In my first
book I said that trying to reconstruct urban life from the works of Gregory of
Tours was like trying to reconstruct Tudor London from the props box of the
Globe Theatre.In this paper I am coming
back, after a long interval, to the Merovingian city and pursuing a different,
and possibly no less tortured, dramatic metaphor.
What became of
classical politics, in the very literal sense of the affairs of the polis, the city? The city, after all,
remained the focus of politics throughout the Roman period. While the municipal sphere had changed
dramatically by the fourth century, it can’t be denied that the very form of
the town continued to reify that of the Roman political system. The late imperial period in the West sees,
wherever one looks, urban contraction and abandonment to some extent but even
in the far north-western imperial provinces the smallest and – by any classical
standards – least impressive towns manifest their centrality to the Empire’s political
system.
An extreme case
might be Bavay just on the French side of the modern Franco-Belgian
border. At some point around 300
(probably) the town was walled, but those walls, for whatever reason, enclosed
no more than the forum of the early Roman town.
By 400 Bavay had lost its status as civitas-capital
of the Nervi to the then-scarcely-more-imposing town of Cambrai, but even so,
even in its reduced size, it manifested the urban nature of the politics of the
Dominate: a fortified administrative redoubt within which imperial revenues were
collected, converted from kind to specie or vice versa; the seat of whatever
officials resided there; the focus of the political activities of the Nervian aristocracy.
Those aristocrats may have been as relatively unimpressive as their city:
former (or current) imperial officials occupying or living off fiscal estates
on short-term leases with a smattering of not very wealthy local landowners,
mostly living in wooden, thatched- or shingle-rooved farmhouses, rather than
the palatial-villa-dwelling Mediterranean grandees who might more readily come
to mind when considering the late imperial aristocracy. The general point, however, remains, mutatis mutandis, whichever town we
might be talking about. Politics, or the
political, focused upon imperial service and imperial service remained centred
on the town. It was true in the sticks,
at Bavay, and it was true at the heart of politics. When it mattered Emperors were to be found in
towns. Indeed, even their villas could resemble
bigger and more impressive ‘towns’ than poor little Bavay. Diocletian’s palace
at Split is the obvious illustration.
Late imperial
towns – even in contracting from their Flavian or Aelian heyday – were possibly
more political than their predecessors. The urban readjustments of the late Roman
period appear to reflect the cities’ relative economic decline, as centres of
markets and production. Lesser
settlements appear by then frequently to have rivalled them in those terms,
which might explain some of the perceptible readjustments to the city network:
the promotion of settlements like Verdun or Châlons-en-Champagne to the status
of civitas-capital with territories
hived off from the civitates of Metz
and Reims respectively; the transfers of capital like that mentioned from Bavay
to Cambrai or (in the civitas menapiorum)
from Cassel to Tournai. In the south,
and at a slightly later date, Sidonius might have waxed lyrical about his villa
and those of his friends, and sometimes decried the state of some local cities,
but the latter were still, clearly, where politics happened.
That continued
to be the case well into the next century.
Simon Loseby has set out, in a series of remarkable articles, the
continued centrality of the civitas-capital
to sixth-century Merovingian politics. Much the same lesson can be drawn from
Michael Kulikowski’s studies of the city in late Roman and early Visigothic
Spain and the picture is possibly truest of all in Italy, at least in the
northern half to two thirds of the peninsula.
The city remained the focus of politics throughout the Lombard
period. And yet, as Loseby noted twenty
years ago, something changed between the sixth and the seventh centuries. The city lost its place as the focus of
politics.
Or at least it
did in Gaul. I am going to talk about a
peculiarly Gallic problem. Or what seems
to be. I need to do more work on Spain
to examine the extent to which a similar pattern can be traced there; as just
noted, something very different appears to be the case in Italy. Whether an analogous transformation occurred
in Britain, or at least the extent to which similar factors could be adduced in
forming a hypothetical account, remains to be considered. The problem, as always, is that we lack the
kinds of evidence that would give us a better idea about the earlier periods. Whatever the case in Spain, Britain or Italy
– even if they all turned out to be variations on the same theme – there are, I
contend, some specifically Gallo-Frankish features to this process.
