Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  In more general terms, the legal evidence does indicate both that there were clearly marked-out status groups in Merovingian society – free, freed and slave (which interlinked with adjustments for age to give the precise value of any individual) – and that some clear functions were attached to the different groups. Free and freed could be called on to fight, for instance, but slaves were excluded from what was seen as a higher-status function. Other legal evidence also calls for public ceremonies to be held when an individual was promoted from one status group to another, and for the most part, these rural social communities were small enough for everyone to know one another.83 These observations suggest a significantly different interpretation, in which burying males, particularly with weapons, certainly represented an assertion of status, but in which, at the same time, it was far from easy to claim an inappropriate status in small-scale, not to say claustrophobic, rural societies.

  By itself, therefore, the social-stress argument is far from self-evidently correct, and the evidence we have for the spread of the furnished habit suggests another line of explanation, if one that retains an element of social stress within it. The richest of all the Merovingian furnished burials is in fact the oldest: that of Childeric himself. His burial (481/2) was followed in close order, perhaps very close order, by a series of rich, but not quite so staggeringly rich burials, known as the Flonheim-Gutlingen group – a name that doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. None of these graves can be dated with absolute precision. In stylistic terms, their gravegoods are so similar to those found with Childeric that the burials must be coincident with his, but they are located outside the limits of the old Roman province of Belgica Inferior, the territory that Childeric is traditionally thought to have bequeathed to Clovis. This suggests, on the face of it, that they followed at least Clovis’ initial conquests, but the argument is possibly circular, since, as we have seen, Childeric’s territories may have extended beyond Belgica Inferior. Either way, they clearly belong somewhere in the last quarter of the fifth century.84

  There are no such chronological doubts about the further spread of the new burial habit. Next in line is a set of less rich though still strikingly well-furnished burials, Rainer Christlein’s so-called Group C burials – another far from exciting term, but at least easier to say. These burials provide both a chronological and a qualitative link between the small numbers of hugely rich burials dating to the late fifth century and the more numerous, if more modestly furnished, graves that are characteristic of the Merovingian period proper and which date in fact from the sixth century rather than the later fifth, and probably mostly from its second quarter rather than the first.85 On balance, this chronological progression of the habit suggests that the new burial rite gained general currency by trickle-down effect from the very grand funerals of Childeric and his immediate associates. The new rite represented a huge break from past Frankish practice – cremation followed by the scattering of the ashes – and hence it is perhaps not surprising that it took the best part of fifty years to take general hold.

  It makes a kind of intuitive sense that Merovingian inhumation developed as the wider population started to emulate – on a more modest scale – the practices of its leaders. This effect is often seen, of course, but doesn’t add up to anything like a full explanation of the phenomenon. In the case of Childeric’s himself, the idea of mounting a really grand burial, dripping in gold, was probably a spin-off from the funerary habits of the Danubian style generated in Attila’s Empire at its height. The Germanic world had seen occasional clusters of rich burials before the fifth century, though none in properly Frankish areas, but as we saw in Chapter 5 the Hunnic Empire marked a watershed in the deposition of wealth with the important dead. The staggering wealth of the Hunnic and immediately post-Hunnic horizons entirely eclipsed anything seen before in the amount of gold put in the ground. The Franks were not among the Huns’ most dominated subjects, but they did fall sufficiently within Attila’s orbit for him to have interfered in a succession dispute, and the Danubian style did generally change the norms of barbarian burial.

  From that point on, the practice of rich burials for leaders became widely adopted, and lasted well into the sixth century. It would come as no surprise, then, for Frankish leaders of the generation after Attila to have adopted the practices of the greatest Empire that non-Roman Europe had ever seen. It is also true that Childeric and Clovis – it was the latter who presumably organized his father’s funeral – were busy changing the nature of Frankish politics. Both had every reason to mobilize Hunnic practice so as to mark out the fact – or claim – that Childeric had been a Frankish ruler quite beyond the ordinary. This certainly means that there was a strong element of competitive display in the revolutionary funeral Clovis arranged for him. Indeed, if the Flonheim-Gutlingen burials were of the same date, rather than a little later as is usually supposed, then the display would have become all the more competitive, since they could even have been the burials of rivals rather than lieutenants.

  The subsequent spread of the habit more broadly down the social scale is not so easy to explain. What was powering it, obviously enough, was new wealth that became available within Frankish society thanks to the astonishing conquests particularly in the time of Clovis, but expansion did also carry on into the reigns of his sons. Against this background, it is perhaps reasonable to think of the later, but still comparatively rich, Group C burials as the crucial catalyst. These men were presumably intermediate leaders whose families wanted to show off their high status by burying their dead along the chic new lines pioneered by their kings. This would be linked to a process of social competition, since Clovis’ conquests put a lot of new wealth into new hands, and what we are seeing here, it would seem, is the winners showing off. This reflex then worked its way down to a much more everyday social level, where, presumably, similar processes were at work, as the wealth generated by conquest percolated down the scale, generating winners who wanted to show themselves, and perhaps also losers who were desperate not to be seen as such, until the new order eventually solidified and produced the much more stable-looking Reihengräber cemeteries of the mid-sixth century.

