Predatory Warfare: the Moral and the Physical

[This is the text of a paper I gave in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago to an interesting conference on 'predation'; my thanks to Laury Sarti and Rodolphe Keller for the invitation.  The argument is essentially that although one could take considerable wealth in early medieval warfare this was not in general done through 'plundering warfare' but through battle and the taking of tribute (brought about by the threat of battle).  It then moves on to argue that in fact the principal rewards in early medieval warfare were not physical ('loot') but intangibles such as prestige, honour and patronage.  It's still very rough round the edges, but see what you think.]

Introduction

The terms of this conference ‘Looting, tribute paying, and the taking of captives: Predation…’ are haunted by some important assumptions.  One is an implicit opposition between predation and some other type of warfare, presumably, following usual military historical typologies, based around set-piece battles.  Is any sort of warfare not predatory?  Also possibly implicit in the conference rationale is a concentration on what we might term the physical or the material, on the economic uses of the things taken during such warfare.  In that analysis the focus remains on the deliberate, human manipulation of objects.  This paper aims to rake up those presuppositions, bring them to the surface and swirl them about.

My first point concerns the diversity of early medieval warfare.  One cannot take the whole era from 450-900, across all of Western Europe, and treat it interchangeably as far as warfare is concerned.  The sixth century differed from the seventh in many areas, one of the clearest of which was the organisation and practice of warfare.  The late seventh century and the decades around 700 saw further important economic developments.  Finally, there were more changes in the ninth century, many of which were at least exacerbated by the Vikings, the way in which they practised warfare, particularly raiding and predation, and by the responses to it.  In Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West I found it helpful to discuss the raising of armies century by century.  To do otherwise obscured many important changes, although of course these generally remained in the sphere of hypothesis.  Separating the data according to date and place usually left one with little evidence but did reveal potentially important differences between various times and places.

In assessing the role of plunder and booty in medieval warfare, the composition of armies, their size and how they were raised are all issues of crucial importance.   One might expect the distribution and circulation of plunder to differ significantly in small armies composed essentially of aristocrats and their retinues, compared with that in large armies with a greater percentage of small-holding farmers, or ones raised on more of a levy basis.  The ease with which armies might have been raised might have been closely related to issues of remuneration through booty.  Historiographically, the clearest example of the exploration of such a possibility would lie in the late Tim Reuter’s theories about the ends of Carolingian military expansion.  We cannot speak of a general early medieval culture of predatory warfare, in any detail at least.  The shortage of data makes precision difficult and aggregation almost unavoidable, but what we say should be inflected by this point. 

Economic Background

One particularly important variable that underlines this point is the economic context within which warfare was waged.  The nature of early medieval evidence is such that we can say far more, in far more detail, about the economics of different regions at particular points in time than we can about the armies that operated in those contexts.  This in turn means that this knowledge must govern what we suggest about armies and warfare, not the other way round.  Historiographically, this seems like an insultingly obvious point, but it must be remembered that the most prolific writer on early medieval warfare, Bernard S. Bachrach has adopted the diametrically opposite approach.

Working from these data further underlines regional diversity and chronological change.  If fifth- and sixth-century north-west Europe is a particularly clear point of economic regression, more southerly regions cannot exactly be said to have been experiencing economic growth at that time.  The northern economy picked up, as is well-known, in the seventh century, but by the end of that century other regions, like the south of Gaul, were undergoing economic decline.  The eighth and especially ninth centuries saw further growth, especially in towns and markets, in the north.  The economic possibilities of warfare – of predation – were not constant across early medieval Europe, even within the same century.  If warfare was for plunder, what were they plundering? 

Settlement archaeology implies that for much of the period there was little by way of wealth to be gained from looting settlements – even the larger commercial centres that began to emerge from the seventh century – until perhaps the ninth century.  Fifth- and sixth-century northern Gaulish and English settlements are pretty ephemeral.  It has taken fairly detailed work with the pottery of the period even to identify certain periods in the excavated record.  Such is the decline in the complexity of the pottery industry and its transportation. 

Much of the period which concerns me was incompletely monetised.  It might, then, not be coincidental, that the fortification of such settlements only begins to look significant from late within my period, the fortification programme of Alfred of Wessex, for instance.  The exception, of course, would be furnished by churches and monasteries.  This is the obvious reason for their targeting by Vikings, but it might also explain why even Christian armies were incapable of always leaving them entirely untouched.

Related to this is the decline in fortification and siege warfare.  Roman towns, of course, retained their walls but numerous sources suggest that these were not always kept up in a very good state of repair.  Indeed some stories suggest their deliberate dismantling – at Reims and at Mainz for example – in the eighth century.  Fortified rural settlements are rare, outside Ireland from the seventh century onwards.  The processes of incastellamento are a matter of debate but they certainly do not span the whole early medieval period.  As with the forts of Scotland, the purpose of even these fortifications might be debated.  What size of threat did they protect against?  What other social factors might have led to their appearance?   Again, it seems no coincidence that the true aristocratic fortified settlement is something that generally appears at the end of the period that I am talking about, in the ninth century.   

The Strategic Consequences of the Economic Background

This archaeologically-revealed material poverty has several important implications, which begin to stir up the sedimented assumptions with which I began.  Where is the wealth that we know existed?  This wealth may have been rather less than was accumulated by Roman senatorial aristocrats or later medieval noblemen but it existed.  Some fairly spectacular archaeological finds have suggested this (although it is always worth reminding ourselves how small the value of even the greatest finds is, compared with the treasures alluded to in the written sources).  Yet the very context of such finds points us at an answer.  It seems to me that the disjuncture between the settlement archaeological record and the written sources is best explained by the assumption that early medieval wealth went into adornment and other, essentially portable, items.  People wore their riches.  When one looks at some of the costume adornments found in burials like Sutton Hoo Mound 1, or many others, this conclusion does not seem very surprising.  It can easily be set alongside considerable written evidence for the importance of costume in competitive status display.

