[This is the paper that I gave yesterday at the very enjoyable conference, Subterranean in the Medieval World, organised by Meg Boulton and Heidi Stoner. As it says at the start, just a few rather basic points. I will add some pics and links in due course.]
My paper is essentially stating
the bleeding obvious, or what ought to be: just a few basic but important
points by way of some conceptual ground-clearing. The first is to associate two aspects of
early medieval burial. One is the use of
features of the pre-existing landscape as a focus for burial: prehistoric
barrows of one sort or another, standing stones or Roman buildings or
monuments. This is common across a wide
swathe of north-western Europe, whether we are looking at Anglo-Saxon England,
northern Britain, northern Gaul, Burgundy, or trans-Rhenan Germania, north or south. So, my first
point is that a single specific explanation, above all one relating the
phenomenon to supposedly pagan belief, especially Anglo-Saxon pagan belief, is
not going to work. We have must be absolutely clear about that. It is also important to distinguish communal
from individual or familial use of these monuments.
The second feature is the trend,
beginning around 600 of building new, above-ground monuments to the dead. These too take various forms, from barrows of
various shapes and sizes, ring-ditches
(whether revealing an original small barrow or just a ring of up-cast earth),
stone grave-markers, walls around graves or groups of graves or, ultimately, funerary
churches. Again, it’s impossible to
study the phenomenon in regional isolation; it is attested in rural districts
right across western Europe. The unavoidable conclusion – and although I
have stated this repeatedly over twenty years or so it has made not a jot of difference – is that Anglo-Saxon
barrows, most famously Sutton Hoo, cannot logically be read a priori as a sign of ‘pagan’ resistance
to Christianisation. That conclusion
does, alas, consign whole books by nice people to the bin, but logic is logic
and, as Derrida once said, the critique of reason can only come from within
reason.
Key to my argument is the
association of those two elements, individual or familial use of monuments, and
the building of above-ground monuments.
To read this, a little more ground-clearing
is necessary. Let’s, first, assume that
the features chosen as foci for sixth- and seventh-century burial were visible
at the time. Howard Williams undertook
the necessary ground-work for Anglo-Saxon England, probably longer ago than
he’d like to be reminded, and concluded that, though some monuments might have
been ploughed out, the data suggested that a significant percentage were still
visible when they were used or reused for burial.
The second point which, obvious
though it is, hasn’t always been taken into account, is that we have no way of
knowing what age early medieval people thought any of these remains were, other
than that no one could remember them being built. We have no grounds for assuming that the
Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Alamans, Burgundians, continental Saxons or Picts, had any
sense of what was or was not Roman. Prehistoric mounds are described in Old
English verse in just the same way as decaying Roman cities. In a problematic book that I have critiqued
at length before, John Moreland says of Wigber Low
that
‘[b]y inserting their dead into
the barrow the organisers of the seventh[-]century burial collapsed and sought
to command time. By making their dead
contiguous with those of remote antiquity, they were making an eloquent
statement, informed by oral tradition and memory, about their relationship with
the dead and place among the living’
Let’s, so to speak, excavate the
sentence. The most obviously
questionable element is the phrase ‘remote
antiquity’. The good folk of
seventh-century Derbyshire did not have C14 dating or a three-age
system, or a complex set of typologies to help them evaluate past remains’
relative age. If they were trying to collapse time – and they might have been – we can have no idea of
what amount of time they thought was at stake, whether they thought the barrow
was ‘Roman’ or from some ill-defined time of their grand-parents, or from some
time out of time, a world of monsters, demons and gods, pagan or
Christian. The second questionable
element is ‘the dead of remote
antiquity’. How can we know that the
people of seventh-century Wigber Low thought the barrow had had any funerary
function? It seems to me that, by purely
archaeological logic, they would not find traces of the site’s Bronze Age funerary
usage until they dug their own graves
into it.
Ailcy Hill, Ripon is a useful comparandum. Widely believed to have
been a motte or barrow, this mound is a natural glacial feature. Middle Saxon dead are buried there,
however. Of course, the people of
Anglo-Saxon Ripon, ‘informed by oral tradition and memory’ might have wanted to
make their dead contiguous with those of the past, but there were no dead of the past, remote or
otherwise, to be found there. The actual
past function of a monument provides no grounds for establishing what early
medieval people thought they were doing when they reused it. You could use Wigber Low and its many
comparanda to argue that the local Anglo-Saxons thought Ailcy Hill was a burial, but you might as easily use Ailcy
Hill to argue that Wigber Low and other sites were chosen because they were visible
mounds, marks on the landscape, not because of any funerary associations. Many other types of folklore could account
for an unusual mound – a devil’s spade-full for example – and we are unduly
second-guessing early medieval people when we assume that they thought that
monuments were things from the past with religious or funerary overtones. There might have been any number of other,
archaeologically invisible, features of the landscape that early medieval people
associated with the past, the divine or the monstrous, all of which makes it,
logically, entirely illegitimate to select a particular class of feature as
allegedly revelatory of these concerns. Finally
it is no more than an assumption that ‘memory and oral tradition’ played any
part in determining the choice of site.
