Changing Minds around 600

[I was very kindly invited to give one of the once-a-term York Medieval Lectures yesterday (in-house speakers are not often invited), which was an honour of course.  I reprint the text as given, minus introductory burble.  It is all very provisional and doubtless all much more complex.  Indeed maybe just plain wrong, but at the moment these seem to me to be interesting lines of enquiry.

The argument goes like this.  Many things were changing around 600, of which I give a sample.  The problem is how to explain this wide range of changes across many geographical areas, social, political, military and cultural aspects, etc.  Pirenne blamed the Arabs of course, but that obviously won't work.  In the past I looked at short-term, important political events, then moved on to see things more in terms of a conflict for resources between kings and aristocrats.  Now I am exploring the idea that a combination of features, contingent political historical events, the knowledge of living 'after Rome', an ideological crisis as a result of the latter, inside and outside the old Empire, and theological worries about the end of the world (dependent upon the long-standing belief that the Roman Empire and the Sixth Age were commensurate) came together to produce a very distinctive world view, one that soon passed but left far-reaching changes in its wake.  Well, see what you think.]

For the last two and a half years, I’ve been working on a project entitled ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

I’ve been exploring the notion of the ‘end of the late antique state’ around 600.   This may or may not be descriptively adequate but it involves discussing the end of a Roman world view, and the need to create new ways of thinking about power, gender-relations and so on and so forth after the end of the Roman Empire.  That was what the ‘changing minds’ element of the title referred to.  But it’s that area – that mental shift – which, over the last two or three months, has really taken over my thinking about the period. It also relates to a lot of other reading I’ve been doing over the past two years about the meaning and importance of history itself.  So, what I present tonight is a long way from being a coherent, fully-worked-out thesis; it is a snapshot, as of February 2012, of where my own mind is at, in thinking about the period between roughly the last third of the sixth century and the first half of the seventh.  In descriptive terms – and in many explanatory ideas too – I have little new to say.  What I have to offer is rather an attempt to bring together various disparate elements – written and excavated data, social and political history, both of those and religious and intellectual history – and to try to confront some important issues, such as how change happens, especially what, with Foucault, we might call epistemic change.

Now, there are four caveats that I need you to bear in mind throughout what I am about to say, as I don’t have the time to reiterate them with every point I make. 

1: The first concerns the diversity of experiences and strands of the story.  If you are trying to give a whistle-stop overview of a period of between, say, eighty and 100 years in less than an hour, you have to generalise.  The period I discuss saw many different histories, whether looking at geographical regions, social groups or historical themes.  They don’t all run at the same speed and with the same chronological shifts.  Some may indeed run counter to what one might see as a main trend.  Classical and medieval thinkers liked to use music as a metaphor for unity in diversity. If you like, this paper represents me whistling something which might be recognisable, overall, as the melody of a particular piece of music but which corresponds in detail to none of the parts played by individual instruments or voices.

2: The second, related, caveat is that I am not discussing a dramatic, revolutionary change, a seismic shift from one thing to another.  I’m not suggesting that on 1 January 601 a bell tolled and everyone changed their ways of doing everything.  There were of course continuities for the ‘old’ ways and precursors, models and forerunners of the new.  What I am taking about is a change of emphasis or of pace.  It’s significant – indeed vitally important – but we need to be clear about how I understand such a change.

3: I don’t for example (and this is my third, again related, caveat), see it all as all happening suddenly, at once or all at the same time.  I might argue that the decades either side of 600 were a ‘Schwerpunkt’ but the period of change spans two or three generations. 

4: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is not the period of change.  I stole my project’s title, shamelessly, from that of my namesake, Guy Bois’ controversial book The Transformations of the Year 1000.  Unlike Bois, however, I am not postulating that this X marked the spot where the ancient world became the medieval world.  The period c.600 is often described as the start of the medieval world.  Indeed one short-lived journal of the 1990s, Medieval History, set its opening date, very precisely, as 594.  What happened in 594?  As I’m sure you know, Gregory of Tours died.  He bore a huge weight on his shoulders; he took to his bed, breathed his last, and the classical world ended.   But, the start of the medieval world?  What does that mean?  I don’t know; it’s one reason I don’t think of myself as a medievalist.  If it means that the world c.650 is more recognisable to people who study the twelfth or thirteenth centuries than the world c.550 then I’d have to agree, but then the world c.750 would be even more recognisable and the world c.450 even less so.  It might well be that many of what one might, were one so inclined, think of as defining features of the medieval world were significantly shifted around 600 but the danger with that sort of thinking is that, like Bois’, it assumes two periods of greater or lesser structural stability on either side of a point of transformation or transition.  The world as it was in western Europe in c.550 was a pretty recent creation and the world that emerged after my period of change did not remain unaltered for long.  A lot happened around 700. 

You must bear all four of these general points in mind, throughout what I am going to say, as qualifying an oversimplifying overview.

2: Description of Period

The Column of Phocas, Rome
Nothing says 'the end of the classical world'
like the Column of Phocas

So, you might be asking yourself, what is so interesting about the period around 600?  Well, I’ll tell you…  This will of necessity be a rather breathless and selective round-up.  I will return to the elements that concern me; others can perhaps be dealt with in discussion.  One topic that most interests me is time and how people thought about it, so this listing has something of a focus on that area.  As ever Gaul/Francia is the area about which I know most and it will retain its centrality within my discussion.  I’m not assuming that what happens in Francia must necessarily happen everywhere else; in some cases clearly it doesn’t; in others there are distinct variations on the theme.  It nevertheless gives a reasonable approximation of the general directions in which things were moving across the West.  One thing that has long been said, and it still seems to be true, is that it was this period that saw a decisive shift of focus towards the north of France and the North Sea cultural zone province from the Mediterranean.  This might be of more general cultural significance than I hitherto supposed.

The material that first drew me to the importance of the changes around 600 was the funerary archaeology of north-eastern Gaul.  I have talked about this Just – So – Very often, not least here, that I will – you’ll be pleased to hear, be very brief but it is important and must be mentioned.   The principal issues are these.  First of all, one of the major shifts in the form and design of artefacts took place sometime between c.575 and c.600.  This involved, not least, a radical shift in the balance of investment in material and decoration from feminine to masculine artefacts.  At the same time, the focus of funerary ritual moved from the comparatively transient (if quite multi-dimensional) display of the grave-goods ritual, to a greater degree of investment in more permanent – if more one-dimensional – commemoration in above ground monuments, and perhaps in other, written or liturgical  forms of memoria.  Monuments include the construction of barrows on the fringes of the Frankish realms, churches (in northern Gaul moving gradually out from the cities, via the smaller administrative nodes, to the countryside), grave-stones, sarcophagus-lids visible at surface level, walls around burials, and so on.  Commensurate with this is a significant growth in the number of cemeteries, usually smaller than their sixth-century precursors. 

Now, it is possible to see similar shifts in other regions of the West, both inside and outside the former frontiers of the Roman Empire.  The rash of lavish barrow burials in Anglo-Saxon England, most famously Sutton Hoo, of course, most recently Prittlewell, is well-known.  Not just the investment in the display is noteworthy, but also the process of separation – both of which find their parallels in Francia, particularly on its fringes.  Many of the changes involved in the move towards what used to be called ‘Final Phase Cemeteries’ – or ‘Conversion Period’ cemeteries (I don’t think the description is very much more helpful) – are recognisably similar, though rather different in detail.  The increased concern with above-ground commemoration extends to the reuse of prehistoric barrows and other monuments – something which has some parallels in Francia, especially in the east, though elsewhere it might be that the standing remains of Roman villae were more important.  North of the old Roman frontier in parts of the Pictish kingdom it is the case that above-ground monuments were becoming more popular at this time, too, with the use of symbol stones, cairns and various types of barrow. 

The usual political interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon burials is as a sign of the emergence of kingship.  The Pictish developments are usually placed in a sequence allegedly charting the growth of the Pictish ‘state’.  I will present some reasons to rethink this interpretation later on.  The standard interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon trend towards the reuse of barrows and other ‘ancient monuments’ is that seventh-century people were attempting to associate themselves with the ancestors, in other words with the past.  I find this reading entirely unconvincing, for reasons I have set out at length, especially with regard to John Moreland’s reading of the Wigber Low barrow in Derbyshire.  There seems to me to be no evidence to support it and, in broader context, especially looked at across Europe, it is far more likely that this represents an over-writing of the past and a concern with the future.