If we pursue this possibility into the military sphere it gains further credibility.  The lavish burials of the first part of the period make clear that weaponry and other military accoutrements were one of the main foci for the expenditure of wealth.  Almost every surface that could practically be decorated was decorated.  Look at the helmets of the period as examples.  Even spurs were frequently inlaid with precious metals, and the belts by which they were attached to a rider’s boots had similar, intricate inlaid patterns.  Bridles and elements of horse-harness, too, show similar attention.  The Staffordshire Hoard underlined much of what we knew already about this aspect of early medieval warfare, but did so spectacularly.  Elements of over eighty decorated swords were found in the hoard.  Much of the gold in the treasure was incorporated in their hilts and fittings.

That, of course, is to limit the discussion to the things which are in general archaeologically visible.  Written texts tell us of the provision of clothes for a retinue.  One imagines that the appearance of one’s followers was as much a source of competition as that of the warband leader himself.  The horse, too, a sine qua non of the early medieval warrior, was costly.  Although horseflesh was highly vulnerable on campaign and a warrior would need more than one horse if he could afford it, it is clear from charter evidence that horses were not cheap – they could be exchanged for pieces of land.  The cost of a decent horse appears to have remained fairly constant at about ten solidi (whatever that might have meant in practice) throughout the period, and that could equate with the cost of the rest of the warrior’s equipment.

In addition to all of the above, it is clear that kings and their aristocrats took their treasure with them on campaign.  The social élite stayed in costly tents.  What all this means, when placed alongside the general poverty of the archaeological record in terms of the settlements and economy of the period, is that, in fact, looting in early medieval warfare was best focused not upon raiding and harrying but upon battle.  This erodes the frequently-assumed opposition between raiding or plundering warfare and the warfare of fixed battles.  Battle does seem to have been comparatively common between the mid-fifth century and the end of the ninth.  Its size may not have been great when compared with other eras but its importance is best measured in terms of stakes fought for.  Quite apart from loss of life – and the numbers of early medieval aristocrats killed in battle are high throughout the era – there were the political consequences of a defeat in terms of the instability that would follow the deaths of a portion of the realm’s royalty and aristocracy.  A king’s defeat could and did frequently lead to deposition and assassination. 

Why did early medieval leaders so frequently play for such high stakes, when even people at the time (such as Sedulius Scottus) knew that battle was a complete lottery?  One reason is the importance of warfare and battlefield prowess in the construction of especially élite masculine identity.  I will return to this but for now as good an illustration as I know can be found in Paul the Deacon’s account of a catastrophic Friulian Lombard defeat against the Slavs.  One Lombard leader accused another of cowardice, which resulted in the latter challenging him to follow him in a charge uphill against the fortified Slavic camp.  The rest of the army followed because, in Paul’s words, ‘they considered it base not to’.  So many were slaughtered that the next duke had to set up a sort of orphans’ home for the children of the aristocrats who had been killed.

Apart from the demands of honour, the other reason for the frequency of battle must have been that it was the best way of taking treasure or increasing one’s wealth from warfare.  This sort of context is, I think, probably the best mechanism within which one might imagine the assembly of the collection of objects found in the Staffordshire Hoard. 

The Strategic Role of Harrying

All that being said, it cannot be denied that early medieval armies did harry and raid their enemies.  One must, therefore, ask why.  If the movable objects to be found in the average settlement were unlikely to oil the cogs of early medieval politics – unless fairly undiagnostic common wares were more sought after than we have hitherto imagined – what was at stake?  One might envisage the taking of cattle and other livestock.  Perhaps this is where we touch upon the theme of slave-taking.  And yet I do not find either possibility particularly convincing.  Obviously there are exceptions.  Cattle were effectively the units of currency of early medieval Ireland, held as much as signs of status as for any actual economic value.  The slave-raiding of the Vikings is well-enough documented, and so is that of Franks on their eastern frontier.  But we might be cautious about generalising from these examples. 

The importance of cattle within the Irish political economy is particular to the island.  Do we really think that an aristocrat like Robert the Strong was really that interested in livestock?  The Vikings struck across the sea and were able to carry captives, quickly, far away from their homelands.  For similar reasons, sea-borne attack remained the principal mechanism of slave-taking in Europe and the Mediterranean (and beyond) into the sixteenth and seventeenth century.  The Franks appear to have established a solid military superiority over their Slavic neighbours by the tenth century.  Absolute military dominance (as with Europeans or European-backed Africans in Africa, or with the early Roman expansion) or the capacity for rapid transportation overseas seem to be the essential requirements for significant slave-taking.  Most early medieval warfare was small-scale and waged against enemies of roughly equal military capacity.  Trains of slaves and herds of captured cattle would slow down an invading army making it vulnerable to attack.

But perhaps that was the point.  In my reconstruction, the main objective of early medieval raiding was to provoke battle – partly of course for the economic reasons just set out.  Harrying territory, burning houses and crops, killing or dispersing livestock, ripping up vines (Gregory of Tours gives a good account of what was involved in Book II of the Histories) struck at the political legitimacy of the opposing realm.  A king or lord, after all, was supposed to defend his subjects, followers or clients and their property from these sorts of depredations.  A ruler who shut himself up in his fortresses might well see off an invading army, given the risks of disease and the usual inadequacy of early medieval logistics and siege techniques – but the efficacy of this strategy was strictly limited over time.  Repeated plunderings that went unchallenged could produce political crisis.  One early ninth-century Slavic leader faced down the Franks for several years by avoiding battle but eventually was assassinated by his followers.  One could stop the plundering by paying tribute: the other means by which considerable wealth might be transferred from one early medieval western polity to another. 

The advantage of tribute, of course, was that it diverted resources used to maintain political support and military effectiveness away from one ruler and towards his overlord.  Further light might be shed on this by the Staffordshire Hoard with its dozens of sword pommels and other fittings.  Some look like they have been snapped off their swords with minimal care.  This might of course have taken place on the battlefield during looting of the dead but it might also have taken place in the context of tribute taking, with the enemy army forced to give up the decorations from their weaponry.  With the concentration of precious metal in these items it is not difficult to suppose that items like this could have been the currency of such transactions.  It would also, of course, remove from the enemy army much of the display and show that was so important, as discussed: a very visible means of shaming an enemy. 