The late Roman
Gallic town differed from its early Roman precursor in various ways, none of
which was unique to Gaul. They were
walled from the late third century, in a probably rather longer process than
used to be thought. There was a huge
reduction in private or municipal spending on public monuments, which probably
best explains the usually short length of the walled circuits and the common
incorporation of existing large monuments within the defences. They contracted, to varying extents. The walls certainly do not give a clear guide
to the size and extent of the inhabited area, as was once believed, but rare
indeed are towns where hitherto-inhabited, now extra-mural, quarters flourished
as before. Public buildings were
frequently given over to new uses, often involving manufacture. None of these features is unusual or specific
to Gaul. All can be observed in Rome
itself.
The other key
development, obviously, was the appearance of Christian monuments. By 400 all the civitas-capitals that had retained their status presumably had a
cathedral, even if we know little about it.
As far as we know, such structures tended to be within the walled area;
I am not sure that there are any indisputably extra-mural cathedrals in Gaul. The Christian cult centre was thus
incorporated in the same, small urban space as the foci for secular
politics. The phenomenon regularly
visible in Italian towns, of a spatial reorientation from a previous civic
centre around the forum to a plaza in front of the cathedral cannot therefore
be seen very clearly in Gaul.
Quite how
secular politics functioned in spatial terms is not always clear. As throughout the Empire, fora were often turned over to new
purposes in whole or part, or encroached upon by new buildings, and many lay
outside the new walled areas. Others, like those at Bavay and Paris, were
fortified. Some sides of Amiens’ forum
were incorporated into the city’s defences.
This presumably did not diminish their importance but it must have
changed the way in which the space was used.
It is possible that where amphitheatres were incorporated in walled
circuits, as at Tours, Périgueux, Amiens, Metz and elsewhere, their arenas were
used for public assembly. The
plausibility of this suggestion is perhaps strengthened by the importance of
circuses and similar buildings in late imperial palace complexes, most famously
at Constantinople. Where such arenas
were now extramural, they might still have functioned in the same way, as might
derelict fora now left outside the
enceinte. It may seem logical to suppose
that the spatial requirements for urban political gatherings were, in any case,
less than before but I would not want to stress that possibility. One of the key features of the Gallic city is
the symbiotic relationship it had with the rural components of the civitas.
Villa-dwelling aristocrats were expected to come to town to participate
in public life, however distasteful they claimed the latter was. The other major possibility, of course, is
the use for such gatherings of the interior of larger buildings, such as basilicae (where these had not been
partitioned and given over to metalworking or similar, or – and this is will be
important – the cathedrals.
The sixth-century
Merovingian town continues most of these features. Secular occupation is
increasingly difficult to find archaeologically, a feature that must partly be
explained by its actual absence as well as, in part, by its ephemeral
nature. There is clear evidence of the
further contraction and decay of the old Roman urban centres. One or two towns in the far north might –
like their British contemporaries – have died out entirely, at least as
settlements that can meaningfully be described as urban. Metz and even Trier have proven remarkably
barren in terms of early Merovingian evidence, a fact of considerable interest
given their secular political importance in the first and second halves of the
sixth century respectively. Town walls were evidently not always maintained in
a very good state.
The other well-known
component of sixth-century Gaulish urban development was the development of the
Christian town. If the cathedral seems
to have been intra-mural, the overwhelming majority of urban churches were not.
