The Carolingian cocio: on the vocabulary of the early medieval petty merchant

The word cocio (i.e. petty merchant or broker in classical Latin) was a rare term that after a long absence in written Latin reappeared in several Carolingian texts. Scholars have posited a medieval semantic shift from ‘merchant’ to ‘vagabond’. But this article argues that this consensus is erroneous. The Carolingian cocio continued to refer to petty commercial agents, that is, to small merchants. Furthermore, the term’s appearance in capitularies and its subsequent medieval vernacular afterlife together suggest that the term was borrowed from (unattested) proto‐Romance usage. A corrected history of the early medieval use of cocio illuminates the relationship between spoken and written Latin as well as aspects of social, religious, and economic history in the Carolingian period, and speaks to the promise of language to shed light on economic realities.

Charlemagne, later repeated, forbade cotiones and similar persons from wandering the country and carrying out 'deceptions'. 3In 859, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims wrote that not only horsemen but cocciones were performing robbery (rapina) in the context of a military campaign. 4A late ninth-century historian, Notker the Stammerer, told two stories about coctiones treated mildly by Charlemagne. 5With these examples to hand, dictionaries of medieval Latin -Du Cange, the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, Niermeyer's Lexicon Minushave endorsed the idea of a definitional shift, from 'huckster' to something broader, like 'vagabond', 'vagrant' (homo vagus, 'Landstreicher'), or 'tramp'. 6In this view, cocio lost its core meaning of buying and selling while retaining derogatory associations of mobility and lowliness.
That consensus is inaccurate, however.The Carolingian cocio was not the early medieval resuscitation and semantic alteration of a museum-piece word.Instead, the word firmly retained its association with buying and selling.This article argues that cocio survived unchanged under the waterline of common speech before reappearing in writing, a hypothesis borne out by the word's Romance afterlife.That sheds light on the relationship between spoken and written Latin (not to mention antiquarianism, capitulary policies, the challenges posed by armies, and monastic storytelling).But more importantly it suggests a new avenue of information for small-scale economic life.The Carolingian cocio illuminates a poorly attested but central figure in the early medieval economy: the merchant-pedlar.

Cocio in classical Latin
Cocio is of uncertain etymology. 7It is not related to coquo ('to boil') despite superficial similarity to that word's derivatives (coctio, 'cooking'; coquus, 'cook'; coquina, 'cookery'). 8The oldest meaning was an individual involved in small-scale commercial activity.Its closest synonym was said to be arillator, an even rarer word for petty dealer. 9n Antiquity, cocio was common enough to give rise to a few derivatives (e.g.cocionor, 'to traffic in petty goods'; cocionatura, 'brokery') and a cognomen or two (Cocio, possibly Coctio). 10 One finds the word in comedy, mime, satire, graffiti, and inscriptions, places where 'low' language is preserved.Plautus may have used the word in his Asinaria, if Joachim Camerarius (1500-74) was right to emend a manuscript reading of coaetio to cocio (not the consensus in the latest editions). 11The word then appears in a fragment from the lost mime Necyomantia ('Necromancy') by the first-century BCE farce-writer Decimus Laberius: duas uxores?hercle hoc plus negoti est, inquit cocio; sex aediles viderat Two wives?Good lord, that's even more trouble, to quote the cocio; he had already seen six aediles. 12This is usually taken as a jab at Julius Caesar's expansion of the aedileship from four to six in 44 BCE and a rumour that he was planning to legalize polygamy. 13Laberius' editor argues that the cocio here was not a character in the play, but that the expression hercle plus negoti est (literally 'by Hercules, this is more trouble') was proverbially linked with a petty merchant.14Aediles were responsible for regulating markets, so their reduplication would have been bad news for hucksters. 15Maybe the point was just that a commoner's sense was common sense.
Cocio was seen as a low word.A Pompeian graffito reads, 'Miccio cocio tu tuo patri cacanti confregisti peram' ('Miccio, huckster, you ripped off your father while he was taking a shit'). 16In his Satyricon, Petronius (first century CE) used the word when his rascally protagonists are trying to sell a stolen cloak to buy back a tunic into whose lining they had secretly sewn (also stolen) coins. 17In a comical predicament, two rustics accuse the protagonists of stealing a fine cloak; the protagonists accuse the rustics of stealing their raggedy tunic (the rustics are oblivious about the coins).The affair brings in the market's small dealers, cociones, drawn like sharks to chum. 18'One of those cociones, a bald man with a very lumpy forehead, who used to do legal work from time to time', slyly offers to act as a trustee for the cloak, his real plan being to give the cloak to thieves (praedones). 19ulus Gellius, who preserves the Laberius quote, describes cocio as one of the many 'obsolete and obscene words' that Laberius borrowed 'from the more squalid usage of the common people'. 20Scholia to poetry drew connections between cociones and greed. 21A gloss on a passage of Horace about a man so lucre-hungry he was called 'Mercuriale' speculates the person behind the nickname was named Coctio, 'as all coctiones strive after lucre'. 22A scholium on Terence conjectures that cociones are named after cupiditas ('greed'). 23ut this disdain represents the view from on high.A late inscription from Rome mentions a 'Pacatianus the cocio'. 24This fragment of an urban prefect's edict, thought to be from the fourth century CE, puts the term neutrally alongside other working-class professions and statuses (stabularius, acutarius, tabernarius, plebeius).Given the fragmentary state of the inscription, it is hard to say in what spirit Pacatianus was given this title.But this seemingly neutral use suggests that not all Romans thought the term so disgraceful.

