Graves and Sexuality: Multiple readings

[I was inspired by a critical discussion by Karl Steel here, of an attempt to project same-sex marriage into the past, to post my (I think only) discussion of sexuality and queer readings of archaeology, for your thoughts/comments, especially form those of you who are more literate in theory than I am.  The quote comes from pp.347-9 of Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul, in a chapter (9) which contains other thoughts about archaeologists' and historians' fear of including same-sex love/emotional attraction within their range of interpretive options.]

Ennery (Lorraine) 'Graves' 6 and 8

Finally in this section I should like to draw attention to the double burials of young males that are known in Merovingian archaeology.  In the cemeteries in Lorraine which I studied the best examples were ‘graves’ 6 and 8 at Ennery (dating to the sixth century), and grave 103 at Audun-le-Tiche, from about a century later.  Logically, the subjects of the graves must have succumbed close in time.  What seem at first sight to be linked arms are on closer inspection no such thing; the arms of the subjects of the Ennery double grave simply lie on top of each other.  This might have been deliberate or it might not.[1]  There is a wide range of possibilities behind these double graves.  They might be those of relatives, perhaps most plausibly those of brothers.  There were a number of other social ties in Merovingian society that might equally have led the community to join two young males in death.  For instance, the male child of the foster father or god-parent of another young man would be regarded as that young man’s brother.  The son of one family, serving as an apprentice in another might have been regarded as, effectively, kin – a surrogate brother – to the sons of that household.  Two young men serving together in a household could have been regarded as sharing a bond.  In all such cases the families of the deceased and perhaps that of the head of the household might, following the interpretation of furnished burial proposed above, have come together in funerary ritual to ease the rupture in relations between the families produced by the deaths in question.  Alternatively, as will be discussed below, young males might have bonded in age groups.  The deaths of two such men might have united their families in grief and led them to create links between them through involvement in a joint funeral.  Lastly it is possible that a joint interment might have been a means of smoothing over tensions created by killing and vengeance.  Nevertheless, we probably ought not to apply a single explanation to all of the instances of such burials.  Double graves might well represent different aspects of society from those manifested by occasional triple burials, such as at Niederstotzingen.[2]

My purpose in mentioning these graves in this chapter is simply to consider a further issue raised by the possibility that the occupants of such graves were united other than by close kinship.  The close homosocial bonds between young men serving together in various contexts (from the monastic to the military) are well known throughout history, as is the frequency with which these bonds encompass homosexual love and sex.  In spite of this, as in other periods of history, accusations of anal sex with men were nevertheless regarded as serious slurs on a man’s standing or honour.  Interestingly, the other bases for insult were cowardice and unreliability in battle.[3]  As has been long debated, such homosexual love is usually not commensurate with a self-consciously gay identity, seen as different from or antagonistic to normative heterosexuality: this seems to be the product of more modern sexual classifications.  It is nevertheless surely a mistake either to deny that such emotional and sexual relations existed (in the latter case – sexual relations – the concern of monastic regulators and authors of penitentials with sodomy ought to be proof enough to the contrary[4]) or that the classifications of sexual behaviour and the views of male homosexual relationships held by medieval people were automatically similar to those of modern observers.  This matters because it presents two possibilities (they are not more than that) to the reading of double burials like Ennery 6 and 8 or Audun-le-Tiche 103.  One is that such emotional bonds were given sufficient recognition to result in shared inhumation.  The other, possibly the more interesting, perhaps the more likely, takes us to the issue of the polysemy of burial display.[5]  The ‘dominant’ reading intended by the creators of a funerary monument like this might to have been to stress the social relations between the two families, or to have valorised the comradeship, trust and fidelity of shared military service, traditionally ‘honourable’ within masculine culture.  Other readings open to contemporaries at the graveside, however, might have dwelt on different issues, such as real or suspected sexual or emotional relationships between the two men.  These might have involved no particular value judgement, simply being alternative.  They might also have been subversive, and they might have been derogatory (as in the insults referred to above).  The latter could be open to members of rival families or to those men barred from participation in what was becoming the normative, military form of masculinity, as discussed in the next chapter.

---

[1] See below, pp.357-60

[2] R. Christlein, Die Alamannen: Archäologie eines lebendigen Volkes (3^rd edition, Stuttgart, 1991), p.89.

[3] PLS [Pactus Legis Salicae] 30, using the translation I proposed in W&S [Warfare and Society], p.11.

[4] Although what, precisely, was meant by the term sodomy is usually vague; many non-procreative forms of sexual encounter could be bracketed under the heading.  Nevertheless, in the context of penitentials I assume it means some form of sexual, physical contact between males.

[5] BW ['Burial Writes'], pp.64-65 (above, pp.219-20).

Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 4

[In the last installment of this piece (which begins here), I examine the role of royal service in maintaining aristocratic power.  It is argued to have been essential and this fact allows us to see the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom as a state in a very real sense.]
Part 3 is here

Gregory describes the redeployment of royal patronage on one occasion.  Following the suppression of the ‘Revolt of the Dukes’ (587) in Austrasia, Gregory says that a number of other dukes were demoted and others promoted to replace them.  All of the Frankish magnates whom we encounter in the pages of the Histories occupy positions within the administration of the realm, as duke, count, patricius and so on.  None of these titles, it is worth reminding ourselves, was hereditary; as implied in the preceding discussion, it is very difficult to find a title (even the general rank) remaining in the same family before the late sixth century.  Obviously it is impossible to know how they obtained their position in the hierarchy; one imagines that they probably came from the loosely-defined de facto aristocracy mentioned earlier.  Nonetheless, what emerges very clearly from Gregory’s account is the absolute dependence of these powerful aristocrats upon the royal court for their status.  We simply do not find an equivalent of the late Roman senatorial nobleman who spent brief intermittent periods in the service – negotium – of the state between longer spells of otium on his estates, or of the brooding late medieval noble plotting in his castle.  When demoted from office, such figures disappear from history.  Consequently the possibility that one might lose one’s position at court drove magnates to extreme actions, such as the Revolt of the Dukes just mentioned. 

The actions of the Austrasian dukes and those of the Neustrian aristocrats after Chilperic’s assassination (584) are very revealing.  The Neustrian magnates who found themselves away from court (generally accompanying an embassy to Spain) sided, on the whole, with Gundovald, a claimant with Byzantine backing.  The Austrasian dukes planned to murder Childebert II and replace him with his infant sons.  Clearly there were two principal options.  Ideally, an aristocratic faction wanted a malleable king (especially a child) whom they could control.  This allowed them to monopolise access to the court and to control the distribution of royal patronage, while still acting with the legitimacy of royal officers.  It is significant, therefore, that the Revolt of the Dukes occurred as Childebert II entered his majority (technically from Christmas 585); the faction of the dukes involved had controlled the court for most of his minority and were now threatened with demotion and replacement.  The Neustrian aristocrats who were at court in late 584 found themselves in the happy position where they could control the court of the infant Chlothar II.  On the other hand, the palatine magnates accompanying Princess Rigunth to Spain were now likely to find their return to favour barred by other factions.  Therefore they took the option of siding with an adult king, Gundovald.  An adult king, even if unlikely to be controlled by particular faction, at least had the corresponding merit of distributing and redistributing patronage between groups, ensuring that all had access and all had their turn.  This was better than exclusion from the court by a rival group.  Note, though, that there was no question of replacing the Merovingian dynasty.  By this stage the Merovingians had clearly established the idea that they were the only throneworthy family in the realm.  There was no Frankish noble lineage to match them; certainly none that could persuade other families to accept their pre-eminence.  Thus it is significant that one of the rebellious Austrasian dukes, Rauching, took to claiming that (like Gundovald) he was a son of Chlothar I.

Those excluded in this way tended to leave the kingdom altogether, as Duke Lupus did during Childebert II’s minority.  Similarly, after the Revolt of the Dukes, Gregory tells us that many men moved to other regions for fear of (pertimescens) Childebert II.  One assumes that they were linked in some way to the subdued rebellious faction.  Their fears were justified.  Childebert II was not a man to cross.  In one of Gregory’s more chilling stories, when the king and his court were watching bear-baiting at Metz, a certain Magnovald was dragged from Childebert’s presence and butchered, his body being thrown into the street as a sign that this killing had been carried out legitimately.  This was done causis occultis.  Some suggested that Magnovald’s alleged murder of his wife was the cause but no one knew; there was not even a show-trial.

Magnovald’s property was confiscated by the fisc.  This indeed was the fate of the property of all those who fell foul of the king: Guntramn Boso, Rauching, Eberulf and many others.  Some stories imply, furthermore, that the king was by no means necessarily disinheriting their heirs in such action.  Even those who were not in disfavour might have their property taken back into the fisc when they died.  The fact that the sons of another Bodegisel were able to inherit their father’s land without forfeiting any of it appears to have been a point of some note to Gregory.  The implications of the story are elucidated by another tale wherein, after their father was killed (evidently near Poitiers) in pursuit of a petty dispute, the sons of Waddo had to go to the king (again, Childebert II) before they were allowed to inherit his lands.  Childebert seems, however, soon to have changed his mind, stripped them of these estates and given them to his rebellious cousin Chlothild.  Royal interference in matters of inheritance is further suggested by Gregory’s repeated complaint that Chilperic of Neustria tore up the wills (testamenta) of those who died leaving land to the church.  This might in part stem, as Edward James suggested, from the fact that Pactus Legis Salicae did not envisage that the inhabitants of the northern Frankish realms could make wills at all.  Indeed no sixth-century northern Gallic wills survive.  If correct, this in turn would support the interpretation of the Law as having some practical import.  Another reason for Chilperic’s ire, however, might be that – given that the king is unlikely to have taken much interest in the social strata below that of the more powerful aristocrats – royal grants were not gifts in perpetuity and thus not the recipient’s to give away.  Parallels can be sought in a roughly contemporary antiqua (old law) in the Visigothic Forum Iudicum, concerning property acquired by a saio whilst in someone’s service.  Any weapons given by the patron may be kept if the saio leaves the patron’s service, but any other property ultimately remains that of the patron.  The Visigothic Law concerning the permanence of royal donations belongs to the seventh century, when it would – equally – evidently not be out of step with contemporary Frankish practice.  