Whilst were on the subject of the future, here are two clauses of Frankish law concerning what you have to do if you can’t pay a legal fine.  The first is clause 57, De Chrenecruda, of the early sixth-century Pactus Legis Salicae – a favourite of any student who has to read the text.  The guilty man goes before the mallus – the court – and declares publicly, with twelve oath-helpers, that he has no property left, above or below the ground.  Whereupon he must take handfuls of earth from the four corners of his house and throw them over his shoulder onto those of his closest relatives, on his father’s and mother’s sides, who must help him pay.  He does this to all those who are related to him within three generations.  Something over a hundred years later, the equivalent clause, 12.2, of Lex Ribvaria, probably issued in the 620s or 630s, though this is uncertain, simply reads that if a man cannot pay the fine, his sons can pay over three generations.  What we have here, whilst the concern with three generations remains constant, is a shift from a public, ritual display bringing in living relatives, towards a spreading of the responsibility into the future.

This is not the only concern with the future in Ripuarian Law, which contains, to my knowledge, the first reference to the procedure whereby, if a written document is not drawn up, young boys are brought to a legal transaction and boxed around the ears to make them remember it.  The reference to documents is important.  Ripuarian Law, and in this it is entirely different from Salic Law, repeatedly says that customary law, partible inheritance and similar matters can be modified if a document exists.  And indeed it is from around 600 that documents start to survive in Francia.  Various chance explanations for this have been proposed but none is very satisfactory.  In the tenth century, the oldest charters Flodoard of Rheims could find in the cathedral archive were from the period between 580 and 600, apart from a couple of bishops’ wills, notably that of Saint Remigius, presumably kept as a relic.  The oldest original charters belong to Chlothar II’s reign (584-629), there’s a possible interpolated charter from the reign of Chlothar’s cousin Theudebert II (596-612) and the oldest genuine copies come from the earlier seventh century.  The numbers of authentic charters really take off from about the 640s and into the second half of the century, though.  The most forged Merovingian king is not, as you might expect, Clovis, founder of the dynasty; Theo Kölzer could only find six forged charters of Clovis.  It is Dagobert I (621-639), for whom Kölzer tracked down no fewer than forty.  Forgers, it seems, picked a reign from which it was plausible that a charter might have survived.  Clearly, no one had ever seen a charter of Clovis, evidently making attempts to claim him as a donor almost as suspect to early medieval readers as they are to modern ones. 

Forged Merovingian Charters, by Reign, Childeric I
to Dagobert I

It is interesting too that for the century or more between Childeric I and Childebert II’s accession in 575 Kölzer found seventy-four deperdita – charters referred to by, or inferred from, other sources but now lost.  He catalogued no fewer than 133 for the sixty-four years between 575 and 639; mostly from Dagobert’s reign.  Now, that evident three- or fourfold increase in the relative frequency of documents must be relativized by the growing survival of written evidence from around 600: a vitally important change in itself.  Doing so reminds us that the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom was highly literate, generating all sorts of documents – almost none of which survives.  Indeed, there are almost as few surviving documents from Gaul north of the Loire before 600 as there are for the British Isles.  Apart from warning us against assuming that a documentary blank indicates illiteracy or illiterate government, this shows that the increased document survival after 600 is not an issue of the introduction of writing as much as the decision to retain documents (an issue not even addressed in John Moreland’s book).  Why that might be the case is an issue to which I will return.  It sheds a different light on the production of northern formularies from the seventh century, for one thing.

Associated with the survival of these documents is the development of aristocratic estates.  Northern Gallic Merovingian aristocrats might have had more secure control, more eminent ownership of, lands and a greater ability to dispose of them as they pleased – far more wills survive from the seventh century than the sixth; Salic Law did not even recognise the possibility of testamentary disposition and a story in Gregory of Tours suggests that some kings did what they could to back this up.  This might also have been because sixth-century royal grants were grants of government and of revenue, rather than of ownership of the land.  Higher-status settlement sites become archaeologically visible in the seventh century.  Associated with this is the growth of immunities, preventing royal officers from entering specified estates.  That itself suggests two crucial developments.  It illuminates the well-known decline of taxation around 600 but the prohibition on royal officers entering estates to collect fines for non-performance of military service suggests, with other evidence, an important change in the raising of armies.  In my book on the subject, I argued that sixth-century armies still functioned effectively as royal coercive forces, raised from administrative units, commanded by royally-appointed officers.  Seventh-century forces appear to be ever more focused upon aristocratic retinues.  There are other military changes at this time that I don’t have time to discuss.  The rites to extract local surplus and military service seem by the middle of the seventh century to have devolved to local aristocrats.  This may have been the case in Spain as well as in Francia, although the Spanish case seems to me to be more complex and to require more thought. 

The key shift that unifies most of the preceding points is a growth in aristocratic power.  Thus one can detect changes in the description of aristocrats.  Magnate dynasties begin to be securely traceable in northern Gaul.  One reason for this is their promotion of rural monasticism, in Gaul often associated with the Irish monk Columbanus but which, as Ian Wood has shown, rapidly became Frankish to all intents and purposes.  The foundation of these monasteries was a focus for the donation of lands, a means of securing aristocratic control over lands and so on. 

The growth in aristocratic power is certainly to be associated with the economic revival of the North Sea zone from around 600.  The trading sites or emporia become more visible than hitherto, and northern Gallic towns experience an upturn after two centuries of stagnation.  An increase in craft-specialisation is detectable in the metalwork and ceramic evidence, and smaller-denomination coinage reappears.  This is doubtless related, too, to the well-known shift in trading patterns at about this time, from the so-called Mediterranean system that predominated in the fifth and sixth centuries to the ‘Continental System’ of the seventh.

Finally, there are major cultural shifts too.  The use of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament, in political writings increases at about this time.  About twenty years ago William Daly wrote an important piece about the difference between Gregory of Tours’ Clovis and the Clovis who appears in contemporary sources, showing that the Clovis of his own day was a much more Roman and Christian figure than Gregory’s.  Daly didn’t make the point, though, that Gregory’s Clovis is very much a Clovis for the late sixth century: an Old Testament king who walks righteously in the sight of the Lord and smites His enemies.  Robert Markus brilliantly discussed the importance of typological thinking to Gregory the Great, and how, when compared with earlier thinkers (most notably Augustine) Gregory is able much more easily to pass through the sign – the word – to the signified beyond.  This sort of development, I think, is more widespread than perhaps Markus thought. 

Jacques Fontaine argued that the seventh century saw an acceleration in the importance of rhythmic verse but especially of a type of poetry that was composed in autonomous strophes making more use of parallel phrasing and synonyms.  This can be set alongside Gregory the Great’s thought and Gregory of Tours’ historical writing.  Another shift that has been remarked upon is in the greater use of miracles in religious writing.  It has been argued that Caesarius of Arles makes almost no use of the miraculous in his Sermons, but that his vita, composed in the 540s contains many miracles and by the time one arrives at the Gregories, especially the Bishop of Tours, the miraculous can be argued, as by Ray Van Dam, to dominate explanation, to the exclusion of theological debate.  Finally the period I am concerned with is, more or less, that of the floruit of Salin’s Style II, which shows a number of key differences from its late fifth- and early sixth-century predecessor, funnily enough known as Style I.

The world's most famous Style II Object

It’s possible to sketch all of these developments too starkly, as I have doubtless done, and there are, as stated, many regional variations, but the selection given at least sets out the background to what I want to talk about in the main section of the lecture.  One thing I would like to stress, to any Anglo-Saxonists in the audience, is just how well the Anglo-Saxon picture fits alongside that which I have just sketched, which I hope will make you reconsider the way in which explanation is still widely hung upon conversion to Christianity – at least ponder whether conversion was a cause or a symptom of change.

3: Explanations

All of which brings us neatly to the issue of explanation.  The most famous explanation is, I suppose, Henri Pirenne’s from the early twentieth century, blaming seventh-century changes on the Arab conquests.  This might still be popular as an explanation in some quarters, for obvious reasons.  But the Arab conquests come too late to explain the western Mediterranean changes and again you have to ponder the extent to which they were themselves cause or symptom of the changes taking place at this time.  Pirenne, famously, thought that the rupture of the Mediterranean from the north-west caused Europe’s centre of gravity to shift towards, well, his native Belgium, really.  That economic dislocation, though, can be traced as early as the fourth century and the Mediterranean economic crisis comes too early to have had much to do with the Arabs – although it might have had crucial knock-on effects in the British Isles and it does have a role in explaining some of the variations in trajectory between northern and southern Europe.

Twenty years ago, I pinned the Gallic changes on the royal minorities that occurred between 575 and 613, decisively altering the balance of power between the royal court and the aristocracy, towards the latter.  I still think that that’s very important in explaining the end of the Late Antique state in Gaul.  But to what extent does, or can, it explain developments elsewhere?  It probably did have effects in southern England but there’s only so far that one can push such an explanation.  It’s true that there were political upheavals in Spain around 600, too, that could have had similar effects, but one must also note that (according to Shetelig in the 1930s!) there were changes at about this time on Norwegian cemeteries that look very like those that took place in Gaul.  Frankish and Gothic political instability surely didn’t have effects that rippled out that far!