Coctiones in Paul the Deacon (late eighth century)
'Hoping to add something to your libraries, seeing as I have very little to offer of my own, by necessity I have taken a loan from another.'So wrote Paul the Deacon, sometime in the 780s or 790s, to Charlemagne. 25He had finished an epitome of the twenty-book glossary of Sextus Pompeius Festus (who wrote in the later second century CE), itself an epitome of Verrius Flaccus (first century CE).26 Paul's epitome consisted of short entries containing words and their meanings, often with an etymological twist.It is difficult to say how much of the collection is Verrius Flaccus, Pompeius Festus, or Paul the Deacon. 27But the book represents the state of Latin lexicography in the age of Charlemagne.
Cocio appears twice in Paul's Epitome, first as a synonym for arillator and second in a stand-alone entry. 28Arillator was an old-fashioned word for 'huckster' or 'broker'.We possess little trace of how this word was used.Greek glosses offer μετάβολος (= μεταβολεύς), 'one who exchanges or barters', and similar neutral terms for dealers. 29A few medieval writers, relying on Paul's Epitome, Aulus Gellius, or the glosses, much later revived it.30Paul's short entry offers a pseudo-etymology that mentions the coccio in passing: Arillator, qui etiam coccio appellatur, dictus videtur a voce Graeca, quae est αἶρε, id est tolle, quia sequitur merces, ex quibus quid cadens lucelli possit tollere.Lucellum diminutivum est a lucro. 31 arillator, which is also called a coccio, appears to be named after a Greek word, which is αἶρε, that is 'pick up', since he follows after merchandise, from which he can pick up such petty lucre (lucellum) as happens to fall.'Petty lucre' (lucellum) is a diminutive from 'lucre' (lucrum).
The (false) etymology reinforces the impression that a cocio was a pedlar so lowly he was liable to scavenge his wares.The image is of a man skulking after a cart on a bumpy road, not much better than a ragpicker, whose 'lucre' is so insubstantial as to merit a diminutive.Cocio then has its own entry stressing the unscrupulousness of such dealers: Coctiones dicti videntur a cunctatione, quod in emendis vendendisque mercibus tarde perveniant ad iusti pretii finem.Itaque apud antiquos prima syllaba per U litteram scribebatur. 32Coctiones are named after 'delay', because in buying and selling merchandise they arrive late at a just price.Accordingly among the ancients the first syllable was written with a U.
We cannot verify whether this orthographical claim (cucio for cocio) is true (the etymology is certainly fanciful) but the impression once again is unflattering.
Given the Epitome's respectable transmission, one might ask whether it stands behind the apparent revival of the term in Carolingian texts.33This is doubtful.First, Paul saw no need to define the term.Second, there is reason to suppose it never truly disappeared.