Frankish practice might descend from late Roman, with the ‘salary’ of royal officers being paid through the grant of tax revenue from particular, defined assets – probably referred to as villae.  The existence of the system is confirmed by a story in the Histories and it makes sense of the apparent ease with which villae could be granted away, taken back and re-granted, as in the story of Waddo’s villa near Poitiers.  It also allows us to understand the meaning of the term villa as it appears in seventh- and earlier eighth-century usage.  A further advantage of this reading is that it makes sense of the social relationships witnessed in the Pactus Legis Salicae.  A freeman (ingenuus) granted the right to take the tax from a designated villa or small geographical unit would remain a freeman like the inhabitants of the villa; the latter would stand in no legally inferior or dependent status to him.  This means of salarying state officers would make sense in an effectively non-monetary economy like that of sixth-century northern Gaul.  The relevant surplus could be extracted and used by the recipient without leaving the locality, any responsibility for converting payments in kind into gold (whether from villae assigned to him as his salary or from other villae from which he was tasked with tax-collection) becoming that of the salaried officer in question.  The only currency we know about in Gaul at this time (outside a small-denomination coinage effectively restricted to Marseille) is imported Byzantine solidi and Gallic imitations struck by the Merovingian kings.  Such coins were of very high value and doubtless therefore circulated (alongside their late Roman predecessors) only among the most powerful socio-political classes, something that made these coins ideal vehicles for royal and imperial propaganda.  With a more or less fixed content of 1/72 of a pound of gold, they should, however, be understood more as convenient units of bullion than as coins proper.  Even in the monetized late Roman period, the value of the solidus to the other elements of currency had been inflationary.  The only other coinage in use appears to have been residual Roman currency, which is frequently found in the pouches with which many Merovingian males were buried.  When taken alongside the presence of balances in lavishly-furnished male burials, we might conclude that local leaders, and especially (one assumes) those with an official title, had a responsibility for ‘weights and measures’.  These old coins presumably circulated as bullion and it was a local leader’s word that determined their worth as pieces of precious metal.

Taken together, the advantages of royal service were clearly considerable for northern Gallic aristocrats.  Legal privilege was only one of these.  In addition, responsibility for taxation and for levying the army from an increasingly broad stratum of ‘Franks’ constituted an important source of local patronage.  The revenue from royally-bestowed villae could be considerable, especially where numerous such ‘fiscal assets’ were accumulated by an officer like a duke or count.  Royal gifts were also prestigious as well as valuable.  Thus it is not surprising that the competition for patronage was fierce and that this outweighed any nascent magnate identity.  It is not surprising that a king like Childebert II could very rapidly call out an army of a sufficient size to spell doom immediately, even for an allegedly large force assembled by the rebellious dukes Ursio and Berthefried.  With all these points made, it is clear that the early Merovingian kingdom can and should be considered a state.  It had the ability to raise an army and use it as an independent coercive force, as well as being able to pay its officials through a, however obscurely, functioning taxation system.  It thus had the means to make its writ run in the myriad communities that were located within its bounds.  Ideologically too, it appears to have managed to monopolise conceptions of legitimate power.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the ability of the third generation of Merovingians (the sons of Chlothar I) to maintain a tight grip on authority while rarely taking the field at the head of their armies.  Unlike other realms, the Frankish kingdoms endured serious military reverses in this period (at the hands of Bretons, Goths and Lombards) without political crises ensuing.  On the other hand, while failure does not seem to have redounded to the kings’ shame, any credit for victories does seem to have allowed the Merovingians to maintain the ideology of triumphal rulership.

When the Merovingians took over the governance of northern Gaul in the later fifth century they were, with few exceptions, not confronted by a powerful, independently wealthy magnate class.  Over the next century, the kings managed to reduce the status of this group further, so that it became yet more dependent upon royal service for its local pre-eminence.  The kings’ actions should probably not be regarded as policy.  Many can be viewed as continuations of the later Roman emperors’ style of governance, maintaining checks and balances and the even distribution of royal favour.  Because of this they find parallels in the activities of other post-imperial kings.  It may be no more than the happy genealogical accident that the Merovingians were able to maintain father-to-adult-son succession for four generations between Childeric I and the sons of Chlothar I that enabled them to be more successful than any other post-imperial dynasty.  Nonetheless that factor reveals the inherent weakness of the system.  Much like the late Empire, political stability relied upon the tenure of the throne by an adult capable of distributing and redistributing patronage and maintain balance between different aristocratic factions.  Again like the Empire, a series of royal minorities, in this case after Sigibert I’s assassination in late 575, produced a critical situation.  This occurred, furthermore, at a point when other contingent factors could come together to exacerbate any crisis in the legitimacy of government carried out in the young king’s name.  The transformations in the nature of the Frankish aristocracy that occurred as a result of this combination of circumstances lie outside the scope of this paper.  As the sixth century entered its last quarter, contemporaries could only have perceived the Merovingian kings as exercising a tight control of legitimate power and a literally life-and-death authority over their aristocrats.  In these circumstances the idea that the latter formed an independently powerful social class would have seemed a long way from reality.

Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 3

[The third installment of this draft article on the sixth-century aristocracy (which begins here) looks at the significance for the debate of the legal evidence and of terminology for aristocrats in the narrative sources.  The argument is that both forms of evidence, while they permit the reasonable supposition that some families maintained social pre-eminence within their localities, this position was not secure or recognisable by southerners as amounting to a real form of social distinction.  The failure of the laws to recognise an aristocratic stratum might have originated as a royal strategy but by the middle of the sixth century it seems to have been a reasonable approximation of reality.]

Part 2 is here

In this context we can reconsider the earliest of the Frankish law-codes, the Pactus Legis Salicae, and its failure to mention any sort of a noble caste.  The Pactus only recognises two types of freeman: the Frank, with a wergild of 200 solidi and the Roman tributarius, whose wergild was 150 solidi.  The only men raised above this general stratum are the presumably Frankish members of the trustis regis (the royal retinue: wergild 600 solidi or double that of the Frank), the Roman members of the convivia regis (the royal table: wergild 300 solidi or double that of the tributarius), the pueri regis (the “King’s Boys”) and comites (companions; here meaning counts: royal officers).  All of these exceptions are defined by a connection to the king.  As mentioned, the interpretation of this fact has been a matter of debate.  On its own, it is difficult to make the absence of a legally-recognised aristocratic stratum bear much weight in proposing that such a class did not exist in reality.  Arguments against it have been numerous.  The kings deliberately did not recognise such a group as a means of strengthening their own position.  Alternatively, the law-makers felt that they could not legislate for a noble wergild; in practice the magnates would set their own blood-price.   Another possibility is that the class of ‘Franks’, with a higher wergild than ‘Romans’ is itself the aristocracy.  Or the coverage of the Pactus is hardly comprehensive and the absence of laws specifically relating to the aristocracy might not therefore be significant.  Indeed there are legal ‘documents of practice’ which decree that ‘Salic law’ be followed in circumstances not covered at all by the Pactus.  Finally, the law itself was only a symbolic text with no necessary grounding in reality; texts actually showing that the Pactus and its provisions were followed in practice are entirely lacking.  By contrast we have later documents recording legal decisions that flatly contravene what the Pactus said should be done.

These arguments against the significance of the Pactus’ silence are of uneven weight but there is something in all of them.  The weakest – like a crude progression from the law’s silence to actual absence – turn on the idea that the law was directly applicable in practice.  In the sixth century, the extent to which this was the case is impossible to gauge.  In defence of the idea that there was some connection between code and practice, we can point to some similarities between the processes it envisages and those described in narrative sources and the fact that the law set geographical boundaries on the area within which it thought it was applicable (between the Ardennes and the Loire).  The best way forward seems to be to remember that the law was a deliberate composition, not a simple, passive transmission of age-old custom.  Even if, as seems very plausible, it was assembled at least in part from pre-existing royal decrees, the Pactus is very consistent in its vocabulary, especially when using ethnic terminology (here it differs from Burgundian law, for example).  It does not seem unreasonable to hypothesise that its authors assembled materials, and phrased their discussion of issues, in a deliberate fashion, whether this was to provide a practical law-book, or simply an object text that symbolised Clovis’ capacity as a law-making king, in Roman fashion. 

