Officers or Gentlemen? The Frankish Aristocracy in the Sixth Century: Part 3

[The third installment of this draft article on the sixth-century aristocracy (which begins here) looks at the significance for the debate of the legal evidence and of terminology for aristocrats in the narrative sources.  The argument is that both forms of evidence, while they permit the reasonable supposition that some families maintained social pre-eminence within their localities, this position was not secure or recognisable by southerners as amounting to a real form of social distinction.  The failure of the laws to recognise an aristocratic stratum might have originated as a royal strategy but by the middle of the sixth century it seems to have been a reasonable approximation of reality.]

Part 2 is here

In this context we can reconsider the earliest of the Frankish law-codes, the Pactus Legis Salicae, and its failure to mention any sort of a noble caste.  The Pactus only recognises two types of freeman: the Frank, with a wergild of 200 solidi and the Roman tributarius, whose wergild was 150 solidi.  The only men raised above this general stratum are the presumably Frankish members of the trustis regis (the royal retinue: wergild 600 solidi or double that of the Frank), the Roman members of the convivia regis (the royal table: wergild 300 solidi or double that of the tributarius), the pueri regis (the “King’s Boys”) and comites (companions; here meaning counts: royal officers).  All of these exceptions are defined by a connection to the king.  As mentioned, the interpretation of this fact has been a matter of debate.  On its own, it is difficult to make the absence of a legally-recognised aristocratic stratum bear much weight in proposing that such a class did not exist in reality.  Arguments against it have been numerous.  The kings deliberately did not recognise such a group as a means of strengthening their own position.  Alternatively, the law-makers felt that they could not legislate for a noble wergild; in practice the magnates would set their own blood-price.   Another possibility is that the class of ‘Franks’, with a higher wergild than ‘Romans’ is itself the aristocracy.  Or the coverage of the Pactus is hardly comprehensive and the absence of laws specifically relating to the aristocracy might not therefore be significant.  Indeed there are legal ‘documents of practice’ which decree that ‘Salic law’ be followed in circumstances not covered at all by the Pactus.  Finally, the law itself was only a symbolic text with no necessary grounding in reality; texts actually showing that the Pactus and its provisions were followed in practice are entirely lacking.  By contrast we have later documents recording legal decisions that flatly contravene what the Pactus said should be done.

These arguments against the significance of the Pactus’ silence are of uneven weight but there is something in all of them.  The weakest – like a crude progression from the law’s silence to actual absence – turn on the idea that the law was directly applicable in practice.  In the sixth century, the extent to which this was the case is impossible to gauge.  In defence of the idea that there was some connection between code and practice, we can point to some similarities between the processes it envisages and those described in narrative sources and the fact that the law set geographical boundaries on the area within which it thought it was applicable (between the Ardennes and the Loire).  The best way forward seems to be to remember that the law was a deliberate composition, not a simple, passive transmission of age-old custom.  Even if, as seems very plausible, it was assembled at least in part from pre-existing royal decrees, the Pactus is very consistent in its vocabulary, especially when using ethnic terminology (here it differs from Burgundian law, for example).  It does not seem unreasonable to hypothesise that its authors assembled materials, and phrased their discussion of issues, in a deliberate fashion, whether this was to provide a practical law-book, or simply an object text that symbolised Clovis’ capacity as a law-making king, in Roman fashion. 

Viewed thus, several suggestions are possible.  One is that, as Chris Wickham wrote nearly twenty years ago, it is significant that the range of relationships and legal situations envisaged by the legislators did not encompass the activities of major, wealthy landlords or their intrusions into a society of small-landowners.  For it is not simply the absence of a recognised aristocratic stratum, with its own wergild, that matters.  There are no references to the relationships that suggest the existence of such a class, either.  This becomes clear through comparison with seventh-century Lex Ribvaria.  Comparison with other codes suggests that the failure to mention a magnate stratum with a higher wergild than the normal freeman is deliberate.  We should not expect this absence, as a matter of course, because of the de facto ability of aristocrats to set their own blood price.  Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon and Lombard laws all recognise such a class.  Furthermore, why ordinary aristocrats could not be legislated for because of their ability to set their own wergild, but aristocrats with royal backing could be so restricted is a problem left unanswered.  Thus the lack of recognition of an aristocracy with status independent of royal approval might indeed have been a deliberate royal statement.  This need not imply that such a group did not exist in practice but the absence from the law of other indices of its presence, which comparison with other codes suggests would normally act to restrict its power, argues that it was not, in reality, very significant.

