One farmer, Arnaldus Palaganus, has suffered the theft of his two oxen and appeals to the king’s agent for justice. Another, Ysardus Gaufredi, has had his grain stolen by the local bailiff in whose tower it was kept for safekeeping. He, too, has a grievance that he hopes will be set right.

These events took place some 800 years ago in Languedoc, a region in the south of France. Thanks to documents written on paper or parchment, historians know about them in detail. Scholars can study these stories, among other reasons, to understand better what life was like in those medieval times.

That is the driving force behind the research of Anne Porter, a graduate student of my acquaintance. Anne spent several weeks this summer at work in libraries located in Paris, Nîmes, and Montpellier, reading 13th-century documents in preparation for writing a thesis.

What draws me to this student’s research is my fascination with the way people lived long before the modern era. The discovery of attitudes and habits of mind stirs in me continued interest. Not situated or equipped to do such research myself, I take pleasure in the work of scholars who devote their lives to such an enterprise.

It’s hard work, reading the documents. The paper on which they are written is fragile. And this young woman is confronted with language long fallen into disuse. “Getting used to medieval Latin was hard at first─a lot of different vocabulary for one thing─but after you’ve worked with a lot of medieval docs, it just becomes second nature,” she tells me by email.

Anne finds the main documents, called “the complaints,” in Paris but she also travels to the two southern cities where she looks for deeds, wills, acts of homage, and other material to provide more detail. In particular, she hopes to find “traces of people who appear in the complaints.”

The complaints were addressed to the agents sent out by Louis IX, King of France in the first half of the 13th century. These royal agents were empowered to arbitrate grievances made against local officials. In about two thirds of the cases the King’s men reversed such decisions and redressed grievances.

Louis IX had the reputation of being an unusually good man. In fact, this view of him was so widespread that he was later declared a saint, one still honored as such by the Catholic Church.

Asked about this king’s reputation for sanctity, Anne Porter hedges. As the documents witness, he clearly treated the people of Languedoc well, but this young scholar tends to think he had a double motive.

Their area had been incorporated into the kingdom of France shortly before, and Louis was anxious to please the people of this southern region so as to secure its place in his realm. However, the documents suggest that he also cared about them and their concerns.

While perhaps admiring him for some of his personal traits, we citizens of the 21st century would be likely to give Louis bad marks for some of his military actions. Having been so gung-ho about the Crusades, for example.

But, as a person of the pre-modern age, he clearly brought a different standard for judgment to what now appear as shameful military excursions differently: he and those around him considered the Crusades a service offered to God.

Incidentally, centuries later, when one of his successors, Louis XVI, was about to be guillotined during the French Revolution, the attending chaplain reportedly said to him: “Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel” (Son of St. Louis, go up to heaven.) So, whatever doubts remain about his moral stature, the memory of the 13th century king had resonance long after his own era.

And what of his subjects who lodged complaints? Were they citizens in the modern sense? Not quite, answers my researcher friend. “Being a civis (Latin for citizen) carried very specific legal rights─rights of transit, different taxes, etc.─but had less to do with political participation.”

As to civil rights, they would not have used the words to indicate something that belongs to each person. “Things were wrong because they were contrary to law or custom, not because they violated someone’s rights,” my friend responds.

Anne Porter is engaged in a fascinating enterprise, but she experiences the ups and downs typical of graduate students doing research. When her progress is evident, she feels great. But when the inevitable doubts about the value of her work set in, the project can seem to her “pointless and misguided.”

Even in these moments, however, she remembers one insight: “I think fundamental self-doubt may be in integral part of dissertation writing.”

I admire her and other students confronted with the challenges of research and writing. They strike me as engaged in work that has importance for the community. Not all research, of course, has this kind of value but the effort to discover more about how our predecessors lived and thought deserves appreciation and moral support.

Richard Griffin