Viewed thus, several suggestions are possible.  One is that, as Chris Wickham wrote nearly twenty years ago, it is significant that the range of relationships and legal situations envisaged by the legislators did not encompass the activities of major, wealthy landlords or their intrusions into a society of small-landowners.  For it is not simply the absence of a recognised aristocratic stratum, with its own wergild, that matters.  There are no references to the relationships that suggest the existence of such a class, either.  This becomes clear through comparison with seventh-century Lex Ribvaria.  Comparison with other codes suggests that the failure to mention a magnate stratum with a higher wergild than the normal freeman is deliberate.  We should not expect this absence, as a matter of course, because of the de facto ability of aristocrats to set their own blood price.  Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon and Lombard laws all recognise such a class.  Furthermore, why ordinary aristocrats could not be legislated for because of their ability to set their own wergild, but aristocrats with royal backing could be so restricted is a problem left unanswered.  Thus the lack of recognition of an aristocracy with status independent of royal approval might indeed have been a deliberate royal statement.  This need not imply that such a group did not exist in practice but the absence from the law of other indices of its presence, which comparison with other codes suggests would normally act to restrict its power, argues that it was not, in reality, very significant.

Other sixth-century evidence permits the argument that even if, when the Pactus was issued, the law-makers’ deliberately ignored a magnate class as a statement of royal power, by the middle of the sixth century the dependence of northern Gaulish local leaders upon royal legitimation was a normal state of affairs.  This is suggested from the analysis of the region’s rural cemeteries during the middle quarters of the century, as already discussed.  That reading of the excavated data finds support in some aspects of the written sources.  The first such aspect to consider is that of terminology.  Gregory of Tours, for example, only employs the term nobilis once to describe a northern Gallic family, referring to the brothers Bodegisil and Bobo.  Otherwise, within Gaul, Gregory restricts his use of the term nobilis to the Merovingian royal family itself, and to southern Gallic senators.  His description of an embassy to Constantinople, one of the occasions when Gregory refers to Bodegisil, suggests why this might have been.  He describes the ambassadors as ‘Bodegisil son of Mummolenus, from Soissons, Evantius son of Dynamius, from Arles, and Grippo, a Frank’.  For Gregory, then, it seems that one’s civitas of origin and the name of one’s father were the principal criteria for inclusion in the social stratum that encompassed the senatorial nobility.  In this, he does not seem too different from his near contemporary Isidore of Seville, whose definition of nobilis, within the category of ‘terms for people’ (de quibusdam vocabulis hominum), was one whose ‘name and lineage are known’.

Wickham downplays the significance of Gregory’s failure to use the word nobilis for northerners, by stating that Venantius Fortunatus, unlike Gregory, does employ the term for Frankish aristocrats.  In fact, scrutiny reveals Venantius’ use of the term to be more or less the same as Gregory’s.  He describes as ‘noble’ southern Gallic senators, the Merovingians and one northern Frank, who dwells in Toulouse.  Otherwise he uses the word to qualify virtues or objects in a religious context.

Nonetheless, looking at the usage of particular terms is not without its problems, given the almost total lack of written evidence from northern Gaul itself.  The sources available are essentially from Aquitaine or – in the case of the works of Venantius Fortunatus – of a poet from Italy.  One issue is whether the failure of these writers to discuss the northern, Frankish aristocracy in the terms usually employed for nobility is significant, or at least in what ways it is significant.  If the northern Gallic magnates were not recognisable as noblemen in the traditional Roman way, does that really mean that they cannot – functionally – have formed a similar type of ruling stratum?  There are, after all, other words which are used to describe northern aristocrats.  Some – seniores, proceres, potentes, or optimates for example – do not have a bearing on the precise enquiry as their general meaning of ‘leading men’ does not necessarily carry with it an implication about the relationship between their status and royal service one way or the other.  Other phrases do, however: maior natu for example.

This is important because, if nothing else, it demonstrates that no position taken on this topic is likely to represent a hard-and-fast ‘right answer’.  Indeed none of the argument presented thus far implies that there was no Frankish aristocracy, defining the latter in a loose sense as a group of people more powerful, in de facto terms at least, than their fellows.  The analysis of the archaeological cemetery evidence discussed earlier does not by any means suggest that some families did not remain dominant within their localities right through the period from the fourth century to the seventh.  Members of such kindreds might indeed be described as maiores natu.  In some areas, in any case, what we might term a noble class – using the word noble to distinguish an aristocracy more narrowly defined by its birth and culture as well as its wealth and standing – certainly did exist.  The ‘senators’ of Trier are the clearest example. 

Another point that must be made is that royal service contained mechanisms that could foster some of the characteristics of such a nobility.  Service in the schola palatina – the royal military household, where the training of the Pueri Regis presumably took place – clearly included literary education, enabling Frankish service aristocrats to partake in Latin literary culture to some extent at least.  Bonds forged between the Pueri themselves could create a sense of group solidarity (maintained by an epistolary culture derived from that of late imperial times), as is most famously attested at the end of the period covered by this paper with the circle of Desiderius of Cahors, which was formed when in the service of Chlothar II and Dagobert I.  Royal service, like late imperial, also brought with it certain honorific titles.  Viri illustri are attested and, in the capitularies, even viri magnificentissimi optimates.  These honorifics might also be used to foster a class identity amongst an essentially service aristocracy.  Such titles, however, were not hereditary. 

Nonetheless, conclusions are possible.  It is clear that, to writers like Gregory and Venantius, most of the Frankish aristocrats – even the powerful ones – whom they met or who featured in their accounts of sixth-century history did not, unlike the Merovingian kings themselves, meet the criteria for nobilitas normally used by their own class.  Some people who appeared in Gregory’s other tales or who commissioned poems from Venantius seem, in a local context, to have been members, by birth, of a stratum of leading families.  It would be difficult indeed to envisage a situation, even within the fluid sixth-century context proposed here, where such families did not exist.  What is at stake is the security of such families’ power and the relative  of royal patronage and of local pre-eminence in terms of lands, wealth and so on.

To shed further light on this issue, one obvious source of information is Gregory of Tours’ Histories, with its account of the doings and, usually, violent ends of numerous Frankish aristocrats.  Gregory’s evident refusal to incorporate the Frankish magnates within his category of nobiles has been mentioned.  One reason for this might have been the fast turn-around of post-holders within the Merovingian realm that resulted from the kings’ adept control of patronage.  This would usually mean that Gregory (and Venantius) was rarely aware of the names of these aristocrats’ fathers or their family relationships.   It is interesting to speculate, too, on the self-presentation of such men, however, and to wonder whether they presented themselves simply as, for example, ‘Grippo the Frank’.  Perhaps patronymics were not habitually given precisely because aristocratic southerners would likely be none the wiser for it.  By way of modern English analogies, questions such as ‘what school did you go to?’ or (for instance) ‘would that be the Hampshire Fortescue-Smythes?’ are questions that can only be, and therefore are only, properly answered by members of the same, privileged class as the questioner.  They aim primarily at elucidating that class-relationship and only secondarily at extracting actual information.  They do not necessarily put all the power in the hands of the questioner as difference can be just as aggressively asserted by a negative response, but social space is nevertheless marked by the exchange.


Part 4 is here

Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 2

[In this second chunk of the article, I look at the dynamics of royal-aristocratic relations and how the maintenance of patronage could work to undermine the local status of aristocrats.  Archaeological evidence is then adduced to show a further weakening of local aristocratic power by the middle quarters of the sixth century.]

Part 1 is here

The exception to this rule, just mentioned, was the aristocracy of the Triererland.  This serves as an instructive case study of the problems that the Frankish kings might have faced, and how they dealt with them.  The aristocracy of the middle Moselle Valley had been closely connected with the imperial Roman presence in the region, when the western Empire’s main capital was located at Trier (western Emperors residing regularly at Trier between the 280s and 388). As well as holding large estates and lavish villas, which might have survived the early fifth-century crises better than those in other regions, it had a powerful sense of its own Roman identity.  References to the senators of Trier are known – uniquely for Merovingian Gaul north of the Loire.  Indeed, the rapacious aristocracy of northern Gaul, so long (probably mistakenly) employed as a paradigm for the late Roman aristocracy, may be specifically located to this region.  Their senatorial identity is represented not only in the statements of the evidence but also in its form.  Trier has produced about a quarter of all the late antique epigraphy from Gaul, and almost all such data found north of the Loire.  In regional context, this Roman means of commemoration stands out like a sore thumb.  As well as a self-confident Roman aristocracy, Trier also possessed an episcopate with an awkward tradition of speaking out against secular rulers, actively maintained during the first half of the sixth century by Saint Nicetius.  With all this in mind it is perhaps unsurprising that the attempts by the Merovingian kings of Austrasia to establish themselves at Trier failed.  By the middle of the sixth century they had abandoned the former imperial capital and moved up-river to Metz.  Against the physical backdrop of the old imperial buildings (in one of which, the cathedral, Nicetius staged one of his confrontations with King Theudebert of Austrasia) and against the ideological background of Justinian’s attempted reconquest, accompanied as it was by the proclamation of the West’s loss to barbarians, any early Merovingian efforts (like Theudebert’s) to present themselves simply as legitimate successors to the Roman Emperors – as emperors in new guise – was surely doomed to failure.  When the audience for such attempts was composed of a noble stratum far more confident about its traditional Roman credentials, their failure was assured.  