As foci for burial, they tended to be located in the earlier Roman cemeteries,
outside the inhabited area. Because of
the contraction of the latter, these cemeteries could now be somewhat removed
from the walled urban core. To proceed
from Tours cathedral, inside the walls, to Bishop Perpetuus’ new,
mid-fifth-century church of St Martin, on the fringes of the early Roman town
rather than in the cemeteries, is a ten to fifteen-minute walk, across a
landscape that, in the sixth century, was a mix of vineyards, derelict areas,
workshops and occasional dwellings. Around St Martin’s, though, was something
like a new city. Other churches and
monasteries sprang up around that holding the famous bishop’s tomb. As well as the clerics who tended these
churches, the monks and nuns who lived there, there were the staff of these
establishments and the people drawn in from the countryside for cures or to
receive alms. Vignettes in Gregory of
Tours’ works suggest entertainers and merchants as well. Thus while on the one hand we can see the
continued stagnation of the traditional core of almost every Gallic city, on
the other we can trace a sometimes vibrant peripheral community. Sometimes, as at Tours and elsewhere (Limoges
perhaps) a ‘bifocal’ town appeared, with an unwalled Christian town, sometimes
called a vicus christianorum as well
as the walled redoubt of the old Roman city.
Some towns (Trier; Lyon) were multi-focal. In others, such as Metz, we might be able to
detect a drift of settlement to certain extra-mural areas (in that case around
the Great Amphitheatre).
The
sixth-century Gallic city was primarily a Christian city, where it could be
called a city at all, in anything other than the technical sense. Through the fifth and sixth centuries, new
churches were founded around the edges of the town, and new cults
discovered. The bishops played an
increasingly important role in the towns.
Most jealously guarded two key privileges: baptism and preaching
(Caesarius of Arles was very much an exception), meaning that Christians had to
go to town for their principal spiritual needs.
The great cults were urban; most monasticism was city-focused. Bishops organised great processions around
the various churches of the city: the rogations first instituted at Vienne, the
processions from the cathedral to St Martin’s at Tours, the great (three-day)
excursion from Clermont to St Julian’s at Brioude, the procession mentioned by
Gregory from the walled city to the church of St Remigius outside Metz, that
across the Rhône bridge from Arles to Trinquetaille and the shrine of the
martyr Genesius, and so on. These were
important social gatherings of the civitas’
inhabitants. Bishops took over many
other urban functions: feeding the poor, maintaining aqueducts and so on.
All this is
pretty well known. Equally appreciated
is the continuing centrality of the civitas
in secular politics. The city-districts
were the building blocks of the sixth-century Merovingian kingdoms, forming the
basis for tax collection and the levying of armed forces. Each city – it seems – had its own count
responsible for the administration of justice, the imposition of the royal dues
and probably leading the civitas’
military contingent. Some other urban
institutions continued, even if we know little of them: the municipal archives,
various officers such as the defensor
civitatis. Political competition
between civitates was well-attested:
sometimes armed conflict; rivalry over saints’ cults; even competing ways of
counting the years.
After this descriptive
preamble, we come to the focus of my paper: the construction of space and of
the political. Space is not neutral; it
is, as Lefebvre said, constructed. This
is not merely a question of the enclosure or partition of spaces, even if these can play a very large part. They act as cues to behaviour, to the bodily
inhabiting of the space, in Bourdieu’s terms to the repeated bodily
dispositions – the habitus – that construct
categories. A slightly, glib, simplistic
and extreme example might be the physically often barely-delineated difference
between road and pavement. Even that, to
continue being flippant, is somewhat more than merely an issue of not getting
squashed, as anyone will know who appreciated the recent Daily Mash quiz that began by asking ‘Can you perform the
relatively simple tasking of walking down a street without making other
pedestrians want to punch you?’
Architecture provides cues; the entrance to a church, to take an obvious
example, marks a point at which comportment, at which your bodily occupation of
space is expected to change. There are
what Gernot Böhme calls ‘atmospheric architectures’, designed to enhance the
nature and use of space.
