Talk:Pagus of Liugas

Article title
Some problems with the title, and considerations for a new one: My ideas: Other languages on WP: fr:Comté de Liège, de:Lüttichgau, nl:Luikgouw Proposal for new name: Pagus of Liège.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:45, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
 * There is very little written or known either about any counts of this Liège "county", or the "county" itself.
 * In the period it existed there is a general problem of knowing whether a count with a county in a "pagus" (the terminology the few records actually used) actually had ALL of that pagus in his county. Generally they did not. Both Sigehard and Richar were clearly counts with status in more than one pagus.
 * I think the article has to cover both counts and pagus of Liège. I will work that way already.
 * There is more to write about the pagus, than specifically about the known counts associated with it.
 * We don't know that the pagus had only one count or county.
 * Having looked at it more closely it seems clear that the connection with the name of the neighbouring city Liège, though it is commonly assumed (for example by Vanderkindere more than 100 years ago) and needs to be mentioned, is seen by scholars such as Nonn as a misunderstanding. New proposals for primary name: Liugas, Pagus of Liugas, Luihgau or Pagus of Luihgau? I think I prefer Pagus of Liugas, because Pagus helps explain the unusual title, and Luihgau is an artificial compromise intended to look like "Liège".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:01, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

User:Andrew Lancaster. Andrew. I'll have to admit I haven't looked at these articles for a while, but I am confused as to the use of the term pagus in this context. I have never heard of the term nor does an Internet search reveal much of anything other than what is in or derived from Wikipedia. I could only find one reference to it in the Cambridge Medieval History (Volume 3, pg. 13). The corresponding Wikipedia entry (Merey, Eure) identifies an old term pagus Madriensis of which its ruler Theodobert was count. Some other comments:


 * Sigehard is listed here with an unclear status but, in his article, he is identified as Count of Hainaut (which is called here Pagus of Hainaut, instead of the County of Hainaut) as well as Count of Liege.
 * The same is true for Richar who is not referred to as a count here.
 * According to the definition, the pagus referred to the smallest administrative unit of a province, and yet the pagus of Brabant includes not only Brussels but also Aalst. Is a pagus supposed to be a piece of a county? What is the ruler of a pagus called?
 * The article refers to the pagus of Hainaut, which the associated article calls a county. This article refers to the county of Mons to be part of the pagus of Hainaut.
 * The pagus of Hasbania is described as being multiple counties.
 * Should it be Pagus of Liugas or pagus of Liugas?
 * The map says that the Luihgau pagus was also known as the County of Liege, and ruled by a count named Thibault. This seems to contradict what is in the text, and at any rate, Thibault is never identified.

There seem to be a couple of books by German historians in the 1980s on the subject, but I'm not convinced that the use of pagus is widespread among historians. I have no idea of the relationship between a pagus and a county is. Is a pagus ruled by a count from somewhere else?

Also, in your comments on the Counts of Chiny, you are down on Vanderkindere. Is there some more recent research on the subject? Dr. Grampinator (talk) 23:07, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
 * there is literally more than a century of literature since Vanderkindere, and the term pagus is well-known and often used in that literature. Try searching on Google Books to reduce the number of Wikipedia-based sites and perhaps also try adding a related word such as "gau", or maybe "county", to your search. You really need to look at more recent literature, but to try to answer some of your questions in a short way:
 * Sigehard and Richer did not live in a period when people had titles like "Count of Hainaut". They were counts, and they governed counties which included parts of the pagus of Hainaut.
 * I do not know which source tells you the pagus was the smallest administrative unit of a province, but it sounds like it is talking about Roman terminology (or at least the way it is assumed to have worked). As you have apparently already noticed, the term did not have such a stable meaning in the middle ages. For much of the middle ages the term seems to have been used as a rough geographical term, like our word "region". So there is no standard and stable term for the ruler of a pagus.
 * Your comments about Brabant and Hasbania must come from something which is using the 870 treaty of Meerssen as its point of reference. Both these pagi were described in that treaty as having 4 counties (each) at that time. See Pagus of Hasbania and Pagus of Brabant.
 * Concerning Chiny, have a look at the reference I added yesterday which is to a oft-cited article available online.
 * Thibaut is identified in the present article? "From 1041 there was a count named Dietbold or Tietpald, generally modernized to Theubald or Thibaut, whose possessions were closer to Aachen than the earlier records" Maybe I should rearrange things a bit to give him his own section, but the real problem is that we know very little about any of these people.
 * The reason this article has to mention the concept of a county or pagus of Liège is because of Vanderkindere still being so well-known among potential readers of this type of article. His etymology linking the two terms is however now considered to be a mistake. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:02, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

