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

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

Part 1 is here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Part 3 is here

The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 2 of 4

Part 1 of this piece can be found here

Transformations around 400


Thus far, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the facts that the northern Gallic social élite was, outside the Triererland, not especially wealthy and that, along with the region’s economy and most of its social structures, it was intimately connected to the imperial state focused upon Trier. Considering the main issue with which this article is concerned, we can conclude that, even were the Merovingians handed control of northern Gaul via treaty in a smooth transfer of political authority, they would not have inherited a powerful, independently wealthy regional aristocracy.

The preceding discussion renders almost predictable the effects on the region produced by political changes after c.380. In 381 Emperor Gratian moved the imperial court from northern Gaul to Italy and Milan. A series of changes is then visible across the region. In most areas villas enter a final phase of desertion, being abandoned by the second quarter of the fifth century. There were exceptions of course. In more southerly areas, around Paris, there is much better evidence of villa survival until rather later in the century, something that seems also be true in the Triererland. The picture, as before, is rarely a straightforward one of economic decline. In the south of the modern Netherlands, around 400 there is a late phase of construction on some rural sites, such as at Gennep. However, these are not villas of the old type. Even with these caveats, however, the impression cannot be avoided that the very late fourth and earlier fifth centuries constituted a period of profound change in the northern Gallic rural settlement pattern and economy. The development is again incompatible with an explanation in terms of an alleged ‘de-Romanisation’ (as is made clear by the continuing – indeed the increased – usage of Roman symbols in burials) or simply through a new military culture. The fifth-century end of the villas makes the latter explanation unlikely. The fourth-century aristocracy of the region had already, as we have seen, been very largely militarised and even those not involved in the army directly were linked to it economically. We cannot be sure that fifth-century aristocrats were markedly more militarised than most of their predecessors. Indeed, sixth-century Frankish law suggests that civic, Roman aristocrats were still a feature of the area’s social structures. If the fifth-century insecurity led to more fighting and greater (and more violent) competition for local leadership, then this affected the survival of villas not through a shift towards a more military state of mind, allegedly eschewing elaborate building, but through the need to spend surplus on local alliances and the equipment of a retinue, leaving little for the upkeep of stone buildings. Aristocrats had to choose where to spend their limited resources and the times ultimately demanded that they choose politics and security over architectural embellishment. Ultimately, the final demise of the northern Gallic villa is an economic issue, not one of a shift in mentalities – even if the latter can reasonably be postulated.

This impression is underlined by study of the region’s towns, which underwent further dramatic contraction and in one or two cases died out completely. There is little trace of occupation on the intermediate settlements, the vici and castra. This is partly related to the problems of dating very late Roman occupation. The two principal supports for such chronologies are coins and finewares and both are problematic after c.400. The latest developments of Argonne Ware pottery, to which we shall shortly return, were not recognised as such until about 1990, which probably means that traces of fifth-century occupation had earlier been wrongly assigned to the fourth century instead. Additionally, the region’s coin supply dried up early in the fifth century after the closure of the Trier mint. While undoubtedly making the identification of late Roman levels very difficult, these changes are themselves significant. The end of coinage and the failure of local powers to mint replacements, after the end of a series of silver imitation solidi in the middle quarters of the century, imply a significant reduction in the scale and complexity of the economy.

Truly monetized commerce requires a neutral medium of exchange and a guarantee of a coin’s value, accepted by both parties to a transaction. The government of a state or polity has the power to provide such a guarantee, moreover one which can be accepted across large distances. With the crisis of the imperial state in northern Gaul around 400, such guarantees disappeared and the areas over which objects were traded shrank accordingly. In whose name the silver imitation solidi, already mentioned, were struck remains mysterious but these coins nevertheless enabled some monetary transactions to take place across a reasonable distance in the middle quarter of the century. Their face value was nevertheless fairly high and the absence of small change is a crucial index of a downturn in the extent of the economy’s monetization. Such coins possibly served other purposes than the strictly commercial, as was the case with the gold solidi. When these silver coins, which are not numerous in any case, ceased to be struck, coinage in the region was limited to imported Eastern Roman solidi until the Frankish rulers began to strike solidi themselves in the sixth century. The function of this type of high-value coinage (1/72 lb. of gold) might very well have been more political than economic. Small denomination coinage remained absent until the seventh century.

Other coins were available nonetheless. The frequency with which Roman coins are found in the pouches buried with sixth-century Merovingian males suggests that such coins continued to serve as handy units of bullion. Their use was more limited than that of a properly minted and guaranteed currency. It has long been known that, in the sixth century, scales or balances are known in northern Gallic burials. Frequently found in lavishly-furnished graves, their symbolism seems to refer to a role in vouchsafing ‘weights and measures’ and this might (though there are other interpretations) have been related to determining the correct quantity of precious metal in old coins. Although these data come from a later period than that which under consideration, they seem suggestive of mechanisms that could have existed as the late imperial monetary economy collapsed. If we combine this evidence with the conclusions just reached about the relative power of the local aristocracy, it is clear that the word of such a local leader would not be recognised by both parties to a transaction over wide areas: another feature in restricting the distances over which commercial exchanges might be made. Some evidence, to which we will return, suggests that the standing of northern Gallic aristocratic families might have been somewhat more secure in the early fifth century than it was a hundred years later and this could have extended the zones over which their word was held to be good, but the general point will surely stand. With the collapse of monetary exchange, the only other mechanism for long distance movement of goods was that associated with the imperial economy but, in the context we have outlined, this too was fading fast.