Cotiones in the capitularies (789, c.802, 827)
In 789, cocio appeared in Charlemagne's Admonitio Generalis, one of the future emperor's most significant legal decrees, the normative articulation of his project of societal 'correction'. 34With over forty manuscripts, the Admonitio was widely read and profoundly influential. 35Themes varied from the normalization of liturgy to the punishment of criminals.Each of the Admonitio's eighty chapters was addressed to a contingent within the kingdom, whether particular (e.g.episcopis, 'for the bishops'; clericis, 'for the clerics'; sacerdotibus, 'for the priests'; populo, 'for the people') or general (omnibus, 'to everybody').Cocio appears in Chapter no.77 (no.79 in Boretius' older edition), 'partly for the priests, partly for everybody'.The most recent editors classify it as one of four chapters (cc.74-7) directed 'against current abuses of presumptuousness and deception'. 36hapter 77 restricted cotiones and mangones, another disparaging word for 'merchants', from travelling over the country and perpetrating frauds, while condemning nudi cum ferro ('naked men with iron', thought to mean 'penitents in chains') who also went from place to place.The text reads as follows in the edition by Mordek, Zechiel-Eckes, and Glatthaar: 77.Aliquid sacerdotibus, aliquid omnibus.Item ut isti mangones et cotiones, qui sine omni lege vagabundi vadunt per istam terram, non sinantur vagare et deceptiones hominibus agere, nec isti nudi cum ferro, qui dicunt se data sibi poenitentia ire vagantes.Melius videtur, ut si aliquid inconsuetum et capitale crimen conmiserint, ut in uno loco permaneant laborantes et servientes et paenitentiam agentes secundum quod sibi canonice inpositum sit. 3777.Partly for the priests, partly for everybody.Also [it is decreed] that those mangones and cotiones, who without any law wander as vagabonds across this land, shall not be permitted to roam and carry out deceptions upon people.Neither should those naked men with iron, who say that they are travelling upon a penance given to them.It would seem better, if they have committed some unusual and capital crime, that they be made to remain in one single place, labouring and serving and doing the penance according to what is canonically imposed on them.This decree reappeared in later capitularies.It appeared in abbreviated form (omitting the part about the nudi cum ferro), in a capitulary designated the Capitulare missorum speciale by Alfred Boretius, dated tentatively to 802. 38It later made its way, verbatim, into the Collectio capitularium of Ansegis, a widely copied compilation of Carolingian law-making published in 827. 39Thus, this capitulum's use of the word cocio had a wide ninth-and tenth-century audience.How one interprets cotiones depends on both how one explains the goals of the capitulum and what one makes of the other named groups, mangones ('petty merchants') and nudi cum ferro ('naked men with iron').Three explanations have been proposed.The first view is that the law was directed against non-elite mobility. 40he Carolingians' decentralized political model depended on local mastery of local problems, so the unmoored presented challenges.One was the delivery of justice.It was easy for guilty people to escape justice by fleeing from one jurisdiction to another. 41Capitularies condemned pilgrims and clerics wandering without papers (litterae). 42A second concern had to do with the burden of care.Capitularies urged secular and religious officials not to neglect 'poor people and pilgrims wandering about'. 43But a flip-side of this was the risk of parasitical mendicancy.Janet Nelson has thus plausibly described c. 77 of the Admonitio Generalis as part of the 'uneasy undertone' of the Carolingian institutionalization of charity. 44 second view dwells on religious dangers. 45Many wanderers made their living as travelling pseudo-prophets, relic dealers, magicians, and hedgerow preachers. 46The Rule of Benedict begins with a condemnation of gyrovagi ('wanderers round about'), travelling monks who lived on charity. 47The 'deceptions' of religious wanderers were not merely spiritual, but material: it was axiomatic that they solicited gifts.Not only were such arrangements disordering when 'holy' men and women were disingenuous; they were corrupting for the genuinely pious.Gregory of Tours describes a wandering ascetic who became a drunkard due to the rivers of wine poured in his direction. 48In the case of the nudi cum ferro, the distorted ideal type would have been a charismatic penitent like St Hospicius, who lived 'fettered with iron chains for bodily purity' (constrictus catenis ad purum corpus ferreis) -and who was thought to have committed a serious crime in earlier lifewhose self-abasement became the source of his sanctity. 49 third interpretation is that the capitulum focused on economics.Like many premodern governments, the Carolingian state attempted to control the minutiae of buying and selling.They restricted markets, blocked the sale of items, regulated the presence of merchants, and meddled with prices. 50The primary meaning of both mango and cotio was, of course, 'merchant'.As Janet Nelson has noted, the text may have intended this meaning. 51That would seem to leave the nudi cum ferro as an exception, but the misdirection of semi-obligatory gifts from local ecclesiastical authorities to unauthorized fraudsters was also a part of the moral economy of Carolingian officials. 52The point would be to prevent unscrupulous wanderers of any sort from swindling local populations, whether through shady deals or dishonest alms-seeking.
All three interpretations are probably partly valid.Carolingian legislation was redundant by design. 53But the meaning of cotiones differs depending on how one takes the text.If one sees the capitulum as primarily focused on social or religious affairs, the theory of a semantic shift from 'merchants' to 'vagrants' is credible. 54Niermeyer and the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch posited that cocio here lost its mercantile specificity and became a generalized pejorative. 55There is some support for this in the paired-term mangones.Even in ancient times, mango, a term for merchants who sold deficient goods, could be used as a generic insult. 56So it would be possible to translate isti mangones et cotiones as 'those rascals and ne'er-do-wells'. 57ut is it credible that Charlemagne's experts coincidentally used two pejoratives meaning 'merchant' without intending to evoke commerce?The choice of mangones argues for, rather than against, an intention to evoke lucre.Though mango lacked the frequency (and neutrality) of terms like mercator, negotiator, and venditor, it retained its commercial flavour in medieval Latin. 58Moreover, it had close vernacular parallels, most relevantly Old High German mangari (compare English 'monger'). 59Mango, spoken aloud, may have been comprehensible to a Germanic-speaking audience as an equivalent of mangari.