The Merovingians therefore, like most other post-imperial rulers, betook themselves to lesser Roman centres, like Paris and Metz.  Metz was a Roman city which offered all the elements of an ‘imperial complex’ like that at Trier or Constantinople: a cathedral, and audience chamber and an amphitheatre.  These however had not been unified into such a complex by the emperors.  Metz thus presented a suitably Roman ‘canvass’ upon which the Merovingians could nevertheless inscribe their own political identity.  Here, moreover, the Merovingians could appoint their own men to the episcopate, largely removing the threat of awkward confrontations with bishops.  As a result of this attention, Metz had, by the middle of the eighth century, largely eclipsed Trier.  Used to having their rulers living amongst them, the Trier aristocracy now had to travel up the Moselle to Metz to obtain the patronage of the Merovingian kings.  Once there, of course, they found themselves in competition with the kings’ own servants and with aristocrats from across the rest of Gaul.  Their local wealth and pre-eminence availed them little in this context.

This relationship between the royal court and local aristocrats is paradigmatic for understanding early Merovingian northern Gallic social structures.  Royal patronage was even more important to the aristocrats of the other parts of the region, whose wealth and familial standing were less secure than those of the Trier ‘senators’.  Reduced to precarious authority even within their own localities, the best means of cementing this leadership and of involvement in politics on a wider stage (such as had been possible to their fourth-century ancestors) was to obtain the patronage of the Merovingian rulers.  This dynamic is important as, as already noted, it removes the need to assume a widespread programme of political assassination or purges.
    

By the opening of the second quarter of the sixth century, which this paper takes as its rough chronological starting point, other developments had further strengthened the Merovingians’ hand.  In addition to the removal of rival branches of the Frankish royalty, already mentioned, which (as is less widely appreciated) continued into the reigns of Clovis’ sons, the defeat of the Visigothic kingdom and the acquisition of Aquitaine from 507 onwards was a decisive moment.  Although the conquest of southern Gaul was a more complex and drawn-out process than is often imagined, with much territory retaken by the Goths under Theudis and thus having to be conquered again (perhaps as late as the 530s), by 535 Burgundy and Provence had also been added to the Frankish kingdom.  These conquests massively increased the Merovingians’ store of patronage.  Northern aristocrats could be rewarded with offices (such as those of count or duke) south of the Loire.  This may not have happened on a large scale but it did not have to do so to have crucial effects.  The imposition of northerners as local civil and military governors, with royally-bestowed rights to collect taxes, hear court cases and levy the army, will have made a considerable difference to a southern Gallic nobility, used to having a powerful Gothic ruler living amongst them for the best part of a century.  Now they had to compete with Frankish royal officers for the favour of a monarch who dwelt to the north, rapidly becoming Francia.  While this dynamic enabled the Merovingian realms to secure their control over Aquitaine, Burgundy and Provence, to a greater degree than their Carolingian and later successors, it similarly maintained the kings’ ability to play off the northern aristocrats against each other in the contest for royal patronage.  This competition for patronage could be played out in various formal settings.  Gatherings of the army, the chief political assembly of the kingdom, and of the Franks especially, were occasions for the kings to reward and punish, as the famous story of the Vase of Soissons makes clear.  Gregory calls this a meeting on the campus martius.  Whether this was named for a place, on the model of the campus martius in Rome, or for a date (1 March) is not clear.  Certainly an annual assembly on 1 March (the Marchfield) seems to have been in existence by the 590s, when Childebert II issued all three of his edicts on that date.  It is possible that by the 590s a fusion of the date and the location had occurred.  Some adaptation of Roman practice is probable.

Thus the kings had, by the second quarter of the sixth century, established themselves in a position of more or less unassailable authority within their realms.  There were other policies that helped to underline this position.  One was their well-known practice of avoiding marriage with the daughters of their aristocrats, preferring low-born women and foreign princesses.  This ensured that no Frank could claim membership of the family without the recognition of a reigning king.  Royal daughters, too, appear to have been kept out of the marriage market, except for alliances with neighbouring kingdoms.  Though decried by some contemporaries, and whether or not it was designed to do so, the division of the realm in fact also helped to bolster the Merovingian supremacy.  Opposition to one king only crystallised around his brother or cousin in another of the Teilreiche.  More probably based upon the pragmatic division of the Roman Empire than upon any kind of ‘Germanic’ inheritance custom, the provision of more than one court facilitated admittance to royal presence.  This further enabled the tight control over the distribution of patronage mentioned earlier.  While this was to the kings’ advantage, the ease of access and the prevention of a monopoly of the court by any particular faction were doubtless seen as aspects of good governance by many aristocrats.

The kings’ dominance and their evident reduction of local leaders to the level of a service aristocracy can be seen further in social and economic developments of the second and third quarters of the sixth century.  This can be traced archaeologically in two or three areas.  The first is the further deterioration of the late Roman fine-ware tradition.  By 540, Argonne Ware production, which had hit a critical point in the mid-fifth century, entered a final phase of decline.  Between that point and its final disappearance from the record around 600, only a limited range of undecorated forms were produced.    A similar trend might also be manifest in the fact that artefacts of Böhner’s Stufe II (c.525-c.575/600) manifest much less craft-specialisation than was visible in, for example, the polychrome garnet-inlaid objects of the late fifth-century Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon.    Although the belt seemingly remained a key item of masculine costume, the belt-buckles of the middle quarters of the sixth century are for the most part plain, unadorned ring-and-tongue designs, sometimes with a simple incised decoration on the loop or tongue, occasionally on the ‘scutiform’ terminal of the latter.  Where plaques are attached these too are often undecorated.  Most of the decoration that we see is invested in female apparel such as brooches but here too the objects are, for the most part, simply cast.

One reason for this must be that the security of local leadership was now even less than it had been in the preceding 100 years.  Surplus was now spent on a cycle of rituals that involved the display and consumption of resources, the bestowal of food, weaponry and other movables or parcels of land in return for alliances and support.  Such rituals clustered around the life-cycle, particularly the processes of socialisation (evidently a long, many-staged procedure for males), betrothal and marriage. Death and burial were the other key focus for such activity and it is from the practices associate with this that we have our most plentiful evidence in the form of archaeological cemetery data.  Between c.475 and c.500, in the Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon proper, most furnished burials were of adult males.  In the subsequent quarter of a century, children and females became more common, giving the phase some similarities with the archaeological horizon of the so-called Föderatengräber in the late fourth and earlier fifth centuries.  We appear to have some locally prominent families marking their status within the community through the use of elaborate ritual. The increase in numbers of such graves seems to reveal a growing number of such kin-groups using material culture linked with the Franks to symbolise a claim for local authority.  The gradual use of the burials of women and children as foci for display suggests that the competition for local authority was becoming more severe, as deaths of all sorts of family-members could bring status into question and require smoothing over with ritual activity.  This activity not only displayed claims for legitimate authority to an audience assembled for the funeral, via appropriate material cultural symbols and emblems; it appears to have been accompanied by feasting and the bestowal of other gifts, maintaining or strengthening ties with other kindreds within the community.  A burial appears to have been an occasion to show that a family could inter one of its members with the appropriate obsequies to the best of its ability.  Within this, there was – obviously – a competitive element.  It is important, therefore, to underline that the ‘wealth’, or otherwise, of a burial is not a passive index of the formal rank or status of the deceased or his/her family, but an active claim to local standing.

By the second quarter of the sixth century, however, this practice had become very much more widespread.  For example, at the cemetery of Lavoye (dép. Meuse), there were only a dozen graves in its first phase (c.475-c.525) but about two hundred in the phase spanning the remainder of the sixth century.  Of these, at least three quarters were buried with grave-goods.  Rather than being clustered with particular families, though, grave-goods were now very clearly distributed according to the age and gender of the deceased.  Community norms appear to govern the forms of material deemed appropriate for individuals of particular ages and gender, as well as the overall lay-out of the cemetery itself.   Clearly the extent of competition for authority had increased with the participation of a wider range of families in the rituals that served to augment as well as cement local relationships.  Burials which are marked out from their contemporaries have to be sought more subtly than in previous phases, usually marked by having more of the correct forms of artefact – and especially gender-related artefacts – for a person of that age and sex.  More obviously unusual burials are nevertheless known, and on some sites distinction is created through the breach of the cemetery’s usual norms.

Thus we can propose from a variety of archaeological sources that authority within a community was now much less secure than had earlier been the case.  In these circumstances a connection with the royal court and its patronage was one of the best means of securing such pre-eminence independently of local political allegiances.


Part 3 is here

Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 1

[This is the second part (the first installment of the first article can be found here) of what started off as a single article about the changes in the Frankish aristocracy around 600 but which has turned into a trilogy!  This piece, again broken up for ease of reading, deals with the period between c.525 and c.575 and argues that the Merovingians transformed the local elite of northern Gaul (not hugely independently powerful in the late Roman period) into a service aristocracy in this period.  This first chunk deals with the historiographical background.
As with 'The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy', this piece is still very much in draft form and lacks notes or any scholarly apparatus.  Any comments are welcome - indeed invited.  Again, once the piece is properly worked up and submitted for publication I will probably remove it from the blog.]

This paper examines the nature of the northern Gallic, or Frankish, aristocracy of the Merovingian kingdom during the sixth century.  This has long been a controversial matter, with some scholars arguing for the existence of a hereditary élite class, independent of Merovingian royal legitimation, and others that the magnate stratum was dependent upon royal favour for its social, political and economic pre-eminence.  The bulk of this debate has concerned the interpretation of sixth-century written sources (or in some cases their lack), which have usually been viewed in isolation or interpreted in line with preconceptions drawn from the analysis of other types of data.  This paper looks at this evidence in broader context, addressing the problem on the basis of the full range of available sources of information.