It is here that Wickham’s attention to the ceramic data is important. His account is as follows:

In northern Gaul around 400 by far the commonest fine ware in the sigillata tradition was Argonne ware … often quite elaborately decorated with a roller wheel … with a 400km radius of distribution from the Rhine to well south of the Loire … [I]t continued into the late sixth century; it reached less than 200km by now … but survived a century into the Merovingian period as a production on a substantial scale.

If this conclusion can be reached from this evidence, then there must – clearly – be something wrong with the model I have sketched. Something about the other evidence, whether of the rural and urban settlement sites or of the burials, to which I will shortly return, must conceal a crucial element in the equation or else the way we read such data is fundamentally mistaken. The picture of imperial crisis and collapse in the region, after c.380, that I have drawn from the written sources must also be wide of the mark. Wickham has (as we have seen) ways of explaining the exiguous settlement evidence in terms of a shift in aristocratic culture to a more military model, which would fit with the idea of the region’s militarisation. This latter proposal is not entirely satisfactory for reasons that have been discussed, but the main point is that Wickham presents a coherent, rounded argument.

Whether intended this way or not, a fair and straightforward reading of the passage quoted is as follows: this pottery was distributed over an area in excess of 500,000 km2 and continued to be produced ‘on a substantial scale’ through the fifth century to the end of the sixth century, even if the area over which it was distributed had shrunk by half by then. The image presented by such a reading is, however, misleading. If we examine Didier Bayard’s study of this form of ceramics, a rather different picture emerges. We find (figure 1) that in his early fifth-century Phase 2, almost all Argonne ware is found within a 300km-radius of the kilns (6 sites yielding such pottery beyond that radius compared with 66 within it) and within in a ‘box’ 500km (east-west) by 300km (north-south). That is an impressive area of 150,000 km2, but still considerably less than that implied by Wickham’s statement. More to the point, by the time of Bayard’s Phase 3 (roughly 440s-460s) this had contracted further. All of the finds he catalogued from the middle decades of the fifth century lay within a 300-km radius and most (67-79%) of them within 200km. Most lie in a box covering 120,000 km2, less than half the area calculated on the basis of the 300km radius of distribution. Thus, this contraction, which a straightforward reading of Wickham’s account implies was something that happened slowly over the fifth and sixth centuries, actually happened quite suddenly around the middle of the fifth, with the abandonment of the Rhine forts. By the time of the political end of the western Empire in the late fifth century (Bayard’s Phase 4) the distribution of Argonne ware had contracted so that 98% of it was found within a 200km radius – in fact within a 200kmx200km box (a considerably smaller surface area) – though fairly evenly distributed within that zone. Argonne ware does continue into the late sixth century but it is important to clarify that the last decorated phase dies out around 540 and that thereafter only standard undecorated forms were produced. So, rather than being distributed across somewhere between 125,000 and over half a million square kilometres during the late fifth and sixth centuries, the impression easily gained from Wickham’s statement, this pottery was in fact only traded across 40,000km2 during this period. In comparative terms, nevertheless, that might represent a widespread distribution of material, but how it relates to other post-imperial ceramics needs to be reassessed. It is now, for example, suggested that some post-imperial wares made in Leicestershire were distributed over an area ranging from the Channel coast to Yorkshire, a not dissimilar reach. It is also important to note the end of decoration in the early sixth century and the restriction in the range of forms, both of which features underline an economic change not unfairly characterised as decline.

The last phases of occupation on the Rhine forts are shadowy and a sophisticated reinterpretation, pondering whether they were still bases for regular troops or, moving away slightly from the usual narrative, centres for local warlords, is overdue. Either way, it seems clear that after the middle of the fifth century whoever did control these forts was no longer in a position to be able to guarantee a market for the products of the Argonne kilns on anything like the old scale. Overall, the link between the collapse of the state and severe economic contraction could not be clearer.

