Gaps, Ghosts and Dice, Version 2.0

[Here is the text of a key-note paper I gave yesterday to this conference, under the title of 'Each thought is a throw of the dice: Transition and Irony, Chance and Change'.  it was a nice one-day follow-up conference (to a larger two day affair in May).  It is in part a rework of my earlier 'Gaps, Ghosts and Dice' post which I think makes it those points a lot more clearly.  Then it develops the points to explore some implications (including ethical and political ones) for the study of transition and change in history (or indeed in related disciplines).  The clarifications and digressions of the initial version still apply!]

Introduction

Seventeen years ago I published an article entitled ‘The Merovingian Period in North-East Gaul: Transition or Change?’  In this piece I principally argued two things: first, at a general level, the concept of transition is essentially teleological.  The whole concept of transition depends on one having determined, after the event, the start and end points of the transition.  ‘From X to Y’: think of how many books and articles have titles of that formula or the related one: ‘the origins of X’.  It relies on one determining from what, and to what, things are in transition.  This tends to remove people from their history; mostly people don’t experience their lives as transitions, largely because they don’t know where their lives are going.  I borrowed a rather nice quote from Ferdinand Lot to open the article - ‘…we who, in regard to our ancestors, are gods because we know their future’ – and, characteristically perversely, the example of Fountains Abbey.  The transept tower at Fountains was completed in 1526, and is an impressive monument at an impressive site – but a ruined site.  Within ten years of the tower’s completion Henry VIII had begun the process of dissolution which in 1539 would see the Fountains monks expelled from their site.  If historians regard the sixteenth century as a period of transition, it can hardly be thought that the Cistercians of the Yorkshire Dales saw things the same way.  As I wrote in 1995:

The only transition that, in c.1520, the Yorkshire monks and canons thought they were living through was one to a period of prosperity and better management, as manifested by their works of restoration and improvement, certainly not one of ‘reformation’, let alone one from ‘medieval’ to ‘early modern’; in that respect they had more important things to think about.

The second, more specific, point developed the first.  The article originated as a contribution to a conference on ancient to medieval transitions.  I argued that to view late antiquity, or Merovingian Gaul, as a period of, or place in, transition muddied the waters by obscuring all the dynamic change that took place within the centuries grouped together under the heading of ‘late antiquity’ or ‘the Merovingian period’.  In all such approaches we prioritise processes that wesee, from our perspective, as having led somewhere, at the expense of all those which we know, but crucially people at the time didn’t, weren’t to lead anywhere.  I didn’t make as much of that last point as I would have done had I written the piece ten years later.

In 1995, I was concerned with the dynamism of change.  Partly this was political – partly local, academic political, in that I wanted to make clear that the Middle Ages wasn’t one big millennium-long lump that a single member of staff could be expected to cover all of; partly political in the wider sense, in that I wanted to argue for the human scale, the lived experience, of historical change and thus that all people have a role to play as historical agents (this, remember, was written in the depressing aftermath of the 1992 general election).  High level political change was intimately related to myriad decisions made at local levels – even in the fifth-to-eighth centuries.  All this, it won’t be surprising to learn, was born of an encounter, via post-processual archaeology, with Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’, both of which in their own ways concern the recursive relationship between ‘structure’ and agency.  The structure within which people act is itself formed by a sort of memory bank of all previous actions and their acceptance or otherwise, a memory bank constantly remade or altered (in however infinitesimal way) by practice, by the innumerable, on-going actions of myriad social agents.   This approach has informed almost everything I have written since then.

That said, the extent to which it can be harmonised with the approach that I am going to suggest today is a problem to which I don’t yet have an answer.  What has increasingly interested me over the last decade is the irony of history.  That is to say that what happens in history may not be the result of one social actor failing or succeeding, or compromising to some extent, vis-à-vis his or her aims, in his or her relationships with another, which is the way that I – and I suspect most historians – have tended to view the issue.  Rather it might be something intended by nobody.  This is something I discussed in the central section of Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, where I tried to construct a historical narrative in the ironic mode, attempting to depict events unfolding without colouring my account or analysis according to what I know (but my subjects didn’t) was going to happen next.  This was to some degree an exercise in writing without the usual portentous phraseology of historians: ‘and so it was that, for the last time, the Roman army campaigned north of the Loire’; ‘this decision was to have fatal consequences’; that sort of thing.  It’s a lot more difficult than you might think…  Going back to the terms of my 1995 article, what sorts of ‘transitions’ did contemporaries think they were living through, or trying to bring about, which actually went nowhere, or went in a completely different direction from the one intended?    The usual methods of history have a tendency to ignore all this by assuming that the path of history is cut by agents who know where they are going and are capable of bringing about the changes they want.  History is thus deliberate.  While I don’t want to remove the knowledgeable social actors or the ability to effect change from the equation, I am increasingly convinced that the course of history is fundamentally unintended, chaotic and accidental.

Folding the Ribbon of Time

To explore all this further I am going to talk about historical narrative and to explore it using some concepts from the two Jacques: Lacan and Derrida, principally the latter.  Where these thinkers and their like have been used in the past, it has generally been in the issue of analysing written (or other) sources or in the problems of extrapolating from such data to historical ‘reality’, a rather pointless debate in my view.  I’m sidestepping that to some extent to look at history, or rather at narrative, itself.  I’m also going to use Derrida to do something creative rather than in the way that he has been used by past theorisers of history, where he serves simply to bolster a posturing, half-thought-through epistemological nihilism – which does him scant justice.  Before I go any further I should make clear that I am no expert on the philosophy that I am using as a springboard for these thoughts; I’m not setting myself up as, any sort of philosopher.  I’m an absolute novice in all this. 

I am currently working on a project provisionally entitled ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’ – an exploration of the wide-ranging and diverse changes that occurred between c.560 and c.650.  As this period has long been regarded as one that saw the ‘transition to the Middle Ages’, the issues of change and transition are of some importance, as they have been throughout my work – perhaps even more so.  In tandem with this, though, I am also interested in the politics and ethics that inhere within the historical project.

All that having been said, none of this represents any kind of fully worked out thesis.  These are ideas, if you will, in transition and – like, as I will argue, everyone involved in what might someday be seen as a transition – I have no idea at all how they’ll turn out, if they turn out as anything at all.  Let me just try out some ideas with you and see where they go.

Let’s start with some pretty basic and uncontroversial modelling.  Maitland said “[s]uch is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web”.  I think that it is time, as it is lived and experienced, that is the seamless web (or, for the sake of diagrammatic convenience, we might see it as an endless undifferentiated line).  History, I will try to demonstrate, is itself the seams in the web.   Let’s envisage past time as an endless ribbon; a ribbon extending up to the present moment (itself ever moving) (as left).  Now, while we might be able to imagine that past, it is, I contend, impossible to make sense of it without selecting particular elements from all those events that have already happened and placing them in a sequence, rightly or wrongly.  

Prior to such activity the past is shapeless, amorphous, unsymbolised, rather than our neat ribbon (right).  It can be imagined but not really made sense of.  History is surely the inescapable and absolutely essential process of making seams in that web or, in our diagrammatic metaphor, that ribbon.  That process inevitably involves a process of winnowing; you can’t remember everything that has happened (unless you’re Funes the Memorious in the Borges story), and you can’t record everything in a history.  We’ll return to the implications of that.  

For now, let us place our chosen sequence of events along our ‘time-ribbon’ (left).  The space between our chosen events is the amount of time that elapsed between them.  However, when we compose, relate and perhaps write a narrative, those time-lapses are erased.  It is as though we bring all those events together, bunching up our ‘time-ribbon’ between them (right).  We often talk of a narrative thread and I would develop that metaphor to mean that thread that we use it to ‘stitch together’ or sew up the events in our story.  

If we give a more 3-D representation of the effect, it would look like this (left).  All the ‘loops’ in the ribbon are, as we have seen ‘eradicated’ and thus concealed from the reader, listener or other consumer of the narrative.  Thus to envisage what our narrative really looks like, concealing the ‘loops’ of unrepresented time, we have to view the ribbon from this side, [the blue arrow in the diagram) so in fact it looks like this (above right).  Each of these folds stitched together by our narrative thread is an event, between our start and end points, and here the only thing that determines the width of the fold from this perspective is the amount of time we devote to describing the event, and thus its relative importance, as we see it.  The relative time between each event has no depiction in the account.

If you want an idea of how things might look otherwise, it might look this two-page spread from Stéphane Mallarmé’s most famous poem, ‘Un Coup de Dés’ (above).  Mallarmé set out the poem with varying spacing over each two-page spread and in different fonts, to try to represent the themes he was exploring.  Different fonts linked particular ideas which made sense on their own, even though the poem read left to right (over each spread) and down the page, as usual.  This, for example, is actually part of the title (Un Coup de Dés n’Abolira le Hasard).  I often wonder about writing history like this, with spaces of different lengths indicating the amount time elapsed between events, and different fonts and font-sizes representing the different threads within the story.  It'd be a huge task and a real work of art, and would sell about three copies even if someone took it on.  But it'd be interesting.

To return to our ribbon metaphor, though, you could break the thread at any point and look at the cloth opened up – say look at the space or the transition between the second and third ‘events’ in our sequence (left) – but to understand it you would still need to make it into a sequence of smaller folds (right); open up one of them and look at a smaller piece of time but have to stitch that into smaller folds still, and so on.  Or you can unpick all of the seams and behold the whole ribbon opened up – and return us to our blurry, undifferentiated ‘ribbon’ but, inevitably, you will only be able to make sense of it by stitching it together again, even if in a new way, with different bits of cloth (time) concealed in the folds.  You can argue that the latter is what happened when historians stopped thinking that their subject was simply the chronicling of high politics, kings and wars, and started thinking about social history, or women’s history.  For today’s purposes, you could say another example came when historians cut the thread at the great fold that lay at 476 and the End of the Roman Empire and made a new fold, called Late Antiquity. 