That raises an intriguing possibility.Classical mango and cocio are basically synonyms. 60If mangones evoked the familiar mangari to Germanic listeners, might cotiones have resonated similarly in Romance ears?Multiple Carolingian capitularies acknowledged the basic linguistic split within the empire between the teudisca lingua and the romana lingua. 61Could this pairing reflect an ambition to reach a broader audience?We lack independent evidence of a proto-Romance word cocio for this period.But, as we will see further below, the evidence for cocio or coctio as a Romance term in later medieval times is considerable.If we hypothesize that the word cocio survived in popular speech, a possibility emerges: the drafters of capitulum 77 used an intentionally redundant pair of Latin words to evoke familiar words in the teudisca and romana lingua respectively, each meaning 'petty merchant'.The capitularies sometimes draw attention to vernacular terms, using phrases such as 'as we say in the vernacular (vulgo)' or 'as the folk (vulgus) terms it', but this is the exception rather than the rule. 62hat would not rule out social or religious interpretations of the capitulum.Even if the individuals pictured by the law were vagrants or religious frauds rather than 'merchants' proper, there would be no reason to posit a semantic shift for mango or cocio.The more parsimonious explanation would be that non-merchant fraudsters were being called 'petty merchants' as an act of delegitimation.The point would be that the authorities insisted that 'those who without any law wander as vagabonds across this land' were not really poor pilgrims or holy wanderers, but mere 'small brokers' and 'hucksters'.
This interpretation undercuts any attempt to see mangones or cotiones as museum-piece words resurrected by the learned redactors of the Admonitio Generalis. 63The word's sparse written transmission misleadingly implies that cocio was recherché, the sort of word known only to readers of classical literature or antiquarian texts like Paul's Epitome.Were this the case, the later medieval spread of the word's vernacular descendants could be seen as the delayed fruit of Carolingian learning.But it is probably the other way around.The Admonitio selected words with vernacular overlap.This has interesting consequences.First, it speaks to the universal ambitions and strategies of the drafters.Second, it hints that other fossils of proto-Romancealongside the more familiar Germanic onesmay be hidden between the lines of Carolingian legislation.

Cocciones in Hincmar of Reims (859)
In 859 Archbishop Hincmar of Reims wrote an admonitory letter to King Charles the Bald, complaining that men of the king's army were ravaging Hincmar's archdiocese. 64In the course of extracting provisions, Charles's 0 falcones ceterasque ad ludendum aves habere non liceat'.Only in two cases have I found a vulgo-expression for words that do not appear elsewhere in the capitularies without one, both times for pieces of clothing: wantos (gloves, MLW 4.2, cols 848-50, s.v.'guanto') (MGH Capit. 1, p. 345, line 9: 'manicas quas vulgo wantos appellamus') and cotzos vel trembilos (mantles, MLW 2.4, col.1975, s.v.'cozzus'; the identity of trembilos is less clear) (MGH Capit 1, 227, line 36: 'vestimentis spretis nova et insolita assumat, id est quod vulgo nominatur cotzos vel trembilos').By contrast, there are several vernacular terms which never get the vulgo-treatment though they are often mentioned in the capitularies, such as the coats of mail called brunia (MLW 1.4, cols 1590-1, s.v.'brunia', from Old High German brunna). 63The text has plenty of recondite language, and the learned Alcuin played a role in drafting it: F men had committed rapina, 'robbery'.This was, in Roman law, the name for robbery with violence (a sub-category of 'theft', furtum). 65In a late Carolingian context, rapina became the common name for extractive violence carried out in the absence of royal law, or by secular officials in the name of the law. 66The royal army was entitled to exactions as it marched through internal territory, but these were meant to be circumscribed. 67Here, Hincmar claimed, Charles's people had gone too far.
In the course of making his complaint, Hincmar underscored that not only 'cavalrymen' but cocciones were performing robberies: Propterea, domine, quod solum ex hoc valeo, facio, id est Dei misericordiam inde peto et vos exinde commoneo et per villas, in quibus non solum homines caballarii, sed etiam ipsi cocciones rapinas faciunt, admonitiones presbiteris, ut eas raptoribus relegant, dirigo. 68erefore, my lord, I am doing the only thing I can do about this, which is that I am, first, beseeching the mercy of God and, then, warning you, and throughout the villages in which not only men on horseback but even the very cocciones have carried out robberies, I am sending admonitions to the priests for them to read aloud to the robbers.
The 'cavalrymen' (homines caballarii) are easy to identify.Caballarius generally referred to a horseman equipped with a shield, lance, sword, short-sword, bow, quiver, and arrows. 69Such soldiers were

The Carolingian cocio
Early Medieval Europe 2024 32 (1) expensive to maintain. 70Although the individual units of Carolingian armies were expected to carry provisions to the mustering place, a great deal had to be requisitioned, licitly or illicitly, from the local populace. 71avalrymen, with their needs, their arms, and their mobility, might be expected to indulge in overzealous confiscation.