The archaeological cemetery evidence fits this picture of crisis. From about the time that Gratian moved the court back to Italy, the number of lavishly furnished burials in northern Gaul increases steadily. In these burials, men are interred with weapons and, more frequently the belt-sets and brooches that were the insignia of imperial office. In some cases they were accompanied by burials of women and children, the former buried with a wide range of new jewellery forms, notably brooches. The latter and the desire to fit this change in the record into the old narrative of barbarian conquest led to the assignment of these graves to incoming ‘Germanic’ settlers. A closer examination of the archaeological data (the rite itself and the artefacts deposited), freed from these assumptions, combines with the lack of any documentary historical support for the notion to compel a more subtle reading. This sees the subjects of these burials, as yet comparatively few in number and found in small clusters, often on larger cemeteries, as representing locally powerful families whose status was called into question by the death of a member. Given what has been said about the bases of the northern Gallic aristocracy’s power, so closely related to the presence and legitimation of the Roman state it should be no surprise that their local standing should have been jeopardised by the removal of effective, regular governmental presence. It should equally be unsurprising that the Moselle valley, where the wealthiest nobles seem to have been concentrated, is largely free from such burials at this time. The choice of items, and their symbolism, also makes sense in the context described. In the absence of effective imperial presence, the bases of a family’s legitimate authority were proclaimed, especially when an adult male member died, questioning the inheritance of such authority. In this situation, legitimate power was proclaimed by the use of badges that made a link with imperial power. Otherwise they stressed traditional Roman aristocratic virtues and pastimes, such as hunting. The women’s costume, one imagines, made a comment about their status as a chaste wife, a good mother, and so on. As imperial presence grew ever more distant, the use of the badges of office waned accordingly, although other symbolism persisted. Nonetheless, examination of the ritual in comparative perspective suggests that, as yet, the power of these families was not decisively threatened. In a slightly later period, the distribution of furnished burials was far more widespread across communities, and the choice (and number) of goods related to the life-cycle and gender. Rather than being concentrated in the burials of a particular kindred, but spread across subjects of both sexes and all ages, grave-goods were focussed upon mature adult males and younger women.

On the eve of incorporation into the Merovingian kingdom, the northern Gallic aristocracy was even less wealthy than it had been before and its status within local communities was more under threat as the effective legitimacy of a claimed link with the Empire faded. Although this does not imply that many aristocratic families had necessarily lost their local pre-eminence, it seems to be the case that the social, political and economic arenas within which they lived had shrunk considerably. It is against this backdrop that the famous passages of Salvian’s De Gubernatio Dei should be understood. Long taken, doubtless wrongly, as the paradigm for late Roman western aristocracy, Salvian’s comments must be placed in a very specific chronological and geographical context. The assumption that his tirades against the corrupt aristocracy of his times were aimed at the magnates of the Trier region whence he hailed (and whence he had fled, not least as a result of the actions of these rapacious individuals) is not certain but is a reasonable working hypothesis. We have already seen that the Triererland was an exceptional region of northern Gaul. Archaeological data make it clear that we should have no reason at all to generalise from the aristocrats of the lower Moselle valley. What has perhaps been less fully discussed is the precise moment that Salvian was describing. Writing in the 440s, it is reasonable to suppose that his account of the tyrannical curiales belongs to the 430s or perhaps slightly earlier; the issue turns on how recent one supposes that Salvian’s arrival in the south was at the time of his writing. If the picture he painted does belong to the 430s then it is quite instructive when viewed against the archaeological evidence.

In our current state of knowledge, this decade would lie towards the end of the period of occupation of the Triererland’s villas. The sharp decline in the distribution of Argonne ware and the end of occupation of the Rhine forts in the 440s have also been mentioned, and the politically-active generation of the region would largely have been children (at most) when even a usurper emperor last ruled at Trier. The area was fast approaching a severe, critical point and it is unsurprising that it had become a political hot-house. There was no imperial presence to regulate those who claimed to wield power in its name and none of the usual rotation of offices that was part of the efficient management of patronage. Thus those who could continued to cling onto their ‘legitimate’ power, and in the critical situation of the second quarter of the fifth century they exploited it to the maximum. Without the opportunity to share this power, their opponents could only adopt the strategies mentioned by Salvian: either to wield local authority without formal imperial legitimation, that is to say to become rebels or bagaudae (in the eyes of the imperial government or of those who claimed to act in its name) or to turn to the barbarians for support. The three responses to crisis described by Salvian (claiming legitimate power; claiming power without allegedly imperial legitimation; and turning to the barbarians for support) were, in general, the options available to the political classes throughout the fifth century west, but around Trier they took on a particular form and intensity. The fourth option, the one taken by Salvian, was to flee to areas where the Empire’s writ still ran, and he does not seem to have been the only one to have chosen this course of action. In the Triererland of the 430s-440s, this must have seemed an attractive choice, especially as (unlike us) contemporaries did not know that the Empire would not return. Indeed their knowledge of history doubtless suggested that, eventually, inevitably, it would. For these reasons, the decisions to join the barbarians or to follow the ‘bagaudic’ course – those that seem to modern observers to be the ‘far-sighted’ or ‘realistic’ options – must have been taken by contemporaries very much in extremis. On their periodic forays back into northern Gaul (fizzling out in the 440s – as we know but contemporaries did not), the representatives of the Empire dealt equally harshly with bagaudae and barbarians. As well as creating these risks, turning one’s back on the traditional bases of political power brought all sorts of other identities into question, not least one’s masculinity. That the depredations of those who claimed a legitimate imperial basis for their power should have driven their rivals to take these actions is a graphic indication of how critical the situation on the lower Moselle had become.