Clearly, one
does not need to go far to see antique and late antique illustrations of these
points. In earlier, classic Roman urban
forms, crossing the pomerium provided
a cue for different social expectations; the architecture of the forum marked a
traveller’s arrival at the political, social and economic heart of the city. Annabel Wharton’s studies of late classical
towns documents shifts in the importance attached to open or ‘optic’ vistas of
the urban space, to what she calls a more haptic space, more enclosed,
experienced more through the act of passing through it. The latter is especially true of churches but
we can see other examples of the trend as perhaps at the palace of Galerius in
Thessalonica. Analysis of the church of
St Martin’s and the various verses placed on its walls is a better illustration
still of the ways in which various architectural components combined to
influence a visitor’s comportment as he or she approached the tomb of the
saint. As Raymond Van Dam has argued,
the architecture worked to impose a sense of awe that inhibited a pilgrim in
venturing too close to the shrine unless she was convinced of her worthiness to
do so: a key element in Van Dam’s ‘socio-somatic’ interpretation of healing
miracles. The same would obviously be
true of the imperial palace and especially the great audience chambers, where
the attendees were arranged by very tightly policed rules of status and
precedence, and where comportment was of notable importance. Even the emperor’s bodily comportment was a
matter of significance and expectations could change from one setting to
another. In the Merovingian countryside,
entrance into the cemetery, still largely removed from the space of the living,
provided further cues, essential for the functioning of ritual.
Transposed into
the realm of identity, such cues emphasis the question ‘what do they want of
me?’ ‘How am I meant to behave?’ The use
of space is vitally important in social interaction, as a means of attempting
to freeze interactions between different social categories in particular
modes. Take, for example, a large Roman
villa. A visitor enters the complex, perhaps
through a gate, after approaching via routes that present the building in a
particular way. Possibly after crossing
the more functional ‘rustic’ part of the villa and perhaps going through a
second gate, the visitor might cross a more enclosed courtyard, again with the
main house as the focus of the gaze. On
entering the main building, the visitor enters a reception chamber, decorated
with mosaics and wall-paintings depicting the ideals of rural aristocratic
land-owning life. If a client, or even
if a guest of equal or superior standing, the setting emphasizes the expected,
formal behaviour of host and visitor: the Latin word for host and guest is the
same: hospes. Both are bound – held hostage by – the rules
of hospitality.
This is where
the poetics of my pretentiously mock-Aristotelian title come in: the shaping – poesis – of reality, its staging, its
scripting. This helps freeze the
interaction between categories of people within a certain, formal range, where
people know the correct ways to behave and where transgression can be clearly
recognised. We are all aware of the
awkwardness of meeting someone only known from a particular setting in a
completely different context.
It is important
to consider how the state operates spatially.
The whole space of the Roman Empire was subject to the operation of
imperial law. The Antonine Constitution,
making all free inhabitants citizens, considerably simplified the hitherto
complex overlapping and interlocking of different legal statuses, especially in
relation to towns. Location within the
nested jurisdictions of the Late Empire made certain space into place. The seat of a provincial governor, acting in
his public capacity, within a public audience hall, bestowed a certain legality
on his actions, within tight rules. The
occupant of such a spot acted to some extent in the place of the Emperor, as
his vice-gerens, as made clear by
various cues in the building itself. Legitimation
was brought, limits to it assigned (and acceptable behaviour constrained), by
the office, not by the dignity of the individual who held it, although the
imperial state recognised the problems that might go with that by assigning
particular status to the holders of specific offices. An official’s jurisdiction operated broadly
uniformly within a defined territory.
How might these
ideas have played out in a sixth-century urban context? A key shift concerns the nature of the state
and public space. The Roman Empire,
throughout its existence, was fairly clear about the nature of public space:
space in other words where politics was enacted. Book 15 of the Theodosian Code prescribes how such spaces were – ideally – to be
maintained. Quite how such theory
related to practice in the contracted and remodelled cities of Gaul is,
however, an intriguing problem. Theodosian Code 15.1 contains over 50
rescripts concerning the maintenance of public buildings, frequently forbidding
any privatisation of such space and decreeing that any private structures that
encroached onto such spaces or sites be torn down. And yet, in an interesting insight into of
the efficacy of imperial law, two constants of late antique urban development are
the dereliction of public buildings and the encroachment of buildings into
public space.