Other sixth-century evidence permits the argument that even if, when the Pactus was issued, the law-makers’ deliberately ignored a magnate class as a statement of royal power, by the middle of the sixth century the dependence of northern Gaulish local leaders upon royal legitimation was a normal state of affairs.  This is suggested from the analysis of the region’s rural cemeteries during the middle quarters of the century, as already discussed.  That reading of the excavated data finds support in some aspects of the written sources.  The first such aspect to consider is that of terminology.  Gregory of Tours, for example, only employs the term nobilis once to describe a northern Gallic family, referring to the brothers Bodegisil and Bobo.  Otherwise, within Gaul, Gregory restricts his use of the term nobilis to the Merovingian royal family itself, and to southern Gallic senators.  His description of an embassy to Constantinople, one of the occasions when Gregory refers to Bodegisil, suggests why this might have been.  He describes the ambassadors as ‘Bodegisil son of Mummolenus, from Soissons, Evantius son of Dynamius, from Arles, and Grippo, a Frank’.  For Gregory, then, it seems that one’s civitas of origin and the name of one’s father were the principal criteria for inclusion in the social stratum that encompassed the senatorial nobility.  In this, he does not seem too different from his near contemporary Isidore of Seville, whose definition of nobilis, within the category of ‘terms for people’ (de quibusdam vocabulis hominum), was one whose ‘name and lineage are known’.

Wickham downplays the significance of Gregory’s failure to use the word nobilis for northerners, by stating that Venantius Fortunatus, unlike Gregory, does employ the term for Frankish aristocrats.  In fact, scrutiny reveals Venantius’ use of the term to be more or less the same as Gregory’s.  He describes as ‘noble’ southern Gallic senators, the Merovingians and one northern Frank, who dwells in Toulouse.  Otherwise he uses the word to qualify virtues or objects in a religious context.

Nonetheless, looking at the usage of particular terms is not without its problems, given the almost total lack of written evidence from northern Gaul itself.  The sources available are essentially from Aquitaine or – in the case of the works of Venantius Fortunatus – of a poet from Italy.  One issue is whether the failure of these writers to discuss the northern, Frankish aristocracy in the terms usually employed for nobility is significant, or at least in what ways it is significant.  If the northern Gallic magnates were not recognisable as noblemen in the traditional Roman way, does that really mean that they cannot – functionally – have formed a similar type of ruling stratum?  There are, after all, other words which are used to describe northern aristocrats.  Some – seniores, proceres, potentes, or optimates for example – do not have a bearing on the precise enquiry as their general meaning of ‘leading men’ does not necessarily carry with it an implication about the relationship between their status and royal service one way or the other.  Other phrases do, however: maior natu for example.

This is important because, if nothing else, it demonstrates that no position taken on this topic is likely to represent a hard-and-fast ‘right answer’.  Indeed none of the argument presented thus far implies that there was no Frankish aristocracy, defining the latter in a loose sense as a group of people more powerful, in de facto terms at least, than their fellows.  The analysis of the archaeological cemetery evidence discussed earlier does not by any means suggest that some families did not remain dominant within their localities right through the period from the fourth century to the seventh.  Members of such kindreds might indeed be described as maiores natu.  In some areas, in any case, what we might term a noble class – using the word noble to distinguish an aristocracy more narrowly defined by its birth and culture as well as its wealth and standing – certainly did exist.  The ‘senators’ of Trier are the clearest example. 

Another point that must be made is that royal service contained mechanisms that could foster some of the characteristics of such a nobility.  Service in the schola palatina – the royal military household, where the training of the Pueri Regis presumably took place – clearly included literary education, enabling Frankish service aristocrats to partake in Latin literary culture to some extent at least.  Bonds forged between the Pueri themselves could create a sense of group solidarity (maintained by an epistolary culture derived from that of late imperial times), as is most famously attested at the end of the period covered by this paper with the circle of Desiderius of Cahors, which was formed when in the service of Chlothar II and Dagobert I.  Royal service, like late imperial, also brought with it certain honorific titles.  Viri illustri are attested and, in the capitularies, even viri magnificentissimi optimates.  These honorifics might also be used to foster a class identity amongst an essentially service aristocracy.  Such titles, however, were not hereditary. 