Part 3 here.

More on the end of the late antique state, and how I might (possibly) be just a wee, teency-weency bit, well ... wrong, basically (in which I go to Cambridge and get a sound kicking - in the nicest possible way)

[Some thoughts, additional to those given in my earlier post (May last year) on the end of the late antique state.  These focus essentially on the definition of the state, and on an extra point of detail on the Gallic situation, relating to Argonne Ware (pottery) production.  These are followed by some reflections on some very pertinent and useful critical points brought out in discussion with a seminar at the Cambridge Late Antiquity Network and finally some musings on the attractions and importance of having to change your mind!]

So on Tuesday I went down to Cambridge to speak to the Cambridge Late Antiquity Network Seminar (CLANS); to talk to the CLANS - see what they did there?  Everything has to have an acronym that spells another word these days, or it doesn't count.  Next week, for example, I am looking forward with unbounded excitement to hearing about PURE, my own institution's new system for something-or-other to do with research 'outputs'.  I am assured that this does not stand for Pile of University-Regulated Excrement although, interestingly enough, I am reliably informed that in early modern England a 'pure-collector' was indeed someone who gathered up fresh dung.  This may or may not be coincidental.  [As it happens, it turned out to stand for PUblication and REsearch, and was a pretty good, useful system.]

Anyway, as it happens this was the first time I had ever given a paper in Cambridge.  If anyone had been waiting for the last (almost) 25 years (since I started my post-graduate research) for me to register on this index of academic acceptability, I can't help feeling that they'd have been more than a little let down, for reasons that will become apparent.  The paper was in many respects a re-run of the hastily assembled piece I presented in Edinburgh last May but I had decided to make it a case study of Gaul.  This meant editing out the comparative thoughts on Spain, England and Italy, which in turn gave me room for an expanded section on defining the state and for some more detail on the Gallic situation.  Here I will just give the 'new bits' (although some is lifted from a paper I gave in Manchester, years ago, on 'state, violence and state violence') and then move on to the important bit, which is the response from the audience.

1. The State

"There are two ways of reading my title. From its current phrasing, you might probably see at as discussing the demise simply of a particular ideal sub-type: the end of the ‘late antique state’. Let’s call that the ‘weak thesis’. Alternatively, it might be seen as meaning the end of anything that can reasonably be called a state with any analytical precision, in the late antique west. The latter, ‘the strong thesis’, is actually the way that I mean it and so I should probably have entitled the paper ‘the end of the state in the late antique west’, although I feared that that might imply that that was where the state ended; that the state didn’t continue in other areas. The ‘strong thesis’ is what I want to try and convince you of, but if not then I hope acceptance of the weak thesis will suffice and that you might pick up on other issues of interest, although, truth to tell, the weak thesis is a bit banal.

The idea that anything that could helpfully be called a state ended in around 600 in western Europe is a historiographically unfashionable view. It has become normal for people to talk about ‘the state’ in early medieval Europe. There are different ways of looking at the genealogy of this topic. In some ways the idea of the early medieval state has quite deep roots, since some of the 19th-century Germanist historians did not seem to have much of a problem in thinking about the ‘Staat’ in this period. On the other hand, the idea of the break-down of the state is also pretty old. In days of yore the post-imperial world was seen as experiencing a collapse into anarchy. In that context people discussed things like ‘blood-feud’ which were supposed to have existed as ‘self-help mechanisms’ in a stateless world – supposed to have existed at all, some would say – the rise of ‘feudalism’ was seen as a response to untrammelled violence and disorder. The move away from these historical myths has entailed the rise or more properly the rebirth of what I at least consider to be another; that of the early medieval state.

It is quite likely, I imagine, that the scepticism about early medieval statehood arises from the influence of thinkers like Weber, whose definition of a state does not really fit early medieval examples. Subsequent theorists have tended to go down similar routes.

But in early medieval history, there has been a counter-move, towards rehabilitating the notion of an early medieval state. This is, to no small degree, linked to the rise of what is called the ‘consensus model’ of early medieval politics, which argues that political negotiation and the use of royal ritual created the consensus necessary to keep aristocrats in league with the kings and indeed get anything done. This is a move linked most obviously to the writings of Professor Dame Janet L. Nelson. The idea of a zero-sum model of politics, wherein a growth in aristocratic power equals a commensurate reduction of royal power (or vice versa), was seriously questioned by, for example, the ‘Bucknell Group’. More fashionable now is the idea that kings and aristocrats worked together in mutually beneficial fashion, in which a growth of the power of one can lead to a growth in the power of the other too: a constantly increasing total amount of power, if you like. Many good historians have shown pretty convincingly that early medieval people had an idea of a political community that existed outside the persons who happened to rule in particular ways at particular times and places. Whether or not – like me – you don’t think that a Personnenverbandstaat is much of a Staat at all, even the most un-state-like of early medieval realms existed on the basis of more than mere personal links, though I suppose there could have been short-lived exceptions or temporary blips. All this, for sure, has shown us that cohesive kingdoms existed in the early Middle Ages and this has been elided into the idea that therefore such polities were states. Indeed in 2003 someone called Halsall published a book about Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, which talked willy-nilly about coherent kingdoms as ‘states’.

