Widows, Orphans and Churches: Protection and Virtue Signalling in the Carolingian World

This article fundamentally reassesses the interpretation of grants of protection within the Carolingian world. The established view of such grants is as the legal mechanism through which rulers asserted control over monasteries and thus connected their rule to extant structures in the localities. It is argued here that, rather than serving as a legal mechanism or as a euphemism for control, protection operated primarily within a moral discourse, in which rulers sought to portray their actions in line with biblical injunctions to protect widows, orphans and paupers; diverging from biblical precedent, we also see churches routinely listed alongside these other vulnerable groups. The application of such protective language to churches may be connected, in turn, to contemporary exegesis, in which biblical references to ‘widows’ were frequently interpreted as symbolising ‘the church’. These moral, as opposed to legal, underpinnings of protection are borne out by a detailed re-examination of extant grants of protection, which did not, in themselves, entail a transfer of legal ownership or control. Furthermore, even the category of ‘grants of protection’, itself the product of nineteenth-century legal-constitutional history and editorial practices, may rightly be challenged. Instead, charters employing protective language or (less frequently) granting protection may be viewed as an exercise in royal virtue signalling, with implications for the construction of Carolingian royal authority and governance alike.