Most of the areas of debate will be touched upon below but a brief overview of the stances taken by past writers will perhaps be useful in providing some orientation for the reader.  On the one hand, some historians have argued that the Frankish aristocracy existed simply as the extended household of the Merovingian kings, in other words as a service aristocracy.  I will term this, unsurprisingly, the ‘service aristocracy’ reading.  The principal support for this position is the absence of any reference to an aristocratic caste in the earliest Frankish law-codes, the Pactus Legis Salicae of the early sixth century and the Lex Ribvaria of the early seventh.  The only individuals recognised as more privileged than their fellows are those with a connection to the king.  Backing this up have been various technical arguments about the laws’ provisions for land-owning and the apparent absence of an independently wealthy and powerful Frankish aristocracy in the Histories of Gregory of Tours.

Opponents of this view (adopting the ‘established aristocracy’ position) do not necessarily agree with each other on the details and take ‘Germanist’ (seeing the Frankish aristocracy as a direct continuation of that which existed in the pre-migratory Frankish homelands) or ‘Romanist’ (stressing a greater degree of continuity with the region’s Gallo-Roman aristocracy) approaches in varying degrees and admixtures.  The evidence for this view is, in some ways, more exiguous than that for the ‘service aristocracy’ interpretation.  First, it turns on counter-factuals: various ways of explaining away the laws’ silence about an aristocratic rank.  Then, more reasonably, it adopts alternative interpretations of the snippets of information found in Gregory’s writings.  An apparently stronger plank of support for this reading is provided by the lavishly furnished burials found in northern Gaul between c.475 and c.525, the wealth of these burials being taken as a reliable index the deceased’s social rank.  This interpretation has some variations.  The similarity in rite between the lavish burials of this archaeological horizon and that of the Frankish king Childeric I in Tournai has been used to suggest that the men interred in these graves were the followers, perhaps the leudes, of the Merovingian royal house.  An alleged southwards spread of such burials in line with the presumed Frankish advance further supported this reading.  Of course, if the leudes of Childeric and Clovis were just service aristocrats, these graves might support the alternative interpretation.  The debate would here concern how one understands the nature of early Merovingian leudes.  Traditionally, however, the wealth in these burials has been held to indicate a more secure and established social pre-eminence of the families whose dead were laid to rest in these tombs: something more than simple royal officials.

These data apart, the ‘established aristocracy’ reading relies upon four approaches.  One is the employment of unsubstantiated (indeed largely unsubstantiatable) assumptions about the pre-migration Frankish aristocracy (often grounded in traditional beliefs about ‘early Germanic’ society, held to be universally applicable across all Germanic-speaking barbarians).  Another derives from preconceptions about the local Gallo-Roman aristocracy, equally based upon importing notions of late Roman aristocracy thought to have Empire-wide relevance although founded in data that is quite restricted in its geographical and social provenance.  Whether these ideas are applicable in this way to the northern Gallic aristocracy has not always been interrogated.  The third approach has been to take evidence from across the Merovingian period.  This view is based upon two premises.  One is that early Merovingian data are so few that (as might be clear from the summary above) they are incapable of furnishing any decisive argument for either ‘service’ or ‘established’ readings.  Thus one needs to bring in other, later material.  This method is associated with a ‘regressive’ approach, holding that the picture of the aristocracy that emerges in the better-documented seventh century can be extended backwards to the late fifth-century Merovingian take-over of northern Gaul.  Quite sophisticated defences of this approach have been offered, based around the shared Roman-Christian heritage of the early Middle Ages and the fundamentally unchanging bases of social distinction (essentially, land and honour) in the era.  The fourth approach, not dissimilar from the ‘regressive’ method, identifies features which the late Roman magnates and region’s equally powerful ninth-century Carolingian Frankish nobility shared and link the two via a straightforward line of development through time.  Nonetheless, however reasonable one may think this quadruple set of assumptions to be, it cannot be denied that it contains no decisive element.  Each view can equally reasonably be countered, even if the somewhat depressing alternative offered is simply that ‘we do not know’.

A new consideration of this well-worn topic is timely because the subject, having effectively lain dormant for some years, has been recently reinvigorated by the discussion in Chris Wickham’s The Framing of the Middle Ages.  Wickham sides with the historians who have followed the ‘established aristocracy’ reading, probably the majority interpretation amongst those who have considered the issue.  Indeed, he argues that the northern Gallic aristocracy was, within the context of the early medieval West (and perhaps even farther afield) an exceptionally wealthy group of landowners.  Wickham’s reading contains more nuance than most previous versions of this argument and an engagement with the full range of material, archaeological and documentary.  In particular, he introduces an economic dimension to the discussion, based upon study of ceramic materials.  Such an analysis was not possible even twenty years ago, and therefore adds importantly to previous archaeological investigations of the topic, which have concentrated almost exclusively upon the evidence of excavated cemeteries, the distribution of grave-goods and the existence or otherwise of ‘tombes de chef’ or ‘Adelsgräber’ (alluded to above).  Wickham poses the question of how the newly established Merovingian kings, confronted by an already extant Gallo-Roman aristocracy in the region and by Frankish noble families, could have reduced all of these magnates to the status of mere service aristocrats.  Surely, he says, the extermination or forcible removal of such people on a region-wide scale is not to be envisaged – a conclusion with which it is difficult to disagree.  Wickham’s argument also relies to some extent (though again to a lesser extent than with previous writers) upon the extrapolation of the early Merovingian situation from the better documented seventh and eighth centuries.  In the late Merovingian period, let alone the Carolingian, Wickham’s conclusion about the wealth of the Frankish élite is hard to dispute – whether or not it was as exceptional as he claims is a question that this paper does not and cannot address, but the case is well-made and plausible. 

Another reason for a new look at this old subject, implicit in my discussion of Wickham’s argument, is the dramatic increase in the range and quality of archaeological data since about 1990.  In the early 1990s it was still possible to criticise Merovingian archaeology for being excessively rooted in very traditional readings of the cemetery evidence.  At that point, although excavation of rural settlements of this period was beginning to take place, exploration (and, even more so, publication) of such sites remained scarce.  This has changed dramatically, presenting us with valuable insights into dwellings, spatial organisation and rural economy, an invaluable counterpart to the display of status visible in the cemeteries.  In addition, studies of the artefacts produced on these sites have increased in number and sophistication.  Most notable here has been the attention to ceramic data, and the construction of typologies and chronologies for the pottery found on rural sites.  Again, this body of data, whilst coming into being, barely existed in 1990.  These developments have emphasised one of the most valuable aspects of archaeological evidence, the ability to pay attention to regional and chronological diversity and precision.  Using these data we can avoid treating the north of Merovingian Gaul as an undifferentiated mass in regional as well as chronological terms.  Such a variegated picture is not possible from the written sources until well into the Carolingian era. 

Nonetheless, the diversity revealed by the excavated data allows us to look at the documentary evidence in a new light.  Rather than heaping all of the written sources together to make a ‘pile’ that looks more statistically significant, we can consider each source according to its genre and provenance in time and space and assign more significance to the differences between them.  The approach adopted is based upon the use of as wide a range of forms of data as possible – documentary, epigraphic, numismatic and archaeological – each treated in context and on its own terms and with conclusions merged at a higher level.  I have previously described this approach as ‘multi-disciplinary’.  The aim is thereby to avoid teleology and other problems arising from the merging of evidence from diverse chronological and geographical contexts. 

When adopting the highly contextualised ‘multi-disciplinary’ method used here, one result can be that the written record’s scantiness can lead to interpretations being founded on very small data-sets, sometimes upon individual anecdotes.  On the other hand, when rigorously separated out by time and place, seemingly generic sources begin to manifest differences which might have been hidden by a concentration upon a corpus of material taken as a whole.  These particularities become significant when compared with similar trends manifested in other types of evidence.  The confrontation of different types of data, of differing genres and of quite divergent forms (excavated and textual) further allows us to evaluate the significance of chronological variation and to select some interpretations over others, as better able to explain a wider range of the observable evidence.  This goes some way towards circumventing the problems created by limited quantity and indecisive statements of the written data.  The emphasis on change further entails exploration of the dynamics of change, located in the relationships between élites and their neighbours and rivals at the local level, and those between these aristocrats and the kings on a wider stage.

This paper argues, somewhat against the historiographical trend, in favour of the ‘service aristocracy’ interpretation.  It nevertheless stresses the dynamics for change and the development of an élite class in this region, an aspect of the debate which has not received due attention.  As well as chronological change, geographical diversity must also be noted.  As will be explored in in depth in a separate article, the unusually wealthy Frankish landed aristocracy envisaged by Wickham (and indeed clearly visible by the ninth century at the latest) was a creation of the important decades on either side of the year 600.  Although countered here, Wickham’s rephrasing of the debate has nonetheless led to a refinement of the ‘established aristocracy’ position, to its grounding in a broader range of evidence and to increased subtlety and sophistication.  Similarly, if my own view is ultimately rejected, it is hoped that it will make a similar contribution to refinement and nuance in any future consensus opinion.