If it was, then it could equally have featured in any other choice.
No. This won’t
do, by any standards of rigour or logic.
That means we have to take Ockham’s
razor to a lot of recent work, not just on Anglo-Saxon but also mainland
European archaeology. Frans Theuws has
argued that usage of old landscape features manifests a concern with
‘ancestors’. This invocation of ancestor
veneration is becoming quite common in early medieval archaeology, but critique
is overdue. It isn’t attested in early
medieval data.
The only piece of evidence that I
can conjure up is the well-known story of Radbod of Frisia. You know
the story: he would rather be with his ancestors in hell than go to heaven on
his own, right? Wrong. It’s another one
of those famous textual snippets that ‘everyone knows’ but no one reads (other
than Ian Wood probably). Here is the
text.
It was written by a Frankish monk, nearly 100 years after the event, in Latin,
describing an exchange that, if it took place at all, certainly didn’t take place in Latin. There is no way of seeing through this later
text to a pagan reality. This is all we have and all we can do with it
is try to unravel what its author wanted to say about pagans, and that was not that they were obsessed with ancestors.
Radbod has asked Wulframn where
the greater part of the kings, principes
or nobles of the people of the Frisians are (ancestors doesn’t come into it):
in heaven or hell?
‘Then the blessed Wulframn [(rather
stupidly), said] ‘Do not stray, shining prince; it is certain that with God are
the numerus [which can mean number or a military unit, a band or following] of his chosen. But it is certain that your predecessors, the
princes [or the foremost men] of the Frisian people who have died without the
sacrament of baptism have received the sentence of damnation; but henceforth he who shall have believed
and shall have been baptised will rejoice with Christ in eternity.’ Hearing this, the unbelieving duke – for he had
processed to the font – drew back his foot from the font, as they say, saying
that he could not lose the company of his predecessors, the princes [or
foremost men] of the Frisians, to go and live with a small number [or a small
band] of poor people in that kingdom of heaven.’
Radbod doesn’t decline to leave
his dead ancestors; he doesn’t want
to spend eternity among horrible poor
people. The opposition is between princes
and paupers rather than ancestors and strangers. Praedecessores
is a fairly neutral term for those who predeceased him, as easily encompassing currently-living
or recently-dead friends amongst the principes
as long-dead relatives. And it is the wealth issue is what Wulframn harps on about throughout
ch.10: all these fine principes live out
eternity in the dark, not in the bright, shiny, gold-plated House of the
Lord. This is about class, money and
status, not family. In this
ninth-century reconstruction, the pagan thinks he can take status and wealth
with him when he dies.
So, if we rule out or at least
think of less mystifying terminology for this ancestors stuff – and we should –
where do we go? My answer is essentially
that we should think about all this not so much in terms of the past as of the
future. The shifts under discussion
take place in the decades around 600, which have been the focus of my work for
the past few years. I suggest that
behind them lies, partly, a change in concerns about time and partly (where I
come closest to current interpretations) a new élite seeking legitimation.
The problem is in the future
perfect: what will have been. That seems
to me to lie, understandably, behind of a number of muddled treatments of the
issue. If there is a concern with the
past or even with ancestors here it is in the sense of looking forward to what
will have been: the past in the future.
If we think, comparatively, about the Antique world what is far more
frequently attested is an overwriting
of the past. The obvious example is Rome
itself. What is Rome if not a massive,
complex architectural palimpsest? Of course, this is making an association with the past but it is not a simple legitimising
association. Each generation writes
itself over the last, looking to the
future. The Church overwrote all sorts
of classical pagan monument, not so much temples but the other crucial areas of
pre-Christian Roman life: bath-houses especially, theatres, and amphitheatres. Especially in the 75 years or so after the
Western Empire’s disintegration, new powers sometimes reused Roman sites to
express legitimacy. [pp] Far more usual around 600, however, is the stamping of
the new over the old. Gregory of Tours’
writings are full of the church overwriting the pagan past in ways fundamentally
no different from the use of monuments for cemeteries. The evidence from the
period suggests that the use of ancient monuments for burial was as likely
motivated by a concern to overwrite, bury it.