There must have
been considerable fluidity. What marked urban space in the last centuries of
the western Empire: the old pomerium,
or the new walls? A possibly ruined or
derelict arch or the new gateway?
Burials began to intrude into formerly inhabited zones, but rarely –
except in Paris – in a dramatic way in Gaul, which suggests some confusion
among contemporaries too. We might
recall the problem mentioned earlier, of where the public spaces were in the
new towns. Many must have been
considerably smaller than in the early Roman period. The ‘placette’ that, it has been suggested,
might have been late Roman Tours’ replacement for the now extramural forum is smaller
than the cathedral.
I referred
earlier to the absence of traces of high-status Merovingian occupation in
towns, whether of kings or their aristocrats and officials. This is a conundrum as we know these
buildings existed. Earlier Merovingian
palace complexes evidently maintained the same key elements of late antique
palaces: an audience chamber, a more general assembly area and a
cathedral. These elements can be seen
clearly at Trier but also at Metz, where the Austrasian kings transferred their
seat after the mid-sixth century. It is
possible that something similar existed at Soissons. Frankish kings were still sometimes
interested in providing spectacles for their subjects. Gregory says that Chilperic wanted to provide
circuses for the people at Paris and Soissons, though quite what was meant by
that (aedificere) is anyone’s
guess. When Childebert II had an
otherwise unknown aristocrat called Magnovald murdered at his court in Metz it
was while he was watching bear-baiting, presumably in the small amphitheatre.
One possible
reason for the lack of archaeological evidence is that such buildings remained
public and in continuous use, eradicating traces of occupation. Another is that, simply enough, the Frankish
rulers or their representatives did not invest significant resources in
modifying or adding to them, but just maintained them. As Simon Loseby once said in a sadly
unpublished comment on Merovingian economic policy, the twin pillars of their
attitude were ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and ‘if it is broke, forget about it’.
In this, their attitude seems typical of the earlier Merovingian elite,
which seems to have spent very little on high-status buildings. In the past I have argued that this was
because of a lack of secure control over surplus and, while I think that that
is correct of most of the sixth-century northern Gallic aristocracy, clearly it
does not apply to the kings or, probably, to their most powerful service
aristocrats. In that case I think it
probably illustrates a particular sixth-century Merovingian attitude towards
wealth and its display.
Of course, the
one type of public building that the sixth-century Gallic elite certainly spent
money on was churches. The royal capital
at Metz certainly had twenty-three, and possibly as many as thirty-three,
churches by 700; it might have had eighteen a century earlier. By the mid-eighth there were certainly
forty-three churches in existence there.
If Metz’s status as a principal urban residence of the Merovingian kings
made it exceptional, it was not by very much.
Le Mans had over twenty churches by the time that its bishop Bertram
drew up his will in the early seventh century.
All this must have a significant bearing on the nature of public space
and its relationship with political power.
Wealth was, however,
above all worn in the sixth-century
West. Costume appears to have been even
more important than it usually is in marking identity. Analysis of northern Gaulish and other burial
patterns appear to show that costume was one means by which social categories
were created. The wearing of particular
forms and arrangements of jewellery marked out different stages of the female
life-cycle. The carrying of weaponry
played a similar role among males, where (as with female costume) it might also
have had an ethnic significance (provided that we’re clear about what we mean
by ‘ethnic’ in this context). Furthermore,
it seems that all social classes followed these guidelines, differing only in
the lavishness of their display. Costume
and other bodily markers apparently created the behavioural cues in social
interaction.
As I have
argued before, the jewellery worn by younger and married women tended to
highlight the parts of the body that were, in Frankish law, not to be touched
without incurring penalty. The cues on
how to behave were now worn: costume created social space. That is, I suggest, related to the general
absence of the old, clearer, architectural markers of space. In those terms, political space was much more
fluid than before; it overflowed what had been its normal boundaries as the latter
broke down. This was doubtless
particularly important in the processions that were mentioned above, which
flowed from the city, through formerly urban space into what had been the city
of the dead: now a place where, in Peter Brown’s classic analyses, heaven
touched earth and where time stood still.