One also has to ask why dynastic crises in Spain and Gaul should have had the same sorts of effects (if they did!).  So I moved on to consider the end of the late antique state.  Many western European polities in the sixth century fit a reasonable, uncontroversial definition of a state, whereas they don’t (as I see it) in the seventh.  My explanations for that focussed on a rivalry for control of comparatively finite material resources, both at a local community-level and at a higher political level, between kings and aristocrats.  That nevertheless questions why crisis should automatically lead to a hoarding of power by the aristocrats.  It raises the problem, as Chris Wickham put it in 1984, using evidently Gramscian terminology, of ‘how the state lost consent’.  The materialist explanation only goes so far here.

So we need to enter the world of ideas.  Markus discussed the period 400-600 as one of ‘desecularisation’.  There was an ‘ascetic invasion’, a shift towards more monastic ways of thinking about the world, which left little room for the secular.  Markus was a very fine historian and obviously there is a great deal in his argument.  Yet, it too falls short.  Like all of us, Markus had his blind spots.  One was a curious lack of interest in the contemporaries of Gregory the Great, who, for Markus, simply stands at the end of a line that starts with Augustine and passes through Cassian and Cassiodorus.  Markus says little about the other Gregory – of Tours – or Isidore of Seville, let alone other types of text.  It’s difficult, moreover, to avoid the impression that Markus saw Gregory as illustrative of a something of a sorry decline when held up to Augustine.  Again, as far as I can judge, there’s something in that but I think that we need to interrogate this more clearly.  Markus saw the epistemological shift around 600 in terms of decline.  His reading is rationalist, as from a sort of analytical philosophical viewpoint but while instinctively I agree with his judgement I think there must be a more positive or creative way of reading the shift.

Markus’ idea of an epistemological crisis is one in which the old ideas cannot provide answers to new questions, forcing a radical shift in ways of thought.  But, says Markus, like a true classicist, the old ways could solve all of these problems.  How could classical civilisation not?  The idea that that sort of thinking might be found wanting is clearly unimaginable!  This is what I want to explore in what remains of this paper.

In 1988, after a paper by Jocelyn Hillgarth about eschatology and political thinking around 600, Karl Ferdinand Werner said (in my translation),

“I just want to say that I am wary of whether an ‘atmosphere’, or certain intellectual ideas can be a driving force.  Does a particular thought dominate men and their behaviour?  I’d like to express some scepticism about taking that too far.” 

It is a fair question.  How far was the rarefied air of a Pope Gregory breathed by kings, or the men hauling Sutton Hoo Man’s ship up a hill in Suffolk, let along those carving Pictish symbols in areas that the Roman Empire had never governed?  This is what I want to explore, using a potpourri of ideas from a range of thinkers, used in my own Humpty-Dumpty-ish sort of way.  They will cluster around the reciprocal relationship between the subject – the social or historical actor – and the symbolic order.

4: Attempt to try and bring all this together



The Immediately Post-Justinianic West



In Barbarian Migrations I dealt with the issue of narrative and the tyranny of a particular narrative of fifth century history – a theme I develop in my new book, Worlds of Arthur.  I tried to write a history in the ironic mode, a history, in other words, determined by unintended consequences of actions aimed at doing something else entirely.  My view of history is as something entirely chaotic.  The period from 550 to 650 presents a very different, if related, set of issues.  For one thing there is no overarching narrative of any sort, once the Roman Empire dissolves.  That is one reason why the importance of the decades around 600 has not really been realised, unlike in the East, where an imperial master-narrative still pertains. 



The Point de Capiton



It seems to me to be crucial to understanding this period to acknowledge that, after Justinian, his ideological output and especially after his wars and their failure to reconquer territories that he now proclaimed had been lost to barbarians, it was impossible to go on believing that Roman Empire still existed in the West, just as before.  By the end of the period that concerns me it was impossible to believe that in the East either, and many of the responses were analogous.  This has important implications.  For one thing and this is a weakness in Markus’ thinking, it cut away the key anchors of the old signifying system.  One is born into a world of language, of signification, which is why Lacan and Derrida were correct to reverse Saussure’s formula and insist on the priority of the signifier over the signified.  But the removal of, in Lacanian terms, the points de capiton of the classical signifying chain meant a fluidity of meanings.  If one were to combine that with Derrida’s not dissimilar view of language, then it seems to me that this would precisely render the old ways of thinking unsatisfactory in a new context, in the way that Markus failed to acknowledge. 

Help, however, was at hand.  One of the crucial changes of the fifth century – perhaps the crucial change of that century, more so than the old narrative of barbarian invasion, which makes it ironic that I didn’t really spot it in my book – is a shift in the way of seeing the world.  In the classical Roman vision, the centre, the core, of political legitimacy was defined by the ideals of the civic Roman male.  Closeness to that core, or distance from it – along analogous axes of barbarism, femininity or animalism – defined relative political legitimacy.  That nearness or distance was of course ultimately determined by those who controlled the imperial court.  For various reasons, that centre fractured in the fifth century and the world came to be structured in terms of religious orthodoxy, and distance from that, towards various heresies for example, was what defined illegitimacy.  You can track that shift at all sorts of levels of fifth-century politics and across a wide spectrum of cultural forms.  One advantage was that the centre, here, was less fixed but it is clear that this was still played out within an essentially Roman framework.  Many Christian values at this time mapped directly onto those of the civic Roman.  Compare the preambles of Valentinian III’s Novels with the laws of his great-grandfather and namesake Valentinian I and see how things have changed.  Even into the sixth century in the West, religious orthodoxy was still a matter linked with the Emperor.  In the East of course it continued to be but in the West what the Emperor thought largely became a matter of indifference after the Three Chapters Schism.  That increased concern with Christianity provides both the cause and the cure of the post-Roman anxieties of the period around 600.

The problem about being Christian in a post-Justinianic world was this.  At least for two and a half centuries, since Eusebius had synchronized biblical history with classical, the sixth age of the world had been seen as commensurate with the Roman Empire.  Christ, after all, had been born during the reign of the first Emperor.  Gregory of Tours added that Saint Martin, his hero, had been born during the reign of the first Christian Emperor.  So, what now?  Now that the Empire had so clearly ceased to exist?  This, I propose, is the key to understanding all sorts of aspects of this period.  Many of those alive in the decades around 600 – which they knew was 600 years after Christ – thought they were living after the end of history, after linear time.  Hence the new and apparently qualitatively different apocalypticism that one finds so strongly so strongly marked in Gregory the Great’s writings.  Less widely appreciated is the fact that similar concerns appear in the works of his direct contemporary and namesake, the Bishop of Tours.  Gregory seems to perceive the approaching end, almost malgré lui in Giselle de Nie’s reading.  In de Nie’s view, Gregory began with the idea of reassuring his readers that the end of the world was not nigh but by the time he finished the Histories the evidence of his eyes seemed to tell a different story.  Signs and wonders were on the increase and with them false prophets.  There is a lot in this.  The only problem is that the Preface to Book V of the Histories contains an unmistakable apocalyptic allusion.  Die Nie thus has to argue that V.Praef. was composed late and inserted into an earlier composition.  I’m not convinced by this and have argued that it is actually – at the opposite extreme – the first part of the Histories that Gregory composed.

So, what do you do in a world after time?  In a world devoid of its centuries-old fixed points?  The solution seems to have been to turn to another source of fixed points and underpinnings, the Bible.  Given the synchronism of Christianity and the Empire and the unpicking of the quilting points of the Roman signifying system, then it is not surprising that the Old Testament should have become more of a constant touchstone than before.

This new set of reference points works in a number of directions.  For one thing it allows western kings to find new forms of legitimation.  This is the moment when kings become new Davids and Solomons rather than new Constantines or Trajans.  Religious underpinnings of kingship come to the fore and in a new way.  Earlier, I contrasted the legal pronouncements of Valentinian I and Valentinian III.  If we skip forward another 100 years to the Edict of King Guntramn of Burgundy, issued before the Council of Chalon in 585 we see something qualitatively different again.  This, it seems to me, is the appearance of kingship as divine ministry.  Kingship is a God-given position you don’t find that under the Empire) and the king is responsible for the spiritual well-being of his people.  What I find interesting is that this royal document predates Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule by eight years or so.  This suggests to me that Gregory’s thinking, where there’s really nothing to allow a distinction between spiritual and secular pastors, may be rather more typical of his age than has been appreciated.  It suggests to me that the idea of the pastor as answerable for the souls of his flock – for which there were plentiful Old Testament reference points -  was keyed into the apocalypticism of the period.  A judgement was coming. 