Nonetheless, conclusions are possible.  It is clear that, to writers like Gregory and Venantius, most of the Frankish aristocrats – even the powerful ones – whom they met or who featured in their accounts of sixth-century history did not, unlike the Merovingian kings themselves, meet the criteria for nobilitas normally used by their own class.  Some people who appeared in Gregory’s other tales or who commissioned poems from Venantius seem, in a local context, to have been members, by birth, of a stratum of leading families.  It would be difficult indeed to envisage a situation, even within the fluid sixth-century context proposed here, where such families did not exist.  What is at stake is the security of such families’ power and the relative  of royal patronage and of local pre-eminence in terms of lands, wealth and so on.

To shed further light on this issue, one obvious source of information is Gregory of Tours’ Histories, with its account of the doings and, usually, violent ends of numerous Frankish aristocrats.  Gregory’s evident refusal to incorporate the Frankish magnates within his category of nobiles has been mentioned.  One reason for this might have been the fast turn-around of post-holders within the Merovingian realm that resulted from the kings’ adept control of patronage.  This would usually mean that Gregory (and Venantius) was rarely aware of the names of these aristocrats’ fathers or their family relationships.   It is interesting to speculate, too, on the self-presentation of such men, however, and to wonder whether they presented themselves simply as, for example, ‘Grippo the Frank’.  Perhaps patronymics were not habitually given precisely because aristocratic southerners would likely be none the wiser for it.  By way of modern English analogies, questions such as ‘what school did you go to?’ or (for instance) ‘would that be the Hampshire Fortescue-Smythes?’ are questions that can only be, and therefore are only, properly answered by members of the same, privileged class as the questioner.  They aim primarily at elucidating that class-relationship and only secondarily at extracting actual information.  They do not necessarily put all the power in the hands of the questioner as difference can be just as aggressively asserted by a negative response, but social space is nevertheless marked by the exchange.


Part 4 is here

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

The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 1 of 4)

[Here - broken down into four parts for - comparative - ease of reading, is a piece I have been working on of late.  It is still very much in first draft form and thus very woolly, un-foot-noted and unchecked.  When it is foot-noted, checked and edited down, I will send it off to a journal and take it down from the blog, so if you wish to comment or otherwise have any input - which will duly be acknowledged - now is the time. 

Essentially the piece confronts a key element in the debate over whether or not the Merovingian aristocracy was an independently wealthy magnate class or - essentially - a service aristocracy dependent upon the kings.  It deals with the assumption, which would be very important, if not fatal, for the second interpretation (which has generally been my own), that there were established Gallo-Roman and Frankish aristocracies/magnate classes existing in northern Gaul when the Merovingians took over.  Using a full range of evidence and paying close attention to regional diversity, the paper demonstrates (I hope!), first, that outside the Triererland the late Roman aristocracy was not an independently wealthy nobility of the type known elsewhere, second (Part 2) that the crisis of c.400 reduced the Gallo-Roman aristocracy's wealth and power further, third (Part 3) that, via a close study of Frankish migration and its mechanisms, we can see that the Frankish leaders who settled in Gaul in the fifth century were already closely dependent upon the Merovingians by c.500 at least, and fourth (Part 4) that a consideration of the archaeological traces of the northern Gallic aristocracy between 475 and 525 underline the point established in the rest of the article: that neither the Franks nor the Gallo-Romans presented the Merovingians with a powerful landed aristocracy with which to contend.  The mighty landed aristocrats of the seventh, eighth and especially ninth centuries were members of a class that was a later creation (of c.600).]

The nature of the Frankish aristocracy has featured heavily in the historiography of Merovingian Gaul. One of the main problems has been whether or not the northern Gaulish aristocracy, which we might term Frankish (as opposed to the more Gallo-Roman magnates of Aquitaine and Provence or the hybrid Gallo-Roman/Burgundian/Frankish élite of Burgundy), was formed of families whose wealth, local standing and power existed independently of the patronage of the Merovingian royal dynasty. This debate has never been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Perhaps, one hopes, it never will be (at least in its entirety) but a new contribution is nevertheless required. Chris Wickham’s monumental Framing of the Middle Ages recently presented a strong case for the wealth and independence, indeed for what he suggested was, in comparative perspective, the quite unusual wealth and independence, of the northern Gallic Frankish aristocracy throughout the early medieval era.