The limited evidence we have suggests that on these and similar occasions
the population could be divided into various sub-groups, on ethnic or other
lines. Such arrangements doubtless
underscored expectations about how the different social categories were
expected to interrelate with each other.
It may be that assemblies
in towns were still on occasion the site of traditional classical urban
political displays. On occasion at
least, wills were still read out in the public spaces of the city. Chilperic for example says that he will – in
best Roman tradition – give the citizens of Tours a slogan to chant at Gregory.
The Magnovald
incident raises the point that, whatever behavioural cues there might have been
in the imperial palace, they appear to have been significantly altered in
sixth-century Gaul, to judge from Gregory’s accounts of things that happened in
the various chambers of the court, including murders, tantrums and slanging
matches.
A number of
cautionary points must be made here. I am not assuming that the socio-political
boundary markers, architectural or bodily, are automatically effective; that
they cannot permanently freeze a set of attitudes – the habitus – in a given mode is elementary: Bourdieu 101. They are in a constant state of
renegotiation. Further, one might wonder
whether the infractions – the, by Roman norms, bizarre behaviour – are recorded
by Gregory because of their significance or unusualness. That must in part be the case, but there do
seem to be an awful lot of them, when you remember that the bulk, the last six
books, of Gregory’s Histories covers
only 16 years. Part of the problem must
be related to the fact of living – from the middle of the sixth century – in a post-Roman world, where the political
itself, the forms of rulership and authority of all sorts, was in the process
of reinvention.
When gatherings
did not take place outside, it might be that another element of post-Roman
confusion entered the equation. As is
well-known, much late antique ecclesiastical architecture followed the example
of imperial secular building, notably the great audience chambers. Obviously, the classic basilical church plan
was based upon the great assembly halls – basilicas – of the civic forum and
the imperial palace. Most discussion of
which I am aware points out how the altar in the raised apsidal end occupies
the space of the imperial throne, or the portrait or statue of the emperor, in
straightforward and unproblematic manner.
What I am not aware of is any discussion of the element of semiotic confusion that could be introduced at a
time when both secular and ecclesiastical authorities were using the same
spatial arrangements in buildings of essentially identical layout, at the same
time. One need not think that late
antique people had no idea what to do when going into an imperial or royal
audience hall on the one hand, or a church on the other, to wonder whether the
varying hierarchies set out in identical spaces did not produce changes in the
political script for which the architecture provided cues. Sometimes the king or emperor – or his image
and his representative – occupied the focal space and ecclesiastical as well as
secular aristocrats were expected to approach only with deference; sometimes
the altar, the image of Christ, and his representative took that position and
even emperors and kings were supposed to approach with humility.
Caesarius’
sermons to the people suggest that the inhabitants of Arles did not always read
the spatial behavioural cues of church architecture as assiduously as their
bishop thought they ought to: lying down, plaiting their daughters’ hair,
fixing their jewellery, chattering away, making a break for the doors when
Caesarius got up to give his sermon (only to find that Caesarius, in a shocking
infraction of basic health and safety guidelines, had had them locked from the
outside). Was this typical? Did Caesarius simply lift it from
Augustine? Was it a general problem or
only at various points of the liturgy?
Gallican liturgy included a point where the deacon asked the people to
be quiet, just before the sermon. Did
such behavior spread from the cathedral to the royal court? What happened when the person occupying the
place of the emperor in a secular court could no longer make a legitimate claim
to be the emperor’s representative, or to have imperial legitimation for his
position? Was it worse when they
occupied actual former imperial space like the aula palatina at Trier?