Nonetheless, that was useful for royal ideology in what I suspect might have been something of a hegemonic crisis.  In the Empire there had been a what one can label, in Gramscian terms, a civil society in which normative codes served to maintain and legitimise the status quo.  With the unpicking of the classical points de capiton in the period up to c.550, all this will have been questioned.  Why should one do what one’s king said?  A religious – what has been called a monastic or ascetic – replacement must have helped to resolve that crisis.

It might also explain some other religious synchronicity.  In 589, Reccared of the Goths called the Third Council of Toledo, where he renounced the Arian creed that his people had followed for more than two centuries.  Within a decade of that, Æthelberht of Kent allowed Augustine’s mission into his lands and shortly afterwards converted to Christianity.  I have long thought that these events are linked in a current of political and religious thought.  The late and post-imperial trend of adopting a religion that differentiated the military élite from the civil, provincial population was coming to an end.  Perhaps this was because the two groups were by now indistinguishable.  By the time that Ripuarian Law was issued, for example, Romani, rather than being a parallel if legally disadvantaged group of the free population, were semi-free, dependant at law upon free Ripuarians – Franks.  Perhaps, too, in the new world, that way of thinking, locked as it was into an imperial framework, was no longer viable. 

In the intellectual climate of the late sixth century, with the idea of royal ministry gaining ground, perhaps universaility was more important.  This might be equally important inside and outside the former Empire and among former pagans as well as former heretics if – as I suspect was the case, the consciousness of living in a post-Roman world caused ideological crises there too.  This point is of course more readily grasped once one abandons the ‘Invasions’ narrative and sees barbaricum and the Empire not as two antagonistically-opposed worlds but as two inextricably linked parts of the same world. 

The other element of this conjuncture of material, social and mental circumstances was indeed those political crises.  I mentioned at the start the question of why these should have produced what I see as the collapse of the state at this time.  A crisis of the old hegemony would create conditions in which a new order of (in Gramscian terms) civil society could be created but in which also the rules of politics were significantly renegotiated.

A regional aristocracy that acquired a security of local pre-eminence and of the control of surplus could have done what it had done under the Christian Empire, got involved in urban building, sponsored and sent its children to civil schools, had its children educated in the old way, forged a class identity, a control of culture and taste and so on.  But the reference points for that were lacking.  The fixed points according to which the old culture was triangulated had gone.  So new aristocratic cultural forms – like royal – were needed.  Therefore it is at this time that aristocratic (and royal) involvement in monasteries really takes off across the West, from Rome itself as far as Britain.  This expression fits the intellectual currents I have described, not least the concern with ministry and the care of souls, and I suspect a concern with the Day of Judgement.  None of this denies the material advantages bestowed upon the élite by these new forms.  It serves to explain or at least thicken our description of the change in forms.

The coexistence of apocalyptic world view and continuing material politics can be well enough understood via the Lacanian formula much cited by Žižek: Je sais bien mais quand-même: I know very well [that the world is ending] but nevertheless [I’ll go on trying to do the best I can for my family via-à-vis everyone else’s].

We can thicken the description further by considering the nature of the changes in thought.  How does one conceive of a world after time?  The increase in the use of typology is key.  The epistemic change can be nicely illustrated by comparing two large-scale, long-term historical projects: Orosius’ Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, written c.417, and Gregory of Tours’ Ten Books of Histories, written 576-592.  The projects of both are similar to the extent that Gregory quotes Orosius in the key Preface to Book V.  Orosius, though, was more up-beat in his message than Gregory, something significant in itself.  However, although Orosius’ message is very much ‘it was ever thus’, his history unfolds in characteristically classical linear fashion.  Gregory’s Histories, by contrast, concentrate on his own time and are entirely discontinuous.  They work typologically.  The Histories begin not with Creation but with the Cain killing Abel, the type of the event that led Gregory to begin his work: Chilperic’s murder of his brother, Sigebert, in late 575.  After the end of linear time, consequences come about vertically, from God to earth according to the nature of human behaviour.  Gregory writes history as though it were hagiography.  Self-contained anecdotes have their own outcomes manifesting divine presence and they are piled high, typologically, repetitively. 

Pictish symbols: metaphors?

I have already mentioned the prevalence of the miraculous in explanation.  It has been shown, most recently in Charlotte Kingston’s PhD thesis, that Gregory the Great’s discussions of the miraculous manifest the same intellectual traits as his theological writings.  Gregory of Tours seems to reject theological debate in favour of miraculous proofs.  It might be the case, though, that the two Gregories can be brought together, alongside other cultural shifts around an increasingly metaphorical way of thinking.  The Isidorean Style of poetry works, I read, in analogous fashion to Gregory’s history/hagiography; it is episodic and works through synonym, paraphrase with no linear connection between verses.  The model, evidently, is the Psalms. The effect seems to me to be to unsettle and, thereby enable a shift to meditation on meaning, on the issues in question.  In that sense I think that Gregory the Great’s ‘freewheeling’ theology and Gregory of Tours’ preference for the ‘sign’ over the text (so to speak) might be more alike than has been appreciated.  It’s possible, idly, to wonder whether Style II on the one hand and the Pictish symbols on the other might themselves be different manifestations of a metaphoric current of thought.

Je sais bien mais quand-même…  We can return to the attractions of all this in a new political world, a new civic society.  Disjuncture, discontinuity, typology and metaphor might be very attractive to new or redefined élites.  The aristocracies on either side of the Channel, maybe north of Hadrian’s Wall and in other areas, even in Italy, were frequently new groups.  This is where typology and metaphor are so valuable.  They imply the ‘always, already’.  Groups with no lineal descent – even if trying to create such – find their justification typologically. 

So we can end by returning to the above-ground monuments.  If there is a link on occasion with the past, I think we ought to conceive of this in other than simply ancestral terms.  I think it is more important to see it as a discontinuous over-writing but above all the concern is with a monument that will last into the future.  The irony is that that concern with the future, which I see in the burial monuments, the retention of documents and their increased use, is that on the eve of the Apocalypse it was essentially a very short-term view!

Apocalypse soon?  Agilbert's Sarcophagus, Jouarre (c.670)
Does anyone know of an earlier depiction of the Day of
Judgement?

That leads me to my concluding thought.  The conjuncture of political, material and intellectual circumstances around 600 created a very specific world-view.  Within half a century the moment passed.  The world didn’t end.  Of course Apocalypticism persisted, but Bede, born not long after the end of my period, returned to the Augustinian idea that the Day of Judgement was not coming soon.  It is interesting that according to Mark Handley’s studies, after III Toledo, the use of the Spanish Era largely dropped out of use for a few decades.  To me it’s as though they thought they had better stop counting.  By the second quarter of the seventh century they had started again. 

Apocalyptic worries, c.700.  An inscription
from Mellobaudes Memoria, Les Dunes,
Poitiers: ALFA ET Ω INITIUM ET FINIS.
QUONIAM QUIDQUID QUOTIDIAE
PEIUS ET PEIUS QUONDIAM FINIS
APPROPRINQUIT

In Barbarian Migrations I narrated the end of the Roman Empire in ironic terms. 

The most ironic thing of all, however, is that during the preceding century it is almost impossible to identify a single figure who had actually tried to cause its demise.  All the decisive acts in bringing down the Empire were carried out by people attempting to create a better position for themselves within the sorts of imperial structures that had existed in the fourth century.

Similarly, if the mental, cultural and political world c.650 was more recognisably medieval, if many of the tramlines that defined ‘medieval’ thought, culture and politics were set in place around 600, then this was largely because many people thought the world would end at that sort of time.  That would mean that – if you like to think in these terms – the creation of the medieval world, like the end of the Roman Empire came about by accident.  It was a monument to history’s inevitable irony.

The Woad Less Travelled: the archaeology of earlier Pictish society and politics viewed from Francia

This is the text of the paper delivered to the First Millennia Studies Group at the University of Edinburgh, 5 October, 2010.

Introduction

To someone used to the abundance of Frankish evidence it can seem difficult to see how anyone could ever say anything about the Picts. The Picts stand as a graphic example of the fact that the contours on the distribution-map of surviving written documents tend to match quite closely those of the spread of surviving, easily recognisable archaeological remains. Fortunately, the high quality of archaeological work, uncovering and exploring Pictish society, goes far towards counteracting the Picts’ own apparently steadfast refusal to leave behind any trace of their existence.

This paper brings the fruits of long study of post-imperial Frankish society to bear on some aspects of Pictish cemetery archaeology, in the hope that this might shed some new light on old problems. In particular I will question whether the development of Pictish society and politics followed the neat and linear trajectory that is often supposed. Instead I offer what I hope are some slightly different readings of particular aspects, which might be useful in future research. As John Hunter very nicely expressed it, Pictish archaeology has a tendency to shrug off theories in the manner of a dog shaking water off its coat. I hope this one might cling on a little longer or that, even if not, its rejection might nevertheless help refine future interpretations.