Important quantities of wealth could be obtained in early medieval warfare but not – I suggest – simply by raiding.  More important was battle, either through the destruction and looting of an enemy army, or through strategies that turned upon battle’s very real possibility.

The Other Purposes of Harrying

Nonetheless, raiding and harrying operations were common in the early medieval west, and often produced neither battle nor tribute.  Sometimes one might wonder what sort of tribute might be forthcoming in any case.  Visigothic armies appear to have fought in Basque territory frequently, often it seems as part of the process of establishing a new king.  According to Julian of Toledo’s account, the new king Wamba spent a week ravaging Basque territory before the Basque leaders submitted and paid tribute.  But what booty, I wonder, could one take in the Pyrenean foothills?  Sheep? 

One might furthermore suppose that, in the cattle-raiding that took place in Ireland, Wales or Scotland or the cross-border raiding that, to judge from the treaties signed between the Doges of Venice and the Carolingian Kings of Italy, formed a sort of background noise to early medieval politics, much of the booty taken by one side in one raid would be taken back by the other next time.

Plunder flowed in other directions than from king to follower.  One is suggested by the story of John, a warrior on the Franks’ Spanish march who sent the loot he took from a defeated Moorish warrior up the political food-chain to his lord, Louis the Pious – who in turn bestowed lands upon him.  Other stories contain some admittedly problematic indications that loot might actually be returned to the people from whom it had been taken.  Gregory’s story of the Vase of Soissons and Felix’s tale of Guthlac returning a third share of the loot he took in his warrior days both come from hagiographic contexts that should make us hesitate before accepting them.  Nonetheless there are reasons why such a thing might be plausible.

Thus we can suggest that the flow of objects in raiding warfare was not always or exclusively in the direction that one might expect.  What I want to stress, though, are the non-material rewards of raiding: the moral rewards as opposed to the physical.  I will suggest that these were, given the economic realities discussed earlier, often actually rather more important than the material rewards.  I have alluded to the importance of warfare in the construction of identities.  It was also, warfare, specifically, rather than violence or fighting in general, that was important to these identities.  In the fifth and sixth centuries in particular, military service was important in the construction of ethnic identities.  Attendance in the ranks (and the acceptance of one’s attendance) when the army was called out was, one imagines, a very important way of underlining a claim to a particular ethnic identity.  Later, involvement in military activity was a sign of belonging to a particular stratum of the free population.  By the ninth century this was so important that aristocrats were known to attack lesser freemen who presumed to take up arms.  Both mechanisms required, one imagines, fairly frequent mustering of the army.  Not only does this explain why, in some times at least, we can see the army being assembled without any significant military activity ensuing – it was the assembling of the force that was important, with the consequent selection of who was and was not deemed to be of military rank.  Military assemblies on 1 March seem thus to have been annual events in Merovingian Gaul and in eighth-century Lombard Italy.  Theoderic of Italy is known to have held regular assemblies of the Goths, the army.

The importance of warfare in the construction of royalty must also have led to frequent mustering of the army.  Few ere the times and places were kings did not feel the need to place themselves at the head of their armed forces on a regular basis.  The Merovingian realms during the reigns of Clovis’ grandsons seems to be one such moment, but more typical, one might suggest, is the kingdom of Mercia, where, between 600 and 850, military action on such a scale as to be recorded in the later Anglo-Saxon Chronicle took place within four years of a king’s accession at the latest.  We can imagine that smaller-scale actions might have been brought about rather sooner.  Wamba’s harrying of the Basques seems like another example.

A further reason for military assembly of course was that it was the closest thing that a king had to a parliament.  It was thus a prime occasion to expose the political and military élite to royal ideology.  It was an occasion, documented in several contexts, for the bestowal of royal patronage.  Warriors who had done well were rewarded; those who had not were punished.  Such seems, for instance, to have been the case at Theoderic’s military musters.   If military assemblies were important for all these reasons it is not surprising that some sort of military activity might follow.  It is probably not coincidental then that the three recorded Marchfields of Childebert II of Austrasia in the 590s all took place on his Rhine frontier – convenient for some sort of display of strength in the trans-Rhenan areas of the Merovingian hegemony.

Thus I want to suggest that the assembly of an army was itself a crucial – if not the crucial – political and even political-economic aspect of military activity, more important, I propose, than any material wealth obtained on campaign.

That leads me to what might be my main point, that for most warriors warfare’s primary purpose was as a means of coming to the attention of their socio-political superiors.  Performing well on campaign was a means by which pueri could come to the attention of their lords, by which their lords could come to the attention of the magnates of the kingdom, or of the king himself.  Such attention could bring patronage in the form of offices and of gifts, whether of lands or of movable objects – not necessarily or even, perhaps, very often those taken on campaign.  To be granted lands, titles or honores was probably far more economically valuable than anything that might be taken on campaign – but warfare was the principal means by which one showed that one deserved such patronage.  The Hispanus John’s despatch of loot to Louis of Aquitaine in return for land illustrates this well.  Thus it might be that whatever was stolen during raids in effect served more as tokens or even as proxies for more important gifts, of intangible things like patronage, of titles, or of lands and movables that were actually transacted afterwards.  If you look at it in that perspective, the returning of the ‘loot’ taken on campaign seems less bizarre than it might otherwise appear.

My thesis is also supported by the events of the first crisis of Louis the Pious’ reign.  The actions of Hugh and Matfrid, sent away to campaign on the Spanish March, make it clear that campaigning, even with the chance of loot, was less important than being close to the king at the centre of politics.  Remember too that the possibilities of real loot were more likely in campaigns in Spain than on perhaps any other of the Franks’ borders.  Hugh and Matfrid’s actions make no sense at all if booty and predation were as essential to early medieval politics as we have been given to believe. 

Predatory warfare might then have been like hunting was at this point in time.  The assemblages from high-status sites, where they exist show startlingly low percentages of hunted animals, compared with those from the end of the first millennium and later.  Set alongside a story towards the end of Gregory of Tours’ Histories the suggestion can be made that hunting was more about training, teamwork and prowess, and about the simple killing of animals – not then taken home to be eaten.  Similarly, much low-level warfare might have been an exercise that served more to demonstrate skill and bravery than to produce valuable treasures.