Sometimes the confusion was only
emphasized by the principal actors. In
Book 7 chapter 7 of Gregory’s Histories,
King Guntramn addresses the people of Paris in church. Gregory says he did this ‘after the deacon
had asked the people to be quiet’, and thus at the very point when the bishop
was meant to speak. It wasn’t the only
time that Guntramn was described by Gregory as acting ‘like one of the bishops
of the Lord’. Quite what Gregory thought
of this is difficult to unravel; he does not seem to me to have thought that it
was a straightforwardly Good Thing. It
might be though that there was a lot of that in the air in the late sixth
century, quite possibly as a result of the renegotiating of the bases of
monarchical power after Justinian launched his wars of ‘reconquest’. When Guntramn presided over a meeting of his
bishops at Chalon-sur-Saône, the preamble he issued makes clear – a decade or
so before Gregory the Great wrote the Pastoral
Care – that he viewed kingship as a ministry.
It is perhaps not surprising, then,
that the Cathedral could be the location for dramatic confrontation. Gregory’s account of the career of Nicetius
of Trier highlights several occasions when the prelate came into conflict with
the kings of Austrasia, haranguing them from the pulpit. Gregory has Chilperic I lament “Behold how
poor our fisc is! Behold how our wealth has been transferred to the churches! Really,
no one rules other than the bishops. Our honour will perish; it has been transferred
to the bishops of the cities.” Whether
or not Chilperic really did ‘often’ say this – or even think it – is impossible
to know, but it wasn’t a bad diagnosis of the way things were going.
Paul Fouracre has pointed out that
the killing of bishops was much more common in Merovingian Gaul than anywhere
else in the post-imperial West, a phenomenon for which he did not have a ready
explanation. The domination of cities by
bishops might nevertheless be an important factor. The domination of the Church by the
senatorial aristocracy from the fifth century onwards is also a peculiarly
Gallic phenomenon, that illustrates the importance of the bishop in local and
regional politics. In northern Gaul at
least, the bishop was also generally the winner in power-struggles with the
local comes civitatis.
As if this weren’t enough, and
possibly also explaining the greater tendency to kill bishops in the regnum Francorum, the Gallic episcopate
appears to have taken up with more relish than most the tradition of speaking
truth to their secular overlords.
Nicetius of Trier is a particular example, drawing on strong local,
Treverian traditions going back to the fourth century, but he was far from
alone. Gregory of Tours himself thought
that the duty of bishops to speak out against the actions of kings and keep
them on the straight and narrow was especially important. There are plenty of other examples: Germanus
of Paris; Salvius of Albi. In the early
sixth century the entire Burgundian episcopacy went on strike to protest one of
King Sigismund’s actions. It may be
significant in these regards that the Anglo-Saxon bishop with the most awkward
reputation, Wilfred of Ripon was educated, and chose to be consecrated, in
Gaul, and that the only time (surprisingly enough) anyone actually tried to
kill him was also in Gaul (though they got the wrong man).
For all of the
reasons that I have just set out, I have suggested that the Merovingian kings
of Austrasia abandoned their attempts to take over the former imperial capital
at Trier and moved to Metz. Metz had the
correct architectural furnishings for a palace complex, but it was not
overburdened either by a ghostly imperial presence or by an awkward episcopal tradition. Unsurprisingly, the kings appear to have kept
a tight rein on appointments to the see of Metz throughout the period. The bishops we know about, even Saint Arnulf,
were all former palatine officials whom the kings felt they could trust. On occasion they might even have been their
relatives.
Nonetheless
there remained some crucial features.
The count governed the territory of the civitas and exacted taxation and other dues from it, moderated by
some exemptions concerning certain duties, and administered the law throughout
it, either personally or via his officers, such as the centenarii or hundredsmen.
The title remained an office, appointed by the king, which could be
withdrawn: it was neither a job for life nor a hereditary title. Thus, wherever the count was, in a sense, the
authority of the king – the presence of the state – was too. The count’s court and the hundred mallus might move around but they
retained their place, within the nested jurisdictions of the sixth-century
state. This surely remained important
even in the fluid and somewhat ambiguous political space of the day.
Taken together,
these factors go a long way towards explaining why the city had lost its place
at the centre of Gallic politics from the second decade of the seventh
century. This is an especially peculiar
phenomenon given that it was at this time that a more general urban recovery
appears to have begun in northern Gaul, and the decline of southern towns does
not appear to have really begun until much later in the century at least.