But cohesion, to me, does not equate with statehood. None of the more recent ‘statist’ historiography, which is usually (though not always) impressive in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, seems to me really to have made the case for thinking of the early medieval realm as a state, in an analytically useful fashion. No one has managed to explain the demise of the late Roman bureaucratic state in the west – for I think that unless you are Bernard Bachrach, Jean Durliat or Walter Goffart, you do have to accept that the Roman state did end. No one has managed to produce a reliable and/or theoretically coherent ‘worked example’ which shows exactly how aristocrats and kings worked together to maximise the power and authority available to each. Although the zero-sum model may not have existed as such, in its crude form, I do think that something very like it did exist: in other words that the acquisition of certain types of local power by local or regional aristocracies did mean a relative diminution of the effectiveness of central government. When all power, ultimately, comes from the land, there is really no way of avoiding this point, as I shall return to discuss in a minute.

Similarly, the flaws of the approach are pointed up if you look at ‘horizontal’ as well as ‘vertical’ competition, that is to say competition within the strata of the élite classes as well as between them. No one, to my mind, has explained, why, if, in the words of one fairly recent (if unreliable) writer on the topic bluntly says, ‘the struggle for political power was not a zero sum game’, was there a struggle at all? And indeed the consensus, statist model of the early medieval state does usually appear to be pretty struggle-free. Almost every paper on the topic piously says at some point that ‘we should not assume that this was a cosy state of affairs’ although, if one continues to read, one rarely gets the impression that it was anything but a cosy state of affairs.

And yet these were polities where kings blinded their own sons, where civil wars broke out that occasionally at least resulted in fairly bloody battles, one of which produced the death of one of the authors much studied by those holding to the consensus view. As I wrote in 2003, ‘there is precious little heroic in death brutally administered by spear, axe and sword’. So what on earth, if everyone gained, were they fighting, killing and dying over?

There are perhaps three main problems with the current historical trend in favour of the early medieval state. First, all the work upon ‘buying in’, upon consensus, has moved us too far away from coercion, from the radiating out. For a state to exist meaningfully both have to be present. A state must be able actively to penetrate local and regional society from above as well as to persuade local and regional élites to invest in it from below. To take an example, local aristocrats and others might have used the legitimacy of power provided by involvement in the structures of Charlemagne’s realm to further their own ends. This helped the coherence of that realm as a political entity. But what if any chance did Charlemagne have of enforcing compliance with his wishes in the localities? The former state of affairs suggests a coherent kingdom but only if we can answer the latter question with evidence of at least relatively effective instances of coercion are we in the presence of a state.

The second problem, closely related to the first, is that historians of all perspectives, Marxist or otherwise, have assumed an alliance between local élites, or aristocracies, and central government, kings, emperors or whatever. Yet this alliance has never been shown to be necessary. Indeed I think it is a fundamentally mistaken assumption. This will underlie much of what I am going to talk about.

The third problem is that the appreciation of collective power has come at the expense of a neglect of what Mann called distributive power: power which, if more is accumulated in the hands of one person or group, does involve a decrease in the power of another. We must appreciate, as Mann argues, that both types of power exist simultaneously, and so that we are not talking about a crude zero sum game. In an early medieval context, there is an important materialist challenge to the concentration upon ideology and collective power. The period that concerns me (and indeed most of the early medieval period in the West) was one where power ultimately resided in the control of land and its surplus. Most of it was non-monetary and, on either side of the 600 watershed, there were few truly urban centres. Trade and commerce were in any comparative sense, rudimentary, in spite of the wealth of very good work done in recent decades on unravelling such exchange systems and networks. Certain types of power might have been collective and potentially infinite, but the material basis of power was finite. Especially in a period with low seed-yield ratios, there was a very clear limit on the surplus to be drawn from land; technology limited surplus extraction to muscle power, human and animal – again finite. And the amount of land available was – also – finite. Thus whatever the ideological and other investments in effective power, when you come down to the basics, the resources of power were limited.

There is a very basic – indeed a brutal – implication of all this. In a socio-economic situation such as existed in western Europe after the break-up of the Roman Empire, armed forces could only be maintained by and rewarded with land and/or (as just noted) comparatively limited surpluses from land. Thus armed force, and armed force like agricultural techniques in this period, was a simple question of human and animal muscle, was a fixed resource. Control over armed force, over the military source of power, was, ultimately, therefore distributive.