Different Ways of Seeing Objects

Finally, I want to look again at the material gained on campaign.  The standard way of seeing predatory warfare in the early middle ages, which I have been at pains to disturb, sees the personnel involved taking material and exchanging it with each other, with these transactions embodying various political relationships.  Then it is a natural tendency to match the value of the relationship to an assessment of the value of the objects which established the relationship: a richly adorned sword, for example, might well embody the loyalty of a powerful magnate to his king.  Clearly this is reasonable enough, given the early medieval obsession with precious metals and stones.

In putting this forward for rethinking, I don’t want just to point out that the biography of an object – to whom it had belonged, the events in which it had participated in the past – might be more valuable than its adornment.  Nor do I want solely to repeat the point that an object’s value transcended its simple cost in terms of labour and materials.  A sword’s value in some early medieval texts, vis-à-vis other items such as cattle or bread, is derived not from its relative cost, a frequent mistake, but from what we might loosely term its use value – the fact that its possession enabled participation in particular social circles.

Following on from that I want to open up the possibility of seeing particular types of plundered or looted object as ‘actants’, according to ‘object theory’.  Perhaps certain objects – ones that we might not now immediately detect – had such a link with the essential political activity of warfare that they shaped relationships between individuals in a way that seems both to transcend their material value and not to fit what one might expect to be their rational use by human agents.  The case of the gold plate given by Sisenand to the Franks, and then asked for back as a result of Gothic outcry, might be a good example of an actant object.

With all this in mind, in early medieval warfare it might well have been that, to quote Napoleon, ‘the moral [was] to the physical as three to one’.

For fans of austerity everywhere

A Nobel-laureate economist speaks.

Archbishop hits out at failing leader

Following in the footsteps of a commendable tradition going back to the likes of Nicetius of Trier and beyond, the out-going Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams lashes out at Cameron's Big Society nonsense in a forthcoming book, as reported here.

I wonder if he got AHRC funding for it...

More trouble...

... at the institution to which we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Bourneville Tech.  We've had reason before to comment adversely on goings on there.  The VC, to whom we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Harry Callaghan, stamped down on students' right to peaceful protest (I must check how that turned out).  This, you may recall, seemed a tad shocking in view of Harry's past as a historian of nineteenth-century British social history and - indeed - a teacher of Marxist approaches.  But then Harry's own web-page makes it clear that he likes to cover up this embarrassing past.  To be fair, he's not the only member of that generation to conceal some pretty vicious, elitist social politics behind a smoke-screen of posturing about subscribing to The Old Left and/or mid-'70s-vintage feminism.

To further erase any suspicion that he might once have earned his crust from the humanities, he's now decided to hack away at Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, as you can read here (though, no mention is made of archaeology.  Ahem.).  In this Harry is being aided and abetted by his trusty sidekick, the pro-VC and Dean of the College of Arts and Law to whom we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Maurikios Kopronymos.  Now, I have no particular axe to grind about the departmental independence of classics or ancient history; quite the opposite, in fact.  What I do have a beef with is the possibility of people losing their jobs.  Whatever.  The thing about Maurikios is that ancient history is his own discipline.  He's issued a statement about this which beggars belief.

Thanks to 'JPG', it is here.

Enrollment begins for Bourneville Tech's new MA in
Evolving Recruitment Landscape Archaeology
(Picture and joke stolen from a Facebook friend who had
best remain anonymous)

Have a read of it and see what you think, but - as you do so - remember that we are talking about situation in which people might lose their jobs, people whose work for the institution and the subject might be no less than Maurikios' (never more than a solid assembler of facts).  You can thrill to the use of management-speak, like 'evolving recruitment landscape', gasp at the juxtaposition of 'quality' as a concern, coupled with losing staff and thus the chance of lowering staff-student ratios, swoon at the sheer chutzpah of the reference to the department emerging with 'unprecedented strength' from the situation where actual human beings, who don't work in areas where Maurikios and his chums think they ought to work, lose their job, probably at ages, and in a climate (a 'recruitment landscape', if you will) where finding a new post will not be so easy.  Be amazed at the constant reference to sustainability, when the whole exercise is a contingent response to a particular set of political directives.  Ask yourself how easy it is to rebuild a department having scrapped some of its expertise if and when the political circumstances change again, or to respond to a new situation where the previous reduction to key areas of 'strength' leaves the department with less flexibility to evolve (when the strengths aren't in favour any more).  Remember with awe that this is being championed by someone who actually proclaims himself to be 'an ancient historian with an interest in archaeology' - presumably only in those bits that he thinks show potential for sustainable and unprecedented strength, mind.  And, to top off the 'astonishing' lack of self-awareness, check out the concluding paragraph puffing up his supposed achievements at the institution to which we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as The University of Warwick.  How his old colleagues must thank him for that.  I don't know why he didn't go the whole hog and just say 'I found it in brick and left it in marble.'

Drink it in.

Harry Callaghan earns (well, pays himself) in excess of £300,000 a year.

In Lieu of a Post

Some gems from bloggers more knowledgeable and more creative than I.

http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2012/06/bullingon-kubla-cam.html

http://plashingvole.blogspot.fr/2012/06/top-gun.html

Thought for the Day

Even the sincere black man (le Noir) is a slave of the past.  However, I am a man, and in that sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as is the discovery of the compass.  ...
The problem I envisage here is located in temporality.  Black and white people will be disalienated when they have refused to let themselves be locked up in a Tower of the Past that they've built for themselves ...
I am a man and it's the whole past of the world that I have to recover.  I'm not just responsible for the rebellion of Saint-Domingue.
Each time a man allowed the dignity of spirit to triumph, each time a man said no to reducing his equal to servitude, I feel solidarity with his act.
In no way do I have to take my calling from the past of the peoples of colour.
In no way do I have to set myself to reviving an unjustly forgotten black civilisation.  I don't make myself the man of any past.  I don't want to sing the past at the expense of my present or my future.

Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire Masques Blancs (Paris 1952), pp.182-3 (my [clunky and loose] translation)

Feud, Vengeance, Politics and History in Early Medieval Europe

[This is the text of a paper I gave at a very good conference in Aarhus in October 2003, which I haven't (yet) written up (the rest of the conference is published here).  At some point I might yet work it up into a piece, although I am thinking of using some of it as an illustration in Escaping the Past.  A counter to the various counters to my original article on feud (1998) is probably overdue.  For now, I hope the points of contact with my previous post are clear - especially in the stitching up of time and the non-ending of narrative.]

Feuds make good stories and it is stories, you might say, that make feuds.  I will therefore – as I imagine many of us will – start with a story.  It is set in 1073 or 1074 in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, in the aftermath of a feast.  Feasts were fine times for violence.  The most famous alleged feud of the early Middle Ages – that of Sichar and Chramnesind – apparently originated at a Christmas party.  So much for the season of peace on earth and goodwill towards men!  The case that concerns me was on the other hand – according to some interpretations – the last recorded episode in a feud.  One might expect feasts, with the gathering together of lots of people and the consumption of large amounts of alcohol, to have been the occasion for acts of hot-blooded violence such as begin periods of hostility or feud.  ‘From one, an irascible ale-swiller, a man full of wine, a sword’s edge will thrust out the life on the mead bench; previous to that his words will have been too hasty’, as an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet predicted (note, incidentally the reference to three types of alcohol in a single sentence).  Be that as it may, in this case, the gathering together of a family for a feast presented its enemies with a golden opportunity to wipe them all out at once.

The sons and grandsons of a man called Carl had assembled for a feast at their manor of Settrington.  One, however, stayed away.  He, Sumerled, shared his principal estate with the man who organised the bloodshed in Yorkshire, Earl Waltheof of Bernicia.  As the story’s most recent and most eloquent interpreter, Richard Fletcher, says, this is unlikely to be coincidence.  Waltheof’s men, possibly coming by sea to the Yorkshire coast and thence riding west to Settrington, fell upon Sumerled’s brothers and nephews and butchered the lot of them.  Or almost.  One, Cnut, was spared ‘because of his innate goodness’.  He was lucky.  Few people in early medieval episodes like this were spared just for being nice.

Our primary source for this episode is an anonymous and very brief narrative written not long afterwards, called De Obsessione Dunelmi, ‘On the Siege of Durham’, a hugely misleading title although a siege of Durham does appear in the course of the story.  Its author digresses from his tale, actually about the descent of six manors on the borders of Yorkshire and Northumberland, to tell us of the violent story that cumulated in this massacre.  The story is well enough known to late Anglo-Saxonists but, for those of you who specialise in other eras, the tale, not very much abbreviated, goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a powerful and energetic earl called Uhtred who saved Durham from the Scots.  Uhtred was married three times.  His second marriage, to the daughter of one Styr Ulfsson, was contracted on condition that Uhtred kill Styr’s enemy, Thurbrand.  Alas, when Uhtred came to swear allegiance to his new king (and old enemy), Cnut, Thurbrand Hold (or Thurbrand the Hold) and the king’s soldiers ambushed him and forty other chief men and killed the lot of them.  Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf succeeded him in the earldom but when he died, Uhtred’s son (by his first wife) Ealdred became earl and killed Thurbrand Hold.  Thurbrand’s son, Carl, and Ealdred then campaigned against each other until they were prevailed upon to become sworn brothers and go on pilgrimage together to Rome.  Unfortunately, the ship was delayed by bad weather so whilst they waited, Carl entertained Ealdred at his home in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in Holderness.  One day, whilst showing Ealdred around his estate – you can guess what’s coming – Carl killed Ealdred in (and from now on I quote the source)

a wood called Risewood and still today the place of his murder is marked by a small stone cross.  Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, who was the son of his daughter, sent a large band of young men and avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.  For when the sons of Carl were feasting together at their elder brother’s house at Settrington, not far from York, the men who had been sent caught them unawares and savagely killed them together, except for Cnut whose life they spared because of his innate goodness.  Sumerled, who was not there, survives to this day.  Having massacred the sons and grandsons of Carl, they returned home bringing with them much booty of various kinds.

Seen from Durham c.1100, this was a series of tit-for-tat killings, such as we might unproblematically call a feud.  In the last episode, at Settrington, according to the writer, Waltheof ‘avenged the killing of his grandfather’.  This all looks fairly straightforward but, unlike the story of Sichar and Chramnesind, which, although far from straightforward, everyone (except me) sees as a feud, there has been significant debate about whether the conflict (to use a neutral term) between Uhtred’s and Thurbrand’s families can in fact be called a feud at all.  I want to contribute to that debate and use recent analyses of the story to highlight some of the problems involved in studying feud in the early Middle Ages.

In my past writings about feud I have expressed profound scepticism about the existence of feud, as we would understand it, in the early medieval west – or most of it anyway.  This of course raises the definition of feud, something I expect we will spend much time doing during this conference!  I feel strongly that we need a fairly precise – but not over-restrictive – analytical definition of feud, a definition which distinguishes feud from simple violent dispute or potentially violent hostility.  It seems to me that much recent discussion of feud runs the risk of dissolving feud into any relationship of hostility, even into any potentially violent dispute.  Thus far I suspect I am on solid ground.  Where I suspect I may not be, and where I expect to be rigorously questioned by people specialising in periods with better evidence, is in that I think we also need to distinguish feud from vengeance.  This point raises what is an absolutely fundamental problem in defining and studying the early medieval ‘feud’ (and I hope you can hear the inverted commas around feud there).  The words that meant, or are translated as, ‘feud’ in the early Middle Ages did not mean ‘feud’ as we would understand it.  Faida, faehþe and their cognates were generally rendered into Latin as inimicitia, perhaps hostilitas.  I hope we can agree that enmity and hostility are not, necessarily, feud. 