But who were ipsi cocciones?Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, in an otherwise illuminating analysis of Hincmar's letter, conflates them with the homines caballarii, whom she interprets as 'the men in charge of provisioning the royal army'. 72Hincmar, in her view, was describing these provisioners as 'coccioneshighway robbers and plunderers of the villages from which they were to make requisitions for the royal household'. 73But this mixes up the text in three ways.First, the homines caballarii seem to be cavalrymen here, not provisioners. 74econd, 'highway robbers and plunderers' is too strong for cocciones, notwithstanding the term's disreputability.Third, Hincmar's phrasing -'not only . . .but also'implies that there was something noteworthy about the contrast between homines caballarii and cocciones.This is underscored by the pronoun ipsi: not only the cavalrymen, but 'even the cocciones' were doing robberies. 75ne possibility is that the cocciones were not part of Charles's military apparatus, but 'vagabonds' emboldened by the bad behaviour of his troops: 'scoundrels, market-and pub-thieves', as one nineteenthcentury scholar put it. 76The scenario is plausible enough.If royal 0 officials were themselves robbing, what would stop opportunists from doing the same in this war-torn diocese?This use of cocio would be in line with the lexicographers' expectations for the word's semantic devolution.But if that were Hincmar's point, he might be expected to say it more openly.The archbishop's letter is focused on wrongdoing by those in the king's vicinity: 'in your palace . . .and in places where you are and through which you travel'. 77nother possibility is that cocciones refers to a part of Charles's army, entourage, or officialdom that would contrast strikingly with caballarii.This could mean warriors on foot, who did not have a horse to provision.But infantrymen joining cavalrymen in pillaging would not be newsworthy, and Hincmar's tone implies a sharper, more shocking contrast.A few scholars have suggested that cocciones here refers to 'porters'. 78That is plausible from context.Still, there is no reason to single out porters as opposed to other subordinate members of a Carolingian military force: slaves, servants, cooks, cart drivers, foragers (pabulatores), and the like. 79Émile Lesne's all-encompassing 'hommes de peine' (i.e.labourers) is more cautious. 80But such an interpretation presumes rather than evinces a semantic shift from 'merchants' to 'knaves'.
The third possibility is, again, that the word retained its core meaning, which we have argued was present in the capitularies and probably in proto-Romance speech too.Carolingian armies were attractive targets for merchants, and there is indirect evidence that Carolingian kings encouraged their presence for logistical reasons. 81The decentralized nature of Frankish military supply made merchants useful for provisioning.Merchantsor those alleging to be suchcould potentially claim to be acting on behalf of the army.Hincmar's point seems to be that not only the horsemen but tag-along 'brokers', maybe with only the most tenuous claims to officialdom, were committing acts of robbery in the name of the royal army. 82he implication is of lucre-seeking by coercion.It is possible that the rapina that so vexed Hincmar's archdiocese involved not only outright theftshorsemen riding into villages and seizing things at sword-point but subtler threats of violence by supposed 'brokers' working for the army.Locals may have been forced to make sales or purchases at ruinously bad rates.Indeed, this would have increased the need to insist that such behaviour was rapina, not commerce.Doubtless the phrase 'those cocciones' intentionally evoked capitulum 77 of the Admonitio Generalis. 83Hincmar knew the old capitularies well, and a pointed appeal to the laws of Charles's grandfather and namesake was definitely the archbishop's style.As with the capitularies, it is most parsimonious to assume that the term still denoted actual buyers and sellers, even if Hincmar meant this to be as pejorative as had the drafters of the Admonitio.

Notker (883/7)
The best evidence that cocio came to mean something like 'vagabond' or 'tramp', without a hint of commerce, comes from the Gesta Karoli.This Life of Charlemagne is thought to have been composed between 883 and 887 by Notker 'the Stammerer' (c.840/50-912), monk and teacher in the monastery of St Gallen. 84The folkloric, episode-driven text is a good reflection of late ninth-century ideals of kingship, less so of early ninth-century realities.A major theme is Charlemagne's openness to individuals of low-status origin.Two stories of this sort depict Charlemagne showing respect to a poor, bedraggled cleric given the name coctio.
In the first story, Charlemagne takes mercy on a wandering cleric who has become the butt of ridicule.At an unnamed grand basilica, 'a certain cleric from among those who wander about' (quidam clericus de circumcellionibus) had entered the choir during a service.Standing dumbstruck and foolish (mutus et amens) among the celebrants, and scarcely aware that the emperor was watching, the man was told off by the precentor (paraphonista) for not singing: Then he, not knowing what to do or where to turn, dared not leave, but 'turning his head in a circular way' (cf.Isaiah LVIII.5) and gaping his outstretched cheeks, he did his best to imitate the appearance of a man singing.The others were unable to stifle their laughter, but the puissant emperor, who could not be shaken from his mental solidity even by major affairs, most decorously, as if he had not so much as noticed the behaviour of this coctio, waited for the end of the mass.Then calling over the poor man (miserus) and pitying him for his works and his sufferings, he consoled him this way: 'Have many thanks, good cleric, for your singing and works.'And to alleviate his poverty, he ordered him to be given one pound of silver. 85 looks as if the word has lost its commercial sense.The man's descriptors all suggest passivity, lowliness, and ignorance (mutus, amens, ignavus, nesciens, miserus).Notker appears to have thought that coctio meant something like 'wretch'.