By way of a hypothetical illustration let us suppose that territory X, a component of Kingdom A, can support 200 warriors from the surplus generated by its land. If access to Territory X is lost by the King of A, either through conquest by Kingdom B or the secession of the local Governor of X, then the King of A loses 200 warriors, whose control is gained either by the King of B or the Governor of X. He cannot simply raise another 200 men to replace them. He cannot increase the surplus commensurately from the rest of his lands to support the extra men – either technologically by increasing yield, because the means don’t exist, or through increasing the rent or tax because that might reduce to starvation the workers of land, who, remember live on a low, indeed knife-edge seed:yield ratio. Nor can he feed 200 more men through state credit or loans, or control markets and so on to pay 200 men in cash. In the post-imperial situation it is difficult even to raise 200 more men: no large urban or rural excess poor populations, the fertile recruiting grounds of later eras. In the military technology of the times, and the time taken to train a warrior, even producing 200 men as tactically effective as the 200 lost from X is going to be difficult.

A polity whose rulers do not tax and thus have no income derived other than from their position as simply one élite landholder among many, and who have no effective independent coercive force, cannot, in my vaguely Weberian view, be called a state. I hope to demonstrate and possibly even explain that proper states came to an end in the West (however temporarily) around 600.

Talk of ‘proper states’ requires definitions. Definitions of a state tend to converge on key issues. Two examples from consciously opposed theoretical camps can serve to prove this. First of all, Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power (vol.1,p.37):

The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality, in the sense that political relations radiate outwards to cover a territorially demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making, backed up by physical violence.

Secondly, John Haldon’s, from The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, a Marxist work written explicitly to counter Mann’s modified Weberianism (pp.32-33):

[A state is] ‘a set of institutions and personnel concentrated spatially at a single point and exerting authority over a territorially distinct area.'

Mann, of course, also argued that a state had to control all four of his sources of social power: ideological, economic, military and political. He also, interestingly, completely skipped over the period that concerns me today. Indeed, as far as I can see the whole 5-600 years of the early middle ages constitute the only era of recorded human political history in Europe that he did skip. Nevertheless, on p.390 of The Sources of Social Power he does say that some post-imperial states existed but that they were small and short-lived. I can say fairly confidently that he is wrong on both of these counts, for the period before 600, but not after.

To take a third example from a historian (like Haldon) for whom I couldn’t have more respect (even if I do seem to disagree with him quite frequently), Chris Wickham’s definition of the state in Framing the Early Middle Ages turns on five things:

1. The centralization of legitimate enforceable authority (justice and the army)

2. The specialisation of governmental roles with an official hierarchy which outlasted the people who held official position at any one time;

3. The concept of public power …;

4. Independent and stable resources for rulers;

5. A class-based system of surplus-extraction and stratification

This might broadly be acceptable as a definition, although I might quibble about point 5, or at least require a fuller definition of what was meant, and I would certainly place heavier emphasis on point 1, stressing the crucial importance of independent coercive force, possibly even above the idea of a monopoly. Such a definition tallies reasonably well with those of other thinkers, including those who work on the middle ages, such as Susan Reynolds. It is broad enough to encompass a range of state forms, as perhaps we shall see, but it is also strict enough to rule out other forms of complex political organisation. The risk run by the current consensus view is that it becomes difficult to see any sort of extensive, coherent polity that might not be called a state. A recent review of an edited volume on the early medieval state concluded by saying that although students of later periods might find it odd to see early medievalists talking about states in their period, this volume made it clear that specialists on that era saw no problems in using the word and that ought to suffice. I don’t think it does suffice.

To return to Wickham’s definition, and to cut to my general thesis, I think that the polities of western Europe before a period of change that I refer to, as a shorthand as ‘around 600’ would generally fit that definition, with a few minor modifications, but that those after that period would not. To demonstrate this, I will, as stated, focus upon Merovingian Gaul."


2. Gallic Economic Decline and the implications for the aristocracy
[Chris Wickham and I have - entirely amicably, I should stress - disagreed about the nature of the very early Frankish aristocracy for a good ten years now.  I've yet to land a really good blow.  Here's my latest effort:]
"One aspect of this which deserves brief comment is the production of ceramics. In Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham argues for a wealthy and independent Gallic aristocracy right through the period that concerns me. His case is largely – I would say almost entirely – based upon an argument about the late production of Argonne Ware. Here he is on the topic (on p.795):

In northern Gaul around 400 by far the commonest fine ware in the sigillata tradition was Argonne ware … often quite elaborately decorated with a roller wheel … with a 400km radius of distribution from the Rhine to well south of the Loire … [I]t continued into the late sixth century; it reached less than 200km by now … but survived a century into the Merovingian period as a production on a substantial scale.  [My ellipses conceal only some descriptive comments.]

This conclusion forms the basis of other arguments about the extent of economic decline in the north and, as mentioned, therefore of the weakness or poverty of the local élite, which could sponsor such craft specialisation and an exchange system over a wide area.

