaimed or having kinship ties dissolved by higher-status parents and guardians appears to have been more common than the act itself, possibly due to the long-term financial disputes this could cause.

Guy Halsall. Clause 60 of the early sixth-century Frankish law-code known as ‘the Compact of Salic Law’ describes how someone who wishes to cast off their kindred should go about doing so. This involved – like various other processes described in the code – performing a very strange-looking ritual in front of the mallus or legal assembly. But, given how important kindred was supposed to be in early medieval life, why would anyone want to cast off their kindred? This lecture is structured around a close reading of this clause of the law. It will not so much provide a detailed, specific answer to the question I just posed as much as interrogate the basis of the assumption behind it – that the kindred was vital to post-imperial social organisation. How important actually was kinship in the fifth-to-seventh centuries in Western European society? Did it govern people’s actions in the automatic ways people imagine? Was ‘dissolving kinship ties’ really any different, any more or less strange, from ‘activating kinship ties’? I will also look closely at the ritual itself to look at how kinship and kindred was defined and how it formed a part of a person’s identity. Even if you went through this legal rigmarole and declared yourself free of ties to your kindred, had you actually dissolved the latter or, in a way, only emphasised them more?

Alice Hicklin. This paper investigated the problem of hostages: who were they, how were they treated, and what did their status mean for kinship ties with their family of origin and their relationship to their hosts? Surveying examples from the Carolingian world, comparatively with those from across Eurasia, the situation was contingent on specific circumstances but there is wide evidence that many people did continue to see themselves as members of their family of origin, even if they developed new ties. Meanwhile, families continued to view these missing people as relatives, including caring for in-laws and other dependents of hostages.*

Margot Laprade. Following the prohibition of sexuality for the major orders of the Western Christian clergy, the sources show a symbolic transformation of the cleric’s wife, who becomes like a sister to her husband. In various sources, the image of the wife-sister, used to underline the continence of the couple – abstinent but still married –, far from dissolving the conjugal bond actually strengthens it and shows how late Antique and Merovingian clerical couples have been shown as a conjugal model.

Tonicha Mae Upham  Among a wealth of information on the (Viking) Rūs transmitted by geographers writing in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish between the tenth and seventeenth centuries, one anecdote stands out as particularly enduring: the presentation of swords to abandoned or orphaned boys as their sole paternal legacy. This paper considers not only the substance of the account but also changes and developments during a centuries-long chain of transmission, encompassing the introduction of assumptions of female inheritance, shifts in the age of the abandoned male child, and caveats to account for later religious conversions.

 Rachel Stone. Benedictine monasticism often uses kinship metaphors, describing God, abbots and abbesses, monks and nuns as father, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers or sisters. Did such metaphors imply the dissolution of previous kinship ties? My paper examines Carolingian rhetoric and practices around three moments of transition between the world of secular kin and monasticism: the separation of spouses to enter the religious life, the offering of children to monasteries as oblates and attempts by monks and nuns to leave monastic life and marry. It concludes that metaphorical monastic kinship did not replace secular kin ties, but often co-existed with them.

Maria Tranter. This paper explored the situation of elite women in pre-conquest England, who status as wives and consorts changed when their husbands left them in order to remarry, or they left their husbands in order to enter into monasteries. It argued that the frequent use of the term ‘repudiation’ in many of such cases may be less than adequate and hindering our understanding of the flexibility of early medieval marriage, and that thinking of these women as moving into a different sphere of influence while keeping intact the ties to their husbands and families may be a more productive approach.

Alex Traves. This paper explored how the act of enslavement affected ties of kinship in early medieval England. Much of the legal evidence would suggest that kinship ties were in effect dissolved after enslavement, with the legal functions of the family replaced by the master. However, evidence from penitential texts and wills suggests that this was not as straightforward as it would seem, and that enslaved individuals were not necessarily denied kinship in the way the legal evidence suggests. This has important implications not just for how we understand the nature and durability of kinship, but also how we understand the consequences of enslavement.

Respondent: Katy Cubitt.

* Summary provided by organisers.

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