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

So that's it, we lost? History and Hope

My hero...

Several things come together in this post, combining medieval history, TV history, current events and the proper scale of historical analysis. I was watching Michael Wood (still, by a country mile, the best of the TV historians) with his Story of England, which reached the Barons’ Revolt and discussed the way in which (it was claimed) it affected the ‘ordinary person’. We were given a hint of a sense of change for the better, of hope: a sense of change and hope that, alas, ran up against one of the most talented military commanders of the Middle Ages (a low bar, admittedly) – and one of the most brutal – in the form the Lord Edward, the future Edward I. The hopes faded just as, over time, pilgrimages to the spot where Simon de Montfort (a funny sort of revolutionary...) got hacked to bits gradually died away.

In the Whig historical view, this is all a step on the road to parliamentary democracy. That way of seeing history is rightly unfashionable, of course, but I still detected a sense that we were supposed to envisage in the events of the 1260s some sort of progress towards a (politically, socially) better or fairer place. Clearly that sort of view is only possible with hindsight, but it is also only possible when viewed from a particular historical vantage-point. Seen in, say 1350, I imagine that one could hardly view it in such terms at all. If it was part of a grand narrative then, presumably, it was as a blip on the march to better, more powerful Plantagenet kingship. (I’m guessing, here, obviously, but you see my general point.) It may well be that in twenty years’ time, unless we are all very careful, it might look different, too. This line of thought took me on to ponder other issues.

One is something that I have often wondered, in a form of empathy (something else that’s unfashionable): what is it like, historically, to know that ‘that’s it; we lost; end of story’? To know that something you fought for and believed in is gone for good. It is of course a sensation cheapened (with apologies to Bill Shankly) by pictures of unpleasant, overpaid idiots like John Terry weeping because he couldn’t hit a goal-sized target, or supposedly broken-hearted fans whose team just lost a cup-final. They can try again next year and win ... and with no more lasting effect or significance. What I am talking about is something marked by an awful finality. What, for example, did it feel like to be Napoleon I (or one of his soldiers) on the evening of Waterloo, and know that, truly, that was that? What does it feel like to experience one of the real ’full stops’ of history? Such moments are rare in history. It is not often that one can know for sure that the historical ‘game’ really is over, that that really is it, and we lost.

This issue matters to me for a number of reasons. It has especially important, immediate contemporary resonance, to which I will return. It also matters because of the scale of historical analysis. On the very first pages of my first book* I argued against the longue durée proposed long ago by the Annalistes, essentially on the grounds that it ironed out the twists and turns of history and in so doing removed individual experience from the analysis. Since the human lifetime is the only framework within which we experience history (if we experience it at all, which is another issue) then it seemed to me that this is the only meaningful framework of analysis. To take an example I used in Barbarian Migrations..., the whole political arrangement of Europe that followed the Second World War, the Iron Curtain, etc., lasted barely two generations. From a geopolitical longue durée perspective, this can be seen as a simple blip. Forty-five years later the map had changed back to something resembling the map before 1939. But for those forty-odd years this arrangement had an enormous effect on the daily lives of millions, which the historian should not deny. In particular the danger (for historians in, say 300 years’ time) would be to play down the horrors of the Second World War on the grounds that the war had little or no long-term effect.

More to the point, as concerns me today, the teleology of the longue durée takes short-term sets of events and experiences, like the common man’s involvement in the baronial reform movement (by the way, I’m not trying to claim the Barons’ Revolt really was some sort of democratic revolution; it is just a suitable example to use for this thought-exercise) and turns them either into blips or dead-ends or ‘steps’ on the road to a major change, depending upon how the course of history is interpreted from a particular vantage point. Both are mistaken ways of seeing. That the common freeman of Leicestershire, hit by the royalist backlash after Evesham, drew no comfort from the fact that ‘only’ 400 years later Parliament would overthrow and behead a king, and introduce a constitutional monarchy, goes without saying. To turn his and his allies’ efforts into a dead-end or a blip because they failed is similarly teleological. The triumphalist grand narrative denies the pain and anguish of lived experience; the ‘dead end’ approach denies us hope. Indeed, maybe it is intended to deny us hope: don’t try and challenge the natural, the ‘right’ order of things. “History tells us …” How often do we hear that phrase? But history tells us nothing of the sort. Ever. So they failed. Try again (as Žižek is fond of quoting); fail again; fail better.

The approach rules out (as I have also argued before) the irony of history. It leads us to the absurdities of, to take just one egregious example, Peter Heather’s arguments that ‘The Goths’ were a people with a coherent set of aims (on the basis that at some later point, some people called Goths ended up with a kingdom within what had been the Roman Empire). In the hundred years preceding the deposition of the emperor Romulus in 476 it is well-nigh impossible to identify anyone who was actually trying to bring down the Roman Empire, rather than trying to re-establish the imperial political system of the fourth century, with them in a controlling position. A great deal of the history of the creation of what we see as the new political and social world of the ‘Middle Ages’ is in fact the history of people trying to recreate the Roman Empire. Napoleon may have realised that the game was up late in the evening of June 18th 1815 but when he signed the Treaty of Tilsit a few years earlier, or when he married Maria Louisa of Austria, or when his son was born, he and his followers can be forgiven for thinking that he (and they) had won. What interests me about the generations around 600 is that the motor for change, as it appears to me at the moment at any rate, is an awareness that they were living through a new phase: that the old world of Rome had gone (note that it had taken the best part of a century after Romulus’ deposition, and some fairly horrible wars, to establish this point). They were trying to figure out how to respond to this, new situation, with (naturally, but perhaps more obviously than usual) little idea of where they were going.

You might well have guessed where I am going with these meandering thoughts. It looks to me that we are at a point where those of us on the Left might well think that the game is up, that that’s it, we lost. If we can draw lessons from the way we think about history, though, I think we might make several important points. One is that many people do not seem (surely?) to realise the implications of what is happening, so there is still a battle to be fought and won. Another is that the game isn’t up yet; or rather that it only is if we give up on it. Cameron and his order-paper-waving right-wingers may think they have won, and that they can go ahead and dismantle the welfare state, and sell its opportunities off to themselves and their chums in the private sector (in effect returning us to a 21st-century form of feudalism) but they can be stopped. And they must be stopped. But that is down to all of us. The alternative is that everything – every little change, every little baby-step, to improve the lot of the ordinary person – that people have fought and died for over the past seven and a half centuries becomes a dead-end, a curious blip that right-wing historians will be able to point to as showing the futility of challenging the ‘natural’ order. Every backlash against fairness, every move against the Welfare State, the National Health Service, free education and so on, will be made into a step on the road of Progress. Is that the history we want to bequeath to future generations?

If we work hard, this may not be the Waterloo of the Welfare State but the Ligny** of the Right. The alternative is not worth thinking about. It’s not over yet, and (to return to my earlier metaphor) David Cameron is no Lord Edward.

* If you’re having difficulty sleeping, read ‘em here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ltVloNz4-tMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=settlement+and+social+organization&source=bl&ots=Jeq6WsoPLP&sig=px7Z4mpdILVGohwJdWskJwewp5o&hl=en&ei=oO7CTN-7OI_KjAeo34W6BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)

** For those less interested in Napoleonic military history than I am, the battle of Ligny was Napoleon’s last victory, fought two days before Waterloo. Napoleon, it has to be said, played a blinder in the Waterloo campaign up until the battle itself. Such is the irony of history.