The fifth-century decline in Argonne Ware production,
as shown by the spread of sites yielding this form of
pottery

But we can examine these statements on the basis of Didier Bayard’s study of this form of ceramics and if we do a rather different picture emerges. We find that in his early fifth-century Phase 2, almost all Argonne ware is actually found within a 300km-radius of the kilns (6 sites yielding such pottery beyond that radius compared with 66 within it) and within in a box 500km east-west by 300km north-south. That’s an impressive area of 150,000 km2, but still rather less than the 500,000+ km2 implied by Wickham’s statement. More to the point, by the time of Bayard’s Phase 3 (roughly the 440s to 460s) this had contracted so that all was within a 300km radius, 67-79% of it within 200km. Most lies in a box covering 120,000 km2 which is about the same as the area you could calculate on the basis of the radius of distribution. Thus, this contraction, which Wickham implies was something that had happened only by the later sixth century, actually happens by the middle of the fifth century and the abandonment of the Rhine forts. In fact, even by the time of the political end of the western Empire, Bayard’s Phase 4, the distribution of Argonne ware had already contracted so that 98% of it was found within a 200km radius – in fact within a 200kmx200km box (a considerably smaller area) – though fairly evenly distributed within that area. Argonne ware does indeed continue into the late sixth century but it is worth clarifying that the last decorated phase dies out around 540 and thereafter only standard undecorated forms are produced. 

In terms of sites producing this pottery, for Phase 2, N=74, for Phase 3, N= 62, and for Phase 4, N = 27.  This would seem to show a big decline from the last quarter of the fifth century.  Bayard says that output for Phase 4 is about the same as for Phase 3, which, if so, would seem to show that there are fewer sites using this pottery  rather than there being less pottery produced.

Now this, I think we can agree, is not quite the picture that Wickham paints. Overall, the collapse of the Argonne fineware production was rather earlier and rather more serious than is admitted.  Instead I would argue that this picture tallies rather well with my own reconstruction of the northern Gallic élite, never wealthy to start with, being critically badly hit by the end of the western state around 400 and, by the second quarter of the sixth century, having gradually been reduced to the status of a service aristocracy by the canny policies of Clovis and his sons."

Response
I've never been good in the question sessions after papers.  In fact I'm useless.  It's a big hole in my game.  Some might call it the academic equivalent of a glass jaw in boxing, although Audley Harrison* doesn't have the option of pondering it all, publishing a thoughtful theoretical justification of why it was actually better for him not to duck that haymaker, and getting a retrospective win on points or at least a draw.  I've never been good at thinking on my feet; better at mulling things over and at reflecting on them in depth.  Not having attended the Academies of Slick Bullshitting I've never mastered the techniques of the Airy Dismissal, the Dazzling-But-Glib Analogy, or expressing yourself in language so carelessly leaden and obscure that everyone thinks you're brilliant because they haven't got a clue what the hell you're on about.  My own approach tends to focus on waffling, going off the point, speaking for too long and generally bumbling, compounded by the fact that I'm no good at all at wrapping my answers (such as they are) in the usual good manners - 'thank you for your question', 'that is an excellent point', that sort of thing - which makes me seem blunt as well as waffly: quite an achievement.  Nonetheless, it was a virtuoso shambles in Cambridge on Tuesday; if there was a Eurovision Waffling-and-Floundering Contest, this would have cemented my status as the Johnny Logan** of the event.

That being said, it should not detract from the fact that the questions and issues raised afterwards were uniformly very good, important and helpful.  Catherine Hills pointed out that it would be useful for me to up-date the distribution maps that I still use from my early work on Metz, in the light of the masses of new data that has come out since then.  Indeed I ought to do that, not least because the maps are purely based on cemeteries, whereas we now have significant quantities of settlement evidence.  Nevertheless, my sense is that that work doesn't actually affect the overall patterns and conclusions that I drew then.  One of the more infuriating things about the fact that my work never gets cited in France is that much of the new work in fact generally confirms the model I proposed in 1995.  Charles West asked whether there were indeed no means of increasing yield in the early middle ages (with reference to my point about the finite and therefore distributive nature of power).  I dare say I need to do more reading on this, for nuance at the very least, but my understanding is that, clearing new lands and bringing them under the plough aside, the really significant increases in the ability to raise the productive level of land, through better seed-to-yield ratios, didn't come about until rather later in the middle ages and after.  Talking to Rosamond McKitterick afterwards made me think that using Charlemagne as an example in my discussion of the state was probably not a good idea.  Charlemagne - at least early on in his reign - does seem to have been able to employ coercive and punitive force against his aristocrats.  But then I do think that the reign of Charlemagne (or at least its first 2/3) was something of an unusual phase in post-seventh-century Frankish rule.