A Frankish model, or two

I will consider Pictish cemeteries in the light of my earlier studies of Merovingian Gaul’s rich funerary archaeology. These have often been concerned with the difference between sites or periods wherein the investment in funerary commemoration was focused upon the transient – grave-goods – and those in which it was concentrated upon more permanent above ground markers. I have also examined the interrelation of the different variables involved: grave-size and shape, or construction; skeletal position; the placement of the grave-goods; the organisation of the cemetery, and so on.

Two different models might usefully be adduced from the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia, the first drawn from the communal, rural grave-goods cemeteries of the regions of Trier and Metz (but which are broadly applicable across northern Francia), the second from the urban burial community represented by the epitaphs from Trier itself.

As I have discussed this on countless other occasions, this description can be brief. In the sixth century, large cemeteries are known, perhaps shared by several communities, organised quite neatly in rows (hence their frequent name: Reihengräberfelder; cimetières par rangées). The families using these grave-yards all seem to participate in the grave-goods custom to some degree. There is little sign of above-ground markers though some surely existed given the regularity of the lay-out. Grave-goods are distributed according to what appear to have been communal norms, structured around age and gender. Investment in funerary display was skewed towards adult males overall and towards adults over children. As this expenditure focused on those individuals, within earlier Merovingian society, whose deaths would have created the greatest tension in social relations, I have interpreted this as indicative of a society wherein local authority and power were maintained with difficulty from one generation to the next and open to serious local competition. This interpretation accords well with the picture drawn from other sources.

In the seventh century, by contrast, the number of grave-goods decreases dramatically. Gender-specific artefacts (especially feminine objects) are greatly reduced in number; there are far less clear relationships between artefact assemblages and the deceased’s age and sex. Instead there is a greater investment in above-ground monuments: sarcophagi with lids visible at surface level, gravestones, walls around burials, reused Roman masonry and sculpture used as markers, and so on. In addition, cemeteries are smaller but more numerous than before and neat organisation into rows often breaks down in favour of smaller, probably familial plots. The investment in funerary commemoration is, if anything, more weighted towards men than women than before, in terms of grave-goods, but the other elements of the tomb, such as the sarcophagi and monuments, show a much more even distribution between different age-groups and genders. The first part of this seventh-century phase is often a phase of ‘separierung’, when locally high-status families distinguish themselves from the remainder of the burial community by less subtle means: above-ground monuments, distributing lavish grave-goods with individuals of ages that would not generally merit such investment in the earlier phase, differential orientation of burials and the physical removal of the graves to a separate part of the cemetery. In other, peripheral regions of the Frankish world this is a period when large ‘aristocratic’ barrows are built; in the region of Metz, churches start being built in the town and other administratively nodal settlements at this time. Shortly afterwards, these families seem not to have buried their dead at the communal cemetery at all, by the mid-seventh century constructing churches on their rural estates. In short this phase is characterised, with reference to the preceding period, by elite ‘rule-breaking’.

The second model is furnished by the study of the Merovingian inscriptions of Trier. After exhaustive study, Mark Handley argued that the investment in epigraphic commemoration in Trier matched that in grave-goods, and there are indeed some important similarities. It seems to me, however, that the investment in the commemoration of men and women is much more even than with the grave-goods custom, and relative expenditure of resources on the marking of children’s graves is certainly greater. Overall, the Trier inscriptions resemble the seventh-century phase of the rural cemeteries in many ways.

The transition from the sixth-century situation to that of the seventh century, and the phase of ‘separierung’ in particular, can be explained with reference to the emergence of a more established aristocracy, which accords with changes in other classes of data (written sources, urban and rural settlement archaeology and so on) at the same time, around 600. This period saw the end of anything that might be termed a state in Francia, though the kingdom remained fairly coherent. The patterns visible in the Trier inscriptions, which span the whole period, can be viewed as the manifestation of a particularly self-conscious (and highly unusual) local aristocracy in Trier itself, the existence of which is visible in other evidence too. Thus, there are important correlations between particular types of funerary display and certain forms of socio-political formation, which match changes in other forms of data which can be understood in the same way. Finally, the transition from one form of commemoration to another is therefore a good index of social change.

This very briefly sets out some background to my consideration of Pictish society. It sets a context for the questions that, from a Merovingian perspective, I would ask of the surviving data. It is most definitely not the aim to use the Merovingian pattern to calibrate the Pictish, to ‘read off’ the Pictish evidence against a set of Frankish correlates. By contrast, I will use the Pictish case to question my reading of the Frankish evidence. I want to see if employing insights from a better-documented area might lead us in some slightly different directions to provide a model that might be refined, corrected or rejected by future analyses.

Long cist inhumations: How Christian? How Roman?

I begin with two interpretations of the ‘classic’ Pictish long cist cemetery. The first is that these cemeteries and the rite of inhumation relate somehow to Christianisation. More subtle studies distinguish the appearance of the inhumation rite from the appearance of long cist cemeteries and, analytically, this seems to me to be quite right. Nevertheless long cist inhumations have generally, as far as I have been able to detect, been interpreted in terms of conversion or Christianisation, in spite of doubts cast upon this as long ago as 1980. The religious explanation is wanting in many ways, however, being based upon several fundamentally mistaken premises. The first is that there is something essentially Christian about the absence of grave-goods. Given the general absence of grave-goods throughout the prehistoric, Roman and early medieval eras in Scotland, excepting those furnished inhumations associated with ‘Anglian’ and later (more plausibly) Scandinavian settlement, their absence in the post-imperial era cannot be deemed especially significant. The general assumption of a Christian equivalence finds no prima facie written or archaeological support. The analogous inhumation rite generally replaced cremation within the western Roman Empire in the third century, before the significant adoption of Christianity. The late antique Church took no interest in grave-goods, except where the objects concerned were liturgical or church property, and there the issue was the alienation or diminution of ecclesiastical wealth, not involvement in un-Christian ritual. Numerous archaeological and documentary examples of Merovingian furnished inhumation under churches are well known. Thirty-three to thirty-five years after Bailey Young’s classic study of the issue, this point ought not to need repeating. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that the Church expressed remarkably little opposition to cremation before Charlemagne’s Saxon campaigns at the end of the eighth century. The Christian associations of the rite of inhumation in a stone cist are weak – after all, such inhumations are known in scattered examples from earlier phases of Scottish archaeology. The idea that long cist cemeteries represent a phase of Christianisation is hardly more solidly based. The better assumption (albeit lacking clear empirical foundation, at this date) seems to be that Christians would wish to demonstrate their community in burial, although this is hardly the only possible reason for the appearance of communal cemeteries. The other assumption, not uncommon in British archaeology, is that the Church espoused an ‘obfuscating’ ideology of equality in death; this is simply untrue. Nevertheless, the appearance of the communal site seems to be the most important element of novelty involved in this development.

What alternatives to the questionable Christian interpretation might there be? One, more recently proposed, would see the appearance of this rite as the product of Roman influence – after the early fourth century this would not be incompatible with Christianisation. In favour of the interpretation one could point to the appearance of unfurnished inhumation in the far north of Germania Magna at the end of the fourth century, almost certainly resulting from Roman influence in the region. On the other hand, the evidence which goes alongside the northern German evidence to make that interpretation likely – the imports of metalwork, pottery and so on – are apparently absent from Scotland north of the Forth, where imperial imports seem to be an increasingly élite phenomenon. Furthermore, the rite itself, as noted, has fairly long antecedents in Scotland and why the introduction of cemeteries should be a product of Roman influence in the region is unclear.

Long cist cemeteries: a slightly different approach

Neither Christianisation nor imperial influence seem, in broader perspective, to be particularly compelling explanations for the appearance of Pictish long cist cemeteries. We should probably seek an account in developments within Pictish society. In this regard it helps to look at the burial’s surviving features, which might provide clues as to any statements being made during an inhumation about the deceased or his or her family. The fairly frequent analysis of the age and sex of the deceased gives us something against which to try and read off other variables: skeletal position, the arrangement of the limbs and so on. The construction of the burial chamber itself potentially contains differences that were meaningful to contemporaries. We could look at the organisation of the cemetery and whether it appears to be organised according to communal principles or grouped into apparent family plots. Alas, some variables undoubtedly noted during excavation – such as the positioning of the skeleton – are not systematically published.