Wickham’s contribution is unusual in that it made well-informed use of archaeological as well as documentary sources and, perhaps more importantly, excavated material other than that normally employed for this kind of enquiry. Most previous studies have drawn mainly upon the evidence of excavated cemeteries for an archaeological insight into local social structures, giving at best a partial image. Wickham however employed ceramic data, which now exists in sufficient quantity and quality for reasonable observations to be made – something that was not true even twenty years ago. This would itself be reason enough for a re-examination of the economic bases of the Frankish aristocracy.

Wickham’s case is solid and well-argued and, for the second half the period covered by his survey (thus c.600-c.800), his conclusions seem entirely valid. Moreover, they are in harmony with what has, perhaps, always been the most common interpretation and with other recent scholarly work which has suggested a more direct continuity between the Gallo-Roman nobility of the region and the land-owning magnates of the Carolingian world. This paper argues against this trend. In a companion essay I deal with the nature of the sixth-century northern Gallic aristocracy and its transformation around the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries. Here, I address a fundamental basis of the ‘established aristocracy’ view. That is the nature of the social élite that existed in northern Gaul at the time of the establishment of the Merovingian kingdom. This paper questions the validity of Wickham’s (and others’) assumption that the Merovingian kings had to confront already-established Gallo-Roman and Frankish aristocracies in the creation of their realm.

Like Wickham’s discussion, it will use the whole range of data available to us, documentary, archaeological, epigraphic and numismatic. As well as chronological change, geographical diversity will be noted. One problem with the period covered by this paper, the late fourth and fifth centuries, is the general absence of written evidence. This means that the overwhelming bulk of the evidence used will be archaeological. Nevertheless, a great advantage of this form of data, and of the cemetery material in particular, is that, as well as being increasingly voluminous, it is securely anchored in time and space, allowing us to explore change through time, something which, as noted, has not always been recognised in previous studies, even Wickham’s. It will also allow us to shed a critical light upon the handful of well-worn fragments of written evidence which do seem to treat with the social structures of the region, most notably Salvian’s On the Governance of God.

Late Roman Background

The obvious preliminary to any discussion of the Merovingian aristocracy in northern Gaul is to examine the regional élite during the late Roman Empire. If a magnate stratum can be shown to have existed there, with secure local pre-eminence and secure control of extensive estates, how the Frankish kings could reduce such a group to the level of a service aristocracy would constitute a sizable historical problem, though not an insurmountable one. After all, such a reduction need not involve forcible displacement or dispossession, let alone the widespread slaughter, of such aristocrats. In fact, however, this problem does not, on closer inspection, really present itself. Across most of the region, the late Roman aristocracy was not composed of independently wealthy, powerful landowners. It seems to have been every bit as dependent upon the state as I would argue that their Merovingian descendants were. There were variations in the degree to which this was the case and at least one region where it certainly was not true but, as a broad categorisation, it will suffice.

This conclusion is based principally upon the archaeological evidence. The northern Gallic aristocracy had never been the wealthiest in Gaul. Studies have suggested that it was less locally dominant than its counterparts in southern Gaul even at the time of the Roman conquest. An exception to this rule might have been found in the civitas of the Treveri, in the lower Moselle valley, and the unusual character of the aristocracy in this area persisted throughout our period and beyond. In the prosperous early imperial era, northern Gaul saw the creation of numerous villas, but these tended to be fairly small establishments. A crucial change occurred after the third-century turmoil, when these settlements were either abandoned or (probably to an even greater degree than is currently known) changed decisively in their form and archaeological visibility. Increasing stress has recently been laid on the fact that better quality excavation and analysis reveal that many fewer of these sites were abandoned than had been believed. This has been vital in reassessing the settlement pattern and economy of late Roman northern Gaul. Nonetheless, even the more subtle analyses suggest that the rates of abandonment were very high, frequently in the region of 50%.