Everyone who has ever lectured to first-year history students about the perils of periodization knows that historical periods are, fundamentally, simply units of convenience that mask certain continuities by fastening upon other pre-determined aspects of change.  But the problem reaches down much further than that into the very way in which we write the narratives (I like to call this stage ‘chronicling’ rather than ‘history’) that we then analyse and explain, which, in my view, is ‘history’ properly defined.

Obviously, though, all that folding or seaming, stitching or threading happens after the event.  Deciding what constitutes an event in the first place, what marks the edges of a fold, how we write about them in purely descriptive terms, and so on, is all ex post facto.  It’s a truism that very rarely (outside the obvious limit cases) do people see the events through which they’re living in the same way as later historians will.  Between 1914 and 1918, for example, we could say that people were experiencing the horrors not of a ‘war to end wars’, as they (or some of them) thought, but of a curtain raiser for an even more horrible war.  I have written that before about 470 at least, it is very unlikely that anyone alive in the fifth century thought they were living through ‘the Fall of the Roman Empire’.  Now I’d argue that that may even have been true for people alive for two or three generations after 470, too.

None of my comments thus far is – I readily admit – startling, new or profound.  At its most basic, essential but initial level, history is the process of symbolising the past.  It’d be uncontroversial to say that we can’t even imagine the past in any meaningful way without this sort of process happening first.  We can imagine all that protean mass of ‘stuff what happened’ but we can’t access any of it without selecting from it, placing those selections in sequence, evaluating them and having some idea of their meaning; in other words without placing it within the symbolic order.  Only then can we really begin to think about the past.  Thus, ironically, it is true to say that memory – or history – happens before the past. 

Historical Narrative is structured like a Language

Here, I hope, things might begin to get more interesting.  I’m going to steal Lacan’s famous comment that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ and twist it to make a different point: Historical narrative is structured like a language. 

What I mean by that is that events gain their meaning within sequences from their juxtaposition with other events, before and after, like words.   It is these juxtapositions that allow us to emplot historical narrative as tragedy or as heroic epic, or in an ironic mode, or however.  It’s not just that we have to use words to describe events, which make sense only through signifying chains of difference; events themselves – types of events or specific events – have different meanings according to the way they are emplotted within a narrative. 

This is old news as anyone who has read Hayden White knows.  But let’s return to our stitched ribbon of narrative and explore what is implicit in that potential difference in meaning.  Behind the ribbon, invisible from our perspective, are all those loops of ribbon: time that has escaped symbolisation (as right).

It’s these loops which I want to think about.  The spaces or gaps in the narrative that they represent are where history happens.  They are the spaces – as I will return to discuss – where nothing is decided and where time has not yet been symbolised in any way – where time or the past has not yet become history.  In that sense I like to think of them as the spaces of The Real in a way that is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek.  For those who haven’t risked an encounter with Lacanian theory, The Real is, with The Imaginary and The Symbolic, one of Lacan’s three orders (right).  Essentially the Real – the trickiest of the three orders to grasp, not least because Lacan himself changed what he meant by it  – is the stuff that’s out there; it’s not ‘reality’, as such, as distinct from imagination, so much as what escapes the process of symbolisation.  It is fleeting, always shifting around on the edge of your vision, and yet always in the same place.  Any encounter with The Real is traumatic.  We could attempt a preliminary transposition of Lacan’s three orders, as they relate to history, thus (below, right).  

The spaces closed up, represented metaphorically by the loops in the ribbon represent the temporal Real of lived experience.  This can only be folded and seamed after the event, thus symbolising and historicising it.  This process only (as we’ve seen) creates further loops (unless, as I said earlier, one were to write in spaces that took as long – relatively – to navigate as lived time) and so it can never be grasped.  Yet it is always there, always in the same temporal place.  In grasping it you pass through it; it is like a ghost, a spectre.  In my transposition, the Symbolic – the order of language – is ‘history’, the incorporation of the past into a sort of semiotic order, and The Imaginary – the sphere of the ideal – is ‘Narrative’ or emplotment, especially personal narrative.  I’m not investing much in that transposition.  It might work or it might not; you can dismantle it at will.

But let’s shift our ground, our viewpoint, and move from the après coup historian’s construction of narrative to look at what happens in these loops.  This historical, ‘temporal’ Real is where things happen without us yet being able to understand or place them in any sort of symbolic order.  Encountering this Real can (as in Lacanian theory) be a terrible thing.  To take the usual limit case, who can have experienced the Shoah (in whatever role) without being aware of living through terrible history as it was being made? 

These spaces are zones of infinite possibility. Let’s assume we can somehow open up the tiny temporal space closed up by the ‘and’ of the sentence ‘Napoleon’s army met Wellington’s south of Brussels and was decisively defeated in the battle of Waterloo’.  (Forgive me for using a non-medieval example.)  This space – the morning of 18 June 1815 – is inhabited by about 150,000 men and women.  French and allied armies are deployed but not engaged.  Blue-clad troops swarming over the horizon to the east are Prussians.  At this point anything is possible.  Napoleon can disengage; he can fight and win (or lose).  He (and the other 149,999) can yet survive the day or be killed.  The day can turn out to be the allied victory of Waterloo, or the French victory of La Belle Alliance, or an insignificant encounter some days before the great Battle of Somewhere Else, that no one other than Napoleonic military history buffs have ever heard of.  It could be the day that Wellington died heroically, trying to stem the rout of his army, or the day of infamy when Gneisenau inexplicably halted the Prussian army, leaving Wellington to be defeated.  Or the day the Emperor’s head was knocked clean off by a Prussian canon-ball at the moment of his greatest triumph.  Or whatever.

Now, this does not simply mean that ‘what happened’ was different; the whole way in which we symbolise and understand it differs.  That symbolization is ever shifting as the narrative lengthens in time.  Thus the symbolization of an historical event is never fixed. 

Our temporal Real – lived time – is a true zone of Derridean ‘differance’.  That is to say that its meaning derives from difference from other signifiers and that any ‘true’ meaning is endlessly deferred.  For those unfamiliar with it, Derrida’s concept of differance (with an ‘a’) was – to put it very simply – formulated in the course of his argument against speech having primacy over writing, having a prior link to a metaphysical presence of meaning.  What Derrida argued was that spoken words operate in the conveyance of meaning in the same way as written ones.  This is why he coined the term ‘differance’ – pronounced exactly the same (in French) as difference (with an ‘e’) but meaning something, well, different.  That difference could only be established through a mental process of differentiating the two words or graphemes.  And you can still get the meaning wrong, or repeat it and convey a different meaning to someone else.  Differance with an ‘a’ merges the terms ‘differ’ and ‘defer’. 

As another modern example, take the history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  If we were writing in 1946, say, we would doubtless see ourselves in a space of triumph after a terrible ordeal; although the future would seem very uncertain, there would be grounds for hope that a new and better world was coming into existence after the horrors of Nazism.  If we were writing in 1982, though, the picture of these events would look very different, a melancholy exchange of one tyranny for another with no sign of anything getting any better any time soon. Even respected professors of modern history could see no prospect of the Fall of the Wall – a good example of why you should never ask a historian to predict the future.  If we wrote that history now, the Soviet occupation would look like an interlude.  The description and analysis, not just the narrative, changes.  The future looks different from the way it looked in the ‘80s but it is no less unpredictable.  Donald Rumsfeld (of all people) once said that the future is no less predictable than the past; the past wasn’t predictable when it happened.

Moving back to our period, a history that stops around 500 finishes with the end of the Roman Empire (Good Thing/Bad Thing/Supreme Irony/whatever) but a cultural history of the period c.300-c.700 can pass through it as though, in most meaningful terms, the Empire didn’t end at all (as in some works within the Late Antique paradigm).  A political history that continued to 814 would end with the revival of the Western Empire under Charlemagne – so the Empire hadn’t really ended after all.  And what if, hypothetically, in our unpredictable post-banking-crisis future, something very odd happens, with the EU becoming a pan-European dictatorship renamed as a revival of the Roman Empire?  Do the 207 years since Francis I’s deposition as Holy Roman Empire become an interval or blip, like the 324 years between Romulus Augustulus and Charlemagne?  Even the history of the Roman Empire hasn’t necessarily ended yet…  What was the significance of 476?  It’s too soon to say. 

The Temporal Real is a zone of pure chance and encounter.  As in my Waterloo scenario, it’s not just the relative skill in generalship of Wellington and Napoleon (and Blücher/Gneisenau), nor the bravery and skill of their troops, nor any combination of those that determines the signification of the event.  All sorts of chance events could intervene.  Turned the other way round, and using a late antique example, no one could have expected, on the morning that the ambassadors of the Quadi came to visit Emperor Valentinian I on the Danube, that their statement – that they had a right to attack Roman troops building a fort in their territory becausethey had intruded into their territory – would anger the Emperor so much that he would drop dead of apoplexy.  That was a ‘response of the [temporal] Real’ if ever there was.  As I set out in Barbarian Migrations, at the start of 421 it looked as though the Roman Empire was going to weather the crisis of 395-413 and re-establish its borders, having gone from this state in 410 (above left) to this one in 421 (below, right).  Who knew that Constantius III was about to contract pleurisy and die, leaving the Empire to a four-year-old Valentinian III and his incompetent uncle Honorius?

This is by no means the ‘What If…’ history beloved of right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson and his ilk.  In this type of history, the premise is that if one thing happened differently, the whole of European or world history would unfold in a quite different way.  This is logical nonsense.  In the poem discussed earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote that ‘a throw of the dice will never abolish chance’.  Quite so, but for Ferguson and co. a different throw does.  What if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo?  Well, what if he did?  What if he fell off his horse and broke his neck the next day?  Or, alternatively, what might have happened if Napoleon had lost the Battle of Waterloo?  By 1848 both branches of the Bourbons had been deposed anyway and by 1851 Napoleon’s nephew was ruling France.  Different outcomes are always possible – they’re still possible.  Vive l’Empereur!  Julius Caesar declared the die to have been cast when he crossed the Rubicon.  He must have thought he’d rolled high, too … until he got stabbed to death by Brutus and the rest, having ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time after all.  The throw of the dice did not abolish chance.  There are no endings in history. 