The most important feature of change seems indeed to be the shift towards communal burial – or at least more communal than hitherto. The cemeteries’ frequent organisation into rows suggests (as with the famous Merovingian Reihengräberfelder) that the burial’s location and arrangement was to some extent governed by factors other than a desire to place members of the same family in close proximity. This might in turn mean that in their rituals, funerals ‘spoke’ to each other in quite direct and distinctive ways.

If the date of the cemeteries’ appearance, around the fifth century, is correct, then it took place against a background of exiguous settlement archaeology in the region, described by Fraser Hunter as a late third- to fifth-century ‘gap’. Combined with the evidence of greater dispersion of settlements in the period immediately preceding the ‘gap’ it is possible that the new cemeteries were used by several different settlements, providing a shared ritual focus. A similar phenomenon can be suggested for sixth-century northern Gaulish cemeteries, which also appear against a backdrop of scattered, ephemeral settlement evidence. Developing this, one might hypothesise that burial became a more public, communal occasion than had hitherto been the case and that a wider audience participated in the funeral process, now apparently including some sort of procession from the household to the cemetery. These features might make the funeral the occasion for statements about the deceased, his or her family, inheritance, and so on.

Although I have employed the term ‘communal cemetery’ above, it is clear that not everyone was chosen for interment in these cemeteries (something which undermines the strongest support for the Christian interpretation). From an admittedly problematic sample of long cist inhumations whose excavation has been reported in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities for Scotland (giving us an admittedly very problematic sample of over 200 burials), one sees two notable features: a clear imbalance in favour of females over males and a distinct preference for young subjects. The absence of old individuals can be doubted, considering the weaknesses of traditional ageing techniques, which telescope ages over about forty. Low numbers of mature and old adults consequently feature commonly in reports of early medieval cemeteries. However, the subjects with age-estimates are very often rather younger even than forty. The idea of a particularly low age of death amongst the Picts seems implausible. Similarly, it is unreasonable to suppose that many different physical anthropologists working at various times with data from diverse sites have uniformly underestimated the ages at which physiological changes took place, allowing us to stretch the age distribution evenly across the adult range, and the notion that they have uniformly mistaken the sex of the deceased is even less plausible. I think we may conclude that our picture shows us that some deliberation took place about who was suitable for ‘public’ burial in the ‘communal’ cemetery.

Before examining what might have lain behind such deliberation, one variable is worthy of comment. Although based upon a tiny sample, it might be the case that there was a difference in the skeletal arrangement of men and women. Women may have been buried with arms flexed, or folded, whereas men were interred with theirs lying at their sides. The only male with flexed arms that I could find was one from the Orkneys, dated by carbon14 to the eleventh century, long after the period that concerns us. It is tempting to relate this to a posture covering a woman’s sexual attributes and thus making a comment about chastity or sexual propriety. Such a conclusion and its elaboration require us to know more about how the body was interred. If it was in a costume that simply leaves no archaeological trace, then such a posture would be publicly displayed; if the dead were interred in a shroud then such positioning would, one assumes, have been done within the household and have a slightly different reading. If this observation is not the simple product of statistical chance, which of course it is very likely to be, it might tell us something about Pictish attitudes to sex and gender. Furthermore, the positioning of the corpse within its shroud might still have been visible to people at the grave-side enabling such a statement to be made to a wider audience.

Grave-construction appears to have been the main locus for any effort expended on demonstrating differences between graves, and certainly have been noticeable at the funeral, but it seems fairly standard. The main distinctions in this regard seem to be that between cists and ‘dug graves’ (simple trenches) and, within the cists, the existence or otherwise of floors or lintelled roofs but I have not noticed any very clear correlations between these and other variables thus far. How much care was invested in the tomb’s construction?

Nevertheless, from the archaeology as it stands, it does not look as though the funeral was the focus for particularly intensive competitive display. It did not involve the expenditure of resources upon grave-goods, although it is worth stating that even in areas where furnished inhumation was normal grave-goods rarely represent huge amounts of wealth. Be that as it may, the deceased’s social role or identity was evidently not symbolised through elaborate costume. Or, at least, not by costume adorned with fasteners and accessories or jewellery. It was certainly not demonstrated by the deposition of appropriate symbols. Such means of public marking of the deceased’s identity can be viewed as a symptom of instability and competition for local authority. The seeming absence of such displays and the investment of effort in tomb-construction instead may therefore be understood as its opposite. It is entirely possible that the funerary process was the occasion for other activities suggestive of competition and instability, such as feasting or the exchange of gifts, which might leave no trace at all in the archaeological record. That said, some evidence suggestive of these activities shows up in the Frankish evidence. We might wonder, therefore, whether the Pictish evidence overall suggests a society wherein social organisation and stratification were stable.

Such a conclusion could be no more than provisional and might be fundamentally misjudged; indeed, for reasons that I will shortly discuss, I think it would be quite mistaken. For one thing, the conclusions drawn from grave-goods rely, to no small extent, on observable change from one situation to another, and back again. The sheer, relentless uniformity of burial rite in northern Britain – where even cremations come in cists – over long periods of time, and the almost universal absence of grave-goods, renders very difficult the simple transfer of the hypothesis where grave-goods equate with insecurity and grave-monumentalisation with stability. Indeed one might valuably take the Pictish case to question the conclusions drawn from the Frankish. Again, though, the issue of differential change through time, with quite dramatic change in burial rites in Francia, renders the application of the Pictish evidence to the Merovingian situation as potentially inappropriate as its inverse.

Straightforward application of these particular conclusions about social structure – drawn from Frankish cemetery archaeology – is thus not possible. We must return to the variables observed within Pictish cemeteries, in particular to the choice of individuals for burial in the cemetery, was highlighted earlier. These patterns permit some suggestions about fifth- or sixth-century Pictish society. It should be said at the outset that these do not match either of the Frankish models although they reveal some important similarities with the sixth-century pattern.

As mentioned, the most striking feature of Pictish cemeteries is without doubt the overwhelming predominance of female subjects. These outnumber the males by nearly 2:1, a fact that led one archaeologist to moot a return to the old idea of Pictish matriliny. This would be premature, not only methodologically, by subordinating archaeological explanation to a notion drawn essentially from a misunderstanding of the written sources, but also because this archaeologically-visible pattern has no necessary link to high status for women, let alone matriliny or matriarchy.

When one considers why younger adult women
might be made the object of public funeral ritual,
the sixth-century Frankish model becomes useful.
In northern Gaul, adolescent and especially
younger adult women were the recipients of
significant grave-goods assemblages. Adolescents
are seemingly not heavily represented in Pictish
burials but the difference might be explained by
considering that between the burials of teen-age Frankish women and those of women above about twenty. The grave assemblages of the younger age-group are very largely concerned with a costume, which I have suggested related closely to their ‘marriageable’ status, and perhaps especially to their status as betrothed or married women. The grave-goods of women older than twenty were much less exclusively related to the adornment of body and costume but were generally more numerous, suggesting a funerary status connected to a role as the mother of young children. If we remove the aspect of costume, on the basis that Pictish costume is not visible in the burial data, certainly that jewellery was not interred, a concentration on women between the ages of twenty and forty remains and perhaps a similar explanation can be proposed. If one considers the life-cycle, not only of particular individuals but of the generations above and below them, synchronically, one might see that a woman who died between the ages of about twenty and about forty was likely to have died before her children had reached maturity, especially if she died in the first half of this age bracket. To accept the analogy, one must accept similar ages at marriage and bilateral inheritance among the Picts as among the Franks, both – of course – things we know next to nothing about. One can insist on that ignorance and reject any attempt to postulate a social structure or, more reasonably, one can insist on the difference between Frankish and Pictish society, better couched as that between a specifically post-imperial provincial society and one that had always lain beyond Roman law’s effective reach, than in terms of supposed differences between ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ societies, both of which are chimerical. But one only needs to accept bilateral inheritance, not all the details of the Frankish system. Equally, my model can incorporate a higher female and a lower male age at marriage without much difficulty.

If then we proceed – cautiously – with a limited Frankish analogy, then the concentration on the public burial of women between the ages of twenty and forty does not indicate the high status of women – as such – as much as the importance of women as the linchpins in alliances between kindreds. In this model, a woman’s death between these ages would mean the dissolution of a marriage alliance, probably before any children produced by the union had come of age; a subtle but important distinction. This would produce stress in relations between the families, especially concerning property and inheritance. The ensuing burial of such women in the shared cemetery might involve both families in the ritual, and efforts to smooth over that tension, resolve the issues and maintain the alliance. If I am right about that, then the earliest phases of the long cist cemeteries might suggest, rather than complete stability, a situation wherein politics operated at a very local, community level, dominated, as one might expect, by systems of marriage and other alliances between families. This could suggest more or less equality between kin-groups and a certain rivalry and competition between them.