In another separate study, I address the subject of the type of aristocracy which faced the Merovingians in northern Gaul, as they established their realm.  There I demonstrate that the Romano-Gallic aristocracy of the region was by no means a securely established, independently wealthy élite.  The principal exception to this rule (to which I shall return) was found around the former imperial capital of Trier, where aristocrats had been unusually wealthy since the early Roman period.  The Frankish aristocracy might have been more deeply rooted within the structures of society but the extent to which this remained true after the settlement of northern Gaul is unclear.  An analysis of the late fifth- and early sixth-century ‘horizon’ of lavish burials (sometimes called the ‘polychrome’ or the ‘Flonheim-Gültlingen’ horizon) supports the claim that the component of the northern Gallic élite that owed its origins to the Frankish migration was associated, or soon had to associate itself, with the Merovingian royal house.  The same was true of its northern Gallo-Roman counterpart.  This study removes most of the argument that, when the kingdom was created, the Merovingian dynasty was confronted by locally well-entrenched leaders.  In this context, selective displays of political violence, such as the eradication of rival royal families (competing foci for political legitimacy), encouraged other Frankish leaders to compete for Merovingian support.  A widespread cull, or mass deportation, of the region’s existing aristocracy need not be posited to understand how the Merovingians established dominance over the leaders of local communities.


Part 2 is here

The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 4 of 4)

The earliest Merovingian aristocrats: the ‘Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon’
[Part 3 of this article is here]

The period between the final demise of the Western Empire and the end of the first quarter of the sixth century has long been considered to form a fairly discrete chronological unit, in its first phase largely defined by a series of prestigious graves. From two of the best-known, this archaeological horizon is often known as the ‘Flonheim-Gültlingen Horizon’ or, from a specific form of metalwork and ornamentation, defined by the ‘polychrome’ style. When chronologies of objects were developed through typology and patterns of association, the last quarter of the fifth century and the first quarter of the sixth became known as Böhner’s Stufe I. The coherence of this phase has been confirmed by subsequent studies of other regions, refined through the use of computerised techniques.

These burials have long been the subject of discussion. The traditional reading is that they represent the leudes of Clovis, settled and granted lands in conquered territory. The dates of the burials thus represent the stages of the Frankish conquest of northern Gaul, the latter seen very much in line with the ‘moving front’ model. There is no reason to dispose of this interpretation, provided that one is clear about how one understands the power relationships involved, both between the king and the aristocrats and between the aristocrats and the remainder of the free population.

The burials of the first half of Böhner’s Stufe I are – classically – those of adult males, lavishly furnished with grave-goods: weaponry above all, but also with belt-sets (like the sword hilts decorated in particular styles), ceramics and bronze and glass vessels. Furnished inhumation (especially of male graves) had been less common in the middle quarters of the fifth century (a decline which I have associated with an uncertainty over how one displayed legitimate status in the de facto absence of the Empire but with no clear successors to that power either). With the burials of the last quarter of the fifth century, it burst back into fashion. Many of the graves under discussion are, furthermore, ‘founder graves’. Some may have been accompanied by above-ground monuments. Burial no.319 at Lavoye (département of Meuse) possibly had a barrow built above it; Childeric I’s famous grave in Tournai almost certainly did. Indeed, the relationship between burials like Lavoye 319 and Childeric’s grave has lain at the heart of the problem. Classically, the aristocratic graves, tombes de chef or Adelsgräber are seen to be copying the royal ‘mode funéraire’ established with Clovis’ interment of his father. Thus, runs the argument, when Clovis arranged for his own burial in a church (Holy Apostles, later Ste Geneviève) in Paris in 511, the Frankish aristocracy imitated this too and were interred under their own newly-founded Eigenkirche.

There are important problems with this interpretation. One is that of relative chronology. It is by no means clear that Childeric’s burial predates its ‘imitators’ – if we leave aside the universally-cited but entirely unreliable date given for Childeric’s death by Gregory of Tours, the Tournai burial has exactly the same absolute chronological indicators as Lavoye 319, for example: 474x491. Thus, when he buried his father, Clovis could have been developing a form of burial that was already being employed by local aristocrats to demonstrate their standing, but taking that demonstration to an extreme degree – as one might expect. The relative chronology of these burials and their use in establishing a political history of northern Gaul is also blurred, first, by a reliance upon Gregory of Tours’ dubious chronology of Clovis’ reign and, second, by circular arguments. Burials south of the Somme, for example, must date to after 480 because that was the date at which the Franks (to whom these burials are attributed) acquired this region; the Franks only occupied the lands south of the Somme after 480 because Frankish burials in those lands are all later than that date. When one adds the facts that the historical record provides no support for the vision of a steady, north-to-south advance of the Franks (as discussed above) and that there is no good a priori reason to assign these burials necessarily to invading Franks in any case, it becomes apparent that the traditional reading is no more than an elaborate construct. Whether Clovis started a new fashion by burying his father in this way or whether (as seems to me to be rather more likely) he employed an existing fashion in an unusually elaborate fashion to make a particularly important statement at a moment of dynastic crisis, is impossible to establish from the evidence as we have it.

Apart from issues of chronology, the ‘emulative’ nature of the late fifth- and sixth-century ‘tombes de chef’ is further questioned by the fact that such burials continue through the sixth century and even beyond, whereas Childeric’s grave is, as far as we know, unique amongst Frankish royal burials (with neither predecessors nor successors), especially if one looks more closely at cemeterial context. To found a new cemetery or a new part of a cemetery one might expect unusually lavish displays of grave-goods; that such displays were not exactly replicated in succeeding generations is not really surprising. The absence of such graves does not imply that the local aristocrats had taken to interring their dead under churches. The building of churches to serve as aristocratic mausolea does not, in any case, really take off until the seventh century whether in town or country. In the sixth century, if aristocratic burials took place under churches, they did so in the civitas-capitals and in the castra and vici, on which the pagi were centred, in other words in the administrative nodes of the kingdom.

Associated with this suggestion is the fact that, at least In Picardie, the ‘tombes de chef’ associated with the ‘Frankish conquest’ are actually away from the civitas-capitals and other centres of the region (figure 2 [This is just a net of Thiessen Polygons based on the towns of the area and laid over the distribution of burials, in the best traditions of the New Archaeology of the 1970s]). Taken together, these points shed an important light upon the nature of these early ‘aristocratic burials’. The rite of burial with grave-goods is essentially a transient display of status (or a claim to status) that requires an audience present either at the grave-side or along the route of the funerary procession. Burials in the countryside, like Lavoye 319 (in Lorraine rather than Picardie but likewise located some way from a civitas-capital) would thus represent demonstrations of status to other members of a rural community. Interestingly Françoise Vallet showed many years ago that these late fifth-century graves are, while often on different sites, found in roughly the same (thus peripheral) parts of the countryside as the late fourth- and early fifth-century lavish burials.

There are some key differences nevertheless. The changes of site or the foundation of new areas within cemeteries is one; the different forms of material culture are another. Rather than being imported from barbaricum, ultimately from the Danubian Hunnic realm, it now seems most likely that the costume represented by the grave-goods of the Flonheim-Gültlingen burials was of a more widespread later fifth-century type, using artefacts made in the Mediterranean and associated with the ‘barbarian’ late Roman armies. The ‘barbarian’ import of the costume is thus of a rather more subtle and specific form than was once thought. In a northern Gallic context, especially when one remembers the intimate connections between the Merovingians and the Loire army (demonstrated clearly enough in Childeric’s burial), such a ‘Roman-barbarian military’ identity would be associated with the Franks. Nonetheless, the material’s association with a new political order seems clear, as is further underlined by the fact that this material tends to appear in burials only from c.475, and thus the precise moment that the western Empire was dissolved, de facto if not de jure. Another difference between the graves of ‘Stufe I’ and those of the late fourth-/early fifth-century ‘horizon’ is that the former are overwhelmingly the burials of adult males.

If we take all of these features together a significant change is suggested. The rite itself makes clear that local instability continued. However, a rupture with the preceding situation is evident. The bases of local pre-eminence had changed; claiming legitimate imperial Roman status in the old way was now ruled out. Local authority was associated with the Franks and their military forces (once again demonstrating the Merovingians’ political advance from the south rather than the north). This might have involved changes in the local ‘pecking order’; new families might (as in the traditional interpretation) have been brought in and settled on lands by Childeric and Clovis. Alternatively, a local family might have sided with the Franks, adopted their identity and been given power in the community. Such a family could well have been that which had held sway since the fourth century or before, or it could have been an opportunistic rival. In each case, a dependence upon the Franks is clear enough. So too are the risks involved in the gamble. Unlike twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians, the inhabitants of the late fifth century did not know that this move towards the Franks would turn out to be the ‘right’ one. Furnished burials of Stufe I are not especially numerous, especially in its first half (the Flonheim-Gültlingen horizon proper); only after about 500 are women and children found in any numbers. At Lavoye itself only a dozen or so burials belong to the half-century between 475 and 525, compared with about 200 from the succeeding fifty to seventy-five years – although the group is characterised by well-furnished burials with clearly-marked gender differences. Even the probable family of the ‘chieftain’ of grave 319 do not appear to have associated themselves with him in death until the second quarter of the fifth century. Evidently it took time to convince the people of northern Gaul of what Hegel might have called the Reason of History! In such a situation the dependence of the subjects of these burials upon Frankish backing is underlined. The developments of the remainder of the sixth century (not the subject of this paper) only serve to emphasise this.