More to the point, the relationship rendered by these words was a one-way relationship.  ‘Feud’, as rendered by these early medieval vernaculars, was not a two-way, reciprocal relationship.  It meant the right, by one party, either to avenge, or rather to punish, an affront (actually, as far as I can see, it invariably meant a killing) through a reciprocal act, usually vengeance-killing, without (and this is the key) any fear of a subsequent revenge attack by the initial aggressors; or, probably more commonly, it meant the right to exact a compensation payment in lieu of such an attack, through the threat of such an attack.  ‘Bearing the feud’ can mean the obligation to seek redress for a wrong, by one party.  At the same time, to ‘bear the feud’ means to bear the threat of vengeance against you, or to bear the cost of the compensation payment.  I have seen no use of the word to mean a lasting and reciprocal relationship of violence, and I have found very little evidence indeed of feud in the modern sense of lasting vendetta.  Now, we may be happy to call this relationship feud, because early medieval people called it feud.  The problem is that in English at least, what people today understand by feud is something rather different.  And, more to the point, the phenomenon analysed as feud in other historical periods, or in anthropological fieldwork, is something rather different.  In a sense that is the root of the problem and why we need tight conceptual frameworks.  Most work on early medieval feud acknowledges the point about contemporary, medieval understandings but then understanding is badly hindered by the fact that modern notions of feud keep bleeding into the analysis.

I should make it clear that I am not sceptical about the historical or anthropological existence of the phenomenon of feud.  I don’t adopt an unnecessarily stringent or exacting definition of feud but I have to say that I can find very little evidence that would satisfy even a minimal (if rigorous) definition of feud in the early medieval West.

The principal area of contention in response to my work appears to lie in a discussion of motivation: feud versus ‘politics’.  Now, of course, this distinction is crude, neither hard and fast nor very clear – perhaps not even very useful.  Nevertheless, it is an important issue, and what is at stake should become clear in the course of my discussion.  Some writers, William Kapelle and Matthew Bennett for example, have argued that some violent early medieval encounters were not feuds but simply part of politics.  The counter, needless to say, is to argue (as, for example, John Gillingham, Isobel Alfonso, Richard Fletcher, Christopher Morris) that you cannot separate feud from politics.  In a sense they are quite right.  But in a sense, too, this is not a very satisfying argument if you really want to analyse and understand feud in the early Middle Ages.  I would argue that we do need some way of distinguishing feud from violent competition for resources between powerful groups or families that happen to have found themselves upon opposing sides in the past.  At least we need to think about it, and conceptualise such differences.  Many of my points run straight up against the frustrating lack of evidence in the early Middle Ages.  Here I would like guidance from those who work on better documented eras.  One lesson I have to underline, however, is that we must work from the (however vaguely) known to the unknown.  So much writing about early medieval violence is beset by assumptions, cherished, long-held notions about the nature of the period.  But feud as a central facet of early medieval life (as many think it was) has to be demonstrated, not assumed.  It won’t do to argue that the fact that we cannot find dramas of repeated tit-for-tat violence running beyond two acts – one initial wrong, and one act of revenge – just because the data is patchy.  And it won’t do, either, to argue that the reason some of our famous ‘feuds’ don’t, on close scrutiny, seem to be feuds is because the authors of the accounts of them were churchmen who did not understand the concept of feud.

There are a number of issues, most of which can be illustrated with reference to the story of Uhtred and Thurbrand’s families.  The first, possibly the most important, is that of history and narrative.  The point that historians shape the traces of the past into a story is often associated with the ‘post-modern’ turn in historiography but it has actually been made since the very earliest days of modern history.  Thomas Carlyle said as much in the earlier nineteenth century.  To be crude, we choose items from the information that has come down to us and connect them together to make a story.  This is, of course, especially relevant to the study of feud, doubly relevant because the point also applies to many of our witnesses.  Contemporaries, or near contemporaries like the Durham Anonymous, selected episodes from the past and linked them together to make a single strand of narrative – the story of a feud.  But was it a feud?  Or was it simply written up as such?  The episodes in the Northumbrian feud sound unproblematic, as related by the Durham Anonymous.  However in fact there were long gaps between them.  If, as is usually assumed, the Thurbrand, enemy of Styr Ulfsson, and Thurbrand Hold are one and the same (no one appears to have wondered why, if they are the same man, the author only explains who Thurbrand Hold was on his second appearance – and one lesson of the story is that name-giving was confusingly unimaginative in eleventh-century Northumbria) then it took ten years for any violence to erupt as a result of Styr’s injunction to Uhtred to kill Thurbrand.  Uhtred had remarried in the interim in any case and, furthermore, it was Thurbrand who did the only recorded attacking.  Styr and Thurbrand might have been rivals but rivalry is not necessarily feud.

Then there must have elapsed another seven years or more before Ealdred exacted his revenge on Thurbrand.  As William Kapelle noted the next episode is interesting in that it is described not as Carl trying to ambush Ealdred, trying to find an occasion to carry out his vengeance killing, but as a period when the two tried to do away with each other.  And the period up to Carl’s killing of Ealdred was another long one.  Ealdred’s murder dates to 1038, that is twenty-three years after his father’s murder of Ealdred’s father, and at least ten years after Thurbrand’s killing.  As noted, the Anonymous proceeds from the death of Ealdred to say simply that ‘Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, ... avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.’  What might not be clear from this is that the Settrington massacre, the fourth and final episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’, took place no less than thirty-six years after Ealdred’s murder.  Indeed Carl killed Ealdred four years before Waltheof was even born.  Thirty-six years is a long time – most of my lifetime.  It took as long to happen in the eleventh century.

So: four acts of murderous violence spread over fifty-eight or fifty-nine years, with probably at least a decade between each of them.  It might be argued that this is to limit discussion to the recorded acts of hostility but that is one area where I object that we cannot assume the existence of types of violence.  For one thing, we do know about other acts of violence involving these people.  The war (let’s call it that) between Ealdred and Carl has been mentioned.  Another war is mentioned over the estates in Teesdale.  Waltheof, ‘avenger’ of Ealdred, was the son of Siward, who married Ealdred’s daughter, as the Durham Anonymous notes.  Now Siward, father of Waltheof, also happens to have killed Eadwulf, half-brother of Ealdred, in 1041.  No feud appears to have ensued between Eadwulf’s family and Siward’s.  This poses huge problems for the reconstruction of the De Obsessione’s story as a feud.  It makes Waltheof switch sides – at best.  The Durham Anonymous could say that when Waltheof had the sons of Carl killed at Settrington, he avenged his grandfather.  From his point of view, as he told his story, it looked like that.  It’s a nice narrative turn.  But, firstly, it only looked like Waltheof had avenged his grandfather because the writer chose to forget that Waltheof’s own father had killed Waltheof’s great uncle, the brother of the man he was supposed to be avenging.  And secondly, however the Anonymous saw it, it does not have any implications for what motivated Waltheof in 1073/74. 