Quite apart from the competitive interplay of actors’ intentions (which side ‘wins’) or the intervention of chance, the outcome of actions can be quite unintended by anyone.  I’ve argued – I hope I’ve demonstrated – that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century came about in spite of the fact that in the hundred years prior to 476 we cannot find a single person who actively tried to bring the Empire down.  I described the end of the Western Roman Empire as an ‘accidental suicide’, the ironic result of actions aimed not at destroying the Empire at all, but at dominating it in the tradition of more traditional fourth-century politics.  Every crucial action contributing to the Empire’s political demise was brought about by people trying to preserve it.  The ‘Fall’ was an outcome that no one intended.  The intervention of chance and the fact that the outcomes of actions are not reducible (usually teleologically) to the achievement or frustration of particular actors’ aims is a major problem with many models of social interaction – even phenomenological.  My way of seeing might help us avoid the totalising tendencies of such approaches.

Implications: Deconstructing Historical Narrative; Deconstructing Transition

I would like to suggest that this way of seeing has some quite important implications for thinking about the concept of transition, which are somewhat different from the problems with the idea that I set out in 1995.  For one thing, even the teleology inherent in the definition of transition is further relativised by the approach to thinking about the symbolisation of time and narrative that I have set out in this paper.  In 1995 I argued that one had to separate early medieval data out by time and place.  In the neutral sense of comparing data from the same place and time, this is something that I’d still stand by.  What the approach I have been trying to set out makes problematic is the idea of ‘context’, that key premise of historicism.  Context is everything, we are told, and indeed it is – except, that is, when discussing the importance of context, which is supreme, regardless of context…  Obviously context is vitally important, but what exactly is context?  We can leave aside the fact that historians often treat context pretty loosely, so that putting – say – Gregory of Tours’ writings of the 570s in context means setting them alongside texts by Gregory the Great written ten or twenty years later, or those of Isidore of Seville from later still (this chronological woolliness is born of several different traditional approaches to the period, which we’ll leave aside for now).  A Derridean deconstructionist approach actually relies on a certain contextualism, not least to provide the other traces that go to make up the ‘texte’ – the network of traces – of which our written texts are part.  It also relies on a certain stability of text which is not often available in early medieval studies; these points are often forgotten. 

Nonetheless, these points being made, it must be said that many of the premises even of so-called New Historicism are questioned by the approach I’m exploring.  How, after all, do we define context?  Surely, as often as not, that is done after the event too, when we select those features which we think define the thought/society/politics of a particular period – when we do this we select and obscure just as much as when we select events – joining up features and leaving others out of the equation.  Indeed those two processes are often interlinked.  Context, in terms of politics, is often related to the selection of the events used to fold up our ‘ribbon of time’ – we saw already that this selection can differ from those used for, say, gender history.  The whole contextualist historicist approach is essentially circular: first one creates a context from the available evidence by selecting key points, features or areas of similarity from it; then you argue that the evidence is best analysed against the context you just created from it.  These are the people who like to mock Derrida for saying there was nothing outside text (something which, incidentally, he never actually did say)…

Leaving the absurd – or some of it – that to one side for a moment, another problem with the contextualist approach is the way it artificially closes down the range of possibilities.  Part of that closing down comes from the approach itself, as I just described.  As a historian I find the approach worrying in that it denies creativity, experimentation, invention, failure – the blind alleys that I have referred to before.  It denies the possibility of non-orthodox readings, subordinate readings, mis-readings.  It denies chance.  A throw of the dice never will abolish chance, said Mallarmé, and (in the last line of his poem) every thought is a throw of the dice.  Thinking about other disciplines than history, I find it bewildering that a source can only be read and analysed in the terms of its own period.  I wonder of historicist readers of literature think that medieval writers’ readings of the Classics or the Fathers are to be condemned for not reading them ‘in context’?  The more I think about historicism, the more utterly incoherent it all seems, heretical and subversive though such thinking is in [Poppleton].

So much for all that.  What I want to dwell upon is deconstructing historical narrative.  Deconstruction is a grossly misused (and abused) word.  People often describe simple close reading as deconstruction; alternatively, people who’ve never actually read Derrida (like, it has to be said, most of Derrida’s historian and analytic philosopher critics) have alleged that it opens the way to holocaust deniers, complete relativism and so on.  It isn’t; it doesn’t.  Deconstruction, said Derrida, is ‘what happens’ (‘ce qui arrive’”).  To be super-simplistic, when dealing with texts, what deconstruction (as I understand it at least) tends to involve is the identification of pairs of concepts, one being haunted (to use a term from later Derrida) by the other but sublimating it.  Then that sublimated term is brought to the fore.

If we take that as a means of reading narrative, then what it allows us to do is to look at historical moments (our loops in the ribbon), what happened and the terms we use to describe it.  All that is haunted by the spectres of their opposites, the reverse concepts (victory/defeat, for example), and the things, the outcomes that didn’t happen, the outcomes that perhaps people (even the people who seem to have got their way) were trying to bring about.  In a sense that allows us to deconstruct transition itself.

To return to the sorts of dynamics that I thought in the mid-1990s were implicit in social change – the interplay of identities – one has to look very closely into the loops in the ‘ribbon of time’, into context if you like.  Identities, by their nature, are about likenesses and a likeness can only imply looking backwards.  Ambitions, obviously, by contrast, can only imply looking forward.  In both cases what one has, in Lacanian terms, are elements of the imaginary; in later Derridean terms you have spectres: no one can quite imagine things as they aren’t.  Such ideals are like ghosts, spectres.  Actions are ‘haunted’ by these spectres.  In later writing Derrida coined the term ‘hantologie’ (hauntology), which in French sounds the same as ‘ontologie’ (ontology).  We’re back to differance.  Nonetheless, that gives us a way into the sorts of unintended outcomes that I’ve been interested in.

Lastly, though, this approach permits, as I see it, a more ethical reading of history.  At the heart of the whole historical enterprise, as I see it, lies an ethical demand to listen attentively to the voices of the past.  Attentive listening doesn’t imply acceptance of their point of view; it implies engagement.  Engagement is consistent with deconstruction.  Deconstruction was always concerned with politics and ethics, as Simon Critchley has argued and indeed as Derrida himself was at pains to make clear in the last decade of his life – it was just that the political element in his thought became more visible later on.  Deconstructing narrative (or transition) means listening for the ideas that didn’t come to fruition, for the ambitions that failed, for the outcomes that didn’t come out.  As I see it there’s nothing more ethical than that.

Ultimately, what an ethical, politically-committed approach to history is about is telling us that things don’t have to be this way.  It is about (to use a phrase of Frederic Jameson) keeping faith with the impossible, with the once possible impossibilities of history.  A throw of the dice, after all, will never abolish chance.  And each thought is a throw of the dice.

Gaps, Ghosts and Dice: More inchoate musings on the nature of history (in which Julius Caesar meets Stéphane Mallarmé): Part 1

[Brace yourself for more ill-informed, half-thought-through pseudo-philosophical waffling about what history really is.  Ill-informed, etc., yes - but serious and heart-felt, too.  

What I am going to explore here might possibly be considered under the general headings of change, narrative, causation.  Those of you who have read Barbarian Migrations will know from the middle section (theoretically and methodologically, the most important bit - although Stuart Airlie seems to be the only person to have spotted this) that I have been interested in the inescapably ironic nature of history.  That's to say that the outcomes of decisions are very often entirely unintended by historical actors.  I've been carting it about with me for days but I've still not read Benjamin on History, so I'm aware that I'm probably re-inventing a wheel he already invented.  This, incidentally, explains some of the thinking behind my miniature manifesto; for some of the rest, check out the posts with the tag 'The Unbearable Weight']

Here are a couple of minor issues: what is the past?  What is history?  Let’s be basic and uncontroversial.  The past, we can all agree, is simply enough all that ‘stuff’ that happened before now, whenever ‘now’ might happen to be – such as me writing the beginning of this sentence.  Or – now – writing the end of it.  But how do we make sense of that?  Surely by selecting particular elements from all those past events and placing them in a sequence, rightly or wrongly.  (I used to keep a diary and, although I have a pretty good memory, I confess that I often had difficulty remembering the exact order in which things had happened, even if they’d only happened the /previous day.)  That sequencing inevitably involves a process of winnowing; you can’t remember everything (unless you’re Funes the Memorious in Borges’ story).  And then we might process that information to involve an element of causation.  X happened – we think – because of Y and if only I/they hadn’t done A then (we like to think) B might not have happened; etc.  It’d be uncontroversial to say that we can’t even imagine the past in any meaningful way without this sort of process happening first.  We can imagine all that protean mass of ‘stuff what happened’ but we can’t access any of it without selecting from it, placing those selections in sequence, evaluating them and having some idea of their meaning; in other words without placing it within the symbolic order.  Only then can we really imagine the past.  Thus, ironically, it is true to say that memory happens before the past.  By the same token, then, we could also say that ‘History’ happens before ‘the past’.