Closer to the urban or sub-urban nodes of the region, it may be that the families who supported the Franks demonstrated this link to their rivals and the potential distributors of patronage in burials in the civitas-capitals, the castra and the vici themselves, perhaps under any churches that existed at that time. Some of the burials of the period, grave 1760 at Krefeld-Gellep for instance, are found close by such nodal points. Again, though, a link to the new powers is clear. In defence of the old view, however, it must be repeated that the bulk of locally-important families simply (in terms of their archaeologically-visible traces) sat on the fence for much of this period. That said, the dynamics of the situation are clear. The economic stagnation of the period is amply demonstrated. The craft-specialisation visible in the polychrome objects of Stufe I soon disappears and the further decline of Argonne-Ware production by c.540 has been mentioned. Rural settlements and any urban occupation remain notable chiefly for their archaeological invisibility. Acquiring the resources to establish local leadership on a more solid footing, let alone breaking out of very local political arenas, was fast becoming a matter of association with the Frankish kingdom as it became ever more powerfully established in Gaul. This dynamic is even visible in the Triererland, where (in contrast to the so-called Föderatengräber horizon, c.375-c.450) some (albeit not many) Stufe I burials are known and where, as in the rest of northern Gaul, furnished burial had become common across rural communities by c.525, even if the epigraphic habit of the ‘senators’ continued in the civitas-capital itself.

When the Merovingians established their rule in Gaul north of the Loire, then, it can be fairly solidly established on the basis of the evidence we have that, even by the last quarter of the fifth century, they held the ‘whip hand’ in any dealings with the local aristocracy. Outside Trier, no independently powerful aristocracy existed (whether in socio-economic or cultural terms). There was no need for widespread purges, exiles or expropriations across the region. What made the core of the Merovingian kingdom so resilient was the fact that, by 500 at the latest, local leaders came to the kings for the basis of their authority. The creation of an independently wealthy, powerful Frankish nobility would, in the context I have outlined, have been a more difficult task than the acceptance of the existing situation. The class of landed magnates that we know so much about by the late seventh century and which was indeed (or at least could be), by the late eighth century at the latest, unusually wealthy in pan-European terms (richer indeed than many a king in the British Isles), was a much more recent creation.

The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 3 of 4)

Part 2 of this article can be found here
The Frankish Aristocracy



A Frankish aristocrat...

Those Treveri who turned to the barbarians for support bring us to the other element involved in studying the origins of Merovingian northern Gaulish social structure: the incoming Frankish aristocracy. The social structure of the Franks, when living outside the Empire, is, however, difficult to evaluate. The archaeology of the Frankish homelands is in many regards exiguous and relevant observations of Roman writers are scanty – a fact that Gregory of Tours encountered as early as the 570s. Frankish communities seem by and large to have employed an unurned cremation rite that left no archaeological traces. Nonetheless this does suggest that the funeral ritual was not the focus for significant expenditure of resources on the manifestation of status, or for competition between kindreds in that regard. Settlement architecture offers some insights suggestive of similar trends. The site at Heeten reveals a small fortification controlling iron extraction. Whether the iron obtained was used within Frankish society and politics (restricting access to the material to those with good relationships with the ruler) or traded with the Roman frontier is unclear but either scenario would see a ruling stratum with politically valuable assets. Trade with the frontier probably also explained the growth of the site of Wijster (Netherlands). It does not seem unreasonable to posit a steady increase in the stability of the power-bases of the numerous local Frankish leaders. Roman frontier policy, insofar as it existed, seems to have prevented the emergence of rulers of the whole Frankish confederacy during the fourth century but does not appear to have undermined the reality of the power of local leaders. When the late fourth-century civil wars broke out, one response to the withdrawal of troops from the frontier to engage in warfare in Italy and elsewhere was evidently the signing of treaties with the barbarian leaders beyond, further bolstering their authority. This will not have been lessened when two such rulers, Sunno and Marcomer, inflicted a defeat upon Roman forces despatched by the equally Frankish magister militum Arbogast. Arbogast’s death in civil war did not produce any amelioration of the situation on the frontier. Claudian is clear that Stilicho’s flying visit to the region did little more than shore up the treaties with the barbarians beyond. As a strategy, this neglect of the crucial Rhenish limes may seem surprising to those brought up on the traditional, misleading narratives of ‘barbarian invasion’ but it fits well with the way the Romans assigned little practical military (as opposed to ideological) value to the so-called barbarian threat, especially when conflict against rival Roman forces loomed. Furthermore, it was not necessarily an ineffective strategy. When a large group of barbarians from the interior of Germania arrived on the Rhine in 405 or 406 and forced their way into the Empire, the local Franks fought hard – if ultimately unsuccessfully – to defend the frontier, killing a Vandal king in the process. No resistance by regular Roman forces is mentioned.

Thus, if there was no established, independently wealthy Gallo-Roman aristocracy for the Merovingians to deal with in northern Gaul, it seems much more likely that a group of powerful Frankish noble or royal families existed with quite well-established power within their communities. Whether there were similarly established aristocratic rungs beneath these lesser rulers, or whether the power of the kings was based upon a more fluid network of leudes or followers is difficult, even impossible, to establish. Nonetheless, traditional historiography has tended to assume that these social strata were those from which the sixth-century Merovingian Frankish leudes (or at least those of this class whose families hailed originally from barbaricum) ultimately descended. Some link seems probable, but the model needs reassessment. For one thing, it remains predicated upon a vision of Frankish settlement that sees it operating as a moving front of invasion, gradually rolling from north to south, somewhat in the manner of the front lines in the World Wars. The reality is likely to have been considerably more complex.

The Frankish settlement of northern Gaul was a slow, complicated process. Some Franks had been settled in Toxandria since the fourth century and doubtless retained contacts with their relatives north of the Rhine. It is probably a mistake, however, to see Frankish migration into northern Gaul as an inevitability once the Romans’ hold on the Rhone frontier was loosened, as it was, fatally, between 388 and 413. The mechanisms of migration require closer consideration than, typically, is involved in the usual assumptions and narratives that see the barbarians as piling up against the limites for some generally unspecified reason and thus inevitably spilling into and swamping or flooding the provinces beyond (in the usual liquid metaphors beloved of the idiom) once the barrier (seen, naturally, as a dam) was removed. The latter is, unsurprisingly, an interpretation beloved of those who present the ‘barbarian migrations’ as a xenophobic, anti-multiculturalist warning to us all. Some barbarians moved as large groups, not peoples but as sizeable contingents related in some way or other to a leader or group of leaders. The latter usually moved into the Empire, in a dynamic witnessed over and over since at least the first century BC, when their standing in their homeland was seriously challenged (often, ironically, as a result of Roman interference). Such mechanisms explain most of the well-known large-scale movements such as the Gothic migration into Thrace in 376 and the ‘Great Invasion’ of 405/6, some participants in which eventually ended up in Carthage thirty years later (these barbarians had arrived in Spain in 409, making this the only dramatic short-term, long-distance migration by any large group in the whole fifth century). There was no Frankish migration of this sort in the first half of the fifth century.

Other migrations were undertaken by small groups or individuals. Sometimes these constituted ‘career migration’, such as motivated by the desire to serve in the Roman army. A permanent change of residence did not necessarily ensue although frequently it did, especially if the recruit reached the army’s higher echelons. Otherwise, barbarians might cross the frontier in search of ‘a better life’, perhaps employed by the Roman state to farm otherwise ‘deserted’ lands, and have a steadier and more assured access to the items of Romanitas which held such attraction in the barbarian homelands. Some furnished burials of late fourth- and early fifth-century northern Gaul have been interpreted as those of such immigrants. Although the evidence for this reading is more or less non-existent, it is likely that some of the local leaders whose families displayed their status in these graves were of non-Roman or specifically Frankish extraction. They nonetheless used the occasion to stress just how Roman their status was.

It is valuable to ponder the existence of these dynamics in the early fifth century. At the higher political level, the withdrawal of organised Roman presence from the Rhine seems – fatally for the ‘straining dam’ hypothesis – to have had no immediate effect on the Frankish polities beyond. Stilicho and, perhaps, other leaders bolstered the power of the frontier kings with treaties and subsidies. This encouraged the Franks to the active defence of the Rhine against the Vandals noted earlier. In this connection one might nevertheless envisage some Frankish groups moving into the Empire, centred on aristocrats or petty kings, perhaps ousted as the greater kings became more powerful in the absence of the old imperial frontier regulation. Although it is likely that they moved further into Gaul to seek the sources of imperial power, it is also possible that whatever residual forces remained on the Rhine (perhaps fast turning into local warlords rather than regular units) would have taken on such recruits. It is also conceivable that such leaders were drawn in by the social and political crisis in northern Gaul, where they could provide armed backing to particular factions. This would be the situation that Salvian witnessed. In this context one might see how an émigré Frankish aristocrat could quite easily become a local leader of some standing and authority. This dynamic might lie behind Gregory of Tours’ famous account of how the Franks crossed the Rhine and set up kings in each pagus. A need for powerful support and backers in the unstable northern Gaulish local politics might also have sucked the power of the Frankish kings southwards and westwards across the Rhine. Such an expansion could also have been produced by the movement of other Franks into the region, when political differences and hostility spilled over into the old Roman province. The dynamics here could have been rather different, though, as any Frankish leaders installed in regions would (it seems reasonable to assume) have been those in a particular relationship with the king. Frankish leaders settled independently might also have been able to maintain their position only by accepting the rule of a greater king.