Above-ground monuments

The other observable variables – and change – within the Pictish burial record concerns above-ground monuments, in which we can include square and round barrows, cairns and probably the Class I symbol stones. Although, as far as I have been able to ascertain, none has yet been found entirely in situ in association with a burial, the most plausible interpretations of these stones see them as commemorative. As already implied, there is a crucial difference between the burial marked by an above-ground monument and the ‘flat grave’ in Francia and the same surely holds for Pictland too. Whatever the ritual and purpose of the standard long-cist burial in a shared or focal cemetery, the fact remains that there was little to record the burial and its significance, except perhaps some stone settings and earth up-cast once the grave was filled in and the mourners went home. As Howard Williams has correctly pointed out, in critique of my work, this does not mean that the transient ritual was without effecting enduring and specific memories about the deceased – quite the opposite. But nevertheless such memories were confined by the lifetimes of the witnesses. The above ground monument might have given information about the deceased that was pretty limited and 1-dimensional by comparison with the actual burial ritual itself, even where straightforward textual epitaphs were employed, but this information was nevertheless available, to those who understood it, potentially until eternity. This seems to me to mark an important social shift, concerning the degree to which families’ positions in local society were established and seen as able to be projected into the future with this sort of permanent mark on the landscape.

Shifts in this regard possibly took place slightly earlier in Pictland than they did in Francia or other parts of the post-imperial West. The sample is very small, the dating imprecise and consequently the conclusion no more than provisional. Nevertheless if, as I think one should, one tries to make a statement on the basis of extant data, for all its problems, then the C14 dates from the Lundin Links cairns suggest their appearance in the sixth century. This does not seem out of line with general trends. The Redcastle barrows might be slightly later, in the seventh century, but the vagaries of carbon dating make a date in the sixth century (possibly earlier) possible too. The Dunrobin cairn yielded a date of 653-782 at two sigmas and a cairn at Urquhart appears to belong to a similar date. This would not be out of step with general views on the appearance of the Class I stones, the earliest secure dating for which would seem to be provided by the fragment found in a probably sixth-century context at Pool in Orkney. Overall, with all the necessary caveats, does not seem too controversial to see the above-ground monuments as secondary to the appearance of the cemeteries and to suggest, provisionally at least, a date after the middle of the sixth century as that for the appearance of these features. This might be a generation or two earlier than the introduction of such monuments on rural Gaulish cemeteries, or of the élite barrows of Anglo-Saxon England.

There are, it seems, some subtle differences between the people buried under above-ground monuments and those buried under what we might very loosely term ‘flat graves’. If one compares the two we see that the subjects interred under barrows or cairns are overwhelmingly adults. It looks as though there is a much greater preference for adults in their 20s and 30s (maybe as many as three quarters of the people in these graves). On the basis of the sample, its size and problems, one would not want to push that suggestion too far but it is something that might bear scrutiny in future research. Certainly there is an even larger proportion of females buried under these monuments than there is in the “flat graves” or cemeteries overall.

One must obviously bear in mind a serious of important caveats concerning the data, the sample and its quality, so I am obviously presenting this as no more than a sketch of some data as it stands, which might be worth thinking about as new sites and/or data become available. If, as I think one is duty bound to do, one attempts to think about what this pattern might mean (and it is always worth remembering that more, new and better data might as easily confirm the pattern as force its rejection), then there are some points that one might make – though you should please bear in mind that I am doing this only provisionally. The first is that this pattern is not like either of the Frankish patterns. The recipients of these burials, when looked at according to their age and gender, look in some ways more like the sorts of individual who received the most lavish expenditure in terms of grave goods: young adult women and (perhaps) slightly older adult males. On the other hand, the concentration on female burials represents an important area of difference. The more ‘monumental’, seventh-century phase of Merovingian burials are much more evenly spread across the sexes and age-groups. But the concentration on the (ideally at least) permanently visible is quite different from the relative transience of the “flat burial”, with or without furnishing. There is one other area of similarity, and that concerns the possible issue of rule breaking.

 Grave 54 at Hallow Hill was a ‘massive cist’, which possibly lay under a low cairn. The subject of the burial was a child of about five-and-a-half years of age, and was buried with grave-goods, largely of Roman origin, most notable a Roman seal box. This is one of very few burials of the Pictish period to be accompanied by artefacts and one of only two children’s burials under a ‘monument’ that I could identify (the other being Thornybank grave 114). This display of difference, both to those present at the interment (viewing the deposition of the goods) and to those who might come later (via the cairn), with the burial of subject not normally interred in such style, clearly manifests some sort of a claim to difference on the part of the child’s family. Burials comparable, in context, to this are not unknown in Francia (the boy’s tomb under Cologne cathedral would be the most obvious example) in the sixth or the seventh centuries, but particularly the latter.

How might one account for this pattern? If one were to combine the evident concentration upon adults who (following the provisional interpretation sketched earlier) died before their children would be old enough to have established themselves, with the sorts of stress that such a death might cause in social relations and the marking out of some sort of difference or a claim to a permanent position in local society and the landscape, I might tentatively suggest the following. These burials are those from families with a newly emerging position within society which enables a more confident statement of that status. However, this position is not entirely secure and depends to some extent upon alliance, through marriage and so on, with other families of the same standing. Such alliances are brought into question by the death of wives, as discussed above, but also by those of fathers who die before their sons have come of age or younger adult males, perhaps similarly important as the linchpins of marriage alliances. They therefore need remaking through funerary ritual. This would in many ways be a similar mechanism to that discussed earlier for the bulk of the population of the cemeteries, but perhaps operating at a particular, slightly higher social level. As mentioned, though, this can only be a provisional attempt at an explanation but the pattern as it stands does seem interesting, and to require some such attempt.

What is also worth pointing out at this stage is that the appearance of these burials, and perhaps (if I am right) the emergence of a more elevated stratum within local society, is more or less contemporary with a series of other developments. The best known, perhaps, would be the most common earliest phases of the early historic occupation of the famous hill-top fortifications in Pictland and the neighbouring areas. It would also seem to be roughly at this time that the settlement pattern generally underwent some change, with various types of dwelling loosely datable to the second half of the first millennium. It does not seem to me unreasonable to focus an explanation of all this on the emergence of a more established local élite.

Up to this point, I have proposed the existence of a society wherein local social differences were not marked, succeeded by one within which a more established élite emerges, with the point of change lying sometime in the later sixth century. So far, as I am sure you are all thinking, ‘nul points’ for originality. This fits pretty well with the received wisdom, although I do not like the vocabulary of ‘kin-based’ and ‘ranked’ societies that tends to be used for the two social formations, and I hope that I have reached the conclusion via a slightly different route (or at least via one I have not seen in the literature available to me) and perhaps suggested some different points of detail. Where I hope to have some more novel ideas comes at the stage of moving from this conclusion to some thoughts about the relationship between all this and high politics, especially the development of the Pictish kingdom.

Interpretation: Social Development

An outsider can detect an understandable reaction in Pictish studies to old-fashioned notions of the ‘mysterious’ Picts, speaking their own pre-indo-European language, using their unique matrilineal succession system and carving mystic symbols in some sort of misty Scythian/Eskimo elf-land. This reaction seems, however, to have gone almost to an opposite extreme, postulating a ‘precocious’ statehood among the early historic inhabitants of Scotland north of the Forth. A ninth-century Pictish state (let alone a seventh- or eighth- century one) would indeed be quite something, seen in a broad European context, but suffice it to say that I have not yet seen any evidence adduced that would convincingly sustain a notion. This is not to deny the existence of an effective and organised kingdom, fully involved in the western European currents of political thought. That the Pictish realm was about as sophisticated a structure as most of its western contemporaries is wholly convincing. But an organised and effective kingdom is not necessarily a state. Even the eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian Empire cannot, for all its size, wealth and military might, convincingly be labelled a state. Until such time as we have evidence of the Pictish rulers’ ability to deploy an independent coercive force, and given the evidential constraints mentioned above I cannot imagine that such evidence is ever likely to be forthcoming, any reference to ‘the Pictish state’ will be premature.

Nevertheless, that something significant was going on in northern British society, whether Pictish, Scottish or British, in the last part of the sixth century seems fairly clear and it is not controversial to propose that this change is associated with the emergence of a social group that was more secure in its position and on occasion at least capable of drawing on manpower resources to construct defended élite settlements.