Concentration upon continuity of occupation also ignores a very important aspect of the problem – the change in the character of the settlement itself. The classical villa, stone-built with tiled roofs and, frequently, mosaic floors, often with under-floor hypocausts, manifests a particular set of social and economic relationships between the owner of the villa buildings and other inhabitants of the locality. Whatever the precise function of the site, whether working farm, ‘country house’ or hunting lodge (and this surely varied from site to site and from one phase of occupation to another), the villas reveal an ability to concentrate surplus and spend it upon the construction of a building that made a permanent mark upon the landscape. Such a building made a claim for the owner’s active subscription to a particular set of cultural attitudes associated with the Roman Empire, however those attitudes were played with and modified in local context. Stone-quarrying, tile-manufacture and mosaic-construction all required specialist manufactures and industries, organised transport networks and so on. Though the potential sophistication of timber architecture should not be neglected, it remains the case that the construction and maintenance of stone buildings necessitated a more complex matrix of specialist skills and industries. The change from these structures to timber, thatch- or shingle-roofed halls therefore marks a vitally important change in the nature of the local social élite and of the northern Gallic economy.

Debate on this change has hitherto tended to focus upon whether the shifts involved implied an economic decline. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that, in some ways at least, this must have been the case, but the best explanation of the transformation of the northern Gallic countryside in late antiquity seems to be to link it to the nature of the Roman Empire that emerged after the ‘third-century crisis’. It has for some time been noted that the evident change in the region’s settlement actually post-dates the conventional dates of the ‘crisis’, coming after Gaul’s reincorporation into the legitimate Roman Empire by Aurelian, who crushed the separate ‘Gallic Empire’ in the 270s. This precise political historical context can be combined with what we know of the Late Empire’s political economy to produce the following reconstruction.

One effect of the third century’s economic difficulties was, as is well known, an increase in the levying of taxes, and in the payment of state employees, in kind. Another well-known late imperial characteristic was the residence of the emperors on the frontiers, in the west most often at Trier (former home of the Gallic emperors). This presence was associated with a concentration of higher-grade troops near the Emperor himself and renewed emphasis on frontier defence and military operations against the barbarians (classic signs of imperial good management). This change, the shift in the system of taxation and payment, and other reorganisations of the hierarchy of troop-types within the army resulted in troops being concentrated in northern Gaul but spread over a wider expanse of the countryside. These features were crucial to the survival of the ensuing ‘inside-out’ late Roman Empire.

These points can be combined with the suppression of the Gallic Empire to suggest that the transformation of the northern Gaulish countryside resulted from the harnessing of the region’s surplus to the maintenance of the huge imperial presence now more or less permanently stationed in the area. Confiscation of the lands belonging to supporters of the Gallic imperial regime may have been associated with other expropriations or ‘compulsory purchases’ to ensure that the production of foodstuffs and other materials was geared to the supply of the large number of troops and civil servants. This hypothesis sidesteps the old argument about economic decline. Production could have continued on a scale commensurate with, or even greater than, that which existed before, but far less of the surplus would have accrued to the region’s local élite. This could nonetheless have meant a decline of sorts – in aristocratic wealth and in some of the industries that had hitherto existed to maintain high-status dwellings and way of life. Some slack was nevertheless taken up by the imperial presence in the region. The regional distribution of the late Roman northern Gallic fine-ware, Argonne Ware, seems geared to the supply of the frontier bases and the Rhenish glass industry flourished as well. The scale of production created by this demand might have stimulated the export of these classes of material further afield, to Britain and elsewhere. Indeed northern Gaulish products were traded far beyond the imperial frontier. Bronze bowls known as the ‘Vestland Type’, because of the concentration of find-spots in Norway, seem for example to have been produced in the Meuse valley. The precise form of exchange represented by this ‘export’ doubtless varied between a possibly ‘normal’ market exchange with barbarian communities immediately beyond the limes, through exchange with what resemble ‘gateway communities’ around the Baltic coasts, to diplomatic payments to the interior of Germania Magna. To whom any profits from the commercial transactions included within this range fell is impossible to establish. Some of it doubtless went to the imperial treasury, other elements probably ‘piggy-backed’ upon the empire’s ‘command economy’ and ended up with those to whom this was entrusted, and some surely represented independent commercial enterprises conducted by such producers, perhaps generated by the possibilities attendant upon large-scale imperially-sponsored manufacture. Some, therefore, must have ended up in the hands of the northern Gallic aristocracy, probably explaining the continued existence, as such, and refurbishment of at least some of the region’s villas.