  The process did, though, take a while. The new burial habit really only became established from c.525 onwards, nearly half a century after Childeric’s death, and this leaves more than enough time for other factors to have impinged. In Anglo-Saxon England, for instance, cremation quickly disappeared with the coming of Christianity, which clearly regarded it as an illegitimate form of funerary rite. Even though Christianity had only just begun to spread among the Franks in the early sixth century, this may also have helped push funerary habits towards inhumation, even if it had nothing to do with the amount of wealth on show.86

  The direct progression down the social scale from Childeric’s burial to those of the second quarter of the sixth century suggests that we should associate the new rite pretty directly with the rise of Frankish power, and particularly with the way in which the wealth of conquest generated competition. But the fact that a strong element of acculturation can be so clearly demonstrated in the spread of furnished inhumation – that indigenous Gallo-Romans clearly bought into the new habit in spades – does not mean that there was little or no actual Frankish immigration into northern Gaul, or that the spread of the new ritual was entirely unconnected to this process. On the contrary, there is every reason to think both that Frankish immigration into northern Gaul was substantial, and that it played a major and direct role in spreading the new burial habit.

  The evidence for Frankish migration west of the Rhine veers from the specific to the general. The detailed case study of Krefeld-Gellep again commands attention. If, as seems likely, the original cemetery continued to be patronized by the indigenous population, a key question becomes who was being buried in the second cemetery, from whose foundation the furnished burial habit then spread over to the first? As the excavators suggested: most likely a community of immigrant Franks. The rich
founding burials at the heart of some of the other new Reihengräber, likewise, look like elite immigrant Franks around whose new social power local rural societies were being remade: hence the relocation of burial sites as well as the adoption of the furnished habit. At first sight, then, the archaeological evidence leads us back to the kind of impasse we have just encountered with the Anglo-Saxons. On the one hand, the new burial habit originated as a trickle-down effect from a new and immigrant Frankish elite. On the other, it was adopted – much more demonstrably in this instance – by considerable numbers of the indigenous population. In the absence of very specific archaeological evidence such as that available in the cases of Krefeld-Gellep or Frénouville, distinguishing between burials of those of Frankish as opposed to Gallo-Roman descent is impossible. Any particular individual might perfectly well be one or the other – or, indeed, both, since intermarriage surely must have occurred. It is possible, however, to take the argument further.

  If the only evidence for immigration were the handful of richly furnished burials at the heart of several of the new Reihengräber cemeteries, Frankish migration into northern Gaul could very plausibly be considered as elite transfer followed by cultural emulation. But there is excellent evidence, in fact, that a much more substantial migration flow underlay the acculturation process. It is worth thinking for a moment about broader patterns of continuity and change right across the Merovingian kingdom. As we have seen, a few furnished burials have been found south of the Loire. In these areas, however, the new habit did not take hold, and the indigenous population as a whole stuck to established burial norms. Within the overall Frankish kingdom, therefore, adopting the burial rite was not an automatic process. It was not enough just to dump the odd Frank in a Gallic landscape for everyone suddenly to be overcome with the brilliant new idea of burying weapons and other valuables with the dead.

  A priori, it is possible to think of several reasons why the new habit should have caught on in the north and not in the south, but there is a correlation between Reihengräber and levels of Frankish settlement. As with Anglo-Saxon England, the linguistic evidence is again crucial. In general terms, the overall effect of Frankish immigration was to shift the line of Germanic language use westwards from the Rhine frontier by a width of territory that varied between about 100 and 200 kilometres (Map 12). But this was the end result of a complex process and did not occur all at once around the year 500. In the first instance, Frankish immigration seems to have generated interlocking patterns of linguistic islands. Even within the area where Germanic eventually prevailed, some of the larger former Roman centres remained Romance-speaking down to the ninth century: particularly Aachen, Prüm and the old Roman capital at Trier. At the same time, place-name evidence indicates that Germanic-speaking communities originally spread much further westwards than the current language line. Germanic place names can be found well to the north-west of Paris, in Normandy and Brittany, meaning that, as in England, a Germanic-speaking elite must have survived in these regions for long enough to give their names to the permanent settlements that eventually emerged (Map 12). In northern Gaul, more or less permanent villages and estates evolved a little sooner than in Anglo-Saxon England, from the seventh century rather than the eighth, so that isolated Germanic place names don’t necessarily provide evidence for very lengthy language retention – maybe just a century or so.87 Nonetheless, as in Anglo-Saxon England, these Germanic linguistic islands could only have been created by migrant groups that included women and children as well as men, even if the much more restricted westwards drift of the overall language line provides a broad indication of where Frankish settlement was at its most dense.