Even then, a hint of lucre remains.In calling the cleric one 'of the circumcelliones', Notker was not referring to Donatist heretics of the fourth-and fifth-century African countryside, but to a usage enshrined by Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, and multiple canonical collections. 86Circumcelliones (also circilliones, circiliones, etc.) became a synonym for the gyrovagi or wandering monks condemned by the Rule of those 'who under the habit of monks wander hither and hither, carrying their hypocrisy with them, circulating among provinces, never sent, never fixed, never staying put, never sitting down'.Their cons varied, but they all shared one goal: 'What all of them are after, what all of them seek is either the prize of a lucrative poverty or a payment for feigned sanctity.' 88The fact that Charlemagne gives the coctio a pound of silver may reinforce this impression.
On the other hand, there is no hint of lucre in the second story about a coctio.Here, the coctio is another poor cleric who warns Charlemagne of Pippin the Hunchback's plot against his father, which took place in 792. 89n Notker's telling, the conspirators hashed out their plans in the church of St Peter at Regensburg, only to realize that 'a single cleric (clericus)' hiding under an altar had heard all.Under coercion, they forced the man to swear to secrecy.But judging his oath dispensable, the man rushed to the palace in the middle of the night: And when he had at last passed, with the greatest difficulty, through the seven gates and doors to the chamber of the emperor, hearing his knocking, the ever wakeful Charles was led to the greatest amazement, as to who would presume to trouble him at such a time.Nevertheless, he commanded the ladies, who as part of the queen's and his daughters' retinue used to accompany him, to go out and see who was at the door and what he was after.When they went out and saw this very lowly individual (persona vilissima), they bolted the doors shut and, with great laughter and guffawing, tried to hide themselves in the corners, blocking their mouths with their clothes.But the most wise emperor, whom nothing under heaven could escape, diligently inquired of the women what they were thinking and who was knocking at the door.Getting the answer that there was a shaven, idiotic, raving coctio, dressed only in linen and leggings, who was insisting upon speaking with him without delay, he ordered him to be admitted.The man at once threw himself upon his feet and revealed everything in due order. 90he coctio is, once again, a cleric (clericus), and Notker's depiction of him as a 'very lowly individual' (persona vilissima) chimes with the earlier episode.The man is dismissed as a coctio derasus, insulsus et insaniens, linea tantum et femoralibus indutus.This passage has been treated as the strongest case for the scholarly assumption that the term came to mean something like 'ragamuffin', 'vagrant', or the editor's Vagabund. 91Du Cange, Niermeyer, and the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch all cite this string of negative qualities in extenso as proof. 92here is some plausibility in this.Certainly, it is not profit-seeking, but risibility that seems the defining characteristic of both coctiones in Notker.It is possible, given Notker's Germanic-speaking milieu, that he was unfamiliar with the proto-Romance term, perhaps knowing the word only from the capitularies, where it may have seemed to him to describe a disreputable wanderer.This would, however, make his usage the exception rather than the rule.
On the other hand, being unintelligent, incoherent, and poorly clad are not qualities limited to vagrants.Here it is worth pausing over the word derasus, 'shaved'. 93If Notker's point is only that the coctio is bedraggled, one might have expected him to describe the man as 'unshaven'.Certainly elsewhere Notker implies that to be 'hirsute' (hirsutus) or 'hairy' (pilosus) is to be unkempt, and he has a scene where a man tidies himself up by, among other things, having his face shaved and his hair cut short. 94What if derasus here refers, in the most scornful way possible, to the cleric's tonsure?The whole string of pejoratives, it should be remembered, is presented as the indirect speech of the giggling ladies-in-waiting.Instead of reporting that a 'tonsured cleric' wishes an audience, they tell Charlemagne that a 'shaved huckster' is at the door.That raises the possibility that Notker did in fact know the term meant 'petty merchant'.What makes these two clerics risible, then, would be that, through unclerical comportment, they seem like pedlars.0 chachinno se per angulos, vestibus ora repressae, conabantur abscondere.Sed sagacissimus imperator, quem nihil sub caelo posset effugere, diligenter a mulieribus exquisivit, quid haberent vel quis ostium pulsaret.Responsumque accipiens, quia quidam coctio derasus, insulsus et insaniens, linea tantum et femoralibus indutus, se absque mora postularet alloqui, iussit eum intromittere.Qui statim corruens ad pedes illius cuncta patefecit ex ordine.' 91 Haefele (ed.), Gesta Karoli, p.