       Digression

In the 1990s people started talking about history as memory.  Cultures in many ways create, deploy and access history in the same way as individuals create, deploy and access memory.  As a result, every bandwagon-chaser in the land began to write articles (sometimes spectacularly impenetrable and yet still somehow meaningless) about ‘cultural memory’.  Yet, I’ve never been very sure what this really added to our understanding of history, other than a new metaphor: memory.  I once quipped sarcastically that the only meaningful interaction between ‘memory, literacy and orality’ in the Carolingian world was when one monk told another monk that he had forgotten what he was going to write…  All this does not seem to me to have added any fundamentally new or different ways of understanding the way that history is used; it does, by contrast, seem unhelpfully to have blurred the useful distinction between how people make and access memories of the personal, lived past and how people and societies construct and access their collective past, especially before that experienced by those alive in the present.  It seemed to me that we already had perfectly good words for the latter, in ‘tradition’ and ‘history’.  But there we are; this is how disciplinary trends and paradigms work…

So, none of those opening comments are startling, new or profound.  At its most basic, essential but initial level, history is the process of symbolising the past.  Only then can we begin to imagine it.  It is here, I think, that things (possibly) get interesting.  Someone said that history was a seamless web; what they meant was that time as it is lived and experienced is a seamless web.  Historyis surely the inescapable and absolutely essential process of making seams in that web; folding it up into the manageable sections that we call periodization.  Everyone who has ever lectured to first-year history students about the perils of periodization knows that historical periods are, fundamentally, simply units of convenience that mask certain continuities by fastening upon other pre-determined aspects of change.  But the problem reaches down much further than that into the very way in which we write the narratives (I like to call this stage ‘chronicling’ rather than ‘history’) that we then analyse and explain (this, in my view, is ‘history’ properly defined).

Historical narrative is structured like a language.  Events gain their meaning within sequences from their juxtaposition with other events, before and after.  Like words.   These juxtapositions allow us to write history as tragedy or as heroic epic, or in an ironic mode, or however.  Events – types of events or specific events – have different meanings according to the way they are emplotted within a narrative.  OK: this is old news.  What I want to explore is what is implicit in that potential difference.  History does not simply put seams in the seamless cloth of time.  What it does is to fold that cloth and stitch it tightly together – over and over again.  To pursue that metaphor, what the temporal cloth looks like after the process of historical narrative is, from the front, a narrow, densely stitched-together mass of neatly creased folds.  Out behind that, invisible from our perspective, are acres of billowing cloth: time that has escaped symbolisation.  Now, you can unpick a seam and look at the cloth opened up, but to understand it you still need to make it into a sequence of smaller folds; open up one of them and look at a smaller piece of time but have to stitch that into smaller folds still, and so on.  Or you can unpick all of the seams and behold the whole cloth opened up but, equally inevitably, you will only be able to make sense of it by stitching it together again, even if in a new way, with different bits of cloth (time) concealed in the folds.  You can argue that the latter is what happened when historians stopped thinking that their subject was simply the chronicling of high politics, kings and wars, and started thinking about social history, or women’s history, or when historians unpicked the great seam that lay at 476 and the End of the Roman Empire and made a new fold, called Late Antiquity. 

All that folding and stitching, though happens after the event.  The decision of what constitutes an event that marks the edges of a fold, how we write about them in purely descriptive terms, and so on.  It’s a truism that very rarely (outside the obvious limit cases) do people see the events through which they’re living in the same way as later historians will.  Between 1914 and 1918, for example, we could say that people were experiencing the horrors not of a ‘war to end wars’, as they (or some of them) thought, but of a curtain raiser for an even more horrible war.

It’s these folds, these billows of cloth behind the stitches, which I want to think about.  These spaces or gaps are where history happens.  They are the spaces – as I will return to discuss – where nothing is decided and where history has not yet been symbolised in any way.  In that sense I like to think of them as the spaces of The Real in a way that is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis.  The historical ‘temporal’ Real, here, is that space where things happen without us yet being able to understand or place them in any sort of symbolic order.  Encountering this Real can (as in Lacanian theory) be a terrible thing.  To take the usual limit case, the Shoah, who can have taken part in that (whether as victim or camp guard or executioner) without being aware of experiencing terrible history as it was being made? 

      Clarification

I’m not – let me make crystal clear – making any sort of equation between the perpetrators and the victims of this crime in terms of the trauma of this experience; just that neither can have occupied this temporal space without knowing that something of immense, unprecedented historical importance was happening – whether you were seeing thousands of your fellows butchered and thinking that your race was going to be wiped from the face of the earth, or whether you were a Nazi thinking you were carrying out some terrible, avenging, messianic task.

So, the spaces closed up, represented metaphorically by my ‘billows’ represent the temporal Real of lived experience.  This can only be folded and seamed after the event, thus symbolising and historicising it.  This process only (as we’ve seen) creates further billows (unless one were to write in spaces that took as long – relatively – to navigate as lived time) and so it can never be grasped.  Yet it is always there, always in the same temporal place.  In grasping it you pass through it; it is like a ghost (though this isn’t the ghost of my title), a spectre.

        Digression

 In his most famous poem, 'Un Coup de dés', Stéphane Mallarmé set out his poem with long spaces and different strands within the work indicated by font-size and their place within the two page spread - a type-setter's nightmare!  I often wonder about writing history like this, with long spaces indicating the time past, and different fonts and font-sizes representing the different threads within the story.  It'd be a huge task and a real work of art, and would sell about 3 copies even if someone took it on.  But it'd be interesting.

If we were to think some more about these spaces we’d see that they are zones of infinite possibility. Let us assume we can somehow open up the temporal space closed up by the ‘and’ of the sentence ‘Napoleon’s army met Wellington’s south of Brussels and was decisively defeated in the battle of Waterloo’.  This space – the morning of 18 June 1815 – is inhabited by about 150,000 men and women.  French and allied armies are deployed but not engaged.  Blue-clad troops swarming over the horizon to the east are Prussians.  At this point anything is possible.  Napoleon can disengage; he can fight and win (or lose).  He (and the other 149,999) can yet survive the day or be killed.  The day can turn out to be the battle (allied victory) of Waterloo, or the battle (French victory) of La Belle Alliance, or an insignificant encounter some days before the great Battle of Somewhere Else, that no one other than Napoleonic military history buffs have ever heard of.  It could be the day that Wellington died heroically, trying to stem the rout of his army, or the day of infamy when Gneisenau inexplicably stopped the march of the Prussian army, leaving Wellington to be defeated.  Or the day the Emperor’s head was knocked clean off by a Prussian canon-ball at the moment of his greatest triumph.  Or whatever.

This does not simply mean that ‘what happened’ was different, but also that the whole way in which we symbolise and understand it differs – and that symbolization is ever shifting as the narrative lengthens in time.  It means, then, that the symbolization of an historical event is never fixed.  What it also means is that our temporal Real – lived time – is a true zone of Derridean ‘differance’.  That is to say that its meaning derives from difference from other signifiers and that any ‘true’ meaning is endlessly deferred.  ‘Differance’, says Leslie Hill in the Cambridge Companion to Derrida, ‘is the beginning space of time and the beginning time of space.’  No, I have no idea what that means either, but it sounds good (and the ‘beginning space of time’ fits what I’m talking about anyway).

Let’s have an example.  Let’s consider the history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  If we were writing in 1946, say, we would doubtless see ourselves in a space of triumph after a terrible ordeal; although the future would seem very uncertain, there would be grounds for hope that a new and better world was coming into existence after the horrors of Nazism.  If we were writing in 1982, though, the picture of these events would look very different, a melancholy exchange of one tyranny for another with no sign of anything getting any better any time soon. Even respected professors of modern history could see no prospect of the Fall of the Wall; one predicted confidently over his beer that the Iron Curtain would not be lifted in his lifetime (to much later ribbing from his colleagues) – a good example of why you should never ask a historian to predict the future.  If we wrote that history now, the Soviet occupation would look like an interlude, and the analysis, not just the narrative, changes.  The future looks different from the way it looked in the ‘80s but it is no less unpredictable.  I don’t like to quote Donald Rumsfeld but the old b*st*rd did come out with some memorable sayings, one of which is that the future is no less predictable than the past; the past wasn’t predictable when it happened.

       Digression

There’s nostalgia here and in the link between time and place.  For example, I recently went for a new job – a job I really wanted and I could have done well – but I didn’t pull it off.  I’m quite depressed and angry about it, but let’s not go into that.  So I just went through Sheffield station and I remembered changing trains there on my way to the job presentation.  It was a lovely morning, I felt confident that I’d written a good talk, the sun was shining and I still had everything to play for – it was still a zone of pure possibility.  Isn’t that what nostalgia is about?

There’s no statute of limitations here.  The holocaust is cast as the terrible tragedy that it was, but one that passed, produced the Israeli state (whatever one might think of that) and an awareness of the horrors of genocide, of where antisemitism could lead, and widespread feeling that both were things to be fought against.  But what if…?  What if ultra-right-wingers sweep to power in a post-banking-crisis melt-down across Europe and pogroms begin again?  Would our own time be closed up as a simple interlude between the First and Second Holocausts (or between the Jewish and Muslim Holocausts)?

A history that stops in c.500 finishes with the end of the Roman Empire (Good Thing/Bad Thing/Supreme Irony/whatever) but a cultural history of the period c.300-c.700 can pass through the period as though, in most meaningful terms, the Empire didn’t end at all (as in some works within the Late Antique paradigm).  And a political history that continued to 814 would end with the revivalof the Western Empire under Charlemagne – so it hadn’t really ended after all.  And what if, in our unpredictable future in post-banking-crisis Europe, something very odd happens to the EU, with it becoming a pan-European dictatorship renamed as a revival of the Roman Empire?  Do the 207 years since Francis I’s deposition as Holy Roman Empire become an interval or blip, like the 324 years between Romulus Augustulus and Charlemagne?  You see, even the history of the Roman Empire hasn’t necessarily ended yet…  What was the significance of 476?  It’s too soon to say. 

The Temporal Real is also the zone of pure chance and encounter.  As in my Waterloo scenario, it’s not just the relative skill in generalship of Wellington and Napoleon (and Blücher/Gneisenau), nor the bravery and skill of their troops, nor any combination of those that determines the signification of the event. As I mooted earlier, it is just as possible that Napoleon could have his head knocked off at the moment of victory or that Wellington stop one of the canon-balls, bullets or canister fragments that killed or wounded almost every member of his staff (while leaving him unscathed) that day.