More significant was Charles' point about the Church, which - as (depressingly) usual - I am guilty of neglecting, in favour of a concentration of lay power, lay office and so on.  If I did mention the foundation of churches and monasteries in town and country it was in the context of lay aristocratic consolidation of landholdings, and in discussion of a shift towards more biblical ideologies of power - points that in many ways render my ecclesiastical blind-spot more culpable still.  In conversation, Charles elaborated on this by talking of where the really dense 'nodes' of social relationships were in the early middle ages.  This seems to me to be an excellent issue to ponder, and I think there would be two principal axes to the analysis.  One (perhaps the more direct, but no less important) would be the way in which central government controlled the localities by using the institutions of the church, perhaps counteracting local aristocratic powers (much good work on this for the Carolingians and Ottonians); the other, more subtle, would be to move through the idea, related to the last point, that perhaps church offices and thus personnel in fact came to be - de facto - the 'state personnel' or the 'state class', replacing earlier secular offices and office-holders, to the idea the ideology of the church and its involvement with kingship played a crucial part in 'gluing' the localities together into a polity.  This latter is the focus of a great deal of excellent analysis by Carolingian historians (Professor Dame Janet L.Nelson, Rosamond McKitterick, Mayke de Jong, etc. etc.).

The first line of attack might not affect my overall thesis too badly, either because the control of churches and monasteries in late seventh- and eighth-century politics seems to have operated pretty clearly on a zero-sum principle, or because this sort of role was less in the sixth century and royal control, proportionately greater.  It is the second line of attack that concerns me more, and keys in with other questions about early medieval analogies to 'civic duty' and similar components of the state.  This makes me wonder whether I have been too keen to play up the necessity of the possibility of autonomous action (which is a better formulation than coercive force) and play down the ideas of consensus (though I remain convinced that they do need a bit of a critical re-think: if people radically interrogated the insidious work that the term 'consensus' does in political discourse they might find a way out of the bind of talking about consensus and then having to make statements - which rarely carry much conviction - that this didn't mean things were cosy).

This was then compounded by a question from an anthropologist (whose name alas I didn't get - if you're reading this, get in touch!) to the effect that polities where the use of coercive force is necessary and frequent, regardless of the ability to use it, are regarded as failed or failing states.  I'd probably need to mull this over more but on the whole I thought that this really was an excellent point that I hadn't considered before.  At all.

The Importance of Being Erroneous (once in a while at least) - and acknowledging it!
So.  A lot to think seriously about and I consider that that is an excellent seminar outcome for a speaker.  The best outcome (possibly) is for everyone to love what you've said and think it really important, but next best is to get useful feedback, even if it means you have to abandon some ideas and theories.  The feedback I received, I should say, was presented much more on the lines of an active engagement with the ideas presented than simply from a confrontational desire to stick to an alternative or opposing line, even if people didn't agree.  That is so much better as an outcome than the bland 'yeah, fine, whatever'  that one can encounter all too often.  Much to ponder.  As it is I might be able to reconfigure my thesis in a sounder and more sophisticated form, or it might be that I am - basically - wrong about all this and that what we have is indeed something akin to my 'weak thesis', that what happened 'around 600' was more a shift in the nature of the state (or the type of the state), rather than the state's actual demise as a useful category.  That could, on the basis of the points raised, be more interesting a proposition to explore than I thought.  Quite a big thing to be wrong about, given that I was toying with The End of the Late Antique State as the title for the (or a) book of the project, but if that's the way it is, that's the way it is.

Sometimes I am surprised by the phobia of 'being wrong' that one encounters in the profession, but what, really, is wrong with being wrong?  OK, I suppose that if you are always wrong there must be something awry with your basic capacity for historical reasoning and deduction (see the work of Bernard S. Bachrach passim) but surely being able to admit that an avenue one is exploring is a dead-end or a bit mistaken is a strength rather than a weakness.  With that in mind I have always quite enjoyed changing my mind about things (e.g. 'Female Status and Power', p.18, n.52; Barbarian Migrations, p.229, n.45) and acknowledging good, effective critique of my ideas that makes me reconsider my position (e.g., Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul, pp.243-7).  I will admit nevertheless to defending vigorously my interpretations where I think they are better than the alternatives (e.g. with the non-Germanic nature of furnished inhumation, or with so-called 'feud') and to being a bit withering with incoherent critique.  But if someone convinces me that there are some holes in my thinking, why not change tack, and why not admit it?  (Some scholars I could name do change their mind, but are never up-front about it, which I think is a shame, because somehow it tacitly denies the importance of dialogue.)

One of the many things that I try (and seemingly increasingly fail) to instil in my students is the idea that education is a journey and that dwelling on the qualification alone - the destination - is the equivalent of the budget airline option.  You could say something similar about 'being right' in history.  It's not a destination - there are no right answers, as we all (well, most of us) know, but some are less wrong than others - but a journey.  We should enjoy that journey.  We should value the detours and having the confidence to accede to the request to 'turn around when possible' because they all help us to get to know the historical landscape and the things that matter in exploring it.

So - to conclude - to all of you who came on Tuesday: thanks very much and sorry about the waffling!

Notes
* A British pugilist renowned principally for falling over quite early on in his fights.

** Australian-born Irish warbler, famed for the unequalled feat of winning the Eurovision Song Contest twice as performer and twice as song-writer (three wins overall).