After the Carolingians: Romance survivals
The word cocio vanishes from Latin after the ninth century.The dictionaries provide no medieval exempla post-dating Notker.In the main databases, there are no medieval examples of the word's use after the ninth century, though one should recall that numerous tenth-century manuscripts reiterated the term's use in the capitulary.
Cocio reappears in Latin only with the early modern antiquarians, curious about its use in Plautus, Sextus Pompeius Festus, and Aulus Gellius. 95Until the seventeenth century, no connection was made between the classical term and the Carolingian one, though scholars knew the capitularies.The editio princeps of the Admonitio Generalis, by Veit (Vitus) Amerbach (1545), struggled with the manuscript reading cogciones, assuming it derived from the word 'cuckoo' and meant 'either impostors or fools'. 96Du Cange seems to have been the first to see that the medieval term was the same as the classical one. 97et this is only in written Latin.Cocio survived in Romance, in a way that suggests robust spoken use. 98First, however, it is important to dismiss a charming but erroneous derivation.Du Cange thought that cocio was related to the Old French word coquin, still in his time a term for beggars, drifters, rascals, and crooks. 99In turn, coquin was once proposed as the origin of the English word 'cockney'. 100A link between cocio and coquin (to say nothing of 'cockney') would be evidence for the shift from merchant to rascal, since there is no hint of buying and selling in coquin.But this charming etymology must be discarded.While there is some uncertainty about the etymology of coquinsome have also proposed coquus ('cook'), a profession with comparable negative associations (cf.'scullion') 101 most philologists agree that coquin derives from the Old French word for rooster (coq). 102n the other hand, cocio gave rise to a host of medieval and early modern Romance terms for petty merchants. 103Across Romance languages and dialects, derivatives such as coçon, cosson, gosson, cousson, cosso, scosson, and so on denoted merchants of goods like pigs, eggs, butter, grain, fish, and cattle.Gendered forms, such as cochonnesse, cossoneresse, and cossenate, referred to female traders.The abstract word cossonnerie meant a collection of merchants or a market, for instance, of poultry and game.The verb coçonner ('to resell', 'to be a merchant') appears in multiple contexts.From French, the word led to two Germanic terms for egg-mongers: Lothringian German kussung and Flemish eierkuts.The best known of cocio's Romance derivatives is probably the Italian cozzone.Cozzone came to mean 'horse-broker' or 'horse-breeder' (figuratively, 'matchmaker'). 104The derivative verb cozzonare, 'to sell (horses)', is a possible origin to the English verb 'cozen'. 105In short, the Romance evidence is relatively prolific and points in much the same direction: in the later Middle Ages, cocio lived on as a term for petty merchants.
It is curious that this well-attested tradition has never influenced the lexicography of the medieval Latin word cocio.In part, the problem is that Du Cange's early link with coquin acted as a misleading confirmation of the thesis of semantic shift.Another problem is simply that 'petty merchants' are not a feature of the modern economy.In a commercial world like that of the early Middle Ages, as well as the Roman and early modern period, petty dealers were the essence of commerce; by the nineteenth century, they were gradually being displaced by stores like Le Bon Marché, Debenhams, and Macy's, and perhaps even more so in the minds of scholars. 106In the world of internet commerce, even fewer of us think about the kind of buyer and seller associated with a term like the English 'monger'.
The Romance story supports a hypothesis of continuity.In none of these derivatives do we see semantic blur.The diffusion of terms from cocio mitigates against the possibility that the word was revived in the late eighth century as a learned term and disseminated downward.
Instead, the vernacular tradition suggests that this word as a term for petty dealer never disappeared from common speech, which is probably why it was selected by the authors of the Admonitio Generalis.

A world of small merchants?