Overall, though, the nature of this élite very likely changed too. If the majority of northern Gallic land was now imperially-owned, it could nevertheless have been leased to palatine aristocrats on long-term emphyteutic leases. Other parcels of land might have been used to reward civil and military service and still others could have been used for the traditional retirement gifts to soldiers. In all of these cases it is easy to see how insufficient surplus remained for estate-owners to continue the construction and maintenance of old-style villa buildings. Either possession of the territories and revenues was temporary or the land was not owned on a very large scale. One imagines that the managers of fiscal or imperial estates would not, furthermore, be retaining more of the fruits of the lands for which they were responsible than was necessary for the upkeep of ordinary dwellings and storage facilities. In this context the observable developments in the late Roman landscape of northern Gaul are easily explicable, without resort of ideas of economic decline or a rejection of Romanitas.

The latter concept, although much promoted in recent years, is particularly unlikely. Building a villa in the fourth century did not make a political statement in the same way as the construction of such a building in the centuries around the birth of Christ, in that it did not represent a new form of monumentalisation that differed from that which went before and proclaimed an adherence to new social, cultural and political modes of life. Nonetheless, the continued centring of Roman aristocratic culture on the villa cannot be denied. Furthermore, if one looks at the symbolism of the grave goods deposited in burials during the time of crisis around 400 (to be discussed shortly) one can see that they focus overwhelmingly upon the traditional symbols of Roman aristocratic life, the bases of social distinction and élite pastimes. A continuing subscription to precisely these well-established modes of Roman aristocratic life is clearly attested. The idea that the regional élite engaged in some form of active ‘de-Romanisation’, let alone ‘anti-Romanisation’ is extremely improbable.

Wickham presents a more interesting and subtle modification of the idea under the heading of the region’s militarisation, a process which is certainly demonstrable. Buildings within late Roman fortifications have frequently proved difficult to detect, leading Wickham to suggest that the late imperial military did not invest resources in lavishly-appointed dwellings. Therefore, runs the argument, a more militarised aristocratic culture would involve much less attention devoted to lavish building. This is an interesting possibility but it seems less plausible if scrutinised closely. The absence of buildings within late Roman forts is sometimes possibly explained by a lack of excavation within the walls, and on occasion, doubtless, by the failure to detect structures on top of more elaborate and indeed more sought-after early imperial phases. Nonetheless a relative reduction in the permanence and elaboration of officers’ quarters is a hypothesis worth testing and, if accurate, could be significant in the ways that Wickham suggests. It might be the case that the Roman army’s officer corps had (when compared with civilian private building) never invested in especially elaborate dwellings within their forts. If so, though, even if there were not a decline in the relative sophistication of their quarters, a militarisation hypothesis could explain a shift from investment in buildings to an investment in other forms of display. The Roman army’s officer corps was especially fond of its ‘awe-inspiring’ costume and adornment. State factories, interestingly known as barbaricaria, were devoted to the gilding and ornamentation of officers’ armour. All these points support Wickham’s idea.

However, other points counter it. One is that the late Roman ‘soldier emperors’ were very far from neglecting their private quarters and constructed new and very elaborate palaces (most notably, perhaps, at Salona in Dalmatia). The lavish villas in the immediate hinterland of Trier, the imperial capital, also suggest that imperial officers, at the higher end at least (some of whom, surely, were military), still desired impressive homes. A vital factor might have been late Roman aristocratic culture, which tended to avoid spending private money on public building, something which doubtless goes far to explaining the changes on urban sites. The early imperial army had sponsored local markets and private craftsmen to a considerable degree, in a way that paralleled the use of private money on civic projects in the civilian sphere. Given the fluidity that existed between civil and military careers at this time, this is not surprising. The later army, by contrast (and again unsurprisingly given the contemporary nature of civilian political life), was supplied overwhelmingly via the state and its workshops. Roman officers might, like their civilian counterparts, have spent money on private dwellings (urban and rural) but not on the public structures of their barracks. Given Late Roman law’s frequent enactments about officers who stayed away from their regiments for long periods of time, this suggestion gains further credibility. These laws demonstrate that military service continued to be an option for the Roman aristocracy and that it was encompassed within the usual aristocratic norms of otium and negotium. Roman officers seem to have spent large amounts of time living away from their barracks. Further, when, during the fifth century, we can examine areas of Gaul where the Roman aristocracy became militarised but remained wealthy, we see that they continued to spend money on their villae (even if, admittedly, less than before) as well as maintaining retinues and taking part in campaigns. A simple militarisation of the northern Gallic aristocratic culture seems, then, to be unsatisfactory as an explanation for the reduction in the number and scale of villas.