I am by no means interested in this as the ‘What If…’ history beloved of right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson (Virtual History) and his ilk.  Or Cowley's What If? Military Historians Ponder What Might Have Been. In this type of history, the absurd premise is that if one thing happened differently, the whole of European or world history would unfold in a quite different way.  This is logical nonsense.  In the poem, referred to earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote ‘a throw of the dice does not abolish chance’.  Quite so, but for Ferguson and co. a different throw does.  What if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo?  Well, what if he did?  What if he fell off his horse and broke his neck the next day – with his son and heir still in Austrian captivity?  Or, alternatively, what might have happened if Napoleon had lostthe Battle of Waterloo?  What if the allies fell out and took to fighting each other at the Congress of Vienna, in the course of which one party backed a Napoleonic restoration against Louis XVIII (Louis ‘the Inevitable’: perhaps my favourite royal epithet in French history)?  Not very likely, you might say, but – hey – by 1848 both branches of the Bourbons had been deposed anyway and by 1851 Napoleon’s nephew was ruling France.  Different outcomes are always possible – they’re still possible.  Vive l’Empereur!  There are no endings in history, but many fictional explorations of the possibilities I am discussing in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges.  Take Julius Caesar, declaring the die to have been cast when he crossed the Rubicon.  He must have thought he’d rolled high, too.  Until he got stabbed to death by Brutus and the rest, having ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time after all.  The throw of the dice did not abolish chance, Julius.  Watch out for my forthcoming Airport history paperback blockbuster, So What? Historians Ponder How Things Could Have Worked Out Exactly the Same…

Political Implications

Now, since my theme in this Blog is very often the relationship between the study of the past and political engagement in the present, you won’t be surprised to learn that I think that there are some political implications in all this.  On the one hand, there is always hope, because the narrative is never closed – maybe it’ll take time, maybe beyond our lifetimes, but if we don’t lose hope and stop fighting, maybe things will change for the better.  After all, only we can do that.  The equal implication, though, implicit in my discussion of The Shoah, is vigilance – because the narrative is never closed.  New Labour was not vigilant.  It assumed that the battle had been won, and it stopped fighting – and look what happened: the battle had not been won at all.  Even the narratives that seem to have come to a happy conclusion require us to keep fighting.  Hope and Vigilance: a committed historian’s watchwords.

Quite apart from the competitive interplay of actors’ intentions (which side ‘wins’) or the intervention of chance, the outcome of actions can be quite unintended by anyone.  I’ve written about the end of the Roman Empire as an ‘accidental suicide’, the ironic result of actions aimed not at destroying the Empire at all, but at dominating it in the tradition of more traditional fourth-century politics.  The intervention of chance and the fact that the outcomes of actions are not (usually teleologically, as in the oeuvre of Gussie Finknottle) reducible to the achievement or frustration of particular actors’ aims is a major problem with many models of social interaction (in my understanding of it, it’s a big problem with Heidegger’s, for example).  My way of seeing might be a good way of avoiding the totalising tendencies of such approaches.

In the next part of these musings, I’ll return to the folds of the cloth, and more on social interaction.  This is where we'll meet the ghosts.

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

Archaeology and Migration: Rethinking the Debate

[This is the text, more or less as given, of the key-note lecture I gave to the conference on on The Very Beginnings of Europe? Cultural and Social Dimensions of early Medieval Migration and Settlement (5^th-8^th centuries) that took place in Brussels on 17-19 May. The argument is essentially that by concentrating on debating the existence or scale of migration we are missing the really important questions, which concern why migration took place in the first place.  I also argue that the terms of the debate need radical rethinking, to  place fifth-century migration in a longer-term perspective looking at both sides of the divide between the 'Roman' fourth century and the 'migration-period' fifth century and to see the Roman and 'barbarian' regions as interlinked parts of the same world rather than as two antagonistic, opposing, confronted worlds.  Doing this will not only allow a better understanding of the migrations themselves (as I suggest by a quick look at the North Sea regions) but also permit a more politically responsible contribution to modern debates on migration.]

1. Introduction and …

It course a great honour for me to open the proceedings of such an international important conference on the origins of Europe by setting out my own perhaps rather idiosyncratic views on migration in what I prefer to call the post-imperial period, the fifth and sixth centuries, and I would like to thank Dries Tys and the organisers for their invitation.

2. … Historiography: Polarised debates

I must express my sincere thanks for this opportunity, because it may very well be that what I am about to say will not please very many people very much!  “A plague on both your houses!” cries Mercutio, famously, in Romeo and Juliet, and in some ways that will be the Leitmotif of what I have to say this evening, although with luck – unlike Mercutio – I will not find myself dying from stab wounds shortly afterwards, no matter how unhappy some of you might be with the general thrust of my argument.

I say this because although the study of these centuries around the North Sea has seen the production of ever more, and ever-better-quality, data of all sorts, new and old, they still seem to me to be being forced into interpretative frameworks which have not developed with the same rapidity, or, indeed, at all.  In some specific cases we seem to be going backwards, in our interpretations, almost as fast as techniques of recovery and analysis are going forward.  This retrograde movement is ironically veiled by a smoke screen laid down by appeal to the latest scientific developments.  I also want to say, very forcefully, that – politically – this is no time for a decline in the sophistication of our interpretations of the historical phenomena of migrations, their causes and consequences.  This is much more than an academic issue; it is one of social and political responsibility.

A good case study to illustrate what I mean is the analysis of settlement and house styles around the North Sea.  Traditionally, changes on rural settlement sites and the new forms of building that appeared in the fifth and sixth centuries were ascribed to movement from Germania into the former provinces of the Roman Empire.  These changes are well known: the spread of the Grubenhaus, the appearance of post-built halls with confronting doorways, and so on.  The similarity in building styles between lowland Britain (or England) and the North Sea areas of Germany and the Netherlands cannot be denied.  However, in the 1980s, as the popularity of migration as an explanation declined, people looked more closely at the settlement data without the existence of migration governing their analyses.  It was noticed that post-built houses had many of the same features, in terms of the ratio of length to breadth, etc., as some buildings on Romano-British sites.  A classic article by Simon James, Martin Millett and others suggested that there might have been a fair amount of Romano-British input into the development of the Anglo-Saxon hall.  ‘How Saxon', it was asked, 'is the Saxon house?’  The absence from Britain of the long house, the Wohnstallhaus, so familiar from North-West mainland Europe, was noted, as was the more disorderly arrangement of early Anglo-Saxon settlements when compared with the lay-out of, say Feddersen Wierde in the fourth century.  With these points in mind, some authors began to question the extent to which there had been an Anglo-Saxon migration at all.  The ‘no migration’ argument finds its most extreme form in a popular volume written by the Bronze Age specialist Francis Pryor, to accompany a television series.  This gave voice to the idea that perhaps the whole idea of the Anglo-Saxon migration was an historical myth.  Certainly some younger British Anglo-Saxonists liked to express this interpretation, often linking it to the alleged dominance or tyranny of a set of documentary historical narratives.

The posing of these sorts of question must be seen as important for the development of the discipline, and many of the points raised were either valid, or at least needed to be raised to make people look more closely at the evidence.  Nonetheless, the revisionist interpretation came in for formidable critique from Britain’s leading authority on early medieval settlement forms, Professor Helena Hamerow, who pointed out, notably, that the Wohnstallhäuser disappear on fifth-century mainland sites too and that fifth-century settlements in the Anglo-Saxon homelands also lost their planned lay-outs in the fifth century.  Thus the opponents of the migrationist reading of the settlement data were not comparing like with like.  Fifth-century settlements in lowland Britain were much more like their contemporaries on the east shore of the North Sea than the critics had imagined.

As I want to stress throughout this paper, the movement of people across the North Sea in the fifth and sixth centuries is not in doubt.  One does not need the written data to know about that.  The linguistic change that occurred in what is now England after the fall of the Roman Empire is impossible to account for without migration, and the same is true of a range of archaeological or material cultural features: certain forms of artefact and the cremation burial rite.  But it is also important to underline what I just said: it is impossible to account for these changes – fully or with any real degree of persuasiveness or conviction – without population movement; I did not say that population movement is what, in itself, explains them.

The revisionist interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon settlement data rapidly went from reasonable arguments, that the new house types were more of a hybrid than people had believed, to wild denials that a migration had even taken place.  Similarly, arguments in favour of the input of Anglo-Saxon migrants into socio-cultural change, usually (it must be said) rather less subtle even in their moderate form, soon reached the point of explaining all change in terms of migration and incorporating various extra, less intellectually worthy, elements.  The measurement of the width of doorways was alleged to show that houses were ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on both sides of the North Sea.  I have to say that measuring doorways to prove the migration of an ethnic group, seen in fundamentally primordialist terms, does not, to me, represent a great theoretical advance from measuring skulls to the same ends, such as went on a century ago and alas still seems to take place in French archaeology.

Similar arguments are visible elsewhere within settlement archaeology.  It was once proposed that the first phase of the famous Anglo-Saxon high status settlement site at Yeavering was British.  The counter argument essentially involved finding parallels for the various building features, concluding that more were found on ‘Anglo-Saxon’ sites than elsewhere and thence declaring the phase to be ‘Anglo-Saxon’.  In 2011, one really must wonder whether this is a valid means of establishing the ethnicity of a site’s inhabitants.  The discussion just referred to implies – essentially – that if one can determine where material cultural traits originate, geographically (or where most of them do), then that will tell you the geographical roots of the people concerned.  In turn, runs the implication, the geographical roots of the people concerned will provide their ethnic identity: Saxons or Britons.  When this reduces to a simple numerical exercise one really has to wonder whether it will withstand any sort of critical scrutiny.