The city lost
out to two other territorial units during the seventh century. On the one hand civitas-identity appears to be replaced by a broader regional,
kingdom-based identity. Changes in
ethnic identity might also have had an effect.
At a lower level, the sub-division of the civitas, the pagus became
much more important. Individuals are
identified by their pagus of origin,
for example, and the pagi acquire
their own counts. The direction in which
things were moving is perhaps very clearly indicated by Fredegar’s account of
the territorial straits to which Chlothar II was reduced by his cousins,
Theudebert II and Theuderic II. He says
that his authority was confined to twelve pagi,
rather than three civitates as one
assumes Gregory would have said.
The secular
political decline of the civitas might be linked to the demise of the royal
dues that had been extracted on the basis of the city network. Frankish taxation certainly went into
terminal decline in the early seventh century, with – in my reading – salaries
hitherto paid via the delegation of tax-revenues from specific tax-payers
extended to ownership of the lands from which those taxes were collected, as
well as by increasing grants of immunity. Military organisation by civitas also ended. The last mention of a civitas contingent in battle is the account of the treachery of the
men of Mainz in Sigibert III’s 636 Thuringian campaign. That same account, however, also refers to a
contingent from the Saintois, one of the pagi
of the civitas of Toul. In any case, the army appears to have been
made up much more of aristocratic households or retinues rather than raised by
general levies of Franks, commanded by royal officers. Immunities were also exempted from the usual
levying of military service. Counties
proliferated and, even if not technically inheritable, seem much more to have
passed down within families.
The increasing
numbers of charters show that public legal gatherings could took place in local
churches and at or in the villae of
particular landowners. They do not suggest that the city retained its
importance in that sense, in the north at least. Charters signed at gatherings in old Roman
cities tend unsurprisingly to be those involving the bishop. The great rural monasteries founded in the
seventh century also drew from attention away from the cities as central places
and the foci of political action, not least because many were the centres of
immunities, from episcopal as well as royal control.
In the seventh
century, the Frankish kings are much more likely to found on their rural
estates than in the old cities. The
majority of royal assemblies took place there, including church assemblies, as
at Clichy in the 620s. Another location
was the great royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. The kings still held gatherings at cities
especially in Burgundy, just as they had held important gatherings at their
villas in the sixth century, but the ratio seems to me to have shifted
dramatically in the direction of the countryside.
The city had
lost its place. Urban Politics were now
very much scripted by the bishops. The
space of the state was increasingly perforated and fragmented as the early
Merovingian state broke down so that the town’s administrative role was greatly
reduced anyway. The stage for politics
passed to various places in the countryside: royal and aristocratic villas,
monasteries, and the elite spent their now more secure resources on these
centres, especially from the middle of the seventh century. How the immunity impacts upon the space of
the political, as an interstice within the areas of operation of royal and
episcopal power, a zone of exception, is an interesting issue, but one which
alas I have no time to discuss. How did
cues for behaviour change in this different seventh-century world. To what extent did the private permeate the
public? Some of the incidents that took
place at royal gatherings in the seventh century certainly suggest a different
scripting from before. Paying more
attention to that constitute the other half of this project (not, fortunately,
this paper) and perhaps we can discuss that.
Public space
and its use had evolved significantly through the Roman and immediately
post-imperial period. But in many ways
the rules of the dramas that unfolded there remained within a Roman tradition –
even if an observer who teleported from the second century to the early sixth
might have had no idea whether he was watching a tragedy or a comedy. As in so many things, though, the crisis of
the mid-sixth century and especially Justinian’s wars and their attendant
ideology brought abut a radical rescripting.
Kings and their officers were no longer able to play the parts that they
had hitherto known off by heart. They
needed to ad lib and to find new theatres in new locations. Unsurprisingly, as the one character whose
part in urban dramas remained unchanged from the late Roman period, the bishop
remained alone on the stage.