The proliferation of ‘woulds, coulds and mights’ in this discussion so far illustrates our absence of hard data and reliance upon hypothesis and analogy. Nonetheless, the mechanisms proposed appear plausible and some support for these dynamics can be found in the scanty written record, outside Salvian’s diatribe. Sidonius’ panegyric for Majorian refers to a victory by Aëtius at the vicus Helena – somewhere in northern Gaul (Hélesmes in the département of Nord [France] has been suggested) – over a group of Franks. The ‘battle’ itself seems principally to have involved breaking up a wedding party. This need not have been as farcical an event as might initially seem to be the case, bringing with it as it does the image of grizzled legionaries overturning the cake and skewering the best man in mid-speech. Quite apart from possibly representing a marriage alliance with a northern Gallic magnate family (as Salvian might have envisaged) such an occasion would doubtless have been the occasion for the bestowing of gifts upon local aristocrats, cementing the Frankish leader’s local standing. To have attracted Aëtius’ attention, this must have been a political event on some scale. The location at a vicus is perhaps also instructive, given what was said earlier about the possible roles of such intermediate settlements in late imperial Gallic society. The incident underlines the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy followed by the representatives of the Ravenna government whenever they were in the region, governing ‘by punitive expedition’, and the seriousness of the decision to join the barbarians or otherwise unauthorised local leaders. An earlier defeat by Aëtius of an encroaching Frankish group is mentioned in the 420s.

The movement of ordinary groups of Franks in search of social and economic betterment seems less likely in this scenario. The socio-economic crisis in northern Gaul would surely act as a deterrent compared with the comparative stability (at this stage) of the trans-Rhenan lands. Migrating groups tend also to have to be sure that there is an extant community within the host population that will accept them. Under imperial government (ironically for the usual views), official sanction and organisation of barbarian settlement eased this process considerably. Without organised imperial presence on the frontier the information exchange across the Rhine must have become much more irregular and unreliable. Fifth-century Frankish migrants, then, would have moved in anything other than the ‘wave’ usually envisaged. It is far more likely that they trod well-known routes towards already-existing Frankish communities. The military leaders mentioned above could thus have acted as ‘scouts’; once established, news of their success could have travelled back to their homelands and possibly encouraged others to join them. In this scenario, the local standing of such leaders would be enhanced by the arrival of their fellows from beyond the old frontier. Nonetheless, one still needs to question why, in the circumstances of the earlier fifth century, other Franks would want to leave their old homes and move to Gaul.

On the other hand, the crisis of the Empire and the decline of effective imperial presence on the Rhine might have made extant Frankish immigrant communities more permanent. Critical study of modern migration suggests that the relative closing of borders and clamping down on state benefits for immigrants in the late 1970s and afterwards, rather than cutting off the flow of incomers, made those already living in the host countries less likely to return home (as had previously been the case) – for fear that movement back again, to find work, would become impossible – and instead a desire to bring their families to the host country to ensure the benefits that were still available. It is not difficult to see similar mechanisms at work in the fifth-century frontier provinces. A big part of the migration of Germanic-speaking barbarians in the fourth century was ‘career migration’: service in the army followed by a return home. Without the regular army’s presence, the Frank was more likely to stay in Gaul than to return across the Rhine, and perhaps find a means of bringing his relatives to join him there. There might have been a shift in the dynamics of Frankish involvement in northern Gaul during the late 440s, as will be discussed later.

The late Roman army in Gaul was, however, still recruiting from the Franks, and this point piles further problems upon the traditional ‘moving front’ model. From the middle of the fifth century the Roman field army in Gaul seems to have operated from bases along the Loire valley. Controlling this line enabled easier movement to north, south, east and west, while holding the crossing points effectively prevented such movement by opponents of the government. The stationing of some barbarian groups settled in the fifth century might, by the middle of the century, have been aimed at further strengthening this strategic deployment (doubtless seen neither as a permanent arrangement nor as acknowledging any formal retreat of the frontier). As the lands that could effectively be taxed by the imperial government shrank during the fifth century crisis, it became more necessary to recruit troops from barbaricum. Thus any Franks entering Roman service would have been drawn to the Loire rather than the Rhine. Given the points made earlier it might be the case that, to a greater degree than in the fifth century, those who had them brought wives and families along as well. It is therefore far from unlikely that Frankish settlement did not simply push southwards according to the ‘moving front’ model. An important focus for settlement was well ‘behind the lines’ in central Gaul.

By the late 450s, the recruitment of Franks to the Loire army was such that the army itself appears to have been known and referred to as ‘the Franks’. One stimulus for this was Frankish politics. In the last major barbarian invasion of Gaul, by Attila in 451, the Huns were joined by a king of the Franks whose candidature for the throne they had supported. His brother and rival, following to the traditional mechanisms of barbarian politics, fled to the Empire and thus the Loire army. Consequently, when the Roman army met the Hunnic forces at the Campus Mauriacensis (or the Catalaunian Fields) there were Franks on both sides.

It might be the case that, by the middle quarters of the fifth century, the Frankish territories were suffering experiencing their own crisis. Early fifth-century stability had, as mentioned, been brought about by treaties with and subsidies from the Empire, as it turned its gaze inwards, away from the frontier. By the 440s, though, the Empire had been absent from the Rhine frontier zone for a generation or more. This might indeed have produced a crisis of legitimacy for the Frankish rulers, especially in times of succession, as the events before Attila’s 451 invasion illustrate. Archaeology provides some confirmation of the hypothesis. Wijster had been abandoned by the second quarter of the fifth century, by which time furnished inhumation, a classic index of some sort of social instability at the local level, had made their appearance in the region. By the last quarter of the century, the rural settlements (like Gennep) that were flourishing at the century’s start also experienced contraction.

It is quite likely that the Frankish king supported by Aëtius before the Catalaunian Fields was Childeric, eventual founder of the Merovingian dynasty, found leading the Franks in campaigns on the Loire by the 460s. When he was stripped of office following the execution of emperor Majorian in 461, Aegidius, the magister militum commanding the Loire forces, apparently (according to a famous story told by Gregory of Tours) adopted the title of ‘King of the Franks’. Gregory tells us that this was during an eight-year exile of Childeric amongst the Thuringians. One possible reconstruction of events is that Childeric had been given command of the Loire forces by Aëtius but was removed from that command under Majorian (who became emperor in 457) and replaced by Aegidius. He resumed his command after Aegidius’ death, which took place eight years later, in 465. Childeric might have returned from the north two years earlier, either as a rival for military leadership or as a subordinate commander for Aegidius. The latter is possible as Aegidius, whose command had been ‘illegitimate’ since 461 might have needed to win allies and support (and Frankish recruits) in the face of aggression from the Ravennate government and its Gothic army in Aquitaine. Aside from his famous grave in Tournai and Gregory’s story of his exile in ‘Thoringia’, the sources locate Childeric, without exception, on the Loire or near Paris.

The military power of Childeric (son of Merovech and thus the first Merovingian) thus originated largely in the Roman Loire army. Childeric’s theatre of operations, on the Loire and around Paris, suggests that he had control, early on, of the more prosperous southern half of the Paris basin. It was for the control of these military and economic resources that, after establishing his right to succeed to his father’s position of a king of the Franks, Clovis competed with Aegidius’ son Syagrius, with the aid of some of his northern relatives. Syagrius’ defeat at or near Soissons made Clovis the most powerful northern ruler. By the first years of the sixth century, Clovis’ Franks had cowed the Burgundians and even the Goths of Toulouse, signing a treaty with the latter at Amboise which brought a large amount of gold into the Frankish coffers. Rather than proceeding is a steady north-to-south advance, then, Clovis’ control over the Paris basin extended more in the manner of a pincer, like the legitimacy of his rule, expanding from one base in the north amongst the Salian Franks and another between the Loire and Paris, founded in what had been the Loire army, ‘the Franks’. With the advantages brought by his control of the southern Paris basin, Clovis was able to turn north and gradually eliminate his Frankish rivals. The chronology of these operations is difficult to unravel, as Gregory of Tours’ grouping of Clovis’ campaigns against the other Franks at the end of his reign results from his stylistic desire to portray the Catholic Clovis as a divine avenger. Nonetheless, the take-over of the Rhine Franks of Cologne must have taken place after 507 and the defeat of Alaric II of Toulouse. The conquest of Gothic Aquitaine was another event that brought great wealth and resources to the Merovingian king, with important consequences.

This discussion has crucial implications for the present enquiry. For one thing it implies that many of the leudes and other officers of Clovis and Childeric owed their position to a role in the Loire army. While military service was hereditary in the late Empire, a position in the command structures was not. The economic resources, booty and tribute acquired by the first Merovingians will also have given them great powers of patronage, attracting Franks to them from the north. Any northern Frankish aristocrats who joined the Merovingians will have found themselves competing for royal favour with the officers of the Loire army and other men – Franks, Romans and others – who had risen in and owed their standing to the service of the kings. The Merovingian take-over of the other Frankish kingdoms saw the transfer of the loyalty of the deposed kings’ leudes to Clovis’ family. These too found their position dependent upon Merovingian favour, as Gregory’s stories make clear. The reward of good service with lands and local position underlined this position.

So far, our enquiry has demonstrated that neither the Gallo-Roman population of northern Gaul, nor the incoming Franks had a significant, powerful aristocratic stratum, with which the Merovingian rulers of the late fifth and sixth centuries would have had to contend. Indeed, especially once Clovis had eliminated or cowed his rivals for authority in the north (the other Frankish kings, the Alamans and the Thuringians) it is clear that he held the whip-hand in any relationship with local leaders. Archaeological cemetery evidence further illustrates the situation.

Part 4 can be read here