User:Andrew Lancaster. Andrew. I looked at your main reference (Nonn) and could find no reference to pagus Liugas. I did see one to Comitat Liugas (county of Liugas?) Are there any references in journals to this material. It seems to me to be a major departure from the traditional use of county. In answer to your questions, generally everything I know about this subject is from the article and Wikilinks. Specifically:
 * Sigehard is referred to as Count of Hainaut and Count of Liège.
 * Richar is identified as having comital status in the County of Hainaut and had a well-attested county in the Luihgau.
 * The reference in the article, pagus, is where I got my information.
 * What you seem to be saying is that a pagus can consist of multiple counties (those two examples).
 * I see that you added a reference on a fresh look at the counts of Ivois, but didn't make any changes there. I haven't read it yet... how does it impact the write-up?
 * My comment was based on the graphic where a Count Thibault is identified. Your previous write-up identified a Thibaut, but didn't say anything about him. The fact that he (Thibault) was called out in the graphic seemed like he was important. I see a section has been added on him, but the graphic hasn't been fixed.

There doesn't seem to be a consistent definition of pagus (your write-up refers to the county of Luigas (in comitatu Leuchia)), or the relationship to the entity of a county. It seems premature to start changing a lot of "counties" to "pagus". Dr. Grampinator (talk) 16:53, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Are we to read this as there is no such thing as "Count of Liege" and that Liege was not part of any county? Dr. Grampinator (talk) 17:38, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes there are no counts of Liège that I am aware of. Liège was sometimes described as being in the pagus of Hasbania, but not every place was in a county. Nonn has a whole chapter on this pagus of Liugas, which was never called Liège, so I am not sure why you say it has nothing. (Nonn's book is called Pagus und Comitatus.) We don't know if there was only one county in Liugas, and indeed that's why we can not equate pagus names to single counties, which was a bit of a tradition in books once long ago. I am not 100% sure how you define the traditional use of the word county, but there are indeed complications to that concept, and the concept clearly changed over the centuries. Historians disagree with Vanderkindere about many things today. In the case of Chiny, the connection Vanderkindere proposed to Ivois has been described as a work of fiction in more recent generations, and I don't believe any historians still take it seriously.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:29, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

User:Andrew Lancaster. Andrew. I don't mean to be picky, but I'm having a hard time seeing how this all fits together. The article on Sigard, which you have edited extensively, refers to him a Count of Liege. And the Medieval Lands reference shows that several were referred to as Comte Liege. (I know you don't like that reference, but it has survived through 5 years of edits, so that must mean something.). I'm not claiming that the term count is not without complications, but the term pagus doesn't make it less so.

Look at the pagus of Hasbania. In the article, it seems to be synonymous (and used interchangably) with the region or territory of Hesbaye, which has 4 counties (presumably with counts), and yet there is no leader. Why not just call it a region? In my (limited, i.e. one day) experience in the subject, it seemly has no definition, no admistrative function, and no broad use in the literature.