There was other murderous violence.  The third son of Uhtred, Gospatric, was, like his father and elder brother, killed at court on the orders of Tostig, Siward’s successor as earl of Northumbria, in 1063.  Gospatric’s son Oswulf killed Tostig’s crony Copsig in 1067 but no ‘feud’ between Uhtred’s family and the Godwinesons is mentioned.  Oswulf was himself murdered by a robber, later in 1067.  More to the point, when Uhtred was killed in 1015 by Thurbrand Hold, he was killed alongside forty other leading men.  Why was it only his family that ‘feuded’ with Thurbrand’s?  And, finally, note that neither Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf Cudel, nor either of Ealdred’s brothers appear to have done anything at all to avenge their murders.  The Anonymous said that Eadwulf Cudel was a lazy cowardly man but not because he didn’t avenge his brother, but because he was afraid of the Scots.  There seems to be a lot of selection from the evidence, selection from a sea of violence and killing, going on here in order to make this into a long, unilinear saga of murder and revenge.  Like all historians, the Durham Anonymous chose how to emplot his story, and he did so in the tragic mode.

An alternative explanation has been proposed.  The admittedly patchy sources for Northumbrian politics at this time allow the suggestion that the families of Thurbrand and Uhtred were on different sides during the turbulent early decades of the eleventh century.  Uhtred’s family had control of the earldom of Bamburgh, or Bernicia, and appears to have been loyal to the old English royal dynasty.  Thurbrand’s family, on the other hand, seems to be counted amongst the supporters of Cnut, and perhaps at the head of a Danish faction in Yorkshire.  The first recorded action in the hostility between the two groups was Thurbrand’s slaughter of Uhtred and other English leaders.  However, as has been pointed out, even by proponents of the feud interpretation, to have slain forty-one men must have required a substantial armed force.  Indeed the sources say the first massacre was on King Cnut’s orders and that the milites who did the killing were his troops.  In the broader English context of the events of 1016, and Charles Insley has correctly pointed out that we cannot see episodes like this in purely local light, Cnut was following a policy of the eradication of the principal supporters of his erstwhile enemy and rival for the kingship, Æthelræd II ‘Unræd’.  Siward’s murder of Ealdred’s brother Eadwulf – unavenged, remember – was carried out in similar fashion, and so were other killings at the royal court (like that of the third brother, Gospatric), none of which appears to have provoked feud.  Kapelle has suggested that the family of the Bernician earls was in revolt against the crown for a while.  Carl on the other hand appears to have been an important royal official in Yorkshire, supporting the Danish royal house.  The reconstruction is plausible and gives us a reason to see how the two could have spent some time campaigning against each other even without the blood that lay between them.

Carl’s eventual murder of Ealdred might have been part of politics on the wider stage.  Another royal official in York, Siward, after all did away with Ealdred’s brother, apparently on royal orders.  But it is equally possible that – at the same time – his actions might have been motivated, and justified, by Ealdred’s killing of Carl’s father.  Finally, Waltheof sent his lads to slaughter Carl’s sons and grandsons.  It is very unlikely indeed, for reasons touched upon above, that this should be seen as an act of feud.  Again, national politics play a part.  Waltheof and the sons of Carl had both found themselves in revolt against William I in 1069-70.  Waltheof, however, had charmed William into forgiving him and even giving him his father’s earldom.  This might not have gone down well with other former rebels.  Possibly trouble was brewing again.  Either way, it seems unlikely that we have to go back further than 1069 to understand the reasons for the Settrington massacre of 1073/4.  Whether, like the Durham Anonymous, Waltheof justified his action as revenge for his grandfather, whether he added it as an afterthought, as icing on the justificatory cake, we shall never know.

The two motives – political expediency (or orders) and personal revenge – are not necessarily clearly separable.  That is the essence of the argument against the ‘politics, not feud’ position.  It is here, however, that we run into the really intractable issues.  Even if we knew how Carl justified his killing of Ealdred, and the cross erected on the site suggests atonement, the past is always made in the present.  Individuals select aspects from their knowledge of the past to justify their deeds in the present.  Carl and Ealdred had been engaged in some sort of a struggle; Carl’s father had killed Ealdred’s father twenty years before, and ten years ago (let’s say) Ealdred had killed Carl’s father.  These were all aspects that would make close friendship between the two unlikely in any society, feuding or otherwise.  Yet they had chosen at one point to forget these past events and become sworn brothers.  There was a choice.  This choice lies at the heart of what Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘dormant feud’.  Yet I think that the concept of a dormant feud is, analytically, deeply problematic.

In 1998 I wrote:

‘if, rather than having a continuous state of violence and enmity, we have a series of independent incidents taking place to solve immediate problems and the contingent selection from the past of particular episodes to justify or explain them, it does not seem analytically useful to link them into a spuriously continuous ‘chain’ of events and call that feud.’

But that, essentially, was what the Durham Anonymous did.  It is what many another individual has done in the aftermath of some event.  It is true of many another feud but, unless there is some conscious relationship, some conscious awareness of a feuding relationship, in the periods between the violence, then do we have a feud?  It seems to me that if the answer is yes, then there can be feuds that were entirely made with hindsight, and never existed in the present.  That does not seem to me to be useful.  Of course this is a question that it is usually impossible to answer in the early Middle Ages.  In his recent book on the hostility between Uhtred and Thurbrand’s families, emotively called Bloodfeud, Richard Fletcher tries out two possibilities.

