of the Czech witness lists are that titles are rarely given for laymen and that they are listed without strict regard to them when included. This is congruent with the absence of titulature or hierarchy noted for the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a whole. The apparent failure to order the names of lay witnesses seems not to have resulted from cartulary norms or from the quirks of particular scribes: the clergy in Czech witness lists are indeed ranked strictly, and members of the Přemyslid dynasty, when present, are always identified first among all witnesses. When court officers (dapifer, agazo, pincerna) appear, they may be in any order, grouped together or separate, at the beginning or in the middle of the list, and so forth. Though the chamberlain (camerarius) is often listed first, or at least toward the top of the list, no fixed pattern prevails. This holds even when the same individuals are concerned, so we may be certain that it does not result from social rankings not associated with titles or offices (see Table 2).81 On the other hand more important men do tend to appear toward the beginning, particularly if a list is long, while men who make only one appearance in our corpus of lists are most often in the second half.
A careful reading of the lists of lay witnesses gives two other strong impressions. The first is that there was no fixed group at court or in castellanies.82 In the second half of the twelfth century, no two lists are the same.83 Shorter lists show more stability, but presumably they have been limited to only the most noteworthy witnesses. Even among the court officers, the dapifer may be present, while the agazo or pincerna is not—keeping in mind here that offices are not always specified. Furthermore, taking 1175 as an arbitrary starting date, a rough average of half the names in long witness lists thereafter are new at the time of their first appearance;84 many will not appear again. The other strong impression one gets from the witness lists is that the same laymen continually resurface, though without pattern. Remarkably, Table 3 shows no significant turnover after the accession of new dukes. Some men appear only in Frederick’s charters and some are one-timers, but many appear in one or more documents before or after this one from 1187, and even in those of Sobeslav II whom Frederick deposed.85 The same sort of table could be drawn up based on a different sample charter with similar results, since some of those who are not listed here also appear quite frequently. Accounting for sanguinal connections—for instance, when the son or brother of a magnate named in one charter appears in another—reinforces the impression that, however much variation appears from list to list at first glance, the witnesses were largely being drawn from the same circle of men.
TABLE 3. WITNESSES TO DUKE FREDERICK’S CHARTER OF 2 MAY 1187 (CDB NO. 317)
a. I have given here the documents’ CDB numbers, preceded by the duke’s initial as follows: S=Soběslav II, F=Frederick (none from first reign), C=Conrad Otto, P=Přemysl Otakar I (first reign), H=Henry (simultaneously bishop), VH=Vladislav Henry. The range of dates is 1175–98. I have not noted, for lack of space, the few occasions in previous or subsequent documents when a title is provided for the individual named. In consideration of “previous” documents I have not included those of Duke/King Vladislav because it is difficult to assume that men from as much as forty years earlier with the same names are identical to the individuals listed here.
b. With Christian names, is itmuch more difficult (ormerely seems so) to be sure that identical individuals are signified by the same names. I have not ventured to guess here unless I can make a determination from other evidence—for example, by family relations. In the case of John, he appears as either Johannes or Jan with the title iudex in all the documents listed in this table.
c. The trouble here is deciding whether this is the same Sežima we find in Soběslav II’s documents (cf. Table 2) or whether this is the nephew of Vitek listed in C323. As he appears as pincerna here, my hunch would be the former but there is no way to be certain.
d. On the assumption that Slavibor is not the same as Slajbor, this is his only appearance.
e. There are two men named Hermann in this list. I am assuming that one is probably this Hermann, the son of Marquard and brother of Záviše.
f. Two men named Budivoj appear in the document. The subsequent three documents concern the same Budivoj, brother of Ben, but whether he is the same as Budivoj here is uncertain.
g. In CDB no. 342 Kuno’s wife Agnes makes a donation to Plasy for his soul, so wemay assume he was dead by 1193.
The witness lists paint pictures simultaneously of constant change and of continuity. If titles were provided more often, the impression of frequent shuffling would probably be even stronger. On the other hand, if we could be more certain of blood or affinal relationships the continuity might be more striking. One thing is certain: all the men depicted here constitute a minute percentage of population, however calculated, and therefore represent an elite. Sufficient overlap exists to reassure us that the evidence from the two very different genres, charter and chronicle, indeed represents the same society. Yet the number of men who appear as witnesses, court officers and castellans even, but absent from the chronicles, and the occasional reverse case, serve chiefly as a reminder of how far beyond our view the lives of the Czech freemen are. And whether named in chronicles or charters, they are a motley crowd. Certainly—most obviously in the first half of the twelfth century but surely before and after that time—the freemen were sometimes divided into one or more factions. Unfortunately, as we will see in Chapter 6, the chroniclers rarely give any indication what characterized these groups, their size or motivation. No wonder, then, that the chroniclers so often refer to the Czech freemen collectively, in loosely defined groupings, rather than as individuals or specific lineages.
Social Mobility and Shared Interests
The analysis of the Czech magnates presented so far has made no mention of the so-called družina, or ducal retinue. This omission has already been noted and explained; yet, given its central place in current scholarship, it seems important to revisit the model and to juxtapose it with the evidence just presented. Studies of the early and high medieval Czech Lands have universally presumed that the retinue of faithful followers formed the fundamental unit of social and political organization. Small retinues, they argue, evolved into a “state” družina centered on the duke, a political elite from whom the duke selected castellans and court officers and upon whom he relied for counsel.86 Assuming a družina institutionalized at any social level or stage of development is unjustified, however. Certainly contemporaries knew who was allied with whom, who was dependent upon whom, who could be expected to fight for whom, but we have no evidence that this was conceived in terms of membership in a družina. Did one formally enter or exit? Were there conditions of membership? Did a magnate have authority over his družina? Was its leader their lord? No evidence provides answers to these questions. At the highest level, the družina model has the disadvantage of positing the družina’s abject dependence upon the duke, a circumstance not supported by the sources, without offering analytical precision in a broader interpretive scheme. It offers no insight into the workings of the duke’s court nor to the role of castellans, and one can only guess whether or how the court or castellans are to be included in a model družina. The witness lists themselves give no impression of a družina, either ducal or “state,” precisely because of the fluidity and stability they simultaneously reflect. Undoubtedly there were rich magnates whose favor with the duke was uncertain, lesser men who ranked high in his favor, great men who were powerful by virtue of both, and lower-ranking men who had little to gain or lose either way. Since these people can be fit into a družina model only awkwardly, in place of the družina I would suggest two fundamental characteristics that governed relations