  Although we lack specific historical evidence, it is most likely that the process that brought these immigrants west across the Rhine was similar in some important respects to that which brought Anglo-Saxons to England. While not by any means the richest of Roman territories, northern Gaul was in the main economically more developed than neighbouring non-Roman territories to the east of the Rhine, and, more simply, the Frankish political dominance created by Clovis’ victories meant that more land could be acquired in outright ownership in the newly conquered territories than was easily available at home. This is not to say that lands east of the Rhine were overpopulated, any more than was Normandy in 1065, but just that military victory opened up exciting new possibilities for wealth acquisition, and the expectation among Clovis’ followers that some of it would come their way. Especially after the dramatic successes of Clovis’ reign, the demand for seriously substantial rewards among his following would have been overwhelming. These expectations are likely to have gone well beyond the distribution of looted movables and on to the level of landed assets – as happened in a variety of ways in the other successor kingdoms to the Roman Empire – and such demands had to be satisfied.88 In reality, there were always alternative leaders for followers to turn to should expectations not be fully satisfied. The spread of the high-status founding burials of the new Reihengräber across the landscape of northern Gaul, in my view, is most likely an archaeological reflection of the allocation of due rewards to Clovis’ loyal followers (and possibly those of his successors too).

  Like that of lowland Britain for Anglo-Saxons, the land and wealth of northern Gaul had been exercising a magnetic pull on neighbouring Franks long before Roman imperial collapse allowed settlement to proceed. Franks had been raiding across the northern Rhine frontier since the third century, and when political circumstances were favourable, whole groups of them had sometimes attempted to annex particular territories. In a famous incident of the 350s, for instance, the Emperor Julian had to expel Frankish groups who had taken advantage of a Roman civil war to seize control of the city of Cologne and some surrounding areas. Some of these Franks claimed that they were refugees from Saxon attack, so that there may have been an additional political motive, but the attraction of Roman wealth is clear enough from the long history of cross-border raiding.89 By the same token, a strong enough field of information was already in operation to kick-start a migration flow, and northern Gaul was in no sense terra incognita for inbound Franks.

  The sources offer us no clear sense of the size of these Frankish migration units. The degree and longevity of linguistic change indicates that many of them included women and presumably also their children. If it is correct to see the migration process as driven by a process of political reward, as broadly it must be, then these migration units will probably have consisted of the warrior to be rewarded and his dependants, familial and otherwise. But, as the later evidence from Viking Danelaw shows, this could still have taken the form of rather more people than a nuclear family. There, whole warbands seem to have been settled together with the followers gathered around their immediate leaders, and this could easily have happened in the Frankish case too. The legal evidence suggests, for instance, that freedmen stood in permanent dependence to particular freemen, so a freeman and his semi-free dependants might well have moved as a group. This may also have been true of greater lords and their free retainers (and the free retainers’ freedmen too).

  The linguistic islands were created, presumably, as these migrant groups established themselves in the landscape. Where these people were more densely packed in, total language change eventually followed; where less so, their linguistic influence shows up now only in Germanic place names. In this case, however, as was not true of the Anglo-Saxons, Frankish migration seems to have begun only after total military victory, and there are no hints of a Gallo-Roman Aurelius Ambrosius. Frankish units of migration could therefore be smaller and, once again, the influence of political structures on the migration process is clear. Parallels with the Norman Conquest would also suggest that this process of land acquisition was unlikely to have been fully under royal control. One of the things that emerges from Doomsday Book is how much unlicensed appropriation had gone on in the twenty years since 1066, one plausible motivation for the report’s creation being that, on the back of
this free-for-all, William was unclear in 1086 about who among his followers held what. Overall, we might see Frankish intrusion into northern Gaul as a non-random form of wave of advance, where the intruders were all looking for a nice piece of Gallo-Roman countryside to make their own.90

  The available materials can only leave many questions unanswered, but the evidence for large-scale Frankish migration (if in small units) is unimpeachable. And the crucial point for present purposes is that there is also enough to indicate a clear link between migration and the establishment of the furnished burial habit. On one level, this is strongly suggested by the link between rich founding burials and the spread of the furnished habit into particular localities. And more generally, where there was no migration, as south of the Loire, then no Reihengräber appeared. Identifying a link between Reihengräber and Frankish migration, however, is not a complete contradiction of the social-stress explanation of the new burial habit, in fact more a refinement. From the Frankish perspective (as from the Anglo-Saxon or Norman in parallel circumstances), the fact that migration was about securing new wealth meant that there was a substantial element of social stress inherent in it, on at least two levels.