In the first, Fletcher draws attention to the cross erected on the site of Ealdred’s murder.  Ealdred left only daughters, three of whom, imaginatively, he called Aelfflaed.  It was one of these that married Siward.  Now, says Fletcher, anthropological and ethnographic as well as historical parallels show that women often play a part in keeping a feuding relationship going, goading their men-folk, producing artefacts associated with the murdered victims, singing songs about the wrongs done, and so on.  The daughters, suggests Fletcher, erected the cross to remind their kin of the wrong done, which required vengeance.  He uses that as a springboard for a nice discussion of female status and power in eleventh-century England.  This is an interesting idea but it is not convincing.  Firstly, if it was the daughters of Ealdred that erected the cross (no source says as much) and if it was their intention to keep the feud alive in their menfolk’s mind, it was both spectacularly ill-advised and astonishingly unsuccessful.  As mentioned, neither of Ealdred’s brothers is recorded as lifting a finger to avenge him, and nor did either of his nephews, or his brother-in-law, or his son-in-law.  If their memory of the feud was dependent on the Risewood cross then this is hardly surprising.  It was erected in the middle of their enemy’s estates.  One might suggest that it is unlikely that the relatives of Ealdred were permitted to make regular pilgrimages to a cross on the estate of their relative’s killer in order to whip the men of the party up into a vengeful frenzy.  It seems to me far more likely that, unless Carl erected the cross in an act of penance, the cross was part of the settlement.  Not only would it have cost money – a sort of compensation payment – if it was the sort of elaborate stone monument well enough known from that part of the world.  It would also have been a permanent reminder to Carl and his family of his perfidy and wrong-doing.  This might have been punishment enough.  In any case, if feud there had been up to that point, this seems to have ended it. 

Fletcher’s is a good try but unfortunately it doesn’t work.  And alas there are precious few better examples of the maintenance of a feuding relationship.  The Merovingian Queen Chlothild’s urging her sons to avenge her father by attacking the Burgundians is sometimes cited as an instance but, as Ian Wood has pointed out, there are huge problems with the story, not the least being the thirty years it apparently took Chlothild to realise that her parents needed avenging.  Now there are references to similar mechanisms at work in the early Middle Ages, but they all concern hostility between larger groups – warfare between peoples.  Frankish washerwomen are said to have sung songs commemorating past wars against the Saxons, for example.  Now, you could assume that if these mechanisms were known at that level then they might have been known at other levels of violence in early medieval society.  But that would be precisely that: an assumption.  There’s no evidence.  This is what lies behind the rest of Fletcher’s analysis (like that of many another commentator), an assumption that feud, as we understand it, was central to early medieval life and thought. 

Briefly, we need to remember that the old idea that the extended family, or clan, was an essential feature of early medieval social organisation has been under attack for some time.  Practical kin-groups were small.  Furthermore, in spite of decades of detailed research into the reconstruction of early medieval aristocratic Sippe, there is little or no evidence that they acted as unified groups in politics.  They fought each other and changed sides in entirely understandable ways, but ways which render the assumptions about early medieval people’s supposed subjection to the demands of feud entirely questionable. 

Fletcher’s other approach, in arguing that the selected and scattered episodes of violence were a bloodfeud, is to argue that medieval texts, laws, show that feuding was a common feature of Anglo-Saxon life.  If it shows nothing else, the story of Thurbrand, Uhtred and their descendants shows that these people had a concept of vengeance.  But many, probably all, societies have a concept of revenge.  To early medieval people God took revenge – ultio – vengeance was, after all, his – but the Lord did not, I suggest, feud.  That would suggest an altogether heretical view of the Almighty.  And the texts cited as showing the centrality of feuding are, as I have argued before and as I have suggested above, about vengeance, not about feud as in modern understanding. 

There is only time for brief points.  Essentially, early medieval law permitted vengeance.  Even law codes like that of King Edmund of England, permitted vengeance, but, and here they drew upon a tradition that went back to the very last Roman laws in the west.  They made precise grants, in specified circumstances, of the state’s right to vengeance.  Only exceptionally energetic and powerful rulers believed they could prevent all acts of vindicatory violence and say that all punishment would be done by their officers.  The early medieval Latin and vernacular words for feud meant the threat to take revenge.  This threat was strategic.  It brought in external parties to mediate.  Specifically, for much of the period, it brought in the king’s officers.  Thus, as I have argued before, ‘feud’ (in early medieval terms) was not a sign of absent state power and nor was its appearance in law a sort of abject admission of this fact, a weary acceptance of the fact that the only way to keep the peace was through a system of deterrence, of mutually assured destruction.  Because the system brought in royal officers to adjudicate, it was a means of enhancing royal presence in the localities.  This vengeance was structurally and analytically different from feuding.  For one thing, it seems to have been the threat of violence that was used strategically to draw attention to the dispute and bring in third parties in an attempt to resolve it.  If compensation was not paid and an agreement or consensus was reached that vengeance was justified, then a revenge killing was seen as punishment, and to have ended the dispute.  It seems to me that this is importantly different from feud, where killing rarely ends the dispute, except perhaps where the whole of the opposing party is wiped out.  Thus to suggest that ideas of feud permeated society, or that feud, as a threat of mutually assured destruction was used to keep the peace in a stateless society, badly misrepresent the early medieval evidence.

The conflict between Uhtred’s family and Thurbrand’s was, to use Paul Hyams’ phrase, feud-like behaviour.  There were certainly elements about it that look like feud.  They were, however, only parts of a complex mix and probably not the most important ones.  Feuds make good stories and the Durham Anonymous wrote this one up into a gripping tale.  But a hugely misleading one.  He made a selection to emplot his narrative as a tale of feud.  The actors in his story might themselves have selected events from the past to justify their deeds.  The point is however that they had a choice.  When other considerations made violence necessary and actions from the past helped to justify this, they chose these justifications.  Most of the time, however, it seems that they chose not to make past violent acts the basis for present or future actions.  These people were not imprisoned within a feuding culture, or bound by the demands of feud.  To emplot the Northumbrian story as a feud masks the complexity of the situation.  More importantly it denies the actors in the story the historical choices that they clearly had and the freedom to act that they evidently enjoyed.