My objection to the more linear plotting of kingdom-growth is essentially based around two sides of the same, problematic idea: that the development of a local élite marches hand in hand with a growth in centralised power. I think this is a mistake but not one limited to studies of the northern British kingdoms; it detrimentally affects work on the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms too, for example, and I think it is the most significant methodological problem with Chris Wickham’s The Framing of the Early Middle Ages. One side of the problem is the fact that the absence of an established élite at a local level does not imply the absence of an effective, even a powerful, centralised government. If we take the comparatively well-documented sixth-century Merovingian kingdom as an example, we see this particularly clearly. The northern Gallic cemetery evidence shows that society was based essentially around age and gender, as I mentioned earlier. There is scant evidence of a local élite, independent of royal service, in the archaeological or the written evidence: I think Chris Wickham is wrong to propose that the Merovingian northern Gallic was unusually powerful and wealthy throughout the early Middle Ages. From about 600 onwards he has a point but in the fifth and sixth century the situation is very different. Anyway, what is abundantly clear is that the lack of a rigid social hierarchy in local communities by no means infers a lack of powerful royal authority. It is not problematic to call the sixth-century Merovingian kingdom a ‘state’; it taxed and it had a coercive military force, even if this did not take the form of a standing army. The key lies in the point just made about the absence of an established local aristocracy other than that based upon royal service. The best way of assuring dominance in the local community, breaking out of the ever-changing network of alliances and gift exchanges was through the acquisition of office in the royal administration. Such offices were extremely desirable as a result and it is clear that the kings rotated their patronage between different groups, distributing and redistributing their favours to ensure that no one faction acquired a dominant position. This meant that the kings held all the aces and that their authority was drawn down into local society along these arteries of patronage.

Many of the precise ways in which the Frankish realm worked descended directly from the late Roman Empire; indeed the mechanisms through which the early Merovingian state functioned mirrored fairly closely, albeit on a smaller scale, those through which the late Empire had operated. These precise things, for fairly obvious reasons, could not be postulated for their sixth-century Pictish contemporaries beyond the old frontier. That said, there were plenty of ways in which an analogous state of affairs could have worked, producing an extensive kingdom at least.

One of the most important problems in studying the early medieval Pictish (or Scottish, or British) kingdoms is the simple, brute, inescapable fact that we have absolutely no reliable information about political history before the period around 600. I have argued before that it is very questionable to try and project northern British political geography, as it appears in the written sources of the seventh century and later, back into the late Roman era, or even, I suggest, into the fifth and sixth centuries. One reason why is precisely the fact that so much seems to have been changing in the period when these areas begin to emerge into a dim light of political ‘histoire événementielle’. These changes probably determine the date of the earliest written data just as they govern the appearance of particular forms of archaeological evidence. It is – it seems to me – eminently possible that the kingdoms, as we see them in the fragmentary Irish and Anglo-Saxon records of the seventh century (very few of which are contemporary), might be quite recent creations. That is perhaps not a very novel thing to say, but what I think might very well be the case that, if they are new, then, rather than emerging from some sort of more or less inchoate tribal, ‘kin-based’ society, they might result from the fragmentation of earlier, larger-scale polities, perhaps the sort of extensive ‘Pictish’ confederation that the Romans thought existed north of Hadrian’s Wall. (And it’s worth reiterating that in late Roman political geography ‘Picts’ start at the Wall, not at the Forth.)

At least it should be conceded that the evidence as we have it accords this suggestion plausibility equal to that of its alternatives. Some points might lend it added credibility. Certainly, the period in which these regions, like those further south, begin to be visible in documentary sources, seems to have been one of political turmoil, extending far into the seventh century. Extensive overlordships are fought for, acquired and lost. A Scottish king is seriously defeated whilst evidently on his way to attack Banburgh in 603. A successor might even have reached and besieged the Bernician capital a decade or two later. A Northumbrian king’s son becomes over-king of the Picts and later one of his relatives exercises a fairly effective hegemony of Britain south of the Great Glen, until his son is killed in battle, when the pendulum evidently swings in the opposite direction. The instances can be multiplied. What seems clear is that the framework within which northern British – like southern British or Anglo-Saxon – politics operated was one of extensive overlordship. This might be a hang-over from a preceding ‘late antique’, confederate state of affairs. The rivalry for dominance within the realms between regional, familially- or dynastically-based aristocratic groups might be the new feature, linked with the developments that we can trace in the excavated record.

The third possibility, again equally plausible, is that the kingdoms visible in the seventh century existed earlier, and with the same extent but were somewhat different in their internal composition and political dynamics. The latter would be based upon the political power of local aristocratic élites and this leads me to the other side of the problems with the ‘linear’ model. The emergence of an élite more securely rooted in local socio-economic superiority makes things difficult for any central ruler: be it king, emperor or whatever. Unless a ruler has an independent coercive force, paid for by taxation (taxation levied with the threat of intervention by the coercive force), it becomes very difficult indeed for the writ of the monarch or the central government to run in localities that lie outside the ruler’s direct control.

The evidential problems of Pictish society make this a difficult issue to explore, let alone resolve. It might, for all we know, be the case that the Pictish kings did indeed have such a coercive force. In my past brief forays into Pictish history, I have tended to assume that the kings had some ability to call upon manpower, manifested in the construction of the hill-forts. There might be something in this. Perhaps sites like Dundurn are simply the seats of royal officials. Equally, though, it might be that these sites are the seats of local magnates. The first option gives us a kingdom ruling through officers ensconced in fortifications dominating local society; the second gives us aristocrats equally ensconced in dominating fortifications but potentially acting between the king and the remainder of his subjects. I can think of no obvious way of resolving the issue, but I offer the following as reasons for preferring the ‘local aristocrat’ reading to the ‘royal officer’ interpretation. One would be that it would coincide with the other evidence suggestive of the emergence of such an élite at about the same time as the earliest fortification. Another would be – perhaps – a difference from the earlier situation (as I understand it) which seems to have but few, larger fortifications (like Burghead). The change might imply some sort of fragmentation and it would lead to a third reason, which would be to ask why such lower-level ‘administrative’ fortifications only appeared at this time – which is not to say that such a question could not be answered. I think that, for reasons set out earlier, seventh-century history supports the idea of more fragmented power or weaker royal authority, but would gladly concede that it is hardly the only way of reading the evidence.

Perhaps a better reason why I prefer a weakening of power in the face of increasing local authority would be the fact that the above-ground monuments seem to be a fairly short-lived phenomenon. Over time, as the forts become more elaborate, the barrows seem to die out and the Class 2 Stones appear, evidently later in the seventh century. Alongside the foundation of churches all this looks – from a Frankish perspective – like classic signs of the entrenching of the power of local aristocracy. The later abandonment of the hill-forts at the same time as the establishment of other types of royal site, like Forteviot, also makes sense as a sign of royal authority asserting itself over such regional centres. The evidently ritual focus of site complexes like Forteviot is to be expected as the establishment of ideologies investing kings with religious sanction and loyalty to them as the ‘meet and right’ thing to do is a classic later first millennium – Carolingian, if you like – means of confronting the absence of coercive force. 

Conclusions

All this nevertheless leaves the million-dollar question unanswered: why? And only have suggestions in response. One obvious starting point would be some form of economic development at a local level – again tied to the development of an aristocracy. It is of course at roughly this time that continental pottery finds its way to the north-east shores of the Irish Sea, a fact which should, I imagine, be linked to socio-economic development in the importing area, enabling exchange. Such imports do not make their way to the east coast in numbers but one might, given the archaeology, propose that similar things were taking place. One might still wonder why this might take place, not simply why economic development might have occurred at this time, but also, and I think more interestingly, why – if it did take place and if the increased surplus was being garnered by local élites for their own purposes perhaps in opposition to old structures of kingship – such élites were adopting this strategy. It is perhaps too easy to see – as I have tended to do in the past – a somehow natural or innate desire of local élites (or potential élites) to shrug off the overlordship of central or otherwise distant kings or overlords. What one might wonder is whether the changes that were taking place across Europe at this time, around the late sixth century, and which I currently would link to the end of the old Roman ways of seeing the world, had similar effects beyond the old frontier. Given the saturation of barbaricum with Roman ideas of power, at least east of the Rhine and south of the North African limes, it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose that such changes would have consequences in northern Britain too. Perhaps Pictish kings too had to find new ideological supports for their power, and for expecting people to conform with their desires, and perhaps this produced a crisis of legitimacy at moments of crisis as it did at this time in other areas. There were, again as in other areas, new ideological forms becoming available to local aristocrats to bolster their authority – in (as indeed in Gaul and northern Italy) Irish monasticism.

What I conclude – and I assure you that this was by no means what I thought I would conclude when I started thinking about this – is that economic, social and political developments in Pictland were very much in line with those taking place elsewhere around the end of the sixth century, that this part of Europe found itself very much in the same currents of change that were flowing through the rest of the West. What these developments imply, though, is not the straightforward growth of royal or central power, a movement up a neat linear trajectory towards the kingdom of the Scots.  The road less travelled, that I am proposing, is much more uneven and twisting, and its destination more unpredictable but it is therefore, in my view, more interesting.