BTW, I did as you suggested and Googled the term in Nunn's book and didn't come up with anything. As his book is almost 40 years old and in German, I was hoping for something more current in English. From my viewpoint, pagus is a Latin term that doesn't seem to have any analog in English other than, say, region. Again, this may all be right, but I'm having a hard time understanding it.Dr. Grampinator (talk) 20:08, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Nonn is a lot more recent than Vanderkindere. There are different complications. Hope this helps...
 * Calling Liugas, "Liège" comes from Vanderkindere and Kurth. People on the internet, including Charles Cawley at MEDLANDS, use Vanderkindere a lot still, but his idea about this pagus name is definitely out-dated.
 * If we translate pagus as region, and basically hide the concepts of gaus and pagi from Wikipedia readers, we would not be reporting what historians say.
 * Pagi arguably still seem to have had some sort of evolving role in defining jurisdictional territories in the 9th century, and not all historians write the same way about this, but they do all use the term when they are writing about this period (10th and 11th centuries).
 * Counties on the other hand generally can not be assumed to be territorial definitions by the 11th century, though they probably did have a connection to pagi back in the 9th century.
 * People were not being described as "Count of Hainaut" in the 10th century, but more typically as a count in Hainaut, which is a different thing. Exactly how administrative districts were working, as feudalism developed, is a bit uncertain. (Eventually various responsibilities like courts and the responsibility for organizing regions militarily, moved to various new kinds of office holders. The counties of counts had to some extent become private property which could be bought and sold and split-up and merged.)
 * It might help to explain that a typical way that the jurisdiction was described in the 10th century was "in the county of Count A, in the pagus of X". When this is simplified in older books into the Count A being a "Count of County X" this is often now seen as a mistake, so we need to look for newer sources to double check the latest thinking.
 * The word pagus was also at least sometimes equivalent to a gau.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:39, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I do understand that Nunn is more recent than Vanderkindere, and you seem to imply that he has more information on the subject. Is this the case, or does he just interpret it differently. It may be just me, but it seems like what you are saying is a major departure from traditional thinking, and I would think it would be more prevalent in the literature.
 * I wasn't saying it should be called Liege, I was saying that the article Sigard, he is referred to as a Count of Liege, a Count in Luihgau, and the count of the pagus of Liege.
 * "If we translate pagus as region, and basically hide the concepts of gaus and pagi from Wikipedia readers, we would not be reporting what historians say." This is what I'm saying....what are these concepts if not regions? I keep saying this, but if it doesn't have any political or admistrative function, isn't is just a region?
 * "Pagi arguably still seem to have had some sort of evolving role in defining jurisdictional territories". I have no idea what this might mean.
 * "Counties on the other hand generally can not be assumed to be territorial definitions by the 11th century, though they probably did have a connection to pagi back in the 9th century." A county is by definition is territorial. Can you provide an example of a county that did not have a territorial definition.
 * "People were not being described as "Count of Hainaut" in the 10th century..." You first example, section 2.1, contradicts that.
 * "a typical way that the jurisdiction was described in the 10th century was "in the county of Count A, in the pagus of X". I have never seen a jurisdiction described in that way. Again, can you provide an example.
 * "The word pagus was also at least sometimes equivalent to a gau." When are they equivalent and when are they not?

Well it's clear to me that I must be getting senile, as I appear to be the only one who can't grasp this concept. The sweeping statement "in the county of Count A, in the pagus of X" really does throw me, as it implies that every county is part of a pagus. Dr. Grampinator (talk) 23:36, 3 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes indeed Nonn (with an O) has a lot more information one this than Vanderkindere. It is a very compactly written reference work which gathers nearly all the early mentions of the counties and pagi, and discusses the literature until that time (which of course includes Vanderkindere).
 * References to Nonn are very prevalent in the literature on these topics, but I can also cite more recent authors. I am not sure which literature you read on these topics? I know you realize much of this is in French, Dutch and German.
 * Sigehard was a count with counties in the pagi of Hainaut and Liugas. You are right that in 905 one record implies that the whole pagus was one county. We can not assume this for other pagi, such as Hainaut.
 * "what are these concepts if not regions? ... if it doesn't have any political or admistrative function, isn't is just a region?" Right, but I wrote that "Pagi arguably still seem to have had some sort of evolving role in defining jurisdictional territories". Sorry if that was confusing but the point is that they seem to have some relevance to administrative functions, at least in some periods such as in 870.
 * "A county is by definition is territorial." No I think this is what confuses people. This works in some periods but not others. Throughout the 10th and 11th centuries counties constantly had to be defined by naming the count. There are rarely any mentions of counties with geographical names at all.
 * ""a typical way that the jurisdiction was described in the 10th century was "in the county of Count A, in the pagus of X". I have never seen a jurisdiction described in that way. Again, can you provide an example." That is surprising! The two Wikipedia articles we are discussing contain quite a few examples? I think Vanderkindere does also? I can get you more reading material but which languages are you comfortable with?
 * "When are they equivalent and when are they not?" That's the problem. It is not always clear. But the important thing for us is that historians no longer assume that they are equivalent.
 * "The sweeping statement "in the county of Count A, in the pagus of X" really does throw me, as it implies that every county is part of a pagus." No it doesn't really? It implies only that parts of counties are within pagi. It does not imply that counties can not overlap different pagi. For example Baerten and others proposed that there was a county called Husce, Hufte or Huste which had a bit in Hasbania and a bit near Maaseik.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:11, 4 May 2021 (UTC)