Other examples multiply, especially when one moves outside England.  The spread of Anglo-Saxon settlement in what is now Scotland has, for example, been measured by the distribution of Grubenhäuser.  Yet, these are now known from sites right up the North Sea seaboard of Scotland as far as the Mounth.  Similarly, although such ‘Sunken-Featured Buildings’ are known in Gaul from the third century and are increasingly being discovered across Roman and post-imperial Europe, and are not known universally, either through time or region, in Germania, these buildings are still somehow claimed to represent unproblematically the presence of ‘Germanic’ newcomers, wherever these newcomers may have come from and whether or not they ever used such buildings in their homelands.  I have heard two objections to this: that the early Gallic examples do not have the ‘right’ number or combination of post-holes and that whatever archaeology might say, Tacitus demonstrates that the Germani had Grubenhäuser in his day…  Leaving aside just how worrying – indeed in my view just plain frightening – the perpetuation and persistence of such crude Germanism is, amongst scholars as young and otherwise intelligent as the origin of that last remark, the debate sums up some principal problems with the discussion of migration around the end of the Roman Empire.

It raises a number of crucial issues.  The first is the polarisation of the argument.  Either migration occurred and it explains every observable change in the archaeological record, or it did not occur, or had no explanatory role.  Note too that frequently – even if one does not wish to talk either side in this debate – one still finds oneself assigned to one or other camp.  Thus, for saying that various cultural forms are not evidence of migration I have been accused of denying that there were migrations.  Anyone with a university post really ought to have the intelligence to be able to distinguish between the argument that a piece of evidence does not prove that a migration took place, and the argument that no migration took place.  The first argument might be employed as an element in making the second argument but there is no reason at all why it even has to imply that the second argument is being made.  It is a shame that many eminent archaeologists have not been able to distinguish between these two arguments but evidently they have not.

The second issue is the domination of the debate by a historical master-narrative, even in counter-migrationist works.  The framework of the debate continues to be: did this thing referred to in later written sources happen, or did it not?  Crucial is the way that the archaeological evidence is simply not allowed to speak for itself, especially when what it seems to be saying contradicts a set of predetermined ideas. 

This is especially visible in looking at burial archaeology.  The introduction of the rite of furnished inhumation is still regarded as an index of the appearance of ‘Germanic’ barbarians within a region, regardless of the fact that the archaeological record provides absolutely no prima facie support for the idea.  Frans Theuws, Sebastian Brather and myself have been making this point for a long time and it might be that it is beginning to gain ground, but one only needs to look at the circular arguments and utter illogic that pervade the defences of the traditional position to see how reluctant archaeologists are to abandon it.  It is time to consider afresh other aspects of the material cultural record, like the Grubenhäuser, using the archaeological data similarly to see what they say on their own terms.  When we do so, we should not reject their testimony if they appear (superficially) to contradict the historical master-narrative. 

A third problem revealed by the discussion of the Anglo-Saxon debate on the origins of settlement and building types is its attitudes towards ethnicity.  This all too often remains untouched by the decades of research into the nature of ethnicity by anthropologists, sociologists and historians.  It seems still to be believed that archaeology provides some way into discovering the ethnicity of the people whose remains, funerary or otherwise, skeletal or cultural, are uncovered in the course of excavation.  In 2011, it is surely time to admit that it does not.  Objects do not have an ethnicity and the plotting on distribution-maps of cultural features – ritual, artefactual or in terms of building design – even where a geographical and chronological point of origin is revealed, does not yield any clear insight into the ethnicity of the people involved.  While I want to stress that this is a point that ought to have been learnt by now, I also want to stress – equally clearly – that this does not mean that archaeology has nothing to say about the archaeology of the early Middle Ages, as seems (inexplicably) to be the fear of traditionalists such as Volker Bierbrauer and Gianpietro Brogiolo.  Nor does it even mean that archaeology has nothing to say about ethnicity or ethnic change.  It certainly does not mean that ethnicity was unimportant in the period, which is a conclusion that has wrongly been drawn from the lack of a direct correlation between the archaeological record and historically-attested ethnic groups. 

The whole ethnicity debate is a manifestation of just how deeply archaeology of this period is permeated by the documentary historical master-narrative, incidentally and ironically a master-narrative of which most historians are nowadays sceptical.  Ethnic identities such as Frank, Lombard, Saxon, Goth, Frisian or Alaman could not and could never emerge from the archaeological record on its own, no matter how many computers the data were put through.  To talk in terms of a ‘Frisian’ brooch or a ‘Frankish’ buckle automatically, and by that act alone, subordinates the archaeological record to the documentary, evaporates any claim at all to be using pure archaeological argumentation or to be following any rigorous ‘Cartesian’ approach to the data.  However, we can still read, defences of H.J. Eggers’ 1950s argument that archaeology’s most important role in understanding this era is through the identification and study of ethnic groups. Eggers famously argued that he was avoiding ‘Mischargumentation’ but using historically-attested ethnic groups to name any grouping at all in the archaeological record is impossible without Mischargumentation.   Saying this does not represent the intrusion of some sort of new-fangled form of post-modernist theory into early medieval archaeology; it is simply the application of logic and argumentative rigour.  

Related to this is another key problem raised by the case study I mentioned: the persistence, even if often merely implicit, of Germanism, the idea of some kind of shared Germanic ethos or identity that transcends things like time and space.  Thus, if Germani from a particular area, who have never hitherto used burial with grave-goods, settle in a specific part of the Roman Empire and furnished inhumation is found there, then that custom must be a sign of the presence of these Germanic newcomers, because other peoples within the enormous area occupied by speakers of Germanic languages, extending from Scandinavia to the Ukraine, used this rite at some point (whether or not contemporaneously or even, on occasion, in a prior era) and the rite can therefore be adjudged ‘Germanic’.  The same goes for other material cultural features such as the Grubenhäuser. 

The fact that this approach stems ultimately from Graeco-Roman ethnographic chauvinism, turned round in the German renaissance and then, especially in the nineteenth-century process of German reunification, is well-known.  Less widely-appreciated, but well-documented, is the fact that the term ‘Free Germany’ or Germania Libera, so frequently encountered in the literature, originated in the twentieth century.  The uses to which the idea of a pan-Germanic history, culture and ethos were employed in the middle of the twentieth century are generally recognised, even if the ways in which they are essentially continued beliefs and political agendas that were common enough in the nineteenth are not.   And yet, in spite of the modern, politically contingent nature of these formulations being established facts, the idea that one group of germani can be treated interchangeably with another, and that there were fundamental, shared aspects of ‘germanitas’, of a ‘Germanic’ culture and ethos, continue to be encountered.  Thus the term ‘Germanic’ continues to be employed as though it has any meaning or analytical worth at all outside the sphere of linguistics.  Historians now argue strongly that it does not.

3. A conflict of theories? 

The polarised sides in the argument over migration have deployed their own bodies of theory.  Those who minimise the importance of migration have tended to turn to theory about ethnic identity and its mutability developed by social anthropologists, perhaps refining this with theories of practice, most obviously that developed by Pierre Bourdieu.  This lays great stress on human beings as active agents in historical change, through the interplay of all sorts of different political identities, of which those based on ethnicity are only one aspect.  The ‘migrationist’ camp has, by contrast, deployed so-called ‘migration theory’.  The problem here is that one body of ‘theory’ by no means stands in opposition to the other.

‘Migration theory’ in some ways isn’t theory at all, or at least not theory on the level of Bourdieu’s or Giddens’ structuration, or their analogues.  It is rather a set of observations about how migrations work.  This is not to imply that it is not of significance.  It is of considerable importance, although in a different way from those in which it has been employed thus far.  The issue is that Migration Theory has simply been adduced to show that migration could have taken place, even on a large scale, in the early Middle Ages.  Once the migrants have moved, however, one is still faced with the same old problems about how the newcomers could bring about cultural and political change or about how the ethnicity of what, even on a maximalist view, could only represent a small minority of the post-imperial population of a former imperial province, might come to be adopted by the remainder, and for that one needs to resort to the other types of theory, just mentioned, about socio-cultural interplay.  Or one assumes that migration suffices to explain all of these changes on its own.  And indeed that is usually what happens.  Once having adduced Migration Theory – and in so doing evidently thinking that one has countered one’s opponents’ use of Bourdieu and the rest – the argument progresses no further in explaining cultural, ethnic and political change.

Putting together all of what I have said thus far, one can perhaps see where my argument is going.  On the one hand we have the production of ever larger quantities of data, of good quality, and on the other we have the persistence of fairly old-fashioned, polarised ways of thinking about the period and indeed about the role of migration in particular.  Thus it seems to me that this data is being hammered into a framework which it will not and cannot fit, and that therefore neither side in these debates is capable of carrying the day.  Neither side is capable of producing a really convincing explanation.  This is why in my view so little real progress has been made in the interpretation of the archaeology, even as our knowledge of the nature of the archaeological data has progressed astonishingly.  In a negative reading, one could return to my Mercutio quote and my ‘plague on both your houses’: in other words both sides are wrong.  In many ways I could defend this position, but a more politic or emollient reading might be that both sides are right – as far as they go, or if we reconfigure the questions correctly.  Or that both sides have important things to bring to the table.  Frequently, as I read it, the traditional migrationist viewpoint is based in the better knowledge of archaeological data, but the opposite viewpoint frequently has the more advanced and more subtle ways of reading those data.

It is, therefore, time to rethink the debate and the framework.  What I want to do in the remainder of this lecture is to suggest other ways in which the framework needs to be adjusted to get us out of long-standing and unfruitful arguments, and then suggest a way towards a new model.

4. Migration and archaeology

The base line of my argument is acceptance of the fact that migration happened.  There is no place here for migration-deniers!  In some cases the archaeological and linguistic evidence makes that abundantly clear.  The change of the language from either Brythonic or (with more likelihood in my opinion) low Latin to Old English in what is now England and lowland Scotland, or from Gallic and low Latin to Old High German along the Rhine is impossible adequately to explain without invoking migration.  The spread of a cremation ritual from the North Sea coastal regions of Germany to England, or the appearance of various artefact forms there with direct ancestors in what we think of as the Saxon homelands: all these things cannot be fully explained without invoking the movement of people – even if we must admit that this was not the only factor involved.