This thesis proposed here, relating changes in the region’s settlement pattern and economy to changes in the late imperial state, accounts for the developments on urban as well as rural sites. Late Roman northern Gallic towns famously underwent serious contraction. This has largely been judged from the length of the late imperial walled circuits, a blunt method which must give misleading results in at least some cases, such as that of Bavay, where the town walls only enclosed the forum. Even so, recent excavation confirms the abandonment of large areas of early Roman towns. These restricted urban ‘enceintes’ probably do not mark economic decline as such. Where details of their above-ground appearance are known, they often show care and attempts at decoration. That the foundations (frequently the only element retrieved archaeologically, of course) include large amounts of reused masonry from demolished early Roman buildings and grave monuments permits no extrapolations about the haste or emergency conditions in which the walls were built. The period of these walls’ construction is much less well established than was once thought. Rather than having been thrown up rapidly in the last quarter of the third century in response to barbarian invasions, their construction could have extended through the fourth century and possibly beyond. Nonetheless the use, in the walls’ foundations, of large quantities of often good-quality sculpture from cemeteries and public buildings makes a statement about urban change that cannot be lightly dismissed.

These fortifications and their scale have valuable things to tell us nonetheless. I suggest that their short length results partly from the well-documented unwillingness of late Roman local aristocrats to spend their money upon public building projects. It might also stem, to some extent, from a lack of independently wealthy aristocrats in the towns’ hinterlands. This decline in the prosperity of the northern Gallic elite probably also lies behind the reduction in the scale of occupation in towns as the small landowners, those not employed to manage imperial estates, seem, as we have noted, to have generally lacked the secure control of surplus necessary to sponsor urban development and manufactures, town houses and so on. A further factor, quite well understood in Britain, would be the rise of lesser settlements, the so-called vici (now often themselves fortified as castra or castella). These settlements often arose as markets and by the late imperial period had probably done much to erode the civitas-capitals’ dominance as economic central places, in economic terms. The Gallic urban hierarchy underwent significant changes in the late imperial era, with some sites (like Verdun, in northern Gaul) gaining civitas status. Slightly further south, by the sixth century (when Gregory of Tours famously remarked upon the fact) the castrum of Dijon had become notably more important than its civitas-capital, Langres. Against such a back-drop it should not be surprising if intermediate settlements rose in importance relative to that of the cities.

The general thesis proposed here to explain late imperial change in northern Gaul is confirmed to some extent by exceptions to what seems to be the general rule. One is the region around Trier, which, although quite badly hit in the third century in terms of the rate of villa-abandonment, nevertheless has the largest and most lavish examples of fourth-century northern Gallic villas (as intimated earlier). Trier itself, of course, saw a rash of public building focused on the imperial presence there and that is the crucial issue. With the emperors and their senior palatine aristocrats resident there for much of the late third and fourth century, it is no surprise that resources could be spent on the city, or that wealth found its way into Trier’s immediate surroundings. When one considers that the prosperity of the aristocrats of the Treveri had been unusual in the early and even pre-Roman eras, the fact that the Triererland bucks the general trend should scarcely be unexpected. The idea that imperial patronage was the main factor determining variations from the norm gains further support at Metz, the next city on the Moselle, to the south of Trier. If Trier’s abnormally long walled circuit probably belongs to the early Roman period, then the 72 hectares enclosed at Metz make that city’s walls by far the longest late Roman enceinte in northern Gaul, perhaps in all of Gaul. The castra of the civitas of Metz also have unusually long walled circuits. This exceptional scale of fortification surely relates to the presence around Trier of troops available for such building projects. An inscription documents the construction of the Langmauer, a long wall presumably enclosing an estate, by a unit of primani.

Even if it does not explain the decline in the number and elaboration of villas, the militarisation of northern Gaul is nevertheless a feature of the region’s archaeology which supports the general hypothesis. The fortification of granaries and other rural sites seems to be associated (as indeed may the walling of urban administrative centres and some villages) with a concern to ensure the safety of supplies ear-marked for the army. The deployment of symbols in inhumations in the region, especially when these become more lavish in the century’s last decades, underlines the close link between imperial (probably especially military) service and local status. For most of the period before 400, official belt-sets and brooches, the badges of rank in the army and civil service, are the most common grave-goods in male burials.

Part 2 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).