I will, however, back-peddle from this position slightly, at the end.
There are widespread cases of
sixth-century Gallic cemeteries located near monuments, especially villas but,
as with the case of St-Vit, also other types of site. Placed alongside other aspects of the
sixth-century burial ritual, however, what seems to be at stake is the use of a
local landmark as a focus for a new, communal cemetery, itself a focus for a
fairly dispersed community. The communal reuse of prehistoric sites in
England, like the barrows used as communal cemeteries, seems analogous. But the main focus of the burial rite is
transient – even if, as Howard Williams entirely correctly pointed out in a
very valuable and pertinent critique of my work, the multi-sensory performance
of these burials probably left a very rounded memory for participants. Nonetheless, once a grave is filled in, once
it is rendered entirely subterranean, that statement was no longer visible and
thus it had to employ a rich and clear semiotics. Furnished burial is about competition and
social instability. Differences in the
lavishness of graves cannot be read off as differences in wealth and power.
What happens around 600 – and it
happens in all sorts of regions across the West – is a shift from this
transient form of commemoration to more permanent forms. The point about investing, in relative terms,
more resources in the above-ground monument than in the in-ground
(subterranean) is that it is intended
to be there permanently. Unlike ancestors-veneration
we can document this concern in actual European evidence from the period. I have written about this at some length
before but I want to put a slightly different spin on it in the light of more
recent thinking on the subject. The
period saw the beginning of the retention and survival of written documents
(I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: that that is as true for Gaul as for England should make us think twice before
assuming that pre-Augustinian England was illiterate), seventh-century Frankish
law, unlike sixth-century, projects situations into the future and is concerned
with mechanisms whereby legal transactions might be remembered – one of which
is through the use of written records.
I have previously associated
this, in Francia, with a solidification of the social structure at this
period. The sixth century’s potential fluidity
and competition made it difficult to project status and a place in the
landscape into the future; that became much more possible around 600 with the
emergence of a more secure aristocracy north of the Loire. The personal or familial occupation of
monuments, prehistoric or Roman stands
alongside the creation of new above-ground monuments, as I mentioned at the
start: gravestones and inscriptions, walls around burials, sarcophagus-lids visible at surface level,
sarcophagi standing above ground, barrows
and churches.
The material signature of these
processes is very similar to that in Anglo-Saxon England which is why I have
repeatedly argued that we ought to see analogous processes at work, and not get
too hung up on the issue of conversion.
Although the record takes a different form, the archaeology of Northern
Britain suggests something similar.
Indeed right across north-western Europe, the written and archaeological
data show the emergence of more locally intensive forms of lordship and a
weakening of earlier, broader but perhaps looser kingdoms. Local aristocrats were able to inscribe
themselves onto the landscape in permanent form, just as we see them
undertaking all sorts of other measures to preserve their place into the
future, and as we become, in turn, able to identify their families over time.
I said earlier that I was going
to back-peddle slightly from my point that this is not about a connection with
the past. The changes I have just
alluded to come, themselves, out of a crisis in connection with the past. The touchstone of legitimacy, up to the
middle of the sixth century, had been the Roman Empire. After Justinian’s wars this was no longer
possible in the old ways. People now
knew they weren’t in the Roman Empire any more and any claim to legitimacy
staked on imperial office wasn’t going to work.
That meant crises for all sorts of power, from the royal down through society,
to gender relations and the meaning of Roman ethnicity, outside the former
Empire as well as within it. And indeed
it meant some profound rethinking in the east as well as the west. New reference points were needed.
Those new reference points, largely
biblical, Old Testament, worked not via simple lineal (ancestral) descent, as
earlier legitimising touchstones had.
Instead they worked typologically.
That is to say that something in the present was foreshadowed by, was a
‘type’ of, something in the past. This
is very visible in thinking about history and time in the late sixth century,
when some people seemed to think they were in a time after time – after linear time – a time when causation worked
vertically according to the type of situation.
The beauty of the typological as a legitimising touchstone is that it is
always already there, and it requires no claim about lineal descent, ancestry. Not, we are
them, but we are like them. They don’t even have to have been here.
Whoever these people were, who put these marks on the landscape, we
don’t know – they aren’t us – but we are here now, like them and we will make
our mark, beside theirs, over theirs.
Nonetheless, although that takes a look back at a strange other past, its primary concern is with when
the present would be the past, in the future,
and creating for the new elite, a future perfect.