But the fact is that normally migrations are very difficult to detect archaeologically.  Migrants frequently leave no material cultural trace.  Often they adopt the culture of their new homeland very rapidly.  We know full well from a range of sources that many, many thousands of barbarians from Germania and elsewhere crossed into Roman territory, throughout the whole period of the late Republic and the Empire.  Yet these immigrants left almost no archaeological trace of their presence.  Often the only archaeological traces of their movement are in the opposite direction.  Thus the Saxons who joined the Roman army are only visible archaeologically from the fact that after returning home they were cremated wearing their old uniform, with its buckles and brooches, or had these items buried with them. 

The Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain is one of the few migrations that can be demonstrated independently of historical evidence.  Indeed it is more or less the only post-imperial migration in from barbaricum into the Empire that can be so demonstrated, with the possible exception of some short-distance movements across the Rhine and Danube.  Ironically, most of the population movement attested to by the late antique archaeological record is in completely the opposite direction – from the Empire to barbaricum.  Further, much of the evidence cited as archaeological proof of migration is no such thing.  Furnished inhumation is one example; I think that the Grubenhaus will turn out to be another, once more rigorous levels of argument are adopted.  That, however, does not mean that migration did not happen.  When looked at in comparative context it is, if anything, the Anglo-Saxon case that is the unusual and unexpected one.  There is no especial reason why we should expect migration to show up at all in the archaeological record.  As I just said, four centuries of migration from barbaricum into the Empire are more or less archaeologically invisible.

5. Ethnicity

One reason why this is the case is that ethnicity – so often the object of archaeological investigation – is itself archaeologically invisible.  It is a shame that in 2011 this is still a point that needs to be made. 

Early medieval historians, since the 1960s and thus for nearly half a century, have adopted and adapted ideas from social anthropology about the ways in which ethnic identities are mutable and not a fixed ‘given’.  Analyses of ethnicity reveal that there is no fixed element is that defines an ethnic group.  For every case where such a grouping was said to be defined by a belief in common descent, or shared religion, or language, or whatever, there was another where the opposite was the case.  The only constant is that ethnicity is a simple matter of belief.  People think of themselves as belonging to one group and think of other groups (for whatever reason) as different.  Trying to find an innate (or primordial) factor, allowing us to identify past people as members of an ethnic group, other than what they said they were (at particular times), is a pointless task.  The implications of this for the archaeology of post-imperial Europe are obvious. 

Furthermore, anthropological studies of ethnic groups in Africa and south-east Asia revealed quite clearly that the links between material culture and ethnic identity were very vague indeed.  Sometimes they were the diametric opposite of those assumed in traditional archaeology; artefacts associated with one group were actually used in another to stress other types of social difference, such as age-grades.  What people said were the distinctive traits of their ethnic group ran contrary to what could actually be observed in practice.  One can find late antique parallels for these features.  These problems must be borne in mind when reading archaeological interpretations of ‘Britons’ and ‘Saxons’, ‘Franks’, ‘Alamans’ or ‘Gallo-Romans’.  They raise practical obstacles to accepting such ethnic identifications which are all but insurmountable. 

The other crucial lesson of modern social anthropology (and closer study of the written evidence from mainland Europe) was that ethnicity can be changed.  In other words, over time, a family that at one point thought of itself as, say, Catuvellaunian Britons could come to see itself as Roman.  That same family might, with the passing of further centuries, eventually consider itself to be East Anglian or English. The reasons why people change their identity are complex but one important factor is political and social advantage.  It is thus not difficult to envisage how post-imperial people might adopt new identities in order to maintain or improve their social standing in a world dominated by warrior élites who claimed a barbarian ethnicity: Frankish, Gothic, Burgundian or Saxon. 

Putting all these ideas together we can conclude that, even if we can identify the geographical origins of a custom, type of object or feature of a building, this would not necessarily provide a sure guide to the ethnicity of the people who used them.  Even if we could plausibly link a material cultural feature to an ethnic identity, it would not necessarily mean that all such people came, originally, from the same area.  ‘Saxons’, for example, could include immigrants from all over the Saxon homelands of north-west Germany but also people of native Romano-British descent and perhaps people of other origins as well.  These conclusions are vitally important. 

They have not, however, gone unchallenged.  It has been objected that people cannot just pick and choose whatever identity they want.  There are constraints on this, such as whether the group into which membership is sought will accept them.  Furthermore, ethnic identity is not just a matter of political advantage; even minority identities can exert a powerful affective force, holding back change.  Simple ‘straight swaps’ are in fact not very clearly attested in the evidence from this period.  Actually, however, none of these good points ultimately negates the general thrust of the broadly constructivist/situationalist position vis-à-vis ethnicity.

Nonetheless, recently, as well as generally unconvincing appeals to cemetery data to support the counter-revisionist position, genetic evidence has been adduced to prove large-scale immigration, particularly the study of modern DNA.    Other, more sophisticated analyses of skeletal data have also been developed which might also be able to shed light on the migration.  These include the analysis of the stable isotopes in the tooth enamel of the excavated skeletons of this period and ‘ancient DNA’, extracted from bone samples from early medieval cemeteries.  Techniques have now advanced to a stage where this data is considered capable of furnishing usable conclusions. 

One might point to numerous general methodological problems involved in the study of modern DNA evidence.  For me, though, the crucial issue is that it fundamentally misses the point.  Examination of its underlying assumptions is revealing.  One assumption is that migration is something that happened in discrete periods, so that, for example, the fifth and sixth centuries are often known as the period of the migrations (an appellation long criticised).  Thus, in this view, demonstrable population-mixing can be dated to such specific blocks of time.  Yet migration is a constant of human existence.  I’ve already mentioned that people were moving from barbaricum east of the Rhine into the Roman Empire for centuries before 400.  People moved, within the Empire, on a large scale too.  And of course people have continued to move and to marry the inhabitants of other areas ever since.  The similarities between the DNA of England and Germany might result from migration from Germany in the late antique period but it might stem from such movement at many other times and, indeed, from movement in the opposite direction.  Once again, movement from the Empire to barbaricum, amply demonstrated in the archaeological record, is excluded from reasoning because it does not fit a model derived from problematic written sources.  Thus this use (or misuse) of DNA is driven by a particular, and a particularly crude, reading of history and its results chosen to fit this story rather than to examine it. 

Another, perhaps even more serious, problem concerns the movement from DNA to conclusions about ethnic or political identity.  DNA chains, like bronze belt buckles, do not have an ethnic identity.  One way in which one counters the points made against the mutability of ethnicity is by stressing that it is multi-layered.   It is deployed (or not) in particular situations as the occasion demands.  A person’s DNA will not give you a sense of all of the layers of that person’s ethnicity, or of which s/he thought the most important or even if s/he generally used a completely different one, or of when and where such identities were stressed or concealed. 

Let me illustrate this.  A male Saxon immigrant into the Empire in, say, the fourth century, would – one assumes – have DNA revealing the area where he grew up, but he would probably increasingly see himself, and act, as a Roman.  His Saxon origins would have no part in his social, cultural or political life, and even less for his children, if he stayed in the Empire.  If he returned home with all the cachet of his imperial service, it might well have been his Roman identity that gave him local status.  However, if a distant male relative of his moved into Britain a hundred and fifty years later, his DNA might be very similar but, in complete contradistinction, this man might make a very big deal of his Saxon origins for they would, or could, propel him to the upper echelons of society.  DNA tells us nothing about any of this. 

What is pernicious about this use of genetic data is that it is essentialist.  It views a person’s identity as one-dimensional and unchanging, and it sees that dimension as entirely derived form that person’s biological and geographical origins.  In short, it reduces identity to something very similar to nineteenth-century nationalist ideas of race.  Everyone sane knows that people moved from northern Germany to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries.  In that sense, these expensive analyses tell us nothing we did not already know. 

However, in their implicit reduction of identity to a form of race, and by masking all the other contingent and interesting aspects of cultural interaction and identity-change, they not only risk setting back the understanding of this period by more than a century but provide pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific ammunition for present-day nationalists, xenophobes and racists.  Many of the same general points can be levelled at other analyses of such things as the isotopes from teeth, which are far less exclusive in the geographical zones revealed than one might hope – again, the part of the map chosen is often determined by the historical story the analyst wants to tell.

6. Migration and explanation

All these points are profoundly significant and cannot be ignored.  Allow me to reiterate.  Archaeology does not and cannot in itself reveal ethnicity; genes do not and cannot reveal ethnic identity; we should not expect migration necessarily to show up in the archaeological record; yet there is no need to doubt migration happened in the post-imperial period, or even that it in some cases, such as the North Sea it happened, over time, on some scale. 

The important issue, implicit in what I have just said, is the relationship between migration and explanation.  The example I gave of the two Saxon migrants to Roman Britain makes the point clear.  The question that must be asked is why migration and ethnic change played a different role in the history of the fifth century than in that of the third or fourth.  As I have said, thus far the debate seems to be polarised into two arguments: migration happened, and therefore it explains everything that we can see happening; or it didn’t happen on any scale and was therefore unimportant.  Neither argument can be made to fit the data in any sophisticated or really convincing fashion.  We need new questions: a new agenda.