The possibility that common folk kept the word cocio alive for centuries despite its absence in writing recalls an old problem in the study of early medieval economic life.Early medieval authors, disproportionately ecclesiastical and elite, had little to say about merchants, especially petty ones. 107When early medieval authors spoke of negotiatores or mercatores, to use the commonest Latin words, they usually meant overseas traders. 108A memorable example of this occurs in AElfric's eleventh-century bilingual Colloquy.When asked to describe himself, the mercator or mancgere (Old English cognate of mango and mangari) replies: I climb aboard my ship with my merchandise, and I navigate over the saltwater tracts, and I sell my wares and buy precious wares that are not found in this land, and I bring them back to you here under great danger upon the sea, and sometimes I suffer shipwreck with loss of all my wares, scarcely getting out alive.This imaginary merchant's wares are all luxury or bulk goods: purple and silk, precious gems and gold, fine clothing and pigments, wine and olive, ivory and brass, copper and tin, sulphur and glass, 'and things like that'. 109hen it comes to petty brokers on the rural scene, we are not entirely in the dark.We know a bit about the weekly markets where such people must have sold their wares. 110A few stories, in the context of hagiography, hint at economic realities of what Étienne Sabbe called 'the local pedlar'. 111In a ninth-century Translatio Sancti Adelphi, a certain poor woman (quaedam paupercula) of Hochfelden asks her neighbour (vicinus) to buy 'necessities' (necessaria) for her, giving him 2 denarii to do so; the neighbour loses them 'by negligence' but by praying to God and St Adelphus in a meadow, rediscovers them among the grass. 112The 'business' goes 'unfulfilled', but the tale hints at markets allowing small purchases. 113n another ninth-century tale, two 'comrades' (conpares) attend a regular weekly Saturday market at Fleury 'for the sake of trading (mercandi gratia)'. 114At the end of the day, they have accumulated 12 denarii collectively, but the one holding the money refuses to give his comrade his due share.Upon the arrival of a local market official, the would-be swindler swears a rash oath ('By Saint Benedict himself, I did give him those denarii!'),suffering paralysis until he confesses and does penance before St Benedict.From the detail that the penitent man offers the saint an iron pitchfork as a votive gift, Michael McCormick has suggested that perhaps the men were selling tools. 115This may suggest an arrangement where one partner focused on sales, while the other acted as the 'register'.Still, if these men ought to be described as pedlars, they were rather successful ones, since 12 denarii for a day's work was a goodly sum. 116 final ninth-century story offers 'the one clear case of a small-scale merchant or pedlar that we have'. 117In this tale, which occupies three chapters of the Miracles of Saint Germain (BHL 3475), 'a certain poor man' (quidam pauperculus), whose sole possession is a donkey (asellus), travels from town to town, buying cheap in one and selling dear in another. 118His companion (the focus of the story) is a deaf/mute child that the man has picked up from the roadside 'partly for the sake of mercy, but partly from the hope of getting a servant'. 119This man, his donkey, and the boy convey a load of salt, by foot, from Orléans to Paris. 120In a reflection of the limitations of the vocabulary used for buyers and sellers by monastic writers, the text describes this poor pedlar as a mercator.
Overall, then, the written evidence for petty traders is thin, but there are hints.Moreover, non-written evidence suggests that the role of small sellers must have been considerable.The circulation and velocity of coinage was enough that peasants paid dues and thus may have also, like the poor woman of Hochfelden, made purchases in silver coins. 121nother hint is the archaeological diffusion of material culture into rural settlements; this suggests, as one archaeologist writes, that 'exchange was facilitated by merchant-peddlers travelling inland on a seasonal basis'. 122The scattered appearance of cociones in the ninth century should be added to the few but precious testimonia for such economic agents.

Conclusion
The Carolingian cocio did not depart, as scholars have supposed, from its ancient meaning of 'petty broker'.On the contrary, the majority of extant early medieval uses suggest the old meaning remained intact.Paul the Deacon's epitome of Festus, one notes, assumed the definition as known.The Admonitio Generalis paired cotiones with mangones, I have argued, so as to echo the two main vernaculars of the Carolingian world.If the capitulum that discussed them meant to designate not 'merchants' but wanderers and rogues, it did so by way of calling them buyers and sellers.Hincmar too had in mind the same class of lowly brokers when he cast the coercive bargaining of men claiming to act on the royal army's behest as 'robbery' (rapina).This hints at a widerbut unattestedproto-Romance usage of cocio, amply borne out by the later Romance legacy of the world.Alone among Carolingian writers, the monk of St Gall may support the conviction that cocio became a generic slur.Then again, as I have suggested above, it is equally possible that this monastic teacher found something inherently absurd in clerics who came off as 'travelling salesmen'.
The Carolingian cocio, then, is a tale of semantic continuity, not change.When the word reappeared in surviving Latin in the eighth century (it is possible earlier uses have not survived), it still referred to the small-scale dealers that made up so necessary, but so elusive, a part of the everyday economic life of the premodern world.As our sources suggest, such individuals were implicated in religious, social, and military issues.Among early medieval elites, they were still thought of as disgraceful, avaricious, or ridiculous, as had been the case in Antiquity.But it is commercial activity, not vagrancy, that fuelled the pejorative sense of the word.
Still, the written Latin tradition may mislead us.In speech, it is conceivable that the neutral use of the fourth-century Pacatianus inscription remained the rule rather than the exception.The later Romance tradition of cocio lacks the negative undertones of the early medieval Latin tradition.It is possible that humble buyers and sellers were looked upon as necessary members of society by a large but now silent portion of the early medieval population; after all, the capitularies had to warn people not to trust mangones and cotiones.If this is right, the history of the cocio may actually be the history of two continuities: the persistence of a sneering attitude toward petty brokerage in elite writing and of a more neutral perspective in common speech.Unlike the former, however, the latter must remain a matter of speculation.