In the current political situation it is, furthermore, extremely important to establish this agenda.  Moving from the demonstration of migration to the explanation of the downfall of the Roman Empire through appeal to migration can be highly irresponsible, at best.  Southern German newspapers have, for example, reviewed a museum exhibition set out in the traditional migrationist paradigm as showing how ‘the Roman Empire fell because it could not keep out the immigrants’ and that we can learn from this.  When a British historian places an argument that the Roman Empire fell because of the immigration of large numbers of barbarians next to arguments that the end of Rome was the end of civilisation and that we need to take care to preserve our own civilisation, when another British historian writes sentences saying ‘the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct’, and especially when the arguments of both involve considerable distortions of the evidence to fit their theories, one cannot help but wonder whether these authors are wicked, irresponsible or merely stupid.  Are they setting themselves up as ideologues of the xenophobic Right or have they simply not realised the uses to which such careless thinking and phrasing can be put?  I have already drawn attention to the worrying implications of the use of genetic data to study this period, and they do not stop with implications about monolithic ethnic identities based upon genetics.

If we accept that it is fundamentally misguided to start looking at the archaeological record primarily in terms of whether or not it demonstrates migration, broad new interpretative horizons are opened up for us.  In particular, new horizons are presented and, simultaneously, ways of contributing in more humane fashion to current debates about immigration, if we break down the set of binary oppositions that bedevil the study of the period: Romans against barbarians; Saxons against Britons; (especially importantly) the Roman empire against barbaricum; the Roman period against the Migration period; Britain versus the mainland of Europe; the Saxon migration moving simply from east to west.  As a means of demonstrating this, I want to end this lecture by briefly suggesting some ways of recasting the study of the North Sea in this period.

6. The Channel/North Sea Cultural Zone: A different framework

My key point is that we should start seeing the late and post imperial North Sea in the same way as archaeologists have long become used to seeing it in the seventh century and later: that is to say as a zone of cultural exchange and interaction, not as a political border.  The domination of the historical narrative means that we are accustomed to see the North Sea as a zone for travel principally in an east-west direction, first by Saxon raiders and then by migrants to Britain.  We have also become used to a separation between the study of the interaction of the two sides of the North Sea (in this limited fashion) and the study of Northern Gaul.  To understand this period, we need to look at all the areas bordering on the North Sea, not just those which the historical sources lead us to think were involved in migration, whether as destination or as points of departure.  This will change our perspective importantly.

One of the most important things that we must do is break down the idea that we must see the Roman and barbarian worlds as in a binary opposition.  The links between the two were dense.  Hostile military confrontation was only one element, and probably not the most common.  The lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube where saturated with Roman influences that took all sorts of forms and went far beyond the simple importing of Roman goods, enormously important though this was.  We must remember that the exchange of goods and cultural of influences between the Empire and barbaricum in the fourth century went overwhelmingly from the Empire to barbaricum. The network of relations determined the nature of politics, depending upon the links that rulers could make with the Empire.  Roman cultural ideas also dominated.  Alamannic chieftains may have produced imitations of the brooches used as badges of office in the Roman army; as mentioned Saxons used the elements of their uniform as key elements of funerary display.  Barbarians were long accustomed to modelling their own jewellery on Roman exemplars.  And so on.  Large numbers of barbarians served in the fourth-century Roman army.  Many went home, as we have seen, when their period of service was up.  Clearly traders plied the routes not only along the North Sea coast as far as Scandinavia, but also along the amber routes along the Elbe. 

By the fourth century, then, Germanic-speaking barbaricum was very much socially, economically and culturally, the hinterland of the Roman Empire.  It depended upon links with the Empire for all sorts of social and political stability.  Similarly a good case can be made that the late Roman Empire itself depended upon the existence of the barbarian world for its political and social stability, even if in very different – political and ideological – ways.  These were not, therefore opposed, separate worlds, but intricately interwoven areas of the same world.  It is also very important to underline that in the fourth century individuals were travelling north from the Empire to barbaricum to at least as great an extent as they were moving from barbaricum to the Empire, even if they were only going home.  Ideas went with them of course and cultural influences going north were by far the most important.  We only need to look at burials to see this.  Note too that contacts and cultural influences seem to have spread from Roman Britain to the Saxon homelands, and indeed it might be that an official settlement of Saxons took place in Britain in the late fourth century, which would increase the ties between the two regions, but they were also dense between the north of Gaul and the Saxon homelands.  The areas around the North Sea, on both sides of the frontier, form a single interlinked world, even if politically and culturally divided. 

This is of huge importance if we want to use Migration Theory really to understand what went on in the fifth and sixth centuries.  This theory has stressed the importance of the flow of information in both directions, to and from the land of destination.  This continued to be the case after the Roman Empire’s final crisis.

The way that North Sea barbaricum, northern Gaul and Roman Britain were interlinked is made especially clear by the fact that all three suffered profound crisis at the same time, around 400.  The crisis in Roman Britain might require some nuance in terms of the speed of collapse but it cannot be denied that a dramatic crisis took place leading within a couple of generations to the collapse of town life, of the hitherto prosperous villa-system, a monetary economy, organised industry, long distance trade and so on.  At the same time, northern Gaul suffered a sharp decline in its towns, one or two of which were abandoned as in Britain, the final collapse of a villa-system and dramatic economic decline.  This synchronicity is acknowledged all too rarely, given the lack of contact between British and French archaeologies and this means that explanations rarely take account of the similarity of the changes in the two areas – although the explanations must differ to some extent.  What is even more remarkable, though, is the way that these transformations within the Empire are contemporary with very similar structural changes along the North Sea coast of Germany, in the Saxon homelands.  There too, we see the desertion of settlements and changes in the location of cemeteries, as well as the appearance of the new furnished burial ritual and the concomitantly increased use of the funerary ceremony as a means of cementing or restoring a family’s local social position.  It is against this background that we also have to see the appearance of very similar-looking settlements in all three areas, with post-built halls and Grubenhäuser. 

Such a way of thinking by-passes old questions linking new types of building to single, concrete ethnic types and their arrival.  Seen thus, what we have are new developments that respond to similar circumstances through the interplay and interchange of cultural influences.  This allows us also to incorporate the appearance of similar building forms in different areas, not linked by the same process of migration, and the early appearance of Grubenhäuser in northern Gaul.  It allows migration and it permits migration to have a role in the spread of ideas but it does not restrict the explanation either to migration alone or to indigenous development.  Migration theory is important here in that it has stressed that movement during migration is rarely one-way.  Migrants return home, either permanently or, as scouts, to bring new migrants and show them the way.  Thus even during the fifth-century migrations we should not envisage movement across and around the North Sea as one-way.  Indeed the written sources themselves describe movements in both directions.

Migration, then, must be retained as an element of the description and as a part of the explanation for specific cultural forms, but the important point is to view the North Sea world as a interlinked whole, which moves the main problem of explanation elsewhere.  Migration should be seen as a symptom of change but not its cause.  What produced the migration?  What produced the crisis that we can see taking similar forms in various areas around the north-western fringes of the Roman Empire?  Here we must return to close linkage of the regions on both sides of the frontier.  They shared, in admittedly different ways, the fact that social stability relied upon a particular style of Roman imperial government, based on the frontier.  In northern Gaul the state had harnessed the rural landscape to the supply of the military and bureaucratic personnel resident in the region.  In a different way, much of the prosperity and stability of Britain was related to its supply of grain and other raw materials to the Roman army.  The imperial court’s location on the frontier served other purposes in distributing and redistributing patronage and maintaining the involvement of the north-western aristocracy in imperial governmental structures.  That in turn was probably vital to maintaining the local pre-eminence of aristocrats in the area.  Simultaneously, this government closely watched the frontier and maintained a balance of power between different barbarian groups.  Gifts were important, particularly to the leaders of barbarian groups away from the frontier and those around the North Sea coast seem to have relied heavily on the control of trade and thus access to prestigious Roman imports.

Thus, when the imperial government was removed to Italy from 381, definitively from 395, and took its eye not only off the management of patronage in the north-west but also off the maintenance of frontier policy, it is not difficult to see why crisis ensued, resulting equally in the Great Invasion of 406 and the British usurpations of the same year.  The archaeological changes we can detect in all of the regions under consideration can easily be understood as manifestations of this crisis.  In the convoluted politics that followed, and the social and political crises on both sides of the North Sea, a matrix of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, such as Migration Theory has discussed, can be envisaged, creating new relationships across the North Sea and movement of people, particularly from the Saxon homelands into Britain.  It is worth remembering that the Saxons only appear in the third century, like many other groups, and that earlier groupings like the Frisians, Angles and Jutes disappear, only to reappear in our period.  It looks as though the Saxon confederacy fractured and fragmented, and some groups who lost out moved into the former Empire, in a manifestation of a dynamic that is attested as far back as Caesar’s day and earlier.  The importance of taking a wide perspective – and not looking at migration between regions in isolation – is that this process was probably also linked to the appearance and short-lived political dominance of the Thuringians on the Elbe valley.

In Britain especially and in Northern Gaul local social competition created a context within which barbarian warrior-leaders could create opportunities for themselves, very much within frameworks whose outlines had existed since the fourth century.  Thus the crisis around the North Sea produced push factors from barbaricum and pull factors within the provinces, but all ultimately stemmed not from the previous antagonistic separation of these worlds but their intimate symbiotic connections.

7. Conclusion.

The framework I have sketched out is subtle enough, and flexible enough, to accommodate a range of interpretative factors, geographical and chronological dynamism and variability.  These incorporate the data as they stand without having to resort to explaining away data that do not fit, and they do not force people into one or another of two mutually exclusive, opposing camps.  This framework also allows the archaeological evidence to speak for itself without adopting a confrontational attitude towards the study of the written sources and what they have to tell us.  Finally, it should promote more sensitive understanding of the challenges of modern migration and its processes, rather than erroneously positing ‘us’ Europeans as the civilised Romans opposed to ‘them’, the threatening foreign outsiders, whom the French Right at least are already accustomed to calling ‘les Nouveaux Barbares’.  Thus, although this might have seemed to be a paper that set out to annoy everyone, it is in fact an attempt to propose a framework within which a new more intellectually subtle and sophisticated consensus might be possible.